A Place of Secrets

by Rachel Hore

  She drank up her tea and decided she should go. Though desperate to hear about Tamsin Lovall and to tell Claire about her Esther dream, never mind to learn what had gone on between Claire and Euan, she was reluctant to play gooseberry to Claire and Jon.

  This time it was Jon’s turn to rescue her, for when she went outside to say, “I probably ought to get back,” he exclaimed, “but you haven’t told me yet. Why you were looking for my nan. That’s why I came, you see. That’s why I was driving down that road at that time and saw Summer. Heck, Claire’s told me I rescued my own daughter! And I was coming to find you.”

  “Coming to … I still don’t entirely follow this. How can Tamsin be your grandmother?”

  “Look,” Jon said, “I’ll start at the beginning.” He leaned against the trampoline and told them the story.

  “An old friend of our family showed my dad the letter you put in the paper on Friday about Tamsin Lovall. I didn’t know her name had been Lovall then, but this friend remembered her and said that it must be her, and I was amazed because I didn’t know she’d been a Romany. Dad had never told me. He said it was because she’d been secretive about it and he respected that.”

  “I take it she is dead then, Tamsin?” Jude said quietly.

  “Yes, years ago, when I was five or six,” Jon said. “I don’t really remember her at all.”

  “Oh, that’s so sad,” Jude cried. So all these years Gran had been worrying pointlessly. Tamsin, from whom she’d taken the necklace, had been dead; she must have died comparatively young. “When was that?” she asked. “Sorry, I can’t work it out because I don’t know how old you are.”

  “Same as you,” chipped in Claire. “He’s thirty-four, aren’t you, Jon? April the fifteenth, I remember. Aries. Fire sign, same as me.”

  Jon looked at her with an expression of amazement.

  “It’s all right,” Claire added hastily. “I never expect men to remember birthdays and things. I’m a Leo—twentieth of August.”

  Jude hardly noticed this conversation. She was thinking: so Tamsin died nearly thirty years ago. And Gran hadn’t known. Nearly thirty years, probably, she’d had that necklace on her conscience. But she’d have wanted to return it to the family, all the same.

  “Anyway,” Jon said, “Dad tried to ring you on the number given in the paper. And it came out as number unobtainable.”

  “Oh?” said Jude, surprised.

  “Yeah, look.” He pulled a wallet out from his jacket pocket, extracted from it a small rectangle of newspaper and passed it to her.

  “Damn, they misprinted the number,” she said, annoyed.

  “Yeah, and it only says Starbrough Hall, Norfolk, so Dad didn’t want to send a letter in case it didn’t get there, and since he only lives up at Sheringham and I had a day off work, I said I’d drop it in at the Hall. So here’s the letter.”

  He handed Jude a white envelope with her name on it. She opened it, read it through quickly, then stood deep in thought.

  “Here, let me look,” said Claire and Jude gave it to her.

  Dear Miss or Mrs Gower,

  I read your letter asking about Tamsin Lovall. That was my mother’s name before she married. She always said she was Romany, but when she was eighteen or nineteen she met my father in Great Yarmouth where she’d gone to be a nurse, it being wartime. He was a Navy rating and they met at a dance, and got married soon after, when I believe I must have been on the way. She never went back to her family. I think she quarrelled with them about the nursing. She had three children, me and my sister and brother, but sadly passed away in 1980 shortly before her 57th birthday, of cancer. My father, George, died in 1999. I’m afraid I don’t remember her speak about your nan, but then she never talked much about her childhood. I think she didn’t want people to know about her being a gypsy and to think she was different. She was a shy woman and never liked to stand out in any way. I would however be interested to meet someone who knew her when she was a child, if you would care to contact me.

  I remain yours truly,

  Frank Thetford

  Claire passed the letter back to Jude. “I’m so confused,” she said. “Who’s George and who’s Frank?”

  “George was my grandfather. He’s the one Tamsin married. Frank’s my dad.”

  “And you’re her grandson.”

  “Which means,” said Jude, finally bringing it out into the open, “that Summer is Tamsin’s great-granddaughter. Jessie’s and Tamsin’s. My God.”

  “And you came to find us just in time to rescue Summer.”

  The chain of coincidences was so astonishing they all just stared at each other.

  * * *

  Later that day, Jude drove back to Starbrough Hall, longing for her bed. When she reached Gamekeeper’s Cottage, she stopped the car, thinking she ought to go and help Euan deal with all the mess. There were no other cars there, not even Euan’s. She knocked at the door, but there was no answer. She walked past the animals and into the meadow. The tent was gone and the caravan shut up. There was no sign of Euan at all. Feeling suddenly very sad and alone, she walked back to the car and continued on her way.

  * * *

  The next morning, she was just finishing telling Chantal everything that had happened when her phone rang. It was the jeweler’s shop in Norwich to tell her the necklace was ready.

  “It’s definitely from around 1760,” the jeweler told her later, when she arrived to pick it up. “And our researcher can pinpoint the goldsmith’s mark to a shop in Hatton Garden. If it was complete and in good condition something like this would be worth, oh, about nine or ten thousand pounds, but as it is, not more than five thousand. I’ve written you a letter here to explain it all, and we’d be able to arrange for a replacement star to be made if that’s what you decide.”

  “Amazingly, we found the missing charm,” she told the jeweler. And in the remnant of a dream a little star twinkled on new-fallen snow.

  “Oh well done. That would give the necklace further value, of course. If you want to bring it in it would be a privilege to do the repair. This is a very pretty piece.”

  “Isn’t it?” Jude said, bringing out her purse to pay the woman. “Can you tell me one more thing, would this design have been common at the time?”

  “It says all that in the letter. Here we are, ‘Although stars became popular later in the century as interest in astronomy became fashionable, at this earlier period they were more rare. This item is believed to be unique, not least because the jeweler specialized in commissions for individual pieces.’”

  So the likelihood that the necklace had been Esther’s was strong. But where had the baby Esther got it from? And now it would be Frank’s. Then Jon’s. And just maybe, eventually … Summer’s.

  The dream was starting to come back to her more strongly now.

  Instead of walking back to where she’d parked the car, she set off for the Castle Museum. She had some forms to fill in.

  * * *

  It was Wednesday before Euan called her, after an exhausting day of dealing with the photographer that Bridget from the office had sent down to photograph Starbrough Hall generally and the library in particular.

  “I’m staying at Fiona and Paul’s,” he told her. “A rest seemed called for. Are you busy tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” said Jude, “but it would be wonderful if you came and joined in.”

  “In what?” he asked.

  “A rather amazing gathering,” she replied. “At Starbrough Hall. The Wickhams have been so kind. We didn’t have anywhere else big enough, you see. And the Hall is so important to the story.”

  And she explained.

  PART

  THREE

  CHAPTER 34

  “The whole thing is like a huge 3D jigsaw puzzle,” Jude told Euan on Thursday morning. They were sitting in the library at Starbrough Hall, where she was showing him the transcripts of Esther’s memoir. “It does my head in just to think about it.”

  “Perhaps writ
ing it down would help,” Euan suggested. “Can I use this paper? A flow chart would be best. Look, here is Esther at the top on the left.”

  “And the gypsy girl, I’ll call her by the name Summer came up with, Rowan, on the right.”

  “Here’s the necklace under Esther’s name, then we’ll do an arrow to Rowan because she must have given it to Rowan.”

  “Then we have to suppose that Rowan passes it down her family, who are all Romany, until it’s Tamsin’s turn to have it in the 1930s.”

  “And that’s when your gran, the gamekeeper’s daughter, takes it off her and keeps it. We’ll write her name, Jessie, down here on the left near the bottom, then your mum’s name, Valerie, then Claire’s and yours, then Summer’s.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell Euan about Summer and Jon, but she’d promised Claire not to.

  “Then under Tamsin’s name, Frank, Jon.”

  They both stared at the chart they’d drawn. “What this suggests is that the necklace should be given to Frank, as Tamsin’s eldest child.”

  “There’s still so much we don’t know, isn’t there?” Jude said. “I mean, Esther writes about being locked in the tower but we don’t actually know, unless we trust my weird dream, how she got out of it and what became of her afterward. There’s certainly no evidence that she was ever connected with Starbrough Hall again. Augustus inherited it, and Chantal’s shown me the family tree. There’s no Esther. And of course, we can only guess that Tamsin is descended from Rowan.”

  “It seems likely, though,” Euan said. “How else would Tamsin have got the necklace?”

  “So the only clues we have,” Jude said, “are hardly going to stand up to historical scrutiny. It’s my own imaginings, and what Summer said happened when she went missing. She still insists that someone needed to get out of the folly and that she was then looked after by some other little girl. Euan, if I hadn’t had strange dreams like Summer’s when I was a child I could more easily dismiss it. But there’s something very weird at work here and I’m not prepared to just dismiss it.”

  “And yet you can’t possibly put it in your magazine article about Esther. You can’t.”

  “Of course I can’t. Apart from the question of historical evidence it wouldn’t be fair to Summer. But maybe, just maybe, we could use it as an hypothesis to lead us to further hard evidence. Let’s assume that Esther did escape. It’s quite plausible that she went off with Rowan and her family. Certainly if Alicia cut her out of her father’s will and Esther felt her life threatened.”

  “‘Off with the raggle-taggle gypsies, oh.’ No, I’m not laughing at you, Jude. It sounds very, I don’t know, romantic, that’s all. Can you imagine her having to live a life on the road after being the daughter of the Big House?”

  “It would have been incredibly hard for her.”

  “So perhaps she did something else, but I don’t see how we find out.”

  “No, nor do I at the moment.”

  They were both silent, thinking their own thoughts.

  Then Euan looked at his watch. “What time do we have to fetch Mrs. Catchpole?”

  “Gran? Just after lunch. It’s incredibly kind of the Wickhams to invite us all here.”

  “It would have been a crush at your gran’s. And you’re right, it’s very appropriate since Starbrough is where it all happened. But are you sure you want me cluttering up the place, too?”

  “Of course I do,” Jude said, placing a hand on his arm. “You’re part of all this somehow.”

  “Do you know, I feel I am,” he replied, smiling at her.

  * * *

  Sitting in the huge armchair in the drawing room, propped up with cushions, Gran looked, thought Jude, like a small, nervous child. Chantal was at her most charming, pouring tea into beautiful porcelain cups, and even Miffy did her best, coming to press her doggy warmth against Gran’s legs.

  “When are they coming?” Gran asked Jude anxiously, for the third time, twisting her worn wedding ring.

  “Any moment,” Jude replied, and Euan, standing at the window, said, “They’re here now,” as Jon’s blue sports car rolled up the drive. There followed a few minutes’ mayhem because the twins let the setters out and Summer was frightened to get out of the car, but Robert grabbed one dog and a neat, slightly portly man who could only be Jon’s father got out of the car and caught the other, and Claire and Summer climbed out of the back. Jon took a carrier bag out of the trunk and passed it to his father. Then, the front doors being open as was appropriate for such a special occasion, Alexia came down the steps like the gracious chatelaine she was and swept them all up into the house.

  Frank and Jon were introduced to Gran, who, now they were actually here, had quite forgotten her nerves and received them like a queen. Chantal seated Frank in the chair next to Gran’s, and while Alexia took Summer to show her the twins’ playroom, the adults tried to encourage the conversation that Gran had needed to have for so many years. They learned that Frank had a job as a driver for a big garage and car showroom in Yarmouth. He was a quietly spoken man with very bright eyes—like Tamsin’s, Gran said suddenly at one point. “I can see her in you.” They seemed to know a lot of the same places and remember local events and notable people. Jude saw Frank’s pride in Jon.

  Jude managed to gather the threads of the family’s story. Frank’s wife had left when Jon was thirteen. Frank had no job at that time and let everything slide. By his late twenties, when he met Claire, Jon had left school with paltry qualifications, played in several bands, none of them successful, and was drifting. Then, a few years later, an opportunity presented itself. He saw a band of local lads playing in a pub and thought they had something. He offered to give them a few tips about who to talk to, how to present themselves, and before long found himself their manager. Now, two successful albums later, they were touring and he was building up his own small record label of other groups.

  “He’s really making something of it, aren’t you, boy?” Frank said.

  Jon looked embarrassed.

  “Hence the manager’s flash car,” Claire commented, but she was clearly impressed.

  Frank glanced at Claire, and looked as though he wanted to say something else, but then decided not to. Instead he picked up the carrier bag he’d brought with him and extracted a photo album. “There’re pictures of my ma in here,” he said, opening it and holding it so Gran could see. “This is her in her nurse’s uniform, and that’s her wedding, of course. Here she is holding me as a nipper and this is us on the beach at Sheringham, I believe.”

  Gran turned the pages in silence, a strange sort of expression on her face, as though she wanted to see the photos but was frightened of the feelings they awoke in her.

  “Your da looks a good man,” she told Frank, who nodded. “Were they happy?”

  “I believe so, yes,” he said.

  “She deserved to be happy,” Gran muttered. The album was passed around and Jude at last saw Tamsin—dark hair tied back severely under her nurse’s cap, deep-set dark eyes, a shy, serious expression.

  “How was it exactly you knew her?” Frank asked. “She never said much about her life before she met my da, except that she lived in a vardo. That was her word for a caravan. She liked to talk about the vardo and the various horses that had pulled it. There’s a picture of it somewhere. I found it again after she died. It might be at the back here.”

  The photograph was stuck inside the back cover. Gran stared at it for some time. She hardly noticed when Frank gently took the album from her and passed it to Jude. The photograph was creased and a little blurred, but it showed a wagon very like Euan’s, in black and white, with a slender girl, presumably Tamsin, sitting upfront next to a muscley, weather-beaten man who was pulling on a cigarette, his other hand holding the reins.

  “That was Ted, one of her uncles,” Jessie said.

  “The caravan is like yours, isn’t it?” Jude murmured to Euan, who studied it closely before passing the album to Claire.


  “It is, isn’t it, but that really would be too much of a coincidence,” he said firmly.

  Claire passed the album to Jon and then Chantal, then stood up.

  “Mrs. Wickham, would you mind showing me where Summer’s gone?” she asked, and the two women left the room. She didn’t like to be parted from Summer at the moment. Jon muttered something about checking on them and followed. Euan rose and quietly went over to the far window where he stood, hands in pockets, looking out over the park. Gran still sat silently turning her wedding ring.

  “What is it, Gran?” Jude asked softly.

  Frank, probably thinking she was tired, started to make his excuses, but Gran motioned to him to stay. But still she said nothing, so Frank gave a sort of harrumphing noise and said, “Mrs. Catchpole, I know something bad happened to my ma. She was always a very private person, haunted by something, I’d say. My da told me as much, too. Somebody hurt her badly, didn’t they?”

  Gran looked at him and Jude was moved to see her eyes glistening with unshed tears.

  “Seeing those photographs … Of course, it brings it all back. But, yes, that’s what happened. It was when she and I were fifteen.”

  Gran was quiet again for a moment, then looked straight at Frank. “I’ve not talked about this for a very long time. I hope you’ll understand. It’s been a burden to me all these years. If I’d told on him earlier it might have been stopped.

  “Well, we went up to the woods one time by ourselves. We met some soldiers, three of them. I knew one of them from school, Frank. His name was Dicky Edwards. He’d always been a bit of a bully and we could tell right away they’d been drinking. Yeugh, the way they looked at us. Well, we were frightened, and it turned out we were right to be.”