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The Woman In The Mirror: A haunting gothic story of obsession, tinged with suspense
Rebecca James
‘A dark treat’ Kate Riordan, author of The Stranger

Haunting and moving, The Woman in the Mirror is a tale of obsession tinged with suspense, perfect for fans of Tracy Rees and Lulu Taylor.
You’ll be the woman of this house, next, miss. And you’ll like it.’

1947

Governess Alice Miller loves Winterbourne the moment she sees it. Towering over the Cornish cliffs, its dark corners and tall turrets promise that, if Alice can hide from her ghosts anywhere, it’s here.

And who better to play hide and seek with than twins Constance and Edmund? Angelic and motherless, they are perfect little companions.

2018

Adopted at birth, Rachel’s roots are a mystery. So, when a letter brings news of the death of an unknown relative, Constance de Grey, Rachel travels to Cornwall, vowing to uncover her past.

With each new arrival, something in Winterbourne stirs. It’s hiding in the paintings. It’s sitting on the stairs.

It’s waiting in a mirror, behind a locked door.


REBECCA JAMES was born in 1983. She worked in publishing for several years before leaving to write full-time, and is now the author of eight previous novels written under a pseudonym. Her favourite things are autumn walks, Argentinean red wine and curling up in the winter with a good old-fashioned ghost story. She lives in Bristol with her husband and two daughters.


Copyright (#ulink_f798638f-768a-5fa6-ada2-cd110c14214d)


An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Rebecca James 2018
Rebecca James 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.
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9781474073172
For the little soul
who wrote this book with me.
Shade of a shadow in the glass,
O set the crystal surface free!
Pass – as the fairer visions pass –
Nor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
That heard me whisper, ‘I am she!’
MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE
Contents
Cover (#ud5cf124b-f1ba-5a81-a6b6-b05d8a8a54c3)
About the Author (#ulink_736f2e76-193c-5564-a488-b8a9058b343e)
Title Page (#ufa0be1cf-6f0b-5a20-bb34-7afdc4032afa)
Copyright (#ulink_c13c4588-6424-564c-84c9-ee606adb1e73)
Dedication (#u65c902a6-56b7-540e-9202-329a018fc74b)
Prologue (#ulink_d9a50190-38cf-565f-96bc-9409138cef1e)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_487a60a7-c6b1-5f2b-88e7-759061d0a74b)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_3d6305de-84f7-5962-9cfa-2b55e38db319)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_87dedeae-dd10-5785-9ffc-d969d4a412f4)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_2d3da5da-5537-599b-83a2-f28e8701afb1)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_2e93fe7a-4519-5647-8001-33156bfd6975)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_1f22fe70-49fa-5089-9448-c4a62a9beaa9)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_1882741b-9fa9-5da2-ad79-89086de50519)
Chapter 8 (#ulink_7d4b508c-e931-5000-adfb-8f327db80916)
Chapter 9 (#ulink_7c451664-d73c-5b26-8638-1d7fe3278e6b)
Chapter 10 (#ulink_ca1d94f1-a9a0-5f46-9538-251a3cfb1c61)
Chapter 11 (#ulink_a99627df-d26b-5655-9154-ec8897c5d13a)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_45a69dc5-183c-5bc9-b173-0c326c41ae69)
Cornwall, winter 1806
Listen! Can you hear it?
There, right there. Listen. You are not listening. Listen hard.
Listen harder.
I hear them before I see them. Their shouts come from across the hill, calling my name, calling me Witch. They come with their spikes and flames, their red mouths and their black intent. They say I am the one to fear, but the fear is with them. Fear is in them. It has no need of me. Their fear will catch them at the final hour.
Shadows crawl over the moors, spreading dark against dark. Their torches dance, lit from the fire at the barn. Burn her! Drown her! Smoke her from her hole!
Witch.
It is not safe for me here. They will touch their fires to my home and I will perish inside. So I escape into the night, their steps bleeding close on the wind like a dread gallop. Down the cliffs, low to the ground, the sky watches, patient and indifferent. Stars are frozen. Moon observes. I cannot turn back: my home is lost.
At the end I will put myself there again, sitting by my hearth and staring at the painting on the wall. It is the painting I did for him but never gave him, a likeness of my house for he had admired it so; he had said what a perfect spot it held, high on the cliffs, a sweet little cottage circled by hay and firs. Oh, for those first days of innocence! For those days of blind hope, before he turned me away. On the night I planned to bestow the painting on him, he broke my heart. The gift I had meant for him remained with me, just as did every other part I imagined I would share.
I never thought I would be a woman for love, or a woman to be loved.
A woman should always trust herself.
What will remain at my home, after I am gone? What will he keep and what will he burn? I fear for my looking glass, my beloved mirror. I pray that it survives, for I wonder if a piece of me, however small, might survive with it.
Ivan. My love. How could you?
I shall never know. I will never understand. What is the point, now, in any case? Ivan de Grey betrayed me. I believed that he worshipped me, I swallowed his deceits and oh, it hurts, it hurts, to think of his arms around me…
Now they have built their case against me. They have shaped their fight and honed their resolve. There is nothing I can say or do; to protest confirms my fate.
I spill down the cliff path. I know it well enough in the dark. Brambles tear my skin and eyes; blood tastes sour in my mouth. I stumble, holding mud and air. My head hits a rock, sharp, hard, and I fall until a pain pulls me back, my hair caught on a stalk. For a moment, I lie still. Thunder, thunder, thunder. I gaze up at the night, the cool white pearl of the moon. I wish I were an animal. I wish I were a wolf. I wish I would transform, and be waiting for them when they come over the edge. I would leap at them with my jaws thrown wide.
But I am a woman. Not a wolf. Perhaps I am something in between.
Run.
I meet the sea, which has swallowed the sand completely. It foams around my ankles and I wade through it, salt burning the cuts on my legs. Ivan long ago decided I was marked. He saw the red on my body and the rest was easy. He told his friends and those friends told their enemies, and all are united in the crusade. Witch.
All he had to do was to make her believe in his love.
Love.
Rotten, stinking, hated love. Love is for fools, bound for hell.
I detest its creeping treacheries. I resent the shell it made of me. My weakness to be wanted, my pathetic, throbbing heart…
There is comfort in knowing that while I die, my hatred lives on. My hatred remains here, on this coast, in this sea and under this sky. My hatred remains.
I trust it with my vengeance, for vengeance I will take.
The water pulls me to my knees, black and thrashing and soaking my dress.
I turn to shore. High on the hill is a bright, living blaze. The men stride towards me, stride through the sea. I will not go with them. I will go on my own, willingly. I will swim to the deep and deeper still. I will picture my home as I drown.
I crawl into the wild dark.
A hand grabs my ankle and pulls me down.
Chapter 1 (#ulink_bdead6eb-47b6-51cc-837a-97abf3021c20)
London, 1947
‘Alice Miller – for heaven’s sake, wake up.’
It might be Mrs Wilson’s uppity remark that jolts me out of my eleven o’clock reverie, or else it’s the warm muzzle of the Quakers Oatley & Sons’ resident Red Setter as it nudges hotly against my lap, for it’s hard to know which happens first.
‘I’m awake,’ I tell her, finding the dog’s warm ears under my desk and working them through my fingers; Jasper breathes contentedly through his nose and his tail bangs on the floor. ‘Can’t you see my eyes are open?’
Mrs Wilson, the firm’s stuffy administrator, draws deeply on her cigarette, sucking in her cheeks. She dispels a plume of smoke before grinding the cigarette out in an ashtray. She pushes her glasses on to the bridge of her nose.
‘I wouldn’t suggest for a moment, Miss Miller, that your eyes being open has the slightest thing to do with it.’ Her fingers clack-clack on the typewriter. ‘It doesn’t take a fool to see that you’re miles away. As usual.’
If I were able to dispute the accusation, I would. But she’s right. There is little about being a solicitor’s secretary that I find stimulating, and my memories too often call me back. This is not living, as I have known living. Haven’t we all known living – and dying – in ways impossible to articulate? But to look in Jean Wilson’s eyes, just two years after wartime, as flat and grey as the city streets seem to me now, it’s as if that world might never have existed; as if it had been just one of my daydreams. I wonder what Mrs Wilson lost during those years. It is easy for one to feel as though one’s own loss overtakes all others’ – but then one remembers: mine is a lone story, a single note in a piece of music that, if played back many years from now, would be obscured by the orchestra that surrounds it.
Jasper pads out from under the desk and settles on a rug by the window. Through it, I hear the noisy brakes of a bus and a car tooting its horn.
The telephone rings. ‘Good morning, Quakers Oatley?’
We are expecting a call from an irksome client but to my surprise it is not he. For a moment, I hear the crackle of the line and the faint echo of another exchange, before a smart voice introduces itself. My grip tightens. I’m quiet for long enough that Mrs Wilson’s interest is aroused. She glances at me over the top of her spectacles.
‘Of course,’ I say, once I’ve taken in all that he’s said. ‘I’ll be with you right away.’
I replace the telephone, retrieve my coat and open the door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Goodbye, Mrs Wilson.’ I put on my coat. ‘Goodbye, Jasper.’
It is the last time I will see either of them.
*
The Tube still smells as it did in the war – fusty, sour, hot with bodies. Next to me on the platform is a woman with her children; she smacks one of them on the hand and tells him off, then pulls both to her when the train comes in. I imagine her down here during the Blitz, when they were babies, holding them close while the sky fell down.
I take the train to Marble Arch, repeating the address as I go. The building is closer than I think and I’m here early, so I step into a café next door and order a mug of tea. I drink it slowly, still wearing my hat. A man at the table next to me slices his fried egg on toast so that the yoke bursts over his plate and an orange bead lands on the greasy, chequered oilcloth. He dabs it with his finger.
I’ve kept the advertisement in my handbag for a month. I didn’t think anything would come of it; the opportunity seemed too niche, too unlikely, too convenient. GOVERNESS REQUIRED, FAMILY HALL NR. POLCREATH, IMMEDIATE APPOINTMENT. I spied it during a sandwich break, in the back of the county paper Mrs Wilson brought home from a long weekend in the South West.
I unfold it and read it again. There really isn’t any other information, nothing about the people I would be working for or for how long the position might be. I question if this isn’t what drew me towards the prospect in the first place. My life used to be full of uncertainties: each day was uncertain, each sunrise and sunset one that we didn’t expect to see; each night, while we waited for the bombs to drop and the gunfire to start, was extra time we had somehow stumbled into. Uncertainty kept me alive, knowing that the moment I was in couldn’t possibly last for ever and the next would soon be here, a moment of change, of newness, the ground shifting beneath my feet and moving me forward. At Quakers Oatley, the ground sticks fast, so fast I feel myself drowning.
The tea turns tepid, the deep cracked brown of a terracotta pot, and a fleck of milk powder floats depressingly on its surface. The man next to me grins, flips out his newspaper: India Wins Independence: British Rule Ends. I sense him about to speak and so stand before he can, buttoning my coat and checking my reflection in the smeared window. I pull open the café door, its chime offering a weak ring.
There it is, then. No. 46. Across the road, the genteel townhouse bears down, its glossy black door and polished copper bell push like a delicately wrapped present that my fumbling fingers are desperate, yet fearful, to open. Before we begin, it has me on the back foot. I need it more than it needs me. This job is my ticket out of London, away from the past, away from my secrets. This job is escape.
*
‘Welcome, Miss Miller. Do please sit down.’
I peel off my gloves and set them neatly on the desk before changing my mind and scooping them into my bag. I set the bag on my lap, then have nowhere to put my hands, so I place the bag on the floor, next to my ankles.
He doesn’t appear to notice this display, or perhaps he is too polite to acknowledge it. Instead, he takes a file from the drawer and flicks through it for several moments. The top of his head, as he bends, is bald, and clean as a marble.
‘Thank you for meeting us at short notice,’ he says, with a quick smile. ‘My client, as you’ll understand, prefers to be discreet, and often that means securing results swiftly. We would prefer to resolve the appointment as soon as possible.’
‘Of course.’
‘You have experience with children?’
‘I used to nanny our neighbours’ infants, before the war.’
He nods. ‘My client’s children require tutelage as well as pastoral care. We are concerned with the curriculum but also with a comprehensive education in nature, the arts, sports and games – and, naturally, refinement of etiquette and propriety.’
I sit straighter. ‘Naturally.’
‘The twins are eight years old.’ His eyes meet mine for the first time, sharp and glassy as a crow’s.
‘Very good.’
‘I’m afraid this isn’t the sort of position you can abandon after a month,’ he says. ‘If you find it a challenge, you can begin your instruction by teaching these children the knack of perseverance.’ He puts his fingers together. ‘I mention this because my client lost his last governess suddenly and without warning.’
‘Oh.’
‘As a widower, he has understandably struggled. These are difficult times.’
I’m surprised. ‘Did his wife die recently?’
Immediately I know I have spoken out of turn. I am not here to question this man; he is here to question me. My interest is unwelcome.
‘Tell me, Miss Miller,’ he says, bypassing my enquiry with ease, ‘what occupation did you hold during the war?’
‘I volunteered with the WVS.’
The man teases the end of his moustache. ‘Nurturing yet capable: would that be a fair assessment?’
‘I’d suggest the two aren’t mutually exclusive.’
He writes something down.
‘Have you always lived in London?’
‘I grew up in Surrey.’
‘And attended which school…?’
‘Burstead.’
His eyebrow snags, impressed but not liking to show it. I know my education was among the finest in the country. My mother was schooled at Burstead, and my grandmother before that. There was never any question that my parents would send me there. I tighten my fists in my lap, remembering my father’s face over that Sunday lunch in 1940. The ticking of the mantle clock, the shaft of winter sunlight that bounced off the table, the smell of burned fruit crumble… His rage when I told him what I had done. That the education they had bought for me had instead brought a nightmare to their door. The sound of smashing glass as my mother walked in, letting the tumbler fall, shattering into a thousand splinters on the treacle-coloured carpet.
He clears his throat, tapping the page with his pen. I see my own handwriting.
‘In your letter,’ he says, ‘you say you are keen to move away from the city. Why?’
‘Aren’t we all?’ I answer a little indecorously, because this is easy, this is what he expects to hear. ‘I would never care to repeat the things I have seen or done over the past six years. The city holds no magic for me any more.’
He sees my automatic answer for what it is.
‘But you, personally,’ he presses, those eyes training into me again. ‘I am interested in what makes you want to leave.’
A moment passes, an open door, the person on each side questioning if the other will walk through – before it closes. The man sits forward.
‘You might deem me improper,’ he says, ‘but my inquests are made purely on my client’s behalf. We understand that the setting of your new appointment is a far cry from the capital. Are you used to isolation, Miss Miller? Are you accustomed to being on your own?’
‘I am very comfortable on my own.’
‘My client needs to know if you have the vigour for it. As I said previously, he does not wish to be hiring a third governess in a few weeks’ time.’
‘I’ve no doubt.’
‘Therefore, if you will forgive my impudence, could you reassure us that you have no medical history of mental disturbances?’
‘Disturbances?’
‘Depressive episodes, attacks of anxiety, that sort of thing.’
I pause. ‘No.’
‘You cannot reassure us, or you can that you haven’t?’
For the first time, there is the trace of a smile. I am almost there. Almost. I don’t have to tell him the truth. I don’t have to tell him anything.
‘I can reassure you that I am perfectly well,’ I say, and it trips off my tongue as smoothly as my name.
The man assesses me, then squares the paper in front of him and replaces it in its folder. When he leans back in his chair, I hear the creak of leather.
‘Very well, Miss Miller,’ he says. ‘My client entrusts me with the authority to hire at will in light of my appraisal of an applicant’s suitability, and I am pleased to offer you the position of governess at the Polcreath estate with immediate effect.’
I rein in my delight. ‘Thank you.’
‘Before you accept, is there anything you would like to ask us?’
‘Your client’s name, and the name of the house.’
‘Then I must insist on your signature.’
He slides a piece of paper across the desk, a contract of sorts, listing my start date as this coming week, the broad terms of my responsibilities towards the children, and that my bed and board will be provided. There is a dotted line at the foot, awaiting my pen. ‘I understand it is unorthodox,’ he says, ‘but my client is a private man. We need assurance of your allegiance before I’m permitted to give details.’
‘But until I have details I have little idea what I am signing.’
The man holds his hands up, as if helpless. I wait a moment, but there is never any hesitation in my mind. I collect the pen and sign my name.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_8298e578-b0c4-53b3-9fa6-a41436d20761)
My train pulls into Polcreath Station at four o’clock on Sunday. The warmth has gone out of the day and a rich, autumn sun sits low on the horizon, casting the land in a burned harvest glow. I’m quick to see the car, but then it’s hard to miss, a smart, black Rolls-Royce whose white wheels gleam like bones in the fading light.
A man greets me, short, middle-aged, fair. ‘Miss Miller?’
‘How do you do.’
He lifts my bags into the car then opens the rear door for me. Up close, the Rolls is more decayed than it first appeared. Its paintwork is peeling and inside the upholstery is fissured and coming away from the seat frames. There is the smell of old cigarettes and petrol. It takes the chauffeur a moment to start the engine.
‘I’m Tom, Winterbourne’s houseman,’ he says, when I ask him: not a chauffeur after all, then. ‘I’ll turn my hand to anything.’ He has a gentle Northern accent and a friendly, easy manner. ‘There’s not many of us – just me and Cook. And you, now, of course. The house can’t afford anyone else, though goodness knows we need it. We’re mighty excited to have you joining us, miss. Winterbourne always seems darker at this time of year, when the evenings draw in and the light starts to go. The more company the better, I say.’
‘Please, call me Alice.’
‘Right you are, miss.’
I smile. ‘Is it far to Winterbourne?’
‘Not far. Over the bluff. The sea makes it seem further – there’s a lot of sea. Are you used to the sea, miss?’
‘Not very. One or two holidays as a child.’
‘The sea’s as much a part of Winterbourne as its roof and walls. I expect that sounds daft to a city lady like yourself, but there it is. You can see the sea from every window, did they tell you that?’
‘They didn’t tell me much about anything.’
Tom crunches the gears. ‘This car’s a bad lot. The captain would never part with it, but really we’d be better off with a horse and cart, at the rate this thing goes.’
‘More comfortable, though, I’d wager.’ Although I’m being generous: with every bump and rut in the road the car squeaks in protest, and the springs in my seat dig painfully into my thighs. The short distance Tom promised is ever lengthening. In time we come off the road and on to a track, on either side of which the countryside spreads, a swathe of dark green that eventually gives way, if I squint into the distance, to a flat sheet of grey water.
‘The moors look tame from here,’ says Tom, with a quick glance over his shoulder, ‘but wait till we reach the cliffs. It’s a sheer drop there – ground beneath your feet one moment, then nothing. You’ve got to be careful, miss. The mists that come in off the sea are solid. Some days you can’t see more than a foot or two in front, you can’t see a thing. All you’ve got to go on is the sound of the sea, but if you lose your bearings with that, one wrong step and you’re gone. Winterbourne’s right on the bluff. Some people say it’s the second lighthouse at Polcreath.’
‘How long have you worked for the captain?’
‘Since before the war. I knew him when he was a…different sort of person. The war changed people, didn’t it? Just because you have a title, or a place like Winterbourne, it doesn’t spare you. He was hurt in France; it’s been hard for him, an able-bodied man like that suddenly made a cripple. Did the war change you, miss?’
I focus on the horizon, an expanse of steel coming ever closer, and concentrate on the clean line of it so intently that I can’t think of anything else. ‘Of course.’
‘Between you and me, I could likely find better-paid employment elsewhere, but I’ve got loyalty for Winterbourne, and for the captain. My mother used to say that you’re nothing without your friends. The captain would never say I was a friend, but he doesn’t say a lot of things that he might really mean.’
‘How tragic that he lost his wife.’
‘Indeed, miss.’ There’s a laden silence. ‘But we don’t speak about that.’
I sit back. I had hoped that Tom’s loquaciousness might lend itself to a confidence, but seemingly not on this matter. Two people now have refused to speak to me about the former woman of the house. What happened to her?
I am expecting us to come across the Hall suddenly, to catch a quick glimpse of it between trees or to swing abruptly through the park gates, but instead I spot it first as a ragged smudge on the hill. That’s how it appears – as an inkblot the size of my thumb, spilled in water, its edges seeming to fall away or dissolve into air. There is something about its position, elevated and alone, that reminds me of a fortress in a storybook, or of a drawing of a haunted house, its black silhouette set starkly against the deepening orange of the sky. As we approach, I begin to make out its features. To say that Winterbourne is an extreme-looking house would be an understatement.
It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic façade. The place instantly brings to mind an imposing religious house – a Parisian cathedral, perhaps, decorated with gaping arches and delicate spires. Turrets thrust skyward, and to the east the blunt teeth of a battlement crown remind me of a game of chess. Plunging gargoyles are laced around its many necks, long and thin, jutting, as if leaping from the building’s skin. Lancet windows, too many to count, adorn the exterior, and set on the western front is what appears to be a chapel. I was scarcely aware of having entered the park, and it strikes me that we must have crossed into it a while ago; that the land we’ve been driving on all this time belongs to Winterbourne.
Gnarled trees creep out of the drowning afternoon. To our left, away from the sea, spreads a wild, dark wood, dense with firs and the soft black mystery of how it feels to be lost, away from home, when you are a child and the night draws close. On the other, the sea is a wide-eyed stare, lighter and smoother now we are near, like pearls held in a cold hand. I see what Tom meant about the drop from the cliffs: the land sweeps up and away from the hall, a brief sharp lip like the crest of a wave, and then it is a four-hundred-foot plummet to the rocks. Further still into that unblinking spread I detect Polcreath Point, the tower light, a mile or so from the shore.
‘Here we are, miss.’ Tom turns the Rolls a final time and we embark up the final stretch towards the house, a narrow track between overgrown topiary. Leafy fingers drag against the windows, and the car rocks over a series of potholes that propels my vanity case into the foothold. At last we emerge into an oval of gravel, at the centre of which is an unkempt planter, tangled with weeds.
‘Winterbourne Hall.’
I gaze up at my new lodgings, and imagine how my arrival must look. A throbbing engine, a lonely car – and a woman, peering skyward, her hand poised to open the door, and some slight switch of nameless apprehension that makes her pause.
*
The first thing I notice is the smell. It isn’t unpleasant, merely unusual, a liturgical smell like the inside of a church: wood, stone and burning candles.
There are no candles burning. The entrance is gloomy, lit by a flickering candelabrum. ‘Ticky generator,’ explains Tom, taking off his cap. ‘We use fires, mostly.’ I look up at the chandelier, its bulbs bruised with dust and casting an uncertain glow that sends tapered shadows across the walls. The ceiling is ribbed and vaulted, like the roof of a basilica, but its decorations are bleached and crumbled. A staircase climbs ahead of me, a faded scarlet runner up its centre, bolted in place by gold pins. Some of the pins are missing and the carpet frays up against the wood like a rabbit’s tail. On the upper walls, a trio of hangings in red and bronze sits alongside twisting metal sconces, better suited to a Transylvanian castle than to a declining Cornish home. There is a large stone fireplace, coated in soot, and several items of heavy Elizabethan furniture positioned in alcoves: elaborate dark-wood chairs, an occasional table, and a hulking chest with edges wreathed in nail heads.
On the landing above, I see closed doors, set with gothic forging. The windows are heavily draped in velvet, with tasselled tiebacks. Dozens of eyes watch me watching. Paintings of the captain’s ancestors bear down from every facet.
For a moment I have the uncanny sense of having been here before – then I place the connection. The headmaster’s study at Burstead. How, when a girl was called in for a flogging, she would be surrounded by an army of onlookers – those men, tyrants past, with their shining eyes and satisfied smirks, their portraits as immovable as the headmaster’s intention, and she would stand in the red punitive glow of the stained-glass window and bite her lip while the first lash came…
Afterwards, when they couldn’t decide how the tragedy had happened, they brought us all in for a whipping; perhaps they thought the belt would draw it out of us as cleanly as it drew blood to the skin. The difficulty was that nobody except me knew the truth. Nobody else had been there. They sensed a secret, dark and dreadful, rippling through the dormitories like an electrical charge, but I was the only girl who knew and I wasn’t about to share it. So I kept my lips shut and I let the lashes come for me and for the others, and time passed and term ended and school finished not long after that.
I blink, and take my gloves off.
‘Where are the children?’ I ask. ‘I should like to introduce myself.’
Tom gives me a strange look. ‘The captain asked us to settle you in first, miss. The twins can get overexcited. They like to play games.’
‘Well, they’re children, aren’t they?’
He pauses, as if my query might have some other answer.
‘What happened to their previous governess? The woman before me?’
‘She left,’ Tom replies, too quickly and smoothly for it to be the truth. ‘One morning, suddenly. We had no warning, miss, honestly. She sent word days later – a family emergency. She was mighty sad about it, hated letting the captain down. We all of us hate to let the captain down. It’d be horrible if he was let down again, wouldn’t it, miss? After the effort he’s gone to, to bring you down here. There’s only so much a man can take. The captain said there was no way round it, and the world exists outside Winterbourne whether we like it or not. Because you do feel that way, miss, here, after a while. Like Winterbourne is all there is, just the house and sea. You find you don’t need anything else.’ His expression is unfathomable, doggedly loyal.
‘Do the children miss her terribly?’ I am not sure if I am talking about the governess or the children’s mother: this pair of doomed women, for a moment, seem bound in a fundamental, terrifying way, but the thought flits free before I can catch it.
‘Of course they do,’ Tom says. ‘But they’ll warm to you even better.’
I’m about to ask my predecessor’s name – it seems important to know it – when there is a noise on the staircase: a shuffle of footsteps, a slow, lilting gait, punctuated by the unmistakable point of a cane. When my employer comes into view, I take a step back. I have never seen anyone in my life who looks like this.
‘The new governess,’ he says bluntly, twisting his cane into the stair.
For a moment I forget my name.
‘Alice Miller,’ I say at last.
The man steps forward, into a pit of shadow so that I can no longer see his face. Captain Jonathan de Grey. The name that has followed me from London, from that interview that seems like years ago in spite of it being days – from before then, even, if that were possible. ‘I trust you had a good journey,’ he says, in a peculiar, remote voice. ‘We’re very pleased that you’re here. Very pleased indeed.’
Chapter 3 (#ulink_fe5085a2-89b4-5012-873a-bce5f6b71f1a)
New York, present day
Rachel Wright stepped on to the podium to address her guests. Pride filled her as she took in the gallery launch, the people mingling, the inspiring artworks and the sheer transformation of the space she had purchased six months ago from rundown warehouse to edgy exhibition. Immediately, she felt his eyes on her.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Paul, her assistant, announced as he tapped the microphone. ‘May I introduce the woman responsible for tonight: Founder and Director of the Square Peg Gallery – Rachel Wright!’ Paul smiled as he led the applause. He wanted to please her. Everyone did. Rachel commanded respect. Little was known about her private life and the care with which she protected it was a point of staunch admiration. Paul and the others knew about the big thing, of course. But nobody mentioned it.
‘Thank you all for being here tonight,’ Rachel began. ‘And thanks especially to our sponsors, without whom none of this would be possible – in particular White Label Inc. and G&V Assets.’ She deliberately named his firm second; it was a stupid power thing. More applause, for them or for her, it didn’t matter. She needed their funds and they needed her association. She’d said as much in her pitch. Where was their commitment to community culture? Were their rivals delivering on social responsibility? She remembered launching her petition in his boardroom, the way his black eyes had trained into her as they trained into her now, challenging her. How did he always manage it? Rachel could present to sponsors from here to Milan, could sit opposite the greatest creatives in the world, but with him, well, he made her feel the spotlight. It was the excitement of their arrangement, she supposed.
‘If this gallery hasn’t stopped to breathe, then neither have I,’ Rachel told her audience, thinking of the three hours’ sleep she had grown accustomed to snatching; of the caffeine she lived off and the cigarettes she was trying to give up but that sometimes pushed her that extra hour into the night, of the determination – ‘my mother had another word for it,’ she joked – that took an idea out of one’s head and made it a reality; of the team she’d had behind her; of her Upper West Side apartment that she never spent any time in and that had become overtaken by work. Talking about the gallery was like talking about herself, for she had given everything to it over the past eighteen months. Art was her passion and her purpose. She had always found sanctuary in it, in its possibility and lack of boundary, in its subjectivity and beauty, in its strength to innovate and energise, to change minds and start dialogues. Since she could remember, she’d been happiest staring into a painting or admiring a sculpture, imagining the stories that went into it and, in doing so, she was able to forget her own.
As always when Rachel spoke in front of big crowds, she wound up feeling they were waiting for more. Perhaps they were. They knew, after all, what had happened to her back in 2012. It had been in the papers, talked about over breakfast tables. Did they expect her to reference it? She wondered, sometimes, if she should. That maybe if she mentioned it once, that would be enough. That would sate their curiosity about whether it was an event she acknowledged and accepted, an event she had dealt with. Perhaps she didn’t ever bring it up because she hadn’t dealt with it.
Her speech closed to the sound of rapturous appreciation. Rachel dared herself to find his face. It wasn’t difficult. She could just imagine the scent of his aftershave, which she caught when they embraced, just inside the angle of his shirt collar.
*
Of course he followed her back from the launch. Mutually they had decided not to be seen together in public. On the surface neither wanted their position to be compromised – his investment muddied the waters somewhat – but deep down it was their shared reluctance to commit. A no-strings arrangement suited both fine. Secret liaisons at her apartment or his heightened the thrill. Being linked officially made it too serious, too much of a fact. Rachel wasn’t ready for that. She liked the emotional distance.
She was stepping into the shower when she heard the buzzer go.
‘Aaron.’ She answered the door in her gown. ‘It’s two a.m. Can’t you sleep?’
He grinned. ‘Not without you.’ He leaned in and she turned her face away, just a fraction, to tease him, even though she knew she would let herself be kissed.
‘You were sensational tonight,’ he said, his arms looping round her waist.
‘Thank you.’
‘I mean it. I was impressed.’
She could never tell how sincere he was being. Aaron Grewal was arrogant and proud (as she suspected were many multimillionaires), and she had a reasonable inkling he slept with other women. But she didn’t care. This wasn’t about heart and soul; it was about danger and distraction. Aaron was different to what she was used to…to what was missing. He was like her late nights, her coffee, her deadlines, a quick fix to get through, nothing permanent or serious, nothing it would hurt to lose.
Afterwards, they lay in each other’s arms. It was nice to be held, to hear the warm beat of another person’s heart. When she’d won the pitch from Aaron’s firm, they’d told her she was one of the strongest candidates they’d seen. The word had stayed with her, become part of why she’d been drawn into romance with Aaron in the first place. He saw her strength and recognised it. Strength was the reason she was still here. It was how she’d got ahead, being decisive, being convinced: it was how she’d survived.
In the glow of the streetlight, Rachel made out the room around her: a student’s room, a rented room, a room lived in for hours at a time. Interspersed with her plans for the gallery, drawings, reports and journals filled with sketches and emails and wish lists, was a litter of empty cups, perfumes, piled up books, pictures that never made it on to the walls, propped up against wash racks, clothes strewn across the floor, handbags and pill packets and phone chargers…
There were no photographs. Aaron had commented on it when he’d first come over. No framed family, no memories, nothing personal. It hadn’t been intentional, just how things were. She couldn’t help it. The past was a stranger.
‘Goodnight, Success Story,’ Aaron murmured, kissing the top of her head.
She smiled into his chest, feeling the urge to cry. Exhaustion, that was all. And an expression of tenderness she had long learned to live without, so that when she received it, it hurt a little. Rachel had cried a lot at the start of her life, and she had cried a lot in 2012, but she hadn’t cried since. As a rule she didn’t cry. Instead she surrounded herself with noise and lights, with anything but quiet and dark.
It took ages to fall asleep. She would manage a couple of hours and that was what she preferred: a brief sliver of quiet before the day drew her into its comforting, busy embrace. And yet the shorter the sleep, the deeper her dreams… Always they came in bursts, the same one on a cycle for weeks at a time. This one had lasted longer than most. Rachel felt herself floating in a familiar space, inexplicable, tantalising, as known to her as her skin yet as alien as the stars: a dimly lit passage in a huge, impersonal house, a moon-bathed window, coarse floorboards beneath her naked feet. This faraway place called her, whispering, whispering, This is where you belong.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_22acd341-fcb4-56c0-91f2-9895c78f1cf9)
He left before she woke the next morning. Rachel was glad, fixed herself coffee and opened her emails. Her inbox was filled with messages of congratulation. They’d made a mint on some of the more expensive works last night and several write-ups had already appeared in the morning’s coverage, calling the Square Peg launch ‘a triumph’ and ‘an enthralling odyssey into the city’s burning talent’. Paul had written with news that tickets for next month’s exhibition had sold out, and that a renowned London artist wished to make an appearance at the weekend. Rachel summoned Paul for brunch and closed her tablet.
It took minutes to get ready. Despite her lack of sleep, the bathroom mirror told her she looked good. With neat brown hair, warm hazel eyes and a smattering of freckles across her nose, Rachel was no supermodel, but she had a fine figure, great skin and she carried herself well. For a long time she had puzzled over the roots of her appearance. Most people didn’t have to – their parents were right in front of them, or they had pictures to go on, blood relatives to join the dots – and she had thought so many times about what a phenomenon that would be. Imagining her mother and father was a bit like imagining her own hypothetical child, as much of a mystery and a miracle. For she had no positioning in the world, no biological foundation: she wasn’t the branch or the leaf on a tree, running deep into the earth, permanent and enduring; she was her own shrub, small and lonely, with roots barely clinging to the soil.
Rachel had got along fine with her adoptive parents, Maggie and Greg. They had longed for a baby and been unable to have one of their own, and when they’d welcomed her at a week old, it had been the answer to their prayers. She was lucky, she knew: they’d been loving, supportive, attentive, and truthful with her, explaining her adoption as soon as she was old enough to understand. But, really, one was never old enough to understand something like that, to properly get to grips with and accept deep inside without umbrage or bitterness that you weren’t loved enough to be kept in the first place. ‘We chose you,’ Maggie used to say over and over, ‘because you were special. We adored you from the second we laid eyes on you.’ And Rachel used to take reassurance from this – that she might have been cast aside by one set of parents but at least she’d been picked up by another – until her older, more complicated years, when she had learned about the adoption process and that Maggie and Greg hadn’t selected her, she had simply been the first baby to come along. It was hard to get a baby, most childless couples wished for babies and there weren’t enough to go round, so no wonder her adoptive parents had felt she was meant to be.
Rachel knew this was ungrateful and unhelpful, so she’d stifled the truth of her emotions and instead focused on the future, always the next thing, getting ahead, refusing to look behind. When she’d referenced her mother in the gallery speech, she’d been remembering how Maggie used to describe her as ‘bloody-minded’. It was meant, for the most part, affectionately, but in her teenage years it had caused toxic fights. Rachel’s stubbornness, her iron will, whether it concerned dating a boy or staying out or refusing to finish her studies, came from a place that neither Maggie nor Greg could trace in themselves, a place so remote and unknown that it served only to remind them what was missing. That Rachel had a family out there who were just like her, and it was their blood that was running through her veins, not the Wrights’.
Maggie and Greg had died within a year of each other when she was eighteen, so she hadn’t had all that much of them either. At the time she’d mourned, but she never shed as many tears over them as she had over her imagined, other parents. It had seemed thankless and hurtful to pursue her heritage while Maggie and Greg were alive, but after they went there was nothing stopping her. Rachel knew she’d been born in England to English parents, and had ideas about travelling there, to some charming retreat or else a townhouse in London, and being welcomed by a woman smelling of vanilla sponge, a friendly wirehaired dog trailing at her feet. However, her ideas came to nothing and her search was short-lived: Rachel discovered inside a week that her birth mother was dead and she had no father listed. That was when she’d decided to close the door on the past. She spoke to no one about it. Nobody knew she was adopted and she preferred it that way. Keeping a lid on her feelings was a trick she’d learned early on, and it had certainly protected her since.
The sound of the mail hitting the mat pulled her from her thoughts. She grabbed her jacket and bent to scoop up the letters to look at later, but a single white envelope drew her up short. It was one of those envelopes that made you look twice. There was nothing menacing about it, nothing especially unusual but for the UK postal address and a red stamp reading STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.
She picked it up and turned it over. Private documents enclosed. There was a return address, a Quakers Oatley & Sons Solicitors in Mayfair, London.
She ran her nail along the seal and opened it.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_84490ef5-cc58-5078-bad2-19e85ab31bd6)
Cornwall, 1947
Only when the captain moves to shake my hand does his face return to the light. It is a fine, distinguished face: the product of centuries of ancestral perfection. His eyes are blue and clear, startlingly bright in comparison with the rest of him. His hair is black and has grown out of its cut, longer and more dishevelled than is the fashion for gentlemen, and there is a faint shadow of, or prelude to, a beard, although that could be the gloom hitting him from beneath. The chin is striking, square and sharp, and his mouth is wide, the lips parted slightly, with a curl that could be mistaken for a sneer. It isn’t a kind mouth.
I notice all this before I notice the most obvious thing: his scars. I was warned about the captain’s war wounds, but I hadn’t known about his burns. His left cheek is pitted like fruit peel, the skin pulled tight towards the angle where his jaw meets his earlobe, where it melts into spilled candle wax.
His clear, blue eyes, as they meet mine, dare me to comment. For a shameful moment I am glad of his disfiguration, for if he were flawless I might not know how to speak. There is a scent about him, of tobacco and scorched wood.
‘Thank you, Tom,’ he says, ‘but I will show Miss Miller to her room.’
‘Very well, Captain.’
The mouth lifts then, but it isn’t quite a smile. Nonetheless I return it and follow him up to the landing. We make slow, awkward progress, and I see how much discomfort his leg causes him but also the pride that prevents him from admitting it.
‘Tell me,’ he starts, ‘what are your first impressions of Winterbourne?’
‘Well, I’ve only just arrived.’ We pass a glass case filled with stuffed birds: a hawk alights on a branch, wings wide, beak screaming. ‘But I should say what strikes me is that it’s very beautiful.’
‘Beautiful.’ The captain repeats the word, as if it’s foreign. ‘Winterbourne has been described as many things, but beautiful isn’t one of them.’
‘No? I’m surprised.’
‘It was built by a band of lunatics. Hardly the way to speak of one’s ancestors, but there’s the long and short of it. Too much money and too little discrimination. They thought they were recreating Notre-Dame, I’m sure. That families should be expected to live here, generations of us, hardly came into it. No – I’ve heard daunting, intimidating, bleak, desolate… but I’ve never heard beautiful.’
‘You don’t like your home, Captain?’
He gives a short, hollow laugh. ‘It isn’t a question of me not liking it. Rather the other way round.’
I frown, but before I can speak he stops at a door and draws a chain of keys from his pocket. It is necessary for him to lean against the wall to do this, wheezing slightly, and my instinct is to help him but I don’t. We are at the end of a passage. Looking back, the way we’ve come appears impossibly long, distortedly so, a carpeted corridor flickering in the glow of feeble bulbs. Ahead is a narrow staircase, presumably the servants’ access.
‘This is your room,’ he says, and the door creaks open.
The first thing I notice is the smell of age, a musty scent that seems to rise from the floorboards and seep from the walls. The atmosphere is deep, as weighty as the green velvet drapes that hang from the high window. There is a wooden four-poster bed, carved ornately in the Jacobean style, its quilts piled extravagantly. Chenille rugs adorn the boards beneath my feet, and behind me, on the wall we have stepped through, is an elaborate scenic mural depicting some dark, tangled foliage. Its pattern is dizzyingly complicated, impossible to follow one twisted vine without getting lost in the knots of the others.
‘Will this be adequate for you?’ says Jonathan de Grey. I nod. Of course it will be. It is, presumably, where his previous governess slept. She flits into my mind then vanishes just as quickly. I wonder about her sleeping here, watching the forest mural from her bed, trying to follow those creepers then unable to find her way out.
‘It’s lovely,’ I say. It isn’t true, just as perhaps ‘beautiful’ wasn’t quite true for Winterbourne. Just something people say to make things well. ‘I shall be very comfortable here.’ I go to the window, pull the curtains and flood the room with light. Already, it looks better. There is a little writing desk, a handsome wardrobe and an adjacent washing and dressing room. I think of my miserable lodgings in London and am once again amazed at the fortune that brought me here. All will be well.
‘I’ll leave you now,’ says the captain, stepping back. For a moment the daylight catches his features, the taut, pockmarked side of his face, and he shies from it like a creature of the night. ‘Mrs Yarrow will collect you shortly.’
The door closes and I am alone. Gradually the captain’s footsteps cease, and against the silence my ears tune into quieter sounds: sounds sewn into the building. I hear a soft tapping, most likely the flick of a branch at the window, but when I look out the wild trees are distant. I travel from one surface to another, the foot of the bed, the top of the wardrobe; I smile, as if the tapping is playing with me, a silly parlour game. It sounds louder at the desk so I open the drawer. Abruptly, the tapping stops – it was a draught behind the wall, or a mouse scratching at wood. Inside is a clock, small and round, 1920s, silver. The time reads twenty-five minutes to three, but the second hand isn’t working. There is an engraving on the back:
L. Until the end of time.
I remove the clock and put it on the table. I’ll see later if it can’t be fixed.
From the window, the view is tremendous. I must be on the westernmost gable because the sea appears huge and immediate, with no cliffs to separate us, as if it is washing right up to Winterbourne’s walls; or we could be on the Polcreath tower light, rising straight up out of the ocean, its root chalky with salt and seaweed. The water is dark, perfectly still closer to shore but in the distance little white crests jump and retreat on its surface. The sky is frozen white and copper, like a Turner painting, dashed with smears of dirty raincloud. I met a former lighthouse keeper, once, during the war. His house had been blown to dust in a bad Blitz. As I held his hand and waited for the ambulance to arrive, he told me of his time, years before, on a remote Atlantic outpost, and that he could never be afraid of the sea, no matter how it churned or roared. ‘The sea’s my friend,’ he assured me, his face blackened with ash. ‘If I fell into it, it would toss me back up. The sea would never take me.’ He missed the water like a lost love, he said; even through the noise and fury of war it called to him, calling him back to its lonely perfection. ‘It’s all right,’ he’d kept saying, as I told him he would find safety and a way to rebuild his life, ‘this wasn’t my life anyway. My life is out on the water,’ and he’d wept for a loss he could not express.
I consider if this sea will become my friend, looking at it every day, and it looking at me. So different from the rush and noise of London, which, once peace was declared, people told me would be a welcome diversion. Everyone was grieving, everyone was spent; everyone had known terrible things and faced terrible truths. But the city pumped on like an unstoppable heart, whisking us up with it, forcing us to go on even if some days we felt like lying down in the middle of the street and closing our eyes and never waking again. Carry on, carry on, that was the message throughout the war. What about after it ended? Carry on, they said, carry on. It was hard for me to carry on. There are some things from which you cannot carry on. Some things hurt too much. Things we did. Things we let happen. I close my eyes, unwilling to remember. A grasping hand, swirling hair, and her eyes, her eyes…
I am about to go and find Mrs Yarrow, whom I assume to be the cook, when something catches my eye that I didn’t notice before.
It is a painting, hanging in the shadow of the dark green curtain and no bigger than a place mat on a dining table. The frame, too, is large, so that the print inside is really quite small and delicate, and I have to lean in to see what it portrays.
It’s a little farm scene, a barn surrounded by hay bales and a grey band of sea just visible in the distance. A cow chews on a tuft of grass. Milking pails lie abandoned. A cluster of dark firs borders a simple cottage, its chimney smoking and a full moon hovering over its roof. The landscape is curiously recognisable as that around Winterbourne: we are here, in this place, at some distant, irretrievable point in the past. The moors are unmistakable, their wild desolation, the colour of the earth.
Perhaps it’s instinctive to look for a human face in these things, because I do, but even though I am looking it still comes as a surprise to me when I see her. She is merely a detail, an impression, not really a person; it’s more the feeling of her, looking out at the window, looking right back at me. Her head must be the size of a farthing, if that, with a wisp of dark hair and two green eyes. The artist has made a point of her eyes, the brightest colour in the picture. I think of the girl peering out at me, just as, a moment before, I was peering out at the sea from my own window. I think of us peering at each other, and for an instant the effect is unsettling, because it really appears that she is seeing me, and I her. Not really a person. Not really.
‘Miss Miller?’ There is a knock at the door.
I tie the curtain back, obscuring the print, and go to answer it.
*
I don’t realise I am hungry until Mrs Yarrow puts soup and a sandwich in front of me, a doorstop of cheese and ham. I remember sharing my butter ration with Mrs Wilson at Quakers Oatley after her husband died, and what another world London seems.
Mrs Yarrow fusses about me like a mother, fetching milk, then a pudding of lemon meringue pie with gingerbread biscuits. I haven’t eaten so much in months.
‘Well, I’ve had practice,’ she says, when I compliment her on her cooking. ‘I’ve worked here for the captain for twenty years, and practice makes perfect, as they say.’ She has a West Country burr, is plump and pink-cheeked, and her frizzy brown hair escapes in soft tendrils from her cap. She sits opposite me, her hands in her lap.
‘Are we pleased to have you joining us, miss,’ she says, with such visible relief that it seems almost inappropriate.
‘I’m pleased to be here.’
‘I don’t know how much longer the captain could have coped. Things have been…testing.’
‘Since my predecessor left?’
Mrs Yarrow nods. ‘I’ve been in charge of the children. As you can imagine, I have my hands full enough with the daily running of things. It was really too much. But none of us wants to let the captain down.’
‘Of course not.’
‘It will be good for the children to have proper care.’ Mrs Yarrow shifts in her seat; she has the manner of somebody loose-tongued trying not to tell a secret. ‘All this up and down, here and gone, no consistency, miss, that’s the problem.’
‘It must have been confusing for them.’ I sip my tea.
‘Yes. Confusing. That’s it.’
‘And to have lost their poor mother, as well.’
‘Oh, yes, miss. That were quite a thing.’
I want to ask again after Mrs de Grey; I want her to tell me. But Mrs Yarrow has reddened and her eyes have fallen to her lap. She looks afraid.
‘I must say I feel fond of the twins already,’ I say instead. ‘To be so young and to go through so much.’
‘Ah, but the young are strong,’ says Mrs Yarrow. ‘Stronger than I, in any case. You’ll see what I mean when you meet them.’
She sees me gazing up at the kitchen shelves, at the soup tureens and jelly moulds coated in dust, at the giant mixing bowls and tarnished ladles, at the china plates and casseroles and long-unused tea sets with their chipped edges and mismatched saucers. The space is cavernous, great wooden worktops and a central island around which we sit, but it’s draughty now in the early evening and its size only summons the buzz and activity that’s missing. Once, this would have been the hub of the house. Today, it’s a graveyard: a ghost of times gone by. I wonder if Mrs de Grey cooked here, her hands dusted with flour and her babies crawling round her skirts. Or perhaps she cut a remote figure, closeted away with her thoughts, wringing her fingers, which I picture as studded with jewels. I know how treacherous thoughts can be. That if you are left alone with them for too long, they can turn against you.
‘It was strange how the war brought Winterbourne back to us,’ says Mrs Yarrow, brightening. ‘When we had the children here – the evacuees – it was like old times. Voices everywhere, running feet, excitement. You wouldn’t have recognised this place.’ She gestures about her. ‘We had littluns piled all round this table, sticking their fingers into cake mix, playing hide and seek in the tower, getting up to mischief with the bell box. Bells were ringing all through the house, miss, and we soon found out why! That was just after the twins came along. Madam used to complain that she couldn’t get any sleep because of the noise. She’d go upstairs to lie down in the day, while I took the babes, and she couldn’t rest for all the shrieking. But, now they’ve gone, it does seem quiet, doesn’t it?’ Mrs Yarrow shakes her head, as if at a fond memory. ‘I still think I hear them sometimes, isn’t that a funny thing? It’s a trick of Winterbourne, lots of creaks and knocks where the wind gets in. And the twins, of course, they can cause a racket – they can make enough noise for twenty children. You’ll have your hands full with them, miss.’
‘By all accounts they’re well behaved.’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ agrees Mrs Yarrow, wholeheartedly, as if in swift correction of having spoken out of turn. She slips a finger beneath the elastic of her cap and scratches her head.‘I mean only that they’re tiring for a woman my age. Do you have children, miss?’ The question is so abrupt and unexpected that I glance away.
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. I didn’t suppose you would, in accepting this station.’
‘You’re right. One day, perhaps.’ I force a smile. It takes an enormous effort of will, but I must manage it because she returns it easily, our awkwardness forgotten.
‘Well,’ I say, changing the subject, ‘I expect you’ll be a veritable mine of information and knowledge for me over the coming days.’
Mrs Yarrow nods. ‘Of course, I’d be delighted. Although,’ she lowers her voice, ‘between you and me, I confess I’m thinking about moving on.’
‘You are?’
‘It’s early days. But I’m getting too long in the tooth for this, miss. Since the last girl left…’ She swallows, an audible, dry contraction. Is it my imagination, or has the cook turned pale, her skin appearing waxen in the fading light, her brow heavy and her eyes deep with some unfathomable terror? ‘It hasn’t been easy. Looking after the children hasn’t been easy. It’s better if I have a fresh start, somewhere new. The captain won’t like it, but he’ll have you. You’ll be the woman of this house next, miss. And you’ll like it. Winterbourne is a special place, a very special place.’
At once, there is clamour from the staircase, a storm of battering, hurrying footsteps like the ack-ack gunfire of home, and Mrs Yarrow forgets her worried turn, straightens and smiles, smoothing her apron as if about to curtsey to the king.
‘Speak of the devils,’ she says, ‘here they come now. Would you like to come and meet them, miss? Edmund and Constance de Grey. They’ve been so looking forward to this.’
Chapter 6 (#ulink_928532cd-daab-57ce-bbc2-d9c2eed1cc14)
The twins run straight into me, their arms around my waist. It almost knocks me over. I laugh, as if being greeted by dogs, friendly, tails wagging, craving attention.
‘Miss Miller, Miss Miller, what a delight!’ The girl looks up at me, impossibly pretty, her grin wide to expose a row of little teeth, as neat as a bracelet. A velvet clip holds her blonde ringlets back and her blue eyes are shining. She has the face of a doll, precise and sweet, with a dimple in her chin that you struggle not to press with your thumb. She is the loveliest thing I have ever seen.
‘Oh, call me Alice!’ I say.
‘May we play with her, Father?’ the boy says, and only then do I realise that the captain is present, his cane in hand. It must be an effort for him to stand because he lowers himself into a chair by the fire. ‘May we please?’
‘Be gentle, Edmund,’ he answers.
Looking at Edmund, it is impossible to imagine the boy being anything but. For all their twinship, the children do not look alike. Edmund has been blessed with copper curls, a crop of them that shine like burnished gold. Across his nose is a light dusting of freckles, and his skin is porcelain-pale and smooth as cream.
They are a pair of angels. Constance tugs my hand and I crouch so I can look up at them both. I have never seen two such innocent faces, shining with happiness and every good thing. ‘I have something for you,’ Constance whispers. Edmund nudges her: ‘Give it to her, silly!’ Constance fishes in the pocket of her dress.
It’s a chain, woven out of grass. The thought is so pure and touching that for a moment I don’t know what to say. Nobody told me how enchanting these children were, not my contact in London, not Tom, not Mrs Yarrow, not even Jonathan de Grey. But enchanting they are, smiling down at me, awaiting my response.
‘How clever of you,’ I say, admiring the grass. ‘And how kind.’
‘Put it on, put it on!’ Constance helps me.
In a flash I am reminded of another time, another bracelet, somebody else helping me to fasten the clasp. That bracelet was gold, and if I concentrate hard I can feel his thumbs on that part of my wrist, over my pulse, his skin warm against mine…
‘There!’ cries Constance triumphantly.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘doesn’t that look splendid.’
‘Capital!’ agrees Edmund.
‘Miss Miller is going to be tired,’ says their father. I glance at him, and for an odd, unaccountable moment the four of us seem absolutely right, together in this dim hall, with Mrs Yarrow hanging dutifully back, as if we are the family, and I am the wife, and I am the mother… The impression vanishes as soon as it appears.
‘She says we can call her Alice!’ says Constance, tugging at my hand once more, her fingers looped through mine. It’s infectious, I’ll admit, and I laugh. It sounds unfamiliar in my throat, girlish, as if it’s a younger me making the sound.
‘Very well,’ says the captain. ‘Alice,’ he pauses, tasting my name: I see him taste it, ‘will be tired. You’re to let her rest this evening. Tomorrow is another day.’
‘But we can’t sleep,’ objects Edmund. ‘We want to play with her – please, Father? Please may we play with her, please?’
The captain stands, his cane striking the floor in a deafening blow. Mrs Yarrow gasps. I get to my feet. The children drop my hands.
‘Do I need to repeat myself?’ the captain says.
Edmund shakes his head.
‘Did you hear me the first time, boy?’
The child nods.
‘Then I neither expect nor welcome your protest. You are to follow my instructions to the letter, do you understand? And, from tonight, you are to follow Miss Miller’s.’ He turns to me. ‘Miss Miller, if you would…?’ I try not to feel afraid, for the growl of his voice and the thunder of his cane casts a shadow across the house.
‘Up to bed, children,’ I say softly. ‘Cook will bring you some cocoa.’
The children retreat, sloping upstairs like kittens in the rain. It troubles me to see the spirit pinched out of them. It troubles me how fast the captain’s temper caught light. Now he bids us goodnight and slips away to another part of the house.
‘The captain prefers the children to be seen and not heard,’ says Mrs Yarrow.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I rather got that impression.’
*
Morning arrives with a burst of sunshine. I wake in my four-poster bed, shrugging off a deep, dreamless sleep, the likes of which I haven’t had since before the war, and go straight to the window to welcome the day. Despite the thick drapes, sunlight razes through the cracks like an outline of fire. I pull them open and let it in. The sea is green today, light, sparkling green, and the sky above a hazy blue. I prise open the window, a hook on a rusted latch, and a draught of fresh, salty air hits my nostrils. I feel like a girl on Christmas morning. I cannot wait to see the twins once more.
When I tie back the curtains, I spy that painting again – the little girl looking out of the cottage. She has one hand flat against the panes, a detail I hadn’t noticed yesterday. The hand is raised as if in greeting or acknowledgement. Or warning.
A bell sounds downstairs. It makes me jump. I feel as I did at Burstead, late for breakfast, the house matrons stalking the corridors with their starched bosoms and shrill whistles. ‘Come on, Miller! Get dressed, Miller! What are you doing, girl?’
In minutes I’m downstairs – but the bell wasn’t for me, of course, it was for the children. Mrs Yarrow has bowls of porridge steaming on the table, decorated with honey and walnuts. ‘Did you sleep well, miss?’ she asks me.
‘Very well, thank you.’
‘You didn’t hear the dogs?’
‘What dogs?’
‘We’ve got a wandering madcap,’ she rattles cutlery out of a drawer, ‘Marlin, they call him. Well, he’s got these giant hounds and walks them on the cliffs at night.’ She lays the spoons on the table. ‘God knows why, miss. And they make the most terrible noise, howling and yowling and yelping at the moon. It used to keep Madam awake something rotten. The children, too, when they were babes. Luckily he doesn’t come as close to Winterbourne as he used to, since the captain and he had words. But do you know what this man Marlin said to the captain? He said: It’s your house that makes my dogs afraid. It’s your house that’s the trouble. So the captain says not to bother walking them round here again, if that’s the way he feels. But still he does.’
‘Is he a local man?’
‘Lived here for years. Not the most sociable person you’ll meet.’
‘I do like dogs. What breed are they?’
The cook goes to the bell a second time, rings it. ‘You won’t like these ones, miss. These aren’t right. They’re great snarling things with huge teeth, and paws that could fell a man in a stroke. To think of them being scared by a big old house is a nonsense. The captain chooses not to let it vex him, but I hate to hear them at night.’
‘I didn’t hear them.’
She turns her back. ‘You must have slept soundly.’
We are interrupted by the children’s arrival, a tornado of gold and copper and neatly pressed shirts and shorts, a frill of dress, twinkling eyes and gracious smiles. ‘Miss Miller! Alice! See, I said we didn’t dream her!’ In the glow of the kitchen, Constance and Edmund appear even more adorable than they did last evening.
Constance takes my hand, her small, perfect fingers looping through mine.
‘Father said we’re not to touch her,’ says Edmund. ‘Remember?’
‘Alice doesn’t mind,’ says Constance, ‘do you, Alice?’
‘I won’t break.’
‘Constance breaks all her toys,’ says Edmund. ‘That’s why I won’t let her play with any of mine. Especially my locomotives.’
‘I do not!’ objects the girl.
‘Chop-chop, children,’ says Mrs Yarrow, encouraging them to sit. ‘Miss Miller will want to get on with your lessons this morning. Eat your breakfast first.’
‘I can eat one-handed,’ says Constance. ‘I’m not letting go.’
I ought to deter her, follow the captain’s rules. But there is such charm about her, about them both, that I am happy to be held.
I’m not letting go.
I was told that before, in another life, when I was another girl. It’s not an easy thing to hear, neither is it easy to resist. And I was let go, wasn’t I? Our hands parted, and I fell.
*
Thus far the children have been educated in an upstairs bedroom, one of the many chambers at Winterbourne that otherwise go unused. On seeing the forlorn space, a dark turret with the oppressive atmosphere of a sanatorium, I immediately decide to relocate. ‘Oh, I never liked it,’ agrees Mrs Yarrow, as she helps Tom and me carry the desks to the drawing room. As the stand-in between governesses, she’d been employed short-term in the twins’ tutelage. ‘Too dingy, and the children kept complaining of coughs and chills. Besides, I could feel her watching me all the time.’
‘Her?’
‘The woman who was here before you,’ Mrs Yarrow says quickly, under Tom’s dissatisfied glare. ‘She had her ways of doing things. That’s all.’
‘What sort of ways?’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing important…’
‘Is this very well for you, miss?’ Tom squares the desks so they’re facing the window. ‘Will you need anything else?’
‘Thank you, Tom, that will be all. Children should be educated in a good light, don’t you agree, Mrs Yarrow? I want Edmund and Constance to feel inspired by our lessons, and where better place to start than with a fine view of nature.’
‘Right you are.’
And I must admit, an hour later, I am feeling positive about our progress. The de Grey twins continue to amaze me in their enthusiasm, their confidence, and their understanding that whatever they know is a mere grain when set against what still remains to be found. They are unfailingly polite, amenable characters with a zest for learning, making my job no less than a pleasure. I had worried, slightly, for the educative aspect. I had been honest about my lack of teaching experience but feared it would prove a challenge. Now I see why my honesty didn’t count against me: these pupils are just about the easiest, loveliest, most rewarding novices a teacher could hope to influence. Whatever methods my predecessor had, they must have worked.
After lunch, the three of us venture into parkland. The lawns at Winterbourne would once have been impeccably tended, but now, as I observed in the Rolls when we first approached, they are hopelessly overgrown. Creepers straggle across the paths; chipped stone planters are covered in moss, and two lion heads at the top of a run of steps have ears and eyes missing, stolen by the elements. The topiary is melted out of shape and the whole impression is one of a garden underwater, liquid and strange. Behind us, Winterbourne rises in giant, eerie magnificence. I hear the sea, an incessant, rhythmic breath as it washes into shore.
‘This afternoon,’ I tell them as we take the path to the wood, ‘we’re going to draw a picture.’ I’m invigorated by the day: the sun, the sky and the birdsong.
‘Like a flower?’ says Constance.
‘Like a fox,’ says Edmund.
‘A flower would be easier to draw than a fox,’ I say, ‘because we need to be able to really look at it. We’re going to look at it in incredible detail, and keep looking at it as we draw, so that we can reproduce as accurate a likeness as possible.’
‘It has to be still, then,’ says Edmund.
‘That’s absolutely right. One can draw a moving thing, of course one can, but one isn’t able to study it with as much care.’ We pick our way over a twisted tree branch. The children are used to coming this way for they step over it easily, while I am obliged to stop and adjust my skirt. ‘Tom found a dead fox,’ says Edmund. He collects a stick and pokes the ground with it. ‘He’s always finding dead foxes.’
‘Edmund!’ Constance covers her ears.
‘It’s all right, Constance.’ I smile. ‘Nature is red in tooth and claw.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘Could I draw a dead fox?’ says Edmund.
‘You could if you wanted. But it’s rather morbid, don’t you think?’
‘But I could study it, in detail, then, as you say. It wouldn’t be able to get away from me. It wouldn’t be able to run away.’
‘True. But when you looked at your picture afterwards, you wouldn’t think of the fox as living, would you? You wouldn’t remember how clever you were to reproduce its detail as it rushed through the wood. You’d remember it as a body.’
‘And you’d hate to look at it,’ says Constance. ‘It would make you sad.’
‘I suppose,’ says Edmund. A neat frown puckers his childish brow. ‘But Father has his case of birds – those stuffed crows on the landing. They used to scare us, didn’t they, Connie? We’d run past them with our eyes shut in case they jumped out and pecked us! People like to look at those, and that’s the same thing, isn’t it?’
I spy a place for us to sketch, a soft clearing, surrounded by flora.
‘It depends on the person,’ I say. ‘Everybody likes different things. Hence the multiplicity of art.’
‘What does multiplicity mean?’
‘A big collection, full of variety.’
‘I’m going to draw a flower,’ says Constance.
‘That’s boring,’ says the boy.
‘In your opinion,’ I tell him. ‘And that’s what we’re talking about. Art is preference. Art is personal. Constance prefers the flower, while you prefer the fox. Neither is right or wrong. It’s about what you wish to see in the thing you’re looking at. Do you wish to observe a living soul, or do you wish to capture it?’
Edmund thinks about it for a moment. Then he smiles cunningly and says,‘May we draw you, miss?’
‘That isn’t really the object of the exercise.’
‘Alice is a pretty name,’ interjects Constance.
‘Thank you.’
‘I wish I were called Alice.’
‘Constance is lovely. It means for ever.’
‘That’s what Mummy used to say.’
The mention of their mother catches me off guard. Another detail, another candle held up to the frozen mist I hold in my mind. What did Mrs de Grey look like? Was she fair, like me, or dark like her husband? She must have been very beautiful, I think, to have such beautiful children and to have attracted a man like the captain.
It is a relief to reach the clearing, and to incite the children to sit and open their sketchbooks. Perhaps it is the ghost of Mrs de Grey still clinging to our collective mood, or perhaps it is the sheer sweetness of their faces as they gaze hopefully up at me, but before I know it I have agreed to Edmund’s request and am sitting opposite on a blanket, preparing to be drawn. ‘Wait—!’ calls Constance, and she jumps up and brings a daisy to me, which she threads through my hair.
‘There,’ she says, kissing my cheek. ‘Now it’s perfect.’
‘Be kind to me, won’t you?’ I say.
‘We’re always kind,’ says Edmund.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_afb254ad-5073-5419-a6d1-309890b58b10)
New York, present day
Quakers Oatley Solicitors
St James House
Richmond Square
Mayfair
London W1—

Ms Rachel Wright
Apt 243E
West 27
Street, NY—

9 September 2016

Dear Ms Wright

Re: Winterbourne Hall, Polcreath, Cornwall

It is with regret that I write to inform you of the death of your aunt Constance de Grey, who passed away at her ancestral home in the early hours of Sunday morning.

I am conscious that this might come as something of a surprise, as I believe you were unaware of your connection with the Winterbourne Estate. Nonetheless, as the de Grey family solicitor, it is my duty to inform you that, being Miss de Grey’s next of kin, the park and all its land and contents now fall directly into your possession.

I would appreciate a swift response indicating how you would like to proceed. Under these circumstances, I normally advise a visit to our offices in London, where we can make the necessary inroads before granting you access to your inheritance.

Yours faithfully

Stephen Oatley, Esq.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_10fb663b-b6ec-5d66-8266-4ebdead54617)
Rachel read the letter, then read it again. Her first thought was that it was a joke. She even looked about her, expecting a camera to be on her, or a crowd to appear, ready to laugh along. But her apartment was unchanged. Outside, the traffic droned on.
Her hands were shaking. Quickly she replaced the letter in its envelope, sitting down because her knees had turned to jelly. The envelope, that anodyne thing, seemed to pulse on the kitchen table. She folded it back out, looked again. Impossible. It was totally impossible. She searched for a clue to its falsehood; her mind tripped over a dozen hoaxes but none fitted with such an outrageous set of claims as this. And yet a voice whispered, It’s plausible, it might be, louder and more insistent each time.
Her phone rang. It was Paul. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘guess what? The City wants to interview you, tomorrow at ten; I’ve booked you a spot at Jacob’s. Sound good?’
She was slow to reply, unlike her. ‘I don’t know, I…’
He was surprised at her reticence. ‘I can put them back, if you like?’
‘Listen, Paul,’ she said, making a decision, ‘I think you’ll have to. In fact, you can clear my schedule for the rest of the week. Next week, too.’
There was a pause. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘Everything’s fine.’ Rachel fingered the edges of the letter, half expecting it to vanish beneath her touch. ‘Something’s come up. Something important. At least, I think it is.’ She thought quickly. ‘I might have to go abroad for a while,’ she said, ‘I don’t know how long. You’ll look after things here, won’t you?’
‘Of course. But—’
‘Thank you. I knew I could count on you. I’ll call you later, OK?’
She hung up. Her apartment seemed changed, submerged, a place she wasn’t quite part of and could no longer stand to be in. As if it were a stage set, with cardboard walls and doors that led nowhere, and plastic pieces of fruit gathering dust in a bowl. She went to the park and walked and walked, and watched the people sailing past in their safe, happy worlds, with families and homes they had always known and loved, a hurrying, babbling stream while she remained a solitary rock, confounded by the noise and rush. All the while the letter glowed with promise in her pocket. She sat on a bench, waiting for her coffee to grow cold.
*
‘Are you sure it’s a good idea?’ said Aaron, when she told him that night.
She’d known he’d question her – he, who had two loving parents and an elder sister who called him ‘Rookie’ and sixteen cousins with who knew how many kids.
‘How will I know if I don’t give it a chance?’
He read the letter again. ‘It looks real,’ he said, with a shrug, turning the page over, as if the word FORGERY might be stamped on its back.
Oh, Rachel knew it was real. She’d spoken to Quakers Oatley Solicitors and the story stacked up. The firm had sounded relieved to hear from her, as if the de Grey estate were one it was seeking to move on from. She had conducted herself as if she were in a business meeting, arrangements, dates, agendas, plans; yes, she would travel to England; yes, she would visit the house called Winterbourne. But she didn’t tell them what she was hoping to find there – some clue to her past, some inkling, however faint, about where she had come from and the people who had made her. It was too much to hope for, wasn’t it? But there was hope, now, at least.
‘What about the gallery?’ Aaron asked. They were in his penthouse, a rooftop tower overlooking Central Park. The vodka in Rachel’s hand was mercifully robust. It had been a sober realisation that really, other than her colleagues, she had no one else here to inform of her intention, just him. ‘Seems like you’re just getting started,’ he said.
She was conscious at moments like these that Aaron wasn’t merely her lover: he was her investor. ‘I am,’ she replied. ‘A week or two away won’t change that. I’ll be online if I’m needed; in the meantime Paul takes charge, he’s more than capable.’
‘You think a week or two is all it’ll be?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know.’ She put down her glass. ‘It depends what I find. A rickety old house, most probably, and a bunch of junk that needs sorting.’
Privately, the thought of that junk containing just one photograph of a man and woman who might have been her parents, or her grandparents, or her aunt and uncle or cousins or anyone, really, made her flush with adrenalin.
‘Will you be OK in such a big place on your own?’ Aaron came to her and rested his forehead against hers, winding her fingers through his. They kissed; he smiled mischievously. ‘It looks kind of…foreboding. Like a haunted house.’
She laughed. ‘You believe in that stuff?’ she asked.
‘You might.’
‘I certainly don’t. Make-believe isn’t my thing.’
‘You don’t think we’re a bit make-believe?’
She frowned, amused. ‘How do you mean?’
‘We’re playing pretend, aren’t we? Pretending we’re together, but we’re not really, not properly. All I’m saying is that make-believe has its perks.’
‘I’m sure it does.’ Rachel reached for her drink, encouraging him to take a step back. ‘But I’m more interested in the facts at Winterbourne. This may be my only shot at finding them. How many adopted kids get a chance like this?’
‘I’m only suggesting you might want a little company while you’re out there.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Creaks and bumps don’t scare me.’
He folded his arms, watching her affectionately. ‘What does, Rachel Wright?’
She finished the vodka, emboldened by it. ‘What kind of question is that?’
‘What does scare you? Because I’m wondering if Winterbourne represents a chance for you,’ he said, ‘to run away from what’s happened here, from real life.’ In that barefaced way of his, he struck her right where it hurt, forging on, heedless of her dismay. ‘Because you haven’t been happy, even I can see that, and by my own admission I don’t know you that well. Working all hours, pouring everything you’ve got into the gallery, barely pausing to breathe – it’s impressive, sure, and I was impressed by you the moment you walked into my office with a torch in your eyes that told me you’d stop at nothing to achieve it. But managing all that has meant you’ve been able to close other, more personal, doors, hasn’t it?’
Seeing her expression, he added, ‘I don’t want to speak out of turn—’
‘You have spoken out of turn,’ she said, coldly. ‘I’m not running away, Aaron. I’m running towards something. Something I’ve been trying for years to find.’
‘I know.’
‘You don’t know. You’ve never been able to get this. I need to see that place. I need to find out about where I came from, the people I came from, my mother, my father, I have no clue who they were. I’ll probably never know, now this last link is gone. But I have to go there, be there, touch it and feel it. I’ve thought of nothing else since I read that letter – and it goes back to way before then. I’ve thought about this, or some version of it, ever since I found out I was adopted. Finally I’ve got the chance at resolution. And once I find that resolution, I can come home.’
Aaron ran a hand through his hair. ‘You’ve been through a lot, Rachel.’
‘I know what I’ve been through.’
‘I don’t want to see you go through any more.’
‘You won’t. I’m going on my own. You won’t have to see anything.’
Perhaps she should have kept the whole thing to herself. She supposed that she had wanted to share it with someone. She had wanted to talk about it with someone because it was too big to take in on her own.
It was hard to think about the person she really wished to discuss it with. His wisdom, his good sense, his kindness, how he would have taken her in his arms… He had always been her first port of call, and Rachel liked that expression because it was true: he’d been the harbour for her little ship that had been bouncing alone on the tides for too many years. He had taken her in, given her shelter, and she’d put too much on him, of course she had, mistaking him for the whole family she lacked, so that when he left it wasn’t just a husband, someone she had hoped to have kids with. It was everyone. It was the past as well as the future. She missed him. Oh, she did.
‘I have to do this, Aaron,’ she said. ‘And frankly I don’t care what you think.’
He nodded. She waited. But the day Aaron Grewal apologised would be the day the sky fell in. ‘Let’s have tonight together, OK?’ he said instead.
She kissed him, an answer he seemed to accept. The future vibrated with nothing and everything, an empty, fearsome space, yet its promise was the closest she had held to her heart in as long as she could remember. Winterbourne would relinquish its secrets. And if it fought her, if it dared make her wait longer than she already had, she would force its mysteries to the surface through sheer dark grit. She was good at that.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_b75b4b73-3748-5758-9acc-3452be06a0ca)
Cornwall, present day
Rachel didn’t like to delay once her mind was set. Twenty-four hours later she was boarding a train at Paddington, the key to Winterbourne safe in her pocket. She kept touching it, running her fingers over its ancient contours. It looked like a key that could open another world, the key to a trapdoor in the ground, beyond which strange creatures roamed and slept, and the sun rose at dusk and the moon rose at dawn.
A woman sat opposite her with a young girl. The girl was applying nail stickers, her focus entire. The woman flipped out a magazine, its cover detailing minor celebrities on vacation, with the headline SKINNY AND MISERABLE!
The train eased from its platform and a voice announced: ‘Welcome to this South West Trains service to Penzance, calling at…’ Rachel reached for her tablet and checked her mail, but it was no good, she couldn’t focus. Instead she looked through the window. It took a while to chug out of London, past the terraces under their drab grey sky, and the motion of the train made her tired. She hadn’t slept on the plane, had barely rested or stopped since she’d opened the letter, and she put her head back now and tried to relax. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw the faces of the two solicitors at Quakers Oatley, sitting opposite her, their expressions by turns fascinated and grave. She had been Alice in Wonderland, tumbling down the rabbit hole, and they were as captivated by her as she was by them. These gatekeepers were about to change her life, everything she had ever thought about herself, every presumption overturned. Her instinct about their being keen to move the case on had been right. Rachel had the impression that Winterbourne was an albatross for them and they welcomed the chance to get rid of its legacy. ‘We weren’t sure we’d be able to find you,’ the woman had said, adjusting her papers in the prim, efficient manner of one pleased at their own good luck, ‘or, if we did, what your reaction would be.’
The man had run through what they knew. Rachel craved more, each answer insufficient, each explanation scattered with holes. She yearned for the names of her mother and father but was left wanting. Her grandfather was identified as a Captain Jonathan de Grey, making Constance, as the letter made clear, Rachel’s aunt. But there was no grandmother. ‘What about the captain’s wife?’ she’d asked, scouring the scant family tree as the solicitors looked apologetically on. ‘That was her, right?’ But the man shook his head. ‘Your mother,’ he said gently, ‘had different parentage…’
It was his way of saying that Captain de Grey had gone elsewhere, and that Rachel’s mother had been born a bastard as a result of his affair. But who had she been? Who was the poor woman who had given birth to Rachel in a London hospital, looked into her baby’s eyes and decided to give her up? Allegedly Constance had been the only person who knew about Rachel, and about this American orphan’s connection to her family. Why hadn’t Constance sought to find her? Why hadn’t she spoken out? Rachel tried not to feel bruised, but it was hard. All her life she had felt fundamentally rejected, and even at the threshold of this incredible discovery that same rejection snapped at her heels. Her aunt had known of her and done nothing, content to let Rachel unearth whatever truths were left behind after she’d died. It didn’t make sense. More questions, more uncertainties: it seemed the more Rachel learned, the more clueless she grew.
When she asked about Constance, the glance the solicitors exchanged implied that she hadn’t been an easy woman. Rachel told herself that, for all the romance and surprise of Winterbourne just falling into her life like a first drift of January snow, she couldn’t for a moment imagine a fairy-tale ending. All her life she had invented pictures that made sense to her – that her birth mother had been unable to cope, or that Rachel had been taken against her will, or that someone had forced her mother to give her up – and there was safety in those knowable limits. Now, every version she’d held dear exploded. It all came to this: this house, this family, and these doubts she might never be able to assuage. Quakers Oatley had dealt with the de Greys for years, but they didn’t know how Rachel fitted in – only that Constance, on her deathbed, had made an assertion that turned out to be true.
It seemed alarmingly easy to inherit one of the country’s grandest estates. Rachel signed documents, provided identification and settled a fee.
In return: a key.
‘The only one,’ said the woman, before letting it go, and Rachel felt the sheer weight of it in her hand and wondered how many had held it in years gone by. It occurred to her that the key was the only thing she had ever touched that her mother, too, might also have touched – apart from herself, of course: her own skin.
She must have dozed because the next thing she knew they were rolling through unbroken countryside and the sun was setting over the hills. The woman opposite and her daughter had gone. Rachel’s carriage was empty.
‘Excuse me,’ she asked a steward on his way past, ‘where are we?’
‘Next stop Polcreath,’ he told her.
She sat back and watched the blackening landscape.
*
Dusk was nearly complete by the time they pulled into the station. The platform was empty apart from a man on a bench, his head tucked into the collar of his coat, and a couple of passengers who had disembarked with her. A sign read TAXI and Rachel followed it out to the road, where a car was parked with its headlights on. She went to the window and named her destination. The driver seemed surprised.
‘You sure?’ he said. ‘I thought it was derelict. No one’s lived there in years.’
‘My aunt lived there.’ It felt wonderful to say it. My.
‘Climb in, then.’
She was hoping he wouldn’t talk. But: ‘You American?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Where from?’
‘New York.’
‘So what brings you here? Winterbourne Hall’s not much of a tourist destination.’
‘Like I said, I have family here. Had. My aunt died recently.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
Rachel sat back, handling the key once more in her pocket. It felt warm, as if radiant, shimmering in anticipation of reaching home.
‘I expect you’ve got lots to sort out, then,’ said the driver, folding a stick of gum into his mouth. He looked at her in the rear-view mirror.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, family affairs and the like. After someone dies. You know.’
‘Yes. Yes, I have.’
‘You’ll be staying a while?’
‘As long as it takes.’
‘There’re people round here that can show you around, if you like.’
‘I’ll be fine. But thank you.’
‘Always friendly faces in Polcreath, you’ll see. And if you’re really short on company, I’m in the Landogger Inn most nights.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ But he’d said it with a twist of humour, which she returned. ‘The Landogger – that’s an unusual name.’
‘Named after the cliffs,’ he said, ‘right by Winterbourne. They’ll surround you. Lethal they are, too: a sudden drop. The house is right on the Landogger Bluff.’
‘You seem to know a lot about Winterbourne.’
‘Not much. Just that for those of us who’ve been in Polcreath all our lives, it’s the stuff of legends. Always there, you know, there on the hill, but no one ever goes.’
‘You must remember my family.’ It was a difficult thought, the idea that this man, friendly though he was, had been closer to her ancestors than she would ever be – that he might have seen them, heard their voices, and maybe even met them. She didn’t know how to feel as the cab drew closer to Winterbourne. A ripple of frustrated anger obscured any sense of homecoming. She wanted to know why she’d been dismissed and forgotten about: why her whole family, it seemed, had cast her aside.
‘I never met them,’ the driver said. ‘They were, and I don’t mean no offence by this, curious. Liked to keep themselves to themselves. I’m going way back now, to the sixties, when I was a boy.’ Rachel could tell by his voice that he liked the memory. ‘The de Grey children… Well, isn’t that a posh name? They weren’t children any more by the sixties, of course, but they stayed on at Winterbourne, a lad and a woman, coming up for thirty, they were. People said there was something funny about the lad, that he was gone in the head. I always thought it was odd, even then, that they should have remained at the house, unmarried, with no families of their own. It was as if they were married to each other. But listen to me, just an idle gossip, talking about your people like I knew them myself.’
He met her gaze in the mirror and she was thankful night was falling. She didn’t want him to see the naked truth: that these were mysteries she could not yet answer. That he, an ‘idle gossip’, knew more about her family than she did.
‘Are we close?’ Rachel said.
‘Not far now,’ he replied. ‘Not far at all.’
*
It was, in fact, another half an hour, and by the time they reached the Winterbourne gates the night outside was pitch black. They’d left the last settlement many miles ago, and the house was so alone and remote that not one light of civilisation could be seen anywhere across the black, boundless moors. The only glow was the glow of the moon, which hung above them like a marble, throwing the sea into glittering grey.
As Rachel stepped out of the cab, glad of its reassuring interior bulbs and the familiar hum of its engine, she looked above at the sky. The stars were immense. Stars like this didn’t exist above New York. Exotic words surfaced in her mind – Cassiopeia, Betelgeuse, Europa. She must have learned them long ago and forgotten, or else had little reason to remember, but here, beneath the vast beauty of space, the stars appeared to her as jewels, unfathomably rare and precious.
‘You sure you’ll be all right?’ The driver leaned over as she got out. ‘There’s a warm bed at the Landogger, I’ll bet. I can always take you back there.’
Rachel shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Winterbourne was hers, after all. Staying here alone might be a foreboding prospect, but she felt as if the house and its ghosts had thrown her a challenge. She had been held back for too many years, against her will, ignorant of its existence, robbed of her choice, letting the years drain out like bath water. She had a choice now, and she’d never find answers if she ran away.
She paid the driver and watched his tail lights disappear into the night. She turned to the mansion, her eyes travelling up its enormous façade, whose shape, in the darkness, she could barely decipher. It loomed, shadow-like, amorphous and huge, a lake of black except where the moonlight caught it and a detail could be glimpsed, like the snap of glass in a window or the gnarled arm of a tree. She regretted her decision – although it hadn’t been conscious, just the way things had worked out – to arrive so late. It’ll be better in the morning, she told herself, bracing herself against the long night ahead. Wait for the daylight. She could hear the roar of the sea against the Landogger cliffs, the foam and spit of it as it churned against rocks.
She took the key from her pocket and let herself in.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_7f5bc4fc-90cb-5987-b3b6-bb92c2628895)
Cornwall, 1947
My first week passes in a contented haze. Being around the children is a constant tonic, their smiles and laughter warming me utterly and their sweet enquiries occupying my mind in a way it hasn’t known in years. I realise that I was merely treading water back in London: working at the solicitors’ office was a way to earn money but it was also a way to let time pass, to allow my life to wash past me in a flat tide. Here, at Winterbourne, with Constance hanging off my arm and Edmund running ahead, I feel hopeful and alive. There is nothing to be afraid of any longer.
Why my predecessor absconded I shall never understand. If a matter should arise of such urgency that I should be called away, that would be very well, but to disappear completely from my charges’ lives? I cannot imagine turning my back on the twins, accepting that I would never see them again. Already, and these are early days, Constance and Edmund have become part of me. Simply, I adore them. Each morning I wait for the sound of running footsteps on the landing above, the excitement of their squeals and their smiles lit up across the breakfast table. I was deeply touched on the afternoon they sketched me in the clearing; I should have known by their furtive whispers that they were planning a surprise, but when I saw the finished portraits I couldn’t help but gasp. They had drawn me all in white, in a sumptuous wedding dress with a full skirt and pretty sleeves, just as I had always dreamed of for myself, and just as I might have had, had I not lost the only man I ever loved. My love, my dearest love… For a fleeting moment the sun disappeared and I had simply stared, wondering how intuitive these angels could be to sense what had happened to me – the happiness that now remained for ever beyond my reach – and the heady mix of irony and sweet enticement their drawings provoked…before their laughter drew me from my reverie and reminded me it was children’s folly, nothing more. ‘You’d make a beautiful bride,’ Constance said, kissing my cheek. That the previous nurse could have left such heavenly companions in her wake astonishes me.
I spoke to Mrs Yarrow on Friday:
‘Isn’t it odd that the last governess sent no word of her whereabouts?’
‘It was a family matter,’ Mrs Yarrow replied.
‘Yes, Tom explained. But, knowing the children as I do, I find it strange to say the least. The captain hasn’t heard from her since?’
‘No one has.’
‘Did she have friends here? In the village?’
‘I wouldn’t know the first thing about her private life, miss.’
‘Of course not. Forgive me.’
Since our exchange, I have tried not to think too deeply about it. Just because I have found an intense connection with Edmund and Constance does not mean every woman would. I can only praise the governess, whoever she was, for the work she completed before her departure. Her students are courteous, inspired, loving and tender. I dote on them as I would my own. But I am training myself away from such fancies, for the children are my wards and there it ends.
Captain de Grey seems pleased with the arrangement, as far as it is possible to tell. I have only encountered my employer twice since that first day, and one of those encounters constituted barely a passing nod on his part. The second was while selecting books in the library for our afternoon study, when I caught him watching me from the door. ‘Are you finding everything you need?’ he asked, but I knew when I turned that he had been standing there longer than was necessary, and longer than an ordinary man would were he hoping to ask such a pedestrian question as that. I replied that I was, thank you, and he retreated to whatever preoccupation holds him in thrall from day to day in his study. Still, even after he’d gone, I felt his eyes on my back and I wondered for how long he had waited, unseen, behind me, before he spoke. It ought to have unnerved me but instead I found it a thrill. I find him a thrill. The surprise of him, appearing as if from nowhere, dangerously quiet and dangerously handsome…
Alice Miller – for heaven’s sake, wake up!
Mrs Wilson’s admonition at Quakers Oatley: I am dreaming again. I am imagining. Always prone to such things, or so I am told.
It is a fine September day, unusually warm for the onset of autumn. This afternoon, the children and I head across the parkland to a promised lake. Part of my concern is to ensure the twins’ physical exercise, and their favourite pastime is swimming. It seemed to me we would be spoiled for water, with the sea surrounding us, but Mrs Yarrow was quick to extinguish that notion. ‘Oh no,’ she said quickly. ‘Absolutely not, miss. The captain would never allow it. The sea is off limits.’
‘We wouldn’t go far. Mere paddling.’
‘No, miss. Captain de Grey forbids it. No child of his will ever set foot in that water. You mustn’t think of it. Swear to me you won’t.’
Of course, I had no option but to swear, and the children accommodated my embargo with their usual charm and gentleness, directing me instead to a pool in a sheltered glade. It is an almost precise circle, bordered by reeds and the fat, happy heads of bulrushes. A dragonfly hovers over the still, blue surface.
‘Geronimo!’ Edmund leaps in in his shirt and shorts, splashing like a dog.
‘Edmund,’ Constance cries, ‘you’re not in your bathing suit!’
‘I know! Isn’t it splendid?’
I ought to chide the boy but the sheer ebullience of his performance brings a smile to my face, after which my scolding would be pointless. ‘Just for today,’ I tell him, sitting with my hands looped round my knees, enjoying the warm breeze as it teases my skirt. Constance obediently changes into her swimming suit and lowers herself gingerly into the water. Edmund promptly splashes her.
‘No! I don’t like to get my hair wet!’
‘Don’t be such a girl.’
‘I am a girl.’
I watch them frolic with childish abandon, the water spraying over their arms and heads in bursts of silver. I find their courage and resilience admirable – the courage and resilience of all children, I suppose. They scarcely knew their mother before she died; they will hardly have a mind picture of her. And yet they carry no bitterness, no sullenness, simply a love of life. I think back to my own childhood and try to pinpoint a moment at which things seemed straightforward, but it’s difficult. When I think of bathing, I think of the dank green bathroom at my parents’ house in Surrey, of the crust of mould around the bathroom taps and the cracked soap in a tray on the sink. I think of the water, cooling around my ten-year-old body, the wrinkled skin on my toes and fingertips but I still didn’t want to climb out. I could hear my parents arguing downstairs, a slammed door then the angry stomp of footsteps on the stairs. My father’s fist would pound on the door. ‘Are you still in there, girl?’
Or I think of the baths at Burstead, those harsh iron troughs, a naked bulb swinging above my head and the shrieks and yelps of girls in the yard outside. When I first arrived at boarding school, I cried in the bath. I cried because I was lonely, and I hadn’t any friends, and I wanted my parents even though I hated them and I wanted my home even though I hated it, and everything was confusing. A girl called Ginny Pettifer had found me crying, and brought her friends to look in at me and laugh. I close my eyes, pushing down the dreadful memories. Of that miserable bath, yes, and of Ginny’s gleeful face at the door – but then of years later, and more water, much more, blooming the most perfect shade of red like a lover’s rose, and a tangle of hair and two panicked, swollen eyes, a hand reaching for mine and grasping air…
My parents had imagined that Burstead was the answer to their problems. I spent seven years at that school and the first five were miserable. Then, all of a sudden, Burstead stopped answering their problems, and started answering mine.
‘Alice, Alice, look!’ Constance’s cry brings me back to the present. She is on the rim of the pond, ready to jump. ‘I’m going to jump! Look, look!’
‘I’m looking!’
With a splash, she’s back in the water. Edmund complains at the impact, splashing her back. For a moment I let myself become part of the joyful scene, really part of it, as if I were one of the children here, a long time ago. No mistakes made, no loss, no suffering. Stop daydreaming, Alice. Daydreaming is for fools.
When the time comes for them to get out, I reach in and offer my arm. Constance takes it first, warm and definite, full of trust, then the boy.
The twins giggle as they dry off in the sun.
See? I think. I did the right thing. This time, I did.
*
Later that day, while the children are taking their supper, I hear a motor car approach the house and then the sound of a slamming door.
‘Are we expecting anyone, Mrs Yarrow?’
‘Only the captain’s doctor.’
I go to greet him. The man on the doorstep is a little older than me, with a mop of brown hair and a neat moustache. He carries a doctor’s bag and there is a wire-haired pointer at his heels. ‘You must be Alice Miller,’ he says, amiably.
‘How do you do.’
The man nods his cap, removes it. ‘Henry Marsh, the captain’s physician.’
‘So I understand. Won’t you come in.’
In the hall, Henry Marsh takes off his coat. The dog trails after him, a splash of white on the tip of his tail. He makes a comment about the animal being his trusted assistant, and how Captain de Grey has no objections to his attendance. I smile and stroke the dog, fussing round his ears and his gruff, wizened face. The doctor watches me kindly, inquisitively.
‘How are you settling in?’
‘Very well, thank you.’
‘Is the man of the house up and about today?’
‘I haven’t seen him – but that doesn’t mean he’s not.’
Henry smiles back. ‘It’s a big place, Winterbourne, isn’t it?’
‘Certainly.’
‘It takes some getting used to?’
‘I’m used to it already. The children have helped me with that.’
Henry’s smile doesn’t move or change, but his eyes no longer concur. ‘I’m sure,’ he says. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I must see to my patient.’
‘Of course.’
An hour later, the doctor is back in the hall, the dog keeping close to his heels.
‘Is everything well, Doctor?’ I ask.
He appears somewhat troubled; I offer him a drink. ‘No, thank you,’ he says. ‘I’d best be on my way. I’ve another appointment in Polcreath.’
I see him move to go, then, on impulse, I place a hand on the door.
‘Doctor,’ I begin, checking swiftly behind me that we are alone, ‘forgive my impertinence, but I wonder if the captain is quite well. You will of course be the person to ask about this – and of course you will tell me if it is not my concern. But his leg appears to be causing him great pain and I worry that he refuses to admit it.’
The doctor steps back. In the same moment, without warning, the wire-haired pointer makes a sudden dash for the bowels of the house, scooting off in a flash of fur to the lower stairs. ‘Hell and damnation!’ Henry cries. ‘Tipper, get back here!’
‘I’m sorry,’ he turns to me, ‘he occasionally does this. Normally I can get him out before he does. It must be rats down there; he’s picking up a scent.’
‘Let’s follow,’ I say, thinking it rather good luck. We walk. He talks.
‘Jonathan is that breed of man who doesn’t readily admit weakness,’ the doctor says carefully, his instinct towards friendliness wishing to answer my question but his professionalism keeping him within reasonable bounds. It interests me that he refers to the captain by his name – it makes my employer seem less remote, more like an ordinary person, no one to be afraid of. ‘He comes from that sort of family,’ Henry says, ‘old English, stiff upper lip, that sort of thing. When he went off to war, there was no question of his surviving. The de Greys were – are – an institution in Polcreath; the idea of one of them falling victim to as trifling a matter as war was unthinkable. The captain wasn’t just to live: he was to triumph.’
We embark down the stairs. ‘Tipper!’ he calls. ‘Damn dog. Sorry for my language. He’s old; I shouldn’t bring him on my rounds any more.’
‘Are the captain’s injuries very bad?’
The doctor considers his reply. ‘They are as they appear,’ he says at length, as he helps me down the steps. It’s cold and dank, this lower part of Winterbourne shut off from the rest of the house so that it feels as if we are trespassing. ‘When his Hawker Hurricane went down over France, it was a miracle he was dragged out alive. Some might say a few burns and a dicky knee were a small price to pay.’
‘Is there potential for improvement?’
‘With the knee, certainly, but with injuries like this, a big part of the patient’s recovery is caught up in his outlook. Frustration doesn’t come close to describing it, particularly for a man in Jonathan’s position. He sees his war wounds as failings, where others might see them as strengths, badges of honour, however you like to describe it. Jonathan is a brave man, no doubt about it. But he isn’t the most open to accepting a doctor’s help. If he didn’t have to see me at all, I’m sure he’d be glad.’
We emerge into a fusty corridor, sooty with dust and cobwebs.
‘This must be the old servants’ quarters,’ I say out loud, and Henry nods, remembering I don’t yet know the house. From the way he stalks ahead, peering behind doors after his dog, it’s clear he’s been down here several times, probably for the same reason. I look up and see the bell box Mrs Yarrow was talking about, the one the evacuees used to play havoc with. It’s a handsome thing, its gold edges tarnished but the dozens of names beneath the chimes are visible: DINING ROOM, STUDY, LIBRARY, MASTER BEDROOM… I imagine the servants rushing along this corridor in another decade, bright with bustle. Now, it’s as quiet as a graveyard.
‘Tipper!’ Henry is shouting. ‘Get back here, you useless mutt!’
The doctor encourages me to turn back; he’ll be up with the dog soon enough. But I’m looking at that bell box, picturing the maids rushing up to the captain’s bedside. I’m picturing the woman in bed beside him.
‘Did his wife die while he was away?’ The darkness makes me bold. Here we cannot be heard, cannot be seen. Here, I can say what I like.
Henry shakes his head. ‘The captain’s crash happened in ’41. He was no good to the effort after that and came straight back to Winterbourne. She’d struggled while he was absent, of course, coping with two babies on her own. But it wasn’t until the following year that she died.’ There, he stops. He knows we have stumbled off limits.
‘I don’t mean to speak out of turn,’ I say, hoping to assure him of my loyalty. ‘It’s just I feel such affiliation with Edmund and Constance, and in turn with Winterbourne, and in turn with the captain. I care for them all.’
‘I understand. But the death of Laura de Grey isn’t a matter for discussion, here or anywhere in Polcreath. I should never have entertained it.’
Her name coats me like heat. It’s the first time I have heard it. Laura.
I have an almost overwhelming desire to say it aloud, but I don’t. Her husband would have left to fight right after their twins were born, leaving her to deal with their infancy by herself. I recall Mrs Yarrow talking about the evacuees and the bell box, about those howling hounds belonging to the man called Marlin, and how Laura was kept awake at night, exhausted and alone, prey to two screaming nurslings, growing to hate Winterbourne and its severe outlook, its arched windows and gloom-laden passages, the thrashing sea outside mirroring the thrashing in her mind, wishing fervently for her husband’s return… And when the captain did come back, had he been the same? Physically he was compromised, yes, but was he the man she’d married, in spirit, in soul, in temperament? Did he look at her in the same way; did he talk to her as he had? Laura. The mother. The wife. The powerful.
Laura.
‘I shouldn’t have raised it,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’
We are interrupted by a frantic bark. ‘At last!’ the doctor mutters, and I follow him down the hall and towards another set of descending steps. Just how deep does Winterbourne go? ‘I should have known he’d be here,’ says Henry, as the barking becomes a higher pitched yap, a moan, nearly, as if Tipper has hurt himself. ‘The cellar – again!’ We arrive in a small, damp room: the full stop of the house. It can’t be longer than a few metres, and the walls are exposed stone, mottled black. There are a few empty crates on their sides on the dusty ground.
‘Is he all right?’
Henry grabs the dog’s collar and attempts to soothe him, but the animal is wild. I take a step back: Tipper’s eyes are mad, his mouth pulled over his gums, his teeth bared. Saliva darts from his tongue with each expulsion. His fur stands on end, his spine arched, his tail set. He yelps then cowers, yelps then cowers.
‘Come now, boy,’ says the doctor gently, ‘it’s just a silly old door.’
I see the door he means, though I didn’t at first. It is set in the corner, lost in shadow but not quite. It is unfeasibly old-looking, and small, so small as to be uncertain if it was intended for a person to walk or crawl through. Its wood is cracked and splintered with age. In the style of the house, it wears a gothic arch, with a heavy rounded handle partway down. I try the handle but it doesn’t give.
‘Why is he afraid?’ I ask.
‘He’s an old dog full of bad habits,’ says the doctor lightly, although I can see he’s as keen to get back upstairs as I am.
‘Where does it lead?’
Henry doesn’t know. ‘I should think there’s a lot of old rubbish behind there,’ he says. ‘Tipper can smell it.’ He’s struggling to restrain the dog. ‘Let’s go.’
We head back the way we’ve come, Tipper dipping his head, his tail bowed, staying tight to his master’s heel. ‘That’s the last time I bring you with me, do you hear?’ he says gently to the hound. Before we ascend the final staircase, I look behind, wondering at this cold, abandoned netherworld, seeing that strange door, beyond which Tipper knew about something we did not.
I hear her name again.
Laura.
Chapter 11 (#ulink_549e7d73-207a-58de-b09f-f8e0eb3bb049)
I sleep well that night. When I wake at the usual time, I imagine for a moment that it is still the small hours, for my room is drenched in a sooty, dim light.
Climbing out of bed, I pull the curtains and see why. The mists have rolled in. I can scarcely see a foot from the window, the air obscured with dense, swirling fog. The sea has vanished, the sky invisible. I glimpse the position of Winterbourne in my mind’s eye, high on the Landogger Bluff, closeted in vapour; cold mists press against the walls and turrets, drifting beneath the arches, smothering the roof of the chapel…
All is quiet. All is still.
As ever when I go to tie back the drapes, I am faced with that eerie painting. Each day, I like it less. Something prevents me from taking it down, some sense that it has been here longer than I. Today, I try not to examine it, focusing instead on the silk knots that draw the curtains into place. And yet I cannot resist. The girl at the window lures me, as determinedly and insidiously as the fogs that roll in off the sea, creeping overnight, slowly, stealthily; it is as if she is whispering to me: Look, look… Is it my fancy, or has her gaze changed? Her regard has moved to one side, towards me, towards the ancient, indecipherable sea. I could swear that yesterday it was not so.
Don’t be ridiculous, Alice, I tell myself. The print is honestly so small, and the girl within it even smaller, that to pick out such an unlikely discrepancy is absurd.
At Burstead, my lover and I once spent a night together in the music school. I remember those handsome, silent pianos, dozens of them, and the way they shone in the moonlight, like war heroes at a gathering, mute but magnificent. I kept thinking, then, that I heard noises in the dark, people who had found us as we lay in Practice Room 3, or some noise beyond, a flit of wings, a whisper, some flight of my nervous disposition. ‘There’s nothing,’ he said to me, as he turned to kiss me in the purple light. ‘There’s no one here except you and me…’ I try to hear him now, but his voice grows fainter with every passing year. There’s no one here. Just me.
I obscure the painting as far as is possible with the material and go to my dressing room, slipping off my nightdress and laying it on the bed. It’s only when I’m buttoning my skirt that I notice the smudge on the inside of my elbow, where the skin creases and softens in the bend of my arm. Thinking it must be soot from the fire, I try to wipe it away and when it doesn’t come, I lick my thumb and try again. Pressing harder this time, it smarts. It’s a bruise, clearly: bluish-brown and shaped like an almond. It seems an odd place to have it, not the sort of bump one might acquire from walking into a bedframe or knocking one’s arm on the newel post.
Surely I struck it in a game with the children. I’ve been so occupied with those happy souls since arriving at Winterbourne that I can’t promise I’d even have noticed. Filled with pleasure at the thought of seeing them at breakfast, I finish dressing and go downstairs to greet my wards.
*
‘Be careful, miss,’ says Tom as he helps us into our coats and boots. ‘The captain doesn’t like the children to go out when the mists are in. It’s awful cold and damp.’
‘We’ll be fine, Tom. Fresh air is good for the children – and, besides, we’ve already sought the captain’s permission.’ This is only true in part. I would have sooner received consent directly, but when I tapped on de Grey’s study door an hour previously, asking if we might venture out for a walk, I was met only by silence.
Instead it fell to the boy Edmund to reassure me that his father had given approval. ‘It’s quite all right, Alice,’ Edmund told me with confidence. ‘I met Father in the drawing room and he agreed we could go. He trusts you, Alice,’ he said, his eyes sparkling, ‘he knows you’ll take care of us.’ I flushed at the unexpected compliment. Could the captain have formed a positive opinion of me so fast, and in such an obvious way that it would be clear to the children?
‘Take this,’ says Tom, producing an old dog whistle and looping it round my neck. ‘Like I said, you’ll fast lose your bearings.’
‘We’re not going far.’
‘I’m excited!’ Constance is pulling on her mittens. Next to her, Edmund yanks his cap down over his ears. ‘We’re going on an adventure,’ he says.
I smile at Tom in a way I hope reassures him that we are doing no such thing. But Tom doesn’t look reassured.
‘Take the whistle,’ he says, ‘and watch your step.’
Minutes later, the door closes behind us. I cannot wait to get out on the moors. The world seems changed, magical and deeply peaceful, as if we might slip into it unheeded, like woods on a snowy morning awaiting a first footprint.
‘Can you hear the sea?’ Constance cries. ‘I can hear it – but I can’t see it!’
She’s right. It’s an odd impression because we are so close to the cliff drop and yet we cannot detect a thing. The sea crashes in with a deep, mellow roar, which takes on a new personality in this muffled, sunken world. Without bearings to situate us – a few steps from the house and it disappears completely – our senses are primed elsewhere. The tide bellows louder; the cold snap in the air smells startlingly clean.
‘Hold my hands, children.’
‘Look at our boots!’ Edmund exclaims as we walk, emerging in pockets of better vision that enable me to reclaim our situation, before we are engulfed once more. Our boots do indeed look strange, uncannily real as they plod ahead, three pairs in a line, two small, one big, and bizarrely separate from the rest of us. It is as if we are walking on clouds, and for a moment the ground beneath us feels precarious, as if we could fall through it at any moment.
I stop. The fog is closing in, too close. I cannot breathe.
‘What’s the matter, Alice?’ Constance asks.
‘Nothing, I—’ My lungs strain. ‘Nothing.’
‘Listen for the lighthouse,’ says Edmund, in a voice that sounds much older than his own. ‘That’s how you can tell where you are.’
‘Do you often come out in the mists?’ I ask, with a nervous laugh. Edmund doesn’t reply. I listen for the Polcreath tower, and its sharp fog blasts tell me we are over the westernmost brow and close to the sea. But in the next instant, I wonder that I don’t hear it to my other side, or above, or behind. The blasts grow louder and more aggressive. My knees weaken. I’m back in London, on a cold March night during the Blitz, and the air-raid sirens are wailing, louder and louder, louder and louder…
‘Bombs away!’
Edmund releases my hand and runs into the wall of fog. I turn, turn, turn, gripping Constance tightly, but I cannot see a thing. I cannot see him.
‘Edmund!’
I think I hear him whooping in the distance, then it is only the ravens’ caws I can hear, and if I can’t see a metre in front of me then how can he? How can he see the cliff edge, the churning swell of the sea, the dagger-sharp rocks below?
‘Edmund! Come back here now!’
But how will he know where we are? How will he see me?
‘EDMUND!’
‘Don’t worry, Alice,’ says Constance, her little-girl voice light and singsong. ‘He’ll be all right. He knows Winterbourne better than you, remember.’
All at once the very sound of Constance, my sweet, sweet Constance, turns on me. I cannot see the child’s face, only the pale grip of her small hand in mine, and our joined palms appear ghostly, dismembered, horrifying. All at once I remember that other hand, her hand, years ago, in the water, reaching for mine, and for a shocking instant it could be hers, her clammy grip, rigid with fear, threatening to drag me in!
‘We both know Winterbourne better than you.’
Why does she talk to me in that tone?
‘EDMUND!’
‘Don’t be silly, Alice. You are being silly now.’
I release her hand, drawing mine sharply away as if something black and slippery has crawled over it. Constance starts crying.
‘Oh, my Constance!’ I kneel to her, find her face with my hands and embrace her. Suddenly she is my Constance again, the strangeness dissolved. She is but a child! ‘I’m sorry, my darling. I’m worried for your brother – that is all. We must find him. Do you know where he is? Do you know where he might have run to?’
The girl sniffs. She wipes her eyes. Her features soften and morph in the eerie half-light, and for a second she looks canny, before her innocence resumes.
‘What are you looking at, child?’ For Constance’s gaze is trained over my shoulder. I turn but see nothing. ‘What are you looking at?’
And then I see her. The mist spools patiently across the cliffs and in one glimmer of clarity I see her. There is a woman. She is facing the sea. She wears all black, head to toe, like a widow. I squint, trying to draw her more sharply into focus, but the more I look, the more she escapes my definition. She flickers and fades, in moments as real as day and in the next a mere black shape, impossibly still and impossibly menacing. What is she doing there? She is right on the bluff; she must be mere inches from its edge. Who is she? ‘Hello?’ I call. ‘Is somebody there?’
Constance has my hand again, and her thumb tickles mine for an instant, as if she is stroking it, as if she is the one replying, Yes, somebody is. The vision itself does not reply. The woman does not move. I have the blinding, improbable notion that she has taken Edmund, stolen him and flung him over the edge into the roiling swell…
She’s come back for you, Alice.
You always knew she would.
I cannot bear for Constance to witness her. Whirling back on the girl, I capture her in my cloak, shutting out our dark companion.
‘Alice, Alice, I can’t see a thing!’
I crouch to her, my eyes wild. ‘I don’t want you to see, my darling.’
‘Why?’ She snivels, wipes her nose, at once a little girl again, my harmless child. ‘I’m scared, Alice – you’re scaring me!’
I turn my head to the cliff edge but the woman has disappeared.
‘She’s gone,’ I say, searching left and right. ‘Where did she go?’
‘Who?’ Constance is crying again now, gripping my cloak with one hand but seeming to pull away at the same time, as if she can’t be sure where the danger lies. But I know where it lies. It lies with that spectre, which, now vanished, seems all the more looming for its absence. There is nowhere the woman can have gone. The mist churns silently across the landscape, exposing the hill as it goes. If she had moved off, I would have caught her by now. She is nowhere. Not unless…
Beneath us, out of sight, the tide rolls on, a thunderous crash of waves.
‘Didn’t you see her?’ I shiver, pulling the girl close. ‘She was right there!’
‘I didn’t see anyone.’
I crouch to her again and search her face. I want to tell Constance that I saw her looking, I saw her, before I turned to the phantom myself – but the words dry on my tongue. Constance’s lip is trembling, her eyes wet with tears. Am I mistaken?
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I manage, and pull her towards me. I must get a hold on myself. This sweet girl is my charge. Her arms wrap round me and her hair is fragrant gold: once again she is my angel, and we neither of us saw the devil on the cliff.
As we pull apart, her hands cross over my elbow. I feel pressure on the bruise inside my arm, as if her tiny fingers have pressed it.
I stand and call his name. Nothing. The whistle blows, short and shrill.
*
Tom is with us quickly. ‘I’m sorry,’ I stammer, ‘he ran off. Edmund ran off. Didn’t he, Constance, darling? He just let go. I don’t know where he is. Oh, help us, Tom!’
The houseman looks to Constance, who neither supports nor denies my claims. ‘It’s all right,’ he puts a hand on my shoulder, ‘we’ll find him.’ He steers me over the hill and then I see the house emerge from the fog – it must be clearing now, daylight beginning to break through – far closer than I had expected.
‘Go back indoors,’ he says, ‘and wait for us there.’
We obey. My fingers and toes are numb with cold, or fear. Mrs Yarrow meets us and gives us mugs of warmed milk, but I can’t drink mine while I’m thinking of Edmund out in the wild, frozen and alone. I feel disgraced by my idiotic confidence, stalking out into the savage mist as if it posed no threat whatsoever. I feel dismayed by my failure to speak to the captain in person about our endeavour, and the vanity that had coaxed me into it, enjoying the captain’s trust in me and wanting to see that trust rewarded. ‘Mrs Yarrow,’ I splutter, once Constance is safely by the fire and out of earshot. ‘Were you out there just now? Were you out in the fog?’
‘Certainly not, miss!’
‘I saw a woman. She was standing on the cliff.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Perfectly. She was… Oh, she was horrible!’
‘The fog plays tricks on us, miss,’ says the cook. ‘There’d be nobody foolish enough to go walking alone on a morning like this.’
‘I swear I saw her. Constance did, too, but she won’t admit it.’
Mrs Yarrow washes out the milk pan. ‘Constance saw her?’
‘Yes. I might not have noticed this fiend were it not for her.’
The cook puts the pan on the draining board to dry. ‘This was after Edmund ran away from you?’
‘Yes!’
‘Children like to play games.’
‘What are you suggesting?’
‘Especially with a new prospect such as yourself, miss.’
‘Please be frank, Mrs Yarrow.’
The cook appears undecided as to whether to speak further. She peers past me to check the hallway is clear, before: ‘Ever since I can recall,’ she says, ‘those twins have had a mischief to them. Goodness knows I struggled to cope with them on my own, before you arrived. Always playing pranks on me, they were. Hiding my belongings. Tricking me into believing I’d said words I hadn’t. Knocking on my door late at night and then running away, so that I became convinced of some ghoul! Once, the boy even put a nasty big spider in my bed, and when I pulled back the covers I screamed the house down – and I knew it was him, I knew!’
‘I cannot accept it, Mrs Yarrow. The children are impeccable.’
‘So impeccable as to tease you into disobeying their father?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Knowing the captain as I do, miss, there is slim chance he would have given blessing to your expedition. I’ll wager it was one of the children, was it not?’
I swallow. Edmund is a boy, full of the boldness of youth. What child hasn’t told a white lie in defiance of a parent? That I will pay the price of that lie is unfortunate. I struggle to answer Mrs Yarrow, but my silence is answer enough.
The cook sits. ‘All I’m suggesting, miss, is that being without their mother might have…addled their natures somewhat. Is it possible that your woman on the cliff was in fact the boy himself? That the twins persuaded you into the outing as a way to pursue their game? These children know Winterbourne and its surrounds better than anyone. It’s their home. They’ve no fear of tumbling into the sea or tripping on a stray log – they know every inch. It’s their playground.’
We’re interrupted by the sound of a closing door.
‘Edmund!’ I jump up.
The boy is huddled next to Tom, the houseman’s coat wrapped around his small shoulders. He is pale and cold, his teeth chattering, and his copper hair is plastered to his forehead with precipitation or clammy fright.
‘Found him in the copse,’ says Tom, ‘and a good job, too.’
Mrs Yarrow steers him into the kitchen. ‘Let’s get you warmed up, lovey.’
‘Edmund, darling,’ I step forward, ‘are you all right?’
As the boy’s meek form travels past me, I feel the urge to apologise – though for what, I do not know. He was the one who ran from me. I cannot bear to think of the accusations that passed the cook’s lips just moments before. Seeing Edmund’s frail body, shivering and innocent, I cannot entertain it for a heartbeat. I think of him shaking and alone on the moors and want to scoop him into my arms.
But it seems I am required elsewhere. Captain de Grey appears in the hall.
‘Miss Miller, I must see you immediately.’
Amid the brutal shadow of his face, his blue eyes glint like diamonds. They frighten and excite me, both at once.
I turn to Edmund but the boy is being led away. For an instant, he glances behind him and sharply meets my eye.
*
‘Just what in hell do you think you were doing?’
‘I’m sorry, Captain. It was foolish to leave Winterbourne. Accept my apology.’
‘Did you not deem it necessary to ask me first?’
‘I’m very sorry,’ I say, for I cannot think of anything else. Edmund is a child, and I could always have overridden his claim.
The captain pours himself a drink – brandy, strong, in a cut-glass tumbler – and knocks it back. ‘Do you want one?’ He pours another.
‘No, thank you.’ He drinks more. He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and I notice the coarse black hairs on the outside of his wrist.
‘Sit down,’ he tells me. I do.
‘Do you have any idea,’ he says, ‘what those children mean to me?’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘I do not.’
‘Then you lie.’ He sits at his desk. It is scattered with paper, an ashtray bearing the stubs of several cigars, and a framed photograph whose picture I cannot see from this angle. ‘You cannot possibly grasp what it might be to lose a child,’ he says. ‘I could have lost Edmund today. Do you hear me? Do you understand?’
I swallow dryly. I have no idea what it is to lose…
Oh, but I do, Jonathan, I want to say. Oh, but I do. And I think that if I were Laura de Grey, with this husband and these children, I would have wanted to live for ever and a day. I would have risked losing nothing. I would have held them all to my heart so tightly that none of them could get away.
‘I accept full responsibility for what happened,’ I manage. Any protest that Edmund orchestrated his own fate would sound petty on my part. If the price is the captain’s anger then so be it. ‘It was reckless to leave Winterbourne.’
I wonder where the captain was this morning, when I came knocking. Possibly he was sleeping, or possibly he’d been drinking. But for a tired man, for a drunk, his eyes are piercingly clear. The burned side of his face is in shadow (does he always sit so as to ensure this?) and his dark hair is unkempt. He trails a long finger around the rim of his brandy glass, watching me.

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