by Sarah Rayne
If I ask Mother how a particular journey has been, she might say the food had not agreed with her, oily foreign rubbish and she is glad to be home, or remark how tiring it had been walking round museums and libraries and she believes she will not accompany my father next time he goes away. She always says this, but she always does accompany him. I think she does not trust him to find his way home by himself.
Father, asked about a journey, might say he had found a most useful museum in some small town, or been given access to a private library which had yielded some helpful information. But as to the people they meet and the places they see, neither of them ever seems much interested.
Today I think I may actually have seen Leonora – at least, someone I take to be Leonora. She is small and fragile-looking, and she has large dark eyes that she fixes on me as if she wants to suck out my thoughts and my memories. She is very pale and she has dark hair – too dark to be called brown, but not dark enough to be black.
It was shortly before supper and she was near the walled garden. I saw her from my bedroom window, which overlooks it. She was standing beneath a tree, looking up at me.
Later, I asked my governess if she had seen anyone wandering around, but she had not.
Am I going mad? What does Leonora want?
Does she want to take over my mind …?
The writing trailed off, the ink leaving splodges and what might be tear stains. Michael turned to the next page and saw, with relief, that the writing returned to its original graceful slant.
Mother and Father returned last night. Mother went straight to bed after the journey so I did not see her until lunch today. She was tired and snappish, picking at her food, and finding fault with everything that had been done in the house during her absence.
Father was wrapped in his thoughts, but he went all round the house as usual, making sure nothing had been disturbed or disrupted. This afternoon he showed me a small framed sketch he had found in a museum in a place called Holzminden. He said it was a piece of history from the Great War – a war in which a cousin of his had served and been killed – so he had asked the museum’s curator if he could buy the sketch. The curator had been more than happy to sell it – he had said he believed it was one of a series of sketches. He had not known what had happened to the others – probably, they had long since been destroyed. Herr Gilmore should remember that that war – the Great War, as some called it – had been over for more than thirty years, and the recent one was more than six years since. And they were all good friends now, England and Germany and Russia and Italy, waren sie nicht?
Father appeared to think the curator was viewing matters through rose-tinted spectacles, but the sale had been agreed very amicably, and the sketch carefully wrapped up by the curator’s assistant. Father said he was going to hang it on the main staircase of Fosse House as a little memorial to his dead cousin, and what did I think?
What I thought was that the prospect of having to see such a sketch every time I went up or down the stairs was horrifying; I did not think I had ever seen anything so disturbing in my entire life. The sketch was of a long, bleak room, with narrow beds and wooden lockers, and men in uniform sitting or lying around. The windows were small and somehow mean, and they all had thick bars across them, as if this might be a prison. So from that aspect alone it is a sad picture, somehow filled with despair, even though several of the young men look cheerful. One is sitting apart from them, and there is such hopelessness and fear in the tilt of his head that I wanted to cry for him. But the really bad part – the part I stared at in father’s library with such repulsion – is that clustered at one of the barred windows are several more men, all wearing a different kind of uniform, all staring into the room with a dreadful eagerness. There is almost hunger in their eyes as they look at the men in the room. They terrified me the minute I saw them, and I know if I look at the sketch again they will still terrify me.
‘What do you think?’ said my father again, and I mumbled something about it being very interesting, and asked exactly what it was.
‘It’s an old prisoner-of-war camp,’ he said. ‘You see where someone has written Holzminden in that corner, and the date? November 1917. There was a camp at Holzminden for captured officers at the end of the Great War – mostly British officers, they were. I believe my cousin Stephen was there – he was captured early in 1917 and held prisoner. So I thought he might be one of the young men in the sketch. That’s why I bought it from the museum.’ He sort of brooded over it, almost lovingly – if lovingly is a word that can ever be applied to my father.
I said, ‘You know a lot about him.’ Father did not often talk about his research or his family, so I was careful how I asked because I wanted to hear more and I was afraid of sending him back into his shell.
‘Oh yes, I do. He was older than me – I always thought of him as a heroic figure because he went off to the war. That war wasn’t like the one we’ve just been through, Luisa. It was crueller than you can imagine, and the young men who fought – they had no idea what they were going into. They went off laughing and singing – some of them lied about their ages to get into the army. Brass bands played at the railway stations as their trains went out, and people waved flags and hung out bunting, and cheered and sang patriotic songs. But all the time they were going into a darkness – into mud and blood and terror. So many of them died.’
‘Including your cousin?’
‘People have laughed at me or belittled me for trying to find out what happened to him,’ he said, still staring at the sketch. ‘None of them understood. I’ve always needed to know what happened, ever since I came to this house, because—’ His eyes flickered to the window, and he got up to try the latch, as if to make sure it was secure. But even when he sat down again, he lowered his voice as if he feared someone might be standing outside, listening. ‘But even after all these years, I still don’t know,’ he said, and there was such sadness in his voice that I wanted to put my arms round him. I did not though. He would have hated it, and we would both have been embarrassed.
Instead I tried to think of something to say that would make him go on talking, but before I could do so, he said, ‘I do know Stephen was sentenced to death in Holzminden, though. I found the execution order in Liège in the museum. That’s why I went to Holzminden from Liège. But I couldn’t find out if the sentence was actually carried out. I needed to know, you see. You do see that, Luisa?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, not seeing at all. ‘Did it say why he was sentenced to death?’
‘No. That’s one of the things I couldn’t find out, and I must find out, Luisa, I must—’
He was staring down at the sketch, passing the palm of his hand over and over its surface, as if he was trying to draw from it the living essence. His eyes had a look I had never seen before – it made me uncomfortable. It was as if the real person – my father, Booth Gilmore – had been squashed into a dark forgotten corner, and something else was looking out from behind his eyes.
Is that how I look when Leonora tries to push me into my own dark corner so she can take over my mind?
Now I am sitting in my bedroom, staring out over the walled garden, and I am thinking that a young man – perhaps one of the very young men in the grisly sketch – perhaps a young man who looked like the early photographs we have in the drawing room of my father – had been imprisoned and sentenced to death. Would they have hanged Stephen, like they hang murderers here? Or shot him because they believed him to be a traitor or a spy? Perhaps he had been a spy. Spies are rather romantic.
I have made up little stories about Father’s cousin Stephen, about him spying and being heroic and romantic. It stops me wondering what happened to him, and how he died. It stops me, as well, from remembering the look in Father’s eyes as he studied the sketch.
The more I think about Stephen, the more clearly I can see him. I can see him crouching in a small stone room, and I think he is waiting for his execution, because he is dreadfully a
fraid.
Is this more of the madness? Is it something to do with Leonora? Did she know Stephen? Was she with him when he died? But I am not Leonora, I must cling to that undoubted fact. I am not Leonora …
But if I were … If I were, I could open my mind without being fearful. I would be able to see the images and the memories properly, instead of these maddening glimpses, as if a flickering candle is being held up to fragments of a dim old manuscript …
Dare I open my mind? Just once? What would I see and feel? I would like to feel and understand Leonora’s emotions – the sheer exuberance and delight and gratitude she would have felt on that extraordinary day when she walked out of the convent with the dark-haired, dark-eyed young man …
Fourteen
The nuns must have thought it scandalous that Leonora, no more than seventeen, should flee with a complete stranger. But the Kaiser’s armies were overrunning the town of Liège, they were actually inside the convent buildings, and Leonora had seen a means of escape – just as, years earlier, she had seen the Convent of Sacré-Coeur itself as an escape from her own chill, unloving home …
My parents often abandon me to go in search of my father’s obsessive quest. Leonora’s abandoned her on the steps of Sacré-Coeur, so we have something in common, she and I. Is that what has forged this curious link between us?
I think her parents’ world was a tidy, orderly place, with no place for a daughter who was flawed – who had been born with a deformity of one leg so that she walked awkwardly. Unwanted is probably too strong a word, but Leonora was certainly not the daughter those two people had hoped for.
Sacré-Coeur, so respectable and respected, provided them with an answer to the problem of their imperfect, unmarriageable child. For the first few years, friends and business connections could be told how dearest Leonora was in a convent school, and very happy there. Later they would have adjusted this to how Leonora had been granted a place in the Choir School, and how wonderful that was. The concerts for Church dignitaries – the bishop – a recital in a cathedral with the archbishop present … ‘We are so proud of her …’
They were so proud of their daughter that they did not trouble to attend any of those concerts, so that they might hear for themselves the pure, clear beauty of the Palestrina Choir, or meet the other girls with whom Leonora shared her life and her studies and her music. There were nights when she wept into her pillow over that.
It must have been beautiful, the music of that Choir. I have found references to it in books in Father’s study: accounts of its soft, sweet music, even one or two letters which Father must have found, in his quest for his cousin Stephen, and brought back to Fosse House.
I don’t know how the nuns of Sacré-Coeur explained away to Leonora’s parents the fact that she ran away with a completely unknown man in the middle of an invasion and a siege. I don’t think Leonora ever knew that. I don’t think she cared, though.
The invasion of the convent is one of the things I can see quite clearly. I can almost smell the fear, and I hear the shots, and my eyes sting from the clouds of plaster dust when the statue of the Sacred Heart was overturned …
The entire convent had been at Vespers, wrapped in the music, enrapt in the intricate beauty of the singing. Leonora had been concentrating on the glowing tapestry threads of the Deus, careful to come in on the correct bars because Sister Jeanne had arranged a new setting, and once or twice looking forward to supper after the service.
The soldiers’ entrance shredded the music into ugly, jagged fragments. Leonora and the other girls in the Choir, not realizing or seeing what was happening, had tried to continue singing, and Sister Jeanne had determinedly begun the Magnificat. But the sounds beyond the rood screens were too horrific, and their voices trembled into discord. They exchanged terrified glances, instinctively moving closer to one another for comfort, most of them not understanding what was happening, or why the two nuns were crying out while the men cheered.
When the Sacred Heart statue crashed to the ground, sending great reverberations of sound through the chapel, two of the rood screens fell with it, and the girls pressed back against the stone columns, plaster dust, dry and thick, billowing suffocatingly into their faces. They could see into the chapel now, and even through the clouds of dust and flying debris, they could see the soldiers tramping through the ruins, rifles in their hands, murder in their eyes. They could see two novices lying on the ground, their robes torn away, their hands over their eyes as if in shame, and they could see two of the other nuns lying prone and still, deep, dark wounds in their heads, and blood pooling around them.
Next it will be us … The fear crackled through them like a fire.
It was Leonora who seized on the only weapon they knew – an appeasement – an offering to the men. Raggedly, she began to chant the cadences of the Magnificat again, picking up the splintered threads of the music, desperately trying to weave them into the familiar patterns, praying to God – to anyone who might be listening – that the others would join in. And that the soldiers would fall back in the face of God’s own music.
But although several of the girls joined in, the soldiers did not fall back. It was only when the dark-eyed man bounded through the rubble and barked out commands in bad French to Sister Jeanne to get the girls to safety that the soldiers seemed momentarily disconcerted. There was a confused interval – people scrambling across the fallen masonry, sounds of sobs and fearful cries – angry shouts from the soldiers, and running footsteps. It was only when the dust began to settle that Leonora heard the clanging of the inner door and the turning of the key in its lock, and she realized she was still in the chapel. And that the nuns and the other girls were on the other side of the locked door.
That was when the unknown man reached out his hand and said, in his difficult, heavily-accented French, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m here to help. We’ll climb through the window.’
She’s writing as if she really could see it, thought Michael, coming out of the journal for a moment. How does she know so much? Did she find information about Leonora in this house – some information her father tracked down – and become fixated on it? Is she subconsciously drawing on that, or simply not mentioning it? There was Iskander’s journal as well. Luisa could have read that when she was younger. Translating from the French would not have been very difficult for her – she had mentioned learning French with her governess. Either or both of these explanations would fit.
He had intended to simply glance through the opening pages of the journal to find names or phone numbers for the hospital, and to do no more than skim a few more pages, in deference to Luisa’s words. But at some barely-acknowledged level of his mind he had already made the decision to remain in this room and read the whole thing. If nothing else, it might distract him from listening for soft footsteps, or wondering what might lie inside the oak chest. It was a peculiar way of spending the night alone in a haunted house, but it was the precept of whatever gets you through. Wasn’t it John Lennon who had said that? Michael was so pleased at remembering this snippet of comparatively modern philosophy that he wrote it down in order to prove to Nell that he did not live half inside the world of the metaphysical and romantic poets.
He glanced around the room, but all seemed quiet, and if Stephen walked the halls of his old home he did so unobtrusively. Michael adjusted the desk lamp and returned to Luisa’s diary.
He was an adventurer, of course, that man with whom Leonora ran away. A rogue and a vagabond – a gentleman of fortune … Do I say ‘gentleman’? But, in a strange way, I think he was a gentleman. He was the one who sought out people in Liège after that brutal attack on the convent. He routed out the townspeople, the young, strong sons who could fight, and he rallied them, ignoring the danger from the other troops of German soldiers already roaming the streets. He was the one who saved the nuns – that must never be forgotten.
So, a thief and a gambler, but always a gentleman.
He was a gentleman wh
en he broke into the wealthy houses on that flight from Liège and took whatever could be taken and sold to fund their journey. He was deft and stealthy and he could enter a house like a shadow and vanish into the night afterwards without the occupants knowing.
‘Only take what will not cause hardship or loss,’ he said to Leonora. ‘These people will not miss that – they will not suffer from the loss of that, or that – oh, or that, we cannot possibly leave that behind for it is beautiful and valuable …’
Somehow, throughout everything, he managed to send articles to the newspapers which employed him, travelling from place to place, as the original invasion developed into full-blown war. Money was sent to him by incomprehensible means – banks were sometimes involved. Leonora did not always entirely understand how this was done; there was something called wiring of funds, and sometimes there were bank drafts to be collected from pre-arranged places.
When this money did not arrive as expected, or the collection place could not be reached, the pieces of jewellery, the silver snuff boxes, the small beautiful ikons, could be sold to provide sufficient money for travel and food. The travel was nearly always the best available, and the food was the finest.
‘I do not settle for the inferior when I can have the best,’ he said, with his unfailing air of believing the world was arranged for his specific enjoyment.
Even that night in the bedroom of a roadside tavern on the Dutch/German borders, with midnight chimes sounding romantically, with the owl-light draining the colour from the trees, and the scent of roses from the gardens … Even then, he was a gentleman …
‘Leonora, my sweet, innocent girl, we must stop this … I mustn’t do this, I must not … We may be forced to share a room because the others were all booked, but I can quite well sleep in the chair – on the floor … I can be honourable, and I will be. Oh, but if you look at me like that I don’t think I can be honourable for much longer …’