by Sarah Rayne
‘You could start getting back into things with the new unit,’ said Jonathan.
‘Prove myself all over again, and then go cap in hand to the GM? “Please let me be a doctor again.”’
‘Don’t be so spiky. I’m trying to help you.’
‘I know you are. I’m sorry. Can I think about it?’
‘Yes, of course. You aren’t going to stay here though, are you?’
‘I’ll have to stay for a bit longer.’
‘Why? The police investigation’s wound up. What is there to stay for?’
‘Oh,’ said Antonia vaguely, ‘loose ends to tidy up.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Dear Daniel
Your letter reached me earlier today–I was in the gardens here, and although I wasn’t wearing a shady hat like my grandmother apparently used to, I was cutting sheaves of lilac for the rooms as she once did. It’s not to scent the rooms, you understand–it’s to drive away the smell of the paint. My grandmother probably had only the sounds of rooks cawing or doves cooing or something equally idyllic: I have the sound of hammering and sawing from within the house, although at least the bailiffs have gone, which my father says is God’s mercy. I should think they were very glad to go–they must have had a thin time of it here, what with the rain coming in through the roof in about forty different places, and death-watch beetle feasting off the timbers.
So it isn’t quite the Irish idyll you said you visualized, but to me it’s still the most beautiful place in the world, and–will you understand this, I wonder?–it’s my place in the world, just as it’s my father’s place. I won’t wax absurdly lyrical about soul places, but I think he and I both knew that one day we would come back here. My father says he thanks whatever saints are appropriate that there were entails thicker than leaves on the ground in autumn, and that he was still the owner–he smiles when he says this, and tries to pretend he doesn’t care one way or the other, but he does care, of course, and he’ll be eternally grateful to George Lincoln for that astonishing legacy. He’s sent quite a large sum of money to help the endowment of the new wing for Latchkill–he’s done that anonymously, so I’m trusting you not to tell anyone.
Thank you for telling me about Maud. She was so confused and unhappy, wasn’t she? But the piano is a wonderful idea–perhaps she will find some kind of peace in her music.
I’m glad the memorial clock to Thomasina Forrester is in its place at last, but I’m not surprised that your prediction about it was right, and that it’s the most appalling monstrosity imaginable but it’s very generous of you to pay for its installing, and to set up the little fund for someone to wind it every week. I think I do understand what you said about liking to know it will be there in the future. You always have felt deeply about things, and there’s no accounting for these feelings, is there?
I’m working in a hospital just outside Connemara for two days in each week, and I love that. When you get here next week, I’ll take you to see it.
And yes, of course, you can stay here just as long as you want to.
Bryony
Antonia finished reading the faded writing, and felt the past brush against her mind all over again. For several moments she was unable to speak. So, after all, Daniel, you were with me, and after all, you did save me. You had a part in arranging for that dreadful, blessed, old clock to be installed and looked after, and it sounds as if you also created the Clock-Winder position. Did you have a feeling it would be needed one day? It’s a pity you can’t know how very much it was needed, Daniel, or that in a future you couldn’t possibly have envisaged, it meant I escaped from Twygrist and from Donna Robards.
Daniel was becoming shadowy now–Antonia recognized this without sadness, but she rested her hand on the letter for a moment. Trying to keep hold of the past, Antonia? No, I’m letting it go. But I’m glad that I touched that past once or twice. Thank you, Daniel. I hope you went to Ireland and to Bryony who lived there. I think you probably did, somehow.
She withdrew her hand from the letter and smiled at the man seated across the table. ‘Oliver, you’re brilliant to have found this.’
‘I am, aren’t I?’ He did not exactly smile back, but somehow a smile seemed to be between them.
‘Kit Kendal thinks the first Clock-Winder was a several-times great-aunt–he thinks her name was Ellen, but he isn’t absolutely sure,’ said Oliver. ‘I told you the Clock-Winder appointment was virtually hereditary, didn’t I? I didn’t know the first incumbent was female, though. Nice that, isn’t it? Women’s equality as far back as the beginning of the nineteenth century.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought you were a particular supporter of feminism.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been able to find out anything about Ellen Kendal yet, but I think the Maud mentioned in Bryony’s letter could have been Maud Lincoln.’
‘The miller’s daughter,’ said Antonia. ‘Was she?’
‘The records do show that George Lincoln had a daughter named Maud.’
Maud. Had she been the withdrawn creature in Latchkill, about whom the day book had recorded that she pressed into the ground as if afraid of the light?
‘How about Bryony?’
‘I shouldn’t think we’d ever trace her,’ said Oliver. ‘There’s no surname or address to start from.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Antonia, but to herself she thought she might see if there had ever been any record of a Bryony Glass who had lived somewhere near to Connemara.
‘If I can find out anything more, I’ll let you know,’ said Oliver.
‘Would you? I’d like to know about them.’
‘I’d like to know as well. More wine?’
‘Please.’
They were facing one another across the table at the cottage’s comfortable heart. Antonia had lit an old oil lamp she had found in the back of a cupboard, and the curtains were drawn against the night. Raffles, who had wandered in with Oliver, had found his favourite place by the radiator.
Antonia was not quite sure how this evening had come about. Oliver had phoned earlier in the afternoon to say he had found Bryony’s letter tucked in a box. He had been looking for something else at the time, he said, but as was so often the way…
Anyway, would it be all right if he walked down to the cottage later that evening so she could see it? Antonia had said, yes, of course, and managed not to ask if he could bring it down there and then.
He had somehow ended in staying to dinner. Antonia had put together a halfway reasonable meal from odds and ends in the fridge, at which point it had turned out that Oliver had brought some wine, a wedge of beautifully creamy Brie, and a box of luxuriously out-of-season strawberries and raspberries.
‘Peace offering,’ he said.
‘Thank you very much. But it truly wasn’t necessary.’
‘I thought I’d like to do it anyway.’ He set the box on the kitchen table. ‘I’m behaving a bit like Godfrey, aren’t I?’
‘Bringing extravagant food? Yes.’ Antonia smiled. ‘Is Godfrey all right? He was dreadfully upset by it all, wasn’t he?’
‘He’s recovering. I think he was secretly planning a crusade to prove your innocence,’ said Oliver. ‘But if so, you spiked his guns by telling us all that you were guilty as charged. Are you always so defensive?’
(‘Don’t be spiky,’ Jonathan had said.)
‘I thought I’d better clear the air,’ said Antonia.
‘Saxon offered you a job at your old hospital, didn’t he?’ he said abruptly.
‘Yes. Heading a project to expand the department–they’d like a proper rehab centre for drug users. How did you know?’
‘He told me he was going to.’ Oliver’s tone was devoid of expression. ‘He said it in a rather challenging way. Shall you accept the offer?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can struck-off doctors be reinstated? I’m sorry if that sounds a bit…’
‘It doesn’t sound a bit anythi
ng,’ said Antonia. ‘It’s nice and direct. Doctors can be reinstated, but it really comes down to whether it’s thought to be in the public interest to let them loose on patients again. I don’t think they’d let me loose,’ she said. ‘Whatever the rights or wrongs, I really did kill Don. I was beside myself with grief for my brother, and I was frightened to death of Don on my own account. A lot of high-minded stuff was talked at the trial–the sanctity of human life, and the trust that patients have to have in doctors–but it’s all perfectly true.’ She paused. ‘I’d like to go back to psychiatric medicine but I don’t think I could bear it if they refused to reverse the original decision.’ It was odd she had not been able to say this to Jonathan, but could say it to Oliver.
‘What will you do?’
‘I like the idea of being involved in drug rehabilitation,’ said Antonia. ‘There are all kinds of areas I could work in without needing to have my licence restored. And I could still be involved with the victims. It would be a compromise, but I think I could be quite useful.’
‘Does the compromise have to be London again?’
They looked at one another. ‘No,’ said Antonia at last. ‘It doesn’t have to be. There are several very good hospitals around here.’
‘Good.’ He refilled the wine glasses. ‘You do know you could have this cottage for as long as you want?’
‘Could I? Along with the ghosts?’ Antonia had no idea why she had said this.
‘Everyone has ghosts, Antonia. But after a while they can be lived with.’
‘I know that. And there aren’t precisely ghosts in this cottage,’ said Antonia. ‘But—’
‘But there are pockets of something a bit odd, aren’t there?’ he said. ‘Especially the part where the kitchen goes through into the old outhouses.’
‘Yes.’ Antonia looked up at him. ‘You know about it?’
‘Of course I know. Why wouldn’t I?’
‘I didn’t think anyone else would understand.’
Oliver seemed about to reach for her hand, and then thought better of it. But he said, ‘I understand all about ghosts. And there’s the same feeling of–of oddness in parts of Quire House. Unhappiness–something stronger than unhappiness, even. But I don’t know any more than that.’ He looked at her very intently. ‘Do the ghosts matter? Or can they be lived with?’
The ghosts. Richard and Don. Oliver’s wife who had died at Twygrist. Daniel Glass, and Bryony who had written that letter to him from her raggle-taggle Irish idyll. The body of the man in the kiln room. And poor sad Maud inside Latchkill…
Antonia said, very carefully, ‘Yes. Yes, I believe the ghosts can be lived with,’ and saw with delight he was reaching for her hand, and this time he was not going to think better of it…
They said there was always one thing you forgot when you killed someone. Always one mistake you made.
Donna had not thought she had made any mistakes–she had had five years to make sure that mistakes would not happen, but…The Clock-Winder. The one thing she had not thought about–had hardly even known about. But if it had not been for that young man–another young man for Weston to get her claws into!–Antonia would have died in Twygrist. She ought to have died: Donna had wanted her to die alone and in the dark.
Instead the bitch was free, the police had discovered Donna’s existence, and she was being questioned. They had turned up at her flat, hammering on the door, giving her no chance to escape, or even to think.
Now she was locked up in this appalling interview room, with everything she said being recorded on a machine, and with serious-faced men and women asking her questions. Why and when and how? Then breaking off to give her a rest, not because they wanted to, but because it was the law, and then beginning it all over again.
And then, quite suddenly, Donna saw something she had not seen before. If she told these people the truth–everything–she would clear Don’s name. Everyone thought Don had killed Richard Weston that night, and only Donna had known he had not. But she could put that right. She could exonerate her beloved boy. A huge wave of delight surged up inside her. She would do it. She would make this sacrifice for Don’s memory.
Most likely it would mean prison, but she would bear it. Once she had vowed to wait as long as it took in order to be revenged on Antonia Weston: she would wait twenty years if she had to, she had said. That still held good. Because even if she did have to wait twenty years, one day she would be free, and on that day…
On that day she would begin a whole new plan for Antonia Weston’s punishment.
As Godfrey pottered around his flat, he saw, from his windows, the lights shining in the cottage’s sitting room. He was pleased that Oliver seemed to have stayed with Antonia for the whole evening. She might have cooked a meal, perhaps, and they would have enjoyed eating it together. Oliver had taken a bottle of wine, and fruit and cheese.
He went into his bedroom to get ready for bed, and he saw the lights of the cottage’s sitting room dim to a soft amber glow, as if the two people in there had thought it might be rather nice to sit together in the firelight. Godfrey, who had a strong sense of propriety, drew his curtains very firmly at this point. He would not have dreamed of doing anything so intrusive or impolite as staring at the cottage, to see if a bedroom light went on.
But he could not help hoping very strenuously that a bedroom light did go on and, as he got into his own bed, he was smiling at the thought of Oliver and Antonia together in the firelight.