by Rachel Hore
An Account of Esther Wickham
I was eight years of age when I first came to know my father. How this could be, since I slept under his roof from infancy and ate his food and was cared for by his servants, it might be difficult to comprehend, but once you are acquainted with the facts of the case; and once you come to understand Anthony Wickham as I knew him, to appreciate the finely wrought workings of his mind, his—some say—unnatural devotion to a single passion, all will become clear.
In the very beginning, he was not my father at all. The filial bond was something we sought for ourselves late and forged together. This is contrary to the usual custom, which is that the names ‘father’ and ‘daughter’ come first, at the birth of the child, the closeness between them following after. In our case, it was some years after we became acquainted that he instructed his lawyer to give legal name to what we had already made real: in short, he adopted me and made me his own.
Much of this he did not tell me until I reached my fourteenth year, for he did not deem it suitable to burden a child with matters that troubled its elders. Suffice it to say I was raised believing, once I was sentient of these things, that I was his child, bone of his bone, blood of his blood. That is what Susan, my nurse, urged me to believe. The channels of her mind, I gleaned later, ran thus: since I was brought to be raised under his roof, with no family name to call my own, an armour of dignity must be joined together for me. He had decreed I be called ‘Esther,’ after the old mistress, his mother, so Esther Wickham was what she bade the other servants call me. As I grew I heard half-muttered rumours below stairs, and remarks from my dear Aunt Pilkington, of whom I will tell more, that I had no right to the name Wickham; that I was an orphan; or that I was the master’s bastard by some woman he’d met on one of his infrequent journeys to London or Bristol, where he would confer with other stargazers and from whence he returned laden with learned books, and specula to grind lenses for new telescopes. These rumours disquieted me and I would wonder about them, but Susan bid me dismiss them as tittle-tattle.
The truth, as I say, I did not learn till I was grown. But perhaps Susan was right to assert her version for while I was small it gave me assurance. I was a nervous infant, prone to nightmares and unaccountable ailments. I clung to Susan as though she were my mother, and she to me, for she was blessed with no infant of her own, nay, nor man, for who would have her, our Creator having seen fit to make her homely, endowing her with a vast body and a wandering eye, which caused the poor creature to be shy and awkward with the stronger sex. But to me she was the loveliest woman on God’s earth, for as an infant she succoured my every need and I wanted no other mother.
Susan it was who comforted me in the night when I woke weeping from my dream. It was always the same dream, that I was wandering lost and alone in darkness, where the sharp claws of trees reached out to scratch my face or to pitch me to the ground. All around the cries of beasts grew closer, the smell of rotting loam filled my nostrils. The nights I had this dream, I would be afraid to sleep again, and Susan would ease her massive body in beside mine and fold me against her pillowy bosom until I quietened, half smothered. I cannot imagine she slept much, those times my demons visited, but she never complained.
Jude read this part over again with a curious feeling of unreality. The girl’s dream was similar to her own and Summer’s. How could that be? She considered the matter. Perhaps it was something to do with Starbrough. The folly itself was very atmospheric—an enchanted place, if one believed that sort of thing—but that didn’t explain Jude’s dreams. As far as she knew she had never visited the folly before this summer. Perhaps it was plain coincidence—dreams of running through dark woods and crying for your mother were, after all, the primal stuff of fairy tales—one had only to think of “Snow White” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” Maybe, way back, after humans became tillers of the ground, they began to fear the dark woods from which they’d emerged. She’d read that somewhere. She found her place on the faded paper and continued to read.
In those days my world was the nursery, the kitchen and the gardens round the house. I was forbidden to venture beyond the park on my own. Sometimes I played with the gardener’s children, Sam and Matt, who liked to climb and run as boys will, and so I learned to climb and run, too, and if their sport did not please me, I would sit by myself to make nests with grass and kindling. I fancied sticks and bits of bone were people and animals. Once Susan gave me some dolls made from pegs and dressed in scraps of cloth, which she’d bought from a Romany woman.
On the twenty-first day of July 1768, my sixth birthday, Susan shook me awake early in an unusual excitement and I rose to see by my window a magnificent doll’s house, fitted with exquisite pieces of furniture. ‘It’s from your father,’ Susan told me, in a tone of reverence. She explained that he’d glimpsed me from his window, playing outside with my sticks and grass, and sent for the doll’s house all the way from London, complete with tiny dolls and finely wrought furniture—the windows even with little curtains, beautifully worked by slender cords, and the beds pretty counterpanes. My father did not visit the nursery to wish me happy birthday. Later in the day, Susan helped me form the letters of my name on a note of thanks. He did not reply. ‘Your father is a very busy man,’ Susan explained, ‘with important tasks to perform. He has no time for little girls. But you see he keeps you in his mind.’
What came to occupy his time was the design and building of a tower which he might climb to study the stars. There was much talk in the kitchens about this tower and to me it sounded a thing of amazement. ‘The folly,’ the servants called it. There was some precedent for such an edifice. The cousin of Mrs Godstone, our housekeeper, worked as a footman at a big house near Norwich and he told her the master had one fashioned like a heathen temple in his park. ‘No good for anything,’ Mrs Godstone’s cousin the footman had said. ‘Though it’s handsome enough for the fine ladies and gentlemen to gawp at and fancy themselves in Rome or Arcady.’
Mr Trotwood, my father’s land agent, was not at all pleased by this scheme. My father, having scant interest in his estates, left Trotwood to run Starbrough as he saw fit, and Trotwood had grown sleek and bullying in the doing. Yet now he was under orders to execute complex instructions about a silly tower that involved the acquisition of large quantities of fine brick, while his master made constant interference and the local men recruited to build it played surly. They hated Trotwood, who had made much trouble for himself in the village by his plans for improvement. One lad of sixteen he saw transported for poaching. Two families he turned out of their homes for not meeting the new rents. There was anxiety, too, among the villagers about the siting of the building, on the hill in a clearing that rumour had it was ancient burial ground. While digging the foundations, the labourers discovered human bones. After this they laid down their tools and refused to work. Trotwood was forced to bring in poor wretches from Norwich Prison for the task, since the master insisted that the project should continue. No one knew what happened to the bones, for the Rector would not have them in his churchyard. Some said that Trotwood himself reburied them in the foundations one moonless night.
It was during my seventh year that this drama was played out, and I remember often sitting under the table in the servants’ hall. Once there was much consternation, for one of the prisoners escaped. For days the women started at the arrival of any stranger and refused to leave the house alone at night, even to summon the coachman to his supper, or to fetch potatoes from the barn, but there was never any sign of the fugitive. Eventually it was said that he had made his way to Great Yarmouth and taken ship for Holland and so peace settled once more. Another time, one of the prisoners professed to have seen a ghost, believed to be the former owner of the ancient bones, so the men refused to work and Trotwood arrived at the house full of spleen, demanding to see the master, who was hunted down eventually in his workshop in the stable yard and who settled the matter immediately by raising their wages.
What did my father do in this workshop? Make his spyglasses, I was told, by grinding optickal lenses and mirrors.
Often, especially in the winter, when the nights were clear and sharp with frost, he never saw daylight, for he passed the long hours of darkness out in the freezing park with his telescopes, observing the starry firmament, and making notes in a large book. Then he’d sleep from sun up to sun down. Sometimes this gruelling routine caused him to sicken, and he’d lie abed for days, with the doctor visiting to bleed him, and great quantities of veal soup and gin taken up by Betsy the housemaid on a tray.
One autumn evening, the gamekeeper arrived at the kitchen with a brace of hares and the news that the folly was complete, and that very fine it was, too, but only Jan, the coachman, was brave enough to climb the hill to see. It was ninety feet in height, he reported, ‘most tall as the cathedral at Norwich,’ and with a room at the top, and, above that, a walled platform with a canopy, from which Mr Wickham might sit out of the weather, sweeping the heavens with his telescopes.
And this is what he proceeded to do. On several mornings, Mrs Godstone complained to Susan that the master had ordered victuals to be brought out to the tower at midnight and attempts had to be made to keep Jan or one of the stableboys awake to perform the task. Eventually, after Jan threatened to take his services elsewhere, Mrs Godstone made representations, and after that, my father took with him of a night a parcel of bread and cold beef or a capon that she packed after supper. And so a sort of equilibrium was restored.
As for me, I listened carefully each time the folly was mentioned, for it fascinated me more and more, the idea of this tower in the forest, and I longed to see it.
‘Would you take me, Susan?’ I asked her once or twice, but she always shook her head, and once she invoked the Lord’s name.
‘The forest is a godforsaken place,’ she told me, ‘full of savage beasts and spiteful spirits. You must never go there, and certainly never alone, for if the spirits or the beasts don’t get you then the gypsies will for sure.’ At the time I was surprised at the passion of that speech. Later, much later, I understood.
But, in the way the Tempter works when something is forbidden, the idea grew within me, that I must see this folly, but I felt myself too young and insignificant to persuade any adult to take me. Then, in the summer that I turned eight, I talked of it to Matt, the gardener’s younger son.
I have said before, that I was not allowed to leave the park. However, I had, the previous year, been sent to attend the small school in the village.
The school, which gathered in a hall next to the church, numbered no more than thirty children, all told.
My teacher, Miss Greengage, was a pale sap of a woman with a hesitant way of speaking that the boys mimicked behind her back, but she possessed an enthusiasm for book learning, and every now and then she threw us some interesting morsel that made even stout George Benson sit up entranced instead of lolling in his seat and gazing out of the window. One of these occasions was a lesson about the movement of the Earth within the heavens. Miss Greengage explained the meanings of the names of the other celestial spheres which, with the Earth, pursue their trajectories around the sun, and how God the creator holds us all in a perfect mechanical pattern that proclaims his glory. On certain nights, she explained, we should watch for these fellow travellers, some of which might be seen in the sky like bright stars. Today, since it was fine, she said, we would go outside and make our own orrery.
Naturally, there was much excitement at this unusual event as we poured out of the hall and across the graveyard to the green, where Miss Greengage arranged us into a model of the planetary system.
George Benson was the sun, I remember; it was a sound choice, for he was big and round and cheerful and could stand for long moments without moving. Matt, the gardener’s younger boy, was a natural Mercury, small and restless. ‘Esther, will you be Venus, goddess of beauty and second planet from the sun?’ Miss Greengage asked me, and I proudly took my place in the orrery between Matt and the two little girls who stood holding hands as the Earth and its moon. Hugh Brundall, the doctor’s son, was deemed a lordly Mars, god of war, and other children I forget took the parts of Jupiter and ringed Saturn. The little ones left over were set to be stars or comets, and so, with Miss Greengage excitedly calling instructions, we began to move in a stately dance, though the moon and the Earth would collide, which set the little sisters into fits of merriment.
Enthralled, I set myself the task that very same evening and, indeed, I saw the two bright stars over the hill top, just as she had said. It was at this moment that my love of stargazing had its genesis. My desire to see my father’s folly grew.
Jude was interrupted in her reading by the sound of a car in the drive. Glancing at her watch, she saw to her astonishment that an hour had elapsed since Chantal left. And shortly she came into the library carrying a scroll of paper.
“I’m much better,” she replied to Jude’s inquiry. “He gave me a temporary filling. Now, I remembered where I’d put the family tree,” she said, laying it out on the desk for Jude to see. “Look, Anthony died at the end of 1778 and there’s no mention of a child.” She noticed the pages Jude had been reading. “What have you got here?”
When Jude showed her the pages she’d found behind the cupboard, Chantal was amazed. “I had no idea of the existence of these,” she said, inspecting them. “Where did you say you found them?”
“Behind here.” Jude showed her the gap in the wood at the back of the cabinet, and, with some difficulty, Chantal knelt to feel along it.
“You could reach your hand down?” she asked. “I never thought to try. I suppose at times everything has been such a jumble they just slipped through.”
“But why had they been torn out of the book?” Jude pondered.
“I’ve no idea. But it must all have happened a long time ago or I’d have noticed.”
“At least they’ve answered my earlier question,” Jude said quietly. “I asked you whether Anthony had a son, and you’re right, he didn’t, but he did have a daughter, an adopted one. Her name was Esther, and she’s described the building of the folly.”
Chantal considered this. “Esther. I’ve never heard of her before. Perhaps adopted children weren’t included in family lists then. Where did she come from, does it say?”
Jude found the place in the diary. “‘was an orphan … or the master’s bastard…’ It’s a bit of a mystery actually. Poor girl, not knowing. And she used to play at being a princess, it says later, so it clearly bothered her.”
* * *
Early in the afternoon, she e-mailed Cecelia about her new find, promising to send the torn journal to her on Monday and describing the battered pages she’d found that seemed to have been ripped from it.
I must read these pages myself first—it’ll be fantastic for my article—and I’ll let you know what they say. What seems sensible is if I transcribe them as I go, then anyone interested can read them. In the meantime, as well as Anthony, we need to find out all we can about Esther Wickham.
She closed down her laptop, and feeling a little tired and headachy, with a dull warning ache in her abdomen, she lay on her bed for a while. She thought about Esther’s manuscript. Transcription would be a brilliant idea. Maybe she could do a little on her laptop every day. But not this afternoon. She was due over at Claire’s later. For the moment, lying here was appealing, so she took a couple of painkillers and, after a while, drifted into sleep.
When she awoke half an hour later, she felt better and decided to go for a walk. She’d not really seen the grounds around the Hall.
Chantal was nowhere to be seen, but Alexia, who was tidying up while the children napped, suggested she visit the gardens behind the house. “There’s not a great deal to see, I’m afraid,” she said. “Though you can go around the stable block and the greenhouses and imagine how they used to be. And there’s Robert’s precious vegetable patch. You mustn’t miss that—he’s very proud of
it.”
Jude explored the flower gardens and duly admired the neat rows of vegetables in the kitchen garden, then walked across the park, jumped the short drop into the ha-ha and picked her way across rough grassland toward the woods. As she came nearer, she saw an iron gate set in the flint wall that divided the park from the woodland. As she feared, it turned out to be padlocked. She grasped the bars like a prisoner and peered beyond at a tantalizing path disappearing through the trees. Presumably it led to the folly. She turned away and began to walk down to the road, thinking she’d do a short circuit of the perimeter before returning to the house.
When she reached the road, she found it pleasant to sit on the low wall for a while under the restless trees, it being such a perfect, drowsy afternoon. In the fields on the other side mahogany-colored cows were grazing. A light breeze cooled her skin.
A quarter of a mile up the road she could glimpse Euan’s car, and at that very moment he came out of the drive and fetched something from the trunk that looked like a strip of wood, before returning to the house.