by Kate Morton
Clare said something, but it was drowned out by a crack of thunder so loud that the house shook. And then: ‘That settles it,’ said Felix, and talk fell to costumes: how garlands might be made, whether gauze could be used to help create the effect that the Eldritch Children were glowing.
Thurston moved closer to Edward. ‘You said that there were ghosts here at Birchwood Manor but then told us a story about a Fairy Queen rescuing her children.’
‘I did not say that there were ghosts; I said there was a presence; and I haven’t reached the end of the story yet.’
‘Go on then.’
‘When the queen arrived to take her children back to fairyland, she was so grateful to the old human couple who had protected them that she cast an enchantment across their home and lands. To this day, it is said that a light can be glimpsed at times in the uppermost window of any house that stands upon this plot of land: the presence of the Eldritch people.’
‘A light in the window.’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘Have you ever seen it?’
Edward did not answer at once and Lucy knew then that he was thinking of the Night of the Following.
Thurston pressed: ‘You wrote to me when you purchased Birchwood Manor and told me that the house had called to you for a long time. I did not know then what you meant, and you said that you would tell me the next time we met. By then, though, you had other things on your mind.’ His glance swept sideways, briefly, to land on Lily Millington, who met it directly and without even the glimmer of a smile.
‘Is it true, Edward?’ said Clare from the other side of the table. ‘Did you see a light in the window?’
Edward did not answer at once and Lucy could have kicked Clare hard in the shins for putting him on the spot like that. She could still remember how frightened he’d been after the Night of the Following, his pale skin and the dark shadows beneath his eyes after standing watch all night in the attic, waiting to see whether whatever had followed him would find him in the house.
She tried to catch his eye, to signal to him that she understood, but he was focused on Lily Millington. He was reading her face, as if they were the only two people in the room. ‘Should I tell them?’ he said.
Lily Millington took his hand. ‘Only if you wish to.’
With a slight nod and a smile that made him look younger, he began to speak. ‘Many years ago, when I was still a boy, I ventured into those woods alone at night and something terrifying—’
Suddenly there came a loud rapping on the front door.
Clare squealed and clutched Adele.
‘It must be Emma,’ said Felix.
‘About time,’ said Thurston.
‘But why would Emma knock?’ asked Lily Millington. ‘She never has before.’
The knock came again, louder this time, and then the hinge-creaking sound of the front door being pushed wide open.
In the flickering glow of the candles, they all glanced at one another, waiting as footsteps sounded down the passage.
As a flash of lightning silvered the outside world, the door flew open and a gust of wind shot through, throwing shadows with teeth along the walls.
There on the threshold, in the green velvet dress that she had worn to have her portrait painted, stood Edward’s fiancée. ‘So sorry I’m late,’ Fanny said as thunder growled past her. ‘I hope I haven’t missed anything important?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Fanny stepped into the room and began to remove her travelling gloves, and with her came an invisible, but potent, change. Lucy wasn’t sure how exactly, but after a stretched moment of suspension, the others all fell at once to action, as if their movements had been choreographed beforehand. Clare and Adele became emphatically involved in a close conversation on the sofa (each keeping one ear carefully tuned to happenings beyond their coterie), Felix returned his attention to the downpipe outside the window, Thurston spoke loudly and generally to the room about his hunger and the difficulty in finding good help these days, and Lily Millington excused herself, muttering something about cheese and bread for supper as she left the room. Edward, meanwhile, went to Fanny and began to help her with her dripping coat.
But Lucy had not received the cue. Instead, she sat lumpen on the armchair, looking left and right for someone to whom she could attach herself. Finding no relief, she stood awkwardly and made a slow blinkered walk towards the door, easing past Fanny, who was saying, ‘A glass of wine, Edward. Red wine. The journey from London was excruciating.’
Lucy found herself heading towards the kitchen. Lily Millington was at Emma’s large wooden table cutting slices from a wheel of Cheddar. She looked up as Lucy appeared at the doorway.
‘Hungry?’
Lucy realised that she was hungry. With all of the excitement of the day – the finding of the floor plans, the hunt for Edward, the discovery of the priest holes – she had forgotten all about tea. Now, she took up the serrated bread knife and started slicing thick slabs from the loaf.
Lily had lighted the tallow lamp that Emma preferred to work by, and the greasy beef smell permeated the room. It was not a pleasant odour, but its familiarity on such a night, as the rain continued in sheets outside and dynamics shifted slyly inside, was welcome and Lucy experienced an unexpected pang of nostalgia.
She felt very young, suddenly, and longed for nothing more than to be a small child again, for whom everything was black and white, and whose bed was even now being prepared by Nanny, a brass warming pan slipped beneath the covers to shoo away the cold and the damp.
‘Do you want to see a trick?’ Lily Millington did not pause in her cheese-slicing task and Lucy was so far away with her thoughts that she wondered if she might have misheard.
Lily Millington looked up at her then and seemed to stare; she reached across the table, a slight quizzical frown on her brow, and with her outstretched fingers took something gently from behind Lucy’s ear. She opened her hand and a silver coin lay in her palm. ‘A shilling! Lucky me. I’ll have to check you more often.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘Magic.’
Lucy’s fingers went quickly to the skin behind her ear. ‘Will you tell me how to do it?’
‘I’ll think about it.’ Lily took a few slices of bread from Lucy’s board. ‘Sandwich?’
She’d made one for herself, too, and now went to sit on the end of the table nearest the front window. ‘Cook’s prerogative,’ she said, when she noticed Lucy watching. ‘I see no reason that we should rush back. The others have enough to keep them occupied. They’ll not starve.’
‘Thurston said that he was famished.’
‘Did he?’ Lily Millington took a deep satisfied bite of her sandwich.
Lucy went to sit beside Lily Millington on the table end.
Outside, through the window, a rift between clouds revealed a small patch of clear sky above the storm. Within it a few faraway stars twinkled. ‘Do you think that we will ever know how the stars were formed?’ asked Lucy.
‘Yes.’
‘Really? How can you be so sure?’
‘Because a chemist called Bunsen and a physicist named Kirchhoff have worked out how to use the spectrum produced when sunlight passes through a prism to name the chemicals present in the sun.’
‘And the stars?’
‘They say that it follows.’ Lily Millington was also staring up at the distant sky now, her profile illuminated by the hazy light of the tallow lamp. ‘My father used to tell me that I was born under a lucky star.’
‘A lucky star?’
‘An old sailor’s superstition.’
‘Your father was a sailor?’
‘He was a clockmaker once upon a time, a very good one. He used to repair the collection of a retired sea captain out in Greenwich and it was there that his mind was filled with seafaring superstitions. It was in Greenwich that I first looked through a telescope.’
‘What did you see?’
‘I was ver
y fortunate, for Neptune had just been found. A planet both new and ancient at once.’
Lucy wished that her father had been a clockmaker who had taken her with him to the Royal Observatory. ‘My father died when I was only a child; he had a run-in with a carriage.’
Lily Millington turned and smiled at her. ‘Then let us hope that we have better luck than they did.’ She inclined her head towards the table. ‘In the meantime, I suppose it’s time to feed the others.’
As Lucy finished her sandwich, Lily Millington assembled the rest of the bread and cheese and arranged the supper on a porcelain serving platter.
Yes, Lily Millington was different from the models who had come before her, those pretty faces who reminded Lucy of the leaves that fell from the towering lime trees in autumn – the lushest of green in summer, but lasting only one season before they fell clean away; replaced the following year by a fresh new crop. Lily Millington knew about science and had seen the planet of Neptune through a telescope and there was something inside her that came out in Edward’s paintings. Something that had made him tell her about the Night of the Following. Lucy had a feeling she should hate Lily Millington for that, but she didn’t.
‘Where did you learn to do magic?’ she asked.
‘I learned from a French street performer in Covent Garden.’
‘You did not.’
‘I did.’
‘As a child?’
‘A very young child.’
‘What were you doing in Covent Garden?’
‘Picking pockets, mostly.’
Lucy knew then that Lily Millington was teasing. Edward did that, too, when he wanted to end a conversation. As she finished her sandwich, she noticed that the clouds had closed over the gap already and the stars had disappeared.
Edward was just leaving when they arrived back at the dining room, a candle in one hand and Fanny leaning hard against his other side. ‘Miss Brown is tired after the day’s travel,’ he said with careful politeness. ‘I’m going to show her to bed.’
‘Of course,’ said Lily Millington. ‘I’ll make sure to save you some supper.’
‘I know you didn’t mean it, Edward,’ Fanny was saying as they made their way slowly along the hallway, her voice more slurred than usual. ‘I haven’t told a soul. You were just confused. It’s normal before a wedding.’
‘Shh, there, now’ – Edward helped her begin up the stairs – ‘we’ll talk about it tomorrow.’
Lucy did not return to the dining room; instead, she watched them disappear and when she considered it safe to do so started up the stairs herself. Edward, she noticed, had taken Fanny into the room beside her own. It was small but pretty, with a four-poster bed and a walnut dressing table under the window.
All was quiet until Lucy heard Fanny notice that the window faced east towards the village churchyard.
‘It is just a different type of sleep,’ Lucy could hear Edward saying, ‘nothing more than that. Just the long sleep of the dead.’
‘But, Edward.’ Her voice carried through the open door and down the hall. ‘It is bad luck to sleep with one’s feet facing the dead.’
Whatever Edward said by reply he said it too softly to be heard, for the next words came again from Fanny. ‘Is your room close by? I shall be frightened otherwise.’
Lucy changed into her nightgown and went to stand by her own window. The clematis creeper that grew hungrily along the stone wall of the house had woven its way into the room and a sprig of flowers sat upon the damp sill. Lucy picked them one by one, sprinkling the petals over the edge and watching them fall like snow.
She was wondering about Fanny on the other side of the wall, when she heard Edward’s voice on the lawn below. ‘I understand that I have you to thank for this?’
Careful to stay out of sight, Lucy craned to see who else was there. Thurston. The rain had stopped and the chill in the air had lifted. A swollen moon had emerged in the clearing sky, brighter, it seemed, for the preceding darkness, and Lucy could see both men standing near the wisteria arbour that ran towards the orchard.
‘She says that you wrote and told her where to find me.’
Thurston had a cigarette between his lips and was holding his Napoleonic Wars rifle, taking careless aim at imagined adversaries in the chestnut tree behind the house. Now, he let its trigger guard roll around his finger like a pantomime villain and held his arms out to the side. ‘Not at all. I wrote to suggest an appointment and when we met I told her where to find you.’
‘You’re a bastard, Thurston.’
‘What else could I do? The poor girl threw herself upon my mercy.’
‘Your mercy! You’re enjoying this.’
‘Edward, you wound me. I’m simply being a friend. She begged me to help you see things clearly. She said that you’d lost your mind and behaved most improperly.’
‘I spoke with her – I wrote to her, too, explaining everything.’
‘Everything? I highly doubt that. “I don’t believe it,” she kept saying, “does he not know who my father is? What he’ll do to him? What this would do to me?” And then, “Why would he do it? What reason could he possibly have for breaking his promise?”’ Thurston laughed. ‘No, I don’t think you explained everything, my dear Edward.’
‘I told her what she needed to know without hurting her more than was necessary.’ Edward’s voice was low, furious.
‘Well, whatever it was you did write, it is little more than a pile of ash in her father’s fireplace now. She refused to accept it. She told me that she needed to see you herself to put things right. Who was I to refuse? You should be thanking me. It’s no secret that your family needs what Fanny offers.’ His lips curled in an unkind smile. ‘Those poor sisters of yours haven’t much hope otherwise.’
‘My sisters are none of your concern.’
‘I wish you’d tell that to Clare. She goes to such great lengths to make herself my concern. I’ve a good mind to give her what she needs. She’s going to spoil my painting with her damn longing otherwise. I’m more than happy to look after Lily, too, once you and Fanny repair your differences.’
The arbour was in the way so Lucy didn’t see the first punch thrown; she only saw Thurston staggering backwards onto the lawn, his hand on his jaw and a half-smile of surprise on his face. ‘Only trying to help, Radcliffe. Fanny might be a bore, but she’ll give you a home and allow you to paint. Never know – with time and a bit of luck, she might even learn to turn a blind eye.’
Lucy lay in bed afterwards ruminating. The fight between Edward and Thurston had not lasted long and when it was over they had gone their separate ways. Lucy had left the window and slid beneath the cool bedcovers. She’d always enjoyed being alone, but now, as she registered a gnawing sensation deep within her stomach, she realised that she felt lonely. More than lonely, she felt uncertain, which was infinitely worse.
The small bronze clock on Lucy’s bedside table said that it was five minutes after midnight, which meant that she had been lying in bed, waiting for sleep to claim her, for over an hour. The house was motionless; the woolly weather outside had calmed. A few night birds had emerged from their hiding spots to perch upon the branches of the moonlit chestnut tree. Lucy could hear them now, clearing their throats. Why, she wondered, did the minutes stretch and the hours become interminable when it was dark?
She sat up.
She was wide awake and there was no point in pretending otherwise.
Her mind was too busy to sleep. She wanted to understand what was going on. Edward had said that Fanny Brown would not be coming to Birchwood Manor, and yet here she was. Everyone else seemed to know enough to be behaving strangely; Thurston and Edward had even had a fight beneath Lucy’s window.
When she was a little girl and her racing thoughts had refused to let her sleep, it was always Edward to whom Lucy had gone. He would tell her a story and answer any question she had; he would calm her down and usually make her laugh. She always felt better when she left him t
han she had when she’d arrived.
Lucy decided to go and see if he was still awake. It was late, but Edward wouldn’t mind. He was a night owl, often working in his studio until long after midnight, the candles burning down towards the necks of the old green bottles that he collected.
She crept into the hallway but saw no light coming from beneath any of the bedroom doors.
Lucy stood very still, straining to hear.
As she listened, a faint noise came from downstairs. The soft, brief scrape of a chair leg moving against the wooden floor.
Lucy smiled to herself. Of course: he would be in the Mulberry Room with his paints and easel. She might have guessed. Edward always said that painting helped to clear his mind – that without it, his thoughts would drive him mad.
Lucy tiptoed down the stairs, past the platform that masked the secret chamber, all the way to the ground floor. As she had expected, a faint flicker of candlelight emanated from the room at the end of the hallway.
The door stood slightly ajar and Lucy hesitated when she reached it. Edward did not like to be disturbed when he was working, but surely tonight, after what had happened with Thurston, he would be just as glad for company as she. Carefully, Lucy prodded the door, just enough that she could poke her head in to see whether he was there.
She saw his painting first. Lily Millington’s face, stunning, regal, otherworldly, stared back at her, red hair flaming behind. Lily Millington, the Fairy Queen, was luminous.
Lucy noticed then the gem at the hollow of Lily’s neck: the same gem that she’d spied when she sneaked an illicit peek at Edward’s sketchbook, now depicted in colour. Bright iridescent blue. As soon as she saw the startling shade, she knew what it was, for Lucy had heard much about the Radcliffe Blue pendant, even though she’d never seen it in real life. And she wasn’t seeing it in ‘real life’ now, she reminded herself; only Edward’s imagined rendering of it: a talisman at his Fairy Queen’s throat.
There was a noise then from inside the room, and Lucy peeked around the edge of the door; she was about to call out to let Edward know that she was there, when she saw him on the settee and stopped. He was not alone. Edward was above Lily Millington, his damp hair hanging over his face while hers was spread glimmering on the velvet cushion; he wore nothing and neither did she; their skin was candlelit, smooth, and they gazed at one another, the two of them locked within a moment that belonged to them alone.