by Rachel Hore
She wondered whether he was just coming home or about to go out. Coming in, she decided, after a couple of minutes with no further sign. She slipped down off the wall and walked up the road.
CHAPTER 14
Euan was crouched by an open hutch in the old carport, and when he rose she saw he was cradling a rabbit in his arms. “Jude, how good to see you. I didn’t know you were down again.” His smile warmed her.
“I’m here for a week or two this time,” she explained, coming close to stroke the rabbit. It tried to struggle away from her. “Oh, I’ve frightened it,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind me dropping in unannounced again like this.”
“Far from it,” he said, gentling the animal. “Come on, boy, it’s all right.” They were standing very close and the rabbit was quieter now; it waited, quivering, as Jude ran her fingers down its back.
“Is this the one you found in the trap?” She saw it no longer wore the bandage.
“Yes, look, its leg’s almost healed. I’m wondering when to let it go.”
She ran her hand over the animal’s ears that lay flat down its back, and her fingers brushed Euan’s shirt, which gave her a surprising feeling of intimacy. The animal, as though indicating that it had the upper hand here, nuzzled deeper than she dared into that shirt. She said, “I reckon it would simply follow you home again.”
He looked concerned. “In that case, I’d have to find someone who wanted a pet. It’s impossible for me to keep them all. Especially if I go away. You’re staying with Claire again, I suppose? I dropped by a day or two ago with the little doll Summer wanted, but there was no one in, so I left it on the doorstep. I hope she found it.”
The mention of Claire was like a current of cool air between them. Jude stopped stroking the rabbit and stepped back.
“I haven’t seen them yet, but I’m sure she was pleased. Actually, I’m staying at the Hall for the moment. Claire’s house is so small it doesn’t seem fair for them, and the Wickhams were quite insistent. I am going over to Blacksmith’s Cottage later though, so I’ll ask.”
“Thanks,” he said. He looked slyly at her. “Hey, it’s lucky you’ve turned up. I need a little help, if you have the time. You’re not nervous of horses, are you?”
“Not particularly,” she said cautiously. “Why?”
“Some men are coming to mow the meadow this afternoon, and I need to move the caravan. The farm horse, Robin, is used to pulling, and Steve said I could borrow him to shift it, but I rang to check and he’s out, and the men are arriving in half an hour.”
“What do I have to do?” Jude said, a bit anxious. She’d not had anything to do with horses since she was a teenager, when she’d had riding lessons on Saturday mornings for a few months after they moved to Norwich.
“The most important thing is to hold Robin steady while I’m attaching the shafts,” he explained. “Come on, I’ll put this little fellow back and take you to meet him.”
Jude passed the next ten minutes cajoling the old carthorse with sugar lumps while Euan harnessed him, then they led him up the road, through the meadow, and somehow backed the horse between the shafts of the caravan.
“Where’s it got to go?” Jude asked, as Euan checked the straps.
“Under the trees there, not far,” Euan said, with a nod.
When it came to it, Robin was more interested in nibbling the sweet grass than pulling, and the caravan wheels had settled into the soft ground over the rainy June, so several more sugar lumps and a mysterious-looking exercise involving Euan staring into the horse’s eyes and blowing up his nostrils were required to coax him into action. Finally, the caravan shuddered up out of its resting place and, with Euan at Robin’s head, proceeded to creak and sway in a slow, wide circle until it came to rest under the poplar trees at the far side of the meadow. They were just disengaging the horse when a truck was heard drawing up outside the cottage. There came an alarming clanking and grinding of metal on stone, then a small mowing machine, driven by a young man in a beanie hat, surged through the gap in the hedge. A portly older man followed on foot, breathing hard, his face flushed with exertion.
“Afternoon, Mr. Robinson. You picked a good day for it,” he shouted. He gestured to the younger man, who killed the engine.
“Haven’t I just, Jim. Jude, this is Jim Devlin, and that’s his son, Adrian. Shall we let them get on with it? We’ll have some coffee waiting when you’ve finished,” he told them.
“Tea for us, if you’ve got it, Mr. Robinson,” Jim said. “Strong enough to trot a mouse on, please, and two sugars.”
“Strong tea it shall be, then.”
“Coffee for me, please, Euan,” Jude said hastily.
As Jude followed Euan indoors, they heard the mower roar into action once more.
“What happens to the hay?” Jude asked Euan as they waited for the kettle to boil.
“When it’s dry,” said Euan, spooning ground coffee into a cafetière, “it’s brilliant animal feed. Some I keep, some I sell to a local pet shop.” He fetched four mugs from the window sill and wiped them, dropping teabags in two and putting them to one side for when Jim and Adrian had finished. “So what are you doing down here, ‘Auntie Jude’? Exploring the dusty tomes again?”
“That’s right. My boss has decided it’ll be the saving of the company this year, so I’m here to do my homework.” She explained about the journals and about Esther and the article she was supposed to write.
“Fascinating stuff,” he said. He collected a milk carton from a cold box in his makeshift dairy and remarked, “You’ll be wanting to see the folly properly, I’m sure.”
“Euan,” she said, feeling a little guilty. “I know you said it wasn’t safe, but I’m afraid I went up the folly by myself in the end. Last Sunday, on my way home.”
“Did you?” he said mildly, pushing the plunger down through the coffee.
“Yes. I thought about stopping to see if you’d come, but it was awfully early.”
“That’s fine. You’re an adult.” He didn’t look up as he poured the coffee. “I don’t want anyone hurting themselves, that’s why I warned you off.” Still, he sounded a little offhand.
“But you go up there, Euan. In fact I felt as though I was intruding. Is that your stuff up at the top? The books and the papers?”
“Yes. It’s for my next book.” He brightened. “I’m writing about the stars.”
“Really? That’s quite a coincidence. I mean, given that I’m researching a stargazer. Anthony Wickham, the man who built the folly. Esther was his adopted daughter.”
“Ah, might be useful for my book then.”
“Is it nonfiction like your other books? What aspect of the stars are you writing about?”
“Oh, not the technical stuff, I’m no physicist, it’s a general read, in the style of the other books really. It’s about the cultural importance of astronomy. I’m passionate about the necessity of the stars to us as people. Living in cities and towns, and with so much artificial light, we’re in danger of losing our connection to the night sky—that sense of wonder about the universe and our place in it. I want to convey all that to ordinary people, you know, get them to look up at the sky occasionally. I suppose that’s an unspoken purpose of all my books, to make people fall in love with nature again.”
Jude thought how bright and animated he looked as he talked. “Thanks,” she said, when he gave her her coffee. “It sounds marvelous, like a book I’d love to read. So is the folly where you go to observe the stars? I noticed the trapdoor in the ceiling—”
“For heaven’s sake, I hope you didn’t go up there…”
He did look alarmed now and Jude said quickly, “No, no, I’m not that stupid. Don’t worry.”
“I know how it works, you see,” he explained. “There’s a particular trick to opening the trapdoor, and that ladder is not a good place to teeter while you try to work it out. Yes, I go up the tower like old Anthony Wickham to watch the stars, but also to think and write
notes. I seem to get good ideas sitting in that little room,” he said, folding his arms and perusing her. “There’s something about the atmosphere. Not everyone likes it, though.”
“Summer, you’re talking about? I know what you mean about atmosphere,” she said, her face sober. “To me there’s a strong sense of history, but then that’s what I’m interested in. There’s also certainly a—well, a presence. I thought about Anthony Wickham up there with his telescopes, whiling away the lonely nights. Though I couldn’t say it was an echo of him I sensed. There wasn’t much up there that looked as if it had been his. Not that I nosed around, of course,” she added.
“You have as much right to nose around as I do,” he said, leaning against the door frame, nursing his coffee. “There are one or two things I’ve found on the site, though, and … that reminds me.”
He put down his coffee and went across to an old dresser against the far wall, which alone had survived of all the old kitchen furniture. He picked up something from a shelf and passed it to her. “What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s a coin, of course,” she said, turning the heavy piece of blackish metal. “Maybe a penny.” She took it over to the daylight and examined it. “A king’s head. One of the Georges, perhaps, but I can’t read which one.”
“It’s George the First, I think,” he said. “King of Great Britain from 1714 to 1727. I looked him up on the Internet. I turned up the coin when I was burying the muntjac. I guess I should give it to John Farrell, since he is the landowner, but the website I looked at didn’t say it’s worth much and somehow I don’t have him down as the sensitive collector type.”
A picture passed through Jude’s mind of Esther’s Mr. Trotwood reburying ancient bones at midnight and the penny falling unnoticed into the hole. Where that idea came from she didn’t know. There had been a small bone sticking out of the earth Euan had turned. She shuddered. “I wonder whether there’s ever been a proper archaeological dig around there,” she said. Just then she remembered another person who had seen the mound.
“Oh. Euan, there was something else odd. Have you come across a woman called Marcia Vane?” He shook his head, so she rushed on. “She’s the new landowner’s lawyer, well, more than his lawyer, I think.” She remembered the easy way Marcia had laid her hand on John Farrell’s arm. “I met her when she came to speak to Robert Wickham. I just avoided bumping into her and a man who might have been Farrell last week, which would have been embarrassing. I ducked behind a tree and they didn’t see me. I didn’t quite get what they were talking about. Farrell was certainly annoyed that the wire had been cut.”
“Funnily enough, that wasn’t me. I just bent it a bit to step over.”
“I wonder who did it, then?”
She examined the coin again and the profile of the first German King of England, who never learned to speak good English, trying to make sense of the worn lettering. The folly, Anthony Wickham, Esther’s story, the coin. Everything led back to the past. She glanced round the kitchen, suddenly aware of the extraordinary fact, which she hadn’t yet begun to assimilate, that her grandmother’s family had lived in this house. There was so little that was original left now. The dresser might have been her great grandparents’, she supposed. She must ask Gran. She must ask Gran lots of things. It was funny how she’d started talking about that gypsy girl she used to know. What was her name? Tamsin, that was it. That would have been the 1920s and 1930s, though. And Jude’s great-grandparents had died in the 1950s.
“Who lived here immediately before you came?” she asked Euan.
“An elderly couple by the name of Herbert, I gather,” he said. “They’d been here since the sixties when the husband was employed as gamekeeper. By the time Mr. Herbert died the Wickhams had sold the land under us to the farmer—who realized there was so much work needed to be done to it he decided to sell outright and that’s when I came along. Everything had been cleared out of the house before I moved in, in case you were thinking I might have found anything belonging to your family.”
“I was, vaguely. I was trying to imagine this place as it must have been when they lived here.”
She hefted the coin, which was warm and heavy in her hand. “What’s it like up there?” she asked. “Right at the top of the tower, I mean? Is it open to the sky?” Esther’s account had mentioned a canopy to protect Anthony Wickham from the weather.
“I’ll take you one starlight night, if you like,” he said.
“I’d love that,” she said immediately. It never occurred to her that this would cause trouble.
* * *
When she arrived back at Starbrough Hall, she went straight to her room to get ready for visiting Claire and Summer. She switched on her laptop briefly and saw that Cecelia had already replied.
I’d definitely like to look at the Esther Wickham stuff. How intriguing, a daughter who’s been wiped from the family tree. I’d love to know her story. Well, I’ve been busy. I ran Anthony Wickham’s name through the Royal Observatory archive catalog. Click on this link to see what I’ve found! What sad people we are, both working on a weekend!
OK. Take care,
Cx
Jude immediately clicked on the link Cecelia had given. The page that opened up described a batch of letters belonging to an eighteenth-century grinder of optical lenses and amateur astronomer, a Londoner named Josiah Bellingham. A dozen of these, the website said, were to Bellingham from Anthony Wickham, dated at various points in the 1770s. She clicked again to read the list of letters and couldn’t believe her eyes.
Quickly she returned to Cecelia’s e-mail and replied:
Cecelia, if you could get me photocopies of these letters, that would be brilliant. I think we’re on to something here. Did you see that the last six letters are from Esther Wickham? She really DID exist! The mystery thickens!
CHAPTER 15
“He’s never asked me to go stargazing,” was Claire’s petulant comment as she seized a piece of junk mail and tore it in two. She made stargazing sound like a euphemism for some louche assignation, Jude thought, but stopped herself from saying so out loud. It would only make matters worse.
She had arrived at Blacksmith’s Cottage for supper to find her sister not long home and venting her tiredness and irritation from a mad Saturday in the shop on an innocent pile of post. Rip—there went a credit-card circular.
“I’m sorry,” Jude said, almost regretting she’d mentioned visiting Euan. But if she hadn’t said anything and Claire had found out, she’d have been in even worse hot water. “I’m sure he would ask you if he knew you wanted to go. I suppose it’s because of all the Anthony Wickham stuff. He can see it would be useful to me.”
“And don’t I run a shop called the Star Bureau?” was Claire’s whiplike comment as she yanked the plastic off a magazine, chucking the publication on the table.
Soul and Destiny, Jude read. “Have you lived before?” ran one of the shoutlines. I hope not, she thought, one lifetime is trouble enough.
Claire glanced at her watch. She was due to fetch Summer from a birthday party down the road shortly.
“I won’t go stargazing if you mind about it,” Jude said with a sigh.
“Why should I mind?” Claire replied.
“Something tells me you’re keen on him.”
“Damn. House insurance renewal time already?” Claire cried, snatching up another envelope and tearing it open. “Bills, bills, bills. What did you say?”
“We were talking about Euan,” Jude said. “Claire, I’m trying not to put my great size sixes in this one.”
“There’s nothing for you to put them in,” she replied. “He’s a lovely guy. I think Summer is trying to get us together.”
“Just Summer?” wheedled Jude, but Claire sidestepped the question.
“She misses having a dad, Jude. You should see them together.”
“I have. And I see what you mean. But what about you?”
“Oh, I don’t think he’s interested
in me,” Claire said, tearing a flier about a sofa sale into several pieces and letting them flutter into the recycling box. “Anyway, anything he went into would be too serious, by all accounts. He doesn’t play around. Darcey’s mum, Fiona, said—”
At precisely that interesting moment the telephone rang and Claire snatched up the handset. Jude mused that she’d need to go carefully with Euan. She didn’t want to upset her sister by leading him on in any way. She must keep everything on a strictly friendly basis.
“Hello? Hello?” Claire was saying down the phone. “If you’re the double-glazing people again I told you I don’t … Oh, Gran, hi! How are you? Is everything all right?”
She met Jude’s eye. Both women switched into alert at the possibility of a crisis.
“You’re fine. Good. Yes, Jude’s here,” Claire said, visibly relaxing. “Do you want to speak to her?” She passed the handset over to her sister. “I’ve got to fetch Summer,” she mouthed to Jude, who nodded.
Jude waited until the front door slammed—Claire never just closed doors—before saying, “Gran, hello, it’s Jude. How are you?”
“I’m surviving, thank you, Jude. Just because I telephone doesn’t mean I’m dying.” Gran was unusually brisk. “I want you to come and see me. I’ve got something for you.”
“Oh, what is it?”
“You’ll find out when you come. I’ve been searching for it ever since you came last.”
“How intriguing!” Jude suddenly remembered that when she stayed there, over a week ago now, she’d heard Gran opening and closing drawers in her room after they’d gone to bed.
“It was such a stupid place to put it,” Gran muttered to herself.
“Gran? Can you still hear me?”
“Of course I can.”
“Are you free at all tomorrow?” She’d been invited to Sunday lunch at Starbrough Hall, but she could escape after that.
“Free? Where would I be going?”
“I can come late afternoon, if that’s any good. Shall I bring Claire and Summer?”