by Kate Morton
‘Murder?’ she’d gasped. ‘How awful!’ Now, she said: ‘I had a look in the drawing room, but I couldn’t see any sign.’
Leonard had no desire to speak of murder or its markers again; not now, not with Kitty. ‘Could you pass me the butter?’
Kitty handed it to him. ‘Was there a big police investigation? How did the thief disappear without a trace? Wouldn’t a diamond as rare as that have been recognised when it resurfaced?’
‘You know as much as I do, Kit.’
Truthfully, Leonard was curious about the Radcliffe Blue. It was right what Kitty had said: the gem within the pendant was so valuable and rare that it would have been recognised instantly by anyone in the jewellery trade; to keep its discovery and sale a secret would have taken an enormous amount of subterfuge. And gemstones didn’t simply disappear: even if it had been cut down into smaller diamonds, they were somewhere. Moreover, popular wisdom had it that it was the theft of the Blue that led to the shooting of Radcliffe’s fiancée, and the death of Fanny Brown that had in turn broken Radcliffe’s spirit and tipped him into a long, spiralling decline, all of which interested Leonard very much, not least because he was beginning to develop doubts about the theory.
As Leonard cooked, Kitty fell to fiddling with the other items on the wooden table in the centre of the room. After a time she disappeared, returning, bag in hand, as Leonard was loading everything onto the tray to take it outside.
They sat together at the iron table and chairs beneath the crabapple tree.
Kitty was dressed now in her own clothing. A smart suit that made her look older than she was. She had a job interview, a typist’s position at an insurance agency in Holborn. She was going to walk to Lechlade where she’d arranged for one of her father’s friends to collect her in his motorcar.
She would have to move to London if she got the job. Leonard hoped that she did. It was her fourth interview in as many weeks.
‘… not your old lady friend, perhaps, but there is someone else.’
Leonard glanced up; Kitty’s nerves had made her talkative and he hadn’t been listening.
‘I know you’ve met someone. You’ve been distracted – more so than usual. So … who is she, Lenny?’
‘What’s that?’
‘A woman. I heard you last night, talking in your sleep.’
Leonard felt his face grow hot.
‘You’re blushing.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You’re being evasive.’
‘I’m busy, that’s all.’
‘If you say so.’ Kitty took out her cigarette case and lit one. She exhaled smoke and then waved her right hand through it absently. Leonard noticed the fine gold ring she wore catching the light. ‘Do you ever wish you could see into the future?’
‘No.’
‘Never?’
Dog nudged Leonard’s knee and then dropped a ball at his feet. The last time he’d looked, Dog hadn’t owned a ball. One of those kids by the river was going to be disappointed later.
Leonard picked it up and lobbed it into the distance, watching as Dog bounded through the wildflowers and bracken towards the bank of the Hafodsted Brook.
There was no one else – not in the way Kitty meant it – and yet Leonard couldn’t deny that something strange was happening to him. In the month since he’d arrived at Birchwood he’d been having the most vivid dreams. They’d been intense from the outset, vibrant concoctions about painting and pigments, and nature and beauty, in which he’d woken with a split-second certainty that he’d glimpsed important answers to the deepest questions of life while he was gone. And then, at some point, the dreams had begun to change, and he’d started to see a woman in his sleep. Not just any woman but one of the models from Radcliffe’s paintings. In his dreams she spoke to him; she told him things as if he were a composite of Radcliffe and himself, things he couldn’t always remember when he woke.
It was being here, of course, in the very place that Radcliffe had invested with so much of his own passion and creativity, a place that he had immortalised in his writings; it was only natural that Leonard, already of an obsessive bent, should find himself slipping beneath the skin of the other man, seeing the world through Radcliffe’s eyes, particularly when he surrendered each night to sleep.
He would never tell Kitty, though: he could just imagine how that conversation would go. Well, Kitty, it seems that I’ve fallen in love with a woman called Lily Millington. I’ve never met her or spoken with her. She is most likely dead, if not extraordinarily old; she may well be an international diamond thief. But I can’t stop thinking about her and at night she comes to me when I’m sleeping. Leonard knew exactly what Kitty would say to that. She’d tell him that he wasn’t dreaming, he was hallucinating, and that it was high time he stopped.
Kitty made no secret of her feelings about the pipe. It didn’t matter how often Leonard explained that opium was the only way he knew to dull the nightly terrors: the cold, wet trenches, the smell and the noise, the ear-shattering explosions that pulled at a man’s skull as he watched, helpless, while his friends, his brother, ran through the smoke and the mud towards their end. If the woman from the painting pushed Tom out of the way at night … well, where was the harm in that?
Kitty was standing now, her bag over her shoulder, and Leonard felt bad, suddenly, because she had come all this way, and even though he hadn’t asked or expected her to do so, they were bonded, the two of them, and she was his responsibility.
‘Shall I walk you into Lechlade?’
‘Don’t bother. I’ll let you know how I get on.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Always.’
‘Well, all right, good lu—’
‘Don’t say it.’
‘Break a leg then.’
She smiled at him, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. They were filled with unsaid things.
He watched her as she started along the coach way towards the barn.
In a minute or two she would reach the lane that led through the village to the Lechlade Road. She would disappear from sight, until the next time.
He told himself to do it now, for both of their sakes, to break it off once and for all. He told himself that he would be setting her free; it was wrong what he was doing, holding on to her like this. ‘Kitty?’
She turned back, an eyebrow lifted in response.
Leonard swallowed his courage. ‘You’ll be great,’ he said. ‘Break two legs.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The meeting that afternoon with Leonard’s ‘old lady friend’ had been arranged for four o’clock, or ‘teatime’ as she’d insisted on calling it. Her manner had smacked of a privileged childhood in which ‘teatime’ meant cucumber sandwiches and Battenberg cake and was as natural a marker of daily life as sunrise and sunset.
After spending the rest of the day poring over his notes to ensure that he had a clear list of questions to take with him, Leonard set off well ahead of time, partly because he was excited and partly because he wanted to walk the long way past the village churchyard at the end of the lane.
Leonard had stumbled upon the headstone quite by accident a couple of weeks before. He’d been returning from a long walk across country, and Dog had raced ahead as they neared the village road, ducking beneath a gap at the bottom of the picket fence to nose about in the ivy that grew like ocean spray between the graves. Leonard had followed him into the churchyard, drawn by the modest beauty of the stone building nestled amidst greenery.
There was a smaller creeper-clad structure on the southern edge with a marble bench beneath it, and Leonard had sat there for a time contemplating the pleasing form of the twelfth-century church as he waited for Dog to finish exploring. The headstone, as chance would have it, had been right in front of him and the familiar name – Edward Julius Radcliffe – chiselled in a plain, elegant font, had leapt out.
Leonard had taken to stopping in at some point most days. As far as resting places went, he had
decided, it was a good one. Quiet and beautiful, close to the home Radcliffe had once loved. There would be enormous solace in that.
He glanced at his wristwatch now as the churchyard came into view. It was only three-thirty; still plenty of time to duck inside for a few minutes before circling back and making his way to the cottage on the other side of the village. ‘The village’ was an overstatement, after all: Birchwood was little more than three quiet streets diverging from a triangular green.
He tracked the familiar path to Radcliffe’s grave and sat on the marble bench. Dog, who had followed him, sniffed at the few spots around the edge of the grave where the ground was slightly disturbed. Finding nothing to interest him further, he cocked his head in the direction of a noise in the underbrush before darting off to investigate.
On Radcliffe’s headstone, in smaller text beneath his name, was written, Here lieth one who sought truth and light and saw beauty in all things, 1840–1881. Leonard found himself staring as he often did at the dash between the dates. Within that lichen-laced mark there lay the entire life of a man: his childhood, his loves, his losses and fears, all reduced to a single chiselled line on a piece of stone in a quiet churchyard at the end of a country lane. Leonard wasn’t sure whether the thought was comforting or distressing; his opinion changed, depending on the day.
Tom had been buried in a cemetery in France, near a village he had never set foot in alive. Leonard had seen the letter sent to their mother and father and had marvelled at the way Tom’s commanding officer made things sound so brave and honourable, death in duty a terrible but noble sacrifice. He supposed it was all down to practice. Lord knew, those officers had written an awful lot of letters. They’d become expert at ensuring they betrayed not a hint of the chaos or horror, and certainly no suggestion of waste. Incredible how little official waste there was in war, how few mistakes.
Leonard had read the letter twice when his mother showed it to him. She’d drawn great comfort from it, but beneath its smooth words of gentle consolation, Leonard could hear the ill choir shouting out in pain and fear, calling for their mothers, their boyhoods, their homes. There was nowhere further from home than the battlefield, and no more wretched homesickness than that of the soldier facing death.
Leonard had been sitting in this very spot the other day, thinking of Tom and Kitty and Edward Radcliffe, when he first met his ‘old lady friend’. It was late in the afternoon and he’d noticed her at once because she’d been the only other person in the churchyard. She’d arrived with a small posy of flowers and had brought them over to lay on Radcliffe’s grave. Leonard had watched with interest, wondering whether she’d known the man himself or was simply an admirer of his art.
Her face was lined with age, and her hair, white and very fine, was pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck. She was dressed in the sort of clothing one might wear to go on an African safari. She’d stood very still, leaning on a delicate silver-handled cane, her shoulders hunched in silent communion. There’d been a reverence to her posture, which seemed to Leonard to go beyond that of an admirer. After a time, when she reached down to shake loose a weed from the stones around the grave, Leonard had known for certain that she must be a relative or friend.
The opportunity to speak with someone who had known Edward Radcliffe was tantalising. Fresh material was the research student’s holy grail, particularly in the case of historical subjects, where the chance of stumbling across anything new was generally next to nil.
He had approached carefully so as not to startle her, and when he was close enough to be heard said, ‘Good morning.’
She’d looked up swiftly, her movements and manner that of a wary bird.
‘I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ he went on quickly. ‘I’m new to the village. I’m staying in the house on the river bend.’
She stood straighter and appraised him over the top of her fine wire spectacles. ‘Tell me, Mr Gilbert, what do you think of Birchwood Manor?’
It was Leonard’s turn to be surprised: she knew his name. But then the village was small and he had it on good authority that news travelled quickly in such circumstances. He told her he thought very highly of Birchwood Manor; that he’d read a lot about it before he arrived, but the reality had far surpassed his imaginings.
She listened, blinking occasionally, but otherwise giving no indication that she approved or disapproved of what he was saying. When he stopped speaking she said only, ‘It was a school once, did you know. A school for girls.’
‘I’d heard that.’
‘It was a terrible shame what happened. It was going to be revolutionary. A new way of educating young women. Edward used to say that education was the key to salvation.’
‘Edward Radcliffe?’
‘Who else?’
‘You knew him.’
Her eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I did.’
It took every ounce of restraint Leonard could rally to sound casual. ‘I’m a research student up at Oxford. I’m working on a thesis about Radcliffe and this village, the house and his art. I wonder whether you’d mind speaking with me?’
‘I had thought that’s what we were doing, Mr Gilbert.’
‘We are, of course—’
‘You meant that you would like to speak with me about Edward, to interview me.’
‘I’ve had to rely to this point largely on letters from the archives and accounts written by his friends, you see, people like Thurston Holmes—’
‘Pah!’
Leonard flinched at her vehemence.
‘Of all the self-aggrandising weasels! I shouldn’t rely upon a word that fell from his pen.’
Her attention had been caught by another weed and she was loosening it now with the end of her cane. ‘I don’t like talking,’ she said between stabs. ‘I don’t like it at all.’ She reached to pluck the weed from the rubble, shaking it fiercely to rid the roots of dirt before throwing it into the bushes. ‘I can see, though, Mr Gilbert, that I am going to have to speak with you, lest you publish more lies. There have been enough of those over the years.’
Leonard had started to thank her, but she’d waved her hand with imperious impatience.
‘Yes, yes, you may save all that for later. I am doing this against my better judgement, but I shall see you at teatime on Thursday.’ She gave him her address, and Leonard was on the cusp of saying goodbye when he realised that he hadn’t even asked her name. ‘Why, Mr Gilbert,’ she said with a frown, ‘whatever is the matter with you? My name is Lucy, of course; Lucy Radcliffe.’
He should have guessed. Lucy Radcliffe – the younger sister who had inherited her brother’s beloved house; who had loved him too well to allow it to be sold to someone who might not care for it as he had done; Leonard’s landlady. Leonard had gone home directly after their meeting, bursting through the front door into the late afternoon dim of the house, heading straight to the mahogany desk in the room with the mulberry fruit-and-leaf wallpaper, across which he’d spread his research. He’d had to sort through hundreds of pages of handwritten notes, quotes he’d jotted down in libraries and private houses over the years, from letters and journals; ideas he’d scribbled and then circled, attached to diagrams and arrows.
He found what he was looking for late that night when the lantern had burned for long enough that the room smelled like kerosene. Amongst notes he’d taken from a collection of documents kept in the private collection of a family in Shropshire was a series of letters exchanged between Edward and his youngest sister while he was at boarding school. They had come to rest in this place, in a trove of other old family correspondence, through a series of marital twists and turns stemming from the middle Radcliffe child, Clare.
The letters had seemed unimportant to Leonard at the time; they hadn’t concerned the house or Radcliffe’s art; they were personal letters between siblings, one nine years older than the other; he’d only copied out their contents because the family had intimated that his visit was an inconvenience and he wo
uldn’t be permitted a second look at their papers. But as he reread the exchanges – funny anecdotes, enchanting and frightening fairy stories, childish gossip about family members – and viewed them in the context of the old woman he’d just met, unsteady on her feet and yet still walking across the village to lay fresh flowers on her brother’s grave fifty years after his death, he saw another side to Edward Radcliffe.
All of this time, Leonard had been focused on Radcliffe the artist, the spirited thinker, the writer of the manifesto. But the long, engaging letters of a boy who was miserable at school to an earnest little sister who begged – rather precociously for a five-year-old it seemed to Leonard – for books about ‘how the stars were born’ and ‘whether it is possible to travel through time’, had added a new aspect to the man. Furthermore, they’d hinted at a mystery Leonard had thus far been unable to resolve. For both Lucy and Edward referred on more than one occasion to ‘the Night of the Following’ – always capitalised – and ‘the house with the light’, the context making it clear that they were speaking about something that had happened to Edward.
At the archives in York, Leonard had puzzled over the letter Edward wrote to Thurston Holmes in 1861 announcing his purchase of Birchwood Manor and admitting that he was no stranger to the house; now he was beginning to think that the two sets of correspondence were linked. Both made allusions to a mysterious event from the past, and Leonard had a feeling that whatever had happened on ‘the Night of the Following’ had led to Radcliffe’s obsession with Birchwood Manor. It was one of the foremost questions on the list of those he intended to ask Lucy at their meeting.
Leonard stood and lit a cigarette. The ground was still rough from where she’d plucked at the weeds the other day, and he smoothed over the spot with his foot. As he returned the lighter to his pocket, his fingertips grazed the cool edge of Tom’s lucky tuppence. He had never stood at the end of his own brother’s grave. He hadn’t seen the point; he knew Tom wasn’t there. Where was he? Leonard wondered. Where had they all gone? It seemed impossible that it could all just end like that. Impossible that so many young men’s hopes and dreams and bodies could be buried in the earth and the earth remain unchanged. Such an almighty transfer of energy and matter must surely have affected the world’s balance at an essential – an elemental – level: all of those people who had once been, suddenly gone.