The Forgotten Sister

by Nicola Cornick

  She started to gather up the box and put all the bits and pieces back. Perhaps she’d moved it over to the bed and had simply forgotten. She was so tired and her head still hurt. Then she noticed. The stone angel, the one she had accidentally taken from Oakhangar Hall on Amelia and Dudley’s wedding day, which she had shoved into the bottom section of the box years ago and forgotten, was not there.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Johnny.

  The closed door, the lights extinguished… She hadn’t been imagining things. Johnny had been in here and since he had not bothered to cover his tracks, he obviously did not mind her knowing it.

  She had no idea why Johnny had taken the stone angel; she didn’t even know how he had come to realise she had it in her possession. The only thing that seemed clear was that he had planned it all. The thought hurt her. She’d thought that Johnny liked her. She’d felt empathy for him because she had seen something of her own situation in his and now it felt as though he had lied to her and screwed her over. Worse, though, was the fear of what he had really been feeling and thinking. Johnny was obviously even more disturbed and unbalanced than she had feared. He needed help. She hoped desperately that he was home and safe.

  She flopped down on the bed in the middle of the sprawl of clothes and half-filled bags. What a mess. Johnny had stolen from her something she should have given back years ago. Somehow, he had known she had the stone angel, and where to find it. And why had he then asked her to go down to the embankment with him to look at the remains of Baynard’s Castle? She had thought at the time that it was odd but now she wondered whether in fact it had been random or if it was all part of a plan. She had touched the stone, she had seen the vision, and Johnny had gone, leaving her sick and alone… None of it made any sense to her but the more she thought about it the more disturbing it became.

  Scrubbing her palms over her eyes, she blinked and sat up. It was then that she saw the notebook, or a corner of it, poking out from beneath the end of the bed. She leaned over the edge and snatched it up. It was a small dark green rectangle, lined inside, the pages ruffled as though well used and with a thin darker green ribbon sticking out of the bottom. Lizzie opened it. It was full of endless notes, diagrams and drawings, sprawling charts that looked like family trees, dates with more scribbles written over the top, crossings out and different colours, chaotic and rambling.

  She had never seen Johnny’s writing but she knew this must be his. She wondered whether he had dropped it, or left it on purpose for her to find. She wondered if he was messing with her mind. Was this payback for Amelia? Suddenly she didn’t know anything anymore.

  Lizzie took a deep breath. The notebook might be able to tell her something if she was willing to use her gift. It might give a clue to Johnny’s feelings when he wrote in it and that in turn might help work out where he was and what was going on.

  She felt a ripple of apprehension at what might happen if she employed the psychometry but Johnny – and Arthur – were more important than her fears. Very deliberately she pressed one palm to the cover of the book, the palm that so long ago had been cut by the shards of glass when the crystal smashed. She kept her mind light and empty; open to images, thoughts and emotions. She felt the cool smoothness of the paper against her fingers, the slight creases and the rough edges of the pages. She waited.

  The images, when they came, were overpowering. Lizzie felt Johnny’s emotions like a blow to her stomach. It was such a complicated mixture, his eagerness and determination, desperation and terror, all connected in some way to the notes he had made in the book. She could sense that there was something that Johnny wanted so badly that it literally made him feel sick with longing and fear, and yet the desire for it drove him onward.

  The sensations shifted and Lizzie saw her own past then, saw the gazing ball and the carved stone angel in the hall at Oakhangar on the day of the wedding. She saw the moment she touched the angel’s wing and the crystal ball exploded into shards. The images were like a film running through her head on a loop. And then she saw something else: six-year-old Johnny on the staircase at Oakhangar as he peered through the bannisters, watching her.

  She came back to herself, and the flat was warm and bright with lamplight yet the shudders still racked her. The notebook had slid unnoticed from her lap and was lying on the bedcover once again, the pages fanned out. Lizzie stared at it, trying to make sense of the images she had witnessed and the feelings she had experienced. It seemed clear that Johnny had seen what had happened that day. He’d seen her touch the stone angel and he’d seen the crystal ball shatter. Perhaps he’d also witnessed someone putting the stone angel in her bag later in the general fuss and confusion, and that was how he had known she had it. He’d asked her about it to get her version of the story and perhaps to see if she would own up to having it.

  What she couldn’t understand was how the stone angel connected to the emotions she had experienced in the vision, Johnny’s emotions. The sense of desperation and longing had been so acute. She could not begin to unravel them. Perhaps the clues to that lay in the book itself but she didn’t want to touch it again just yet. She felt completely exhausted, as though the psychometry had drained her of all energy.

  She wished, suddenly and fiercely, that she could talk to Arthur. She reached for her phone and called up his number. Then she stopped, cancelling the call. It had been a totally instinctive reaction but she realised how stupid and potentially dangerous it would be. She barely knew Arthur, no matter the strange connection there was between them. After the police had interviewed her about Amelia’s death, the lawyers had told her to have nothing to do with the Robsart family at all. She’d already broken that commitment several times. Ringing Arthur up and pouring out a weird story about how his brother had been to see her, stolen an ornament that wasn’t hers in the first place and had then vanished was asking for trouble.

  She walked over to the window. The view of the river was different from here; she could see the Shard and the News Building on the southern bank, and Blackfriars Bridge lit up in pink and gold above the inky black water. Often the view over London excited her, sometimes it soothed her, but tonight she felt impossibly restless and hemmed in.

  Her phone rang in her hand. She did not need to look at the screen to see the caller ID. She instinctively knew exactly who it was.

  ‘You wanted to talk to me,’ Arthur said, without preamble.

  ‘Yes.’ Lizzie took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I did.’

  Chapter 14

  Amy: Baynard’s Castle, London, Spring 1557

  I first saw the ghost boy on the day I had the news that my mother had died. She had been living at Stansfield Manor still, and had been ailing for a while. When he had died, my father had left the manor to her for her lifetime with the stipulation that it would pass to me on her death along with a number of his other estates. I was his heir; he had left nothing to Arthur, yet it was Arthur who had continued to care for my mother in her sickness and it was Arthur whose writing I recognised now on the letter.

  I remember everything about that day so clearly. It was very early spring still with more than an edge of winter. The first leaves were starting to tinge the trees with green but the winds were cold. We were at Baynard’s Castle, one of Queen Mary’s favourite palaces. Robert was once more a courtier but our lives had changed out of all recognition. Gone were the estates, the grand style of living, the power, the royal favour. Robert had his freedom but precious little else. The Queen had no fondness for him. How could she, when he had been the man sent to take her captive only five years before? In her eyes he was a traitor and never to be trusted.

  Mary’s spies watched us constantly. The Queen was no fool; men spoke disparagingly of her blind stubbornness, that she baulked like a donkey when thwarted, but she knew her false friends and she knew Robert’s loyalty lay with her sister Elizabeth and not with her. No, it was her husband Philip, the Spanish King, who had taken Robert into his retinue a
nd sometimes I thought he had done it deliberately to spite Queen Mary. He had no affection for her though she mooned after him like a young lovestruck maid. Philip disliked her and he hated England and he showed it in many small and petty ways. One of the tools he used to taunt her was his friendship with Robert.

  Life at court was expensive, especially in the retinue of Philip of Spain. Robert’s brother had made over to him an estate in Hales Owen, somewhere in Worcestershire, in order to give him an income, but one small plot of land was nothing to a man who had once held so many manors. We never went there though Robert ran it dry.

  ‘Ambrose has so much,’ Robert grumbled one night, ‘and I so little. He could give me more and it would not harm him.’

  I could have told him that more would never be enough for him but I held my peace. Robert did not tell me things in order to gain my opinion. He had no interest in my views. Something had broken between us that day in the Tower of London, a trust, a loyalty. Or perhaps it had only ever existed in my imagination or my dreams. I did not know. What I did know was that whatever emotion held Robert and I together, it was a shallow thing, a shadow of the feeling he had for the Lady Elizabeth. We were wed and so my fortunes were tied to his but there was nothing else to bind us. I mourned the love I believed I had once had for him now it was gone.

  On that spring morning, Robert, King Philip, a number of the other Spanish gentlemen and a few of the English were down in the tiltyard, practising the joust. With Arthur’s letter clutched to my chest I made my way down there, pushing through the crowds of pages and esquires, the throng who would turn out to see the King and his courtiers at play, hoping for a word or a favour. There were few women there. I hated the coarseness of the tiltyard, the rough masculinity. It was in the air, the pounding of the horses’ hooves, the smell of hay and sweat and dung. It was in the shouts of the men. It felt dangerous.

  Outside the sunlight blinded me and I realised that it was because my eyes were full of tears. There was a pressure in my chest with the weight of my grief. It was so long since I had seen my mother and although we had written frequently the sudden realisation that I would never see her again hit me hard. My half-siblings and I were scattered, Arthur in Norfolk, John at college in Oxford and Anna in Cambridgeshire where her husband was rebuilding a grand house in place of the one that Robert had destroyed. The Queen had compensated them well for their loyalty to her and although I had seen both Anna and Antony in London when he came to sit in the parliament, we were not reconciled. I knew she would be unlikely to write to me to share our grief over Mother’s death and that hurt to my soul.

  A raucous cheer went around the tiltyard when some of the men saw me. Robert had just finished a bout against Philip himself, which he had cleverly let Philip win, but not too easily. He slid down from the horse, patted its sweating neck, and strode across to where I was standing. He was frowning and for one horrible moment I thought he was about to upbraid me for seeking him out, here in front of all the men. But I had misread him. Instead he swept me up into his arms, the letter crumpled between us, and kissed me hard. I stiffened to pull away but he was already releasing me, his point made, his virility emphasised by the joust and the embrace of a pretty girl. I suppose I should have been glad that the pretty girl had been me.

  ‘My mother is dead,’ I blurted out, too overset for any finesse.

  Robert was still breathing hard and I could see the excitement of the joust was still in his blood. He was very still for a moment and I wondered if he had not heard me, but then his eyes blazed and he reached for me, and with horror I thought he was about to kiss me again.

  ‘Robert!’ I said. I knew exactly what he had been thinking and it was not of my mother’s death or my grief; it was of my father’s will and the money and the estates, and the fact that we could sell the land now and not be for ever in debt or pinching and scraping to survive. I saw it all in his face before he said a word; he had spent my inheritance before he even offered his condolences.

  Then the light went out of his face and he stepped back.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ he said formally. ‘You will wish to be chief mourner, of course. I will ask Hyde to arrange your journey to Norfolk.’

  William Hyde was the weasel who managed our financial affairs, one of a group of unsavoury characters whom Robert seemed to collect around him like maggots to a carcass. I did not know the work they did for him and I took care not to enquire too closely but when there was a tavern brawl or a knifing down a dark alley it seemed one or other of them were often involved.

  I stared at him. ‘Will you not accompany me?’

  ‘I am to go abroad with His Majesty very soon.’ Robert glanced across to where Philip was talking to one of his knights. ‘It is all agreed. There is talk of war with France.’

  ‘You did not tell me.’ Grief was making me stupid and slow.

  He did not look at me. ‘It was only recently that His Majesty discussed it with me.’

  I knew this meant that everyone else was aware of the plan and that as usual I had not been deemed important enough for Robert to tell me. I felt a huge surge of anger; I was aware that I was making a public scene, that men were watching us out of the corners of their eyes and some more openly, and that Philip himself was tapping his foot impatiently as he waited for Robert to rejoin him. The King had no time for awkward, clinging wives. He was cruel enough to his own and did not tolerate anyone else’s.

  ‘And what will become of me?’ I said. My voice shook. ‘Where am I to go whilst you play at heroics with His Majesty?’

  ‘I have made provision for you,’ Robert said. ‘You will be staying at a fine manor in the country, with goodly company.’

  This evidence that he had planned my future as well as his own without any word to me knocked the breath out of me for a moment.

  ‘I am to be sent away?’ My voice rose dangerously now. ‘You must reconsider now that I have come into my inheritance. I shall go to Norfolk and take up the running of the estates.’ Suddenly I wanted it more than anything else in the world, wanted a place to belong, a path of my own to follow that was not tied to Robert. Arthur would be there; he would help me. I could learn all about the land and the seasons, the animals, the crops, the estate business. The idea intoxicated me.

  Yet Robert was shaking his head.

  ‘That would not be seemly, wife,’ he said. ‘We have people to run our affairs for us, men whose knowledge of business is far superior to your own.’ He looked down his aristocratic nose at me, the provincial daughter of a gentleman whose lineage went back a great deal further than his own.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘You will allow me no say in the running of my estates. Have you already borrowed against them to fund your extravagances?’ My contemptuous gesture encompassed the tiltyard, the preening peacocks of the court. ‘I see you have. My land is already as good as sold and the money already spent—’

  His hand closed warningly about my arm. ‘Amy. We’ll speak of this later.’

  ‘Very well.’ I took a deep breath and grasped for the ragged edges of composure. ‘Just tell me where you had planned for me to go.’

  ‘Later,’ Robert said, with a swift glance, a nod over his shoulder to the King.

  ‘Now,’ I said.

  He grimaced but he conceded this one, small point. ‘William Hyde has generously offered his manor at Throcking in Hertfordshire,’ he said. ‘It is conveniently placed between London and Norfolk—’

  It was, I realised, also very conveniently placed for Hatfield Palace, where the Lady Elizabeth currently languished in exile from her sister’s court. If Robert were to visit her, I would be the pretext.

  ‘Convenient indeed,’ I said cuttingly, ‘to be able to visit your wife and your mistress within easy distance of each other.’

  Fury darkened his eyes, violent and terrifying. His previous irritation had been no more than a shadow of this. ‘Do not speak thus of the Lady Elizabeth,’ he said, very softly.

 
I knew it was indiscreet of me but by now I was drunk with grief and anger, all the more so because I knew that his concern for her sprang from a love I simply could not understand. All the misery and neglect I had fostered within me unknowingly over the past years seemed to well up.

  ‘Why should I not?’ I was shaking. ‘I know your regard for her far outweighs your love for me.’

  ‘Amy,’ Robert said again and this time his tone shrivelled what was left of me. His hand tightened on my arm. I winced at the pain. ‘You are distraught,’ he said smoothly. ‘You there—’ A scurrying servant slid over to us. ‘Take my lady back to her chambers. She is in grief.’ His lips touched my cheek in a kiss as cold as snow. ‘I will come to you soon—’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ I wrenched myself away from his grip and ran, slipping on the cobbles and the manure, dirty water splashing my skirts from the gutters. I blundered into the palace, momentarily blinded by the darkness after the bright light outside, aware of nothing but the gaping faces around me as I clutched Arthur’s letter in one shaking hand. The sobs tore at my chest and I was obliged to stop to steady myself, one hand against the wall, my breath coming in pants.

  ‘Mistress… Dudley, is it not?’

  I dashed the tears from my eyes. There was an unnatural stillness around me all of a sudden. The crowds had fallen back, waiting.

  It was the Queen. I had not seen her approach. She peered at me, head poking forward like a myopic tortoise.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Your Majesty.’ I dropped the best curtsey I could manage under the circumstances, wiping my eyes and, surreptitiously, my nose. ‘Please excuse me. I did not realise…’