House of Shadows (36 page)

T
he police were questioning Flick. Mark had stayed with her for moral support. Holly went out into the walled garden, through the picket gate and out to the millpond. Now that it had started raining again there was a pool of water lying in the dip, its silver surface reflecting the moon. It seemed odd to Holly that there could be so little water here when it had flowed fast enough through the mill race to break the wall down and wash Ben’s body back. But she was not entirely sure now that there had been a flood. It had sounded like one. It had felt like one, but when the police had gone down in the cellars there was only a puddle. Not enough to drown her. Not enough to cause so much damage.

Holly sat down on a huge sarsen stone, put her hand in her pocket and drew out the golden chain. She could remember seeing it in one of Elizabeth’s portraits, the Sistrin glowing in the clasp. Now the pearl was gone but
it seemed its power remained in the chain that had bound it.

Well, it had not taken her but it had wrought destruction. Holly looked out across the wood. For so long she had linked Ben’s disappearance consciously or unconsciously to the magic of the mirror and the pearl. It was a shock to see that actually it had come about through the destructive power of love, just as Robert Verity’s death had. Flick had loved Ben desperately. Holly could see that now. Flick, struggling and unstable, knew no half measures when it came to love. She was not like Holly, careful to take no risks, to avoid hurt. Holly remembered the grief she had seen in Flick’s eyes when she had come to the studio and the studied carelessness with which she had always asked if there was any news of Ben. She must have been tormented in so many different ways. Fragile, alone, carrying a secret she was too afraid to share … Holly felt so furious, so lost and angry, yet she could not sustain her anger with Flick. It was like hating a butterfly.

But Ben … Ben had not been the good guy she had thought him. The sick anger rose in her. She wondered how she could have been so blind. Tasha had told her Ben had been having an affair and Holly believed her to be mistaken. Worse she had thought Tasha disloyal and uncaring. She remembered her sister-in-law’s brief softening into tears that day at the mill when she had come to collect Flo. Now she understood that Tasha’s tears had been as much for the loss of something irreplaceable as they had been born of anger with her husband. Even Hester had not been unaware of Ben’s faults but Holly had not listened to what
her grandmother was saying. She had ignored their doubts because she had been so sure. She had had absolute faith in him.

There was a step behind her and she turned to see Mark walking slowly towards her. He stopped a good distance away and she understood that.

‘Is Flick OK?’ Holly asked. ‘Have the police finished talking to her?’

She saw the flash of expression in Mark’s eyes, the surprise behind the utter exhaustion. ‘She’s doing all right,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ He drove his hands into his pockets. ‘They’ve almost finished. I’m going to take her home in a minute.’

Holly nodded. She turned away to look back across the wood.

‘I knew Flick and Ben were having an affair,’ Mark said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’

Holly felt a great weariness fill her. It was laced with pain. ‘Why didn’t you?’ she asked.

‘If I had believed for a moment that Flick knew what had happened to Ben I would have told you,’ Mark said. ‘I would have told the police even though it would have killed me to do it. I’d asked her if she had seen him that night and she denied it and I believed her.’

‘I know it wouldn’t have made any difference to the fact that he was dead,’ Holly said numbly, ‘but if Flick had told the police where she had last seen Ben it might have helped them find his body.’ She looked up at him. ‘I’m trying, Mark. I’m really trying not to be angry but …’ Her voice shook. ‘You
knew
how I felt. I was in pieces! Every time that damned phone rang I hoped …’ She stopped and took
a breath, trying to calm herself. ‘Why didn’t you say? I even asked you if you disliked him!’ She jumped up, the fury in her suddenly a bright and vivid thing. ‘I gave you the chance to tell me,’ she said, ‘and you weren’t honest with me.’

‘No,’ Mark said. His tone was flat. ‘I wasn’t honest with you. I hated Ben. He was having an affair with my kid sister, knowing how vulnerable she was, knowing he was married and that Flick was burning up with the desperation of loving him. I asked him to leave her alone. I practically begged him. Hell, I wanted to kill him myself.’ He shifted; ran a hand through his hair. ‘Sorry, but I did. Especially when he told me that he loved Flick – but not enough ever to leave Tasha and Florence to be with her. That’s not love, at least not in my book. He was cheating all of them.’

There was a silence but for the soft splash of the water over the mill wheel.

‘I do understand that,’ Holly said, after a moment. ‘Of course I do.’ She felt cold inside with the knowledge of the depth of her brother’s betrayal. Flick had got herself into a terrible situation but Ben was more culpable in her eyes because he had been older, married, a father … His disloyalty was everything Holly hated and suddenly she was struggling with such anger and misery that she had to press a hand to her mouth to keep the tears in because she didn’t want to cry in front of Mark, not now, perhaps not ever again.

It was too late. Mark had heard the catch in her breath and she realised that she had no defences against him. She was completely vulnerable. She had let herself trust him. She loved him. She could not hide.

‘Holly.’ Mark’s voice was rough. ‘This was why. This was why I didn’t tell you.’ She heard him sigh. His tone softened. ‘You had Ben on a pedestal from the first,’ he said. ‘He didn’t belong there. He was human and fallible like the rest of us. But I felt I couldn’t tell you all that. I didn’t want to strip away your illusions about Ben when you were so desperate not to lose him.’

You had Ben on a pedestal …

Tasha, Holly thought dully, had said the same thing. Guy too, and even Hester. But she had not been listening. She had not wanted to listen.

‘You shouldn’t have protected me,’ she said dully. ‘I’m a big girl. I would’ve been able to cope. I always cope on my own.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Mark said. ‘You’re strong and you’re brave, Holly Ansell. One thing I know now, one thing I learned fast, was that you are nothing like your brother. But I didn’t want to hurt you. And I didn’t
want
you to be on your own. I wanted you to be with me. So,’ he shrugged. ‘I made a mistake.’

‘Yes,’ Holly said. ‘Yes, we both did.’ She looked up. ‘You’d better get back to Flick. She really does need you.’

Mark looked at her for a very long moment and then he nodded. When she looked back he had gone.

Ben’s funeral was as different from Robert Verity’s as it was possible to imagine. The church was packed with people and it felt to Holly more like a social gathering than an occasion for mourning. A lot of Tasha’s celebrity friends
were there looking cool in black, wearing dark glasses. The press were encamped outside.

Holly knew that Hester and John were finding it difficult. This was not a farewell to a grandson they knew, it was like the funeral of a stranger, usurped by people who did not know him.

Holly had already let go of one aspect of her brother’s memory. Ben had not been the man she had believed him to be. Mark had been right: she had set him on a pedestal and refused to see any wrong in him and that had blinded her to what he had truly been. Now that those illusions were gone she could see Ben had been a man like any other, a man who had made mistakes, had got himself in too deep, perhaps. She had felt more kindly towards him after that, her bitterness and anger with him settling into regret. Love was starting to edge back around the corners of her feelings for him. In time, she hoped, she would be able to think of him with generosity again as well as love.

She drove Hester and John back to Oxford after the service, before returning to Ashdown. It was the Open House that night at Mark’s building development, and she was determined to be there. There were things she had to say to him.

First, though, she had a quest to complete.

Back at the mill she changed out of her black trousers and jacket and into her work clothes, and went along to the studio. The rain was heavier now, drumming on the roof in an insistent beat, dripping from the gutters onto the path outside.

Holly switched the lights on, flooding the workshop with
artificial brightness. She had everything she needed – gloves, an artist’s respiratory mask, chemicals, a hammer, a screwdriver. On her workbench lay the crystal mirror with its false diamonds dull, its reflection opaque. Eleanor Ferris had sent it back to her a few days previously with a long report. Since then, Holly had been racking her brains as to what to do with it. She had thought that perhaps the correct thing to do would be to send it back to Espen Shurmer along with the golden chain, but she hesitated to do that. Shurmer had wanted the mirror preserved, reunited with the Sistrin pearl, but Holly knew deep in her heart that that would be too dangerous. She had to destroy the mirror before it could wreak any further harm. She did not know if she would ever find the pearl but she did know the mirror and pearl could not be allowed to coexist. Taking up the screwdriver she inserted it between the glass and the frame, carefully prying the two apart. The glass came out with surprising ease, lifting free. Holly placed it carefully on a piece of lint-free cloth. It was exquisite, perfectly cut, as clear and unblemished as the day it had been made.

She realised that she had been holding her breath as though expecting something to happen. She had expected it to defend itself. Yet it lay quiescent on the cloth. It was almost as though it knew its time had come.

Slowly, methodically, Holly applied paint stripper to the silvering on the back of the glass. She had expected it to take hours for the silvering to peel away and yet it seemed to dissolve almost instantly, melting, disappearing and leaving very little trace. She washed the glass again, in distilled water this time. She was not sure why she was going to so much
trouble when she was going to smash it and yet it seemed important to make it beautiful again.

She picked up the little hammer. The crystal mirror was no longer a mirror. It was a piece of wood and a piece of glass, the two parts separate now, unable to reflect anything, the future or the past, for good or evil. Holly raised the hammer intending to bring it down with the slightest of taps that she knew would smash the glass to smithereens.

She paused. For a brief second the glass seemed to shimmer before her eyes, dazzlingly bright. She lowered the hammer. This was Bohemian crystal, over three hundred years old. She could not break it. It would be a criminal thing for an engraver to do, a betrayal of her craft.

As she stared at the glass a picture started to form in her mind, a rose with eight petals on a slender stem, fragile and beautiful. She could take the glass and etch the symbol of the Knights of the Rosy Cross on it as a memorial. She could turn the mirror from an object of power and danger into something beautiful. She would change its purpose and give it new life.

The glass started to glow again then, ripples of flame running across its surface. Holly saw the flash of images like the flickering of an old black and white film: Men, hooded and cloaked within a ring of fire, Ashdown Park burning … Cold ate into Holly’s bones and she gave a convulsive shudder.

She raised the hammer and brought it down hard and the glass shattered into a million fragments.

London, Autumn 1661

H
er nephew Charles came to visit her. Once he knew that he would not be required to make any financial provision for her he was quick to pay his respects. It amused Elizabeth to see how attentive he could be when he saw how much her popularity grew with each passing day. Where he called others followed. It was a virtuous circle and soon she was dining with the Duke of Ormonde at Kensington and visiting Lady Herbert at Hampton Court, receiving calls from ambassadors, going to the theatre or to masques at court. It was pleasant enough; she disliked the licentiousness of the court and thought her nephew a lecher but she was old, a different generation, and her values were not theirs. Rupert was in England too. He had returned before she had, in fact, and was a popular member of his cousin’s circle. The ladies adored him and it was, Elizabeth thought, mutual.

Craven House was a cocoon of luxury. There was a garden to walk in on the fine days and a library to read in on the inclement ones. She was pampered. She wanted for nothing. It was easy to sink into the pleasure of it.

Craven was building again. He had his estates restored to him now, and he had lost no time in starting a grand plan of improvement. The scale of his ambition was dazzling.

One day he brought two men to see her. She was tired that day with a headache and a sharp pain in her chest that stole her breath. She was little inclined to meet strangers but when she saw them she realised that she had met them both before, in The Hague. Sir Balthasar Gerbier was the consummate courtier, wily, charming, slippery as a fish. Gerbier was all things to all men: courtier, spy, diplomat, artist and now an architect. With him was a youth Elizabeth remembered, Craven’s godson and, at one time, a page in her household. Captain William Winde was diffident where Gerbier was expressive, stolid where Gerbier was quicksilver. Yet of the two men she far preferred him.

‘Gerbier and Captain Winde are to build you a house,’ Craven said, drawing Winde forwards whilst Sir Balthasar flourished a ridiculous bow and kissed her hand. ‘I have an estate in Berkshire, at Hamstead Marshall. It was once a royal demesne and it will be again. We plan—’

‘A palace!’ Gerbier exclaimed. ‘A marvel to rival the beauty of your castle in Heidelberg, Majesty! Magnificent!’

‘You expressed a wish to live peacefully in the country.’ Craven was looking pleased with himself. Her wish truly
was his command. She felt a flash of irritation that Craven though her so easy to please, and then reproached herself for her ingratitude.

‘I did,’ she said. It had been a careless remark when she had been tired one day, her bones aching from the damp of a dismal London in the autumn rain.

‘There is to be a hunting lodge too. You love hunting,’ Craven reminded her. He beckoned Winde forwards. The young captain unfolded a set of papers, spreading them across the walnut table, moving aside the book Elizabeth had been reading.

‘Ashdown Park,’ Craven said. ‘It is set in the best hunting country. It will be built from chalk, white like your mother’s palace at Greenwich, your Majesty.’

‘It looks top heavy,’ Elizabeth said staring at the drawing of a tall, square house with four floors and a roof terrace. On the top was a dainty looking cupola with a very big gold ball. How like Craven to crown his plans in gold.

‘It is pretty,’ she said quickly, seeing Winde flush red. ‘Like a dolls’ house.’

‘It is the latest style, your Majesty.’ Gerbier had pushed the younger man aside and was pointing enthusiastically to the plan. ‘The continental influences … See, we have pediments and a balustrade and the hipped roof—’

‘Like the Wassenaer Hof,’ Elizabeth said, and felt a prick of nostalgia. She smiled at Winde. ‘I like it. I shall look forward to seeing how your plans progress, captain. Sir Balthasar.’

It was a dismissal. Both architects looked disappointed. Did they expect her to talk about stone and mortar,
architraves and quoins? But Craven had not noticed her lassitude. He was still enthused.

‘Perhaps in the spring we could pay a visit,’ he said, ‘and see how the building work progresses. They have opened the quarry already, and are taking sarsen stone too, for the foundations, from an old fort across the fields …’

Elizabeth was not listening. Spring seemed far away. She liked London. She did not want to be immured in the country, where nothing happened. She had had forty years of living an empty life. If she moved to Berkshire everyone would forget her, whereas here she was celebrated and courted and it was very fine.

‘In the spring,’ she said. ‘Yes, let us go. Of course.’ And she knew she would not.