Eventually the dusk thickened and she turned her head to one side to listen to the high-pitched squeak of bats as they swooped to snatch small moths from the air. Suddenly conscious she wasn’t alone, Mathilde looked across to the small coppice beside her. She hadn’t heard anything; whoever or whatever was there, was stealthily quiet.
Keeping perfectly still, she held her breath and waited for whatever it was to make a move, which surely it must sooner or later. Then as her eyes adjusted, she thought she saw a dark shape in the shadows. Was it a deer? It was now dark under the thick shaded canopy of summer leaves and she could just make out the indistinct outline of someone standing with their head bowed. Black on black. She screwed her eyes up; whoever it was blended into the velvet darkness so well she could barely see him. What were they doing there?
‘’ello? Who is there?’ she called. There was no response and as she spoke the person turned away from her and was gone.
Thinking the visitor had walked away through the woods towards the stables, she jumped to her feet and hurried around the exterior of the trees to surprise them at the other side. It was now too dark and far too overgrown to be able to catch up as she crashed through the undergrowth. When she got to the other side, the person was nowhere to be seen. And, she told herself, in truth she hadn’t expected to find anyone there. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen something that couldn’t be explained: a guest from another time. She was certain that was who’d been visiting her. Although what he was doing in the middle of the woods, she had no idea.
From somewhere close to the house she heard Rachel calling to her, but hunching her shoulders and pushing her hands in her pockets Mathilde slipped around the side of the house and opening her van she crept inside and lay down beneath her blanket. There was so much racing around her head she simply couldn’t take any more. She couldn’t adjust to the present, while she was still trying to understand her past.
The following morning after a surprisingly good night’s sleep in her van, Mathilde appeared in the kitchen early. The others were already there, Fleur slowly eating a bowl of cereal, dripping milk from the bottom of her spoon into her lap.
‘Coffee?’ she smiled hesitantly at Rachel, unsure of her reception after her outburst the previous evening. Any frostiness she may encounter would be her own fault and after a night’s sleep she could see that.
Ruffling Fleur’s hair as she walked past she took a piece of toast from the plate on the table, wedging it in her mouth before dropping three large spoons of coffee granules into her cafetiere. She held it up and raised her eyebrows but Rachel smiled and shook her head pouring herself more tea. Sisters they may be but their upbringing firmly dictated their early morning drinking habits.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mathilde said, turning to face her sister, ‘I was too sharp last night, it wasn’t fair of me.’
‘No,’ Rachel held her hand up to stop Mathilde saying anything else, ‘you don’t need to apologise. I can’t begin to imagine what this must be like for you, it’s all been a huge shock. It’s fine honestly. Look, we’ve had a letter,’ Rachel showed her an envelope, ‘it was pushed through the door when I came downstairs this morning. It’s addressed to both of us so I opened it but really it concerns you.’
Mathilde paused, her coffee cup halfway to her mouth.
‘It’s from Aunt Alice. She must have gone home and really wound herself up because it says that she’s taking legal advice to contest the will. But don’t worry she won’t be able to. I was with Dad when it was drawn up and Mr Murray knows it’s all sound. It could get messy if it goes to court though.’
‘Contest? There is a contest?’ Mathilde’s face creased in confusion.
‘No,’ Rachel laughed, ‘in English that means she’s going to try and change the will, by going to court and asking a judge to give her the house instead of you. But it won’t happen so don’t worry.’
Mathilde shrugged. She had enough to think about without their hysterical aunt to contend with as well. Hopefully the woman would keep her distance.
‘So,’ Rachel changed the subject, ‘what are your plans for today? Did Mr Murray give you the deeds and a map of the estate?’
‘No, he said they come from … land people?’
‘Land Registry I expect,’ Rachel nodded, ‘they have to register you as the new owner and they’ll probably send you a copy of the deeds. Then you may be able to see who owned the hall over the years, depending on how old the paperwork is. I was intending to go through some more of our father’s belongings today, would you like to help?’
‘Yes, thank you, I’d like that.’ Mathilde nodded, her mouth widening into a smile. She wanted to discover more about her father, this man who’d been lost to her almost her entire life. If the cab he’d been travelling in had just been a minute earlier, everything would have been different. She’d have been living here with her maman; Rachel wouldn’t have been born but perhaps she’d have had other siblings. It was like a mirror, looking in on a life she’d almost lived.
‘I’ve already sorted out Dad’s clothes.’ Rachel walked towards the hall, talking over her shoulder, as Mathilde followed. ‘There was nothing even worth donating to charity; he liked to wear his old gardening clothes morning, noon and night. He was a right scruff!’ she laughed to herself remembering, ‘he used to say he’d had enough of wearing a suit to work for years and he was going to spend retirement feeling comfortable.’ Mathilde tried to imagine him in khaki shirts with the sleeves rolled up and baggy trousers tucked into wellington boots. She’d spotted the boots still stood beside the back door, as if waiting for him to slip his feet in, one last time.
Rachel led her down a short, narrow passageway behind the stairs and into a room at the back of the house. It wasn’t large but it was flooded with light from a window that looked out over the sprawling vegetable garden close to where Mathilde had laid her pots of herbs.
‘This was his office,’ Rachel explained, holding her arms out to the side. Her voice cracked slightly and Mathilde looked across to her, feeling an unexpected scratchiness behind her eyes. They smiled at each other and Rachel rubbed Mathilde’s back for a moment as if soothing a child. There was a brief pinprick of empathy, both of them washed with the same brushstroke of sadness for their father, a sharing of emotions. A sensation Mathilde had never experienced before.
The walls were lined with shelves haphazardly stacked with books together with the dusty remains of the detritus of his life; a mug proclaiming the delights of Southwold filled with pens, document storage boxes, frames filled with photographs. Mathilde gazed round the room trying to drink it all in. Everything in here was a part of him. She closed her eyes trying to feel blindly for his spirit, his essence, some tangible evidence he was still in there with them. She wondered if he’d been the shadowy figure beneath the trees the previous night.
‘As you can see, he wasn’t a very tidy person. Thankfully he only lived at the back of the house for the last ten years, all those formal rooms I showed you have been covered in dust sheets and closed for ages.’
‘This desk is lovely,’ Mathilde ran her fingers across the tooled leather inlaid into its dark mahogany top. It was solid, appearing to have grown up out of the floor, its roots buried beneath the ancient frame of the house and now pitted and scarred by centuries of use.
‘Dad kept everything important in here,’ Rachel explained dropping to her knees and pulling out a deep drawer at the bottom of the pedestal. ‘I’ve seen this before of course,’ she took out a sturdy cardboard box and laid it on the desk, removing the lid and tipping it up slightly so Mathilde could see the contents. ‘It’s everything he collected and kept about you, your life.’
On top was a faded photograph of a young couple with a baby held between them, in front of a backdrop of mountains. Mathilde lifted it out and for a moment she pressed it against her chest and squeezed her eyes tight, determined not to let the tears out, before looking again.
‘It’s us, my p
arents and me,’ she whispered, ‘I’ve never seen a photo of us before but I recognise this dress, my maman wore it for years and years. Maybe she remembered when this photo was taken. Mourning him.’ Laying it reverently on the desk she began to sort through the rest of the contents, spreading out everything carefully until they created a patchwork of her first twelve months, a prelude to the life she should have had.
‘See here, these are clippings of articles our father wrote for the paper, when he was in Beirut,’ Rachel began to point, ‘and these are adverts he placed in newspapers, trying to find you. Both in Lebanon and later in France. He eventually managed to find a government official who confirmed your mother had left with other refugees. And look,’ she picked up a tatty, folded map, ‘he ringed everywhere on this map of France he went looking for you.’
‘He was so close to us, if only we’d known,’ Mathilde murmured gazing at the areas marked.
‘Where exactly were you living?’ Rachel stood beside her.
‘All over this département,’ Mathilde waved her hand over the area around Toulouse, ‘we moved about constantly. Always. My mother insisted it was the only way to stay safe. She was so traumatised from the war, the constant bombing, she had nightmares her whole life, couldn’t hold down a proper job; she was forever broken. She’d lost my father, our home, her whole life, and she never recovered. When she didn’t feel too bad she’d work in bars or pick fruit in summer. We had to find places to live and they were always temporary. Sometimes we’d squat in barns or derelict houses and occasionally we’d find a holiday cottage to break into. I didn’t always go to school; if my mother was in a dark place, I needed to stay with her. We dressed differently, we didn’t blend in. We were often suspected of stealing so we kept moving on, we had no option. And then, when I was sixteen, she died in a fire. A curtain caught on a candle flame. I was out and when I returned the cottage was ablaze. Since then, I’ve been on my own.’
‘How awful, I’m so sorry, it’s incredibly sad you had to live like that. I’m glad you’re here now and that we finally found you. This is your home from now on. Please always remember how much our father loved you.’ Rachel wrapped her arms around her and for a moment Mathilde relaxed into the warmth of another human body. It was alien to her but she admitted to herself, it felt good.
‘It’s not that easy,’ she said in a quiet voice, ‘I can’t just change into someone I’m not. Travelling, living day to day, that’s who I am. It’s all I’ve ever known. All this,’ she waved her hands around the room, ‘it’s too late. I don’t deserve it. I don’t even remember my father so why would I stay here?’
‘Because you do deserve it.’ Rachel hugged her closer, ‘just because you had a hard start in life doesn’t mean you have to carry on that way, it’s not a sentence to be served in perpetuity.’ Mathilde frowned and Rachel paused for a moment before saying: ‘Forever. You don’t have to carry on leading that nomadic lifestyle, now you have the chance for a fresh start. Although your beginnings were traumatic they don’t have to colour your whole life. Don’t you want to be a part of a family?’
‘I wanted it yes,’ Mathilde nodded, ‘it was everything I dreamed about growing up. We’d walk past big houses with toys in the garden and I’d wonder what it was like to grow up with maman and papa and a proper house to go back to every day, year after year. Always there in the same place. A secure place to anchor in the storm when people came after you, shouting at you to move on. Except nobody would do that, would they, if you lived in a house all the time, if you’d put down roots?’
‘Then let me in and I can help you,’ Rachel whispered.
A shout from the living room interrupted them, and with an apologetic grimace Rachel left the room leaving Mathilde standing in the same spot, paused in time. The smallest speck of her angst against the world dissipated into the air as her shoulders dropped, just a fraction. Her enduring belief her father had abandoned them by dying that day had been based on a misunderstanding and yet it had coloured everything, her whole life. Was it really possible to change now? If she opened her arms to this new family could she really trust them?
Her lower lip was caught between her teeth as she carefully packed everything away in the box again, placing it back into the drawer from which Rachel had taken it. As she did so, she heard a knock against the wood and sliding her fingers in they touched something cold and metallic. She grabbed and pulled hard, drawing out a smooth round object attached to a long, fine chain. It was tarnished and dull but it appeared to be gold, and as she turned it over in her hand, it sparked a memory. She remembered the painting in the chapel, the one she and Rachel had thought was a snake. It wasn’t though she realised, they were mistaken; it was a chain with a locket on the end. She wondered what the connection between this item and the chapel was as she went to share her discovery with her sister.
Chapter Twelve
April 1584
In the murky gloom of twilight as the day began drifting towards night, Tom went as he did every evening to ensure the plants in the physic garden were all well-watered, and to put the top on the small frame he’d made for the vanilla. He was nurturing it as carefully as if it were his own child.
He loved being outside and always took as long as he dared, ambling around the gardens, the scent of the individual plants as familiar as friends. The gardeners and cooks knew not to touch anything, especially as some plants may be poisonous if used incorrectly. Out here the air was fresh, he could smell the river even though he couldn’t see it, and through a gate at one end of the kitchen garden he could see the flowers laid out in beds in the formal gardens where the Queen and her retinue often walked on fine days. The comparison with the stuffy, dark interior of the palace was great.
Standing up from plucking off the tops of some thyme, Tom watched as two men strode across the garden from the direction of the gate. Despite the thickening night and their dark clothes, with his sharp eyesight he could see they were dressed impeccably and were heading straight for him. He felt a shudder of trepidation twist in his gut. Whoever these men were, their sombre countenance and the supreme confidence they exuded, scared him. As they approached, he removed his cap and bowed politely, before standing up again and waiting for one of them to address him.
The slighter of the men dressed all in black, with dark, swarthy skin began to speak, his white teeth shining in the dusk. He spoke quickly and Tom had to catch some words to decipher what he was saying.
‘It is said at court that you are both deaf and mute, is this true?’ the man asked. Tom nodded. ‘But you can tell what I am saying?’ Tom nodded again. Wasn’t that obvious, given his previous answer?
‘I’m informed you understand what people say, just by watching their mouths?’ Tom paused, unsure how to answer. If people were speaking very fast or their mouths were obscured, or they weren’t English or French then no, he couldn’t. But he wasn’t able to explain all that so instead he relied on his hand signals and holding out his hand, palm down, he rocked it from side to side, hoping they realised he meant both yes and no.
‘Hugh tells us you travelled here from France?’ Tom wondered where this questioning was going, given that the French and English were not remotely friendly. He nodded a little more hesitantly.
‘So, you speak French? This is good. Did you meet any Frenchmen on the boat over that you have since seen at court?’ This time Tom wasn’t certain he’d understood correctly, and shook his head.
‘Excellent. My name is Sir Francis Walsingham and this gentleman is my Lord Burghley.’ The man held out a piece of parchment with the two names written on it. ‘We work for the Queen. Sometimes she requires people to collect information for her without divulging it to anyone and pass it on to me. Do you understand?’ Tom was becoming fed up with all the questions and wished he was in a position to ask a few of his own. He wasn’t remotely sure he wanted to work for these two gentlemen. He was happy in the peaceful garden and in the stillroom where he only needed to commun
icate with Hugh and where he knew what he was doing. At least, it had been peaceful. Before he could try and explain that he’d rather decline their suggestion, the man called Walsingham continued.
‘I see that you are hesitating but I think you misunderstand me. We will assume that you are confused because you could not hear what I said. I am not a man to say “no” to, unless you wish to end your stay in London far quicker than you had intended. The Thames washes up bodies in the swirling waters beneath London Bridge almost every day. Miscreants – and people who do not do as others wish – find themselves unsteady on their feet as they walk along the riverbank where it is easy to slip on the mud and be pulled under the water by the strong current. I’d hate for that to happen to you, Tom Lutton.’ Tom had understood everything that Walsingham had said that time and the way both men were standing, upright and foreboding, shoulder to shoulder, told him even more than the speech that had just been delivered. He looked them both in the eye and nodded his acquiescence, despite the intense rush of foreboding that washed over him.
‘Good.’ Walsingham’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘As I say, you could be very useful to us. Sometimes I may ask you to watch people and see what they disclose, then write it down and bring it to me. Hide in the shadows, nay, hide in plain sight. Nobody will suspect you, as you seemingly cannot hear what anyone is saying nor whisper it in others’ ears. You could make an exceptional spy. Do not tell of what we have said and we will call for you when we have need of your skills.’
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