A Place of Secrets

by Rachel Hore

  I did so in a quavering voice. The book offered a queer postulation: that the whole universe might contain many stars like to our sun, and many planets, too, all inhabited by strange beings of God’s creation such as we’d never yet encountered. I stumbled over the unfamiliar words and soon, not unkindly, he bid me cease, instead asking what I thought as to the ideas therein. Why, there are strange wild beasts on earth I’ve never seen, I told him, not sure what answer he required of me. ‘There are some who believe a strange race inhabits the moon,’ he said gravely, and I nodded, for I’d gazed at the moon many nights and believed I saw buildings and forests upon its surface. ‘If so,’ he added, ‘what other planets might lie out there beyond our sight, and what manner of creatures might live there?’

  Later, when he’d finished his polishing, he took me to his library and traced the paths of the planets of our solar system on an ingenious structure he’d had made after the great Lord Boyle’s, named an orrery, which put me in mind of the game we’d played at school. Saturn was the strangest to me with its rings.

  ‘Six planets circle our sun,’ he told me, ‘but some say there might be more.’

  ‘I should like to find another planet,’ I replied, my shyness quite gone. ‘That shall be my ambition.’ He was a quiet-spoken man, my father, often silent, alone in his thoughts. I liked it when he spoke with me for though he called me child he asked me questions as if I were his equal and never laughed at my answers or dismissed them as infantile. He needed to have someone to talk to of his interests, and, I like to think, found me useful in my limited way.

  After that day, my life changed, and his, too, I believe. I still attended school and slept in the nursery and ate with Susan and the other servants, but sometimes the order would come down and Susan dispatched me to his workshop or his study. It was I who steadied his new spyglass as he coaxed the mirror and the eyepiece into alignment in its long wooden case, and I was present on the warm September evening that the men installed it in the folly, my task being to carry my father’s notebooks then to wait quietly in the tower room listening to his impatient instructions as they laboured to fix it on the platform above. The task complete, he and I spent the precious hours until darkness fell poring over the star charts he’d drawn as he tutored me in his theories about the paths of planets, the nature of stars and comets, until moths came fluttering down through the skylight, drawn by the light of our lantern, and we saw the stars were coming out. It was time to mount the ladder and watch the skies through his new glass.

  At first I could see little. ‘Practice is the key,’ my father said, laughing, seeing my moue of frustration, and after this night he brought me with him to the folly from time to time, though Susan complained at my irregular hours. ‘The child is too tired to attend school, sir,’ she scolded him, and because he trusted her with me he concurred and took me more rarely, for all my begging him.

  The new spyglass was a marvel, revealing the skies to be filled with stars he’d not dreamed of before. My father became more absorbed in his work, often sleeping long into the day after a full night’s viewing, so in a week of clear skies I might hardly be summoned at all to his presence. But then there would be periods of cloud, and the following year a winter so cold that birds fell frozen from the skies, and he’d invite me to his study where we huddled by the fire and he taught me mathematics, philosophy, and how to record my observations—all tools, he explained, to aid astronomy.

  The mathematical symbols made little sense to me at first, nor did they for some long while, but I caught his passion to unlock the secrets of the heavens and persevered. By his teaching also I learned much about the fabulous monsters and tragic children of the gods commemorated by the ancients in the night sky. From there it was but a step to teaching me Greek and Latin, so I might read the old charts, and something of the wondrous new knowledge of opticks and the secret properties of light.

  And so the pattern of our new life together became set. My eleventh birthday came, and I remember it well because the gardener’s cat had had kittens, and he brought me a black and white one all to myself, which I named Thomas.

  Sometimes, at little notice, my father would summon the carriage and dispatch himself with bags and boxes to Norwich or London, where I daresay he would meet with other stargazers or visit merchants of optickal instruments, for he would oft return nursing a crate packed with delicate lenses or mirrors and then he’d shut himself in his workshop for days at a time, experimenting and polishing.

  It was on one of these occasions, in the late autumn of 1773, when he had been away nigh a week, that a pedlar woman came to the kitchen door one afternoon selling pegs and ribbons and the like. Betsy was much taken with a lace cap, which she bargained for, and Susan pleaded with Mrs Godstone to buy me some ribbons. I hung back, clutching my little cat Thomas, yet fascinated by the young woman’s sun-baked skin and her fine foreign eyes and the lively movement of her strong lean body as she crouched to search her basket for the particular sky blue Susan demanded for my fair hair. And when Susan summoned me forward to try the colours, the woman seemed wary, studying me curiously as she waited for Susan to make her choice. When she bid us farewell, her eyes rested on me last of all as though she would commit me to memory, and this alarmed me.

  Afterwards I sat in the servants’ room as Susan hemmed my new ribbons, and listened to them gossip.

  ‘Farmer said they were back,’ Mr Corbett announced briefly as he built up the fire. ‘He’s setting up a watch at nights till they’re gone.’

  ‘Reckon it was they vagabonds took his birds last time, not the Romanies,’ Mrs Godstone said. ‘I chased them out of the tatty bed, remember?’

  ‘Aye, well he’s not taking chances.’

  ‘Where do they live, the gypsies?’ I asked, and I spoke so little they looked surprised.

  ‘Why nowhere and everywhere,’ Susan told me. ‘They’ll have pitched their camp up in a clearing off Foxhole Lane, I reckon.’ Foxhole Lane led up past the folly.

  How wonderful, I thought, to travel with a wagon and camp up in the forest. But less pleasant if I had no house to go back to in the morning. Still I was curious to see this camp and when I told Matt the next morning, he said straightaway that we should go.

  Instead of going home after school, he and I set off up the road past the gamekeeper’s cottage, all the way up the hill to Foxhole Lane. There we hid ourselves among the trees and crept along like savages stalking a deer, skirting the path. The smell of smoke reached us first, then the crackling of their fire, and voices in a strange musical tongue and harsh laughter. We burrowed into undergrowth, peering out at a strange sight.

  Three tents and two open wagons, once bright-painted mayhap, but now dingy and battered, were arranged in no particular order round a newly lit fire. Two women—neither of them the one who’d come to our door—were sitting on stools by the fire chopping up vegetables and casting them into a large cooking pot planted on the ground between them. A thin girl of ten or eleven fed sticks to the flames from a bundle she held. As we watched, a wiry man with a bow-legged gait emerged from the trees nearby and cast a brace of conies onto the grass by the pot. At this the older woman gave a harsh cry of satisfaction, immediately grabbing one up and starting to skin it, only stopping from time to time to toss bits of the steaming guts to a stubby little dog and to lick the blood off her fingers.

  The girl brushed dirt from her hands and called to someone in the nearest tent. The doorflap twitched aside and two younger children, a black-haired boy of five or six and a pretty girl, two or three years younger than me, in a poppy-red headscarf, slipped out and followed her direction to search for firewood. All three were dark-eyed with sun-browned skin, but the girls at least were tidy and their dresses, though worn, neatly mended.

  We’d been there only a few minutes when Matt caught his foot on a root and grabbed a branch to steady himself. At the sound the dog bustled over, barking. Matt shushed it in that natural way he has with all animals, and
it skittered back to attend the rabbit-skinning, but the bow-legged man had already crossed the lane towards us. In a moment his eyes met mine through the leaves. ‘Hi,’ he shouted in surprise. Matt and I struggled out of the bushes and ran as if the black helldog Shuck was after us. For a while we heard the man crashing about, but then the sounds grew fainter and by the time we reached the road by the gamekeeper’s cottage he’d given up the pursuit.

  ‘Bloody gypsies,’ Matt swore, when he’d recovered his breath, and spat most liberally into the mud. Swollen with pride at our adventure we swaggered home, where a furious Susan decreed I be given only bread and scrape for dinner for tearing my clothes.

  I saw her again, the girl in the poppy-red headscarf, two days later. My father had returned from his latest excursion with a parcel containing two books that smelt new-printed, and news of a comet, and I begged him to take me with him to the folly that night to search for it. It was twilight when we arrived, and when we had gained the roof platform Father found he’d forgotten an astrolabe he very much wanted and I was dispatched to fetch it. It was when I flew out of the doorway at the bottom of the tower that I surprised her, just standing there, her eyes large with fear, her body poised for flight.

  For a moment we stared at each other in the half-light, the girl and I. She was thinner than I, perhaps seven years old, maybe eight. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ I whispered, but my speaking to her was too much, and she picked up her skirts and ran for the trees, though stopping once to look back at me. I waved forlornly, in what I hoped was a friendly fashion, but she continued in her flight.

  I thought of her as I half walked, half ran back down to the Hall, not nervous now I knew the forest and its ways. There was something a little familiar about her face, whether the heart-shape of it, or the short upper lip, or the small straight nose, I couldn’t say. The surprise, though, was that her eyes were not brown at all as I’d thought when I saw her at the camp, but blue. Unusual with the sun-burned skin and the black hair, but then what did I know about gypsies?

  When I returned in the gathering darkness half an hour later, breathless, but clutching the astrolabe, of her there was no sign, and caught up as I was in the subsequent excitement of locating the comet I completely forgot about her.

  A few days later Thomas, my black and white cat, did not appear for his breakfast. Nor was he to be seen the rest of the day, despite my searching and calling. By the following morning, a Sunday, I was distraught, and before I could be caught and dressed in my hated best for divine service at Starbrough church, I slipped away across the park and into the trees to look for him. Young though he was, Thomas was proving a fine mouser, with a passion to roam. Perhaps he’d been caught in one of the gamekeeper’s traps on his nightly hunting trip, from which he’d often return to build a line of fat corpses on the kitchen doorstep. It was, I admit, a small chance that he’d wandered so far, but Sam and Matt and I had searched the barns and the stables for him, and their father had promised to watch for him as he worked. Nobody, it seemed, had seen poor old Thomas dead or alive.

  At first I took our usual path, which ran from the edge of the park, snaking through the scrubland and up where the trees began. I called and called for Thomas, stopping to inspect where I knew the gamekeeper set traps, but there was no trace of him. I had almost reached the folly, when my attention was caught by a tuft of white fur lying among fallen leaves by the side of the path. I stooped and picked it up. It was soft like thistledown—or cat fur—and as I stepped over some trailing brambles into a small clearing my worst fears were met. There lay the half-eaten corpse of a small animal amid matted clumps of black and white fur. I crouched beside what was left of poor Thomas, the tears already coursing down my cheeks. A fox then, it must have been. A quick death it was, I prayed. Kinder than lingering wounded in a trap, at least. The savage forest had taken my little cat. I wept.

  As I wiped my teary face on my sleeve, I became aware of someone standing nearby and turned to see. It was the gypsy girl, her eyes wide this time with pity. She stepped over to crouch by the poor little corpse, and for a moment, despite the bright headscarf, she seemed herself like a small animal, the bones delicate under her tawny skin. When she raised her face to look at me, there were no tears, only that calm pity. She set about collecting twigs and leaves and handfuls of the damp forest earth, proceeding to lay them over poor Thomas, and after a moment I helped her, weeping all the while. When we’d finished, she took my hand and we stood together looking down at the burial mound and I thought about Thomas, how Father had picked him out of the litter for me before Matt’s father drowned the rest, how Thomas clawed his way up curtains as a tiny kitten and liked a lick of butter as a special treat.

  ‘Poor cat,’ she whispered, and it was as though she’d heard my thoughts for she added, ‘You will find another.’ I glanced at her in astonishment and not a little dudgeon, but her small heart-shaped face was serious. ‘You will.’

  And she was proved right.

  When I arrived home an hour later with my dreadful news, the household all comforted me. Thomas was a good cat, they said, but he’d a dangerous tendency to wander. Several days later, Mr Corbett came back from the village with a tiny tabby in a basket. On Father’s suggestion I named her Luna, for in her grey and silver she was as pretty as the moon, and like the moon she remained fixed in her orbit. She never liked to leave the stable yard.

  As for the gypsy girl, I saw her twice more that autumn. Once, the following week, she was collecting firewood near the folly, and she waved to me shyly, but when I made to speak to her she vanished like a fawn into the shadows. The second time I had climbed up to the tower room on some quest one afternoon at dusk. My skin prickling, I turned and was startled to find her standing behind me. ‘How did you…?’ I began, but stopped as she glanced around the room, fear and curiosity doing battle in her face.

  ‘Have you been here before?’ I asked her, at once knowing it unlikely, for my father kept the tower locked, and she shook her head and mimed someone striking her. ‘You are forbidden?’ I guessed, and she nodded.

  ‘We come here to see the stars,’ I told her, and showed her one of my father’s charts, and her eyes widened and she moved her finger over the map as though it meant something mysterious to her. I tried to coax her to climb the ladder, but she said, ‘No,’ and smiled, before retreating down the stairs once more. I was left staring at the chart and wondering what she’d seen in it.

  A day or two after this, my father’s agent, Mr Trotwood, came by to see his master and imparted with a ghastly satisfaction the news that the gypsies had moved on. The implication was that he’d had some hand in this. I was angry with him. The thought that I might not see the girl again saddened me and we had, as far as I could see, no quarrel with these people. Their only sin, it seemed to me, was to differ.

  Jude finished typing, then read through the whole passage again, hearing Esther’s voice, clear and strong, in her mind. Her origins were still clouded in mystery, but Alicia had offered another suggestion, that Esther had been abandoned by a mother too poor to look after her and was “a pauper’s bastard.” Actually that really didn’t make sense. Not if she’d been wearing rags of silk. But rags? If she’d been wellborn, why had she been wearing rags? Had her mother abandoned her or suffered some tragedy? Her relationship with the man she called “Father” was a touching one. He seemed to be coming to value his young charge, even to show a fatherly affection for her. Perhaps it was because of a meeting of minds—that she, too, was fascinated by the stars.

  She glanced up at the portrait above the fireplace. If, as Chantal said, he’d been twenty-two when that was painted in 1745, he’d have been forty-two in 1765 when Esther came to the Hall, a middle-aged, childless bachelor; but the gentle wisdom in his expression, the book he held to denote he was a scholar, these gave a strong impression of his personality. He was a marvelous teacher, by Esther’s account, and keen to make her his apprentice at a time when many would have dismissed
her for her gender and for her misty origins. And until this account had emerged from the dusty back of this cupboard, Esther Wickham had been lost to history. Jude’s desire to remedy this was growing steadily.

  She had tried to be true to Esther’s spelling, writing in square brackets when she felt a word needed clarifying for a modern readership, and she double-checked everything now for typographical errors. Then she e-mailed the passage to Cecelia, realizing she was unlikely to reply for a few days because of Paris. She could hardly bear the wait. In the meantime she would print off what she’d done and show it to Robert and Chantal.

  CHAPTER 20

  The next morning, Thursday, brought a terrible shock. The post came while everyone was finishing breakfast. Robert opened the official-looking envelope and said, “Good God,” then, “I was right. Mother, I told you they were up to something.”

  “Who? Not Farrell?” Chantal asked, her face suddenly tired and strained.

  “What is it?” Alexia asked, coming in from the kitchen with fresh toast.

  The letter was from the Council Planning Officer and it outlined the details of a planning application that John Farrell’s company was making with respect to Starbrough Woods.

  “That’s why that Vane woman was asking about access. They want to turn it into a blasted holiday park.”

  “What?” said Chantal and Alexia together.

  “Surely they can’t, not if it’s always been forest,” Jude put in.

  “All right, not quite a holiday park. But listen…” Robert tapped the letter with an impatient hand. “Here we are … erect twelve single-story dwellings on the west side of the route named Foxhole Lane for use as rented holiday accommodation and a single-story lodge to be an office. The landscaping of the surrounding forest is considered desirable as is—my God, no—the demolition of the tower known as Starbrough Folly. I think they’re relying on precedent that there has been building there before.”