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The Last Days of Summer: The best feel-good summer read for 2017
Sophie Pembroke
‘easy to fall in love with, it’s delightfully warm and captivating’ - LovereadingHome at last…Summers at Rosewood were always about cocktails on the terrace and cream teas in the rose garden. Until two years ago, when Saskia broke her family apart…Receiving an invite to the most exclusive garden party in the country, Saskia knows she won’t be welcomed with open arms. But this is one event she can’t avoid, no matter how much she would like to hide from her past. It is finally time to face the music!Arriving back at Rosewood everything looks the same, but under the surface family secrets threaten to disturb the picture-perfect family celebration.Spend your summer at Rosewood, full of family, friendship and a chance to heal your heart.


SOPHIE PEMBROKE writes very British romance for Mills & Boon / Harlequin Romance, Avon and HQ. She has been dreaming, reading and writing romance ever since she read her first Mills & Boon as part of her English Literature degree at Lancaster University, so getting to write romantic fiction for a living really is a dream come true!
Born in Abu Dhabi, Sophie grew up in Wales and now lives in a little Hertfordshire market town with her scientist husband, her incredibly imaginative eight-year-old daughter, and her adventurous, adorable toddler son.
In Sophie’s world, happy is for ever after, everything stops for tea, and there’s always time for one more page…
Website: www.SophiePembroke.com (http://www.SophiePembroke.com)




Copyright (#ulink_cf91429f-c423-5a16-9a42-731500f300ff)
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2016
Copyright © Sophie Pembroke 2016
Sophie Pembroke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © April 2017 ISBN: 9780008193140
Version date: 2018-06-08
In memory of my own grandparents, Elfed and Olwen Whitley.
For everything you gave me that helped make me who I am today.
I miss you, every second.
Contents
Cover (#u7eab00d3-e5ed-56c3-99e4-18ff4b52ff32)
About the Author (#ucad6a272-4cd3-5ad1-9613-070932db2c35)
Title Page (#u6f99bc4e-a93d-5fa4-8391-eb2eb96e33be)
Copyright (#ubfec04e1-ce3e-5ce4-8fd8-e7f46941c066)
Dedication (#u58e70abf-3e10-53bd-8219-a10eb8bf38d7)
Prologue (#ulink_7c80077d-e25c-5039-988c-aec79bf2133b)
Chapter One (#ulink_a2236e7d-56bb-5ded-a1f2-1bdfde25b543)
Chapter Two (#ulink_a0a4a7c9-c652-5ffe-83e1-fb7a2980befb)
Chapter Three (#ulink_63761a26-458b-5023-9769-76c9670a2fd0)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Endpages (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_62729b42-6612-599a-9334-d4fa9bfb4dac)
“Home isn’t a place, Grace. It’s a feeling. An overwhelming emotion that, once you’ve felt it, you can’t live without.”
“A bit like love, then?” Grace asked.
I nodded. “Sometimes, I think they might be one and the same thing.”
Going Home, by Nathaniel Drury (1980)
I like to think that there’s a book for any feeling, any emotion, any problem. In my world, the cure for what ails you is always a new story, or, sometimes even better, an old one. Some might say it’s a distraction, a diversion from whatever is wrong with your reality. But for me, I often find the answers I’m seeking within the pages of a book – or at least by the time I’ve followed a story from beginning to end, I have a new perspective on my own problems.
I think I read more books in the two years after I left Rosewood than ever before in my life. Or since.
Sometimes I’d read romances, to remind myself that love could end happily. Sometimes I read fantasy novels, for the joy of a high quest and magical solutions. Sometimes I read literary fiction, to experience the world through another’s kaleidoscope. Sometimes I read children’s books, to escape to a simpler time.
And whenever I felt homesick, I read my grandfather’s books, and imagined I could hear him speaking the words to me.
I was homesick that Saturday morning in May, when the first phone call came.
Dressed in my pyjamas and dressing gown, I’d decided to laze around my tiny flat in Perth, Scotland, drinking too-strong black coffee and nibbling on endless pieces of toast, until I felt better. But instead, I found myself moving around the flat restlessly, a copy of Going Home in my hand, absorbing a page or two at a time before my own memories overtook me.
Nathaniel always claimed that the house in the story wasn’t Rosewood, the same way that Biding Time wasn’t about him and my grandmother, Isabelle. But as with all his books, every time I reread them, I found another hint, another clue, that led me towards the truth. Like a treasure hunt Nathaniel had laid out for me, he hid patches of his own history, his own life, in his fiction, waiting for me to find them.
Like the house. However much he denied it, the description of Honeysuckle House in Going Home matched Rosewood to the letter. Not just the honey-coloured brick, symmetrical Georgian design, or the twelve chimneys, or even the white-marble steps leading up to the front door. There was something about the feel of the place – the way he described the sun on the terrace when the gin and tonics were being poured, or the coolness of the middle room when the rain came down outside – that made it feel like home to me.
I flipped a few pages through the book again, pausing at a description of Honeysuckle House:
When the afternoon sun alighted on the windows, the whole house lit up, as if it were night and every lightinside had been left on. Inside, the house could be cold – Grace’s mother had decorated it in the latest styles, with lots of white and sharp edges. But she couldn’t cool the natural warmth of the house as I looked upon it, or sharpen the corners of the worn golden brick exterior. And when the house filled with people… Ah, that was when Honeysuckle House came alive. And so did Grace.
I put the book aside. I didn’t need Agnes’s descriptions of Grace’s house – not when I had my own memories of Rosewood. Of the Rose Garden, the Orangery, the sweeping staircase that dominated the main hallway. Of Nathaniel’s study, every inch crammed with books and papers.
And of Nathaniel, most of all. The way his voice boomed and echoed around Rosewood, or how he poured his drinks too strong, or how every meal became story time, somehow. How every little event of his day became a hysterical monologue by the time he’d finished telling it. And how he knew to listen, sometimes, and just be there – a warm, comforting, reassuring presence I’d relied on my whole life.
I’d always have my memories. It was just hard to imagine not knowing when I’d next be there in person. When I’d see my family again.
The phone rang, and I put my book aside, reaching past my empty coffee cup to answer it.
“Saskia? It’s your grandfather.” As if I couldn’t tell from his voice. “Now, tell me, did you see the ridiculous invitations your grandmother picked out for this Golden Wedding thing? You have to come home and help me through it.”
I frowned. “Golden Wedding?”
“Fifty years of wedded bliss and she wants another damned party.” Nathaniel’s voice dropped low, as if he were afraid someone might be listening. “Don’t worry, I’ve got something in mind to fire up the festivities. You really don’t want to miss it, Kia.”
It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to go home for my grandparents’ Golden Wedding anniversary. Isabelle and Nathaniel Drury knew how to throw a party, after all, and this was sure to be a big one. The sort of shindig people talked about for decades to come. In fact, people still told stories about the first ever party they held at Rosewood, back in 1966. There were reports in the society pages. Couples met at Isabelle’s parties, or got engaged – or even pregnant. But they weren’t the sort of parties I imagined when I thought of the sixties – I’d seen photos. Isabelle’s parties required full evening wear, champagne, important people – and enough drama to keep people gossiping for weeks afterwards.
There hadn’t been a party at Rosewood since Ellie’s wedding, as far as I knew. I didn’t want to miss it – and I really didn’t want to be the person at the hypothetical future dinner table saying, “I don’t know, I wasn’t there,” when someone asked, “And do you remember the bit when…”
I just didn’t know how welcome I’d be when I got to Rosewood.
“I didn’t get an invitation,” I said, as lightly as I could manage. “But I take your word for it that they’re awful.”
“Hideous,” Nathaniel said, with an audible shudder. He paused, then asked, “Did you really not get one?”
“Nope.” I ran my hand over the cover of Going Home. Apparently, I wasn’t. Isabelle knew every tiny detail of party etiquette, and obeyed it all, when it suited her. If she’d wanted me there, I’d have received an invitation. The fact that I hadn’t – or even any notice that the party was happening at all – told me exactly how welcome I’d be.
“Well, that’s stupid,” Nathaniel said. “You should have done. Consider this call your invite.”
I gave a small laugh. “I’m not sure that’s quite how it works.”
“It is now. It’s my party too, isn’t it?”
“Not really.” I was pretty sure that, in Isabelle’s head, the man she married was entirely incidental to the party she was throwing to celebrate that aforementioned marriage.
“Then I’m reclaiming it. And you’re invited.” There was a rustle of paper on the other end of the line, and I leapt on the noise as a way to change the subject.
“What are you working on?” I asked, trying to be interested in his answer. It had to be better than thinking about how my own grandmother didn’t want me there for a family party.
“I’ve been thinking about the nature of truth in fiction,” he replied, instantly distracted, as I’d known he would be.
“Truth in fiction?” I echoed, topping up my coffee. That sounded like a fairly epic procrastination exercise. I wondered what Nathaniel was supposed to be writing that required such distraction; he never liked to talk much about his works in progress until they were shiny and published and winning awards.
“Are all stories just reflections of ourselves? Are even the fictions we write based on the truths of our own lives?” I tried and failed to come up with a satisfactory response to what I hoped was a rhetorical question. “Take your work at the paper,” Nathaniel went on, apparently not noticing that I hadn’t responded. “How much do your own life and your life experiences colour the reports you write?”
Since most of what I wrote for the Perth Herald was based entirely on press releases, and my main concern was getting them all in on time, probably not a lot. But, on the other hand, I didn’t want Nathaniel thinking that I wasn’t properly investing in my artistic side, so I said, “Probably more than I know,” in what I hoped was a thoughtful voice.
“Exactly my point! So, the conclusion I’ve reached is that it is only through knowing ourselves, understanding our true selves, that we can hope to create anything meaningful in fiction.”
“That’s… interesting.” Did I have any more bread left for toast, I wondered? Not getting invited to a family party definitely deserved self-pity toast.
“So, you agree, then?”
“Absolutely.” Maybe even chocolate spread.
“Perfect! We can discuss it more when you visit this summer. For the Golden Wedding party.”
I froze, halfway through putting more bread in the toaster. “I can’t come, Nathaniel. Not if I’m not wanted there.”
“I want you there,” he said. “And I’m sure the others do too, even if they don’t know it yet. You wouldn’t let an old man down now, would you? Leave him to face all his wife’s acquaintances while wearing white tails and a bow tie? I’ll probably even have to make a speech…”
“I’m fairly sure you can cope with a party with your friends without me,” I said drily. “Besides, you love making speeches. You’ll survive.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You haven’t heard what I’ve got to say in this one, yet. Really, Kia. You don’t want to miss it. Trust me.”
There was something in his voice, a hint of mischief and possible magic, something I’d missed so much over the last two years, that it tugged at my heart to hear it again, trying to lead me home.
I wanted to be there. I wanted to go home, more than anything.
And so I said, “Okay. I’ll come.” Even though my brain was screaming that it was a terrible idea. Sometimes you have to let your heart win.
Nathaniel whooped. “Fantastic! Send me your train times. It’s August twenty-fourth. See you there!”
And with that, he hung up, leaving me wondering what on earth I might have to wear to a garden party thrown by Isabelle, not to mention the rest of the weekend.
After all, Rosewood was another world, a throwback to a time that had passed before Nathaniel and Isabelle even bought the house. We always dressed for dinner at Rosewood, and had pre-dinner drinks on the terrace if the sun shone. Rosewood didn’t have Wi-Fi, or video games, and Isabelle had even hidden the telly in the middle room, down the darkest downstairs corridor. Rosewood had stories, and mystery, and ghosts, and champagne… and my family, who hadn’t invited me home for the Golden Wedding.
Maybe, if I could find the right costume, the right clothes to blend in, no one would think to ask what I was doing there in the first place.
Chapter One (#ulink_a0d30fe6-3c64-59da-b808-36c1d5e14287)
“We’ll take it,” I said, making Bella laugh as she looked up at the imposing house.
“You can’t just buy it! We haven’t even stepped inside yet.”
I pulled her close against my side. “I don’t need to. This is it. This is home.”
Biding Time, by Nathaniel Drury (1967)
Two long years away, and the first person I saw upon my return to Rosewood was the ghost. Even if I didn’t quite realise it at the time.
I’ll admit, I was preoccupied. I hadn’t planned on going home so soon, not until Nathaniel called and insisted, and the temptation was too great to resist. Oh, I’d assumed I’d go back eventually, for a visit, at least. But two years away didn’t seem like enough. Two Christmases, two birthdays, two anniversaries – Ellie couldn’t possibly have forgiven me so soon.
This was a mistake. Which is why I was loitering in the Rose Garden instead of going inside.
The walled Rose Garden is one of my favourite spots at Rosewood, especially at midsummer, when it’s overflowing with flowers. As children, Ellie and I would mix up buckets of perfume from the petals: pungent flower water we’d sell to charitable passers-by at the end of the driveway. This year, however, it seemed that someone else had got there first.
Almost all the yellow rose bushes had been decapitated, leaving only stalks, leaves and thorns. As I blinked at the empty spaces where the flowers should be, I thought for a moment that I saw someone standing across the flower bed – a girl, younger than me, with long dark hair and pale features. The summer sun shone through her skin, lighting her up from the inside, like a creature from one of my grandfather’s more fantastical stories, only existing between one second and the next. Because when I opened my eyes, I was alone again, standing outside the house that was supposed to be my home, wondering if I’d be welcomed or dismissed.
Wasn’t that Rosewood all over? A place out of time, more fiction than real it seemed sometimes. Like Nathaniel had pulled the house itself from the pages of one of his books, complete with secrets and mysteries – even the paranormal.
Before I could fully process what I’d seen, my grandmother’s voice echoed out from the terrace, imperious and impatient, just as I remembered. Isabelle Drury was the mistress of Rosewood, and she never forgot it, not for a moment. It was more than a home to her; it was her kingdom, and she ruled it – and us, her willing subjects.
“We’ll need more of the eucalyptus. You can go and tell her.”
There was no response, and I found myself waiting, breath stuck in my chest, all thoughts of the strange girl forgotten. I wanted to hear another familiar voice, there, in the buzzing summer air, with its insects and pollen and freshly cut grass, rather than over a too-clear phone line. I wanted to feel like I was really home again.
I hadn’t intended to come back to Rosewood so soon. But now that I was here, I couldn’t imagine how I’d stayed away so long.
“And don’t forget the etched vase,” my grandmother’s voice rang out again. I smoothed down my hopelessly creased pale linen skirt and stepped out of the Rose Garden. Time to face the music.
Isabelle had moved back inside, and whichever family member she’d been ordering about had obviously rushed off to fulfil her demands; haste was always a good idea when dealing with my grandmother’s requests. The terrace was deserted again.
“In and out,” I muttered to myself as I retrieved my suitcase. “Minimum casualties.” That was the plan. This was a tester weekend. If it wasn’t dreadful beyond all measure, maybe I could come back for Christmas. Start finding a place here again. Maybe even find forgiveness, eventually.
But first I had to make it through the weekend.
I climbed the few steps to the glass-panelled doors that led from the terrace into the house, pushing down the hope beating in my chest. It was all so familiar, as if at any moment Ellie, aged seven and a half, could come running out carrying dolls for a tea party, Isabelle following with the second-best china tea set. At least, until I passed through the empty drawing room and reached the cool shade of the hallway.
The tiled floor of the wide entrance hall was covered in buckets, vases, stands, and what appeared to be chicken wire. Bright yellow roses and dark green foliage were stuffed and stacked into any and all containers; loose leaves and petals littered the ground. And in the middle of it all sat Isabelle, head bent over a small crystal vase filled with two blooms and a few sprigs of lavender, sunlight from the windows either side of the front door shining silver on her hair.
I leant my overfilled suitcase against the wall, and asked, “Can I help?”
Isabelle jerked her head up to look at me, and she lost her grip on the vase in her hand. It tumbled to the floor, spilling water across the floor tiles and crushing one of the rose’s stems. I darted forward and righted the vase, miraculously still intact. For one, brief moment, I saw the depth of the shock she must be feeling flash across her face, before she recovered her composure.
She really hadn’t expected me to come. As much as I knew the lack of an invitation wasn’t a mistake, I realised a small part of me had been hoping against hope that it was. That I hadn’t been forgotten, cut out.
Except I had.
“Hi,” I said, trying to look less nervous than I felt.
“Kia, darling, really!” Isabelle smiled, but she still looked a little shaken. Older, too, I realised. Faded. Frail. “You should have told us you were coming. You can’t just show up, scare people half to death.”
I reached my arms around my grandmother’s body, feeling bones and skin. “I did tell you. Well, I told Nathaniel I’d be here, when he rang to invite me. I even gave him my train times when he called last week.”
He’d wanted to check I was still coming. I wasn’t sure that it was a good sign that Nathaniel was so desperate to have me there to witness whatever he had planned to add excitement to Isabelle’s party. It almost made me an accessory.
Not to mention the fact he hadn’t told anyone else he’d invited me. What did that say about the welcome I should expect?
Isabelle wriggled out of the embrace and, regaining her natural poise, set about choosing a new rose for her vase. “And isn’t it just like him not to mention it.”
“Perhaps he wanted it to be a surprise?” I suggested, feeling even more uneasy. I’d honestly assumed he’d have at least told them I was coming. I should have known better. This all had the stink of one of Nathaniel’s Plans – and they seldom ended well.
“I’m sorry, Isabelle. I really thought Nathaniel would have told you.” Isabelle sniffed, but looked faintly mollified, so I went on: “Where’s everyone else?”
Isabelle checked her watch and ticked them off on her fingers. “Your parents have taken Caroline to buy a dress for the party, as the one I picked for her was apparently unacceptable to her. Your grandfather has the DO NOT ENTER sign up on his door, so I choose to believe that he is writing. Therese is probably still wandering the woods aimlessly, and has forgotten she’s supposed to be collecting foliage for me. Edward’s here, though. He can help you with your bag.”
No mention of the two people I wanted to know about most, I noticed. Had it been Ellie Isabelle sent for vases? I wanted to ask a thousand questions. About how Ellie was, how she’d been, since I left. Whether she still hated me as much as I imagined she must. And, most urgently, what had Ellie told our grandmother about why I left? From Isabelle’s reaction, I suspected that she knew more of my secrets than I’d like. When I’d left, while Ellie and Greg were on their honeymoon, what happened had been a secret between the three of us. I couldn’t imagine that Ellie would want anyone else to know, any more than I did. But it was clear that Isabelle knew something.
God, what if everybody knew? My hands started to tremble at the very idea, a horrible sense of dread seeping through my veins. What if my secret was out, and I was walking into a house full of people who utterly – and rightly – despised me?
It was enough to send me running back to the train station, and the safety of my flat, hundreds of miles away in Scotland. But then, something curious about her list struck me.
“Edward?” I asked, trying to shift my focus away from my fear. I was pretty up to date on family members, despite my absence, and I was sure that there hadn’t been an Edward when I’d left.
“Yes.” Isabelle moved to the stairs and called, in as genteel a manner as possible, “Edward!”
I went and picked up my suitcase. If my grandmother had started hallucinating household help, I’d probably better get used to carrying things around myself.
To my relief, when I turned back a tall, slim stranger was leaning on the banister at the top of the stairs, looking utterly at home. “You hollered, Isabelle?” The man raised a sandy eyebrow. “I don’t suppose that you were just missing my company?”
“Always, dear,” Isabelle said, absently. “I thought that you might like to help Saskia with her bags, while I call Sally and Tony and inform them that their prodigal daughter has returned.”
“Might like to?” Edward asked, taking the stairs at a lazy jog, long legs making easy work of the wide steps.
“Would if I asked you to,” Isabelle clarified.
“Of course.” Edward hopped over the last few stairs and landed on one foot on the hall tiles. “And I assume that this is Saskia,” he said, turning on his heel to face me. He looked a little older than my twenty-six, with the start of tiny laugh lines around his eyes. He wasn’t smiling now, though, and he didn’t seem in any way pleased to meet me. In fact the coldness I felt from him suggested exactly the opposite.
“I’ve heard a lot about you from Ellie,” he said, which explained the chill. Even if she hadn’t spilled the whole story to this stranger, I was under no illusion that she’d have spoken about me in anything approaching glowing terms.
“Oh good. Listen, I’m fine carrying my own case, honestly.” I had four whole days stretching ahead to spend time with people who disapproved of me. I didn’t really feel up to starting off with someone I’d never even met before.
Edward took two long strides across the hallway and snatched up my bag. “Not a problem.” He gave me a short, tight smile, then swung round to face Isabelle, suitcase swaying in his hand. “Which room is she in?”
“My room,” I said, as if that should be obvious, at the same time as Isabelle said, “You’d better put her in the Yellow Room.”
“Right-ho.” Edward hefted the case up the first few stairs.
“Hang on. What’s wrong with my room?” It was, after all, my room. I snatched the case out of Edward’s hands.
“Caroline’s sleeping in it.” Isabelle looked vaguely regretful for a moment, but it didn’t last. “But really, Kia, it is a little girl’s room, and Caro’s too big for the box room, now. She’s almost ten. She needs her own space.”
Caroline – our last-minute-accident baby sister, and the shocking evidence that our parents were still having sex into my secondary-school years. How could she be ten already? How much had she changed in the last two years? How much had I missed?
“It’s my room,” I said again, even as my brain acknowledged the ridiculousness of this statement.
“Your room is the candy-stripe confection in the attic?” Edward reached out and retrieved the case from my hands again, his long slim fingers brushing against mine as he took the handle. I gritted my teeth against the slight shiver his touch gave me, even in the warm summer air.
“My grandfather helped me decorate that room.” One long summer when my parents were abroad and Ellie and I had stayed at Rosewood for six glorious weeks, instead of sweating it out in our semi in the suburbs of Manchester. It had taken an age, because Nathaniel had been working on Rebecca’s Daughters at the time and would regularly disappear into his study for hours in the middle of painting the walls.
Edward grinned. “Strange. Nathaniel never struck me as a candyfloss kind of guy.”
“Who are you, anyway?” It didn’t seem fair. I’d been home mere minutes, and I was already being mocked by strangers.
“I’m your grandfather’s assistant,” Edward said, making his way up the stairs, lugging the case alongside him.
I looked to Isabelle for confirmation. “I know,” she said. “We were surprised too. But he’s been here over a year, now.” And no one had mentioned him to me – not even Nathaniel. Which said more about how far I’d run away than the seven hours it had taken me to get back by train that day.
Edward reached the top of the stairs and paused, obviously waiting for me to follow. I looked at him with a new appreciation. The last assistant Nathaniel had hired, six months before I left for the wilds of Scotland, had lasted approximately a fortnight before falling down those very stairs in his hurry to get away from Rosewood. Granddad did not work well with assistants.
“Well, okay then.” Picking up my handbag, I turned back to Isabelle. “Do I really have to sleep in the Yellow Room?”
“It has a lovely view of the Rose Garden, darling.”
“But all the roses are in here!” I waved an arm at the overflowing buckets of blooms.
“Don’t be melodramatic, dear. There are plenty of roses left. We’re only using the yellow ones, anyway.” She plucked a few leaves from the bottom of a rose stem and added the flower to the bucket. “Besides, these are just for the house displays. The florist is doing the stands and centrepieces outside.”
That sounded like an awful lot of flowers. “But the Yellow Room’s all… yellow.” There was a muffled snort of laughter from the top of the stairs, and I mentally glared at Edward, wondering what it was about Rosewood that made me thirteen again. “Never mind. I’ll go get freshened up, and maybe by the time I get back my parents will have found their way home.”
“Perhaps. Kia…” Isabelle paused, as if trying to decide whether to speak again or not. Finally, she said, “Did your grandfather say particularly why he wanted you to come back?”
I blinked in surprise. “It’s a family occasion. I assume he wanted us all here.”
Isabelle gave a sharp nod, and turned back to her buckets of roses. “Of course.”
Confused, I turned to follow Edward. But I couldn’t help wondering what Isabelle thought Nathaniel was up to this time.
“There you go, then,” Edward said, placing my bags on the window-seat. “I’ll leave you to settle in.”
I nodded, gazing around at the sunshine walls and golden blankets, wondering how many guests had visited twice, after being put to stay in the Yellow Room.
Probably all of them – at least any that had been invited back. A weekend at Rosewood had been a highly sought-after ticket, back in the day. Well, according to Isabelle, anyway.
“Actually,” I said, trying to sound decisive, rather than just unsettled, “I think I might go and find Great-Aunt Therese. It must be almost time for her afternoon tea.” Never mind that I’d spent seven hours on various trains and really could do with a shower; first, I needed to feel home again. And after that very lacklustre welcome from Isabelle, I knew I wasn’t going to find that feeling in the Yellow Room. At least Great-Aunt Therese might be pleased to see me.
Assam tea and a Victoria Sandwich in Therese’s cottage garden were more familiar to me than even my attic bedroom. Nathaniel had moved his younger sister into the cottage on the edge of Rosewood’s gardens as soon as her husband died, the year I was born, when she was only forty-one. Almost every afternoon that I had spent at Rosewood since had always paused for tea with Therese at half past three, first with my mum and Ellie, and later just the two of us.
Edward shrugged indifferently. “I’ll come with you, then. May as well see if she’s finished collecting leaves for your grandmother. Pre-empt being sent.”
“If you’re Granddad’s assistant, why aren’t you assisting him rather than Grandma?” I asked, as we trotted out into the sunlight. It felt odd to be at Rosewood with a stranger – especially one who seemed far more at home than I did.
“He’s having one of his Great British Writer days. Doesn’t like anyone hovering, in case it disturbs his flow.” Which might explain why Edward had lasted longer than the other assistants. A keen sense of when to get lost.
“So you’re just making yourself useful until he needs you again?”
“Got to earn my keep somehow.” Edward gave me a quick smile as he turned off the drive and onto the long, rambling path that led, eventually, to Therese’s cottage.
He didn’t seem inclined to any further conversation, and I found my attention drawn instead to the familiar sights along the way – the huge magnolia that overhung the path, the strange fountain statue that Isabelle had found on holiday in France one year and had shipped back, the wild flower patch my mother planted which, over the course of a few summers, overtook almost a whole lawn.
As we reached the bend in the main path that led down to the abandoned ruin of the old stables and Therese’s tiny cottage, my great-aunt appeared in the distance. Therese was unmistakable with her 1950s silhouette of full skirt and tight cardigan even when, as now, her arms were full of eucalyptus leaves.
Edward squinted up into the sun, the light bleaching his sandy hair even paler. “This looks like another of those ‘earn my keep’ moments,” he said. “Isabelle will only send me back for them later, anyway.” He jogged away down the path to relieve Therese of her leafy burden. He had a point; Isabelle never came down to Therese’s cottage if she could send someone else. In fact, I didn’t think I’d ever seen her there. “I’ll take these up to the house for you, Mrs Williams,” I heard Edward say. “Save you the trouble, since I’m heading back anyway. Besides, you’ve got a visitor.”
Therese’s pale blue eyes widened and her red lips pursed as I came close, and I wondered what changes she saw in me. But then she smiled, and I was eighteen again, home from university as a surprise one weekend, folded into her expensively perfumed embrace and thoroughly kissed, leaving lipstick marks on my cheeks. Therese was an anachronism, a throwback to a decade she’d only just been born for, with her fifties costumes and curled and pinned hair. But she was a part of Rosewood for me, every bit as much as Isabelle’s cocktails before dinner and Nathaniel’s stories.
“It’s so good to have you home,” she said, leading me inside, and I blinked away unexpected tears as I realised just how much I had missed her. At least someone was pleased to see me.
Therese’s cottage was as I had left it, filled with knick-knacks and jugs full of sweet peas and dishes laden with glass bead necklaces. The only difference, as far as I could see, was the vast collection of clothes that hung from every hook and corner and ledge in the lounge. And the hallway. And running up the stairs. Dresses and skirts and blouses and coats and handbags, with gloves and scarves and tops and shoes spilling out from old steamer trunks, stacked carelessly against the walls.
Therese had always been a bit of a clothes horse, but this was taking things to extremes, even for her.
I peered into the lounge from the hallway, and saw that in amongst all the accessories, my favourite photo of her still sat on the mantelpiece. Therese, aged nineteen, pale and pouting in black-and-white with crisply waving hair surrounding challenging pale eyes. It must have been taken in the tail end of the sixties, I’d worked out once, but Therese looked like a screen siren from thirties Hollywood. It was one of a very few photos I’d seen of Therese out of her fifties costume, and even that was out of sync with the rest of the world – but fitted perfectly at Rosewood.
Rosewood existed in a bubble all of its own, out of time, because that was the way Nathaniel liked it. I wondered absently how Edward was coping with the lack of internet at Rosewood. Maybe I’d ask him later.
Picking up the picture frame, I studied the photo, finding familiar lines in the much younger face. She kept it up as a reminder, Therese always said. A reminder that she’d been beautiful once. Before life happened.
Turning to watch her potter around the tiny kitchen, filling the kettle and warming the pot, I knew that she was still beautiful. Why had she never remarried? “Once was enough,” she always said, but she’d only been forty-one when Great-Uncle George had died. Therese would have been quite a catch, with her perfectly pinned hair, slim waist, beautiful outfits, and her pale blue eyes. She and Isabelle together as young women must have been a formidable sight.
Great-Uncle George had always been a little bit of a mystery. He’d died before I was born, so all I really had to go on were occasional snatches of parental conversation, when the adults thought I wasn’t listening. I’d asked, once, but hadn’t really received any satisfactory answers.
As far as Ellie and I had been able to piece together, George had been some hotshot trader in the city when he met Therese and they’d fallen instantly in love. They’d married shortly after and gone to live in London, where he showered his new bride with lavish gifts of jewels and dresses. Isabelle, it seemed, was always a little sore on this point.
Still, and this was the part that didn’t make any sense, when George had suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of only forty-seven, creditors had swooped in and taken the house, the furniture, the cars, and most of the jewels. Therese had showed up at Rosewood with a suitcase of evening gowns, planning to stay only until she was back on her feet, and she had never left.
Isabelle mentioned that part often, pointedly, usually when Nathaniel and Therese had their heads together, laughing over some private, shared joke the way only siblings could. The way Ellie and I used to.
In fifteen years’ time, would I be back at Rosewood, begging asylum again? And if so, would Ellie resent my presence as obviously as Isabelle had always resented Therese’s? Probably.
“We’ll take tea in the garden,” Therese said decisively, smoothing a lace cloth over a plain silver tray, and laying out the china cups, sugar bowl, milk jug, and a plate of chocolate-covered ginger biscuits. “Will you bring the pot, Kia?”
Wrapping the handle of the delicate teapot with a clean tea towel, I did as I was told, and followed Therese out through the back door into her tiny, hedged garden.
Therese’s flower beds were tended and nurtured daily, and carefully trained to appear as a hodgepodge cottage garden. Lupins and delphiniums and foxgloves loomed over fuchsias and snapdragons; sweet peas clambered up canes set against the cottage wall, sending their familiar scent past me on the breeze.
In the middle was a small, circular patio, occupied by a wrought-iron bistro table and two chairs, glowing warm in the late afternoon sun.
Therese settled her tray down on the table, took the pot from me and motioned for me to sit down.
“So,” she said, pouring the first cup, “you’ve come home.” The ‘at last’ went unsaid.
I nodded, picking up a biscuit to nibble. “Nathaniel called and asked me to. Said he had plans for the Golden Wedding.”
“God save us from my brother’s plans.” Therese settled into her seat. “I’m glad he did, anyway. I was worried that your invitation might go mysteriously astray if it was left to Isabelle.”
I winced. “I never did actually receive an invitation.” Isabelle was always meticulous about sending invitations. I remember being made to handwrite invites for my eighth birthday party, not only to all my classmates, but also my own sister, even though she was sitting next to me as I wrote it. If Isabelle had wanted me there, I’d have been sent an invitation. And the fact I hadn’t… Well, it stung like a needle pressed up against my heart.
“Typical Isabelle,” Therese said, selecting the biscuit with the most chocolate coating. “They were hideous, anyway.”
“So Nathaniel said.” I sighed. “I can’t believe he didn’t tell anyone I was coming.”
“I imagine that you’re part of Nathaniel’s plan. You know how he likes surprising people,” Therese said. “More fun that way. Besides…” she laid a hand on mine “…this is your home. You have as much right to be here as anyone else.” Maybe I could just stay in Therese’s cottage for the duration, I thought.
Therese polished off the cookie and reached for her teacup. “Now, tell me about Scotland.”
So I did. I told her about my flat on the edge of Perth, and how it wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but I’d finally got the inside the way I wanted it – cosy and bright. I told her about the newspaper, about my job, and when she said, “But what are the prospects like? When are we going to read you in the Guardian?” I distracted her with a story about a police press conference on an operation to confiscate alcohol from teens in the local park that had to be curtailed when half the cans and bottles went missing.
Therese laughed in the right places, but somehow I still got the impression that she was just humouring me. And, as I finished my last story and my cup of tea, she pounced.
“So, tell me about your young man,” she said, picking up the pot and refilling my cup. “Because I can’t believe you haven’t got one, pretty girl like you.”
“Just one?” I laughed, hoping vainly to throw her off the scent. Yes, there was a man, of sorts. But Duncan and I were casual, fun… and just a little bit too complicated to explain to an elderly relative. Still, it might not be a bad idea to let everyone know that I’d moved on, that I had a new life, a new romance in Perth. Even if that wasn’t quite the truth.
“Only one that means something, I’m sure.” Her voice was placid and immovable. “So, tell me about him.”
“Well, his name’s Duncan,” I said, sifting through my mind for what could be considered safe to talk about, and how to say it without using the words ‘friends with benefits’. “He works with me – he’s our new editor, actually. Brought in from Edinburgh earlier this year.”
“Ah, so it’s all quite new, then?” Therese leant forward. “I understand. Still all flowers and romance and sex all day on Sundays. Still in that private, special world where there’s only the two of you.”
Quite aside from the fact that hearing my great-aunt talking about all-day sex sessions had rendered me incapable of speech, there was just no way I was going to explain to her that, actually, it was less flowers and romance and more the second part, so I just smiled weakly and nodded.
Therese patted my hand and said, “I understand,” again.
“Anyway,” I said, regaining my voice, just in time to change the subject. “I meant to ask – what’s with the clothes shop inside?”
Her face lit up with an excitement I’d only ever seen on her before at the Harrods sale. “So you noticed my little enterprise! Caro helped me set it up.”
I wasn’t quite sure when my baby sister had become an established business guru, but then, I still wasn’t entirely sure what the business was. “Really.”
“Oh yes. She figured out with me how to get an account on eBay, and PayPal, and how to list things and set prices. Turned out that there was quite the market for some of my old evening dresses and such.” Therese smiled a little ruefully. “Only it takes a lot of restraint to only sell, and not be tempted to buy.”
“So, all that stuff inside…”
“Waiting to be sold on,” Therese said, firmly. “See, it turns out that a lot of people want to get into vintage wear, but don’t know where to start, or what size to buy. So that’s my USP.”
Which sounded more like something you’d use to track ghosts than sell clothes. “USP?”
“Unique selling point. They send me their measurements, and a photo, and a bit of information about them and what they want the clothes for, and I put together a one-of-a-kind vintage outfit, including all accessories, for their specified occasion.”
I blinked. That was actually a really good idea. “That’s… great.”
In a sudden movement, Therese was on her feet, motioning for me to stay where I was. “Actually, I have something that would be perfect for you,” she said. “For tonight. Just wait here.”
She was back within moments, holding out a navy dress on a satin padded hanger. “To wear for dinner.”
I reached out a hand to touch it. The dress was of a style that had been popular in the 1930s, and the cut was exquisite, with fluted cap sleeves and a silky bow at the neckline, above the narrow waist belt. The cotton was soft and worn under my fingertips, but the colours were still crisp and bright. It was only as I looked closer that I realised; this was the dress Therese had worn in the photo on the mantle.
“It should fit, I think,” she said, pushing the hanger into my hands. “You’ve lost weight since you’ve been away. Hold it up against yourself.” I did as I was told, and she looked at me critically.
“It’s lovely,” I said, swishing the skirt from side to side. “But you don’t think it’s a little… too much?” Even at Rosewood, dressing for dinner didn’t usually require evening gowns, as such. Not that this was – it was just a hundred times nicer than anything I had in my suitcase.
“Nonsense,” Therese said. “George always said that a person could never really be overdressed – merely better dressed than everyone else. Now, you’ll need the shoes and a bag too, of course. You’re a six, yes? Come with me.”
She trotted back into the cottage and I followed obediently. Maybe a makeover was just what I needed to get through the rest of the visit. Maybe Ellie wouldn’t remember what I’d done if I looked like someone else.
I returned to the main house some time later, laden down with hangers and bags, to find the place deserted. Assuming that people were getting changed for dinner, I followed suit and sneaked up the stairs to my allotted room, pulling a face at the yellow walls as they glowed in the slowly fading sunlight.
On the other hand, I realised, the one good thing about the Yellow Room was that it had an en suite. I decided to take advantage of it, hoping that a shower might wash away the ache that comes from sitting on trains too long, and the tension that came simply from being home. Besides, tea with my great-aunt had left my head overflowing with thoughts, and some hot and steamy water was the best way I knew to flush them out.
The shower didn’t help as much as I’d hoped. In less than an hour I’d be sitting down to dinner with my entire family, something I hadn’t done in two years, and I was going in with nothing but a vintage outfit and a vague hope that Nathaniel had a plan.
I didn’t even know how much Ellie had told the family, or how much they’d guessed, about what had happened.
And then there was Greg.
Tonight, I’d see Greg for the first time in two years. For the first time since the wedding.
Two years, and I still wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure I ever would be.
Part of me wanted to see him, more than anything. To get it over with. To know, for sure, that there was nothing there between us any more. To be certain that my heart wouldn’t beat too fast when he was in the room, that I wouldn’t find my eyes drawn to him every few moments.
To show that I was no longer in love with my sister’s husband.
The rest of me just wanted to put the inevitable off for as long as possible.
The love Greg and I had shared had been childish, irresponsible – and all-encompassing, for a time. The sort of love that makes you abandon caution and sense and morals. The kind of love that causes pain.
I never wanted to feel that sort of love again.
But seeing Greg was nothing compared to my terror at seeing Ellie again. I could take any reaction from Greg – anything from love to hate. It didn’t matter; it couldn’t change anything now.
But Ellie… the thought of seeing the same hate in her eyes as the day she found out, of knowing for certain that nothing had changed, and never would – that filled me with the same paralysing fear that had kept me away from Rosewood for so long. When I was hundreds of miles away, there was still a chance that she might have forgiven me. Once I saw her again, whatever she felt was the truth, and I couldn’t spin it into possibilities any more.
And that idea frightened me more than anything.
I ached across the shoulders, and my eyes still felt gritty, but at least I was clean. Wrapping one towel around my hair and another around my body, I wiped beads of water away from my eyes and opened the bathroom door, letting the burst of steam obscure the alarming yellow of the bedroom walls.
My skin burned, and I knew I’d be bright pink from head to toe. I liked my showers hot – hot enough to leave me gasping for breath when I stepped out.
Pulling the towel from my head I shook my wet hair out across my shoulders, and clutched the towel around my body tighter as I crossed the room to open the balcony door. Fresh air filled my lungs as I stared out over the Rose Garden. Edward was there, I realised, his blonde head moving between the remaining blooms. Isabelle had been right; I did have a magnificent view of the Rose Garden. I felt I could almost reach out and pluck one from its stem.
Suddenly, something else in the garden caught my eye. Another figure, too pale in the sunlight. She seemed to move in a different plane to Edward, as she ran her hands over the decapitated rose bushes, as if to her they still bloomed.
Was it really the Rosewood ghost?
I leant further out across the balcony railing to get a better look, until a rush of cold air told me that my towel hadn’t leant with me. I grabbed for it, yanking it back up over my breasts, but not before Edward turned towards the house again.
Even at a distance, I could see the sardonic eyebrow he raised at my state of undress. Then he turned his gaze away and walked slowly towards the other gardens.
Damn.
I was beginning to think that I hadn’t made the best ever first impression on my grandfather’s new assistant.
Chapter Two (#ulink_7f149ac4-067b-5404-a45b-95435b4eff50)
Family is who you have left when there’s nothing and nobody else. When the wind blows cold and the waves batter the cliffs, when night falls and darkness seeps in… family is still there.
On A Summer’s Night, by Nathaniel Drury (2015)
When Ellie and I were young, we visited Rosewood every weekend. Then, as now, my parents kept a house in Manchester, to be near the university – a small, untidy, cosy terrace house not far from where many of the students lived. Day to day, a perfectly ordinary existence for the daughters of a professor and a secondary-school drama teacher. But at weekends and holidays, we were spirited away to the magical, mysterious grounds of Rosewood, where there was always something new to discover or explore.
Rosewood was a grand old manor house from the Georgian era, hidden away in the Cheshire countryside behind wrought-iron gates and too many trees. It had been crumbling when Nathaniel and Isabelle bought it, back in the sixties, but slowly they’d invested in it. First, just enough to keep it standing and habitable. Then, as Nathaniel’s career continued to blossom, enough to make it a proper home.
The house’s flat-fronted brick exterior was punctuated by white frame windows betraying the sheer quantity of rooms in the place, and the acres of gardens surrounding it led straight onto the woods. The symmetrical chimneys still puffed smoke, and every room held a new surprise, even now – decorated ceilings, or a hidden door, or a story. Isabelle had redecorated a dozen times since they moved in, but she couldn’t paper over the magic and the history of Rosewood.
It was my favourite place in the world.
From my usual attic bedroom over the main staircase, which had long ago been the servants’ quarters, I could hear everything that went on down below: the sound of feet stomping up the stairs, the laughter floating up from the terrace as my grandfather mixed cocktails for his friends, a couple arguing on the landing.
The Yellow Room was clearly more suitable for guests – situated to the far right of the building, above the back drawing room (rarely used because of the rotting window frames, and the awful draught that blew through every afternoon), away from anything interesting that was going on. It was disconcerting, I found, to be at Rosewood and not know what was happening elsewhere in the house.
But by the time I’d changed into my costume for the evening – Therese’s blue dress and sandals, bright red lipstick and my dark, bobbed hair curled into waves around my face – I felt strangely more like myself again, and almost prepared for the night ahead. Almost.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel quite ready to see my sister again, or Greg. But neither could I stay away.
As I made my way down the main staircase into the hall, I could hear the strains of jazz music emanating from the kitchen – a sure sign that my father was cooking. I smiled. Whatever he was making smelled like home to me.
Sticking my head around the kitchen door, I checked to make sure I wouldn’t be interrupting a moment of culinary magic by stopping in to say hello. And if it put off seeing Ellie for a few more moments, well, I wasn’t going to complain.
“That smells good,” I said, slipping through the doorway.
Dad dropped his wooden spoon into the pan and turned, beaming, wiping his hands on his apron even as he stepped towards me for a hug.
“Kia! I’d heard you were home.” He held me close, then stepped back to inspect me, just as Therese had done. “You know I’m not one for formalities, but I believe an RSVP is usual for one of Isabelle’s events…”
“And if I’d received an invitation, I’d have sent one,” I said, as brightly as I could.
“Lost in the post, huh?” Dad asked, but I could tell from his tone that he knew full well it hadn’t been.
“Something like that.” I boosted myself up to sit on the edge of the kitchen table, my feet swinging, as Dad turned back to his bubbling pot. “So, what have I missed around here?”
“The usual. Can you hand me the basil from the windowsill?” Dad held out a hand, and it was as if I’d never been away at all. I smiled to myself for a moment before moving to the window to retrieve the herb. “Nathaniel is writing and won’t tell us what; Isabelle is fretting that he’s really just up there playing solitaire and avoiding her, which he might be. Mum’s latest class musical was Les Misérables, so we’ve been eating garlic and misery for months. Ellie…” He stuttered to a stop. “Well. Ellie and Greg are well. And Caro thinks she’s a fairy. Still. Didn’t you grow out of that sort of thing by ten?”
“I don’t remember,” I said, absently, as I handed him the plant. I was more concerned with what he wasn’t saying about Ellie. “So, Ellie’s okay? I mean, she was?” I didn’t imagine that discovering I’d returned home had filled her with any particular joy.
Dad sighed, and started stripping the basil plant of its leaves with unnecessary force. “As far as I know. I haven’t seen her since we got back from town, but she was happy enough at breakfast.”
I bit my lip. “Do you think—”
“Saskia,” Dad interrupted me. “I don’t know exactly what happened between you and your sister, and that’s fine with me. Because it is between you and Ellie, not the rest of us. And if you’re hiding in here to avoid seeing her…”
“Can’t a girl come and get a ‘welcome home’ from her father these days?”
Dad turned and flashed me a smile. “Of course she can. And, sweetheart, I am so very glad to have you home. I’ve missed you.”
A warm glow spread through me at his words, one that had been missing ever since I left Rosewood two years earlier. “I missed you too.”
“Good. Then maybe you’ll visit a bit more often after you go back to Perth.”
“I will,” I promised, and hoped I wasn’t lying.
“And in the meantime…” He pointed towards the door with a wooden spoon dripping with sauce. “Go say hello to the rest of them. Because it won’t get any easier the longer you put it off, and dinner is nearly ready.”
“Yes, Dad.” I gave him a small smile, and headed for the lounge, the heels of Therese’s sandals clicking on the wooden floor. I paused at the door, and sucked in a deep breath. Dad was right. Might as well get this over and done with.
My mother was mixing some luridly coloured cocktails at the sideboard under the window, while Isabelle critiqued her bartending capabilities from her cream wing-backed chair. Therese, leaning against the gold and cream sofa, was the first to spot me.
“Oh now, there,” Therese said, beaming. “It looks perfect on you. Doesn’t it, Sally?”
My mother turned away from the drinks tray, the multicoloured chiffon scarf around her neck clashing with the cocktails. She smiled, but it seemed a little forced. “Kia, darling, there you are! What a wonderful surprise.” Glass still in hand, she bustled over and wrapped her free arm around my waist. “If only you’d told us you were coming, we’d have collected you from the station.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I told Mum. “I got a taxi easily enough.”
“Yes, so Isabelle said.” Mum glanced briefly over at Isabelle, then smiled at me again, more naturally this time, squeezing my waist with her arm. “It is lovely to have you home, sweetheart.”
“Where’s everyone else?” I asked.
Therese patted the sofa beside her and I went to sit as instructed. “Your grandfather is still writing, or so we are given to understand.” Isabelle made a small, disbelieving noise that, coming from anyone else, would be termed a snort.
“Edward’s gone out to fetch Caroline from the woods,” Therese went on, ignoring Isabelle completely, as was her usual technique for dealing with her sister-in-law. “Greg isn’t home yet and Ellie is…”
“Here.” The voice, soft and familiar, was calm and expressionless, without feeling. But the sound of it made my whole body freeze, just for a moment, waiting for a reaction that never came. I forced myself to turn, to look, to accept whatever truth I found in my sister’s eyes.
And there she was, pale and blonde in a pastel blue skirt and camisole, her fringe framing her face. Biting the inside of my cheek, I searched Ellie’s face for the answers I’d come home to find, but they weren’t there. Her eyes were still as sad as I remembered from the day she left for her honeymoon, but there was nothing else. No hate, no recriminations – but no forgiveness or love either. Nothing.
It was as if I didn’t matter to her any more at all.
And that was more painful than any of the scenarios I’d imagined, when I’d thought of this moment.
“Hello, Kia.” Ellie swept past me with swift but elegant grace, to the drinks cabinet, where Isabelle handed her something pink with lots of ice. Therese passed me her own gin and tonic, since it appeared Isabelle wasn’t about to offer me one, and I gratefully took a gulp. It was stunningly strong.
Two years, and she just said, ‘Hello.’ Like nothing had happened. Like I was a passing acquaintance, holding no importance in her life.
Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I shouldn’t.
But she still mattered to me, and the distance in her eyes cut me deep, even through my costume.
“Ellie…” I started to get to my feet, but Mum stepped between us before I could get any further. Isabelle, for her part, had already dragged Ellie over to the window, murmuring something about table favours.
They had to know, right? If not the details, they knew I’d wronged Ellie. Why else would they be running interference between us?
“Now, Kia,” Mum said, pulling me back down onto the sofa. “Tell me. What are you wearing for the party? Because I’m sure there are still some of your old clothes up in the attic…”
While I was ignoring the question, in favour of trying to eavesdrop on the conversation at the other end of the room, Therese said, “She’s wearing a vintage sage-green frock with silver accents.” She turned to look at me directly, and added, “It’s very beautiful.”
If I’d only known that Therese had such a costume store, I wouldn’t have bothered bringing any of my own clothes.
“Will Nathaniel be coming down for dinner, at least?” I took another sip of gin and tonic. “After all, he’s the one who demanded I be here.” Without him, the house felt disjointed, like a collection of people in a waiting room who didn’t quite know each other well enough to make conversation. Once Nathaniel arrived, I hoped we’d feel more like a family again.
Therese shrugged. “Goodness knows. He’s been working so hard lately we’ve barely seen him.”
Over by the window, Isabelle’s glass slipped from her hand and smashed against the sideboard. Mum rushed over to help Ellie mop up and, content that no one was hurt, I lowered my voice and asked Therese, “What’s he working on?” And why was Isabelle freaking out about it so much?
Therese looked away from Isabelle and back to me, her eyes concerned. “Nobody knows. Maybe he’ll tell you – and I want you straight down to my cottage spilling the beans if he does. I’m ferociously curious.”
Dad appeared in the doorway, and I found myself being thoroughly hugged again. “Because I really did miss you,” he whispered, before letting me go and announcing the imminent arrival of food in the dining room.
If it wasn’t for the intervention campaign my mother and Isabelle were running between Ellie and me, I might almost have felt welcomed home. As it was, Mum ushered me towards the head of the table, just as Isabelle herded Ellie towards the other end. Or possibly, Ellie was herding Isabelle; our grandmother was leaning on Ellie’s arm quite heavily, I noticed.
I found myself sitting beside the empty seat reserved for Nathaniel, with Therese beside me, and I looked up at the doorway at just the wrong moment – just as Greg walked in.
I’d known I wasn’t ready for this moment. But I hadn’t realised how unprepared Greg would be. His eyes met mine and widened, the shock clear. Had no one called to tell him I was here? Surely Mum or Isabelle would have done, if they’d known the whole story? So perhaps they didn’t, after all. Ellie sure as hell wouldn’t have called him. And me being here shouldn’t’ve made the damnedest bit of difference to him.
But from the way he looked at me, I knew it did.
He stumbled, grabbing on to the door frame like he’d had too many of Mum’s cocktails. I held myself very still, tearing my eyes away to stare down at my empty place mat, focusing on keeping my expression neutral, my shoulders straight. Trusting in the red lipstick and an eighty-year-old dress to keep me safe.
“Kia,” Greg said, so I had to look up. His gaze was fixed on me, and I winced. There went any hope of pretending that it was all in the past. That nothing had happened at all. I could feel our whole history in his gaze.
I just hoped the others couldn’t see it, too.
“Hello, Greg,” I said, as coolly as I could. Then I turned my attention back to my place mat, confused. Surely this should hurt more? As much as I hoped I’d moved on, that I was over Greg, I’d loved him once. I’d expected it to cut deep, seeing him again.
As it was, I felt more jealousy that he still had a place at Rosewood, than pain that our romance was over.
“Greg, you’re down here between me and Ellie,” Isabelle said, patting the chair beside her as she eyed me with suspicion. Great. Well, if she hadn’t known what Ellie and I had fallen out over before, she had a pretty good clue now. “We’re sitting boy–girl tonight.”
“But, Grandma,” Caroline said, peeking around Greg, where he was still stalled in the doorway, “there aren’t enough men for that. You always said…”
“Never mind what I said, Caroline,” Isabelle snapped, and turned her attention back to Ellie and to Greg, who’d finally found his way to his seat.
Caroline huffed as she marched into the dining room dressed in what looked like a vintage cream lace dress, presumably one of Therese’s, with a sparkly tiara on top of her light brown hair. The hem of her too-long dress was green with grass stains.
She was followed at a distance by a tired-looking Edward, who slumped into the seat opposite me. Caroline, on the other hand, clambered immediately into the heavy wooden seat on my right: Nathaniel’s chair.
“I was wondering where you’d got to,” I said, tucking her hair behind her ear.
Caro rolled her eyes. “We had to go and get me a dress for the party, even though I said I wanted to wear one from the cottage, and it took ages. Then we were late back, because Dad insisted on going to the supermarket, once he knew you were here, and then you’d gone somewhere, and I didn’t want to miss the fairy wedding in the wood, so I had to throw on my dress and tiara and run down to the toadstool ring.” She pulled a small foot out from under the table to show me her incongruous white trainers. “I didn’t even have time to change my shoes,” she said, mournfully.
I thought that I’d remembered everything about Rosewood and my family, looking back over long nights in Perth. But I’d either forgotten, or never known, that Caroline had such an imagination. I’d certainly never realised before that she was so like me. A fairy wedding in the woods sounded like just the sort of thing I’d have ruined a vintage dress for.
Dad reappeared from the kitchen, a covered casserole dish in his oven-gloved hands, which he deposited in the centre of the table. “Ta-da. Grub’s up.”
It didn’t escape my notice that he’d made Chicken Provençal with thick pasta ribbons and crusty bread – my favourite. Ellie never took to it, mostly because of her irrational fear of olives.
As we all tucked in, conversation was restricted to appreciative noises and requests for condiments. Next to me, Caroline was very carefully removing every single olive from her serving and placing them on the edge of her plate. Edward, almost unconsciously it appeared, was helping himself to the abandoned items and popping them in his mouth in between forkfuls of his own food. I wondered if this was an everyday occurrence between them. Perhaps Edward had actually been hired as a babysitter. It certainly made more sense to me than the idea of him as Nathaniel’s assistant.
“It’s so nice to have all my girls back home together,” Dad said, pouring himself another glass of wine. “It’s been too long.” Ellie didn’t think so, given the nervous way her eyes were flicking between me and Greg. “So, Ellie, Kia, what have you got planned for tomorrow?”
Mum glared at him, and I realised that Dad knew exactly what he was doing: trying to forcibly cram a bridge between Ellie and me.
“I’ve got lots to do for the party,” Ellie said, her voice sweet, and achingly familiar. “It’s going to be a busy day.”
And there, I realised, was my chance to get close to Ellie and start the reconciliation. “I’ll help!”
Ellie looked up with unwelcome surprise, but I kept the smile on my face regardless. Across the table, my mother put down her knife and fork and looked up, smiling equally brightly. “So, Kia, tell us about Scotland!”
I toyed with the last bit of pasta on my plate. “Well, it rains even more than it does here. Other than that…”
“What about work?” Mum pressed. “How’s the newspaper going?”
“It’s fine,” I said, shrugging. It was fine. Predictable, unchallenging and fine. “Busy. You know.”
“You’ve got a new editor,” Therese said helpfully. “Let’s hear some more about him.” She was giving me an opening, I realised. A chance to show everyone – especially Ellie and Greg – that I’d moved on, that I had a new life. But I wasn’t sure telling my family I was having sex with my boss on a regular basis was actually the best way to prove I’d grown up.
“Duncan Fields,” I supplied. “He just moved up from Edinburgh.”
“Brought in from the big city, eh?” Dad said, reaching across Therese for another piece of bread. “Shaking the place up a bit, is he?”
I glanced up at the ceiling. Mostly, Duncan had been shaking cocktails at the bar after work then, later, my bed frame, but I didn’t think that was quite what Dad meant. “Something like that.”
“Well, that could be good for you, I suppose,” Mum said. I resisted the urge to tell Mum that, yes, it was very good for me indeed, thank you. “An office shake-up could mean a promotion for you, after all. Next step on the ladder to the nationals.”
“Mmm, maybe,” I said, in a way I hoped conveyed, ‘but probably not,’ without adding, ‘because Duncan would probably get fired for giving his girlfriend preferential treatment.’ Besides, I wasn’t entirely certain I wanted that London career any more. Some days I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a reporter.
“Never mind about work,” Isabelle said, pouring herself another glass of wine. “I’m much more interested in your social life. Is there anything at all to do in Perth?”
Since Isabelle had spent most of her life living in the middle of nowhere, Cheshire, I’m not quite sure where she got the idea that outside Rosewood, London and possibly Paris, the world was a social wasteland.
“Plenty,” I said, racking my brain for an example. Lately, most of my evenings were spent in bed with Duncan. “We go out for drinks with the guys from the office most Thursdays. And Sundays my friend Claire and I tend to meet for lunch.” It sounded phenomenally boring, put like that.
“We?” Isabelle asked, suddenly looking a lot more interested in the conversation. “Who’s we?”
Across the table, Edward rolled his eyes at me, as if to say, ‘Well, really. What did you think she was going to pay most attention to?’ I wasn’t sure I liked the way that Edward had slotted so easily into my family’s life.
“Ah… Duncan and I…” I stopped, unsure as to how to continue. As it happened, I needn’t have worried.
“Darling, how lovely!” Mum said, obviously not grasping the implications of ‘he’s my boss’ as quickly as I’d have expected. “I didn’t know you were seeing anybody!”
“You should have invited him to the party,” Isabelle put in, obviously so annoyed to have been deprived of the opportunity to cross-examine a potential new family member, that she’d forgotten she hadn’t actually invited me.
“Well, it’s all still rather new…” I said, wishing I couldn’t feel Greg staring at me. I wanted to explain that it wasn’t serious, that nobody needed to buy a hat or anything. But they all seemed so pleased that I’d found someone, I just couldn’t.
“Does this mean you won’t be home for Christmas again?” Caroline sounded put out. It was nice to know that someone would miss me this year.
“Of course she won’t,” Isabelle said, in a definite manner. “She’ll want to be with Duncan.” Which was a much better reason than, ‘She wouldn’t dare upset her sister by visiting twice in one year.’
“You’ll understand when you have a boyfriend,” Mum said to Caro, and sighed. “Which will probably be in about a fortnight, the rate you’re growing. It’s such a shame they grow up so fast. Christmas isn’t the same without little children around.” She stared wistfully across the table towards Ellie. “It would be so nice to have a baby at Rosewood for Christmas.”
Ellie flinched, and Greg reached for her full wine glass, taking a large gulp. I grabbed my cutlery just a little harder, and was wondering when I’d be able to escape back to the purely aesthetic horrors of the Yellow Room rather than the emotional horror of family dinner, when my grandfather’s deep, dark voice rang out through the room.
“Oh, good God, no. I like my Christmas morning lie-ins, thank you.” Everyone’s attention snapped to the doorway where Nathaniel’s broad form was filling the frame, his familiar orange fisherman’s jumper clashing with the elegant cream and gold of the dining room.
Nathaniel Drury. Literary legend, imposing intellect, household name and always, always, Granddad.
He’d been twenty-one when he published his first novel, and become a literary sensation almost overnight. There are photos of him as a young man on the wall of every fashionable artists’ haunt in London, New York and Paris, and he drank everyone under the table in all of them. He was notorious as a womaniser, and a drunk. Which is why the national presses were so astounded when, a year later, he disappeared from London society for two weeks, only to return with a wife in tow. One Isabelle Yates, local beauty and daughter of the richest man in his home town in North Wales. They bought Rosewood the next year and, well, the rest became our family history.
“What’s for tea?” Nathaniel asked, leaning on the back of Edward’s chair and smiling at me like no one else in the room mattered.
“If you’d come down to dinner at a reasonable time, and wearing appropriate clothes, like the rest of the family, you’d have been able to find out.” Isabelle didn’t look at her husband as she spoke, instead apparently choosing to glare at me. I blinked, and tried to figure out how, exactly, this was my fault. Ellie’s sad eyes at the dinner table and sulky refusal to talk all evening? Absolutely my fault. Nathaniel’s bizarre writerly habits? They’d been around far longer than me.
“We had Chicken Provençal,” Caro told him, oblivious to Isabelle’s temper. “But we’ve eaten it all. It’s Saskia’s favourite, you know.”
“I remember,” Nathaniel said, grinning at me again.
“There might be some leftovers coincidentally keeping warm in the oven,” Dad said, looking up at the ceiling to avoid the moment Isabelle’s glare swung his way. “And some bread in the bread bin.”
“I’ll go and grab it for you,” Edward said, presumably more out of a desire to escape the dining room for a while than because he was trying to expand his servant repertoire from carrying cases. “Anyone else want anything? I’ll bring more wine.” Without waiting for a response, he disappeared through the door and across the hallway to the kitchen.
Watching his long legs stride across the tiled floor, I found myself wondering if his legs really were that long, or if he was just so skinny that he looked taller. Perhaps more slender, than skinny… Skinny implied unattractive, which he wasn’t. At all. More… graceful, I supposed.
Strange. He was nothing even close to my type – I went more for darker, more brooding good looks. Like Duncan. And Greg, come to think of it. Edward was all golds and creams, like Isabelle’s decorating scheme. Like sunshine.
And for some reason, I couldn’t help but watch him.
“Now, to business,” Nathaniel said, leaning on the back of Edward’s vacated chair. “If I’m going to eat, I’ll need a place to sit. Now, which chair do I normally sit in, I wonder?”
Curled up on the base of Nathaniel’s seat, Caroline giggled.
He leant further across the chair back, angling his upper body to stare at Caro. “Well, I’m head of the family, so it makes sense that I’d normally sit… at the head of the table!” He lurched across and grabbed at Caroline’s legs, and she squealed. “But who’s this sitting in m-yyy chair?”
“It’s me, it’s me!” Caro squawked, as he started to tickle her. “And I’m not moving!”
“Is that right?” In one deft movement, and surprisingly fast for a man of his age, Nathaniel hefted his youngest granddaughter out of the chair, swung his body round to take the seat, and dumped Caro on his lap. “Hah!” he said, reaching for the unused wine glass above Caroline’s plate. “I am victorious. Servants, bring me wine!”
I couldn’t not laugh, no matter how hard Isabelle was rolling her eyes. Dad was openly grinning, and even Greg was looking amused.
Therese passed the red wine down the table towards me, and I filled up Nathaniel’s glass, just as Edward reappeared and replaced Caroline’s plate with a new, heaped one, before reclaiming his seat.
“How was the journey?” my grandfather asked me, ignoring the food and taking a gulp of wine instead.
I shrugged. “Not so bad. I got here about four.”
“I’m afraid I was shackled to my desk,” he said, with an exaggerated sigh. “Or I would have been here to greet you.”
“Since you were the only one who knew she was coming,” Isabelle said pointedly, “it was really very rude not to offer to meet her at the station.”
“If only she’d received an invitation.” Therese sighed and looked innocently around her. “She could have RSVPed and avoided all this confusion.”
“What story are you writing?” Caro asked, bouncing enough in Nathaniel’s lap to spill a few drops of his wine onto his plate as he lifted his glass. “Is it about people telling lies and secrets and death and stuff? My friend Alicia’s mum says that’s all you ever write.”
Nathaniel muttered something under his breath that I couldn’t quite hear, but could probably guess at. Edward obviously heard, though, as he choked on his mouthful of wine.
“My stories,” Nathaniel said, loud enough for us all to hear, “are every one of them different and new and utterly unlike anything I have written before. This one more than ever.”
Across the table from me, Edward put down his wine glass, too hard, and stared at his empty plate, apparently not even noticing as a few drops of wine sloshed onto his hand.
“But what’s it about?” Caro pressed. Nathaniel shook his head. “You’ll all just have to wait to read it. You, longer than most,” he added, patting Caroline’s shoulder, “as not all sections are suitable for such a young lady.”
Except for Edward, I realised. Edward, as my grandfather’s assistant, would know exactly what he was working on, how it was going and whether he really was writing at all, or just avoiding Isabelle.
Is that why he’s looking so nervous? I wondered. If Nathaniel wasn’t writing, it might explain why Edward was so keen to make himself invaluable elsewhere in the household. A writer who didn’t write wouldn’t have much need for an assistant, after all.
“But I want to hear a story,” Caroline said, twisting in Nathaniel’s lap.
“Ah, but that is a different matter entirely,” Nathaniel said. “I may not be able to tell you about the book I’m writing now, but far be it for me to deprive a young girl of a chilling tale of betrayal and murder when she wants to hear one!”
“That’s quite enough, Nathaniel,” Isabelle said, standing abruptly. “Now, who wants to help me clear the table?”
Caroline shook her head. “Not me, Grandma. I’m listening to the story.”
At the end of the table, Ellie got to her feet with her usual grace, before the vein throbbing at Isabelle’s temple burst. “I’ll help,” she said, and began systematically gathering up plates, clanking them together loudly.
Fifty years of marriage had obviously instilled some sense of self-preservation in my grandfather, because he waited until Isabelle had carried the first load of plates out of the room before he began to tell his story. Greg had apparently learned the same in less time – he was already taking the plates from Ellie’s arms and whispering something to her. They left the room together, and I couldn’t help but watch them go.
“Now,” Nathaniel said, his eyes on Isabelle as she disappeared into the kitchen. “This story is a special story.”
“Why’s it special?” Caro asked, pulling her legs up and wrapping her arms around them.
“Because it’s about this house,” he explained, “and the people who used to live here.” At his words, I knew instantly the tale he would tell. I wasn’t entirely sure it was suitable for a nine-year-old, but maybe Nathaniel would edit it for Caro. A consummate storyteller, he always was a great judge of his audience.
As the others disappeared in search of digestifs, I pulled my chair in closer to better hear the story. Across the table, I realised, Edward was doing the same. I raised my eyebrows at him and he shrugged. “I’m a sucker for a good story,” he said. “How else do you think I got pulled into this gig?”
“If everyone is quite comfortable,” Nathaniel said, feigning considerably more patience than I happened to know he possessed, “then I’ll begin.
“This house has stood on this land for hundreds of years.” His voice had dropped into a cadence I recognised from childhood – that of a storyteller, rather than a writer. The sound of it, warm and familiar, washed over me and I shivered as I listened to his tale. “There are so many stories in its walls, I could never have time to tell them all. But this is a story of the first family to live here.
“Long ago, a man named John Harrow, a merchant, bought this land and commissioned a fine house to be built. But what is a fine house without gardens? So once the house was finished, Harrow hired a head gardener, a man of impeccable reputation. And that gardener brought with him his apprentice: a boy with incredible talent, a boy who, local people said, could make dead plants bloom.”
“Is that possible?” Caro whispered loudly, leaning back towards Edward.
“Absolutely,” he replied, straight-faced. “But very rare.” I hid my smile.
Nathaniel raised his eyebrows until Caro settled back down, then continued. “Now, Harrow had only one child, a daughter, the apple of his eye. She was young and beautiful and ready for love.”
“Did she fall in love with the apprentice?” Caro asked, bouncing slightly. Nathaniel ignored her.
“The moment she set eyes on the apprentice, one summer’s day in the new Rose Garden, she fell in love. And he, by return, worshipped her from the moment he saw her.”
“I knew it,” Caroline whispered, to me this time.
“The young couple knew that John Harrow wouldn’t approve,” Nathaniel said, raising his voice a little. “So they kept their love a secret, and met only by moonlight, in the Rose Garden where they first fell in love. And as summer turned to winter, the apprentice picked impossible flowers from the dormant rose bushes for his beloved.
“All was wonderful, until the day John Harrow saw roses in his house at a time of year when nothing blooms, and his daughter watching the apprentice from the balcony of what is now the Yellow Room.”
“And you complained about sleeping there,” Edward murmured across the table to me. He raised his eyebrows and I blushed, remembering exactly what he’d seen on that balcony that afternoon.
“I didn’t realise I was part of a literary tradition,” I whispered back. I was fairly sure that detail was a new addition to the story. Nathaniel never could tell a story quite the same way twice.
“Suspicious, Harrow lay awake that night, listening for his daughter. When he heard the staircase creak in the darkness, he picked up his gun and silently followed her to the Rose Garden, where he saw her kissing the apprentice.”
Nathaniel’s voice dropped again, and we all leant in closer to listen. “Harrow went crazy with rage. His beloved daughter, kissing a gardener? It was unthinkable. He called to her to get away from the apprentice, but the young man put himself between his love and her father. Harrow wasted no time. He pulled out his gun and shot the apprentice.”
Caroline jumped as Nathaniel’s voice rose suddenly at the shot being fired. “Was he okay?” she asked.
Nathaniel shook his head sadly. “The apprentice died that evening, and that same night Harrow’s daughter took to her bed and stayed there. She wouldn’t eat, would drink nothing but a little water, no matter how much her father begged her.”
Caroline’s eyes were huge, now, with all her attention on Nathaniel. “What happened next?” she asked in a whisper.
“Nothing happened. Nothing happened for eleven days and eleven nights. She stayed in bed all over Christmas, and refused to move until New Year’s Eve came around. Then, that night, she asked to be taken out to the Rose Garden.
“Her father, hoping that she might be ready to forgive him, agreed, and she was carried out in her blankets. There, she asked to be placed on the bench where she’d sat with her love. ‘There are no more flowers,’ she said, looking around the garden. Her father tried to reassure her that they’d be back with the spring, but the young woman said, ‘No. There are no more flowers for me.’ Then, with a final breath, she died.”
Caroline gulped a sob, and it occurred to me again that this possibly wasn’t the most appropriate story for a nine-year-old, just before bedtime. But Nathaniel wasn’t finished.
“It’s said,” he continued, his voice almost inaudible, “that she walks there still, on moonlit nights, looking for her lost love.”
“A ghost?” Caro asked, all excitement again. “We have our own ghost? That’s brilliant.” Slipping off Nathaniel’s knee, she skipped towards the door. “I’m going to go see!”
Was that the explanation for the strange girl I’d seen in the Rose Garden that afternoon? Even for Rosewood, it seemed impossible.
Nathaniel stretched his legs out under the table, and pushed back his chair. “Well, now I’m in trouble.”
“I think you already were,” Edward pointed out, before finishing off the wine in his glass.
From the hallway, we all heard Isabelle saying sharply, “Caroline Ryan, you are not going out in the garden now. It’s past your bedtime. You are going to go up those stairs and put on your pyjamas.” There was a short pause, before she added, “Now,” over whatever objections Caro was trying to raise.
I checked my watch; it was almost eleven – more than past Caro’s bedtime, it was very nearly mine. It had, after all, been quite the day. “I think that might be my cue,” I said, and got to my feet.
Nathaniel stood, too, and put his arms around me, pulling me in close so I could smell the pipe smoke on his jumper. “It’s good to have you home, Kia.”
“It’s good to be here,” I mumbled back, burying my face against the scratchy wool. And, just for a moment, it was good. Whatever happened tomorrow, whatever Ellie had told everyone, right then, there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be but Rosewood.
Upstairs in the Yellow Room, I could just make out the sound of Caroline protesting pyjamas. Switching off the bedroom light, I sat by the balcony, looking out at the darkened garden, Nathaniel’s story fresh in my mind.
I didn’t see any ghosts, but I watched for a while, just in case, before climbing into bed and dreaming of meadows of flowers in winter.
Chapter Three (#ulink_bdea5385-1ebb-586c-812b-4d110246b085)
“Everyone keeps their ghosts in the attic, Agnes. It’s the only place no one ever wants to look.”
Ghosts in the Attic, by Nathaniel Drury (1973)
I’d left a lot of stuff behind when I escaped to Scotland. I’d been living at Rosewood full time for almost two years when I left, working on a local paper nearby, and I’d accumulated a significant amount of junk that hadn’t fitted in my suitcase. If Caroline was sleeping in my attic room, then someone would have had to move my stuff to make space for her.
I woke up the next morning with a desire to rediscover what I had left behind.
It was only just eight, but the day already felt warm. Sorting through the clothes I’d brought with me, I realised that the office wear I’d filled my Perth wardrobe with just didn’t fit in at Rosewood. Maybe, if I could find my belongings, there’d be some more suitable clothes there.
Eventually, I settled on a pair of jeans that usually got worn with stilettos, so hung over the ends of my bare feet, and a lace and silk camisole that only normally saw the light of day through a slightly-too-sheer work cardigan I’d somehow neglected to pack. It would do until I found something else, anyway. Fixing my hair back from my face, I set out to investigate the attic.
The obvious place to start was my old room, tucked under the eaves of the house, up in the attic, so I climbed the rickety wooden staircase at the end of the corridor and knocked lightly on Caro’s door. There was no response, so I slowly turned the handle and pushed the door open, wincing at the awful creaking it made.
Luckily it didn’t matter, since Caroline was already up and out. “Probably ghost-hunting,” I muttered, glancing around the room. The walls and the furniture were the same, as was the bright pink radiator I’d insisted on, installed against the only full-height wall. The other walls sloped downwards to the low window and window seat, familiar pink pillows still stacked along the wooden bench.
But there was no sign of anything else that belonged to me. The brush set on the dressing table, the clothes hung over the back of the chair, the books on the bookcases, even the pictures on the wall – none of them were mine. I shut the door behind me.
There was a large storage area just along the hallway, which I remembered as dusty, stuffy and full of rotting cardboard boxes. Of course that was where they’d have stashed my stuff.
The door was unlocked, and as I pulled it towards me a rush of hot, stale air hit my lungs. With one last deep breath, I headed in, leaving the door open behind me in the hope of ventilation.
The attic was much as I remembered, and I tripped over piles of messily rolled rugs and faded cushions on my way through the box maze. On the far side of the space there was a window, and I made my way towards it, hoping it hadn’t been painted shut.
It hadn’t, and the morning air breezing in over the gardens was cool and fresh. Beating dust out of a large floor cushion, I settled down at the base of the window, and started pulling likely looking boxes towards me. As I pulled out books and pictures, the musty smell of damp paper rose up from the prematurely yellowed and crinkled pages.
Every box I looked in awakened waves of memory I hadn’t even been aware I was suppressing. A storybook Nathaniel wrote me for my eighth birthday; a pair of absurdly expensive pink heels I’d bought with my first student loan and never really worn, because they didn’t fit with the agreed student uniform of jeans and slobby jumpers; postcards of Devon from Ellie and Greg’s first holiday away together; a wire-bound copy of a series of fantastical short stories I’d written for a creative writing course as part of my degree, taking their starting points from my childhood at Rosewood. A hundred wonderful things I’d forgotten all about.
And, shoved down the side of a box of musty paperbacks, a stack of unopened letters, addressed to Ellie, in my handwriting. Still bruised from my awkward welcome home, I couldn’t quite bring myself to open them yet. I had a horrible feeling the letters somehow wouldn’t say what I knew I’d been trying to articulate. Instead, I turned to my stories.
In the warmth of the attic, with dusty cushions at my back, I settled in and lost myself in my own tales – wincing at jarring turns of phrase, but smiling when I found something I’d forgotten, something true and real from my childhood.
I hadn’t fully remembered, for example, that each tale took a turn for the imaginary, somewhere around the second page. Forgotten that my own life hadn’t been exciting enough for me, even then. That I’d needed to pretend there was something more.
I was so engrossed in the pieces of my past, I failed to notice that my hiding place had been discovered until Nathaniel’s voice interrupted me from the doorway. “What are you reading?”
Smiling up at him, I waved the poorly printed manuscript. “Stories from a lifetime ago,” I explained, as he came closer, settling himself on a cushion opposite me. “Just some stuff I wrote for a writing class, once.”
“And here was me thinking you might be hiding,” he said, his smile a little too knowing. “Anything else worth reading in there?”
I shoved my letters to Ellie further down inside the box, and pulled out one of the birthday storybooks. The golden inked lettering on the front read The Garden Ghost. “You wrote this for me for my eighteenth, I think.” I glanced through the pages before handing it over. “The story’s a little different from the one you told Caroline last night.”
In my book, the daughter had fallen pregnant, shaming the family, but refusing to speak the name of her lover. She died in childbirth, and it was only once the child made dead flowers bloom, several years later, that John Harrow discovered the truth about his daughter and the apprentice. Which was the real story? Or were they both just figments of Nathaniel’s imagination? I knew better than to ask. To my grandfather, truth and fiction were almost the same thing, there to be intertwined to make the best story.
I worried, sometimes, that I’d inherited that trait, only without using it to write the kind of books that won awards.
Nathaniel flicked through the book with a chuckle. “Caro’s still a little young for some stories.”
Watching him reread his own words, I remembered something that had been bothering me. “Why didn’t you tell me that you had a new assistant?”
Nathaniel looked up. “Edward? Didn’t I?” He shrugged. “No idea. I suppose that I was always more interested in what you were up to, whenever you called.”
Which was very unlike my grandfather. Nathaniel always wanted to talk about the trials and tribulations of life at Rosewood; a new assistant would normally be prime fodder.
Suddenly, I wondered what other secrets he’d been keeping, what else I’d missed. Staying in touch with Rosewood only by phone or the odd email with Dad, I’d been left out of all the day-to-day events, the little things that tied the family together – and excluded me. I’d called home, once a week on a Sunday, and spoken with Mum and Dad, with Caro, and Therese, sometimes, if she was there. Occasionally I’d shared a few words with Isabelle, too, but not often. That, at least, made more sense now. Whatever Ellie had told her about what happened, it had been enough to dig a rift between me and my grandmother that couldn’t be crossed by phone.
I’d never spoken to Ellie, of course.
Nathaniel had tended to call me, erratically, as he thought of it. Sometimes we’d talk for hours, others just for a few moments. But I’d never felt that gulf between us that I’d felt with Isabelle, or even the slight distance that had grown between me and my parents, by virtue of the miles separating us, if nothing else. I’d thought my relationship with Nathaniel was unchanging and unchangeable.
But he hadn’t told me about Edward. Why? What else had he kept from me? What else had I been left out of, by being away?
And would I ever be able to catch up?
Nathaniel reached out and selected another of the storybooks he’d written for me – the one he’d presented to me on my tenth birthday, whispering in my ear that the Forest Maiden of the title was really me. I’d held that secret close to my heart all year, I remembered, waiting for my next story. They were all about me, really, I came to realise, much later.
“How many of these did I write for you?” he asked, flicking through the pages.
“One a year until my twenty-first birthday.” Just five years ago. At the bottom of the pile was the board book he’d created for my first birthday, full of brightly coloured pictures of things you might find around Rosewood, each with a little rhyme after them.
“I always hoped you’d start writing your own,” he said, still staring at the words on the page. “You had such an imagination… I always thought you’d be a writer.”
“I am,” I said, amazed. Even when I’d signed up for my creative writing course, he’d never said that it was a good idea, never asked to see my coursework.
“I suppose,” he said, putting down the book and picking up the next one in the pile. “But it’s not really using your imagination, is it.”
“You never said anything.” My throat was suddenly tight at the idea that I hadn’t lived up to my grandfather’s dreams for me, even if I hadn’t known what they were. “I never thought…”
He looked up at me then, and smiled, his pale blue eyes soft. “Well, you had to choose your own path, after all.” He dropped the book back onto the pile. “I always told myself that there was time. Plenty of time for you to find your own way.”
Creaking to his feet, he bent down and kissed the top of my head. “You’ll get there,” he whispered, before turning and leaving, pulling the door shut behind him as I sat and blinked away my tears.
I emerged from the attic at mid-morning, by which time the rest of the house was busy running errands for Isabelle. I, however, had more important things to attend to.
If I wanted to belong at Rosewood again, to be a part of family life once more, there was only one place for me to start: with my sister. I needed to know who knew our secrets, and who might forgive me, even if Ellie couldn’t. I needed to know if I really could come home again. Even if that answer hurt.
“Have you seen Ellie?” I asked Mum, when I stumbled across her tying ribbons on menus in the kitchen. She was dressed in a long, tie-dye skirt and bright pink T-shirt that contrasted starkly with the elegant cream and gold menus.
Mum looked up sharply. She might look the woo-woo hippy part, but when it mattered her edge was knife-keen. “I’m not sure now’s the right time, sweetheart. Your sister’s very busy today.”
“I just want to talk to her about something,” I said, wondering again how much everyone at Rosewood knew about the situation.
Mum sighed, a proper world-weary parental sigh. “Why don’t you and I have some tea, eh?” And, without waiting for a reply, she stood and crossed the kitchen, flicking the kettle switch and reaching for the cups and saucers. Resigned, I took a seat at the kitchen table and examined the menus.
“Kia,” she said, as we waited for the kettle to boil. Then she sighed, a sure sign we were getting to the important stuff. “I don’t know what happened between you and your sister, and I’m not sure that I really want to. I can make certain assumptions, and one of those is that Greg’s involved somehow.”
I sat very still, and very quiet, privately hoping that if I didn’t say anything, she might forget that I was there and wander off to annoy someone else.
But she went on: “Whatever happened, it was two years ago. And while I do sincerely hope that you and Ellie will make up, of course I do…”
“She’s not showing any signs of forgiveness,” I finished for her.
Mum sighed again. “Exactly.” Picking up a ginger cookie, she placed it on a saucer and put it in front of me. “And perhaps it’s not a good idea to force it. You know Ellie; she has to come to her own decisions, when she’s ready to make them. I think you have to let this happen in its own time.”
“You’re saying I just have to wait.” Which was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do. I’d let it fester for two years, after all. How much more time could I reasonably spend avoiding it?
The secret my sister and I were hiding had kept me away from my home, my family, for too long already.
“I think so, yes.” She leant forward and patted my hand, before pouring a splash of hot water into the pot to warm it. Her voice returned to its normal, bright and bubbly tone, as she said, “But that means you have time to tell me all about this Duncan, instead, doesn’t it?”
I mentally revised my list of ‘last things I want to do’ to include ‘discussing my casual lover with my mother.’
“Look, Mum, really, I get what you’re saying. But like you said, everyone’s very busy today – all hands on deck for the party, and all. And I did promise I’d help.” I shoved the ginger cookie in my mouth. “Thanks for the biscuit!” I said around it, and hurried back into the hallway and closed the door before she could object again. It was quite obvious that Mum was firmly on Ellie’s side – which wasn’t a surprise. That was the way it had always been: Mum and Ellie, me and Dad. Caro, on the other hand, was her own, complete, confident, perfect person with the loving support of all of us – the benefit of being the baby of the family.
I didn’t blame Mum for siding with Ellie. I just wished she understood that I was trying to make things better, not worse.
After some scouting around, I found Ellie in the Orangery, surrounded by sugared almonds and tiny cardboard handbags and top hats. She wore a dark pink skirt with a paler heart print all over, and a T-shirt in a matching rose shade. Her pale hands moved quickly, with efficient finesse, as she folded the table favours.
“Why don’t I help you with that?” I asked from the doorway. Ellie looked up, her heart-shaped face full of surprise that quickly turned to doubt. “It’ll be much quicker with two of us, and I’m sure you’ve got lots of other things to be getting on with.”
Before she could object, I dropped into the wicker chair opposite her and prepared to assemble.
“You take handbags,” Ellie said pushing a pile towards me. She still looked suspicious, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes, letting her hair fall in her face instead. “I’ll take top hats.”
I waited until we’d reached some sort of a rhythm, until our hands were folding bags and hats on autopilot, and the stick-on ribbons were no longer sticking to everything but the favours, before I broached the subject I wanted to discuss. Even then, I thought it best to come at it from an angle.
“Why on earth does Isabelle want table favours, anyway?” I poured exactly four sugared almonds into my current cardboard handbag, folded the top to seal it, then reached for the tiny gold bow to stick on the top. “She does realise this isn’t an actual wedding, right?”
“Maybe she feels she missed out,” Ellie said, not looking up from her cream cardboard top hat. “You know, eloping and everything. She never got a proper wedding.”
“We didn’t have to go through all this for their ruby wedding,” I grumbled, as a sugared almond escaped my grasp and fell down the side of the seat cushions. I recovered it, and rubbed it against my jeans to get rid of the fluff, before dropping it into the bag. It wasn’t as though anyone actually ate the things, anyway.
“But fifty years, that’s really something.” Ellie added another perfect top hat to the box, and reached for the next one. “It makes sense that they want to celebrate.”
“I bet you and Greg will be doing this in forty-eight years’ time,” I said, trying to sound excited at the prospect. “The big party, I mean, here at Rosewood, with table favours and fruit cake.”
Ellie looked up and caught my eye for the first time since I’d come home. “I hope so,” she said very quietly.
Her eyes were huge under her tidy blonde fringe, I realised. Huge and sad. As if just being near me was painful to her.
Maybe I didn’t need to search for answers. Maybe that pain was all the answer I needed.
But it was a reaction, at last, even if not one I wanted. At least I knew she felt something about me being there. She hadn’t cut me out of her life – out of her heart – completely. I wasn’t sure I should feel so relieved to cause my sister to suffer.
My thoughts and words started to run together. “I mean, you and Greg, you’ve already made it two years, that’s more than lots of couples make it, isn’t it? So, really, you should…”
“Stop it.” Ellie’s voice was quiet, but when she looked up, her eyes were blazing. “Just… stop it, Kia.”
“I just meant—” I tried to explain, but Ellie cut me off.
“No. You don’t get to comment on my marriage. You don’t even get to have an opinion on my relationship with my husband.” Every word was louder than the last, ringing out around the Orangery, battering their way into my head. I froze, hands still wrapped around a stupid cardboard handbag. This wasn’t the Ellie I remembered at all. Had I done this to her? Awakened this anger? “Whatever you might have thought two years ago, there is no place for you in my marriage, or with my husband. You’re not friends, you’re not confidants, you’re nothing. Do you understand that?”
“Of course I do,” I whispered. “I know that. And I wouldn’t—”
“Don’t tell me what you wouldn’t,” Ellie said, bitterness seeping through her voice. “You already did. Remember?”
Shocked silence fell between us. Of course I remembered. Even if I’d spent two years trying to forget.
“I’m sorry,” I said, for what had to be the thousandth time. More, if you counted the letters she’d never read. “I… I’m not back here to see Greg. Or to cause any trouble. I know I did an unforgivable thing; I get that. I just…”
“Want to be forgiven,” Ellie finished for me, her voice hard.
“You forgave Greg.” I didn’t mean to whine, didn’t mean to imply that she was being unfair or that I deserved the same. But still the words came out. And as I said it, I realised I wanted to know why. Why did he get to stay here, to be part of my family, to live the life he’d always wanted, while I was exiled to Perth to do penance?
“Greg told me the truth,” Ellie said. “After… it happened. He came to me, practically on his knees, and told me the truth. He told me he couldn’t marry me, because he didn’t deserve me. Did you know that?” I shook my head. I’d been too preoccupied with my own fate to wonder exactly what happened between Ellie and Greg. “He was ready to walk out, leave his home and his family and his job, his life, because of what you two did.”
“And yet he’s still here.”
“Because I chose to forgive him.” Ellie leant across the table between us, hammering her point home. “I chose to go through with the wedding, even knowing that he’d slept with my sister just two days before, because I loved him. I still love him. I knew he truly regretted what he’d done, and I knew that together, we’d be able to move past it.” She leant back, her gaze fixed on mine. “It’s taken a lot of work, a lot of talking, a lot of love, but we have. We’ve moved on, and our marriage is stronger than ever.”
“I’m glad,” I said, softly. “I’m so glad that you’re happy together.”
“We are.” Ellie gave a firm nod. “And we will be when you leave again.”
And that, I supposed, was my answer. As far as Ellie was concerned, there was no place for me at Rosewood.
“Who else knows?” I asked, looking down at my hands. “When… two years ago, you said you didn’t want anyone to know.”
“I was ashamed.” Ellie gave a short, sharp laugh. The sort that isn’t funny at all. “Me. I was ashamed of what you two did.”
“You shouldn’t have been. I should. I am.”
“I know I shouldn’t have been,” Ellie replied sharply. “And when I realised that… I was able to talk about it, a little.”
“Who did you tell?” I asked, desperation leaking out in my voice. I needed to know who already knew my secrets, and who didn’t. Who I needed to explain myself to, who I needed to convince I wasn’t here to cause trouble. Mum and Dad had both said they didn’t know, and I suspected that was more because Ellie had wanted to spare them

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