Eleanor flushed. ‘I shall be there directly. I just need to finish—’ She gestured to the poem, clasped protectively in her hand.
‘Leave it,’ Will said. ‘Mama wants you now. She is in the Long Gallery.’
Eleanor looked ready to burst into tears with no time to hide her precious writing. I wondered if she thought Will or I would pounce on it and read it as soon as she had left the room.
‘I’ll keep it safe for you, Nell,’ I said, wanting only to help, but she flushed scarlet and scrambled down from the seat and ran.
‘Poor Nell,’ Will said, staring after her. ‘No spirit at all.’ He ignored the sheet of writing, which had drifted down to the floor. He came across to me. All his attention was focused on me and suddenly I realised that we were completely alone. My heart seemed to catch in my throat.
‘I wondered if you would care to come with me to the fair later, Lady Mary?’ Will spoke softly, as though afraid of being overheard.
I felt elated and swift on the heels of the excitement, utterly downcast.
‘Lady Fenner would never permit it,’ I said.
He smiled at what I had unwittingly given away. ‘She need not know,’ he said. ‘If you wish it, that is all that counts.’
I stared at him, not quite believing. ‘When?’
‘Tonight.’ He took my hand and pressed a kiss to the palm. My fingers closed automatically as though sealing it in. ‘What do you say?’ His voice was still low, intimate, insistent. ‘Just the two of us.’
I looked into his eyes and saw danger and excitement reflected there. For the first time, I understood why Alison had risked all to steal moments alone with her lover. More practically I wished I had asked how she had managed to slip away unnoticed. I had not thought I would ever need to know.
‘How…’ I started to say. His eyes danced with amusement.
‘I will arrange it.’
Of course he would. He was adept at trysting with women.
Eleanor came back then, very flushed and indignant. ‘I could not find Mama,’ she complained as she bustled over to the window and grabbed her poem in jealous hands. ‘You must have misunderstood, Will.’
Her brother did not take his gaze from me. ‘Very likely I did,’ he agreed. ‘Your pardon.’ And he smiled his secret smile, for me alone, and kissed my hand again, and was gone.
*
I spent the evening in an agony of anticipation. Lady Fenner snapped at me for inattention. Even Eleanor commented that I seemed distracted and asked me if I had the headache. It was the excuse I needed and I seized upon it, apologising to Lady Fenner and asking to retire early. She was at cards with Will and he did not look up once from the hand he was playing. I waited for a sign from him but none came and Lady Fenner raised her brows and asked why I was still standing there.
‘The girl acts like a simpleton sometimes,’ I heard her complain to Will as I was leaving the room. ‘It is hard to believe her mother was a clever woman.’
‘We do not all inherit our parents’ virtues,’ Will said smoothly. ‘If one considers intelligence a virtue in a woman.’
Lady Fenner gave him a very unfriendly look.
I could not fathom their relationship. She was proud and possessive of Will, her only son, and yet utterly contemptuous of his weaknesses. He tolerated her sharpness and her interference, more out of laziness than anything else, I believe, though sometimes he would snap back at her and his words always had a sting in them.
Up in my chamber I paced the floor, unable to settle. Will would not come for me. He had forgotten we were to go to the fair. I should go to bed and forget about it. I was half excitement, half dread, shredding my handkerchief between my restless fingers, running to window when I heard a sound outside, watching the door.
Yet I still missed his coming. One moment I was standing gazing out into the twilight, the next I turned and he was standing right behind me. I drew my breath on a gasp and he pressed a finger to my lips, silencing me.
‘Hush! Are you ready?’
It was so very typical of Will to give me no word but expect me to be waiting for him. Which, of course, I was. Reckless excitement possessed me.
‘Yes!’
‘Come then.’ He held out a hand to me and led me to the door. Truth is, I was disappointed. I had imagined we would climb down the ivy—except that there was none at my window.
The corridor outside my chamber was empty. Will paused, listening, then drew me towards the servants’ stair at the end. We tiptoed. My heard beat like a drum. I think I was shaking.
There were steps, voices. He pulled me into the darkened doorway of Lady Fenner’s chamber, pressing me close, his body hard against mine. I could not have breathed then had I wished. Two maids passed by, heads bent close together, giggling. One held a pail. They were so close that some of the water in it splashed my gown but they did not see us.
‘I would bed him,’ one of them said, nudging the other with her elbow, causing more water to splash. ‘He is very handsome.’
‘Then you would be a fool, standing in line with all the other fools,’ the other girl said.
I felt Will’s amusement. He bent his head and his lips brushed my hair.
‘Come, sweeting.’
The maids had gone and I was still standing there transfixed like another of his fools.
The stair was tight and narrow and our footsteps sounded loud on the bare wood but no one came. At the bottom was another narrow passageway I did not recognise. I had never visited the servants’ quarters; Lady Fenner would have been horrified. Light and noise at one end of the passage, but at the other there was a chill draught and an open door. We were outside, in one of the small courtyards, and Will was laughing as he pulled me towards the stables.
‘We’re free!’
The rain had cleared to leave a starlit twilight. We rode east, towards Hungerford, Sir Walter’s domain where I had never been before. Will did not speak but hummed under his breath, a tuneless ditty. He seemed in a very good mood.
There were bonfires on the Common Port Down and the sound of music in the air. The crowds were huge, noisy and rough, though good-tempered in the main. The surge of humanity took us hither and thither with no free will of our own, swept along like so much flotsam on the flood. I was constantly pressed against Will’s side as we as we walked through the narrow avenues between the booths. He did not seem to mind one whit and wrapped an arm about me to hold me safe.
I had heard of the Hungerford Midsummer Fair though I had never thought to see it. During the day it was a place where farmers, merchants and men of more dubious means came to buy, sell and barter, but at night they retired to the tents and booths to feast and drink. Then the fair became the province of the minstrels and the jugglers. Strolling players mingled with the crowds, tumblers danced around us, making me jump with their brightly painted harlequin faces, like dolls from an infernal toymaker. I clung tight to Will’s arm as the crowds buffeted us. When we came across the bloody remains of a cockfight I buried my face in his jacket and he laughed at me.
‘You’re too soft-hearted, Mary,’ he said. ‘You need to toughen up.’
We drank mead that Will swore was entirely proper for a lady but which made my head spin delightfully, and we danced to the music of the lute and the recorders, and watched the fire-eaters, and I felt dizzy and drunk as much on excitement as mead. Many a woman passed by, lady and harlot both, who cast Will a covetous glance but for that one night he was all mine.
Trouble came out of nowhere, violence like a whisper of wind through the corn, growing and spreading. There was a group of men standing outside a booth talking loudly. They were drunk and on the edge of argument already when Will jostled one inadvertently in order to protect me from the lurch of people on the other side. The man spilt his ale and spun around on an oath.
‘Watch yourself, you clumsy fool.’
I felt the change in Will. He drew himself up straighter, his arm falling away from me, his hand go
ing to the sword he carried beneath his cloak.
‘It’s Will Fenner of Middlecote,’ I heard someone whisper. ‘God ’a’ mercy, it’s Wild Will—’
There was a shout away to the left and Will turned instinctively towards to noise.
‘Fenner! You whore-mongering bastard!’
A fist flew above my head. Something sharp grazed my cheek. One man was barrelling in from the right, trying to attack Will with fists and feet. Another, the man whose drink he had spilt, had pulled a knife. I screamed.
I was falling down amongst the pounding feet and writhing bodies and I thought I would be trampled for sure, but Will caught my hand and dragged me out from beneath them all.
‘This way,’ he said, in my ear, and we were running, dodging amongst the booths, away from the light and the shouting and the noise. I stumbled over my skirts and heard the material rip. I had a stitch in my side, my face felt sore and I had lost a shoe but I was exhilarated, laughing so hard I had to stop running, and when Will swung me around to face him and the surprise in his eyes warmed into approval, I laughed all the harder.
‘You surely know how to entertain a lady, Will Fenner.’
He laughed then too, and kissed me.
‘Mary,’ he said, against my mouth. ‘Who would have guessed you had such spirit.’
The stars spun all the more about my head and I thought I had never been happier than I was then, in Will Fenner’s arms.
It was as easy as that for me to fall in love.
Chapter 14
Alison checked the office surreptitiously to make sure everyone was engrossed in their work and then flipped Internet screens from a luxury lodge on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast to a picture of an eighteenth-century map of Wiltshire. It was the earliest one she had been able to find online and was almost impossible to decipher with its cursive writing and strange topographical detail. It showed the north-east corner of the county as it had been in 1759, with all the named tracks across the Downs marked on it: the Thieves’ Way and the Sugar Way and the Rogues’ Way. She had traced a likely route for Reginald De Morven from Oxford to Salisbury, taking him past his ancestral home at Kingston Parva but she was no closer to discovering at what point he had turned aside from that path and travelled from the past to the present.
She leaned closer to the screen, squinting at the map detail. One plus was that it did show the location of Kingston Manor, which had still been standing in the mid-eighteenth century. It was to the west of the church, as the vicar had indicated, and although the map was far from accurate, she would probably be able to find it using the landmarks shown. At the bottom right of the map was also Middlecote Hall and a huge tree drawn totally out of scale beside a name that read ‘The Big Stile’. In smaller letters, she saw tangled in the roots the words ‘The Phantom Tree’. Any moment she expected to see the legend ‘Here Be Dragons’.
It was not far over the hills from Middlecote to Kingston. Alison tried to measure the distance but the actual scale was impossible to work out. A network of tracks led between the two, however, passing Lambourn Woodlands and Baydon and various other villages.
‘Planning a safari into the past?’ Charles slapped a set of papers down on her desk, making her jump.
Something of the sort…
At any other time, Alison might have laughed since a trip into history was exactly what she planned. This was no laughing matter though. Twice now she had been caught using the work Internet for personal projects. C&D were pretty hot on such transgressions. No surfing the Net, no mobile calls on work time. The trouble was she was becoming suffused by the need to find out about Arthur. It was all she thought about, from the moment she woke to when she went to sleep. The longing permeated everything—not overtly—no one would have guessed her preoccupation—but it coloured her life like a stain. She was becoming obsessed, just as she had been when she first arrived and had been utterly fixated on going back to find Arthur and bring him to the present.
‘I…’ Alison knew better than to lie. ‘Sorry, Charles.’
‘That would be right up Alison’s street,’ Andre said quickly. He had seen the panic in her eyes. He turned to Kate. ‘D’you remember that time when we were in the pub and she’d had too much white wine and started rambling on about parallel universes and time travel?’
‘Yeah.’ Kate cradled her coffee cup, smiling gamely at Charles. ‘Alison said it was perfectly possible to travel between different dimensions.’
It seemed unlikely to Alison that a rehearsal of her one ill-timed attempt to talk about her life would charm Charles out of his bad mood.
‘I think I had flu and was running a temperature,’ she said. ‘Clearly I was deranged.’
She had been ill, she thought. She had been sick, and bone tired and lonely, because there had been a big item on the news about a baby snatched from its mother. The woman’s grief had cut her to the heart and broken down all the carefully erected defences she had built about her emotions. Sometimes it simply was not possible to be strong, to lock away the hurt with all the other old secrets. Sometimes she just wanted to tell someone, to let them into her world.
‘Some physicists think time travel is possible,’ Charles said.
‘Special Relativity,’ Kate said. ‘Einstein.’
Alison felt inadequate. She had had very little formal education. Usually it didn’t matter; she was sharp and had discovered that she was commercially aware and she knew she was good at her job. It was only occasionally that she felt lacking, just as she had done as a child.
Charles, however, seemed to be looking at her with something approaching approval.
‘I rather like that as a concept for our cultural tours,’ he said. ‘Travel through time… the closest thing to Special Relativity you can get in the modern world… Hmm, yes. Good work.’
He wandered off, murmuring something about Einstein.
‘You owe us,’ Andre said, sitting back in his chair and grinning.
‘What was it this time?’ Kate had wandered over to Alison’s desk and was looking over her shoulder.
‘“A topographical Map of the County of Wiltshire, 1759,”’ she read aloud. ‘What on earth are you looking for?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alison said. She felt so tightly wound up she wanted to snap. Reginald’s fate tormented her. On the one hand it held out the possibility of finding her way back to Arthur, but it was a false hope because she had no idea how to use that knowledge. Frustration and anger stabbed her viciously in the gut. It felt as though every path to her son was closed to her. She would never find him. Even if Adam helped her to discover the clues Mary had left, what could she do with them? She could never go back.
She blinked hard and picked up the file that Charles had left on the desk, pretending to study it. The last thing she wanted to do was cry in front of her colleagues. Why wouldn’t Kate just leave her alone and go back to her desk? She wanted to push her away and had to repress the physical impulse.
She read the cover brief on the file. A family of two adults and three children wanted to plan a bespoke safari to Tanzania. Great. Time to play happy families again. That was all she needed. She hated arranging family trips; one of the reasons she enjoyed the Africa work was that relatively few families made the journey, usually finding the driving distances too great to keep children amused, as well as worrying their offspring might be eaten by leopards.
‘Oh, how lovely!’ Kate’s eyes lit up. ‘There are loads of family-friendly venues we can put forward for them. Perhaps they could write a piece for our newsletter on travelling with children.’
Alison shuddered and saw Kate’s eagerness dim at her blatant lack of enthusiasm. She hated herself in that moment. Kate had never understood her attitude towards children and families. How could she? Alison could never explain. Kate had reached out to her a few times, wanting to talk as a friend would, and she had always knocked her back.
Alison’s phone buzzed. It was a relief to break the circle of toxic tho
ughts. She looked around to make sure that Charles was out of sight then checked the caller ID. It was Adam. Suddenly she felt edgy and anxious. As she was leaving Middlecote, Adam had said he would ring her when he had been able to get hold of the box and the portrait for her to have a look at. This was one call she was definitely not going to let go to voicemail.
She pressed the button to answer, gesturing meaningfully with her head towards Kate, who scooted back behind her own desk.
‘Hi, Adam. How are you?’ She hoped her voice didn’t betray her nerves. She saw Kate’s lips form the words ‘Adam Hewer’ at Andre, who raised his brows and grinned.
‘Good, thanks.’ Adam sounded a bit abrupt. ‘Are you free this evening?’
Alison briefly considered and discarded the idea of pretending that her diary was packed. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I’ll meet you at the National Portrait Gallery,’ Adam said. ‘Seven?’
‘Why?’ Alison said. She saw Kate roll her eyes at the bluntness of the conversation. Well, they had agreed it was only business.
‘The portrait is on show there now,’ Adam said. ‘If you want to see it, you’ll have to join the queue.’
‘And the box?’ Alison said.
‘I can get that for you in a couple of days,’ Adam said. ‘Not the contents though, I’m afraid. They’re under lock and key in the university lab undergoing analysis.’
Alison thought about it. She could go and see the painting on her own; she didn’t need Adam there. The less he knew about why she was interested, the better.
‘Not to worry,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ll wait until the box is ready, thanks.’
‘Right.’ Adam sounded put out, as though he was surprised she had refused. ‘I’ll let you know.’ He ended the call without saying goodbye.
‘Don’t ask,’ Alison said as Kate opened her mouth. Kate closed it again.
‘Jesus,’ Andre said, ‘I can see why you never have a long-term relationship. It’s just amazing you have any friends.’
‘Sorry,’ Alison said. She saw that Kate was looking flushed and unhappy, and was instantly contrite. ‘Sorry, Kate. I’m a moody cow.’
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