Matt didn’t seem put out. ‘So,’ he said. ‘We’re having dinner.’
‘Yes.’
‘And after that? What are your plans?’
‘I don’t know.’ It wasn’t so simple, I’d found, to just walk back into a life. Too many things had changed – it was like putting on old clothes that didn’t quite fit. For the moment, I still had my job at the paper, but, ‘I thought I might try my hand at writing a book,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a good idea for one.’
‘What kind of book?’
‘True crime.’
‘How does it end?’ he asked.
I knew it mattered how I answered, but I really didn’t know. I knew the figures on the chequerboard were shifting once again, but it was just too soon, I thought. Too soon.
He understood, I think. He drew himself up, in the wind, and found my gaze, and held it. ‘Maybe when you get that figured out,’ he told me evenly, ‘you’ll let me know.’
AFTERWARDS
I’ve been told, by people more experienced at writing, that the hardest part of telling any story is the search for its beginning, and its end.
I learnt the truth of that.
All through that winter, and the springtime, and the summer that came after, I was writing. People helped me: Jenny Augustine, who, as she’d promised, used her publishing connections to arrange a solid book deal for me; Regina Marinho, whom I found, with Anabela’s aid, in a remoter part of Portugal – in hiding, but, to my relief, quite safe; Manuel Garcia’s widow, who was living in the north of England, and who kindly shared with me her memories of her husband, and her memory of the visit she’d had one week after that, from Deacon. He’d bought all her husband’s paintings. Every one. When she had protested, he’d said that he was sure he would recover what he’d paid her, when he sold them in his shop. Meantime, he’d made arrangements with the British Embassy to honour their agreement with Garcia, so that, when the war was over, she could emigrate to England. What he gave her for the paintings was enough to pay her passage, and to buy a little house. ‘He was a good man,’ she had told me rather huskily. ‘You must write kindly of him.’
She had sent me, too, a small sketch of her husband’s, that she’d saved for all these years. Not the windmill – that would have been too much to hope – but a view over Lisbon, with its crowded streets and houses tumbling down to meet the harbour. Jim, when he saw it framed over my desk, was admiring.
‘He had a great talent,’ he said. ‘Such a waste.’
Jim helped, too, with my writing. He called me daily on the phone, and visited in person when he could. And he bought me the dog. It was company for me, he said, though I knew he was really just trying to give me protection. He worried, a great deal, about my protection. So I was surprised when, in June, he announced he was going on holiday. Our wet and gloomy spring, he said, had left him starved of sunshine, and he had a sudden urge to see again the places he had travelled to, when he was younger – Istanbul, and Rome, and the idyllic isles of Greece.
I missed him, when he left, but I enjoyed the stream of postcards, and of course by then I was absorbed completely by the book. I was revising my first draft, then, and still searching for the ending.
And, at last, it came; not in the form of inspiration, but by messenger, with flowers, for my birthday.
The dog heard the knock at the door before I did – he usually does – and I opened the door with a hand on his collar. Without the dog there at my side, I would never have opened my door to a stranger. Not even a smiling young man holding flowers.
But the flowers were roses. Tea roses. And when I saw them I knew straight away who’d sent them. It was, after all, my birthday, and although Jim was out of the country I knew that he wouldn’t have let the day pass without some sign to show he’d remembered.
With the roses came a box – not large, just the size of a bottle of wine, and about the same weight. It was wrapped twice: the first time in tidy brown paper, and under that, prettier tissue, with ribbons.
I sat down to open it, carefully working the knots. The box itself was very plain, and lined with wads of newspaper – Italian, from the look of it. I thought, at first, he’d sent a statuette, some kind of sculpture. It felt heavy in my hand. But then I turned it, and the paper fell away, and I could see exactly what it was.
The phone rang, and I reached for it with absent fingers. Tony, sounding cheerful. ‘Happy birthday, gorgeous.’
‘Thanks.’
I was still looking down, at the handle-sized, ivory white dragon’s head carving, with lifeless red eyes. I could see, at the bottom, where someone had sawn off the walking stick. Clearly in my mind I could hear Jim’s voice saying, like a promise, No one lives for ever. And I knew what he had done.
Tony’s voice, forgotten, asked, ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. I’m just…’
‘You were working, weren’t you? Isn’t that thing finished yet?’
I glanced toward the great untidy pile of pages sitting to the side of my computer; then my gaze went further – past the table to the window, and beyond, where I could see the two small rosebushes my grandmother had planted in the yard, against the fence. They were in bloom, now; pale pink, beautiful. I gripped the phone more tightly. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s finished now.’
And slowly, but decidedly, I set my birthday present down, and folded shut the box.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
We writers choose our stories, sometimes. Sometimes, they choose us.
I still remember this one choosing me some fifteen years ago when, at a dinner party, I was told the sad tale of a man who’d witnessed something in the war, and who had written a report, and who had suffered for it. What struck me at the time, and what stayed with me, wasn’t what he’d seen, but that this man, grown old and disillusioned in his search for justice, had at last arranged to meet a journalist, to pass on his report and make it public. ‘But he died,’ so I was told, ‘before the meeting could take place.’
So Andrew Deacon grew from that, a grey and faceless shadow at my shoulder who would not allow me rest until I put him on the page.
It took four years to write this book, and in that time I had the help of many people, some who have themselves inspired characters – most notably the incredible Canadian women who actually went to New York in the Forties to work for Sir William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination, and who so generously shared their memories with me. I’m indebted to the writer Bill McDonald, author of The True Intrepid, one of the best and most fascinating biographies of Sir William Stephenson, for introducing me to these ‘BSC Ladies’ – June Welsh, Mayo Lyall, Wynne Woodcock, Betty Noakes, Jean Martin, Bev Bible, and Chris Ruttan, without whose help Kate’s grandmother would not have been the woman that she was.
I am indebted, also, to the FBI’s Rex Tomb, who in the chaos that immediately followed 9/11, when the FBI undoubtedly had more important things to do, still found time to connect me with retired agent Kenneth Crosby, in whose gracious company I learnt of the realities of working in intelligence in the Second World War.
For details of Camp X, I was assisted by Norm Killian of the Camp X Historical Society, and by several of the veterans who had trained there, most particularly Leslie Davis, who not only suggested Deacon could be an instructor, but proposed the way that Georgie might be sent up from New York to meet him – plot points I’d been struggling with till then.
In Portugal, I owe thanks to Regina Gato, Fátima Da Silva of the British Embassy Consular Service, Anabela Matos of the York House Hotel, and above all to Robert Wilson, awardwinning author of A Small Death in Lisbon, who went beyond the call of kindness to read through the book in manuscript to see I got my facts straight.
Closer to home, in Toronto, Sue Gariepy of the Globe and Mail patiently answered all my journalism questions, as did the incomparable Suanne Kelman.
And finally, my mother, as always my first and best reader, helped more than she knows.
/> About the Author
SUSANNA KEARSLEY was a museum curator before she took the plunge and became a full-time author. The past and its bearing on the present is a familiar theme in her books. She won the prestigious Catherine Cookson Fiction Award for her novel Mariana, and was shortlisted for the Romantic Novel of the Year Award for Sophia’s Secret. The e-book of Sophia’s Secret, published in the US and Canada as The Winter Sea, has been in the top five of the New York Times bestseller list.
www.susannakearsley.com
By Susanna Kearsley
Mariana
The Splendour Falls
The Shadowy Horses
Named of the Dragon
Season of Storms
Every Secret Thing
(previously published under the name Emma Cole)
Sophia’s Secret
(also published as The Winter Sea)
The Rose Garden
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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Copyright © 2006 by SUSANNA KEARSLEY
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
First published in hardback and trade paperback in 2006,
and in mass market paperback in 2007, under the name Emma Cole.
Reissued in 2010 under the name Susanna Kearsley.
This ebook edition first published in 2011.
‘After Long Silence’ by WB Yeats used by permission of
AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael B Yeats.
‘I See Your Face Before Me’
Words and music by Arthur Dietz and Howard Schwartz
© 1937 (renewed) Chappell & Co. Arthur Schwartz Music Inc.
All rights administered by Warner / Chappell Music Ltd, London, W6 8BS.
Reproduced by permission.
‘Make Believe’
Words by Oscar Hammerstein II and music by Jerome Kern
© 1927 TB Harms & Co. Inc., USA
Universal Music Publishing Ltd (50%)
Chappell Music Ltd (50%)
Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1175–8
BY SUSANNA KEARSLEY
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Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
EVERY SECRET THING
Dedication
Table of Contents
Epigraph
BEFOREHAND
CHAPTER ONE
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18
CHAPTER TWO
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
CHAPTER THREE
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1
MONDAY, OCTOBER 2
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3
CHAPTER FOUR
STILL TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3
CHAPTER FIVE
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6
CHAPTER SIX
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11
AFTERWARDS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
About the Author
By Susanna Kearsley
Copyright
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Every Secret Thing Page 39