Butterfly Island

by Corina Bomann

  Before she could continue, Jonathan had returned with a magnifying glass and a small basket of fruit.

  “The admin ladies gave me this when I declined their invitation to lunch.”

  Diana raised her eyebrows. “Is it past lunchtime?” A glance at her watch confirmed it.

  “It certainly is. But as a researcher I know how absorbing the past can be. Read on and let me know when you find something groundbreaking. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find any more gems like this one.”

  Diana gave him a grateful smile and picked up the magnifying glass. Before turning her attention to the notebook, she took a banana. As she peeled it and slowly ate it, she wondered who had written this message of despair.

  Once she had finished eating, she took out the envelope she had found beneath Daphne’s coffin. The ink was of the same colour as the writing in the notebook. No wonder—both items had been written here. But had the notebook belonged to Victoria or Grace?

  Comparing the two documents directly, she saw that the handwriting of Victoria’s letter was more childlike, playful, while that in the notebook was flatter and more angular, as if in their haste the author had given no consideration to fine lettering. But there were similarities in the two hands, as though they had been taught by the same teacher.

  Had this really been written by Grace? Had she poured out her soul on to these pages?

  Her heart racing, Diana took the magnifying glass and began to read.

  The wording was typical Victorian chasteness, yet the inner turmoil that had led her to set it all down was clear. As Diana read on, it became clear that the author was, indeed, Grace.

  At one point, Diana caught her breath and looked up.

  “You know what?” she said as she snapped the notebook shut.

  “What?” Jonathan looked up in surprise from his pile of papers.

  “We’re going to the Stockton plantation!”

  “Now?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, what’s behind this? Something you’ve found in that little book?”

  “And some!” Diana replied. “My ancestor says here that the whole disaster, as she calls it, began with a visit to the Stocktons’. If I’ve found such a concrete indication, I’d like to follow it up as quickly as possible.”

  Jonathan raised his hands in resignation. “OK, you’re the boss! Let’s see how far it is from here.”

  He got up and went to the map of the region that hung on the wall by the door. It was quite old, as evidenced by the yellowing paper, but the roads and tracks would not have changed.

  “If you’re up for an energetic walk, we should make it in about three hours,” he concluded, after studying the roads that led further north.

  “I’m ready for anything. I have to see the Stockton plantation—and the documents they’ve got stored there.”

  Jonathan nodded with a smile, then picked up his bag.

  Although it was obvious that the plantation was run-down, the mansion still looked magnificent, lording it over the surrounding decay. The paint was peeling from the walls, and some of the windows had been roughly boarded up, but as she stood with Jonathan in front of the imposing gates, Diana could imagine what life had looked like here a hundred and twenty years ago.

  “Excuse me,” Jonathan called out.

  Diana tore her gaze away from the house and only then noticed the man in work clothes who was hurrying across the courtyard.

  “What you want?” the man asked in poor English. Jonathan switched to Tamil. Diana did not understand what he said, but she assumed he was explaining their presence and asking him to allow them to look around.

  The man said something in reply, then vanished.

  “What now?” Diana asked.

  “He’s gone to fetch the key. He says the estate manager isn’t here, but if we promise to leave everything as we find it, we can have a look inside.” Jonathan smiled at her, then continued, “The house is really impressive. I’m surprised this plantation has got so run-down, as the growing conditions are the same as those at Vannattuppūcci.”

  “It must be down to the owner.” Diana reached out to touch a delicate tendril of ivy, a plant that looked completely out of place here—almost as though the Stocktons had never intended to fit in in this country. “The things Grace Tremayne wrote about him are anything but flattering.”

  “So he was a real bastard?”

  “A womaniser, by the sound of it. I’m interested to know what became of him. Maybe that will bring us a bit closer to Grace.”

  Before Jonathan could ask anything else, the worker reappeared, keys jingling. The gate’s hinges screeched as it opened, giving Diana goosebumps.

  “Let’s go,” Jonathan said, his enthusiasm in stark contrast to the indifference of the man who let them in.

  In the middle of the lawn stood a For Sale sign in three languages.

  “What could anyone do with a building like this?” she whispered to Jonathan.

  “A spa hotel, perhaps? Or a museum? The times of the English nobility owning second homes in a place like this are long gone.”

  “But the tea plants are still here,” Diana said. “It’s possible that tea cultivation could be revived here again one day.”

  “Yes, maybe. I’d say Mr. Manderley would be a good candidate—the fields neighbour Vannattuppūcci after all. But I’m sure even he wouldn’t want to be responsible for maintaining two substantial houses.”

  A pity, Diana thought, despite what she had read in the diary.

  Looking at the house close up, Diana saw a crack running up the wall, as though there had been an earthquake here. Large patches of paint beneath two of the ground-floor windows were peeling away. The old front door had been replaced by a modern one, which had the effect of a shrill discord slicing through the harmony of an orchestra. In Germany, alarm bells in the historic building protection offices would have sounded a long time ago, Diana thought with a pang.

  But as soon as they left the hideous door behind, she was immediately immersed in the shadows of past times. Despite the lack of furniture, and the dark patches it had left behind on the walls, Diana could vividly imagine how magnificent the house must once have been. She looked in awe at the marble staircase that led to the upper floor. A stately, dark-haired man in a frock coat stared down at her from a heavy gilded frame. As if drawn to the life-sized portrait by a spell, Diana climbed the stairs towards it.

  There was no inscription, but from the style of the man’s dress, the landscape, the tea fields behind him, and the distinctive lines of the mansion he was standing in front of, she assumed this must be Daniel Stockton. She also had a vague recollection of the photo from the Hill Club, although her attention had mainly been on Henry Tremayne.

  At first glance, this did not look like a man who would feel the need to chase after a young woman. His angular features looked serious, his neatly trimmed beard and well-groomed, lightly greying hair indicating a certain vanity. It was impossible to tell whether the painter had been a little flattering with his body, or he simply did not have the belly that many men gained at his age. In any case, Daniel Stockton was a fine figure of a man. Only the black, impenetrable depths of his eyes suggested the repressed desires of the man described in Grace’s notebook.

  As she turned, she noticed that Jonathan had been watching her the whole time.

  “That’s the man from the club photo, isn’t it?” He hadn’t forgotten.

  “I assume so. Who, if not the owner of this plantation, would have had a life-sized portrait of himself hung here?”

  “Maybe we’ll find something to help us with the relationship of the Stocktons to the Tremaynes. The estate worker’s only given us an hour; we should make a start on exploring the rooms.”

  Diana nodded, and as she came back down the stairs she really felt as though Stockton’s dead eyes were boring into her back.

  Many of the rooms were completely empty, the furniture long gone, but bare cables hanging
from the walls suggested that offices must once have been housed here.

  Having found nothing on the ground floor—even the room Diana took to have been the drawing room was bare—they went upstairs past Stockton’s portrait.

  Some doors were locked up here. Peering through the keyholes, they saw rooms that had probably not even been used when the plantation was still going well.

  “Look! We might find something interesting in here.”

  Behind the door Jonathan had pushed open was a room that still contained some furniture. Diana supposed it was Daniel Stockton’s study. The high bookshelves had been relieved of the most valuable volumes, with only a few tattered books lying here and there. The furniture that remained had either been secured or was simply too heavy for thieves. Papers were piled on the wide windowsills—a mess of documents from different periods, yellowed newspapers and faded cardboard folders.

  As her gaze swept the room, Diana discovered a pile of brochures with a photo of the mansion in better days on the front cover. Faded by the sun, they lay untidily on top of an old, chipped chest of drawers.

  Diana picked up one of the brochures and opened it. A shiver of anticipation ran down her spine as she read it and discovered that someone had actually gone to the trouble of writing up the history of the plantation in two languages, English and Tamil.

  Alongside a series of general facts, she found a family photo of the Stocktons, which confirmed her guess at the identity of the man in the portrait.

  Daniel Stockton brought the plantation to the heights of prosperity until, at the age of seventy, illness forced him to hand over the reins to his son. He died two years later, following his wife, who had died suddenly twenty years earlier.

  Diana glanced at the brief biography. Alice Stockton had died in 1888 at the age of forty-three. There was no mention of whether Stockton had married again.

  “I wonder if Stockton had anything to do with his wife’s death,” she murmured softly.

  “What makes you think that, Holmes?” Jonathan said.

  “In Grace’s notebook I’ve only seen one date so far, and that was the fourth of October, 1887. It could be possible that Stockton wanted to court Grace himself. If the incident at the viewing platform I read about is anything to go by, he could have had his eye on her for some time.”

  “But to kill his wife for her?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Diana said. “Grace clearly had an aversion to his son, which he seemed to share if she wasn’t mistaken. Why shouldn’t he have longed for a beautiful young wife?”

  “He could have got a divorce.”

  “Which would have meant a scandal.”

  She was reminded of the reference to a scandal in Victoria’s letter. Had it been anything to do with Stockton? Had he proposed to Grace? Had he done something that would justify sending Grace back to England?

  A cold shiver tickled her skin as she imagined that Stockton might not have balked at taking Grace by force . . .

  She was immediately overcome by an urge to continue reading the account to gain a deeper insight. But the little book lay back in the Vannattuppūcci archive.

  “Maybe Henry didn’t send Grace away because she had fallen out with him, but to protect her from Stockton.” Jonathan spoke her thoughts out loud.

  “But if that were the case, why would he have disinherited her?”

  Diana fell silent and looked out of the window. Was the platform where Stockton had harassed Grace still out there somewhere?

  A look at her watch told her that they only had another quarter of an hour before the estate worker would come and ask them to leave.

  “Let’s go and look for the viewing platform,” she said, following a sudden impulse.

  “Don’t you want to see the rest of the house?”

  “Yes, but we don’t have much time. Maybe we can come back again another time.” She pushed the small brochure into her bag. The family photo would be enough to help her in her deliberations. “For now, I want to try see the place where he was alone with Grace.”

  The directions in the notebook were only very vague, Grace having concentrated on describing her feelings towards Stockton, so Jonathan went to ask the estate worker, who was lurking behind a nearby hedge, smoking. Caught, he quickly threw down the cigarette.

  The man’s wild gestures were a little bewildering for someone who didn’t understand the language, but Jonathan got it.

  “This way.”

  The section of the garden they passed through now was even more of a wilderness than the undergrowth around the martial arts school at Vannattuppūcci. Nature had been left to its own devices here for a long time. The steps Grace had climbed with Stockton were almost completely overgrown, with only a narrow beaten path remaining.

  But when they managed to peer through the thick greenery, there were still glimpses of the tea fields.

  Halfway up they came across a barrier. The sign that swung from a rusty chain was written in both Tamil and Sinhalese script.

  “‘No entry,’” Jonathan translated. “It seems there’s a risk of falling.”

  Diana was set to ignore it, but Jonathan grasped her arm as she made to proceed.

  “It would be better if you don’t go. Your family secret will never be solved if you fall to your death. There’s probably nothing left up there anyway.”

  Diana felt a brief impulse to resist, but then she remembered that Grace had written of a precipitous rocky outcrop.

  She gave in and stayed where she was.

  “I’d have liked to have seen it so much,” she murmured, like a disappointed child.

  “Who knows, maybe the place is haunted by Stockton’s ghost,” Jonathan replied with a comforting smile. “If he sees you, he could get all kinds of crazy ideas, and I didn’t bring my Ghostbusters equipment.”

  That brought a smile to Diana’s face, and all at once the time she had wasted on this walk seemed trivial.

  As they returned to the house, Jonathan slipped the estate worker, by now waiting impatiently, a few notes and apologised that they had substantially overrun the hour he had granted them. Then he took his leave and turned back to Diana.

  “He says we can return any time we like,” he told her once they had left the mansion’s ivy-clad fence behind.

  “No wonder, with you slipping him money like that.”

  “I know how to make friends in circumstances like these.”

  Diana studied him for a moment. “Have I actually thanked you for everything you’ve done so far?”

  “I don’t think there’s any need,” Jonathan replied. “Especially since we haven’t found the missing piece of the puzzle yet.”

  Diana smiled to herself. If Philipp were half as thoughtful as this, she might consider trying again with him. But the more time she spent with Jonathan, the more clearly she felt that there would be no going back for her after her return to Germany.

  And what then? a small voice asked. Will you ever find another man you like?

  I already have, she answered herself silently. I’ve known it for a while.

  Back at Vannattuppūcci, she felt shattered—but at the same time inspired. The secret seemed to be within her grasp.

  After a quick evening meal with Jonathan, they went back to the basement.

  “You’ll tell me if you find something groundbreaking, won’t you?” he asked, making himself comfortable in his chair and closing his eyes for a few moments.

  “Of course I will,” she said as she picked up the magnifying glass and continued her reading.

  15

  Vannattuppūcci, 1887

  In the night, two days after their visit to the Stocktons’, Grace decided to go and see Vikrama. In this situation she needed the advice of a friend, not a sister who wasn’t old enough to understand, and not the advice of a friend who was so far away that her answer would not arrive until after the engagement had been arranged.

  After reassuring herself that Victoria was sleeping dee
ply, she threw on her blue velvet dressing gown over her nightdress and opened the window as silently as possible.

  The modesty instilled by her upbringing caused her to hesitate a moment—it wasn’t seemly for a young lady to be running around in her night attire—but then she hitched up her nightdress and dressing gown and climbed out of the window.

  She had never before been outside on the plantation alone at night. She had never even ventured out into the park at Tremayne House without someone to accompany her for fear that the old ghosts of the house would be out and about at night, so she was amazed that in this place, where the darkness was no friendlier, she felt no fear at all. Who was she going to encounter here?

  Having reached the edge of the garden, it occurred to her that she had no idea where to begin looking for Vikrama. She supposed his house must be in the village with the others’, but she wasn’t sure. Maybe he even had a room in the administration building. It was strange that she’d never thought about it.

  She finally decided to make for the village and, if necessary, ask for him there, if her instinct did not guide her to him. She followed the path through the jungle for a while, depending on her memory since she could see practically nothing.

  She heard voices from somewhere. Someone was still awake in the village. Or was it Vikrama’s friends setting off for their martial arts practice?

  When a white-clad figure appeared in front of her, she ran up and cried out, “Vikrama teedureen!” which she hoped meant, “Where can I find Vikrama?”

  The figure whirled around. “Miss Tremayne, what are you doing here?”

  With a start, she realised that this was Vikrama, clearly on the way to his practice session.

  “I . . . I was looking for you,” she said in a small voice, abstractedly tugging down the sleeve of her nightdress through the sleeve of her dressing gown in her embarrassment. “I . . . I wanted to talk to you.”

  Vikrama inclined his head to one side, then his body relaxed. He set the white-wrapped package he was carrying down on the ground.

  “Is it about the lessons? Your father is keeping me so busy at the moment that I hardly have time to draw breath.”