I felt myself relax. We can be friends. Everything will be all right.
I smiled back at him and put my hand into his. ‘I am very happy to meet you, Francis Lovell,’ I said.
Chapter 5
Serena
Minster Lovell, Present Day
Serena walked away from Jack and Zoe and she didn’t look back. Her chest still ached with fury and pain. Surely Jack should know how difficult this was for her. Could he not see how she felt? How dare he come here and ask questions, as though this was some sort of news story rather than the hideously complicated and hurtful history of her twin’s disappearance and death.
She pushed open the wrought-iron gate that led up the path to the front door of the manor house, pausing for a second with her hand on the cool metal. For a moment she felt a little dizzy. She did not want to share her quest to find Caitlin with anyone else. This was too personal, her secret, her burden. Yet somehow Jack was here before her, asking questions, doing his own investigation. Perhaps it was petty of her but she felt possessive of Caitlin. Whatever there was to find out, she wanted to know first. The knowledge that Caitlin’s body had been found at the church and that Jack knew before the police had got around to telling the family was incredibly hurtful. She wondered if the entire village knew.
Looking back over her shoulder at last she saw that Zoe had gone but Jack was still watching her with that concentrated, perceptive gaze. Once again, she felt a tug of memory and a persistent sense that in some way, Jack held the key to something crucial that she had forgotten. She shook her head, turning away again and concentrated instead on the manor garden in front of her, on the sound of the sparrows in the old apple tree, where the faintest of fresh new green shoots stood out against the gnarled bark, and on the sparkle of the dew on the neat box hedge. If anything could help to soothe her it had to be this place.
It felt peaceful and Serena felt the ache in her chest ease. A moment before she’d been on the verge of ringing the police and complaining about Zoe and Jack, but now she let the quiet of the garden wash over her and take away some of the pain. It was natural to want to lash out because she was hurting but it wouldn’t do any good. She was meeting with Inspector Litton in a few hours. They could discuss it then.
She followed the direction sign around the side of the building, rounding the western end, and found herself in the courtyard. Here, once again, things had changed, the old lichen-covered cobbles were scrubbed clean and the stable doors mended and repainted. The archway that had once led through to the orchard and walled garden was blocked by a wooden gate. RENOVATION IN PROGRESS, the sign read. NO ENTRY.
An elderly man was rolling up the blind in the shop, the big picture window revealing a room filled with soft furnishings in tasteful heritage colours; cushions in pastel spring blue and yellow, china mugs with flower patterns, throws and picnic baskets. Serena pushed open the door and found herself amongst racks of postcards and local history books, toys, scarves and gardening paraphernalia, ornaments and jewellery.
‘Hello!’ The receptionist, whose name badge proclaimed him to be a volunteer by the name of Nigel, looked pleased to see her. ‘We’ve just opened. Would you like to look round the house?’
‘Yes please,’ Serena said. She took out her purse.
‘Have you been here before?’ The man was inserting her ticket into a neat little guide leaflet.
‘Yes,’ Serena said. Then, feeling she should make more of an effort, ‘It was a long time ago, though. The house wasn’t open to the public then.’
‘It’s a lovely little place,’ the man said. ‘A Tudor farmhouse really, incorporating some earlier parts of the medieval hall. It’s all in the guide book, if you would like to buy a copy?’ He waved a thicker, glossier book hopefully in her direction.
‘I’m all right, thanks,’ Serena said. ‘I’ll enjoy walking around and just soaking up the atmosphere.’
‘The self-guided tour starts through the door and on the right,’ Nigel said, emptying a bag of change into the till with a clatter. ‘There are information boards in each room and arrows signposting which way to go. You can’t get lost.’
‘Thanks,’ Serena said, stifling a rebellious urge to deliberately do the tour in reverse order. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Nigel raised a hand in farewell and turned his attention back to the till, and Serena stepped back outside and obediently followed the arrow that said ENTRANCE, pausing for a moment to read a board that told her what she already knew: Minster Lovell Hall was no stately home despite its name; when the Old Hall had fallen into ruins in the sixteenth century a small part had been carved out and retained to serve as a farm. It was this unpretentious stone building that remained, with its grey walls, mullioned windows and uneven floors, upgraded a little over the centuries as the family who lived there upgraded themselves as well, from yeomen farmers to gentlemen. The place had passed through a number of hands down the centuries.
Serena couldn’t remember when her grandparents had bought the place. She wasn’t sure if she had ever known. It had been their home from her earliest childhood but she did remember her mother once saying that the house had been in a terrible mess at the beginning and that her grandparents had lovingly restored it over the years. She knew it hadn’t been the place where her father and Polly had grown up – they had been born and lived in a London suburb – so perhaps her grandparents had moved around the time she and Caitlin had been born, or a little bit before.
The back door from the yard led into the kitchens and for a moment Serena thought she was in entirely the wrong place. The 1990s’ cupboards that had once been so shiny and modern, together with the gas cooker and the stainless-steel sink, had gone, as had the lino and almost everything else she remembered. The room had been stripped back to bare white walls and old timber beams. The information board stated that the kitchen and scullery were part of the original Tudor house, possibly incorporating elements of the medieval hall. Only the huge old fireplace was familiar to Serena. The room had a chill to it, perhaps from the emptiness or perhaps something more; a sense of abandonment that places sometimes had when they had once been busy and were now silent and unused.
A stone-floored passageway led into the room Serena remembered as the sitting room but which her grandmother had always called the parlour. She was amused to see that the Heritage Trust had also chosen to use this terminology, pointing out with some pride the stone-mullioned windows, the oak panelling and the elegant plaster ceiling that had been painted white to reflect the light into the room.
A figure passed by the window, making Serena jump. A couple in outdoor clothing with two young children, one in an all-terrain buggy, were making their way up the path towards the information centre. Serena wondered how her grandmother, so proper, so fastidious, would have taken to people invading her home. Professor Warren, as Serena’s grandmother insisted on being referred, had been a classics scholar and lecturer at Oxford. Dick Warren, in contrast, had appeared to have very little formal education and was, Serena thought, as much a doer as a thinker. Her grandmother had been quite brusque and sharp, whilst her grandfather was gentle and thoughtful, yet somehow the pairing had worked. Serena realised now that she was older just how much Pamela Warren must have had to struggle to establish herself at Oxford in the 1960s. It had still been a male bastion and that probably accounted for her grandmother’s hard edges. Polly had inherited some of her mother’s drive to succeed but with a softer, warmer approach.
So quiet was the house that Serena heard the click of the gate closing behind the visitors and the excited high-pitched chatter of the elder child as they made their way across the courtyard. She sat down on an upright chair of dark wood with spindly legs and a cane base. It quivered, too fragile to be used. Once again Serena was reminded of Caitlin. Caitlin, whose memory was as insubstantial as gossamer. She could visualise her twin perched on this very chair, swinging her legs, as she chattered about something that excited her. Caitlin had always b
een enthused, never able to keep still for long.
The hall looked exactly as she remembered it. Serena realised that her grandfather, or the lawyers acting on his behalf, must have sold off some of the contents along with the house. There were the same thin, faded rugs on the floor, the heavy Victorian furniture, the grandfather clock with the painted lion on its face, the eyes moving left and right at each tick. She and Caitlin had screamed and run away the first time they’d seen that. It had given her nightmares; she’d thought the lion would jump down from the clock in the middle of the night, find her in her bedroom and eat her.
Serena waited, weighed the memories, but felt no emotional response to them other than a pang of nostalgia. It was as though she was watching a series of images unspool through her mind rather than reliving the experience. In their worst fights, Jonah had told her that she was cold and emotionless. She didn’t mean to be and she didn’t think that she was really, although she certainly hadn’t been able to give him what he had wanted. But it was true that after Caitlin had gone, leaving a wake of emotional devastation behind, Serena had emerged with her ability to feel deeply somehow impaired. She wanted to love – she felt as though she was short-changing herself and other people – yet it didn’t come. Perhaps Jonah had been right that she wouldn’t give her love easily in case it was snatched away again. Or perhaps, she thought with a grimace, she simply hadn’t loved Jonah enough. He hadn’t been the right person for her. Either way, it wasn’t simply her memory that was missing. When Caitlin had gone she had taken a fragment of Serena’s soul with her.
She thought of Polly fretting over whether stepping back inside the manor house would trigger all her lost memories and cause her grief. Well, that hadn’t happened. Clearly, she needed more of a stimulus to remember anything significant. All she felt was the ache of happy times that had been lost – and that odd sensation that Jack Lovell was in some way a key to the past.
With a sigh Serena walked down the south corridor where there was a second, smaller parlour that her grandfather had used as his study, opened the door and stood for a moment in the patch of sunlight that flooded the room.
This had always been her favourite place in the entire house. It had been a room filled with all the treasures that had intrigued her – her grandfather’s books were an eclectic mix of fiction, natural history, folklore, civil engineering, biography and many other topics, and they had piled up on the shelves and overflowed at random onto the floor, utterly dissimilar to the serried ranks of classical scholarship on her grandmother’s shelves. The room had also held photographs of Serena’s grandparents looking impossibly glamorous at dinner dances and parties in the 1950s, and then there were bottles of coloured sand and costumed dolls from package-tour holidays in the 1970s, a giant metal key, a plastic model of a medieval castle, a strange stone compass and other random items. The room had also housed an ancient gramophone player and Serena could remember the repetitive scratch as the needle turned, poised to pour out the notes of ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ into the room from an ancient 78 record.
Now there was no music, only a blackbird singing from the bough of a yew outside the window… Serena blinked. The musty smell of closed rooms was suddenly strong. The room was nothing like the study she remembered for it had been recreated as a second parlour – THE TUDOR PARLOUR, the information board told her – with a couple of tapestries on the walls and some rather uncomfortable wooden furniture softened by piles of cushions. Some dark portraits stared down from the walls. Serena wondered whose ancestors they were; they certainly weren’t hers.
The oak staircase, to the right of the parlour, led to the first floor and the bedrooms. As Serena climbed the stairs, she felt her heartbeat increase. It felt as though this, at last, was bringing her closer to Caitlin. Here they had shared a room, whispered together after the lights were out, tiptoed across the uneven floorboards to climb onto the window seat and gaze out over the garden on the nights of the full moon.
A door opened abruptly to her left, spilling a family out onto the landing and making Serena jump almost out of her skin. She had thought she was alone in the house. A small boy dressed as a knight with a plastic sword ran past her and into the room, his footsteps clattering over the floor. Behind him came a girl a few years older in a long dress and a cone-shaped headdress, also brandishing a plastic sword. Both children flung themselves up onto the big four-poster bed with shrieks of excitement.
‘They love it here.’ A man, grasping the hand of a third child, threw Serena a slightly harassed smile. ‘It’s great that they can dress up and play on the furniture. Most places don’t allow it but I think it makes history come alive.’
Serena smiled politely. There was a clothes rack in the corner of the room laden with different costumes. The girl had swapped the princess outfit for a cavalier’s frilly shirt and plumed hat. The boy was still bouncing excitedly on the scarlet tapestry-covered bed. Any connection she might have felt to the past was severed by the immediacy of noise and activity dragging at her attention. She would have to come back again when it was quiet.
Serena was halfway down the stairs when she saw a girl in a green coat. She was on the bottom step, her hand on the smooth oaken rail. In that moment, the door into the walled garden opened, letting in a dazzling, diamond lozenge of sunlight and with it, the honey scent of buddleia and roses. Serena heard laughter and voices:
‘Caitlin! Wait for me!’
The girl paused. Then, with a patter of footsteps and a flash of emerald-green she whisked away through the door, leaving Serena with the impression of long blonde hair and smiling green eyes.
Serena’s heart started to pound in her throat so violently she was afraid she would pass out. She gripped the bannister until the unyielding wood made her fingers cramp. She could still hear the girl’s laughter and see that mocking flash of green:
‘Catch me if you can…’
She felt as though she had been running after Caitlin all her life.
Serena stumbled down the stairs, almost tripping over the threadbare carpet runner, and rushed to the door, her hot palms coming up against the cool glass panels. She fumbled with the handle but it did not turn. She tried again but the door remained obstinately closed. Then she saw the sign, the same one that had been on the gate from the courtyard: RENOVATION IN PROGRESS. NO ENTRY.
Serena banged her hands against the doorframe. ‘Caitlin!’ Her voice was shaky, barely more than a croak. She tried again, louder, and the name bounced off the walls of the hall and came back at her like an echo.
‘Caitlin…’
There was no one in the passageway and she could see no one out in the garden. Nor were there any roses or buddleia or summer flowers, because this was March and it was the pale mauve of pulmonaria that mingled in the borders with the peeping yellow of primrose.
Serena shivered. The sun had gone behind a pile of grey cloud and the air looked chill. A blackbird called in alarm from a tumbling ivy but the garden was empty.
Gradually Serena’s breathing returned to normal. She felt cold. Upstairs the voices of the children still echoed along the corridor but there was no one down here with her; no one but the ghosts of herself and her twin sister whom she had alternately been running from and looking for down ten long years; Caitlin, who had disappeared one hot July night at Minster Lovell Hall and who, at some point between then and now, had died.
Chapter 6
Anne
Ravensworth Castle, July 1470
In the summer of the year fourteen and seventy, when I was ten years old, my father raised a rebellion against the King.
There had been much talk of revolt in the previous twelve months. My uncle, the Earl of Warwick, had lost patience with the way the Queen’s kin, the Woodvilles, had the King’s ear and the pick of the richest noble marriages. He had been the first to rise up in protest, along with the King’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, who had an eye to taking the throne himself. The North had been quick to follow t
heir lead, anger and dissent flaring up like so many small fires that burned themselves out fast and fierce but left a smouldering resentment. The summer of 1470 was hot and the countryside felt like a tinderbox. The lake ran dry and all the fish died. We could neither eat nor pickle them quick enough. No sooner had Lord Warwick been pardoned than he rebelled once again and this time my father supported his betrayal.
Even at so young an age I had been aware of the swirl of rumour, the messengers who had come and gone by night, the secret meetings and the whispers of treason. The world felt unsteady, as though it might tip over at any moment and tumble us all into the unknown. And then it did.
I had not been able to sleep that night for there was tension coiled tight about Ravensworth, although perhaps Joan and Frideswide Lovell did not feel it as they were both dead to the world when I slid from the bed that morning. They had come to live with us after the death of their mother and I was happy to have their company. Joan in particular had become a fast friend to me. Then, the previous year, Francis had also joined us. His education in Lord Warwick’s household alongside the King’s brother had ended with Warwick’s treason and as he was my husband, it was deemed appropriate that my father should take over his knight’s training. What he thought of Ravensworth after the grandeur of Middleham I did not know for Francis, fourteen now and on the cusp of manhood, was as close with his feelings as he had ever been.
It was a beautiful morning the day my father led his troops away. The air was soft and warm in the chamber and the light was already spilling across the floor, though I could tell by its paleness that it was still early. Yet despite the gentleness of the day, I knew that something was wrong. I could also hear the hum of the castle awake, the muted noise of men and horses, of an expedition being prepared. As I slipped into my clothes as quietly as possible, I felt my heart start to race.
The turret stair was dark, the torch burning low now the night was spent. In my haste to descend I stumbled and almost fell. Some sort of desperation possessed me. I had a sense of urgency and fear that something terrible was going to happen and that I had to stop it or it would be too late. My chest was bursting with bright pain as I ran into the courtyard and found it empty.
The Last Daughter Page 6