The Silk House : A Novel (2020)
Page 29
Fiona answered the door wearing an incongruous Christmas apron, over which her clerical collar could just be seen. ‘Hello,’ she said, welcoming Thea inside. ‘I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again so soon. What can I help with? Presuming, that is, this isn’t merely a social call?’ The smile on her face was warm and open and Thea knew then that she had come to exactly the right place.
Fiona led her to a bright sunroom and they each took an armchair facing a sweeping view of rolling hills, Grovely Wood a dark smudge on the horizon.
Thea told the curate what she had found, and everything she now believed.
‘How absolutely fascinating,’ she said when Thea had finished speaking. ‘I can hardly believe it.’
‘I think I know what I should do, but I’d welcome your opinion.’
Fiona paused, considering. ‘There are three possible solutions,’ she said finally. ‘First off, I don’t see that there’s any point in contacting the police. From what you say, it’s been there far too long for any good to come of that course of action. And of course, that would mean it wouldn’t stay quiet.’
Thea nodded in agreement.
‘Secondly, you could speak to the headmaster, and leave it in his hands. Or …’
‘Or could I bring it to you?’ Thea asked hopefully. ‘Perhaps it might be possible to bury it in consecrated ground? I think that’s what the piles of dirt are saying.’ She couldn’t logically explain it, but she felt sure that properly burying the tiny coffin would put an end to the disturbances in the house.
Fiona sucked in her cheeks. ‘Well, it could be a bit of an administrative nightmare, to be honest.’
Thea’s spirits sank.
‘But not entirely impossible.’ She gave Thea an enigmatic half-smile. ‘I think if we handle things quietly, it might be the best way. I’ll have a word with the boss.’
‘You mean God?’ Thea asked.
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Reverend James. Though I might seek His guidance too.’
‘I am convinced that we should not involve anyone else,’ Thea said. ‘It wouldn’t serve history, nor Diana’s remains.’
Fiona gave her a short nod. ‘Agreed.’
Thea got the call later that evening. ‘I’ve found a solution to our dilemma. Bring the package to the churchyard at dawn,’ Fiona said. ‘There’s a funeral here tomorrow. A local family who have a crypt in the churchyard. It’ll be open first thing, and I can slip in then. No one will be any the wiser.’
‘Are you sure?’ Thea asked. ‘It won’t get you into trouble?’
‘Let me worry about that.’
The sun had not yet risen as Thea made her way to the church. She carried the box covered in a tea towel, and then innocuously in a shopping bag. It weighed a ton, and she had to concentrate to hold it level so as not to disturb the contents. She just hoped she wouldn’t be spotted by anyone she knew.
Fiona waited by the moss-covered crypt, its heavy door ajar. As Thea approached, her shiver was not entirely due to the seeping cold, for she didn’t much care for hanging out in dark churchyards.
Before the curate took delivery of the package she leaned over it and made the sign of the cross, then unwrapped it and read the inscription.
‘Only two hundred and fifty years late,’ said Thea, trying to lighten the atmosphere.
Fiona gave her a reassuring smile as she held the coffin in her arms and spoke softly. ‘Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, I now commit the body of Diana to her place of rest. “Go back you child of earth, for a thousand years in Your sight are as yesterday …”’
After a few more brief sentences, Fiona gestured to Thea to follow her. Thea didn’t fancy being in a dank crypt, no matter what the reason and so she hung back, watching Fiona disappear into the darkness. The curate reappeared a moment later. ‘You need to come in, Thea; it’s the only way.’
Fiona took her hand and, scarcely believing that she was doing it, Thea walked inside. There was a musty smell and the air was even more frigid than it was in the churchyard.
When her eyes had adjusted, Thea cast about but could not see the tiny coffin. ‘Has it … Where has it gone?’ she whispered.
Fiona shook her head and pointed to a spot in the far corner. Ah, there it was, dwarfed by the caskets surrounding it. It looked so pitifully small. Thea swallowed the lump that rose in her throat.
Fiona began to chant in a high soprano as she pulled Thea deeper into the crypt with her. Reaching the tiny casket, she sprinkled holy water and chanted a final prayer, then bowed her head.
Singing over the bones, thought Thea, unaccountably moved by the ceremony. An ancient way of mourning the dead in so many cultures.
Finally, Fiona indicated that they could leave. ‘She’s at rest,’ she said, gathering Thea in a hug as they emerged into the fresh air. When Fiona released her, Thea heard the dawn chorus begin to tune up, the first chirrups carrying sweetly on the still air like the notes of a piano. The sky began to lighten and the mist to clear. It was going to be a beautiful day.
FORTY-FIVE
Now
‘Remember, remember …’ chanted the girls as they walked in lines towards the school. It was a little over a fortnight since Thea had scattered her father’s ashes, just over a week since her discovery of the tiny coffin belonging to Diana Hollander.
The fifth of November: that infamous day in 1605 when Guy Fawkes was discovered as the ringleader of a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. On Bonfire Night, according to Claire who had filled Thea in, the school celebrated by building a pyre on a disused field at the far reaches of the grounds. Earlier in the week, as the girls played hockey, Thea had seen Mr Battle supervising the outdoor staff in its construction in a roped-off area. He’d been given strict instructions to keep all exertion to a minimum, according to Gareth, but was clearly having trouble with the doctor’s orders. ‘Keep those girls away from here,’ he barked at her as they ran past, ‘or there’ll be no end of trouble, mark my words’. She gave him a smile and was pleased to see the corners of his mouth twitch in response.
The floodlights were on, casting shadows over the grounds and as they reached the field, she saw that a straw man – the guy – was now perched atop the enormous pile of branches and sticks and old bits of wood. For a moment it looked to Thea as if Battle himself were atop the mound, for the stuffed man wore a similar old-fashioned frock coat.
‘Parkin?’ Claire materialised in front of her, wearing a black velvet cape fastened at the neck with thick ribbons and brandishing a tin of a dark, sticky-looking cake.
Thea helped herself to a slice and took a bite, tasting spices and treacle and feeling the crumbs stick like cement to her teeth. Claire had disappeared, swallowed up by the throng of children and teachers. Loud chatter filled the air and Thea struggled to keep her eyes on all of the girls. Worried that she had lost a couple, she looked across to see Fenella, Sabrina and Joy standing in line with a group of boys near a long trestle table laden with silver foil-wrapped baked potatoes, piles of grated cheese and tubs of sour cream. Next to that was a large urn, bowls of marshmallows and hundreds of mugs in racks, ready for hot chocolate. She watched as Fenella threw her head back, laughing at something that one of the boys had said. The excitement was infectious and Thea’s mood, subdued since the night on the playing fields and at the crypt, lifted.
After everyone had filled their bellies with potato and many were chewing on treacle toffee – ‘Mind your fillings,’ warned Claire – the call went out that the fire was about to be lit. The students were ushered to a safe distance away, behind the ropes, with teachers watching over them. Mr Battle lifted the cordon and approached the towering structure. He was dwarfed by it. Thea saw the spark of a lighter, the flare as he lit tapers and thrust them into the heart of the pile, again and again.
A moment of complete silence, then a gasp as the fire took, its crackle and snap increasing in volume until it roared in Thea’s ears, as though it might consume her if she let it.
‘Yes,’ she replied, shouting to be heard over the roar of the bonfire. And suddenly she remembered a day, forgotten until that moment, a family holiday, she must have been about ten years old, Pip eight. A car journey, everyone hot, tired and sticky from the January heat and an ineffective air conditioner. They had been not far from Beechworth, north of Melbourne, returning from visiting their grandparents, she and her sister lolling in the back seat, sticky with sunscreen and the residue of pine-lime Splices, as the radio warned of record temperatures, the danger of fire. The air was an odd dusky orange and the smell of smoke seeped in even through the closed windows, making the asthmatic Pip cough and wheeze. She remembered her mother’s worried expression as she looked past them and out the back window. Flakes of ash falling like snow on the car. Her father told a story – a sketch from Monty Python – turned to reassure them with a smile, made even her mother laugh. But Thea had seen the whiteness of his knuckles as his hands gripped the steering wheel, felt his relief when they reached home safely. A bright pebble of a memory.
‘You okay?’ he asked, seeing her distant expression.
‘Fine, really,’ she replied, throwing him a reassuring smile.
Eventually, when the bonfire was nothing more than a skeletal heap of glowing embers, the teachers began to collect their charges. The housemasters led the students back to their respective boarding houses and gradually the field emptied, until only the girls and a few of the teachers who were on clean-up duty remained.
‘We must be off now,’ Thea said, calling the girls to her. ‘Fenella, can you fetch Sabrina and Morgan? I think they were near the food tables with some of the boys.’ The girl nodded and went to collect them. When they had all gathered, they walked back towards the school gates.
‘Straight upstairs now.’ She ushered them through the door of Silk House and towards the cloakroom. As they noisily removed their coats and shoes and hurried up the stairs, Thea saw the kitchen door creak open. ‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Dame Hicks, is that you?’ She hadn’t seen the housekeeper all day and was starting to wonder where she might be.
There was an answering sound, but it wasn’t a human one.
FORTY-SIX
Now
The cat slunk towards her, meowing furiously.
‘Isis!’ said Thea, bending down to stroke her. ‘Where’s your mistress, hey?’ As she stroked the cat’s neck, she felt something attached to its collar. It was hard to make out in the dim light but Thea’s fingers found the end of a thin ribbon and she pulled it, loosening the knot that had been tied in it. Isis gave a small hiss of protest, and then scampered away, leaving a heavy, coin-shaped object in Thea’s hands.
She ran her fingers across its surface, then brought it closer to her face, to see it better.
The Dame’s brooch. Thea had never known her to be without it.
She kicked off her muddy boots and took swift steps towards the Dame’s room at the back of the house. She hesitated when she reached the door. If the Dame had gone to bed early, Thea didn’t want to disturb her. A faint light was coming from the gap at the bottom of the door, convincing Thea that the Dame must be there.
She would return the brooch in the morning.
The Dame failed to appear after breakfast and so once Thea had seen the girls off to school, she went to the room at the back of the house once more. She knocked, waited, knocked again, but there was no reply.
Frustrated, she reached for the door handle, expecting it to be locked. To her surprise it turned in her hand and she gently pushed open the door. ‘Hello?’
Her voice sounded hollow in the empty room. As she peered inside, she gasped at the blast of cold air that came towards her and the sight of the room.
Save for the furniture and a quilt rolled up at the end of the bed, there was little evidence that anyone had occupied the place. A faint smell of herbs hung in the air and as Thea looked towards the window, she saw the pot of salve sitting on top of a worn red leather book. And there, was also a scrap of something beside it.
The fabric! She held it up to the window. It was almost transparent in the light, the woven plants seeming as though they were suspended in mid-air.
Thea picked up the book, which threatened to split at the binding. Pow’rful Plants: a guide. She opened it, startled to see the name Rowan Caswell written in faded copperplate in the top corner of the flyleaf. She put it down again and looked helplessly around the room. Where could the Dame have gone? They weren’t due to move to the new boarding house until later in the week, so why had the Dame’s room already been emptied? And why did she have a book belonging to a former maid at the house? A book that was hundreds of years old?
None of it made any sense.
Hearing a knock on the front door, she left the room, and went to answer it. She blinked as she saw a lanky dark-haired man standing on the step. He looked familiar but it was a moment before she could place him.
‘Jeff,’ he said, and as he smiled she saw his rickety teeth.
‘Of course, the photographer! Hello, how are you? I’m afraid the girls aren’t here at the moment.’
‘Oh no, I’ve only come to drop these off.’ He held out a large brown envelope. ‘Sorry it’s taken so long, but I’ve been slammed. Beginning of a school year and all that.’ He pushed his hair out of his eyes. ‘There’s a copy for each of the girls. I had to do a tiny bit of Photoshopping,’ he said apologetically.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, there was a strange shadow on all of the frames. I left one of them untouched so you could see it – it’s on the top.’
Thea said goodbye, and slid her thumb along the edge of the envelope. Sure enough, there was one print on top of the pile that was different from the others. Exactly where the Dame had been standing when they were in the garden was a white, blurred shape. The only sign that she had ever been there.
As if at the turn of a key, a realisation clicked into place.
Had she ever seen the Dame in the company of anyone else? Apart from that morning in the garden, she had never been in a room at the same time as the girls – not for meals, not first thing in the morning as they left for school, not last thing at night when they went to bed. Had anyone else at the school ever actually mentioned her? Moira, or any of the other kitchen staff? Claire? Dr Fox? Thea searched her memory, but couldn’t find a single instance.
How could she have been so blind?
She told herself that there was no way she could have simply imagined the woman: the Dame had given her the salve, talked to her, reassured her … but had Thea ever touched her, felt the warmth of her skin, the substance behind her clothes?
She shook her head, trying to reconcile what was real and what was not, convincing herself that she hadn’t gone mad. Not totally.
Without bothering to take the house keys with her, Thea raced along the path to Summerbourne, seized by a sudden need to escape the claustrophobic house. To get some fresh air and perspective. As she crossed the top of the high street, she found her way blocked by a Mini that had come off the worse from an encounter with a large four-wheel drive. A police car was already there, its lights slowly revolving, and although there was a group of shocked passengers, no one seemed to be badly hurt. To avoid it she cut through the churchyard, thought perhaps she might even find Fiona there and that it might help to talk to her about everything, might calm her down.
As she walked along the path, music floated through an open window, a choir rehearsing a requiem: she’d seen the posters advertising the concert a few weeks earlier. The voices soared and dipped, swirling around the gravestones, giving the place a peaceful ambience that was miles away from the traffic snarled on the high street.
A spray of lilies resting on one of the graves caught Thea’s attention. Drawn to it, she slowed her steps for a moment. The stone was modest, small and rounded, age-spotted with yellowy-green lichen.
Her breath left
her as she deciphered the worn inscription.
Sacred to the memory of Rowan Dean née Caswell. Beloved wife of Thomas Dean. Mother of Lucy, William and Grace. Born 31 October 1754. Died 5 November 1804. Aged 51 Years.
She ran her fingers over the chiselled stone, as if to prove to herself that she wasn’t imagining things, that it was real. Rowan Caswell had lived – for those times, anyway – a long life. And had been buried in consecrated ground – so the accusations of witchcraft hadn’t stuck. Somehow that was comforting.
The date of the woman’s death was the same as yesterday’s. Two hundred and fifteen years earlier. At the top of the stone was a pentacle, and at the bottom an arrow in a design that exactly matched the brooch the Dame had worn.
A network of women who look out for each other.
It made a strange kind of sense.
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ Claire asked, pointing to the book in Thea’s hand.
They were in the staffroom after classes that afternoon and Thea was preparing to walk back to Silk House.
‘It’s a history of the silk merchant’s house – Silk House. It mentions that maid I told you about, the one who was accused of witchcraft, so it fits right in with my studies. And I think I found her grave in the church earlier.’
‘A reason to stay perhaps?’ Gareth asked hopefully as he joined them.
‘Yep,’ said Thea with a broad grin. ‘I’d say there are plenty of reasons.’
The sun was setting, colouring the sky a glorious orange and tinting the clouds rose-gold, and so Thea decided to walk back to the house via the river. As she came to the edge of the playing fields, she took the path that ran parallel to the river, eventually coming upon the back of Silk House. When she reached the gate to the garden, she decided instead to continue along, all the way to Summerbourne, still mulling over the strangeness of her discovery that morning.
She heard the rushing water of the millrace, noticing a fork in the path as it curved down to the water. The river there was overhung by a thick tangle of brambles, dense with thorns and bare of fruit. She avoided that path and turned towards the village, so she didn’t see the shadowy form of a dark-haired maid crouching among the bindweed and the nettles.