A Place of Secrets (13 page)

“I couldn’t possibly impose myself upon you all.” Jude crossed her fingers under the desk at the lie.

“Oh, you wouldn’t be. Robert
liked you very much and I know he’d be happy to have you stay for a week or two.”

“That’s enormously kind of you.” Jude thought longingly of the beautiful library, the conversations she’d had with this sympathetic woman.

When Jude ended the call, she felt a great sense of relief, of rightness. Norfolk was where she needed to be.

“I’m sorry, Caspar,” she whispered as the shreds of a dream fled, already forgotten. She opened her eyes.

She was lying in a big double bed between soft white sheets and sunshine was pouring into the room. A split second later she remembered where she was. Starbrough Hall was deliciously quiet. If she listened she could hear birds singing all around, maybe the distant purr of a passing
car, but otherwise there was no sound. She rolled over to consult the watch on her bedside table. Eight o’clock. Not too embarrassingly late, then.

It was a perfect room to wake up in on a summer holiday, being on a corner away from the family bedrooms, with windows on two sides that admitted the morning sunshine. “You really don’t want dear old Max and Georgie bothering you at six o’clock,”
Alexia had told her cheerfully the night before. “And you’ll have the bathroom next door all to yourself.”

Cheerful was exactly the right word for Alexia. She had a light, happy voice, and was attractive in a fair, healthy, bright-eyed way. Her calm, encouraging manner with the three-year-old twins was only slightly adjusted when she soothed her husband, who, Jude observed, liked his routines.
A countrywoman, the daughter of Yorkshire farmers, she also managed the housekeeping, the dogs and her grieving mother-in-law with equal facility. The accommodation of an unexpected guest into the household seemed not to trouble her in the slightest.

Jude was glad of the remoteness of her bathroom. As she ran water into the great claw-footed bath the pipes clunked and groaned so much she’d have
been worried otherwise about disturbing the rest of the house.

She climbed out of the water, her mind as free and refreshed as her body. It was difficult in fact to believe that she’d arrived yesterday evening hot and dusty, the great rush of Friday-afternoon traffic adding an hour to her usual journey time. A good night’s sleep, and the deep quietness of the place had quickly restored her. The
trauma of Caspar and the stress of the office had quite melted away.

Downstairs, breakfast was in progress. Chubby, golden-haired Georgie was pouring as much milk on the wooden table as on her cereal, chattering all the while; Max, neat and dark like his grandmother, shouted at his sister for splashing the book about dinosaurs he had open by his bowl. Alexia greeted her brightly; Chantal’s small
spaniel, Miffy, shuffled over to sniff her feet, waving his flaglike tail. Of the other inhabitants there was no sign.

“Come and sit down. Sleep well?” Alexia said, mopping up milk with one hand and stacking dirty bowls with the other. “The tea’s only recently made.”

“I slept wonderfully, thanks,” Jude replied, pouring herself some.

“Please help yourself to breakfast,” Alexia said. “We’re going
swimming in a moment, aren’t we, children? Like to get your shoes on now? Robert’s out somewhere with the dogs,” she explained to Jude, “and I don’t think Chantal’s been down yet. She’s often awake in the small hours, poor thing.”

As she ate her cereal, Jude listened to the sound of the twins running up and down stairs, gathering jackets and plastic backpacks, their chirpy voices squabbling over
swimming goggles and towels. Then the back door banged, the car revved away and there was blissful silence.

She put her bowl in the dishwasher and made a piece of toast and some coffee, and reviewed her plans as she drank it. Three whole weeks in Norfolk, she could hardly believe it. When Robert had rung her at the office to repeat Chantal’s eager invitation to stay, she’d confessed that she
might be in the county for this length of time.

“You must come for as long as you like,” he said. “After all, it’s in our interests. And my mother seems to have taken to you. It will be nice for her to have somebody new about the place. She doesn’t have much of a life, poor thing.”

This morning she would start work; however, Claire had rung yesterday inviting her over to supper. Jude had already
told Alexia this, adding, “I’d be glad to cook for you all occasionally while I’m here. Call it my contribution to the household.”

“Oh you needn’t do that,” Alexia replied, but she seemed pleased that Jude had offered.

Jude took her coffee and her laptop along to the library. Everything there was as it had been, except for the journals that were now with Cecelia, but not for much longer, Jude
thought sadly. Soon the shelves containing Anthony Wickham’s books would be empty, the globe and the orrery would no longer grace the room. But the roof of the Hall would be sound. Robert, she’d learned at dinner last night, ran some mysterious import-export business, but it was suffering in the recession. This explained further both why he was around the house so much and why there was no money
for the upkeep of the Hall.

She stood staring out over the park and, once more, her eyes were drawn to the line of trees on the hill. It was funny how you couldn’t see the folly from the house, but you could see the house from the folly. Again, she wondered whether that had been the case when the folly was built. It seemed odd that, when follies were supposed to be decorative, you couldn’t see
it.

There were a dozen rolled-up charts in the cupboard and she knelt down to take them out one by one, then passed an absorbing hour while she tried to make sense of Wickham’s plotting of double stars or objects he thought were comets. She jotted down in her notebook anything she thought might be interesting for cataloging.

Then, underneath the last bundle of charts, she was surprised to find
what looked like another volume of the observation journal, one she had obviously overlooked. She opened it and turned the pages. What a shame, it was mutilated. About a third of the leaves had been torn out of the back. The remaining two-thirds were entirely written in the newer handwriting, and when she turned to the first page she realized that the first entry was 10 March 1778. The volume followed
the others in date order, in fact. How could she not have noticed the book before? She began to read and, as she did, her amazement grew.

Father wishes me to continue our charting of new nebulae and double stars, now that he can no longer. It is a heavy burden that I bear, but I will endeavour to carry out his wishes with all the skill and mastery that he has taught me. I will not fail him, though the nights are lonely and cold and he at least had me to help him. I have no one and must consult an atlas frequently, so that much time is lost.

4.30 in the morning, as the moon nears the horizon in Ursa Major, I saw Bodes Nebula, round with a dense brighter core.

Jude stopped to consider. “My father…” So the second author was Wickham’s son. Who was he? She’d have to ask Chantal. Had Wickham
died or was he away or incapacitated? She’d need to find all this out for cataloging purposes. She continued to read.

24th March

Early evening, no moon tonight and the air is very still. In Taurus near Tau Tauri at 15' distance a new star cloud or perhaps a comet.

In several subsequent entries, the diarist mentioned this new object, deciding that it was moving. By early April he concluded: “
Viewed at 278 magnifications bright and clear-defined. Possibly a comet. No previous reference in my father’s notes
.”

Eventually, it seemed, he recorded it as a comet, though he seemed to have some doubt.

After this, there were long gaps of time between diary entries and little of a personal nature. The observer mentioned a partial eclipse of the moon, the addition of a new nebula and, with notable
excitement, a possible double star that Wickham senior had been tracking for some years.

* * *

Jude finished making notes and was about to put the book back in the cupboard when Chantal came in.

“Don’t let me disturb you,” she said. “I only wanted to see if you were all right.”

“I’m absolutely fine, and you’re just the person I want,” Jude told her. “I’ve found another volume of the diary—look—and
need to check Anthony Wickham’s dates with you. And those of his children.”

“Of course,” Chantal said, taking the book and examining it. “It’s a pity that it’s damaged. I wonder who did that? Yes, I will look up the dates you need. But I can tell you right away that he did not have any children, not as far as we know, anyway. Or even marry. His estate passed to his nephew, you see. A man called
Pilkington, who changed his name to Wickham.”

Jude stared at her in puzzlement. “Then who is it in these pages who calls Anthony Wickham ‘Father’?”

“I have no idea. I will search for the family tree upstairs, if you don’t mind waiting a bit. I have to hurry now. Last night, I had such a toothache…”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“The dentist told me to come straightaway. Will you be all right here for an
hour or two?”

“Please don’t worry about me,” Jude said. “There’s plenty I can get on with, I can assure you. Good luck with the dentist.”

When Chantal had gone, Jude settled down to work once more. She had reached the bottom of the cupboard now and was surrounded by scrolls and books. She bent down and looked toward the back of the bottom shelf, in case she had missed something. It wasn’t a
very well constructed cupboard, she saw. There was a piece of wood missing at the back and she could see the crumbling plaster beyond. Or was it plaster? There was certainly something. She reached in and put her hand through the gap, and felt paper. She grasped it and pulled gently, but it was stuck, so she shuffled herself round a bit and tried to fit her other hand into the gap as well, to find
out what was holding it. She felt more paper. There seemed to be a whole wad of the stuff. She held it together and once more tugged. This time it moved, and she wiggled it out through the hole.

What she’d found was a thick curled-up wedge of pages covered in a faded handwriting, the same writing, she quickly realized, as in the journal she’d just been reading. She opened the journal toward the
end, and, fitting the pages to the torn binding, saw that, amazingly, she’d found the missing leaves. How extraordinary. But why had they been torn out? She tried to smooth out the pages she’d found, anxious not to damage the paper further, but they kept curling up again. At least they weren’t damp, which was lucky really, considering where they’d been hidden. The writing was very faded, though,
and difficult to read. With growing anticipation, she took her find over to the desk, turned on the lamp there, and tried to decipher the first line. It was a title. She thought it said “An Account of Esther Wickham.” It wasn’t a name she’d heard before. She began, with great difficulty, to spell out the first few lines. “I was…” something—eight, perhaps. Goodness, was the whole document going to
be as illegible as this? But when she peeled back the first page to check she saw that the writing on the next was darker and easier to interpret. Heartened, she turned once more to the first page and began to make out the faded letters. The voice was awkward at first, the sentence structure overcomplex, but quite quickly it became more fluent.

An Account of Esther Wickham

I was eight years of age when I first came to know my father. How this could be, since I slept under his roof from infancy and ate his food and was cared for by his servants, it might be difficult to comprehend, but once you are acquainted with the facts of the case; and once you come to understand Anthony Wickham as I knew him, to appreciate the finely wrought workings of his mind, his—some say—unnatural devotion to a single passion, all will become clear.

In the very beginning, he was not my father at all. The filial bond was something we sought for ourselves late and forged together. This is contrary to the usual custom, which is that the names ‘father’ and ‘daughter’ come first, at the birth of the child, the closeness between them following after. In our case, it was some years after we became acquainted that he instructed his lawyer to give legal name to what we had already made real: in short, he adopted me and made me his own.

Much of this he did not tell me until I reached my fourteenth year, for he did not deem it suitable to burden a child with matters that troubled its elders. Suffice it to say I was raised believing, once I was sentient of these things, that I was his child, bone of his bone, blood of his blood. That is what Susan, my nurse, urged me to believe. The channels of her mind, I gleaned later, ran thus: since I was brought to be raised under his roof, with no family name to call my own, an armour of dignity must be joined together for me. He had decreed I be called ‘Esther,’ after the old mistress, his mother, so Esther Wickham was what she bade the other servants call me. As I grew I heard half-muttered rumours below stairs, and remarks from my dear Aunt Pilkington, of whom I will tell more, that I had no right to the name Wickham; that I was an orphan; or that I was the master’s bastard by some woman he’d met on one of his infrequent journeys to London or Bristol, where he would confer with other stargazers and from whence he returned laden with learned books, and specula to grind lenses for new telescopes. These rumours disquieted me and I would wonder about them, but Susan bid me dismiss them as tittle-tattle.

The truth, as I say, I did not learn till I was grown. But perhaps Susan was right to assert her version for while I was small it gave me assurance. I was a nervous infant, prone to nightmares and unaccountable ailments. I clung to Susan as though she were my mother, and she to me, for she was blessed with no infant of her own, nay, nor man, for who would have her, our Creator having seen fit to make her homely, endowing her with a vast body and a wandering eye, which caused the poor creature to be shy and awkward with the stronger sex. But to me she was the loveliest woman on God’s earth, for as an infant she succoured my every need and I wanted no other mother.