A Place of Secrets (15 page)

Jude explored the flower gardens and duly admired the neat rows of vegetables in the kitchen garden, then walked across the park, jumped the short drop into the ha-ha and picked her way across rough grassland toward the woods. As she
came nearer, she saw an iron gate set in the flint wall that divided the park from the woodland. As she feared, it turned out to be padlocked. She grasped the bars like a prisoner and peered beyond at a tantalizing path disappearing through the trees. Presumably it led to the folly. She turned away and began to walk down to the road, thinking she’d do a short circuit of the perimeter before returning
to the house.

When she reached the road, she found it pleasant to sit on the low wall for a while under the restless trees, it being such a perfect, drowsy afternoon. In the fields on the other side mahogany-colored cows were grazing. A light breeze cooled her skin.

A quarter of a mile up the road she could glimpse Euan’s car, and at that very moment he came out of the drive and fetched something
from the trunk that looked like a strip of wood, before returning to the house.

She wondered whether he was just coming home or about to go out. Coming in, she decided, after a couple of minutes with no further sign. She slipped down off the wall and walked up the road.

Euan was crouched by an open hutch in the old carport, and when he rose she saw he was cradling a rabbit in his arms. “Jude, how good to see you. I didn’t know you were down again.” His smile warmed her.

“I’m here for a week or two this time,” she explained, coming close to stroke the rabbit. It tried to struggle away from her. “Oh, I’ve frightened it,” she said. “I hope you don’t
mind me dropping in unannounced again like this.”

“Far from it,” he said, gentling the animal. “Come on, boy, it’s all right.” They were standing very close and the rabbit was quieter now; it waited, quivering, as Jude ran her fingers down its back.

“Is this the one you found in the trap?” She saw it no longer wore the bandage.

“Yes, look, its leg’s almost healed. I’m wondering when to let
it go.”

She ran her hand over the animal’s ears that lay flat down its back, and her fingers brushed Euan’s shirt, which gave her a surprising feeling of intimacy. The animal, as though indicating that it had the upper hand here, nuzzled deeper than she dared into that shirt. She said, “I reckon it would simply follow you home again.”

He looked concerned. “In that case, I’d have to find someone
who wanted a pet. It’s impossible for me to keep them all. Especially if I go away. You’re staying with Claire again, I suppose? I dropped by a day or two ago with the little doll Summer wanted, but there was no one in, so I left it on the doorstep. I hope she found it.”

The mention of Claire was like a current of cool air between them. Jude stopped stroking the rabbit and stepped back.

“I haven’t
seen them yet, but I’m sure she was pleased. Actually, I’m staying at the Hall for the moment. Claire’s house is so small it doesn’t seem fair for them, and the Wickhams were quite insistent. I am going over to Blacksmith’s Cottage later though, so I’ll ask.”

“Thanks,” he said. He looked slyly at her. “Hey, it’s lucky you’ve turned up. I need a little help, if you have the time. You’re not nervous
of horses, are you?”

“Not particularly,” she said cautiously. “Why?”

“Some men are coming to mow the meadow this afternoon, and I need to move the caravan. The farm horse, Robin, is used to pulling, and Steve said I could borrow him to shift it, but I rang to check and he’s out, and the men are arriving in half an hour.”

“What do I have to do?” Jude said, a bit anxious. She’d not had anything
to do with horses since she was a teenager, when she’d had riding lessons on Saturday mornings for a few months after they moved to Norwich.

“The most important thing is to hold Robin steady while I’m attaching the shafts,” he explained. “Come on, I’ll put this little fellow back and take you to meet him.”

Jude passed the next ten minutes cajoling the old carthorse with sugar lumps while Euan
harnessed him, then they led him up the road, through the meadow, and somehow backed the horse between the shafts of the caravan.

“Where’s it got to go?” Jude asked, as Euan checked the straps.

“Under the trees there, not far,” Euan said, with a nod.

When it came to it, Robin was more interested in nibbling the sweet grass than pulling, and the caravan wheels had settled into the soft ground
over the rainy June, so several more sugar lumps and a mysterious-looking exercise involving Euan staring into the horse’s eyes and blowing up his nostrils were required to coax him into action. Finally, the caravan shuddered up out of its resting place and, with Euan at Robin’s head, proceeded to creak and sway in a slow, wide circle until it came to rest under the poplar trees at the far side
of the meadow. They were just disengaging the horse when a truck was heard drawing up outside the cottage. There came an alarming clanking and grinding of metal on stone, then a small mowing machine, driven by a young man in a beanie hat, surged through the gap in the hedge. A portly older man followed on foot, breathing hard, his face flushed with exertion.

“Afternoon, Mr. Robinson. You picked
a good day for it,” he shouted. He gestured to the younger man, who killed the engine.

“Haven’t I just, Jim. Jude, this is Jim Devlin, and that’s his son, Adrian. Shall we let them get on with it? We’ll have some coffee waiting when you’ve finished,” he told them.

“Tea for us, if you’ve got it, Mr. Robinson,” Jim said. “Strong enough to trot a mouse on, please, and two sugars.”

“Strong tea
it shall be, then.”

“Coffee for me, please, Euan,” Jude said hastily.

As Jude followed Euan indoors, they heard the mower roar into action once more.

“What happens to the hay?” Jude asked Euan as they waited for the kettle to boil.

“When it’s dry,” said Euan, spooning ground coffee into a
cafetière
, “it’s brilliant animal feed. Some I keep, some I sell to a local pet shop.” He fetched four
mugs from the window sill and wiped them, dropping teabags in two and putting them to one side for when Jim and Adrian had finished. “So what are you doing down here, ‘Auntie Jude’? Exploring the dusty tomes again?”

“That’s right. My boss has decided it’ll be the saving of the company this year, so I’m here to do my homework.” She explained about the journals and about Esther and the article
she was supposed to write.

“Fascinating stuff,” he said. He collected a milk carton from a cold box in his makeshift dairy and remarked, “You’ll be wanting to see the folly properly, I’m sure.”

“Euan,” she said, feeling a little guilty. “I know you said it wasn’t safe, but I’m afraid I went up the folly by myself in the end. Last Sunday, on my way home.”

“Did you?” he said mildly, pushing the
plunger down through the coffee.

“Yes. I thought about stopping to see if you’d come, but it was awfully early.”

“That’s fine. You’re an adult.” He didn’t look up as he poured the coffee. “I don’t want anyone hurting themselves, that’s why I warned you off.” Still, he sounded a little offhand.

“But you go up there, Euan. In fact I felt as though I was intruding. Is that your stuff up at the
top? The books and the papers?”

“Yes. It’s for my next book.” He brightened. “I’m writing about the stars.”

“Really? That’s quite a coincidence. I mean, given that I’m researching a stargazer. Anthony Wickham, the man who built the folly. Esther was his adopted daughter.”

“Ah, might be useful for my book then.”

“Is it nonfiction like your other books? What aspect of the stars are you writing
about?”

“Oh, not the technical stuff, I’m no physicist, it’s a general read, in the style of the other books really. It’s about the cultural importance of astronomy. I’m passionate about the necessity of the stars to us as people. Living in cities and towns, and with so much artificial light, we’re in danger of losing our connection to the night sky—that sense of wonder about the universe and
our place in it. I want to convey all that to ordinary people, you know, get them to look up at the sky occasionally. I suppose that’s an unspoken purpose of all my books, to make people fall in love with nature again.”

Jude thought how bright and animated he looked as he talked. “Thanks,” she said, when he gave her her coffee. “It sounds marvelous, like a book I’d love to read. So is the folly
where you go to observe the stars? I noticed the trapdoor in the ceiling—”

“For heaven’s sake, I hope you didn’t go up there…”

He did look alarmed now and Jude said quickly, “No, no, I’m not that stupid. Don’t worry.”

“I know how it works, you see,” he explained. “There’s a particular trick to opening the trapdoor, and that ladder is not a good place to teeter while you try to work it out.
Yes, I go up the tower like old Anthony Wickham to watch the stars, but also to think and write notes. I seem to get good ideas sitting in that little room,” he said, folding his arms and perusing her. “There’s something about the atmosphere. Not everyone likes it, though.”

“Summer, you’re talking about? I know what you mean about atmosphere,” she said, her face sober. “To me there’s a strong
sense of history, but then that’s what I’m interested in. There’s also certainly a—well, a presence. I thought about Anthony Wickham up there with his telescopes, whiling away the lonely nights. Though I couldn’t say it was an echo of him I sensed. There wasn’t much up there that looked as if it had been his. Not that I nosed around, of course,” she added.

“You have as much right to nose around
as I do,” he said, leaning against the door frame, nursing his coffee. “There are one or two things I’ve found on the site, though, and … that reminds me.”

He put down his coffee and went across to an old dresser against the far wall, which alone had survived of all the old kitchen furniture. He picked up something from a shelf and passed it to her. “What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s a coin,
of course,” she said, turning the heavy piece of blackish metal. “Maybe a penny.” She took it over to the daylight and examined it. “A king’s head. One of the Georges, perhaps, but I can’t read which one.”

“It’s George the First, I think,” he said. “King of Great Britain from 1714 to 1727. I looked him up on the Internet. I turned up the coin when I was burying the muntjac. I guess I should give
it to John Farrell, since he is the landowner, but the website I looked at didn’t say it’s worth much and somehow I don’t have him down as the sensitive collector type.”

A picture passed through Jude’s mind of Esther’s Mr. Trotwood reburying ancient bones at midnight and the penny falling unnoticed into the hole. Where that idea came from she didn’t know. There had been a small bone sticking
out of the earth Euan had turned. She shuddered. “I wonder whether there’s ever been a proper archaeological dig around there,” she said. Just then she remembered another person who had seen the mound.

“Oh. Euan, there was something else odd. Have you come across a woman called Marcia Vane?” He shook his head, so she rushed on. “She’s the new landowner’s lawyer, well, more than his lawyer, I
think.” She remembered the easy way Marcia had laid her hand on John Farrell’s arm. “I met her when she came to speak to Robert Wickham. I just avoided bumping into her and a man who might have been Farrell last week, which would have been embarrassing. I ducked behind a tree and they didn’t see me. I didn’t quite get what they were talking about. Farrell was certainly annoyed that the wire had been
cut.”

“Funnily enough, that wasn’t me. I just bent it a bit to step over.”

“I wonder who did it, then?”

She examined the coin again and the profile of the first German King of England, who never learned to speak good English, trying to make sense of the worn lettering. The folly, Anthony Wickham, Esther’s story, the coin. Everything led back to the past. She glanced round the kitchen, suddenly
aware of the extraordinary fact, which she hadn’t yet begun to assimilate, that her grandmother’s family had lived in this house. There was so little that was original left now. The dresser might have been her great grandparents’, she supposed. She must ask Gran. She must ask Gran lots of things. It was funny how she’d started talking about that gypsy girl she used to know. What was her name?
Tamsin, that was it. That would have been the 1920s and 1930s, though. And Jude’s great-grandparents had died in the 1950s.

“Who lived here immediately before you came?” she asked Euan.

“An elderly couple by the name of Herbert, I gather,” he said. “They’d been here since the sixties when the husband was employed as gamekeeper. By the time Mr. Herbert died the Wickhams had sold the land under
us to the farmer—who realized there was so much work needed to be done to it he decided to sell outright and that’s when I came along. Everything had been cleared out of the house before I moved in, in case you were thinking I might have found anything belonging to your family.”

“I was, vaguely. I was trying to imagine this place as it must have been when they lived here.”

She hefted the coin,
which was warm and heavy in her hand. “What’s it like up there?” she asked. “Right at the top of the tower, I mean? Is it open to the sky?” Esther’s account had mentioned a canopy to protect Anthony Wickham from the weather.

“I’ll take you one starlight night, if you like,” he said.

“I’d love that,” she said immediately. It never occurred to her that this would cause trouble.

* * *

When
she arrived back at Starbrough Hall, she went straight to her room to get ready for visiting Claire and Summer. She switched on her laptop briefly and saw that Cecelia had already replied.

I’d definitely like to look at the Esther Wickham stuff. How intriguing, a daughter who’s been wiped from the family tree. I’d love to know her story. Well, I’ve been busy. I ran Anthony Wickham’s name through the Royal Observatory archive catalog. Click on this link to see what I’ve found! What sad people we are, both working on a weekend!