A Gathering Storm (2 page)

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ Hetty said. ‘I was her sister.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I hadn’t spotted you – you weren’t sitting with Tom.’

‘No,’ Hetty said shortly. ‘Well, never mind all that. I thought I’d warn you not to say anything stupid. You won’t, will you?’

‘Stupid? What do you take me for?’

Hetty seized her arm and Beatrice felt a spray of spit as the woman hissed, ‘Angelina never told him about you, you know. Never.’

Beatrice felt the last shreds of hope blow away. ‘Didn’t she?’ she said faintly. Then she pulled herself up straighter: ‘Told whom what?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. So keep mum. Trust me, it’s for the best.’

She might not like Hetty, but Beatrice saw enough urgency in the other woman’s face to worry her. She gave her the slightest of nods and turned away.

When she finally reached Tom’s side she felt only numbness, knowing she mustn’t say what was in her heart. She put out her hand.

‘Thank you for coming,’ he murmured as he shook it, looking at her, curious. ‘Do I know you?’

‘I’m Beatrice Ashton,’ she said. ‘I used to be Beatrice Marlow. A family friend.’ She watched his face change.
He knew,
she saw immediately.
He knew who she was.

With a supreme effort, Tom Cardwell recovered his composure.

‘It’s very nice of you to come, Mrs Ashton. Perhaps you’d join us for refreshments shortly. I’m sure someone could give you a lift to the hotel.’

‘I have my own car,’ she said, but already he was turning from her.

‘Aunt Hetty,’ she heard him say, as she moved on.

‘Such a shame my brother Peter couldn’t take the trouble.’ Hetty’s reply carried clear and loud.

‘It’s a long way from New York, Hetty, and I gather his health isn’t good.’

‘Well, he needn’t expect
us
to turn up for
his
funeral.’ She gave a snorting laugh.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Tom said.

Beatrice joined the other mourners, admiring the wreaths laid out on the ground. Lucy and her mother, Gabriella, were a little way ahead.

‘Oh, this is all so . . . weird,’ cried the girl passionately, and started to cry. Gabriella tried to soothe her. Beatrice watched them walk away together into the garden. It seemed she wasn’t to speak to them either. No one talked to her. She was a stranger – no, worse, a ghost.

Finally losing her courage altogether, she decided to skip refreshments and looked for the path to the car park.

Later, she was to agonize over her cowardice. If Hetty hadn’t warned her, who knows what she might have said to Tom and the effect it would have had. Perhaps it was better for the truth to lie sleeping. After all, who would benefit from it coming to light? Maybe only herself. But hadn’t her own mother always enjoined her to tell the truth? A lie leads to a bigger lie, she used to say. It wasn’t originally Beatrice’s lie, but Angelina’s.

Cornwall, April 2011

‘
Please
, Will.’

‘Lucy, we’re already late. If you girls hadn’t taken so long packing up . . .’

‘It’s not far on the map – look.’

‘I can’t when I’m driving, can I?’ Will’s eyes didn’t flicker from the road ahead.

‘There’ll be a sign to Saint Florian soon,’ Lucy said. ‘I showed you on the way down, remember? Oh, Will, it’s only a few miles to the coast. Come on, please. I did say I wanted to go there.’ She tried not to sound petulant.

‘And we’ve been busy doing other things all week. Are you going to blame me for that?’

‘I’m not blaming you for anything. I just want to see the place.’

‘Listen, Lu, we’ll go another time, how about that? Jon says let’s come again in the summer.’ As if to settle the matter, Will touched a paddle on the steering wheel and rock music pulsed through the car, drowning all possibility of conversation.

Lucy traced a finger along the wobbly line of the Cornish coast, with its promise of smugglers’ coves and wild headlands, and privately wondered if there would be a second visit. She’d hardly known Jon and Natalia, the other couple; they were friends of Will’s, and she hadn’t even been seeing Will very long. She sneaked a look at him and her pessimism grew. That scowl was becoming an all-too-recognizable reaction to being crossed. He was twenty-seven, as she was, but despite his longish hair and the attractive, unshaven look, which in London she’d taken to mean laidback and open to new ideas, he hadn’t turned out that way at all. As for the others, Jon, like Will, was obsessed with finding the best surfing beaches, Natalia with shopping, and Lucy was the only one prepared to walk the cliffs if more than one drop of rain was falling. But as the newcomer to the group, and lacking her own transport, she’d had to comply with their plans. She folded her arms and stared out of the window, trying to ignore the ugly music.

Will glanced at her and turned down the volume. ‘You look pretty miserable,’ he remarked.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand why you’re so desperate to get home.’

He shrugged. ‘I want to get the drive over with. Anyway, there are things to do. I’ve booked the editing suite this week and I need to go over the brief.’ Will was a freelance film editor, and Lucy worked for a television production company as a production assistant.

‘You’re not thinking about work already, Will?’

‘You’re lucky having next week off.’

‘I feel I’ve earned it . . . Oh, look!’ A road sign had come into view. Lucy sat up straighter. ‘The turn-off. Please, Will. It’ll only take twenty minutes, I promise. Let’s go,
please.
’

Will, who was a little alarmed by Lucy’s impetuous side, gave in and swung the driving wheel.

‘Thank you,’ Lucy breathed, touching his arm. His forehead creased into a frown.

They drove on in silence, the narrow road winding between high hedges. Several times they were forced to pull in to let cars pass from the opposite direction, Will’s fingers tapping the steering wheel.

‘How much further?’ he growled.

‘Just another half-mile. Oh, look, the sea!’

They had crossed a plateau and reached the point where the land sloped down to a horseshoe-shaped bay. To the left, high cliffs curved out to a headland with a lighthouse. The view to the right was blocked by a line of Scots pines crowded with rooks’ nests. Ahead, the road dipped steeply towards a cluster of whitewashed houses, presumably the beginning of the town.

Another sign, this one pointing right, along a lane behind the pines: ‘
The Beach and Carlyon Manor
,’ Lucy read aloud. ‘Will, stop! It’s Carlyon!’

Will checked his mirror before jamming on the brakes. ‘For goodness’ sake, Lu. I thought you wanted the town.’

‘I do – but Carlyon Manor, don’t you see? That’s where Granny lived when she was little.’

Will muttered something impatient under his breath, but turned right anyway. Lucy gazed out of the window at the wild daffodils in the hedgerows and her spirits rose.

Half a mile on, they came to a fork in the road. A white noticeboard detailing parking charges pointed left to the beach. ‘Right again,’ Lucy said, and the car swerved between a pair of granite posts and along a deep lane, where newly ploughed fields spread away on either side. Then came another bend and a short driveway to the left, to where a pair of high, wrought-iron gates was set in a long stone wall.

‘Stop in here,’ Lucy said, and Will pulled the car to a halt.

She flung open her door and hurried over to the gates. They were locked and the padlock smudged with rust. She shook them in frustration then gazed through the bars, trying to see a glimpse of the house, but a mass of trees swallowed the view.

Will said, ‘Too bad. Get in. Let’s go,’ and revved the engine, but Lucy had noticed where some stones from the long wall had spilled onto the lane, some way further down.

She reached for her camera bag in the passenger well, swung it on her shoulder and set off at a run, saying, ‘I won’t be a minute.’

‘Lucy!’ Will called.

She waved without looking back.

A hundred yards down from the gates she came to the section of the wall that was crumbling. She scrambled up, leapt down into the undergrowth on the other side and pushed her way through a thick belt of trees. There she stopped and stared. Set out before her was Carlyon Manor.

In the photographs she’d found in Granny’s box, Carlyon was a long, graceful Elizabethan stone house set amongst elegant trees, its rolled lawns stippled by sunlight. This building was derelict and blackened by fire, its ragged skeleton outlined against the sky, the one remaining chimney reaching up, pitifully, like the wing of a crushed bird. Instinctively, she took out her camera and started to take some shots, wondering all the while when this could have happened. Nobody had ever mentioned a fire.

She scurried across the shaggy grass and the weed-infested gravel. Several steps led up to the front entrance, but some flakes of wood on rusted hinges were all that remained of the double doors. She hovered on the threshold, considering the possible danger, then curiosity got the better of her and she stepped inside.

She was in a ruined hallway that was open, in part, to the sky. She wandered carefully from room to room, stepping over rubble, past twisted shapes of what had once been metal, trying to imagine what it might have been like once, before. It was, she saw, possible to glean the layout of the ground-floor rooms and something of their former purpose. There might once have been a central staircase, she thought, and a gallery, but perhaps that was her imagination.

She stared round at it all in dismay, wondering when the fire had happened and how. From a large room at the back of the house, the rusted vestiges of french windows looked out onto a flagstoned terrace and beyond, a wild garden. They were right on the clifftop here, and between the fluttering leaves of poplar trees glittered the sea.

She turned back to the room. It was the drawing room once, she supposed. The corroded metal innards of an armchair crouched by the fireplace. On the wall above hung the charred shape of what was once a great mirror. She crossed the rotted floor, rubbish crunching beneath her feet, and examined the ruined mantelpiece. It still featured a carved design. She moved her fingers over the lumps and bumps of the burned wood, wondering about the pattern of fruit and flowers. It would have been a stunning piece of craftsmanship. The ghostly remnants of the mirror and the armchair fascinated her, and she reached again for her camera.

Round the rooms she moved in a reverie, taking pictures of anything that caught her eye, trying to imagine the people who had lived here. Sometimes she thought she heard children’s voices. God forbid there had been children in the house when this happened. They were gentle voices, though, not sounds of terror, and she came to realize it was just the wind calling through the ruins.

Half an hour later, she became aware that there really was someone calling. Will. She’d forgotten about Will. She picked her way back to the front entrance and looked out across the park. He was standing over by the belt of trees, legs apart, hands on hips. She waved and he began to jog towards her.

‘Lucy, what the hell . . .? I didn’t know where you were going. You just vanished.’

‘I’m so sorry. I forgot the time. Isn’t this wonderful?’

He looked past her at the ruin. ‘It looks like a dump to me. What did you call it?’

‘Carlyon Manor. Where Granny lived when she was young.’

‘Very nice,’ he said, ‘but it must be dangerous. Come on now. We must go.’

She didn’t like his hectoring tone, but came reluctantly down the steps. ‘I still need to see Saint Florian,’ she said and bit her lip, seeing his outraged face.

‘I’m sorry, Lucy, but it’s just not on. We need to get home.’

He really was furious, and though she resented it she supposed it was understandable. She started to follow him back to the car, but her footsteps dragged; she couldn’t dispel the silly notion that the house was calling her back.

Will, she saw, had already turned the car round so that it pointed resolutely in the direction of home. They got in, and when he started the engine she suddenly imagined herself sitting beside him all the way to London, listening to the clangy music, discussing the wretched documentary he was editing, with the town of St Florian, still unvisited, receding further and further away.

They were passing the pines with the rooks’ nests now, and Will was signalling left, away from St Florian. A mad idea occurred to her. It wasn’t as though she had to get home yet.

‘Will,’ she said. ‘Stop and let me out.’

He hesitated. ‘Lucy, please. I’d like to get home sometime today if possible.’

‘I’m not coming.’

‘What?’ His face was a mask of disbelief.

‘Look – I’ve got a week,’ she told him. ‘I was just going to play about with photographs, maybe get some framed, but I can do that anytime. So I’ve decided I’m staying here. I want to take a proper look at Saint Florian, see if there’s anyone to ask about Carlyon and my family.’

‘That’s ridiculous. Where will you stay? You can’t just decide things like that.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll find somewhere.’ She reached for her handbag and camera. ‘Thanks, Will. For everything. It’s been fab.’ She leant across and gave him a quick kiss, then opened the door. He sat there, wooden, not looking at her. ‘Would you unlock the boot, please? I want my suitcase.’

He gazed at her, his expression anxious and unhappy, saying, ‘This is just stupid. Look, I’ll tell you what, I’ll drive you down to Saint Florian if you’re that serious. Then you’re coming back with me.’

It wasn’t only the tone of voice that maddened her, but the fact that he had no interest in this adventure.

‘You don’t have to, really. I can walk down. Please open the boot.’

‘Lucy—’

‘I want to do this on my own.’ She knew that now.

A moment later she was standing at the roadside with her suitcase, watching his car speed away.

‘Bye, Will,’ she whispered.

Trundling her case behind her, with the spring sun warming her back, she set off down the hill towards the town.