by Kate Morton
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Birchwood Manor was one of those places in which the threads of time slackened and came unstrung. Lucy noticed how quickly the others all slipped into a routine, as if they had been at the house forever, and she wondered whether it was a function of the weather – the stretch of summer days that seemed to go on and on – the particular collection of people that Edward had gathered, or maybe even something intrinsic to the house itself. She knew what Edward would say to that. Ever since he’d learned the tale of the Eldritch Children as a boy, he had been convinced that the land within this bend of the river held special properties. Lucy prided herself on being of a rational persuasion, but she had to admit that there was something unusual about the house.
Edward had written ahead to engage a young woman from the village, Emma Stearnes, as a maid of all work, to come in early each morning and then to leave after the evening meal had been prepared. On the first night, when they arrived from the railway, traipsing across the wildflower meadow towards the house, Emma had been waiting for them. She had followed Edward’s instructions to the letter and the large iron table in the garden had been covered with a white linen cloth, a tremendous spread laid out upon it. Glass lanterns had been suspended from the lowest branches of the chestnut tree, and as dusk fell, the wicks were lit and the candles began to flicker. Their illumination strengthened with the darkening night, and as the wine flowed, Felix took out his guitar. Adele started to dance while a chorus of robins sang away the last of the day’s light, and eventually Edward stood upon the table to recite Keats’s ‘Bright Star’.
The house slept like the dead that night, and everyone woke late the next morning in high spirits. They had all been too tired the evening before to investigate properly and now ran from room to room exclaiming over this view or that detail. The house had been built by a master craftsman, Edward said proudly, looking on, delighted, as his friends explored; every feature had been knowingly included. In Edward’s view, such attention to detail made the house ‘truthful’ and he loved everything about it: every piece of furniture, every curtain, every whorl in every floorboard, hewn from the nearby woods. His favourite aspect was an engraving above the door in a room with mulberry fruit-and-leaf wallpaper; the room was on the ground floor with large windows set into the back wall that made it seem almost part of the garden it overlooked. The engraving read, ‘Truth, Beauty, Light’, and Edward could not stop staring at it in wonder and saying, ‘You see, this house was meant for me.’
Over the coming days, Edward sketched the house relentlessly. He went everywhere with his new leather satchel across his shoulder, and could often be seen sitting amongst the long grasses of the meadow, hat upon his head, staring up at the house with an expression of deep contentment, before returning his attention to his work. Lily Millington, Lucy noted, was always by his side.
Lucy had asked Edward about Fanny’s whereabouts. He had taken her on the first morning, leading her along the halls by the hand, to show her the Birchwood Manor library. ‘I thought of you especially when I saw these shelves,’ he told her. ‘Look at this collection, Lucy. Books on every subject you could care to mention. It is up to you now to fill your mind with all of the knowledge that the world and its brightest scholars have acquired and published. There will come a time, I know, when women will have the same opportunities afforded men. How can it not come to pass when women are the smarter and more numerous? Until then, you must take control of your own destiny. Read, remember, think.’
Edward did not make such declarations insincerely, and Lucy promised that she would do as he said. ‘You can trust me,’ she’d replied solemnly. ‘I will read every book on every shelf before this summer is over.’
He laughed when she said it. ‘Well, perhaps there’s no need to work quite so quickly as that. There’ll be other summers. Make sure you leave enough time to enjoy the river and the gardens.’
‘Of course.’ And then, because the conversation had reached a natural lull: ‘Are we expecting Fanny to join us?’
Edward’s demeanour did not change, but he said, ‘No, Fanny isn’t coming,’ and then he moved at once to point out a nook beside the fireplace that he suggested would be perfect for concealed reading: ‘No one would even know that you were in there, and I have it on good authority that reading when hidden improves the experience immeasurably.’
Lucy had let the subject of Fanny drop.
Later, she would wish that she had probed further, asked a few more questions; but in truth she did not much care for Fanny and was glad that she wouldn’t be joining them. At the time, Edward’s perfunctory, almost dismissive, response had said it all. Fanny was a bore. She commandeered Edward’s attention and tried to make him someone he was not. As a fiancée, she was far more threatening to Lucy than a model. Models came and went, but marriage was forever. Marriage meant a new house for Edward somewhere else. Lucy couldn’t imagine living without her brother, and she couldn’t imagine what it would be like for him to have to live with Fanny.
Lucy had no plans for marriage – not unless the perfect person happened along. Her ideal husband, she had decided, would be someone just like herself. Or Edward. And they would be very happy, the two of them, alone together forever.
Edward had been right about the library: it was as if it had been designed and stocked with Lucy in mind. Shelves lined the walls, and unlike the collection at their grandparents’ house, which comprised copious religious tracts and pamphlets protecting against the commission of social solecisms, here were real books. The previous owners of Birchwood Manor had amassed a tremendous amount of material on all manner of fascinating subjects, and where there were gaps, Edward had sent to London for further titles. Lucy spent every spare moment scaling the sliding ladder, scanning the spines, and planning the summer weeks that stretched ahead – and she had many spare moments to fill, because from the first day that they arrived, she was left to her own devices.
Even as they had carried out their initial explorations of the house, each artist had been focused on finding the perfect place in which to work. There was an added urgency to their quest, for just before they left for Birchwood, Mr Ruskin had undertaken to support an exhibition of their collective works in the autumn. Each member of the Magenta Brotherhood had a new creation in mind, and the air was thus infused with a blend of creativity, competition and possibility. Once the rooms had been chosen, each painter fell at once to unpacking the art supplies that had come by coach from the railway station.
Thurston chose the large sitting room at the front of the house, because he said that the south-facing window afforded him the perfect light. Lucy tried to stay out of his way, partly because she found Thurston inexplicably disconcerting, and partly because she was embarrassed to have to see her sister’s big mooning eyes. Lucy had chanced upon Clare modelling when the door was open and had needed to run through the meadow at full speed afterwards just to rid herself of the uncomfortable creeping sensation. Lucy had glimpsed the painting before she left. It was fine, of course – even if still in its earliest incarnation – for Thurston was a competent technician; but something had struck her as notable. The woman in the painting, though she shared the languid position that Clare was modelling, draped with ennui over the chaise longue, had been given lips that belonged unmistakably to Lily Millington.
Felix had commandeered the small enclosure off the panelled drawing room on the ground floor, and when Edward pointed out that it had hardly any light at all, he had agreed eagerly and said that this was the point. Felix, who had heretofore been known for painting moody scenes from myth and legend, now declared an intention to use photography rather than paint to portray the same subjects. ‘I am going to make an image of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott to rival Mr Robinson’s. Your river is perfect. It even has the willows and aspens on offer. It shall be Camelot, you’ll see.’
Fierce debate had been raging ever since amongst the group as to whether it was possible to render the same a
rtistic effect in the new medium. At dinner one night, Thurston said that photographs were a gimmick. ‘A cheap trick, all well and good for creating reminders of loved ones, but not for communicating on a serious subject.’
At which point, Felix had taken a button from his pocket, a small tin badge, and flipped it over in his fingers. ‘Tell that to Abraham Lincoln,’ he said. ‘Tens of thousands of these have been given away. There are people all over the continent of America wearing the man’s face – his very image – on their clothing. Once, we wouldn’t have known what Lincoln looked like, let alone what he thought. Now he has forty per cent of the vote.’
‘Why didn’t his opponents do the same thing?’ asked Adele.
‘They tried, but it was too late. He who acts first wins. But I’ll promise you this: we won’t see another election in which the candidates don’t trade on their image.’
Thurston took the tin badge and flipped it like a coin. ‘I’m not denying that it’s a useful political tool,’ he said, slapping the badge down on the top of one hand. ‘But you can’t tell me that this is art.’ He lifted his palm to reveal Lincoln’s face.
‘Not that particular button, no. But think of Roger Fenton’s work.’
‘The Crimean pictures are extraordinary,’ Edward agreed. ‘And certainly the communication of a serious subject.’
‘But not art.’ Thurston poured the last of the red wine into his glass. ‘I will allow that photographs are useful tools for reporting news and happenings; for performing as the … the …’
‘The eye of history,’ Lily Millington proffered.
‘Yes, thank you, Lily, the eye of history – but art they are not.’
Lucy, sitting quietly at the end of the table, enjoying a second serving of pudding, loved the idea of the photograph as the eye of history. So often in her own reading about the past – and in the digging she had been doing in the woods behind the house, where she had started turning up odd and ancient remnants – she was frustrated by the need to extrapolate and imagine. What a gift it was to future generations that photographs could now record the truth! Lucy had read an article in the London Review that referred to the ‘unimpeachable evidence of the photograph’ and said that from now on nothing would happen without photography being used to create—
‘A tangible, transferable memory of the occurrence.’
Lucy looked up so sharply that a dollop of cream fell from her spoon. It was Lily Millington who had taken the words right out of Lucy’s mouth. That is, she had taken the London Review’s words right out of Lucy’s mind.
‘Just so, Lily,’ Felix was saying. ‘One day the photographic image will be ubiquitous: cameras will be so small and compact that people will carry them on straps around their necks.’
Thurston rolled his eyes. ‘And their necks will be stronger, too, I suppose, these Amazonian people of the future? Felix, you’re making my point with your talk of ubiquity. Having a camera to point does not an artist make. An artist is a man who sees beauty in a sulphuric fog where others see only pollution.’
‘Or a woman,’ said Lily Millington.
‘Why would anybody see a woman in pollution?’ Thurston stopped as he realised what she meant. ‘Oh. I see. Yes, very good, Lily. Very good. Or a lady who sees beauty.’
Clare chimed in then with the self-evident observation that there was no colour in a photograph, and Felix explained that this simply meant he would have to use light and shadow, framing and composition, to evoke the same emotions; but Lucy was only half-listening now.
She couldn’t stop looking at Lily Millington. She did not think she had ever heard the other models say anything sensible, let alone show up Thurston Holmes. Lucy had imagined, if she had given it any thought at all, that Edward would exhaust the inspiration he had drawn from Lily Millington, just as he had grown tired of the other models who came before her. But she glimpsed now that Lily Millington was different from the others after all. That she was a different kind of model entirely.
Lily Millington and Edward spent each day squirrelled away in the Mulberry Room, where Edward had set up his easel. He was working diligently – Lucy recognised the look of distracted inspiration that came upon his features when he was in the process of creating a painting – but so far he had been unusually circumspect about his planned piece. Lucy had thought at first that this must be an effect of his contretemps with Mr Ruskin after the latter’s lack of support the previous year when Edward exhibited the La Belle painting. Between Ruskin’s appraisal of the work and Mr Charles Dickens’s reporting of it, Edward had been left fuming. (When the review was printed, he had stormed down to his studio in the back garden and set fire to every work penned by Mr Dickens, along with his prized copy of Mr Ruskin’s Modern Painters. Lucy, who had lined up at W. H. Smith & Son every week between December 1860 and August 1861 in order to purchase the latest instalment of Great Expectations, had to hide her treasured copies of All the Year Round, lest they, too, should be sacrificed to his fury.)
Now, though, she had begun to wonder if there was something else at play. It was hard to say what it was, exactly, but there was an element of secrecy that surrounded Edward and Lily Millington when they were together. And just the other day, Lucy had approached her brother when he was working in his sketchbook, and as soon as he realised that she was beside him he’d snapped it shut – not before she’d caught a glimpse, though, of a detailed study of Lily Millington’s face. Edward did not like to be watched when he worked, but it was highly unusual for him to behave with quite so much furtiveness. It seemed particularly unwarranted in this case, because what was there to hide in a study of his model’s features? The sketch had been like any of the hundred others that Lucy had already seen on his studio wall – except for the pendant necklace she was wearing. Other than that, it was just the same.
Whatever the case, Edward was much intent upon his work, and so, while the others were busy during the day, and Emma was occupied by her many tasks, Lucy took possession of the library. She had told Edward that she would pace herself, but she had no intention of doing any such thing: each day she chose a clutch of books and then took them outside with her to read. Sometimes she read in the barn, other times beneath the ferns in the garden, and on days when there was too much breeze for Felix to attempt to shoot the Lady of Shalott, when he had stalked about the dawn meadow with a finger lifted to assess the prevailing wind and then returned to the house with his hands thrust deep and disconsolately in his pockets, she would sit in the little rowing boat, moored down at Edward’s new jetty.
They had been at Birchwood for almost two weeks when she came across a particularly ancient and dusty book, its covers hanging by threads. It had been pushed to the back of the very top library shelf, hidden from view. Lucy paused on the ladder and opened to the book’s title page, where it was announced in elaborate font that the book was called Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into three Bookes and that it had been printed in ‘Edinbvrgh’ by ‘Robert Walde-grave, Printer to the Kings Mage∫tie’ in the year 1597. A book on necromancy and ancient black magic, written by the king who had also brought them the plain English Bible, was of more than passing interest to Lucy, and she put it under her arm and climbed down the ladder.
She took a number of books with her that day when she set off for the river, along with her lunch, wrapped in cloth. The morning was hot and as clear as glass and the air smelled like drying wheat and secret, muddy, underground things. Lucy climbed into the boat and rowed herself upstream. Although it wasn’t still enough for Felix to make his photographic exposure, it was not windy and Lucy planned to let the boat drift slowly back towards Edward’s jetty. She stopped rowing as she neared St John’s Lock and took up On Liberty. It wasn’t until after one o’clock that she finished with John Stuart Mill and opened Daemonologie, and she did not get far with King James’s explanation as to the reasons for persecuting witches in a Christian society, because beyond the first few pages she discovered that the
book had been hollowed out to create a cavity. Inside were a number of sheets of paper, folded and tied with a length of twine. She undid the knot and opened the pages. The first was a letter, very old, dated 1586, and written in such faded scratchy writing that she did not even attempt at once to read it. The other pages were drawings, designs for the house, Lucy realised, remembering that Edward had said that it was built during the reign of Elizabeth.
Lucy was thrilled, not because she had any particular interest in architecture, but because she knew that Edward would be delighted, and anything that earned his pleasure made her glad. As she studied the designs, though, she noticed in them something unusual. There were sketches of what the house would look like, the twin gables, the chimneys, the rooms that Lucy now recognised. But there was an additional layer inscribed on the most transparent of paper, which overlaid the first. When Lucy put it on top and lined them up, she noticed that it showed two additional rooms, both of them tiny. Far too small to be bedrooms, or even antechambers. Neither of them had she come across in her explorations.
She frowned, lifting the fine paper and then replacing it in a slightly different position, trying to get a sense of what the rooms might be. The boat had come to rest by now in a small inlet, its prow nosing into the grassy riverbank, and Lucy folded the floor plan away, taking up the letter in the hope that it might shed some light. It was written by a man called Nicholas Owen, the name vaguely familiar to Lucy – perhaps from something she had read? The writing was of an elaborate historical style, but she managed to pick out some of the words – protect … priests … holes …
Lucy gasped as she realised what the plan revealed. She had read, of course, about the measures taken against Catholic priests after Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne. She knew that a great many houses had a secret chamber built into them, whether within the walls or beneath the floors, in order to shelter persecuted priests. But to think that there were one – maybe even two – here at Birchwood Manor was beyond thrilling. Even more exciting, it seemed probable to Lucy that Edward had no idea about the secret hideaways, for surely, if he had, it would have been one of the first things he’d have told them all. Which meant that she was going to be able to share something wonderful with him about the house that he loved: Edward’s ‘truthful’ house had a secret.