by Kirsty Ferry
‘It’s beautiful. And this is Georgiana, finally. My word.’ Elodie looked up at Cori. ‘I can’t thank you two enough. You have to let me pay.’
‘We won’t hear of it. Don’t be so silly. Here.’ She pushed the picture closer to Elodie. ‘It might not even be her. But Simon enjoyed the project. Any more work like that,’ she smiled brightly, ‘just sling it our way. I enjoyed seeing her come to life as much as he did.’
Elodie nodded and leaned over the picture. ‘Alex will know if it’s her. I think it is, though. She looks like the statue on the tomb.’
And she looks like the girl in the portrait Ben painted, the one that he gave her when they ran away …
‘I think she looks a bit like you,’ said Cori. ‘Maybe it’s the eyes and the hair colour?’
‘Maybe.’
‘But tell me about the mystery woman under the tree – any news?’
‘Oh, Alex thinks he’s got some idea who the skeleton might be – she wasn’t Georgiana, and she died from a close-range shot, but he says there’s an aunt that fell off the radar around that time. Alex suggested to the forensics team it might have been a suicide, because of where she was buried.’ It wasn’t a lie. He had spun a jolly good tale, pretending it had been an aunt rather than the Countess; the family didn’t need any more Hartsford-related scandal. It was ironic, he’d said, that he was the one now trying to cover up their misdemeanours.
‘In those days,’ continued Elodie, ‘they buried suicides and witches at crossroads, so their spirits got confused when they wandered. Where she was found, forms a crossroad where the drovers’ routes meet. Anyway. I’m not going to talk about her. I want to look at Georgiana. I recognise the locket from the tomb.’ Elodie was quite glad that the portrait was protected by a layer of bright, shiny glass. She had a huge compulsion to run her hand over the locket around the girl’s neck and knew she’d probably ruin Simon’s work if she started poking around. She contented herself with running a fingertip across the glass, then guiltily rubbed the resulting greasy smear off with her sleeve.
‘Hasn’t she come to tell you exactly what happened then?’ asked Cori.
Elodie laughed. ‘Not exactly. But I’m fairly sure this is her.’ Cori knew all about her gift – they’d both seen a ghost the very first time they’d met at the National Theatre. It had been shortly after that when things had finally cracked with Piers, and she’d made the decision to go back to Hartsford. Cori had supported her completely.
Elodie also knew that the essence of Georgiana, the real Georgiana was the girl in this portrait, the girl wearing the white dress and the silver locket. The girl with the blonde hair that tumbled in ringlets from her topknot and the hint of mischief in her eyes and the slight smile on her rosy lips that looked perhaps a little bruised from a recent kiss.
Elodie studied the portrait a moment longer. ‘Oh, Georgiana. What really happened to you? Do you think we’ll ever know?’ But of course, there was no answer.
It was difficult trying to stick to the speed limit on her way back to Suffolk. She just wanted to hurry back there and show Alex the portrait and—
Elodie’s foot faltered a little on the accelerator and a car behind her tooted loudly as she dropped about fifteen miles an hour and recovered it as quickly as she could. She acknowledged the driver with a little wave, but he overtook her anyway with another loud paaaaaaarp on the horn. Elodie was glad he had sped past and not stopped. She hadn’t considered what Alex’s reaction might be about the portrait and she couldn’t think about a road rage incident as well as that. She really hoped he’d like it.
Elodie acknowledged to herself that she’d been swept up in congratulations and diamond engagement rings and excited phone calls to her parents involving wedding plans, and the Delilah-and-Margaret hugs had made her partially forget the fact she had borrowed the portrait so long ago. She really hoped he would like it. She’d called Cassie and enthusiastically told her all about it – and she, at least, was looking forward to seeing it. It had been difficult not to confess to Alex where the portrait was, the night she’d heard Blaze in the woods; the night she’d seen Ben give the portrait to Georgiana. That was why she’d glossed over the memories; but then, Alex had other things on his mind anyway; like a very real murder mystery on his estate and a skeleton that his sister had revealed.
Ah, well. She squared her shoulders. It was a good thing she’d done. The main aim was to surprise Alex and make him happy, and she was certain it would. Alex knew she was friendly with Simon and Cori; she just didn’t think he knew how good Simon was at what he did.
Anyway. She could see the lights of the village over the fields, glittering amongst the frosty countryside. One swing of the road on the right and down the dip and she would be off the bypass and into Hartsford. She was glad she had Georgiana’s picture back before Christmas though. The police hadn’t released the Countess’s body to Alex yet and it seemed right that Georgiana should return in a sort of triumph first.
Lucy’s evil little letter had been torn into tiny squares and tossed into the River Hartsford at twilight some weeks ago. Elodie had leaned on the Faerie Bridge and watched the fragments whirl and swirl away with the currents, and she was pleased. She could have sworn she felt a little hand touch hers, and she had smiled. She gazed across at the woods, and saw Alex and Hughie weaving their way through the trees, and she had blown a farewell kiss to Lucy and turned towards them.
It had been a perfect night.
Elodie grinned into the moonlight and pressed her foot on the accelerator just a little harder. For she knew that when she pulled up in front of the Hall, she’d be able to see the lights in the Christmas Room window, twinkling and sparkling and reminding her that Alex was waiting for her and she was almost Home.
Alex was waiting. He was in the Christmas Room, and it was all decked out for the festivities; they’d used some of the decorations he’d found in the marquee to bring it to life again.
But the huge, formal dining table wasn’t spread with food today – it was spread with his father’s genealogy papers. It was the biggest surface he could find and his father had an awful lot of papers. He’d never been interested enough to look at them properly and since he’d come back from Oxford, he’d never had the time or the inclination up until now.
The family tree went back generations and generations, to the cousin they’d found in France, Etienne Jasper Somersby Aldrich, and back again to the original Kerridge line, right the way past Alexander, first Earl of Hartsford – Mortuus in Gloria.
‘Jasper.’ Alex’s lips twitched into a half-smile. His father had always simply called him Etienne Aldrich, and Alex had wondered at the strange combination of a French Christian name with an English surname. But there was the family link, right there, along with Somersby; if you only knew where to look for it. Whoever these cousins were, they’d named their child after Jasper, perhaps in the hope of currying favour with the old Earl. They obviously hadn’t known about Jasper’s supposedly disgraceful death.
There were some complicated documents and notes that Alex skipped over, but he understood they were from George IV, when he was the Prince Regent, resurrecting the earldom in the name of Etienne Jasper Somersby Aldrich. He had created the young man the new Earl of Hartsford as a reward for his services to the crown at Waterloo, after the king’s people had discovered Etienne’s link to the Kerridges in Suffolk; but the most interesting thing that Alex found was a journal – the journal of George, Earl of Hartsford – the father of Georgiana.
The Earl had written pages and pages in cramped, crabbed handwriting, telling of his hatred for his children and his wife, obsessing over minutiae, years old. Accounts of his son’s gambling debts were nestled side by side with vitriol about his wife’s behaviour and lists detailing the whereabouts of her empty wine bottles. He heaped blame upon the Markwell family for allowing their unstable daughter, Jane, to become his Countess. The defects in their offspring were clearly Markwell traits and he wished M
arkwell blood had never diluted the Hartsford stock. The family was so wide-flung that he feared most of the families in the very county were related to Jane and therefore he lived within a seething mass of in-breeds and it was no surprise … etc etc.
Reams of notes were also available, should anyone wish to read them, about his youngest daughter’s fragile mental state. He painted an unsympathetic picture of a young girl trapped in her own world, fighting demons that were beyond the average adult’s ken, never mind a little child’s. The greatest diatribe, however, was reserved for his ungrateful whore of a daughter, Georgiana. He speculated on murder and suicide and gleefully said that they had ‘hanged a man, known to be the cur that defiled her’. Even more joyfully, he acknowledged that the girl had disappeared, along with a pistol from the family collection and his greatest hope was ‘that the corpse is found with a hole in the skull.’
It was nothing Alex didn’t already know, but he was sickened by seeing it all there, written down by someone who was supposed to care for and protect his family.
He felt no sympathy when he found the last entry:
‘I find that I am cursed to leave this life without issue. The lunatic has died from a fever and my bloodline hath ended. Is this what was destined for me? This? For a man who has only ever had the greatness of this family at the forefront of his being?’
‘No,’ growled Alex. ‘Your destiny is that the world will know how vile you were, because by God I’ll make it known!’ He read down the self-pitying rhetoric, disgusted, until he came to the last few lines. Then he read them again and his heart began to pound.
‘A letter arrived today. A most unfortunate letter. The whore is abroad with the bastard who defiled her, and they have sent for the lunatic. The devil take them all to Hell – the child they urge to follow them is already there, and so too shall they be when God sees it fit. The letter has been burned and that, I pray, is an end to them all. I find myself torn – but even the continuation of my bloodline is too precious a price to pay to acknowledge them. No. It is best the world believes them dead. They are, and have been, dead to me since the night it happened. I shall marry again and father more children and they shall be my heirs.’
The entry was dated the fifth of February 1800. Lucy had died on the second. And the Earl himself had died, according to the records, quite suddenly the following month. The devilish part of Alex hoped it had been the result of an apoplexy, after he discovered his daughter had survived. Whatever it was, there was never any time for him to carry out his plan – and the title had, so it seemed, died with him. That was, until 1816, when, for services at Waterloo, the remote French cousin had been granted the Earldom and the valiant, heroic nineteen-year-old Etienne Aldrich had come to live at Hartsford Hall.
Alex stared at the papers again. He had to show Elodie this. It was proof that the experiences they’d had were real, and absolute proof that Ben had come back for Georgiana as he had promised. He put the journal and the documents to one side, and saw again the image of Georgiana as she had appeared to him in Ben’s memories. The likeness to his fiancée was still startling, and he was beginning to think he needed to cast his net a little wider in the genealogy field, just to check something out.
He rummaged through the papers again – there were, he knew, some tenants’ lists in amongst the documents; wages paid, rents due, that sort of thing. It wouldn’t take him long at all to find out the information he wanted, thanks to the internet and the wealth of genealogy websites that were available. It would be interesting reading.
‘Alex?’ The door opened and he turned. Elodie was standing in the doorway, still wearing her coat and boots. ‘I thought you might be in here. It looks beautiful, doesn’t it? I could see it all the way from the drive.’
‘We did a good job.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’m glad you came. I was going to search for you later anyway.’
‘I should hope you were!’ She walked over to him and he opened his arms. She fitted into them and rubbed her cold nose on his chest. ‘I wouldn’t have been far.’
He laughed and kissed the tip of her nose. ‘You’re cold. Was Cori okay?’
‘She’s great, thanks. Looking forward to the wedding. As am I.’
‘Me too. But this is what I wanted to show you today.’ He led her to the table and pointed to the book. ‘Georgiana’s father’s journal. It doesn’t make for pleasant reading, but you might like the last entry. Well – some of it. The very last bit.’
‘Oh?’ Elodie flicked through the book and turned to the last page. There was silence as she read it, and Alex watched her face carefully for a reaction.
He wasn’t disappointed; her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open slightly, then she looked up at him. ‘They survived! They sent for Lucy!’
‘They did. Our only mystery now is where did they go and did they ever come back?’
‘If they’re going to tell us, they’ll tell us. And if not, well.’ She shrugged and smiled up at him. ‘The most important thing is, they were together, wherever they ended up.’
‘What a way to end a love story,’ Alex said with a grin.
‘The only better way is to end it with a wedding.’
‘No.’ Alex shook his head. ‘A wedding is the beginning of the biggest part of the love story. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘I think, perhaps, I would.’
And they kissed, and the world beyond theirs faded until there was only Alex and Elodie in the whole universe and a promise of new beginnings.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The wedding was perfect. There was no other word to describe it. Alex turned to see Elodie walking down the aisle as the first few bars of the Prince of Denmark’s March were punched out on the ancient organ by Margaret and, to borrow a cliché from Delilah, she took his breath away.
Elodie’s dress was very different to the one she’d worn that other time, and, in Alex’s opinion, even more amazing; something he hadn’t thought possible. Of ivory satin, it was Regency style, very high-waisted, with a long skirt that fanned out behind her into a train, like an old-fashioned riding habit. Over the top she wore a short, winter-white spencer – a little Regency style jacket that ended just under her bust. Her bouquet was holly and ivy, studded with waxy white Christmas roses. The red and green glowed against the pale dress and her hair was loose and curled around her shoulders, with what seemed like a hundred diamond clips dotted in it. They sparkled as the candlelight caught them on her way down to the altar.
Most of the village had turned up for the wedding and they were crammed into the newly repaired church, which still smelled faintly of sawdust and cement beneath the scents of beeswax and greenery. There was a small gaggle of Elodie’s non-Suffolk friends clustered in a pew; Becky and Jon had loaned them five-year-old Grace as a flower girl, and Cori and Simon passed good-natured Kitty between them, the child holding her arms out to each parent in turn. Kitty was also practising a killer smile on Lissy and Stefano, who split their time between London and Italy. The way Stef was chucking Kitty under the chin as Lissy dropped little kisses on her red hair and nibbled her tiny fingers suggested that they were being won over, slowly but surely.
Grace, dark-haired and pretty in a snowy dress trimmed with red, preceded Elodie down the aisle scattering white rose petals in front of her, enjoying the limelight before her new baby brother came to join the family – she’d shared that exciting news with Alex about ten minutes after meeting him. Horace the dog strolled proudly next to Grace, wearing a red bow ribbon instead of a collar, complemented by reindeer antlers on his freshly-shampooed head. And Cassie brought up the rear, beaming and sleek in a forest-green sheath dress. She’d finished University now, and was back home.
And when Elodie’s father handed Alex’s bride to him, Alex was the proudest and happiest man on the planet.
‘Look after her,’ said Mr Bright. ‘The last one didn’t. Bloody idiot.’
‘Daddy!’ Elodie hissed, but she was smiling as she said it and
Alex hadn’t missed the adoration on the older man’s face as he spoke to her.
‘I will,’ he whispered back. ‘It’s what I’ve wanted to do for years.’
‘Thank you,’ Elodie’s father said. ‘You were always the one I hoped she’d fall for.’
And then they were into the service.
Which was perfect.
‘I’m sorry your parents weren’t here,’ Elodie said to Alex after the ceremony was over and the guests had all gone home. It was almost midnight, almost Christmas, and they were walking hand in hand back towards the church, loathe to see the end of the day. And anyway, there was something important she had to do there, and part of that task was to lay her bouquet on Georgiana’s newly restored monument.
‘I’m pretty sure Dad was there. But Mother? Nope. Didn’t expect her to come, even with the free booze.’ Alex shrugged.
‘Her loss.’ Elodie squeezed his hand.
‘Indeed. But Delilah and Margaret and your mum were there and they’ve been more like mothers to me and Cass than our own dear mama ever was. Hey ho. Anyway.’ It was his turn to squeeze her hand. ‘It’s good of Delilah to give you some time off for the honeymoon – isn’t it, my darling Countess of Hartsford? Or do you prefer Elodie, Lady Hartsford?’
‘Don’t! That sounds weird.’ She laughed. ‘Elodie Aldrich will do just fine. Gosh, can you imagine a couple of generations back? I’d have been expected to stay at home and do Worthy Things. But I love the café! I don’t want to give it up.’