by Jenny Colgan
‘It’s just so beautiful here.’
The seal hopped along the rock.
‘Hello, fat seal,’ said Zoe. ‘It’s just me.’
The seal hopped along its rock a little bit more.
‘That looks painful.’
‘They’re very thick-skinned,’ murmured Ramsay.
Zoe watched as he bent down and picked up a stone to skim. She found herself musing on how very far it was from the bottom of his body to the top and wondered if he thought it was strange, then realised what a ridiculous thing she’d just asked herself.
She looked around her, from the water through the woods and the gardens to the house, cold air catching in the back of her throat.
‘You know, where I grew up . . . we had one room. My dad . . . he wasn’t really around. Was involved with . . .’
She tailed off.
‘Bethnal Green . . . stuff. Before Bethnal Green was all nice and posh and full of furniture shops and things like that. We didn’t have anything. No grass, no trees, not really. Just traffic and exhaust fumes and a little flat in a council block with “no ball games” written up everywhere and junkies on the scrub. I didn’t even know places like this existed.’
Ramsay smiled a little sadly and expertly skimmed another stone out into the water.
‘I don’t . . . This is going to sound stupid.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Ramsay. ‘Stupid is a step up from where I am right now.’
In the sky above, two terns were circling one another, rising higher and higher on the updraught. Zoe watched them go, then glanced back at the barely perceptible ripples of another perfect skimming stone on the glass surface of the loch.
‘I don’t understand how anyone could be unhappy here.’
Zoe bit her lip and felt oddly close to tears.
Ramsay gradually lowered the stone he was holding in his hand. He hadn’t been expecting that at all.
‘Really?’ he said.
Zoe nodded, staring at the ground.
‘I couldn’t . . . If you’d shown me just your house and these grounds and this land, and oh my God, you’ve got your own wood! And the foxes and the birds and the fish and . . .’
Ramsay looked at her.
‘I know. How could anyone be unhappy here, right? It makes sense, I suppose.’
He heaved a great sigh as he looked around.
‘I’d better go see her.’
* * *
Alas, Kirsty hadn’t ended up being much more help.
‘Oh, that’s just awful.’
‘She needed two stitches!’
‘Christ. Another one.’
‘Really?’
‘Although normally not here – the Highlands and islands are the happiest place for children in Britain, did you know that?’
Zoe felt a pull in her stomach. It confirmed what she’d sensed since she’d arrived, what she’d said to Ramsay. Clean air, clean water, safe places to play. She couldn’t think of anywhere better for children. For her own child, who, even though he still wasn’t speaking, was more outward-looking, more confident than he’d ever been. Patting dogs, making friends – things she thought he might never manage.
She dragged her thoughts back.
‘Yeah, I can see . . . Doesn’t really help Mary though.’
‘No,’ frowned Kirsty. ‘You know, her being at home, dwelling on things all the time – that’s not going to be doing her any good, you know that, right?’
Zoe nodded.
‘Totally.’
‘We have counsellors connected with the school . . .’
‘You’ve used them?’
Kirsty shrugged.
‘Honestly, most of our kids . . . I mean, if they lose a sheep dog, that’s a disaster. And we had wee Ben last year, who had problems with his reading, but nothing I’d refer up. But I hear they’re very good.’
‘This needs referring up,’ said Zoe forcibly.
‘Well. Yes. Quite. But, Zoe, listen: she has to be back in school. Get her back after the holidays, and we’ll manage.’
Zoe nodded.
‘Right.’
She didn’t mention it was the very thought of going back to school that had done this to Mary in the first place.
Chapter Seven
Mary needed a few days in bed because the wound was in an awkward place and if she ripped the stitches it could be pretty bad.
But somehow, with Zoe and the boys, it didn’t matter.
The squabbling, brattish group she had met only two months before seemed to have changed beyond belief. They made tea, were helpful, fetched eggs. Of course they still squabbled noisily. But it tended to be while they were doing things. Even Hari was useful, ish, man-handling a little broom and carrying his laundry, one pair of socks at a time, up the four flights of stairs to his bedroom. It took a very long time, but that didn’t seem to matter.
It gave Zoe longer to spend with Mary – not to talk to her; she had learned her lesson about taking the direct approach, and knew it didn’t yield very good results. Instead she showed up at her door with a copy of an old book.
‘It’s about a girl who doesn’t have her mum and is laid up in bed and hates everyone,’ she explained. ‘So it’s probably not relevant to you.’
This direct approach was entirely deliberate on Zoe’s part.
She had decided, lying awake long into the night the previous evening, sure that half the rest of the household was doing so too, to stop tiptoeing round the issue. She didn’t know where Mary’s mother was. It seemed entirely likely that Mary didn’t either from the questions she’d been asking. The only person who knew was possibly Ramsay and probably Mrs MacGlone and neither of them were much help.
But Zoe was going to stop keeping up this ridiculous pretence that their mother was simply in another room, busy next door, would be back any minute. She would stop censoring any mention of the word ‘Mum’ or ‘Mummy’, stop talking absolute bullshit.
It was a terrible fallacy – and she thought that writers of the past understood this better than writers of the present.
Then, she supposed, to lose a parent was a common thing. You had a five per cent chance of dying in childbirth. Any old disease could kill you. The world was full of motherless bairns and of fatherless bairns whose fathers were lost to one war or another. And the world was full of dead siblings, of babies born and left unnamed until the family knew they would survive tetanus or scarlet fever, measles, polio, influenza, dropsy, typhoid and war and horse accidents and deadly childbirth. And they were straight with it. They understood and were clear with children about death and pain; didn’t pretend it didn’t exist or wouldn’t touch them.
Now it was rare to lose a parent or lose a child; and people wouldn’t discuss it, in case it invited bad luck in. In case it was tempting fate, or superstition. She thought of how many people wouldn’t talk about Hari’s speechlessness in case drawing attention to it would somehow visit it upon their own children.
But Zoe had decided to stop with all that. Children weren’t stupid, not remotely. They picked up on everything that went on, even if they didn’t fully understand it. Hari had known from the earliest times that his father would not come to stay, would not always be there. He wasn’t happy about it, but he knew what it was. Pretending there wasn’t really an issue about the children’s mother had led them straight to the hospital, and Zoe wasn’t going to do that any more.
So she said it lightly – this book is about a girl who has no mother – and looked straight at Mary as she did so.
Mary looked back at her warily. Zoe wasn’t sure whether she was imagining it or not, but it felt like some of the fight had gone out of her.
‘I don’t mind,’ she said finally. So Zoe sat next to her, and opened up What Katy Did.
Chapter Eight
It wasn’t so much that the fight went out of Mary. That could never happen. There was a bit of the girl that was wild and she always would be, and Zoe figured she could
probably make her peace with that.
But there was something about her not being able to move that made a difference.
For some, maybe most people, being laid up would make them churlish, restless and irritated. For Mary, it seemed to have the opposite effect. Zoe wondered if perhaps it lifted the burden; that the emotional expense of having to be constantly on her guard, defensive, stressed, like a cornered animal, had lifted.
She slept a lot and ate without arguing about the dishes Zoe put together for her. Nothing complicated: thick overnight-steeped porridge with heavy cream you could buy locally and their dense bramble jam, everyone had so much of it; Horlicks (Zoe hadn’t had it for years but had found big tins in the pantry); chunky vegetable soup and good bread; even (and more than once, as soon as she realised what a huge hit it was) jelly and ice cream.
And now that her room was cleared up and a bit more organised, Patrick and Hari started going up there to play. Mary made mild objections, but didn’t mind really. And every moment when she wasn’t working, Zoe would be in there, reading to her.
They got through all the Katys, and straight on to Little Women as the days started to shorten and the leaves blew all over the road, blocking the drains and stopping the trains. The fire burned all the time in the kitchen now, and Mrs MacGlone agreed to lay one in Mary’s room as well, and after a few days, Zoe was reasonably sure that the wound itself was healed – she was a young girl after all – but also equally sure that having some time as an invalid, staying in bed, was healing something else in Mary, even if she couldn’t absolutely pinpoint what it was, and she mentioned as much to Joan when the kindly doctor came to take out her stitches.
‘Maybe just say it’s not quite ready yet?’ said Zoe hopefully in the hallway. Joan harrumphed.
‘It’s not good for a creature not to be up and walking about.’
Zoe thought of Mary’s long lonely walks by the waterside; how far she used to roam, on her own, in her nightie, her mind thinking goodness knows what.
‘I realise that,’ said Zoe. ‘But in this case, do you think you could make an exception?’
Joan blinked.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘I think you’re getting rather fond of this place.’
‘It’s freezing,’ said Zoe. ‘There’s never any hot water, the deer keep eating all the strawberry plants, the children still aren’t at school, the house is full of spiders and I’m not making enough money to keep a field mouse alive.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Joan.
They smiled at each other as Zoe went back in to Mary’s bedside.
‘Sorry,’ said Joan. ‘Four more days in bed.’ She glanced sideways at Zoe, who kept her face neutral.
Although she’d normally have started a fight, Mary looked oddly relieved.
‘Okay,’ she said in a small voice.
And indeed, with night coming in earlier, it was a cosy sight in the bedroom: the heavy drapes, finally cleaned, half pulled so there was still the glimpse of stars beyond; the fire crackling happily in the tiny hearth; the row of books above Mary’s bed growing longer by the day; Patrick and Hari pretending to be bears on the hearth rug. Zoe had brought in late flowering plants from the garden, and field scabious and sedum stood there, adding a pretty touch to the large room.
‘Then,’ said Zoe after Joan had left, ‘we really will have to think about getting you some new clothes.’
Mary scowled.
‘Stop trying to make me like you,’ she said.
‘I’m not,’ said Zoe equably. ‘I’m being practical. It didn’t matter in the summer you tearing about the place in a nightie. It’s going to matter in the winter.’
‘I can wear Shackleton’s old stuff.’
‘You really can’t.’
Shackleton was in his father’s old clothes which Zoe strongly suspected had been handed down – or at least just been around the house – through generations of Urquarts. He looked rather dashing in all the tweed, it had to be said.
‘Come on, it’ll be fun. We’ll go to Inverness. They used to have a Zara,’ said Zoe, reading off her phone.
Mary looked like she had no idea what a Zara was and couldn’t care less.
‘Seriously, are you doing this to make me like you?’ she asked again sulkily. Zoe figured she must be on the mend if she was getting her attitude back.
‘No,’ she said honestly. ‘It doesn’t matter if you like me or not, I’m just the au pair. It does matter that you don’t freeze to death while I’m supposed to be looking after you.’
Mary thought about this for a second.
‘Okay,’ she said finally.
Chapter Nine
Zoe waited until Ramsay was back one evening and in the library, but that he hadn’t been in there too long. She didn’t want him sunk in some great tome.
She made him a cup of tea and cut some fresh shortbread she and Shackleton had made together that afternoon. Patrick and Hari had also made some but they’d had their own special section, rolled by their own little hands, that they got to eat themselves, because they were so deeply filthy.
Zoe knocked on the heavy wooden door carefully. She still hadn’t seen inside the library. The children had paled when she’d said she was going up there.
‘It is absolutely quite absolutely private,’ Patrick had warned, looking as if she might get eaten by a tiger. It was strange; Ramsay seemed such a mild character, nothing at all like the Bluebeard Zoe had half-expected when she’d arrived. But all the Urquart children were definitely afraid of this.
As she walked down the darkening passage, Zoe told herself not to be ridiculous. But even so, it was in the front of the house, not the wing with the kitchen and Mary’s room and the little steps to the servants’ quarters where she normally stayed. She wondered if she should have written out a list of things she needed to ask in case she forgot. It was just her boss. She just needed to be brave. Again, she thought rather glumly.
She tapped lightly at first, then, after a moment, a little harder. She heard a voice from inside which she took to mean come in, and pushed the heavy creaking door.
Inside, the room was so beautiful that for a moment she just stood, looking.
Lamps burned everywhere, and the windows were open to the last light of the fading day, a line of gold on the far horizon. The room spanned the entire depth of the house, Zoe realised. It was double height, with walkways around the second storey, and curved metal staircases on both sides.
Books towered over her, up metres in the air to the ceiling – dark reds and golden spines and old green cotton covers. If she had thought the books downstairs in the drawing room were interesting, this was a treasure trove. Zoe stood, transfixed.
He had a little fire too, burning with sweet-scented wood, and at the end of the room under the many-paned window was a huge globe of the world that didn’t look like it had all the countries on it yet. In the roof was a large glass cupola through which the night stars were already appearing and popping out. A large telescope sat at the front of the second storey of the library in the window alcove, which had a deep window seat piled high with embroidered tapestry cushions.
Back on the ground to her right were two long desks with piles of books skewed on them, and on her left was a set of map drawers and an apothecary’s chest with many tiny drawers labelled with extraordinary things: gentian, sulphur, alumen, boric. There was an astrolabe on a shelf and a skull – was it real? – and a stuffed bird and so many interesting things Zoe immediately wanted to explore them all and turn and flee at the same time. And now she was scared to turn and look at Ramsay, who she had half-thought – and if it sounds ridiculous in this day and age, truly, you had to be there – she half-thought in fact he must be a wizard, and that she had been transported to some other place or some other time.
She gasped and nearly spilled the tea. Then she heard Ramsay say, ‘Zoe? Are you okay?’
He was standing up from behind a desk – not, in fact, a wizard; just a shambling, ov
er-tall, slightly bemused-looking man.
Zoe turned round.
‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Sorry! I haven’t been in here before.’
Ramsay blinked. ‘Yes. I keep it locked, mostly . . . There’s some exceptional . . . well, some things . . .’
‘The children think you’ll kill them if they come in here.’
He didn’t smile, and his face suddenly looked severe and rather worrying in the dim light.
‘I don’t want them to come in here.’
Then it was as if he shook himself.
‘I mean, Patrick would be swinging from the rafters.’
Zoe couldn’t deny this so handed over the tea.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.
‘Oh, it probably needs one of your magic clean-ups,’ he said. ‘I’ve barely changed a thing, and my father didn’t either. The house was built around the library; this part of the building is much earlier. Seventeenth-century probably. All sorts of books were smuggled here during the reformation; too out of the way for the king’s men. It became known as a safe haven. That’s where the name of the house means – The Beeches.’
‘I thought it was after the forest.’
‘Those aren’t beeches,’ scoffed Ramsay. ‘Those are oaks, can’t you tell?’
Zoe folded her arms.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Not many trees in Bethnal Green?’
‘No,’ said Zoe.
‘Well, anyway,’ Ramsay went on, ‘it’s code. The word “book” comes from the word ‘beech’. It’s what they were originally made out of. You knew you could store your library here.’
Zoe went closer, brushed her fingers across the ancient texts.
‘They’re beautiful.’
‘Some of them are. Very. Beautiful and important too. That’s what I spend my life doing: trying to match them up with a series. With their brothers and sisters. Finding who survived fires and belief system changes and clear-outs over the years . . .’
‘Books Reunited,’ said Zoe. Ramsay half-smiled. ‘Well, yes. Something like that. Did you make this shortbread?’