Suicides were denied burial in consecrated ground. I remember Reverend Rolland’s sombre tones, and everything in me rises up as if in a great shout: NO! Isabel would not have jumped off the tower, I am sure of it. Lady Vavasour or serving girl, she would not have killed her child or herself. It is impossible that she would have done such a thing.
Unless she was mad.
I remember how muddled I – she – was about things. Was it possible? Is that why she can’t rest?
Perhaps that is why there is no sign of Kit in the records. Perhaps he was just a servant’s brat. Perhaps he never lived at all.
No! No, no, no! My head rings with the conviction that I am wrong. Kit was no phantom child. He was flesh and blood, warm, real.
I remember how much I loved him, and how I feared for him. I hated being weak, but Judith’s words that day gave me courage. I had to be well before Edmund came home, and I had to be well for my son. I did not want Kit to grow up fearing madness as I had done.
So I forced myself out of bed, and pinched my cheeks to give them some colour. I ignored my spinning head and dragged myself up to the nursery. Kit was in his cradle, blue eyes alert, and when I bent over and saw him smile up at me, the rigid fear inside me melted away.
‘Unswaddle him,’ I said to Meg, who pursed her lips, but couldn’t prevent her expression from softening as she undid his swaddling bands and pulled off his shirt. She lay him on the coverlet on the table and he squealed with pleasure as he kicked and flailed and grabbed his toes, and she watched jealously while I cooed over him. His eyes were clear, his belly plump and there were sweet rolls of fat at his wrists and ankles. He was a sturdy baby, happy and healthy, and I swore to myself that I would keep him so.
‘Who is my pretty boykin?’ I tickled his tummy and made him shriek with laughter, and when I glanced at Meg, I caught a smile on her severe face.
‘He looks well,’ I said.
As soon as she saw me looking, she tucked her smile away. ‘You would not have thought so last night,’ she said dourly. ‘He was somewhat wayward then, crying and wailing.’ She shook her head at Kit. ‘And look at him now!’
‘Has he a tooth growing?’
Aye, mayhap. He was drooling.’
‘Perhaps Judith could make an ointment for you to rub on his gums?’ I offered. ‘She made one with daisy roots that helped my Lord Vavasour when he had the toothache.’
Meg bridled. She liked Judith even less than she liked me. ‘I have my own recipe, my lady. I will use that.’
‘As you wish.’ I knew better than to try to convince Meg to do anything she didn’t want to. I was not a very stern mistress, but I knew that Meg would do anything for Kit.
‘Meg,’ I said impulsively. ‘If anything should happen to me . . .’
She scowled. ‘Nothing is going to happen to you, my lady.’
‘But if it should . . . you would have a care of Kit, would you not?’
Meg folded her lips in a grim line. ‘Doubt not of it, mistress.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, heartfelt. ‘Thank you, Meg.’
‘Ask your mom if you can have a cookie.’
I look up to see Felix holding a big tin of biscuits. ‘Can I have a cookie?’ he asks obediently. He doesn’t add ‘Mummy’, but shoots me a complicit glance. It is the one he uses to remind me that he is only pretending that I am his mother, and every time the thought that he still doesn’t recognize me plummets through me like a stone. I don’t know how to persuade him that now I am only pretending to pretend.
‘You can have two,’ I say, holding up two fingers. ‘But no more. Say thank you,’ I add automatically as Felix puts the tin on the floor and squats down to burrow through it.
Matt places a mug of tea on the table in front of me. ‘Voilà!’ he says with a flourish. ‘Who says I don’t know how to boil water?’
I take a sip. It is so strong it makes my eyes water. ‘That’s Yorkshire tea, all right,’ I say. ‘Consider yourself a master tea maker.’
My attempt at jollity doesn’t fool Matt. ‘You seem preoccupied,’ he tells me. Pulling out a chair, he sits opposite me. ‘Are you worrying about what we discussed last night?’
‘No . . . yes . . . no, not really.’ I cradle the mug in my hands. ‘I just wish I could remember. Not just you, everything. It feels like I’m on a track and my wheels are spinning but I can’t get anywhere until I know what happened last year.’
‘It must be tough,’ Matt says sympathetically. He tries his own tea and pulls an exaggerated face. ‘Bleuch! How can you drink this stuff?’
He’s trying to lighten the atmosphere, and I laugh obligingly. ‘It’s an acquired taste.’ There is no point in fretting endlessly about Isabel, I decide. I will find Kit if I can, but it is Felix who matters more. Somehow I need to convince him that I am his mother again, but in the meantime I must pull myself together before Matt, too, starts to think that I am obsessive and depressed.
A large board is propped up against the dresser behind Matt. It is covered in differently coloured Post-it notes, each one covered with scribbles. ‘What’s that?’
He glances over his shoulder to see what I am looking at. ‘Oh, that’s my story board. What you see there is plotting in action. It’s not a pretty sight, is it?’
‘What’s your story about?’
‘It’s pretty much a rerun of what happened before.’ He tips back in his chair and bends down to filch a biscuit from the tin that is still on the floor being rearranged by Felix. ‘In the first movie I had a character who lived in a house with a truly uncanny resemblance to Askerby Hall who got haunted; cue much screaming and special effects. This time the house has been rebuilt as luxury holiday apartments and I’ve got a group of guys who think it’s a good idea to rent it for a class reunion.’
‘And one of them gets haunted?’
‘You got it. Cue more screaming and special effects.’ He grins at me. ‘That’s the fun and games. I’m still trying to work out how it ends, though.’
A bit like me and Isabel.
I toy with my mug. ‘So it’s a ghost story?’
‘Ghost story, horror, comedy, all in the great tradition of Gbostbusters,’ he says with mock grandiloquence.
Felix is happily counting out biscuits onto the tiled floor. Matt doesn’t seem to mind.
‘I suppose you don’t believe in ghosts,’ I say.
‘Sure I do.’ He says it so easily that my mouth drops open and I stare at him. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ he asks, lifting his brows at my surprise.
‘I don’t know . . . I just assumed that your movies were poking fun at the supernatural.’
‘They do, I guess, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think ghosts exist. I keep forgetting you don’t remember,’ Matt says, brushing biscuit crumbs off the table. ‘I came to Askerby years ago, when I was travelling around England with a girl. We were bowled over by the place, and it was a beautiful day, so we thought we’d climb the tower and look at the view. The lady at the ticket desk said it was pretty special.’
‘It is,’ I say. I’m looking into my mug, but I am remembering Edmund’s hands on my shoulders, the way I had to narrow my eyes against the wind. The flash of sunlight on the river, the moors rolling breathlessly away into the distance and my chest expanding with happiness.
‘So we set off up those stairs,’ Matt goes on. ‘We were talking and laughing at first, but as we got near the top we both fell silent. It’s a long climb in an enclosed space and you think you’re going to climb round and round for ever, so I thought it was claustrophobia at first, but it was more than that. The air in there was clammy and there was this terrible feeling of – I don’t know – urgency, I guess. I started to feel panicky. It’s hard to describe what it felt like,’ he confides, ‘but it gave me the heebie-jeebies. Jess – my girlfriend – said later that she felt exactly the same, but neither of us wanted to suggest turning round and going back down.
‘I couldn’t wait to get out of that staircase and
onto the roof,’ Matt tells me, ‘but the moment we did, we were hit by this wave of sadness, grief, misery, fear. It was like it just rolled over us, a wash of cold terror, like you could touch it. It was horrible.’
He grimaces at the memory. ‘I don’t mind telling you, I was shit scared. I’d never felt anything like it before. Jess could feel it too. She grabbed my hand and started babbling that she didn’t like it, she wanted to go, but she didn’t want to go back down the spiral staircase. In the end, we decided the stairs were less scary than the roof, so we bolted back down and were both white as sheets when we got to the bottom, where it was a perfectly nice sunny day and nobody else seemed to have noticed anything wrong at all.’
‘Were there other people up on the roof when you were there?’
‘A few. They clearly didn’t feel it, or there’s no way they could have stood there calmly looking at the view.’ Matt’s shoulders twitch at the memory. ‘But when I mentioned it to one of the volunteer guides, she said we weren’t the first visitors to feel it, and she told us the legend about the servant who jumped off the tower.’
I open my mouth to say that it wasn’t a servant, it was Isabel, but I shut it again. Since seeing the evidence of Judith’s grave, I am not sure any more.
‘That was my inspiration for The Tower,’ Matt says. ‘It was a straight drama to begin with, but over the years I changed it, and when I pitched the idea to a producer, he suggested throwing a few laughs in as well, and because I’m not the kind of guy who suffers for his art, I rewrote the script. It might seem like I think ghosts are a load of fun, but I’ve never forgotten how it felt up that tower, and I sure wasn’t laughing then.’
I glance at Felix but he’s still absorbed in counting biscuits. I’m remembering how the Vavasours claimed that Matt encouraged what they called my ‘obsession’. ‘Did I use to talk about seeing ghosts before?’
Matt’s brows shoot up. ‘No. Why? Are you seeing them now?’
I hesitate. I am so tempted to tell him about my memories as Isabel. It would be good to talk to someone about them, and I don’t think he’ll scoff. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of Felix stealing a look at me before sneaking another biscuit, and I wag a warning finger at him. This isn’t the time.
‘No,’ I say to Matt, and it is the truth. I haven’t seen anything. It is all in my head. ‘Sometimes the atmosphere at the Hall is a bit unsettling, but that’s probably me.’
‘Okay.’ Matt doesn’t look as if he believes me. ‘Well, I recommend staying away from the tower.’
I shudder at the thought of it. ‘I think I learnt that lesson,’ I say, rubbing my leg ruefully, and he slaps his forehead.
‘Shit! I wasn’t thinking. Sorry, Kate, you don’t need me telling you about the tower.’
‘It’s all right. Things are weird enough for me at the moment without going near that tower. I’m happy to give it a wide berth. In fact, if I never go up it again, it’ll be soon enough for me.’
With some help from Philippa, Joanna and I work our way through all the archive boxes and end up with five piles of documents divided into centuries, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first. The pile for the nineteenth century is by far the biggest. The Victorian Vavasours were clearly fascinated by their own history, fortunately for us, as most of what we know of earlier Vavasours comes from them.
There is some fascinating material from the first half of the twentieth century, too, but after Margaret and Ralph’s fairy-tale wedding in 1949 it is as if all interest in recording the family history stops. Since then, they have only looked back, not forwards. They have preserved what history they have, yes, but they haven’t made any of their own.
Thanks largely to an unmarried Vavasour daughter who went through all the family papers in the 1860s, I have been able to draw up a line of descent which will be central to the display in the Visitor Centre. Edmund’s grandfather, Ralph Vavasour, merchant of York, is right at the top, and Felix at the bottom, with a direct line linking the two. The title has not always descended from father to first son; sometimes an eldest son dies or is killed, and sometimes the line jumps a generation, as it will from Jasper to Felix, but it is direct. Most families can only trace their history directly for three or four generations before the line breaks, ending in childlessness or premature death or – worse – a family of daughters, but the Vavasours have beaten the odds, and look proudly back on an unbroken line of male heirs.
There is only one link missing. I haven’t found Kit. A dotted line connects an Edmund Vavasour who died in 1697 to my Edmund. Isabel’s Edmund, I correct myself quickly. Edmund died in 1613, when he would have been in his forties, I calculate. It is just possible, I suppose, that the later Edmund might have been his son, but it is very unlikely. That is what I tell myself, anyway. There is a Lord Vavasour missing. His name might not be Christopher, I know, but it might be. It might be.
I haven’t given up hope of finding him yet. Isabel won’t let me. Find him. Find him. Remember.
Chapter Thirty-two
Joanna tells me that there is a scanner in the estate office, so I gather together a selection of photos and other material from the archives and various albums and put them in a folder with the ones I have borrowed from Dosia. The estate office is a bit further than the stables but not as far as the village, so I can walk there easily, although I’m not sorry to be able to rest my leg when I get there.
George greets me coldly. We have been rigidly polite to each other ever since the night he got drunk and asked me to marry him. It makes for an uncomfortable atmosphere sometimes but the last thing I want to do is offer him any encouragement. I am hoping that in spite of everything he may start to see Angie in a new light, although why she would want someone who can talk about ‘bad genes’ is beyond me. If I am right about Dosia and Ralph, Peter’s genes were as much Vavasour as Kaczka, but I don’t know for sure and I can’t say anything. It is Dosia’s secret, not mine.
Angie is briskly elegant today in a black trouser suit. She is much smarter than George in his cords and fraying cuffs, and I marvel again at his casual dismissal of her as ‘the help’. It seems to me that she is brighter, more competent and certainly better dressed than any of the Vavasours. George would be lucky to have her.
When I explain that I am here about the displays, George passes me on to Angie. If she has picked up on the frigid atmosphere between George and me, she doesn’t comment on it, but happily clears a desk so that I can spread out the A4 sheets showing what I’ve done of the family tree so far.
‘These show the line of direct descent between fathers and sons, or sometimes grandsons,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve included wives where I can, so it isn’t too male heavy, but we don’t always know their names.’ I haven’t put Judith’s name next to Edmund’s. I still think there must be some kind of mistake. I don’t want to believe it is true.
‘Wow, this looks great,’ Angie says. ‘You’ve done so much work.’
‘Most of it was done by Sophia Vavasour,’ I admit. ‘She never married and seems to have devoted her life to the family history. We found her notes, and she’d done a lot of digging in the parish registers, and there was apparently a family bible which recorded all the names that seems to have completely disappeared. It’s a shame, as it must have had so much information about other members of the family, too. They don’t seem to have been very interested in their daughters.’
‘That’s how the estate has survived intact,’ Angie says, unconcerned. ‘It’s been passed down from father to eldest surviving son, and hasn’t had to be broken up to support the younger sons.’
‘Primogeniture.’ I look at the family tree without enthusiasm. ‘It seems so unfair.’
Angie shrugs. ‘You might not like it as a system, but it’s going to work in Felix’s favour. Askerby will be his some day.’
‘I’m not sure that will be good for him.’ Frowning, I straighten from the desk. ‘I wish there was some way to disinherit him.’
&nb
sp; ‘Disinherit Felix?’ Her head comes up and she stares at me in astonishment. ‘Are you crazy? What on earth would you want to do that for?’
‘It just seems so unfair, Angie.’ I try to explain. ‘Even the royal family have moved on from a boys-only approach! Felix should make his own way in the world, not be chained to this place all his life. If anything, it should go to Philippa when Jasper eventually dies.’
‘Philippa?’ Angie says scornfully. ‘What good would that do? Philippa’s a lesbian.’ She makes no attempt to hide her distaste.
I remember that George hinted at the same thing. I have no idea if they’re right or not, and I don’t see that it matters, anyway. ‘So?’
‘So she won’t have children, will she?’
‘She can do what she likes. The point is that she can make her own choice, not be bypassed because of some law set up in the Middle Ages.’
Angie’s mouth is tight with disapproval. ‘If you’re going to change the laws of inheritance to include women, strictly speaking George should inherit. Joanna is older than Lord Vavasour.’
‘Fine by me,’ I say, gathering up the sheets of paper.
All at once the air is precarious, as if it is shimmering with fumes that will explode at the slightest flick: an ill-chosen word, a careless intonation. I don’t want to fight with Angie, so I fold my lips, concentrate on pulling out the other items I’ve found for the display. I’ve put together snippets from diaries and letters, a menu for a grand dinner at the beginning of the nineteenth century, sepia photographs from the Victorian era, some of the portraits that still hang in the Hall, and various other images that I think together make for a varied and interesting display.
House of Shadows Page 30