Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor

by Melanie Dobson

  But the rest of the task still felt daunting.

  “Finally!” Ella exclaimed, holding a book in her hands.

  Heather glanced up. “What is it?”

  “Something interesting.”

  Heather scooted around the boxes until she was at Ella’s side. Instead of folders in this box, there was a stack of photo albums. And a manila envelope packed with more pictures.

  Ella flipped through the pictures in one of the photo albums, most of them from Heather’s years as a child. Heather glanced at the pictures over her daughter’s shoulder. It seemed her parents recorded every milestone of hers, great or small, through the lens of their camera. There was a picture of her crawling on the linoleum in their kitchen. Planting flowers in the beds behind the cottage. Picnicking in what Mum had deemed their “secret garden.”

  It was no wonder that Heather once thought magical things happened in gardens.

  Ella opened the envelope and dumped the contents onto the lid of another box before quickly flipping through them. “Is this you?” she asked, lifting up a black-and-white picture of Heather’s parents when they were much younger, each holding the hand of a girl wearing a pleated skirt and bolero jacket. The girl’s long hair was held back with a wide headband.

  “No.” Heather studied her parents and then the face of the child. “This was taken before I was born.”

  “Do you know who the girl is?”

  “Her name was Libby,” Heather said slowly as she studied the picture. “She was my sister.”

  Ella glanced up. “You never told me I had an aunt.”

  “She died when I was a baby.”

  Ella leaned back against a box. “How did she die?”

  “She was sick.”

  Ella’s eyebrows climbed. “Like the measles?”

  “I don’t know.” Heather sat down on one of the boxes. “I asked my mother over and over about Libby growing up, but my questions made her so sad that I finally stopped.”

  There were more pictures of Libby in the cottage gardens and one behind what looked like Ladenbrooke Manor. Heather studied the photo of Libby on the bench in Mum’s secret garden.

  Her sister had passed away at the age of fifteen, and she wished her parents had told her more about Libby’s childhood. And what took her life.

  When she was a girl, Heather had longed for a sibling, and for a season—a very long season—she conjured up a sister named Beatrix after her favorite author. Beatrix was practically perfect unless Heather did something wrong. Then Beatrix was her scapegoat. In hindsight, her parents had been incredibly kind to oblige her whims. Heather maintained Beatrix’s presence until she was eleven, and then she pretended for years that Christopher’s siblings were her siblings as well.

  When Ella was seven, she conjured up a sibling for herself too, and Heather had accommodated her. Every girl, she figured, needed a sister, imagined or not.

  Ella began flipping through another photo album and held out a page to Heather, tapping on it. “Who’s the guy?”

  Heather’s stomach plunged as she stared at the picture of her and Christopher at the dance at Henderson Court. August 1988. A week before he’d asked her to marry him.

  This was a question she didn’t want to answer.

  Heather looked up from the picture, forcing a smile on her lips. “It’s my date, of course.”

  “Does this date have a name?”

  Part of her wanted to make up a story, but she’d promised herself long ago that she would never lie to her daughter. Dodging the truth, she’d determined, was not the same as deception though. Sometimes omission was the best for everyone.

  “His name is Christopher,” she said simply. No need for further explanation.

  But Ella wouldn’t let it go. “Christopher who?”

  “Christopher Westcott.”

  Ella placed the open album on top of another box, examining the picture. “Was he stuffy?”

  Heather turned the page and there was a silly picture of Christopher making a face as he pinned a rose on her dress. She laughed again as she had done many years before. “Not a bit.”

  When she looked up, Ella was searching her face. “Why didn’t you marry him?”

  “At the time, my parents didn’t like him much.”

  Ella crossed her arms over her chest. “Your parents didn’t like Dad either.”

  “It didn’t matter to me or to your father what my parents thought.”

  Ella glanced back down at the picture. “But it mattered to Christopher—”

  “I suppose it did.” There was much more, but she didn’t want to tell Ella how she thought she would marry Christopher, no matter what her parents said. She’d never had the opportunity to marry him. Instead of fighting for her, he’d broken her heart.

  “Whatever happened to Mr. Westcott?” Ella asked.

  “He went to one of the colleges in Oxford,” Heather said, trying to sound much more casual than she felt.

  “So he turned stuffy?”

  Heather shrugged. She didn’t want to think about Christopher anymore.

  When Ella reached for another album, Heather stepped toward the open door. Excusing herself, she walked along the overgrown stone path to the gardens behind the house. Two chairs and a table were on the back patio, protected by mildew-stained covers. She zigzagged among the new weeds and tufts of old flowers, the perennials that somehow survived without her mum’s care.

  Mum had died twenty-three years ago, not long after Heather moved to the States. She had grieved in this garden while her father grieved in the house. Her mother’s presence was deeply rooted in every corner of these beds, in every flower that continued to bloom long after its caregiver was gone.

  Memories began to flood back. Dad pushing her in the swing that hung from the giant oak. Mum spreading out a picnic of tomato-and-cheese sandwiches, fresh plums, and bread with blackberry jam. Each of her parents holding one of her hands as she waded in the fractured threads of the river down in the forest. She’d been born to her parents later in their marriage, and they’d poured their love into her.

  Even though Ella had been raised in Portland, Heather tried to gift her daughter with the same happy childhood she’d had in England.

  A rushed archway cut through the overgrown hedges surrounding her mum’s secret garden. Heather pushed away the vines draped over the arch and entered the place that had once been a haven for Mum and for her.

  She sat on a stone bench and looked up at a tower above the hedge. It was impossible to see Ladenbrooke Manor from the main road, but from here, she could catch a glimpse of it.

  When she was a child, she’d often wondered about the old manor. Some said the place was haunted, but she thought it mysterious. Sometimes when she was a girl, she would wander through the wrought-iron gate along Ladenbrooke’s stone wall. The fragrance from flowers on the other side captivated her along with the beauty of the gardens. The butterflies reminded her of the fairies she’d loved as a child and, when she was older, of the fairies dancing through the magical garden in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Shakespeare was born forty miles from here. In Stratford-upon-Avon. Perhaps the gardens in the Cotswolds inspired him as they once inspired her.

  When Heather was growing up, her mum told her the Croft family used to allow the community to explore their gardens for one day each summer, but after Oliver died, they’d moved away and never opened their gardens to the public again. As a child, she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to keep all of that beauty to themselves, but she understood now as an adult. Oliver’s parents were probably trying to preserve their son’s legacy.

  She also remembered an overgrown maze near the bottom of the gardens at Ladenbrooke, with a brick wall surrounding three sides of it. In the middle was a tower crafted to look like one of the three towers on the manor. When she was a girl, she’d tried to find the path to the garden tower but instead had become lost near the maze. That day, a young woman found her and guide
d her home.

  Or at least, she thought there had been a woman. Sometimes she wondered if it had been only a dream.

  The shadows began to crawl across the hedge, toward her bench. As if they were chasing her. Leaning back, she refused to run, basking instead in the trailing rays of sun.

  “Mom?” Ella called out.

  “I’m back here.”

  Ella turned the corner around the archway and stepped into the garden. She held up her iPhone and tapped on the screen. “He’s a professor of theology at Wycliffe Hall.”

  Heather held out her arms to soak in the last of the sunlight. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Christopher Westcott.” Ella sat on the bench next to her. “If he wasn’t stuffy before, I guarantee you he is now.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me whether he’s stuffy or not.”

  Ella kept scrolling down on her phone. “He’s written a bunch of magazine articles.”

  Heather already knew Christopher was a professor at one of the colleges in Oxford. A few years ago, she’d searched for him online to find out what happened to him. She’d found his biography and then surfed from one article to the next, reading about his views on everything from ecclesiology to eschatology. Then she’d closed her laptop and vowed never to check up on him again. Curiosity was one thing. Obsession was quite another.

  She’d wanted to ask about Christopher when she came to visit her father, but there was no good reason, she figured, to inquire about him. Her father never mentioned Christopher though he’d talked about the Westcotts on occasion, telling her when Christopher’s siblings had married or when Mr. and Mrs. Westcott became grandparents.

  “There’s nothing about a wife or children in this article,” Ella said.

  “I’m sure he married a long time ago.”

  Ella slipped her phone back into her pocket. “You should drive to Oxford and see him while you’re here. Get a pint together.”

  “I hate beer.”

  “Then take tea.” Ella tilted her head. “And don’t tell me that you hate that as well.”

  “His wife probably wouldn’t appreciate that.”

  “You don’t know he’s married—”

  “Even so,” she said with a sigh. “I’m not stalking a boyfriend I haven’t seen in almost thirty years.”

  “It would be reconnecting, not stalking.”

  Heather glanced at her watch. “Don’t you have to pack?”

  “I’m finished. All I have left to do tonight is call Matthew.”

  Heather smiled. “You do realize you’ll be seeing him in two days.”

  “Yes, but that seems like an eternity.”

  Heather sighed. “I’m going to miss you.”

  Ella kissed her cheek. “I’m going to miss you too.”

  Her daughter had grown up years ago, and yet every time they said good-bye, Heather still had trouble letting her go. But Ella had a home and a husband now, far from Portland. Heather had her studio in Oregon and plenty of peace.

  She stood, and they began walking back to the house. Four in the morning would be excruciating, but they had to leave early for Ella’s flight.

  With her daughter gone, she’d work even harder to finish the daunting task before her. Instead of going to Oxford, she would finish her work at the cottage as soon as possible and then return to Oregon for good.

  PART TWO

  Looking back over my life, the answers seem so clear, but it’s meaningless—perhaps even dangerous—to see the past clearly without using that 20/20 of hindsight to sculpt the future.

  Some people, when they discover the terrible things that happened in their past, drape that knowledge around them like a cloak of bitterness. They may even dig deep and wallow in it for a season. Or a lifetime.

  Libby wasn’t like other children, but I’ve learned now that no two children are alike. Every child struggles in some way and excels in another. I just didn’t appreciate Libby’s strengths as much as I criticized what I thought were weaknesses.

  I tried to bury my anger when she was young, but it seeped through as bitterness at first; then resigned itself into apathy. I had wanted children, many of them. Instead I was given one child who wasn’t my own. One who didn’t seem to want me as her father.

  I thought I knew all about God back then, but I relied only on myself. And I failed both myself and those I loved miserably. In my misery, I brought others down to wallow with me, and I learned that wallowing can be a messy business.

  The ugliness of my anger replaced the beauty in life, and Libby craved beauty more than anything. Beauty and freedom.

  Perhaps the past should be used more like the frame of eyeglasses as we look forward, the mirrors of a periscope to help reflect what lies ahead instead of a magnifying glass to analyze every detail behind us. For it’s not just what we learn about the past that’s important. What we discover changes how we view the past, and then we can choose—quite deliberately—to change our future.

  Instead of wallowing, I should have protected Libby. Given her the desires of her heart inside a perimeter of love and care. Like the Father above wants to do with each of His children.

  I thought Libby needed me, but really I needed her and the gifts she had to offer our family.

  God gave me a daughter, the desire of my heart, but in order to succeed as a father, I had to rely on Him. And show Libby how to rely on Him as well.

  Perhaps this is why God often gives us our desires in a different way than we expect. Perhaps it’s because He knows exactly what we need.

  JULY 1959, LADENBROOKE MANOR

  Forest stretched from the edge of the gardens behind Ladenbrooke Manor, down to the banks of the swift River Coln. The water rushed over branches and stones as it swept past the boundaries of the Croft property and then plunged down a hill that separated British nobility from the commoners.

  On the hillside above the river and trees, Ladenbrooke Manor stood as a grand monument to the prominent Croft family, aristocrats whose bloodline stretched centuries back to the Norman Conquest.

  The manor house was built in the eighteenth century, and its walls were a weathered, gray stone with three towers that rose above the slate roof—two towers facing the stone gatehouse in front of the house and one overlooking the terraced gardens in the back. Glass from dozens of windows glimmered in the afternoon sunlight, and the tall windows along the dining hall reflected the fountain on the patio terrace.

  A stone curtain enclosed the house and forest, the Croft gardens and fruit orchards, forging a distinct line between Ladenbrooke and the outside world. The main gate into Ladenbrooke was used only by the Crofts and their guests; employees and those delivering packages used the gate along the wall nearest to the village. On the opposite wall, there was a much smaller gate—this one wrought iron and used originally by the team of gardeners employed before the Great War.

  There were a dozen buildings on the estate—a stable, nuttery, old kitchen house, dovecote, icehouse, and several follies built among the gardens for decor. Outside the wall the Croft property included farmland, barns, and several cottages where their servants and farmers resided.

  The war with Germany had knocked many of the aristocratic families down a notch or two, their grand homes crumbling from neglect and decay, but the Croft family clung to their status and property like the wisteria clung to the stone towers on their house.

  The hill between the manor and forest displayed layers of Lady Croft’s prized gardens. Paved pathways wove through a formal Italian garden, rose garden, water garden, lily pond, and a tulip garden built around Roman ruins.

  Maggie stood beside a statue of the goddess Hemera and a row of yew bushes that had been neatly pruned into a wall to form the perimeter of the Croft family maze. Walter sat nearby on a picnic blanket as she scanned the hillside above the maze to see if she could find Libby’s copper-streaked hair among the immaculate gardens and all the people dressed in their finest for this entree into Ladenbrooke’s gardens.<
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  The Croft family opened the front gate to the public once each summer. Hundreds of people from around the Cotswolds came to peruse Lady Croft’s magnificent displays—the golden heather, purple dahlias, peach lilies floating on the pond. Some of them might hope to catch a glimpse of one of the elusive Croft family members or visit the rooms inside, but the Croft family always fled to their home near London before the locals descended.

  Thousands of Londoners visited this area during their summer holiday, but only the people from Bibury and surrounding villages knew about this annual event. It was one of the many secrets the local population kept to themselves. And Maggie had a deep appreciation for people who knew how to keep secrets.

  Walter had found work as a postmaster soon after they’d arrived in Bibury, four years ago, and a year later, she’d begun working as a housekeeper at Ladenbrooke. Walter tolerated his work, and her position allowed her to bring Libby to work each day. She doubted Lady Croft would let her bring Libby if she was a lively child, but the Crofts employed a quite capable nanny who watched Libby along with Sarah and Oliver, the Croft’s young children.

  Libby sat in the nursery with the Croft children on rainy days and quietly colored or cut shapes out of paper; on sunny days, Lady Croft allowed her to play in the gardens. Oliver and his sister fought over toys, and sometimes even fought over who would play with Libby, but according to the nanny, Libby wasn’t interested in playing with either child.

  On the other side of the yew bushes, children laughed and called to one another as they traversed the winding maze toward one of the follies—a stone tower built to look like one of the towers on the manor house. The head housekeeper at the estate told Maggie the tower was built by a former Lord Croft, an aristocrat back in the 1700s who had more money than sense about him. The current Lord Croft, she said, was particular about his finances and even more particular about his family.

  Today dozens of children from the village played in the gardens and trees below the manor house, but neither Sarah nor Oliver Croft were playing among them. Both Lord and Lady Croft thought the children of Bibury might somehow taint their offspring.