House of Shadows

by Pamela Hartshorne

  In truth, I nearly did. The rain turned the track to a quagmire and we had to pick our way slowly along the way. Edmund’s escorts were hard-faced men whose eyes were never still, their hands never far from their daggers. They rode close beside us. ‘There are vagabonds aplenty hereabouts,’ said Edmund, matter-of-fact, when I queried the need for their presence. ‘Poor wretches who have nothing to lose by attacking an unarmed party. They would not hesitate to strip you of your rings and your girdle – and worse.’

  But we had made it onto Askerby land without incident.

  ‘You would ride,’ Edmund reminded me mildly.

  ‘Aye, and as well I did,’ I said. ‘If you had been saddled with a wife in a coach you would have had to turn back long since.’

  ‘True,’ he agreed. ‘It is fortunate I did not marry an obliging wife, after all.’ He had a way of smiling that was not quite smiling, more a crinkling of the eyes and a quiver hovering around his lips. It made me warm and dissolve and shiver, all at the same time.

  ‘Look.’ He pointed down the hill. ‘You can just see Askerby down there. It is not far now.’

  ‘Not far now.’ Jasper’s voice jolts me back to reality. It is a strange thing, remembering, being there and not there at the same time, seeing and not seeing. Without leaving my seat, I have gone away. The road, the car, the man beside me are all curiously blank compared to the intensity of the life I have remembered. I put a hand to the back of my neck, and although one part of me knows quite well that it has not been raining, another part is startled to find that my skin is quite dry and there are no rivulets of water running cold into my collar.

  All at once being enclosed in the vehicle feels threatening, unnatural. Jasper is a stranger. I want Edmund with his sort-of smile. Time feels disjointed. The road bends round to the right and heads down the hill. It twists and turns under the trees, passes over a narrow bridge.

  I know where I am and that we are driving down the hill in a car, that behind me Fiona is saying something about lunch, but in my mind I am riding down the same hill in my sodden skirts, my tired horse’s hooves skidding in the mud, following my husband down towards Askerby at last.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Jasper asks. He sends me a concerned glance, and I wonder if I look as white and shaky as I feel.

  ‘A bit strange,’ I say honestly. I can’t tell them the whole truth, though. They mustn’t suspect for a moment that I have been lost in memories of another life altogether.

  Fortunately, they don’t seem to find this odd. ‘The nurses warned that you might feel overwhelmed after being in hospital for so long,’ Fiona says as we drive through a pretty village of grey stone houses. I can’t see much. I glimpse a pub, a little school, a church with a square tower that sets something jangling in my head. ‘I’m afraid you still have a long road ahead of you before you feel really well again.’

  Dr Ramnaya told me this as well, but it’s only now that I realize just how dependent I am going to be on the Vavasours. I am not strong enough to work, even if I could remember what I do and how I do it, so it’s going to be some time before I can support myself and Felix, who everyone says is my child.

  ‘It’s very good of you to look after me,’ I say, twisting a little in my seat so that I can include Fiona in my thanks. ‘It’s not as if I’m your daughter.’

  ‘You’re Felix’s mother,’ Fiona says, as if that explains everything. ‘What would everyone think if we left you to manage on your own?’

  At least she doesn’t pretend that they care for me. What matters to them is the Vavasour reputation. They have centuries of tradition to uphold, after all.

  ‘I meant to say –’ Jasper interrupts the slightly awkward pause – ‘I did manage to get in touch with your parents eventually. It was jolly hard to find them!’ Jasper talks with a bluff heartiness that always seems forced, as if he is acting the part of a country landowner in some pre-war drama. ‘It turns out they’re working in the back of bloody beyond, and they only get to communicate with the outside world on occasional trips to their field office, but I was able to reassure them that you were out of danger and that we were taking you home.’

  The only parent I remember is my mother, but the mother who was strapped to the bed screaming in her madness is not the mother who is somewhere in Africa, content to let strangers care for her daughter. Does it bother me that my parents haven’t been in touch with me themselves? That I am not important enough for them to want to be by my bedside? It’s hard to tell how I usually feel. I can’t summon any sense of missing them, so I suspect I have been used to their absence for a long time. Their lack of interest in me is embarrassing rather than sad.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say uncomfortably. ‘I’m afraid, though, that means you’ve been lumbered with me. I must have been such a nuisance over the last few months, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to work for a while yet, as you say. I don’t know when I’ll be able to leave.’

  ‘There’s no question of you leaving,’ Fiona says sharply. ‘Felix is a Vavasour and so are you now. Askerby will always be your home.’

  It sounds more like a threat than a promise.

  Jasper turns the car through an imposing gateway with great pillars on either side, topped with statues of snarling lions. I don’t remember them at all. On the left is the Lodge, tucked into the trees like a fairy-tale cottage. It has little windows hatched with diamond panes and quirky angles and ornately twisted chimneys. I half expect a wolf to pop its head out of one. There’s a neat garden, with roses lining the path to the door, and a vegetable patch. Over the wall, I can see runner beans scrambling up wicker wigwams. The Lodge should be charming, but it’s not. There’s a sullenness about the lowering roof, a stillness behind the windows, and the whole house is enveloped in the shadow of the trees that seem to be creeping up around it.

  ‘Is that where Angie lives?’

  ‘For now,’ Fiona sighs. ‘We’d really like to renovate it and give it to one of the young estate workers – it’s perfect for a family – but for reasons I have never understood, Jasper’s father gave it to her grandparents rent free for life!’

  ‘My father was friends with Adam Kaczka during the war,’ Jasper says with a faintly defensive edge. ‘They flew Spitfires together.’

  ‘I still don’t see why he had to give them free accommodation. These people always live forever when that happens! Dosia must be almost a hundred now.’

  ‘She was a sweet woman. Mother never liked us going down to the Lodge, but Joanna and I used to sneak off occasionally and play with Marek and Peter. Dosia would always have a cake or squash.’ His voice warms with the reminiscence. ‘She used to make ice cream in a tiny ice-cube tray and the most delicious chocolate sauce. Far better than Cook ever made.’

  Fiona is unmoved by Jasper’s memories. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if she’s ever going to die,’ she sighs in exasperation. ‘As far as I know, nothing’s been done to the house since the fifties. It’ll need to be gutted.’

  ‘What about Angie?’ I say. ‘Won’t she want to stay?’

  ‘Thank goodness she’s not covered in the agreement. It was just for as long as Dosia or Adam were alive. Adam died ages ago – not before time, I must say, he was a most unpleasant man, wasn’t he, Jasper?’ Fiona doesn’t wait for him to answer. ‘The Lodge is much too big for a single person, anyway. Angie will be much happier in a nice little house in the village.’

  I’m not sure about that. I remember how Angie’s face glows when she talks about Askerby, how she had looked at me without comprehension when I suggested that she move away: I’d die if I had to leave.

  ‘She seems very committed to Askerby,’ I say cautiously.

  ‘I don’t know what George would do without her,’ Jasper offers. ‘Or any of us, come to that. Angie gets us all organized.’

  ‘Yes, she’s marvellous,’ Fiona agrees in her cool way. ‘We should really give her a proper role here. George would like her to b
e his full-time assistant, I think, but the rest of us have rather come to rely on her. She’s been wonderful with Felix.’

  ‘So I gather,’ I say.

  ‘And she’s the only one who can manage my mother,’ Jasper says. ‘Pretty little thing, too,’ he adds blithely, unaware of his wife’s baleful stare from the back seat.

  My fingers are twisted tightly together in my lap, and I force myself to relax them as I fold my lips and stare out of the window to stop myself snapping back at them. I wonder how Angie can bear to devote her life to people who think of her as a ‘pretty little thing’ and refuse to give her a proper job because it’ll mean they have to pick up their own dry-cleaning, people who will move her out of her home without a second thought.

  We are driving up an avenue lined with beech trees. The parkland on either side is dotted with more magnificent trees, great oaks and ash and horse chestnuts heavy with candles. Cows graze peaceably, their heads in the lush grass, and I count nine horses twitching their tails under a spreading sycamore. It’s a tranquil scene, but as the avenue curves round and the gatehouse comes in sight, my heart starts to pound, thudding against my ribs with a queasy mixture of anticipation, apprehension and alarm. Because here it is: Askerby Hall.

  The gatehouse is topped with two hexagonal towers, miniature versions of those on either end of the great house. Instinctively, I look towards the one on the right, and terror swoops through my brain without warning, blurring my vision and making the world shriek and spin sickeningly. I clutch onto the leather seat with both hands while I wait for my breathing to steady. I don’t need to be told that that is where I fell.

  ‘You must remember Askerby Hall,’ says Fiona behind me.

  I nod slowly, grateful when that awful feeling of vertigo recedes almost as quickly as it came. ‘Yes,’ I say. My knuckles are white where I am clinging to the seat and I make my fingers relax, although I don’t let go completely. In truth, I’m not sure if I do remember or if I’m thinking of the photos Angie showed me on her iPad, but it seems easiest just to say that I do. ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Well, thank goodness you’ve remembered something.’ Fiona is exasperated by my memory loss. I sometimes wonder if she thinks I am just pretending.

  Jasper drives through the gatehouse into the courtyard, and the sound of the tyres on the gravel crunches loudly in my ears and makes me tense. He stops the car right in front of the great carved doorway and switches off the engine. Silence swamps the car and for a moment none of us moves.

  ‘Well,’ Jasper says at last in a hearty voice that is too loud for the restricted space. ‘Here we are.’

  I don’t answer. I am looking up at Askerby Hall. The car has been feeling claustrophobic and alien, but now that we’re here, I really don’t want to get out. I can feel the house waiting for me, watching me. The mullioned windows are dark but they glitter silver as the sunlight sweeps across the facade only to plunge back into dullness as the wind pushes the clouds across the sun. Light, dark, light, dark. It is as if the house is trying to send a message only I can decipher, except that I have forgotten the code. Is it beckoning me in, or warning me away?

  The light is the only thing that moves, the light and my painfully thumping heart. The stillness is uncanny, ominous. It is as if we have driven into an old painting and are frozen in time. Jasper and Fiona must feel it too, or surely they would say something, do something. To my horror, I feel a cry pushing into my throat and desperately I swallow it down. There’s no reason to scream. We are just sitting in front of an old house.

  The spell is broken as the front door opens and what seems like a whole pack of dogs swarms out. They surround the car, barking and wagging their tails. George follows them, and comes round to the passenger door. ‘Settle down,’ he shouts at the milling dogs, without any noticeable effect.

  He opens the door and holds out a hand to help me down. ‘Welcome back, Kate,’ he says, and as I take his hand another memory streaks through my mind: Edmund, his face sheened with rain, smiling and holding up his hand to help me off my horse. Welcome to Askerby, wife. A longing for him, sharp as a spear, slices through me and I cannot help flinching, but George does not notice, or if he does, he puts it down to my injuries.

  ‘Easy does it,’ he says, and I let him help me gingerly down from the car, into the sea of dogs. There are only four of them, I realize, but they are tumbling over each other and thoroughly overexcited, rushing between Fiona and Jasper and George. A black Labrador shoves its nose in my crutch.

  ‘Jago, stop that!’ George pushes him aside with an apologetic look. ‘Pippin has been pining for you,’ he tells me. ‘She’ll be overjoyed to see you.’

  ‘Which one is Pippin?’ I ask in an effort to distract myself from memories of Edmund. Angie showed me a photo of her, I know, but all I remember is a small, scrubby terrier with bright eyes and a black nose.

  George looks around vaguely. ‘I thought she’d be here.’ He stops as he sees what I see: a small, wiry dog crouching by the step. Her teeth are bared and she is looking straight at me. She is growling.

  ‘Good God,’ says George. ‘What on earth is all that about? Stop that, Pippin.’ He makes to step towards her, but I put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Leave her,’ I say. There’s a drumming sense of dread beating along my veins. ‘It’s all too much right now.’ For me as well as for the dog.

  Jasper has been unloading my small bag from the car. ‘Let me get rid of all these dogs,’ he says. He hasn’t noticed Pippin. ‘They’ll knock Kate over if we’re not careful.’

  He gives George my bag to carry and whistles for the dogs, who bound around a bit more and then rush after him through an archway into another courtyard. Pippin looks after him, then back at me. Her growl deepens. I stand very still and after a moment she bolts after Jasper.

  ‘How strange.’ George looks more upset than I am. ‘Pippin adores you. Normally she won’t leave you alone.’

  ‘Everything’s strange at the moment,’ I say. I’m thinking of Edmund, and the first time I came to Askerby. The impossibility of it makes me stumble, and George puts an arm around me to steady me. His touch makes me cringe. No, I want to shout at him. No, not you!

  ‘Sorry,’ I mutter. ‘I’m not used to being on two feet.’ I look around, desperate to stand alone. If I cannot have Edmund, I do not want anyone. ‘Could I have my stick?’

  Fiona produces the stick the physios have given me from the back of the car. It is an unlovely thing, sturdy steel with a thick rubber base and a padded handle, but I take hold of it as if it is my only support, and to my relief, George takes his arm from my waist, although he keeps hold of my elbow. Fiona comes up on my other side. She doesn’t touch me, and I’m glad about that. I think I would scream if she did.

  I feel very odd, as if I am missing a skin. There is something very wrong but I’m not sure exactly what it is. I look up at the house, wondering what it is trying to tell me, and somehow my eyes are drawn to the tower again.

  Falling . . . I’m falling . . . Falling out of my life and everything that I remember. Falling into darkness and fear. My mouth opens but I have no breath to scream. I wanted to fly, to soar as gracefully as a bird, but instead I am cumbersome, twisting and tumbling awkwardly, with a strange and terrible slowness. The ground is reaching up for me. It is going to grab me and swallow me up.

  Nausea roils in my belly and I falter as my mind spins darkly once more. When I drop my eyes to the ground I am surprised not to see myself crumpled there. There should be a mark, surely? A stain, or an indentation. Something to show where ‘then’ ended and ‘now’ began. But it can’t have been here, I realize after a moment. Dr Ramnaya said a tree broke my fall, so I must have landed somewhere on the other side of the tower.

  George’s gaze has followed mine to the tower as I stop. There is an awkward pause.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ says Fiona smoothly from behind us. ‘Kate needs to rest.’

  I let them steer me up the step
s, into the great hall, where Philippa is waiting, slouched against a massive oak table. ‘You made it back, then?’ she says.

  ‘Thank goodness we’re closed today,’ Fiona says. ‘Otherwise we’d have had to take her round the back to avoid being gawped at by tourists.’ She looks around the hall as if imagining it crowded with people in shorts and T-shirts, all tipping their heads back to admire the intricately carved plaster ceiling or pausing reverently in front of the portraits hanging on the panelled walls. It is a room meant to impress, to intimidate, and it does.

  ‘Yes, we wouldn’t want anyone to witness an emotional Vavasour family reunion, would we?’ says Philippa, straightening.

  I am not listening to them properly. I’m trying to put my finger on why the hall feels not quite right. I know I remember it, but the memory is elusive. It flits in and out of my mind like a moth looking for a way out of a room, and I can’t fix it in one place.

  ‘Have you changed things around since I’ve been in hospital?’

  Philippa gives a snort of laughter. ‘Change? That’s a good one. We don’t do change at Askerby. “Centuries of unbroken tradition”, that’s our tag line. I don’t think anything’s changed here since the seventeenth century.’

  ‘You do exaggerate, Philippa,’ Fiona says, running a hand through her ash-blonde hair and barely tousling it. ‘Electricity, plumbing, the Internet . . . We have to have a website and a Facebook page and someone to tweet for us, whatever that means, not to mention hordes of tourists swarming all over the place in summer.’ She sighs. ‘Sometimes it feels like everything has changed. It’s so important to hold onto what’s special about Askerby. People expect it of us.’

  ‘I agree,’ says George, sounding very like Jasper. ‘We can move with the times on the estate, but the house needs to stay exactly as it is. What do you think, Kate?’

  I don’t answer. I’m looking at the huge fireplace. The flickering, frustrating memory is coalescing into an image. A fire burning and me, holding my hands out to the flames. I remember the overpowering smell of wet wool and the way the steam rose from my sodden skirts. A servant brought wine and cakes and took away my poor hat and my cloak.