A Place of Secrets

by Rachel Hore

  Night was falling fast and the fox cub sat down and began to yowl for its mother, a heartrending sound that went on and on, but the men only shouted at it or cajoled. The eldest of the men fetched a fiddle and attempted to imitate the noise. The fox cub still cried so the fiddler shrugged and started up a dance tune, first tentative, then faster and more rhythmic until toes started tapping and hands clapping and Nadya got up and began to dance. Jessie had never seen a dance so expressive, so wild and carefree. She clapped to the beat and watched the flash of gold jewelry in the firelight and the sparks flying upward and thought this the most extraordinary experience of her life.

  Then out of nowhere came a sharp crack.

  The fox cub gave a last yelp, rolled over and lay still. The horses began to buck and screamed with fright.

  For the smallest second everyone froze. Then came a frenzy of activity: the men rushing to soothe the horses, the women to hustle each other into wagons.

  Between the whinnying and the shouting could be heard someone crashing about in the undergrowth, then came another gunshot and a man’s laugh, receding into the distance. Jacko and the next uncle, Ted, each snatched up a brand from the fire and ran off in pursuit, but Jessie knew they were already too late.

  There was something about that laugh that struck a chord in her, but at the time she didn’t give the matter a thought.

  * * *

  “What did you do, Gran?” Jude cried, when Jessie told her all about it that afternoon.

  “I was terribly frightened, dear. I simply picked myself up and ran off home without even saying good-bye. I knew the route perfectly, even in the dark. Back along Foxhole Lane, I ran, then all the way down the hill. I was in a fine old state, I can tell you, when I got back.”

  She remembered her face, glimpsed in the bathroom mirror, all sooty and streaked with tears. Her clothes stank of smoke and strange food. Relieved she was safe, her parents were still furious. How dare she go to the woods at night? Especially to “those gypsies.” But she thought they didn’t mind the gypsies. Well there were limits, weren’t there, and she’d crossed them by a mile. Anything could have happened to her, she might be dead or worse. A gunshot frightened her? Let it be a lesson.

  She was banished to bed, weeping.

  As she lay awake listening to the vixen’s cries of grief and thinking over the evening’s events, Jessie remembered that laugh.

  “It was Dicky,” she told Jude. “He must have seen us go up the hill together. He’d have got the gun off his da.”

  “What happened to him, Gran?” Jude asked, enthralled by this dramatic tale. “Was he punished?”

  “No, not then. I told no one anything at the time,” Gran said finally. “I knew it was Dicky, and Dicky knew that I knew. I saw it in his eyes at school the next day, a challenging look. What’re you going to do about it, then? that look said. I was scared of him. He had his gang, too. They’d lie, say he was with one of them. And I couldn’t prove anything—no one had actually seen him—so what was the use of telling? I was sorry for my silence later, but it’s easy to forget what it’s like when you’re very young, how weak and foolish you can feel. Things that look rational and easy to grown-ups don’t look that way to children at all.”

  “But didn’t Tamsin help…?”

  “Tamsin didn’t turn up to school the next day. Or ever again. I sent my brother Charlie up Foxhole Lane to look for her. He came back and said they’d gone.”

  “So that was the last time you saw her?”

  “Oh no, the gypsies still came to Foxhole Lane, but not for a while and when they did Tamsin told me she was finished with school.”

  “And when did she leave for good and you take the necklace?”

  Jessie’s expression hardened suddenly and Jude wished she hadn’t been so forthright.

  “I’ll come to that when I’m ready.” Jessie gave an impatient gesture and Jude knew that the conversation was over for the day.

  * * *

  Jude returned to Starbrough Hall with “Dicky, presumably Richard, Edwards” scribbled on a piece of paper, but she knew Gran didn’t think it would come to anything. To tell the truth, nor did Jude. If Dicky was still alive he was unlikely to want to help. She still had so many questions to ask her grandmother, though. Like, when did Tamsin eventually hide the necklace—presumably in the folly—and why? She arranged to visit again on Monday afternoon.

  After supper at Starbrough Hall she called Claire, still feeling bad that they’d quarreled.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” she told her sister. “I wanted to ask how you got on at the doctor’s.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” Claire said. “You frightened me, that’s all. The doctor thinks Summer’s fine, so I’m trying to believe him.”

  “Well, I’m very glad about that,” Jude said, but uncertainty hung somewhere in the ether between them. She didn’t think everything was all right, and she didn’t believe that Claire did, either, but she didn’t want to disturb Claire’s fragile equilibrium by saying so.

  “Oh, I took that astrological chart in and got Linda to look at it when we had a quiet moment,” she told Jude. “She thinks it’s very old, too. She found a book we sell in the shop and looked everything up. It’s not a good horoscope, Jude. There’s a lot about loss and tragedy and strength to overcome difficulty. I’d be worried if a child of mine had one cast like that. I’ll show you in detail next time you come.”

  “Thanks. Though I don’t know what use it will be. We don’t know who it belonged to, do we?”

  “Your Esther, you thought?”

  “It could be. If we’re saying it’s 1760-something. Your reading doesn’t bode well for a happy ending to her story.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Look, I’m not busy tomorrow. I could fetch you both and take you out to lunch somewhere, what do you say?”

  “I’m sorry, we’re busy tomorrow. People are coming to lunch.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. Anyone I know?”

  “Yeah. Darcey and her parents. Oh, and I’ve asked Euan.”

  “Oh.” Jude waited to see whether her sister would invite her, too, but she didn’t and there was a silence between them again. She felt herself blushing and awkward, then managed to say, “Well, some other time, then.”

  “How about the evening?” Claire said in a rush. “Come and fetch the chart then and I’ll show you what Linda’s written.”

  “All right,” Jude said coolly. The lunch thing was silly. She felt furious with her sister, but also that she had no right to feel furious. It was as though she and Claire were engaged in some guerrilla warfare in which neither party would quite make their demands clear.

  CHAPTER 23

  On Sunday morning, Jude woke to the patter of rain on the window and a deep sense of loneliness. She tried reading a crime novel in bed for a while, then dressed and went downstairs to find she really was on her own apart from the dogs, the family having disappeared off to church. There was a note on the breakfast table from Chantal in her neat foreign handwriting explaining it would be just the two of them for lunch—the twins and their parents had been invited out. Jude breakfasted, catching up with yesterday’s newspapers, then, not having anything else to detain her in the empty house, settled herself in the library and continued to transcribe Esther’s writing. As ever, it was comforting to hide herself in her work.

  Thereafter we grew close, my father and I. Often he was the same as he had always been—secret, lonely, alone. He would still disappear into his workshop for long periods, or I would find him in his study deep in a book, his food untouched on its tray. Sometimes he’d seem not to notice me and I’d sit there quietly with him conducting some research of my own, but then suddenly he’d say, ‘Listen to this,’ and read a passage out of some tome about the Via Lacta—our Milky Way—being milk spilt across the sky from the breast of the goddess Hera, or the latest method of calculating the temperature of the sun. The towers of books had grown all around us, and
I sometimes felt he was like some alchemist of old, the instruments of his art lying washed up like jetsam on the piles of papers and charts all around.

  No one was ever allowed to move anything. Betsy might bring in his food—that was all. She was not to clean. I alone was trusted to dust a little sometimes, but only if I replaced everything exactly as it was, he’d grumble, or else it might be lost irretrievably.

  ‘Father, you require more shelves,’ I sighed one day when he asked me to pick out a particular volume about opticks, and I was made to move twenty other books before I found it.

  He looked around, blinking like an owl dazzled by daylight, as if he had never seen the room properly before. It was a dark narrow chamber at the back of the house, its aspect towards the stables. He’d chosen it when he was a boy, he had once told me, because no one else had any use for it. ‘What say you, Father, we locate a bigger room to make a library?’ I said excitedly, but he scowled.

  ‘And where would we do that?’ he replied, not possessing that kind of imagination, so I cast my mind about.

  Later in the day, roaming the house, still thinking of the possibilities of this idea, I walked into a room I had hardly visited before. It was at the front of the Hall, looking out across the park. The room had no purpose, as far as I could see, beyond housing an elegant fireplace, a great wooden chest—empty—and a pedestal with a bust of Socrates upon it. In some ways it was no room at all, merely a sizeable anteroom where a certain class of visitor, an equerry with a message perhaps, might be ordered to await the master’s pleasure, and there was, I saw, a reason for its dismissal—one side of the room bowed out a little, whether to some practical purpose or as the result of some structural weakness I could not say.

  Still, the marble floor with its oval patterning pleased me, and when I stepped over to the window my heart lifted to view the forest in the distance and, since the sun had moved away and the sky was cloudless, I was sure I could just see the folly peeping above the trees.

  I turned and inspected the room once more, and suddenly saw in my mind a revelation of how it could be. This would be our library, and to solve the problem of the curved wall, it would be oval. Father must be informed at once.

  The sound of a car on the gravel forecourt ripped Jude’s absorption like a knife slashing a picture. She’d imagined she’d been there in the eighteenth-century past, with Esther, seeing the room as it had been before it was a library. And, in turn, sharing with the girl a vision of how it was now. What a curious fancy, she thought, aware of Chantal’s voice greeting the dogs.

  Soon the door of the library opened. “Jude,” she cried, “I thought you’d be in here again. You do work hard, dear. Are you all right? Am I disturbing you?”

  “Not at all,” Jude said warmly, her regret at the broken moment wiped out by the desire to share her new knowledge. “In fact you’ve come at just the right moment.” She showed her Esther’s papers. “She’s describing how the library was made. It seems the whole thing was her idea.”

  Chantal came and settled down beside Jude, who read what she’d already transcribed and stumbled through the next section of Esther’s writing to find out about the making of this extraordinary room.

  My father took little persuasion once I explained the scheme, and my confidence quickly grew. By the following spring, in the year of 1774, the architect submitted his scheme for an oval room and the work commenced. Soon Starbrough Hall lay under siege to carts bearing sand and seasoned wood. Others drove away transporting heaps of rubble and dust. Half a dozen labourers arrived from the village, then a number of fine craftsmen, fresh from fashioning new buildings at Holkham Hall. These men all trampled grit down the corridors where Mr Corbett laid matting, and soon to breathe meant to choke on a chalky miasma. Betsy and I claimed we could taste dust in our food, but Mrs Godstone took umbrage at our complaints and Mr Corbett bid us hush.

  It was the shouted orders and the hammering that drove out Father in the end. He took to living in the folly for days at a time, even sleeping in the tower room on a small mattress when he’d a mind. And so I was left alone to direct Mr Gibbons, the architect, a gentle man apparently with a daughter close to myself in years, who discussed matters with me in a grave and courteous manner. This pleased and surprised me. No one outside the house had ever treated me with such respect before, and I flowered under my new responsibilities. My father’s agent, on the other hand, the odious Trotwood, deliberately flouted any instructions I gave regarding his labourers, his intention being to humiliate me. And so in time I learned discretion, using Mr Gibbons or the foreman instead to convey my will to him.

  As the months passed in this way, I noticed how Mrs Godstone and Mr Corbett changed towards me. They remained polite and kindly, but there grew an uneasy distance between us, and there came a time when I no longer ate with them, but with my father, or, if he were away, by my lone self in the great dining room, with Betsy to serve. Even Susan treated me differently, calling me Miss Esther as often as not, which wounded me. She’d not shared my bed for some years, for I was no longer a little girl with nightmares who needed comforting, but now she took to knocking before she entered my room. ‘You’re becoming a woman,’ she told me, when she helped me dress for dinner once. ‘Nay, a lady. I always knew … And a lovely one.’ All the old affection remained, I saw that in her eyes, but still, something important had changed. Father was treating me as the daughter of the house, and the household took their lead from him.

  I felt the loneliness of it first when my old friend Matt began to touch his cap when he greeted me. We were shyer with one another, but then we were aware of becoming man and woman; at fourteen we could no longer play in the dirt as though we were children, nor did we wish to. He worked all the day with his father now, his daily clothes shabby where mine were fine and neat, his hands calloused, the nails ingrained with earth, while mine were clean and manicured. On high days and holidays I heard tell he met in the village square with other lads and they would drink too much ale and tease the wenches; our days of running off to the forest together were long gone and never mentioned. Sometimes this saddened me, for I longed for a friend of my own age.

  By harvest time the main work on our new library was complete and the labourers slipped away to help on the farms. But there came a day late in September when the final details were complete. We stood, my father and I, admiring the rows of white-painted shelves and cupboards, the glass doors and the powder-blue painted ceiling. We remarked on the beautiful ornamentation picked out like white sugar piping, the sublime touch being a delicate oval centrepiece forged in plaster like a huge halo above our heads. We waited a week or two for the decoration to dry and the stink of lead paint to fade, then began the great task of transporting the contents of Father’s study into its new home.

  He would allow none to assist us packing the crates of books and papers, and once they were carried to the library I was allowed only to unpack and make suggestion, not to arrange. Finally Mr Corbett, with Sam and Matt and Jan the coachman, carried in the heavy desk and chairs, the globe and the orrery, and all was complete. That first evening I found him there already engrossed in his charts, a merry fire crackling in the grate, his supper as usual forgotten on a tray. ‘Goodnight,’ I called, but he gave no sign of having heard. I smiled to myself and closed the door quietly.

  “There’s no mention of this ceiling painting, is there?” Chantal pointed out. “I wonder when they did that?”

  “Maybe Esther will tell us in due course.” Jude closed down her laptop again, remembering how, for a moment earlier, it had seemed as though she had been inside Esther’s mind, seeing the room as it had been, and imparting to Esther the vision of how it was now. It had been a curious experience; she couldn’t explain it. Perhaps she’d fallen asleep for a short time and dreamed it.

  There was still so much unanswered about Esther, but then she didn’t know all the questions. Yet gradually, like pieces in a great complex jigsaw puzzle for which she had
no picture to guide her, different snippets of information were coming together. Areas of detail were beginning to come into focus.

  She glanced at her watch. It was half past twelve. She had a sudden mental picture of Euan arriving at Claire’s in a sports jacket and jeans, carrying a bottle of red wine. When she imagined him kissing her on both cheeks …

  “Chantal,” she said quickly, “had you anything special planned for lunch?” Since both of them had been left out of their families’ arrangements today, why shouldn’t they do something special and enjoy themselves?

  “Not really,” Chantal replied. “I thought we might finish some leftovers.”

  “In that case,” Jude said, “let me take you somewhere for lunch. I rather feel like it. Do you know anywhere that might take a last-minute booking?”

  “The Green Man,” Chantal said promptly, her eyes sparkling. “Yes, let’s go out for lunch.”

  * * *

  The pub Chantal recommended was able to squeeze them in at the last moment. It was only a couple of miles away, so not far for Jude to drive, a lovely old building with wooden beams, that hadn’t been too messed about by modern development. Their table was in the garden under a big canopy. They both ordered good old-fashioned Sunday roasts and a bottle of rich, red Burgundy. “My treat,” Jude insisted. “It’s so kind of you all to have let me stay at the Hall for so long.”

  “No, we love having you,” Chantal cried. “Alexia says what an easy guest you are and, anyway, it makes sense, with you working so hard on the sale. You are not having much of a holiday at all.”