by Rachel Hore
Jude said, “Of course you must go. I’m sure Mrs. Wickham and I will get on fine by ourselves.”
Mrs. Wickham gave her a complicit smile. “Please call me Chantal,” she murmured, then told her son, “I hope you find it’s foxes, Rob. I don’t like the idea of human thieves. George gets such bees buzzing in his bonnet about people and it leads to bad feeling locally.”
Robert nodded as he gulped down his coffee. Then with a “See you both for lunch,” he hurried out of the room. A moment or two later the women watched the estate car lurch off down the drive, the dogs bounding about in the back.
“Dear Robert, he always has to be rushing about,” said Chantal. “Come and sit down for a moment, Jude.” She patted the space on the sofa beside her. “You must be tired after driving all this way.”
“Oh, I stayed in Blakeney with my gran last night.”
“So you know our part of the world, then?”
“Sort of. I lived in Norwich in my teens,” Jude explained. “And some of my family are still here. Mum has a house outside Sheringham, but she’s selling up and moving to Spain with my stepfather. My sister lives very close by—in Felbarton. Do you know a shop in Holt called the Star Bureau? She owns it with a friend.”
“Oh, the gift shop in the arcade? Such a pretty window display. All those starry lights and mobiles. I’ve always meant to go inside. I’ll make sure I do now.”
“Yes, I think you’d love it. And, it’s an amazing coincidence, but Gran used to live here on the Starbrough estate. She was the gamekeeper’s daughter. Their name was Bennett—does that ring any bells? It was ages ago, though. She must have been born—oh, 1923 or so…”
Chantal shook her head. “I’m afraid I don’t remember any Bennetts,” she said. “But then I didn’t come to this country until 1959 and your grandmother had probably moved away by then.”
“Yes, she would have done. Her parents died in the midfifties, I think. Where did you come from originally?”
“I was born in Paris, but I came here when I was twenty.” That made Chantal sixty-nine now, Jude calculated, so she was older than she looked. “I always think of Starbrough Hall as home.” A deep sadness darkened her expression, but then she said in a low, passionate tone, “I love this house. I married into it, but it’s a part of me now. And Robert and Alexia have been so kind, letting me live here still.”
“They … moved in recently?” Jude guessed how Chantal would answer; knew, with a sudden rush of sympathy, why she felt such a strong connection to this woman.
“William, my husband, died two years ago, and the house became Robert’s. The trouble is, as ever, filthy lucre. There is no capital, you see. My husband was forced to sell some of the estate before he died, then Robert had to pay dreadful death duties. And the repairs … oh, the paint’s flaking off and the roof needs an overhaul, so Anthony Wickham’s collection must go. It’s so tragic. It is part of the house and its history. That’s Anthony.” She indicated the portrait over the fireplace, which Jude looked at properly for the first time. Anthony Wickham had been a very slight young man with a small neat head and an owlish expression. A view of Starbrough Hall appeared in the background to the painting, but the way he clutched the open book in his hand, as though the artist had interrupted his studies, indicated more strongly where his interests lay. There was a date painted in one corner: 1745.
“We think that was painted when he was twenty-two, a few years before his father died and he inherited the house. I cannot bear to think of his things being divided up among strangers, appreciated only for what they’re worth financially. Robert means well, but I’m sure there must be some other way…” She looked suddenly guilty. “Robert wouldn’t be pleased. I’ve said far more to you than he would like. But you seem so … sympathique.”
Jude listened to this speech with a swelling tenderness for Chantal. She was an outsider who had married into this family, and felt a part of it all, yet had no right to make decisions about her home. At the same time, remembering those rotting windowsills, it was possible that she and her husband had not been completely realistic about the costs of keeping up Starbrough Hall in the modern age.
“Please don’t worry about what you’ve told me,” she said quietly. “I understand, and I feel for you … I do this work because I’m fascinated by the books themselves, not just the words in them but as artifacts, the way they’ve been created and cared about. Of course, I have to decide what they are worth, because that’s my job, but I’m like you. I love to know the stories of the people who owned them and read them and cherished them.” She was surprised at how passionate she felt. So much of the time her work was stressful, but sometimes she remembered why she loved it.
“So I was right to say these things to you. Thank you, dear. Now, let’s look at the books.”
Jude draped her jacket over the back of a chair and followed Chantal to the glass-fronted cabinet. Chantal spread the doors wide and stood back so that Jude could see. With a practiced eye, she took in the dozen or so shelves, twenty-odd books on each. Easily two hundred and fifty books. And then there would be the manuscripts and the instruments. This was indeed a day or two’s work. She reached up and extracted a volume of the Isaac Newton, laid it down on a console table and examined the preliminary pages. She was right, she saw with a rush of pleasure, it was a third edition! She turned the pages carefully, marveling at the good condition. There was some foxing—tiny brown spots—on some of the pages, but that was only to be expected for a book this age. “Did you know that this is a very rare printing?” she asked Chantal.
“We had our suspicions,” Chantal replied. “Robert’s friend thought it might be valuable, but we’d never employed an expert before.”
“Not even for insurance purposes?” Jude felt rather shocked.
“I say with some embarrassment, no. My late husband, dear man though he was, did not share my interest in this library. Robert, too … he’s an outdoors kind of man. He sees this collection as … dispensable.”
The phone in Jude’s handbag began to ring. She retrieved it with foreboding. Yes, it was Inigo. She sent the call to message and turned off the phone.
Returning to the bookcase, she took down the other volumes of the Newton and inspected them. She could hardly believe it. They were a complete set, all in the same good condition. She fetched her briefcase, and while she waited for her laptop to start up she pulled a chair over to the table and started making notes on a pad.
Chantal asked, “Shall I show you where everything else is first? Then I’ll sit quietly out of your way and work my tapestry, but be ready to help if you need it.”
“Thank you,” Jude said.
“In this cupboard—” Chantal unlocked the pair of doors below the bookshelves and pulled them open—“are the notebooks and charts. Robert must have told you about them. I’m afraid it’s a bit of a jumble. Here…” She extracted a leather-bound foolscap tome from an untidy pile on the shelf and opened it at random. It was filled with dense handwriting in a neat, even script, the ink faded to sepia.
“What’s this?” Jude said, taking it from her, fascinated.
“One of Anthony’s observation journals. A year or two ago, when I found myself with time on my hands, I transcribed some of the first volume.” Her smile was regretful. “It wasn’t easy.” She showed Jude a school exercise book. “I didn’t copy the very technical material, the mathematics—that didn’t interest me so much, only his commentary. My eyes aren’t so good … I’m afraid I didn’t get very far.”
“It was good to have started, though,” Jude murmured, turning the pages of the original. She was used to deciphering old handwriting. “It’ll be very useful, I’m sure.”
“And these scrolls are some of his charts. This one…” Chantal crouched down and eased out a roll of parchment. Jude put down the journal and they looked at it together. “It plots some of the double stars he found,” Chantal explained.
“Those are pairs of stars, aren’t
they, that revolve around each other?”
“Yes. It was thought useful to monitor their movements. Somehow that helped them measure the distance of stars from Earth. They were becoming very interested in stars rather than just planets, because of the new telescopes.”
“Your son mentioned something about a telescope.”
“It’s in here.” Chantal went over to a tall cupboard in the wall between some bookshelves and opened it to reveal a blackened wood and metal cylinder about three feet high, standing on the floor. “Or rather, the bits of it are.” She tried to drag it out, but it was heavy and Jude had to help. “Tilt it to the light, like this, then look down into it,” Chantal told her.
Jude did so, and gasped at a flash of light and then, all at once, her own faint image staring dimly back at her. “Mirrors!” she said. “Of course!”
She knew this was part of an early reflector telescope, which worked by mirrors collecting light from the sky and projecting it for viewing through a magnifying lens in the side of the telescope. They were better for studying faint objects than the original refractor telescopes. Refractors were longer and clumsier, and meant looking at objects directly through lenses, which often distorted the light.
“And this one belonged to Wickham?” Jude asked and picked up from a shelf what looked like an eyepiece.
“It seems likely, don’t you think? These bits were found in one of the barns soon after I first came to Starbrough. Robert’s father thought there had been more of it originally, but in the war odd bits of scrap were often sent off to make shells. This escaped somehow.” Jude helped her shut the heavy capsule back in the cupboard.
“This whole room,” she said, gazing round, “is so wonderful, Chantal. Magical, really. Did Anthony Wickham make it?”
“We believe so, yes,” replied Chantal. “We don’t really know, you see. Most of the archives for that period were destroyed in an office fire in Victorian times. My husband’s father was a great reader—a lot of these later books were his. For me, this room has often been a place of great solace. That’s why I feel so upset that Robert … Oh, I shouldn’t say this to you.”
For a moment her eyes were great pools of remembered pain. They were such expressive eyes, Jude thought.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “about your husband. The same thing happened to me. My husband died four years ago.”
“Oh my dear,” Chantal said, touching her hand to her mouth. “And you’re so young.”
“I was thirty,” Jude said. It seemed like a lifetime ago; she’d been a different person then. “It was a climbing accident.”
Even talking about it, all these years later, brought back the shock of that terrible moment. She’d been driving home, following a police car down their road. It stopped outside her house. She’d parked her car askew, walked up her garden path, legs trembling, to meet the young officer standing on her doorstep, the news naked in his face. She blinked the image away to see Chantal staring at her with a look of deep concern.
“An accident. That’s terrible,” Chantal whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“Your husband…” Jude prompted, desperate to push away her own pain, the pain that could split her wide open so suddenly, even now.
Chantal said quietly, “William was ill for several years. The cancer kept returning and,” she spread her hands in a hopeless gesture, “eventually it won. We’d been married for more than forty-five years.” She shook her head. “For many months I could do nothing. I would come here, into this room, and sit by myself, or with Miffy; she’s my little dog; a great companion. I came to the idea of copying out Anthony Wickham’s notebooks. It wasn’t a task I had to think much about, you see. And it passed those great acres of time.”
“It must have helped having grandchildren.”
“Yes, it’s marvelous watching them grow. Georgie, now, she reminds me very much of my William, a very sturdy little thing. You didn’t have any children?”
“No,” said Jude slowly. “It’s something I regret.”
“I understand,” said Chantal. “I expect your friends and family say this: you are young, there is plenty of time.”
“I wanted Mark’s children,” Jude blurted out, her voice harsh in this peaceful room.
It had seemed as though there was all the time in the world when they were newly married. They’d both had jobs they loved; they took pleasure in one another’s company. Babies had always been in the plan somewhere, but not yet. And then it was too late.
“It must be difficult to accept,” said Chantal, and Jude wondered at how she and this older woman, strangers, had volunteered such intimate information to one another.
She sat down at the desk where the pile of books awaited her attention, but felt suddenly at a loss about what to do next.
“I’ll fetch some more coffee,” murmured Chantal.
She closed the door gently behind her and Jude sat for a moment with her face in her hands. Recovering, she got to work, opening a new file on her laptop and carefully listing all the books, describing their condition and publishing history, occasionally scribbling queries on her notepad. She was leafing through John Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis with its beautifully drawn representations of the constellations, when she realized something. At the same moment, Chantal returned with coffee, a sewing bag, and an elderly King Charles spaniel in tow.
She helped Chantal with the tray then said, “Look!” She showed her a picture of Gemini in the Flamsteed and pointed up at the ceiling.
“They’re the same! I hadn’t noticed before,” exclaimed Chantal. The Heavenly Twins from the Atlas were faithfully reproduced above their heads. “What about Aquarius?”
Jude turned the pages of the book until she found the Water Carrier. Flamsteed had been the model for that part of the ceiling, too. She looked inside the front of the book to check the date. Anthony Wickham had been given the book by someone: in the flyleaf was written ‘AW from SB, 1805.’ Was SB the artist, perhaps?
“It’s fascinating, isn’t it? We often wonder who could have painted it.” And now Chantal left Jude in peace to work while she sat and worked a tapestry with a design of flowers and fruit. Miffy snored on the rug. It was companionable, and Jude found the time slipped quickly by.
At lunchtime, Robert returned and the cozy feeling evaporated. “We ought to eat,” he said, and they repaired to a breakfast room next to the kitchen, where the daily woman had left plates of sandwiches on the big pine table.
“How have you got on this morning?” Robert asked Jude. “Is the collection worth much?” He spoke casually, but there was expectation in his face. She’d seen that expression on clients’ faces many a time.
“I haven’t been through everything yet by any means,” she answered cautiously, “but there are certainly some rare editions of important works. I was explaining to your mother about the Isaac Newton.”
“I thought that would interest you. You can’t put a figure on them yet? Even a rough estimate?”
Sellers were all different. This one wanted instant answers. “I’ll give you a ballpark figure later today,” she said, “but I must research one or two things further once I get back to the office.” She was thinking of the Newton and the observation journals. “I need a specialist for the instruments.” She needed to put him off; she didn’t like to raise people’s hopes unrealistically, and hated it when people were impatient, as though her mere appearance meant a check in the bank. She was always careful to explain that although she could estimate what items might fetch at auction, there was simply no guarantee. That was the point of a reserve price—the safeguard level below which the owner would not sell.
Then there was the system of taxes and commission that was always disappointing for people new to the business to learn. Illogical though it might be, she, as the bearer of bad news, usually felt guilty. “That’s ridiculous,” Inigo had sneered once when she’d foolishly confided in him about this. “They have to learn that it’s a business, not a tre
asure hunt.” She remembered Inigo’s call. She’d have to get back to him when she had a moment.
“What did you discover about the pheasants, Robert?” Chantal asked, moving from one difficult subject to another.
“Well, unless the local foxes have acquired wire-cutters and heavy boots, it’s the work of human thieves. Fenton, who is, Jude, shall we say, traditional in his views, is sure it’s the gypsies. He was all for going up to the site to challenge them, but I calmed him down and persuaded him that it was a job for the police. We’re meeting an officer at the jail in an hour, so I’m afraid I’ll be leaving you by yourselves again.”
“That’s fine,” Jude said mildly, and she and Chantal smiled at one another, comfortable in the shared knowledge that Robert would not be restful company for the task in hand.
“There’s trouble in the village over the travelers,” Chantal explained on the way back to the library. “They’ve always come to a site nearby which used to be our land, but the new landowner isn’t happy about it. The council is trying to find somewhere else for them but of course nobody wants them in their backyard.”
The afternoon passed peacefully, Jude alone for some of it, because Chantal liked to take an afternoon rest. She worked her way through a couple of dozen more books, then, for variety, again picked up the first of Wickham’s observation diaries. She loved the feel and the smell of the old leather binding, and the beautifully tooled spine. The script proved fairly easy to her practiced eye, even without the help of Chantal’s transcription. Each entry began with a general description of the sky before listing the detailed observations of each object viewed.
The entries continued much in this vein. As well as observing constellations, Wickham seemed interested in the planets, especially Mars, to which he referred as “our nearest celestial brother.” Only rarely did his personality threaten to break through the dry objectivity of his notes: “Moon too bright again. A night wasted.” Or “Rings of Saturn wondrous bright, praise the hand of our Creator.”
There were seven or eight more notebooks like this, each covering two or three years, and she flipped through several of them, admiring the occasional small diagram plotting the position of a newfound star or the patterns on the face of the moon. Sometimes the entries were in a different handwriting and this new hand gradually became more frequent. Halfway through the last book, which covered 1777 and early 1778, the new handwriting prevailed. It was puzzling. The recordings were still in the same clipped tones, but they were definitely penned by someone else. Dictated by the original writer, perhaps. Curious. Jude considered the saleability of the journals. It was difficult to put a value on something like these without knowing more about their context. She would e-mail her friend Cecelia tonight, to ask if she’d have a look. She opened the final volume again, at random, and read with a little jolt of surprise the following entry for 1 June 1777, written in the newer hand: