That Summer

by Lauren Willig

  Cautiously, Julia took a step closer. She was lighter than he was; with any luck, she probably wouldn’t go plunging through anything. “Nick?”

  He looked up at her, and something in his face made the smile die on her lips. Slowly, he rose to his feet, gesturing Julia forward. “Look at this.”

  “This doesn’t sound good,” she said, her eyes on his face, not the floor. She squatted down where he had been, squinting into the dark cavity.

  At first, she thought it was a twig. It was brittle and brown. But twigs didn’t have fingers. There was a hand lying on the packed earth beneath the floor of the summerhouse, a hand that had, until recently, been attached to an arm. Julia rocked back onto her heels, blinking against the sunlight, seeing dark spots against her eyes.

  There was a corpse. In her summerhouse.

  Or, rather, under her summerhouse.

  Julia staggered to her feet. “That’s a hand,” she said unnecessarily.

  Nick took her place by the side of the hole, tugging at the splintered edges of the board, trying to enlarge the gap. “You must have some tools—an ax?”

  Julia hovered behind him. “Shouldn’t we leave the body where it is?” she asked, with vague recollections of CSI episodes. “In case we’re destroying evidence?”

  “I don’t think we need to worry about that.” Nick looked up at her over his shoulder. “Whatever this is, it’s been here a long time.”

  “Not whatever,” said Julia soberly. “Whoever.”

  She hadn’t paid terribly much attention in ninth-grade bio class, but even she could identify a human skeleton when she saw one. The only plus side that she could see was that it couldn’t have been recent; didn’t it take the body some time to decompose all the way down to the bone like that? There had been no flesh on those skeletal fingers.

  The thought was enough to make her feel cold in the heat of the day.

  Nick had no such reservations. Working industriously away, he had succeeded in widening the gap so that about a square foot of the ground beneath the summerhouse was bared. He pointed at something next to the body. “The poor sod had his luggage with him when he died.”

  Gingerly, Julia knelt by the edge of the broken section. It felt curiously like one of those viewing stations at a nature museum, as if she were on a macabre sort of class trip. Mercifully, she couldn’t see the skull; the section Nick had cleared revealed a torso, clad in a rotting jacket with tarnished buttons and legs in the tattered remains of trousers.

  Beside him, next to his outflung hand, lay a large leather bag. The brown leather was disfigured with patches of green mold, gnawed through in part by rodents. The contents had fared equally poorly. A smell of must and mold rose from the whole.

  Julia’s attention was caught by a flat, rectangular parcel. Unlike the satchel, it appeared to be largely intact, wrapped in a dark, tightly woven fabric.

  As Nick tugged at the floorboards, attempting to widen the gap, Julia drew the package out of the hole, the fabric gritty against her fingers. It must have been treated with something. Wax, perhaps? It was dirty but hadn’t decayed.

  The wrappings came away with difficulty, revealing a large portfolio, the leather scratched and scraped with use but otherwise intact. Retreating to a relatively solid stretch of ground, Julia laid the portfolio flat on the floor, hunkered down on her haunches, and undid the string tie.

  The top sketch was of a man, kneeling, his head turned slightly away, one hand raised to shield his face in a gesture of contrition or shame. It looked like the visual equivalent of someone thinking aloud, bits drawn and then redrawn. Julia could see where portions had been rubbed out and reconstituted; the man’s legs looked as though they had been moved from one knee up, one knee down, to both knees on the ground. Even in the rough black and white sketch, she could tell that the man was wearing a stylized sort of armor and a helm and sword lay discarded by his side.

  He looked a lot like the figures from the Tristan and Iseult painting. In style, that was. She couldn’t remember that any of them had been in quite this pose.

  “I’m going to find an ax,” Nick said from somewhere over her shoulder. He sounded very cheerful at the prospect of getting to demolish a substantial subsection of her summerhouse. He thought about it. “Or a hammer. That would do.”

  Julia nodded, her attention fixed on the pictures in front of her. “There should be a garden shed,” she said vaguely, and felt the boards beside her creak as Nick edged past, intent on his mission of destruction.

  There was another study for the same painting, the same man, kneeling, but this time with a screen in front of him and a large chalice, floating seemingly in mid-air. The next one had a woman holding the chalice; the one after that reverted to the chalice elevated of its own accord, giving out rays of light like a Renaissance halo.

  Julia flipped through, with growing excitement, marking the stages of a picture in a progress, pages devoted to nothing but the set of an arm or fifteen versions of the same chalice. But it was the sketch of the woman that made her really stop short.

  This wasn’t the stylized lady of the Arthurian sketches. Her gown was tight waisted and full skirted, not the pseudo-medieval robe of the woman holding the Grail. She lay on her side on the grass on a blanket. A picnic basket sat open beside her, ripe apples spilling out onto the grass, giving an impression of fecundity and bounty.

  Somehow, even in nothing but black and white lines, the artist had managed to convey the impression of a sunny summer day, the grass thick below, lines of light and shadow falling across the woman’s supple body. She wore a demure dress, tightly buttoned to the waist, but the heavy skirts were tucked under and around her, creating an impression of softness despite the prim collar and long, fitted sleeves, a froth of petticoat showing beneath the hem of the skirt.

  The woman’s dark hair was soft and mussed with sleep. Her hands were tucked up under her face, and there was a slight smile on her lips, as though she was dreaming pleasant dreams.

  Julia knew those features. She had seen them, studied them, on the portrait on the drawing room wall and in the painting of Tristan and Iseult. There was none of the wild quality here that Julia had seen in those others; this woman wasn’t haunted or wracked with dangerous passions. She looked peaceful. Content.

  The sketches weren’t signed. They didn’t need to be.

  Julia heard the steps creak with Nick’s return. Without looking up from the sketch of the sleeping woman, she said, “Nick?”

  “Yes?” Nick hunkered down next to her, a hammer dangling from his hand.

  “Look at this.” Julia pushed the portfolio towards him. She looked at him soberly. “I don’t think Gavin Thorne ever made it to New York.”

  * * *

  The discovery of a 160-year-old corpse in the garden of a house in suburban London caused a mild media sensation.

  It was the silly season, Nick said, that was the problem. Whatever the reason, Julia found herself mobbed with inquiries from a dozen tabloids and local news stations. Had she ever felt anything strange in the house? Did they know who it was? Was the corpse only one of many?

  When Julia countered all questions with a terse no comment, they dredged up obscure historians with lisps who wagged their heads and talked of unsolved murder cases and legends of haunting, and, even worse, people who claimed they had once lived nearby and recounted with relish tales of odd moanings and wailings and clankings from the garden of the house at Herne Hill.

  “Can I sue?” Julia fumed to her best friend, Lexie. Admittedly, Lexie did corporate transactional work in the United States, not UK lawsuits, but a lawyer was a lawyer when all was said and done. “This is not going to help with my property values!”

  “You never know,” said Lexie helpfully. “Some people are willing to pay a premium for a haunted house.”

  People were certainly eager to come and gawk. On the second night of the onslaught, Julia was woken in the night by strange noises and lights flashing in the garden
, not from any spirits but from the ghost hunters who had snuck in by a gate she hadn’t even known existed, all the way down at the far end of the property, by the overgrown remains of an old orchard. After seeing them off the property, Julia had grimly nailed the gate shut. She’d hung up a few handmade Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted to the Full Extent of the Law signs as well, just for good measure. She had no idea what the law was in England vis-à-vis trespassers, but if one more film crew tried to sneak in at midnight for “ghostly messages” she fully intended to use it.

  It wasn’t all bad. Julia’s father and Helen offered to fly out to help her cope with the reporters; Jamie and Robbie just wanted to see the bones. The Tate approached her about buying Thorne’s paintings and sketches. A psychic offered to contact Thorne’s spirit for her for the reasonable price of only five thousand pounds.

  “Only five thousand pounds for the first hour and nineteen-ninety-nine for every subsequent communication?” said Julia to Nick at the end of the first week.

  She was getting a bit slaphappy by then. It was more than a little surreal to emerge from her house for groceries only to find reporters with fuzzy microphones standing on the sidewalk. No wonder celebrities were so skinny; they couldn’t leave their homes for sustenance. She didn’t mind subsisting on the last of her stock of Tesco’s frozen dinners, but she did very much mind the fact that she was nearly out of coffee.

  “We can’t have that,” said Nick, and showed up at her door two hours later with two bulging sacks of groceries, among which were two pristine cans of illy coffee.

  She hadn’t seen Nick since they’d seen the bones into the hands of the local police the previous Sunday. The police had been justifiably bemused at being presented with a 160-year-old crime scene but had duly wrapped her summerhouse in crime scene tape all the same and taken the skeleton into custody. By the time they’d gotten through, it had been late, and Nick had an early flight to catch, a buying trip to various far-flung estates in France and Belgium. He’d offered to cancel, but Julia had told him it was fine, she could handle it.

  He must, she realized, opening the door to him in his suit and collared shirt, a tie tucked into his pocket and an overnight case slung over his shoulder, have come straight from the airport.

  “Bless you,” said Julia gratefully, accepting one of the bags and hastily bolting and locking the front door behind him. “But you could have gone home first.”

  She wasn’t quite sure what any of this meant. They’d spoken on the phone over the course of the week, but he had been in hotels and she’d been fuming over the idiocy of people who really believed you could track ghosts using a flashlight and a thermometer. There had been no time for state-of the relationship talks.

  “I couldn’t leave you under siege and uncaffeinated,” said Nick. “Some of the reporters might get hurt.”

  Instead of sitting in the kitchen, they lit the fire in Aunt Regina’s old study, with its wood-paneled walls and warm carpet. It also had the benefit of overgrown shrubbery blocking the window, as well as heavy drapes.

  Delighted as Julia was to see both Nick and his overnight bag, the prospect of The Star having a long-lens camera looking through the window in the hopes that she might stumble on another corpse did put a distinct damper on amorous thoughts.

  “How do people live like this?” Julia asked, drawing the drapes closed, thankful for whatever familial thrift had caused Aunt Regina to retain the anachronistically heavy curtains on their brass rods.

  “It will die down,” Nick said with authority, and Julia remembered that he had good reason to know. He’d been that two-week wonder once, in much more painful circumstances.

  “I don’t know,” said Julia. “I was rather tempted by the one who offered me a private séance with Gavin Thorne, results guaranteed. It would be nice to have a firsthand account of what actually happened out there.”

  In deference to their surroundings, while Nick had built the fire Julia had made a pot of tea in Aunt Regina’s battered brown pot, paired, incongruously, with a set of delicate Spode cups and saucers. Among the bounty in Nick’s grocery bags had been a variety of biscuits, so Julia had arranged ginger biscuits and chocolate fingers on a plate and now they sat, surrounded by crumbs and warmed by tea, on Aunt Regina’s comfortably saggy old sofa, watching the flames in the fireplace snap and crackle.

  Nick had discarded his jacket, which hung limply off the side of the couch. His collar was open and his feet were stretched comfortably out in front of him.

  It all felt very cozily domestic, but for the reporters outside and, of course, the hole in the floor of the summerhouse where Gavin Thorne’s body had lain, unsanctified, for the past 160 years.

  “At least now we know that Thorne didn’t run off on Imogen Grantham,” said Nick. His arm stretched out along the back of the sofa, brushing Julia’s shoulder. “Poor sod.”

  “Poor Imogen,” countered Julia, allowing herself the luxury of leaning into his arm. “Can you imagine, all those months, living in this house, wondering what had happened to her lover? I wonder if she suspected, or if she just thought that Thorne had abandoned her.”

  Among the belongings found on the body, worn by time but still legible, had been papers and tickets for a Mr. and Mrs. Gareth Rose. Julia found it ironic that they had been bound for New York. It was enough to make one wonder about karma. If they had made it to New York—if Imogen’s daughter had been born there—

  Then Julia’s mother would never have met her father and there would have been no her, she reminded herself. But it struck Julia strongly, all the same, that she had wound up where Gavin and Imogen had intended to be.

  She curled her legs up underneath her, resting her arm against the back of the couch. “In some ways, it makes it sadder. To think that they were so close to happiness and someone stopped them.”

  Nick snagged a ginger biscuit from the plate. “‘Stopped’ is such a tasteful euphemism,” he murmured. “As opposed to ‘walloped,’ ‘whacked,’ or ‘otherwise slaughtered.’”

  The police had managed to confirm that the bones were of the right time period, give or take a few decades, and that the skull showed signs of fracture, presumably with some sort of blunt instrument.

  “It’s like a game of Clue,” said Julia. “Do you think it was the candlestick in the conservatory or the fireplace poker in the library?”

  “Or a gentleman’s walking stick,” suggested Nick. He crunched down on his biscuit with obvious relish, scattering crumbs across his knees. “There’s one logical suspect in all this.”

  It didn’t take much to figure out what he was thinking. “Hell hath no fury like a husband wronged?”

  “Divorce wasn’t easy back then.” He leaned back, regarding her speculatively. “If Imogen Grantham was having an affair with Gavin Thorne in 1849 and her daughter was born in 1850 … Did it ever occur to you that Thorne might be your great-great-grandfather?”

  “Actually, no,” said Julia slowly. It had all seemed like a story in a book, something long ago and far away, with no practical application. Purely of academic interest. “That’s … wow.”

  Nick took another bite of his biscuit, looking far too pleased with himself. “It would explain the artistic strain.”

  Julia narrowed her eyes at him. “I thought you were the one who said these things didn’t necessarily run in families. Or what was that about your notable performance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

  “Notable for being anything but notable,” Nick corrected. He twisted his head to look at her. “Don’t you like the idea?”

  Julia leaned back against the cushions, trying to make sense of it all. “In the abstract, yes.” It was kind of neat to think of being descended from one of the original Pre-Raphaelites. “But it doesn’t really make any difference, does it? I’m still the same me I was before, whether I’m descended from Gavin Thorne or the dustman.”

  “Or William the Conquerer—if your cousin Caroline is to be believed,” said Nick bla
ndly.

  Julia lobbed a small embroidered pillow at him.

  He ducked neatly, saying, “But where it does matter is in terms of motive. If Grantham knew that his wife was carrying another man’s child…”

  “We don’t know that for sure. Even if she was, Grantham might have been happily ignorant. Did you see those piles and piles of diaries up in the attic? Those were their daughter’s—Olivia’s. It doesn’t sound like Grantham ever mistreated her or neglected her or ever gave any indication that he wasn’t her real father.”

  “He didn’t have to, did he?” Nick argued. “The adulterous parties were both dead. Easier to hush it up and play the doting father.”

  Julia wasn’t convinced. “You don’t think it would have come out, somehow, in his behavior if he’d known?”

  “People are unpredictable,” said Nick profoundly. “What we do know is that someone killed Thorne, here, on the grounds of this house, and had the means to stick him away under the summerhouse. Who else could it be?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Herne Hill, 1857

  It was a rainy Tuesday and Olivia Grantham needed someplace to hide.

  To be fair, she hadn’t meant to spill ink on Miss Penbury’s false curls. Penbury was terribly proud of her hairpiece, although how she could assume that anyone believed that it was real Olivia didn’t know. It wasn’t even the same color as the rest of her hair. The curls were a determined auburn, while the rest of Miss Penbury’s hair was a rather streaky grayish brown.

  Olivia had a strange fascination with those tightly rolled curls. So, when she had happened to come upon Miss Penbury’s hairpiece unattended …

  Really, she had just been looking at it. It was pure bad luck that she had happened to knock over that bottle of ink and even worse luck that Penbury had come in before Olivia had got it all sopped up. Apparently, dropping the false front into the washbasin hadn’t been at all the thing to do.