The Phantom Tree

by Nicola Cornick

  Squabbling with Adam, scoring points… She knew it was futile and it didn’t relieve the misery beneath her frustration but made it worse. There was a sharp pain wedged in her chest. This was so important to her, a lifetime’s quest.

  The corner of the book dug into her ribs. She longed to throw it into the nearest rubbish bin and vent her frustrations that way. Except that it was her only hope and she clung to that tenaciously. There might be something buried deep within the text that could help her to trace Mary’s history. That was the first part of the quest. Find Mary and she would find word of Arthur. She was certain of it. It was just a pity that the plans she had made so carefully all those years ago had gone so spectacularly wrong.

  Two girls, laughing and careless, almost knocked into Alison as they sped along the pavement, hair flying. She could see one of then had three copies of Uncovering Anne Boleyn clutched to her chest. The books were getting soaked in the rain and so were the girls. They wore no coats even though it was winter. Alison wondered if they even noticed the weather. She felt old all of a sudden. The north wind from the Downs was making her eyes smart so that unwanted tears slid from the corners and chilled her cheeks. Winter these days so seldom involved snow. It always seemed to be cold, stinging rain and a wind that found its way into her bones. It was with relief that she saw the neat box trees that marked the entrance to the hotel and the lighted foyer beyond. She needed a coffee.

  ‘Miss Bannister? Excuse me. You forgot this.’

  The voice made her pause and turn on the hotel steps. Richard Demoranville was standing a few feet away. He reached into the inside breast pocket of his coat and held something out to her. Alison took it automatically, feeling the wind almost tug the flimsy sheet from her fingers. It was a newspaper cutting.

  ‘I don’t think that’s mine—’ she began, but Richard shook his head once, sharply, silencing her.

  ‘It’s the only media report that gave details of the location of Adam’s find,’ he said. ‘Although the owner of the house wanted it kept quiet, one local paper reported it before they realised. I think you’ll find it useful.’

  He raised a hand in farewell and turned away, vanishing into the shadows before Alison even had time to ask the questions that were forming in her mind. She heard his footsteps recede into silence. The street was empty.

  Frowning, she went into the hotel foyer, closing the door carefully behind her and taking off her sodden raincoat as she hurried up to her room. The newspaper cutting was soaking too, almost translucent and too difficult to read. She felt a moment of panic that the ink would run and she would never discover what it said. After flattening it on the radiator, she waited edgily as the paper dried and the words gradually reappeared. When she could wait no longer, she snatched it up and carried it over to the light.

  It was from the Marlborough Mercury and was dated roughly three months earlier. It was only a tiny square of information at the bottom of an article about the opening of a new recycling plant: ‘Local celebrity historian discovers lost treasure’. She had not thought that Adam was local. She was sure he had told her his family were from Cambridgeshire. She shrugged impatiently and read on:

  ‘“Local celebrity historian, Adam Hewer, will be announcing today that he has discovered a significant new portrait of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII. Hewer, who has written both a TV programme and book about the discovery, has been working for the last eighteen months to catalogue the contents of sixteenth-century Middlecote Hall, home to the reclusive Smithfield family.”’

  Middlecote Hall.

  Alison sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed.

  She should have guessed. As part of her search for Mary, she had racked her brains, sought out all the places with some connection to the Parr and Seymour families. There had been so many places for her to research over the years: Elvetham in Hampshire, Berry Pomeroy in Devon, houses still standing, houses rebuilt, houses lost. She had not remembered Middlecote though, perhaps because the connection was so tenuous.

  There had definitely been some Seymour family connection to Middlecote though. It teased at her memory. Quickly, she ran through the names of the cousins she remembered, then, with a slight shrug, reached for her laptop. All her notes were stored here, family trees, the ones she could not show Adam because there she was—Alison Banestre, born 1543 to Hugh Banestre and his wife Alice, only surviving child.

  She flicked to the next page of the family tree, a sideways step via the Seymours to other cousins. There it was: Fenner of Middlecote Hall, Berkshire, a distant connection by marriage a couple of generations before either she or Mary had gone to Wolf Hall.

  Fenner. Now, at last, she knew. Mary had gone to Middlecote. So she would too.

  Chapter 9

  Mary, 1560

  Darrell spoke to me as I was leaving Wolf Hall. I did not try to shut him out. I was too lonely and unhappy. Probably that was how he had known something was amiss. When either of us were miserable the other always sensed it.

  ‘Cat.’

  ‘Darrell?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  There were times when I thought that Darrell was a typical boy. He did not like talking about emotion. I could sense in those two words all of the reluctant obligation he was feeling and the hope that when I replied it would be to reassure him that all was well.

  Had I been less miserable I might have laughed.

  ‘I am sent away again.’ I made an effort. ‘Don’t fret. It’s fine.’

  Swiftly he demolished my pretence, the answering feeling deriding my lame attempt to fool him.

  ‘It’s not. What happened? Where are you going? Why?’

  So many questions. It was complicated. I sent thought patterns showing death and blame and danger, accusations of witchcraft, fear and suspicion. I felt him stiffen as though he were there beside me.

  ‘Cat. No.’ Vehement. Then: ‘Do they know about me?’

  ‘No. No one knows.’

  I felt his relief and knew it was for me, not for himself. Darrell had always warned me to tell no one. Not that I needed warning. I knew it was not the sort of thing that anyone would understand. People would see it as yet another sign of my difference, a threat, a hint of witchcraft.

  ‘Keep it a secret.’

  ‘Always.’

  I felt warmth then, security and love falling like rose petals. Then the moment of intimacy faded and he was practical again.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some other family manor, I think. They would not tell us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘My cousin Alison is with me. They sent us both away. Alison swears she will run off and start a new life.’

  I felt Darrell’s snort of derision at the thought of a girl being so foolish as to imagine she could forge her own path and for once I was quite cross with him.

  ‘Why shouldn’t she?’

  ‘Women don’t do that.’

  ‘Whom are you talking to?’ Alison’s voice cut across our thoughts and I broke away from Darrell instinctively, as though afraid she would read my mind and find out about him.

  ‘I?’ I feigned bewilderment. ‘No one. How could I? There is no one here but you and I.’

  The coach jerked over a rut and I steadied myself against the frame. Rain beat monotonously on the leather roof; the chill of it seeped inside and set me shivering. I had half expected Edward to banish me in a turnip cart, sent away under cover of darkness, but whatever Alison had said to him had evidently stiffened his resolve to behave like a gentleman. This was his second-best coach, lined with linen hangings and with the Seymour coat of arms on the side. We had armed outriders too, for protection and to show the superstitious folk of the forest that Lord Seymour’s orders should not be challenged.

  ‘Your lips were moving,’ Alison said. ‘You were talking to someone in your head.’

  ‘I was only talking to myself.’

  She shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

&
nbsp; I wondered how she was really feeling about leaving Wolf Hall. I had asked her the night before when we had sat by the fire and I had tried to read the future for her in its flames as I had promised.

  ‘I am not sorry to go,’ she had said. ‘I want respect and I will never find that here or in Whitney’s bed. I want to be like a man and determine my own fate.’

  ‘Women don’t do that.’ I remembered Darrell’s words. She was braver than I, or perhaps she was foolhardy and Darrell was right. I did not know. But I wanted her to succeed.

  ‘I’m not coming with you,’ she whispered to me as we climbed up in the carriage that dank morning. ‘Edward says I am to live with you now but that would never serve. We would drive each other witless within a week.’

  I was not sure. We had come to some sort of understanding, she and I. It helped that she believed I had seen the future for her when I had pretended to scry the flames. We had sat together before the fire the previous night and I had pretended to scry the flames. To add colour and conviction to the experience I had told her to light three candles about us.

  ‘It is the power of three,’ I had said mysteriously. ‘Such magic is strong.’

  Then I told her that I had seen a castle with high grey battlements, flying gold and blue pennants, and her baby in a nursery there surrounded by women who loved and cared for him. As soon as I had said the words I had regretted them for there was a look of vivid unhappiness on Alison’s face and I wondered whether she would have preferred me to say that no one loved him. That was the trouble with lying; it was so difficult to know what to say for the best.

  She gave a little sigh. ‘Are you sure they care for him well?’

  ‘He wants for nothing,’ I said. ‘I can see him wrapped in a blue blanket.’ I was warming to my theme now. ‘He has a tiny gold crucifix about his neck.’

  ‘I gave him that,’ she whispered. ‘It was one of the few things my mother left to me.’

  That did surprise me, since I had seen nothing of the sort. However it convinced her.

  She smiled at me. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Then: ‘This castle—where is it?’

  ‘That I do not know,’ I said. ‘Somewhere north of here.’

  That left a great deal of the country, but she seemed satisfied by my geographical vagueness for she nodded.

  ‘Livery of blue and gold,’ she said. ‘I will find it.’

  I felt misgivings then and almost told her that I had made it all up, but there was a new serenity about her and I was too much of a coward to crush it with the truth.

  Now I could feel her watching me, but she said nothing more, instead turning her shoulder to me as she lifted the window flap to stare out at the rain-drenched landscape.

  ‘We are nearing the bridge at Marlborough,’ she said. ‘I will be leaving you soon.’

  There was an odd note in her voice: tension, excitement, fear. The same emotions were mirrored in her face. She looked half defiant, half terrified. On impulse I reached out a hand to her.

  ‘Won’t you tell me where you are going?’ I asked. ‘Is it to find Arthur?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I’m going to prepare a place for him. Then when it is ready I will come back and find him.’ Her voice held a hint of uncertainty but I could see in her eyes how dearly she wanted it to be true.

  Suddenly, she grabbed my hands. ‘If I don’t come back—’ she said.

  ‘You will.’ I wanted to reassure her. She seemed so frightened all of a sudden, swinging from confidence to doubt like a weathervane.

  ‘Find him for me,’ she said. Her grip tightened. ‘Find out where Arthur is and leave word for me.’

  I stared at her. I had no idea how to do what she asked. ‘Leave word where?’ I asked weakly.

  ‘Somewhere you know I will find it,’ she said.

  We were rumbling down Marlborough High Street now. The coach had slowed to a crawl. I could hear the familiar sound of the street market, the clucking of the chickens, the shouts of the vendors, all drowned in the steady thrum of the falling rain.

  ‘Give me your promise.’ Her hands were tight on mine. ‘I saved your life. You owe it to me.’

  ‘I promise,’ I said.

  The coach jerked to a halt. I heard the irritable voice of one of the squires asking what the deuce the driver was doing but then, like quicksilver, Alison had slid out of the door grasping the folds of her cloak in one hand and a small bag in the other. I heard the squire give a shout of warning but Alison slipped like an eel out of his grasping hands and ran.

  ‘Good luck!’ I yelled.

  She turned towards me, already soaked by the steady fall of rain, her face a pale blur beneath the black edge of the hood. She nodded. ‘And you.’

  I saw the dripping market stalls marooned in a sea of mud, the huddled stallholders, the pearly grey of the sky, the endless fall of rain. That was how I remember Alison—a small upright figure in a sea of grey, her hair soaking, wearing the vivid orange tawny as she had in my vision.

  She ran for the nearest door. It was the White Hart, the rain dripping from its eaves, a sullen curl of smoke from its chimney the only sign of life. She tumbled over the threshold with one of Cousin Edward’s squires in hot pursuit, grasping after her cloak.

  Alison had planned this and taken our guards entirely by surprise. Edward’s intention was that we should have gone quietly into whatever retirement he had chosen for us. But Alison never went quietly. It was not in her nature.

  Her workbox had fallen to the floor when she had scrambled to get out of the coach. It lay on its side, the lid open. I picked it up. It felt smooth and cold against my skin. I knew how precious it was to her and how angry she would be to so carelessly have left it behind.

  The box was empty but for a few scraps of material, a pale blue ribbon, some pins with enamel heads and a shred of parchment with a pencil sketch. I turned it around. It was Wolf Hall, drawn in a few spare lines that captured the essence of the place, all higgledy-piggledy roof and jumbled windows. It was very good. Alison always had had a sharp eye and a fair hand.

  I looked up as the squire clattered out of the inn empty-handed, palms spread wide. A low-voiced colloquy followed. I could not hear what he said to the others but the inference was clear. Alison had disappeared.

  I sat in the coach and waited whilst they searched the inn and the streets around, getting progressively more wet, dirty and angry.

  They did not find her.

  Chapter 10

  Alison, London, the present day

  Alison felt better when she was back in London, more stable, more sane. She had loved the city from the first moment she had seen it, loved everything about it from the lazy curves of the wide river to the multiplicity of people on the streets. She loved the fusion of old and new, the scents and the sights, the buzz of excitement. It was the only place she had ever felt truly at home, where she felt her life click back into place.

  With the benefit of hindsight, she could see that the mistake she had made in the beginning was to stay in Wiltshire. It had made sense in an illogical sort of way; she was close to places that were vaguely familiar and she had thought it would be easier to find her way back to claim Arthur. Driven by anger and hatred at the way Edward had treated her, at the way he had treated Mary, too, she had made the rash decision to flee into the future. Naturally, she had misunderstood every aspect of her situation. She had been unable to return to the past. She had no idea how to survive in the alien world she had discovered. Early on, sleeping rough, she had tried to barter some of the jewels she had brought with her for food and shelter. The police had been called. She had ended up in care.

  It had been the best thing that had happened to her. She was fed, clothed and educated. Beyond trying to discover where she had come from no one asked her anything. She was swallowed up by an incurious system, processed. It gave her exactly what she needed, which was the chance to learn how to speak like everyone else and to observe how this new world worked. She was
small for her age and they assumed she was younger than she was. They assumed a lot—that she had run away from home, that she had been abused. It was close to the truth.

  She had used the system well, gone to college and studied for a diploma in travel and tourism. She had a real determination to succeed and loved everything that was different about this world from the one she had left—the technology, the opportunities to travel, the significant improvement in the status of women.

  She caught sight of a billboard showing a scantily clad starlet promoting online betting. Even after four hundred years there was still some way to go.

  She keyed her pass code into the box at the side of a discreet door in Kensington and felt the stresses of the weekend fade away. Up in the office there was chatter and the smell of strong coffee. The familiarity was almost enough to smooth over the memory of the one constant, the nagging ache, the vital thing that she had left behind. Arthur.

  ‘Ali!’ Kate, her colleague and friend, paused in exchanging weekend news with one of the other girls. Her face lost its glow. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Fine.’ Alison slid behind her desk and accepted the mug of coffee Kate proffered. ‘Thanks.’ She took a deep swallow of the scalding liquid and closed her eyes, relaxing back in her chair. ‘It’s good to be back.’

  ‘At work?’ Kate said.

  ‘In London,’ Alison said.

  Kate’s expression cleared. ‘Yes, well, you’re not really a country person, are you? The rest of the world—fine. The British countryside—not so much.’

  ‘I grew up there,’ Alison said. ‘That was enough.’

  ‘How was your friend?’ Kate perched on the edge of Alison’s desk. Then, as she saw Alison’s expression: ‘Bad?’

  Alison nodded. ‘I’m not sure I’ll see her again.’