The Forgotten Sister

by Nicola Cornick

  ‘Don’t go back,’ Avery said, and suddenly her voice was devoid of all warmth. ‘It’s not a good place, Elizabeth. There’s something wrong with it. My ancestor built it from the stones of Cumnor Place.’ She spread her hands expressively. ‘What can you expect if you build the memory of a tragedy into the very fabric of a new building? Nothing happy will come of it, that’s for sure. And so it proved, with Amelia falling down the stairs…’ She shuddered. ‘Just like poor Amy Robsart.’

  Lizzie felt the light brush of something along her spine like feathers, or cobwebs. She shivered convulsively. ‘Who?’ she said.

  ‘Amy Robsart,’ Avery repeated. ‘She was the wife of Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester. He was the favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Such a demeaning word, “favourite”,’ she added. ‘It makes him sound like a gigolo. Still,’ she shrugged, ‘women have been demeaned as royal mistresses for centuries and I don’t suppose we should feel sorry for Robert. He did very well for himself.’

  ‘You said Amy was called Robsart,’ Lizzie said. ‘Was Amelia descended from her?’

  ‘Amy had no children,’ Avery said, ‘but yes, it’s the same family as Arthur and Amelia. They originated in Norfolk in the fifteenth century, I think, but Amy lived – and died – at Cumnor in Oxfordshire, which is only a few miles from here. So is Oakhangar Hall, of course. I did wonder…’ She looked troubled for a moment. ‘When I heard about Amelia’s death I wondered if the curse of Oakhangar had struck again,’ she said slowly. ‘It sounds fanciful, but it has happened a number of times before and the circumstances were so similar I could not help but think on it. My son tells me I’m a silly old woman, but he is a quantity surveyor and has very little imagination.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s silly,’ Lizzie said slowly. She was thinking of her own gift of psychometry. ‘There are plenty of things that are impossible to explain rationally,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t mean we should assume they are fantasy.’

  Avery’s bright blue eyes considered her. ‘That’s very sensible, Elizabeth,’ she said, after a moment. ‘It would be arrogance to think we can explain everything away logically.’ She sighed. ‘When I first set foot in Oakhangar Hall I knew there was something wrong about it; something awry. It was all the fault of the Third Earl Basing. When Cumnor Hall fell into disrepair in the early nineteenth century, he took the stone to build his new manor at Oakhangar and to repair the church there. Not that he was particularly mean with money,’ she added, with a twinkle in her eye. ‘The Basings were extravagant to a fault, but it was a common practice in the past to reuse the materials from old buildings. All those monasteries that Henry VIII destroyed! There are pieces of them in buildings all over the country, and bits of Roman villas too. We’re a magpie breed; we take what we want but sometimes, perhaps, we take more than we imagine.’

  ‘You mean that the stone retains a memory of the past in some way,’ Lizzie said hesitantly, ‘that certain buildings can contain the memory of events that had happened hundreds of years ago?’

  Avery’s gaze was very direct and very clear. ‘I think that’s true,’ she said quietly. ‘A physical place can hold an emotional memory.’

  Lizzie wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. It was such a close match with psychometry; reading objects that had emotional memories attached was akin to reading the history of a place through its fabric. Perhaps she could do that too. She hadn’t made a habit of going around touching the walls of old buildings… A flash of memory came to her and she saw herself standing on the Thames Embankment, touching the blue plaque that marked the site of Baynard’s Castle. The vision she had seen then had not been an emotional memory, though. With the heat of the sun and the scent of the river, it had felt as though she was actually there.

  She blinked, coming back to the sunlit kitchen and the bright chirruping of the birds outside. Avery was watching her and it felt as though she saw so much, knew so much, of what Lizzie was only starting to work out…

  ‘Be careful, Elizabeth dear,’ she said. ‘I know you are curious, but there has been enough hurt.’

  She reached for her basket and unpacked more milk, butter, eggs, cheese, ham, lemonade, a loaf of granary bread, a sausage roll and three other brown paper bags. Her busy movements and averted gaze indicated that the subject had been very firmly changed. ‘These are just a few things to keep you going,’ she said. ‘Your grandmother would have wanted me to look after you, I’m sure.’ She passed Lizzie a copy of a magazine. ‘This is the local paper. It’s got a list of all the events and societies in Burford at the back so you can join in. This is a community,’ she added. ‘You’re one of us now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lizzie said, overwhelmed. She turned to the back of the magazine. A bewildering array of activities met her eye: badminton, crafting, horticulture, knitting, the soup and pudding club… There was yoga, but probably not the type of class she was accustomed to doing at the World’s End Studio in Camden, which was generally accepted to be London’s premier urban yoga experience.

  ‘Perhaps I could try something new,’ she said weakly. ‘The art society? I’m very poor at drawing.’

  ‘What an excellent idea.’ Avery smiled warmly. ‘Everyone wants to be a celebrity these days so it’s refreshing to meet a celebrity who wants to learn a new skill.’

  ‘I expect there’s a reality TV show already showing celebrities doing that,’ Lizzie said. ‘And if there isn’t, there soon will be.’

  Avery kissed her cheek, gathered up the empty basket and gave her a little wave. ‘I’ll see you soon, my dear. Just call around if you need me.’

  The air seemed to buzz and quiver before settling after her departure. In the sudden silence, Lizzie’s phone rang. When she saw that it was Bill her heart sank.

  ‘Lizzie! Where the hell are you?’ Bill sounded exactly the same, as though they had never had an almighty row, as though she hadn’t ever been arrested, as though she hadn’t dismissed the lawyers he’d sent. ‘You disappeared from London before I could get hold of you.’

  ‘Hello, Bill,’ Lizzie said. ‘I’m so glad you called. I wanted to ask you—’

  ‘Look, Lizzie, I’ve had The James Gordon Show on,’ Bill interrupted. ‘They want you for an interview tonight. It’s a special feature on public shaming; from golden girl to enemy of the people sort of thing. There’ll be you, and that politician who faked his expenses and was sent to jail, and a kid who was a chess champion until they worked out he’d been cheating—’

  ‘Bill.’ It was Lizzie’s turn to interrupt. ‘No. Just – no.’

  ‘I know it’s short notice,’ Bill continued, ‘and that you won’t be able to talk about the legal case since it’s ongoing, but you can drop a few hints, I’ll get the lawyers to brief you. ‘I’ll send a car if you tell me where you are. And the producers of Famous and Frozen have been in touch. You know, it’s the show where celebrities are abandoned in the Arctic for weeks with just a tent and a few tins of food. They thought the public might like to see you tackling something like that as a kind of punishment—’

  ‘Again,’ Lizzie said. ‘No. Thank you. But as you’re on the line, can I ask you why you let The High get so rundown when I was paying for a caretaker and a gardener?’

  ‘Where?’ Bill said. ‘Look, where are you?’

  ‘At The High,’ Lizzie said, ‘hence the question.’

  ‘Right,’ Bill said, ‘right.’ He sounded slightly more cautious now as though the penny had finally dropped. ‘You’re in Burford. Of course – that’s where you said you’d go. I didn’t really think you’d do it.’

  ‘Clearly not,’ Lizzie said warmly. ‘Whilst Jules helps me sort out this legal mess I’m going to be writing some music, just like I mentioned. Or I will be when I get the house cleaned and the garden cleared and the piano tuned and all the other stuff done that I was paying you to sort out.’

  ‘Look, Lizzie,’ Bill said, ‘there was no point throwing money away on that place. I… ah… I invested it
for you instead. I’ll give Francis a call; ask him to send you the financial details…’

  Bill, Lizzie thought, had never been so keen to involve her in discussions with her accountants before.

  ‘Please do call Francis,’ she said. ‘Tell him I’m moving my business to Carpenter’s. Oh, and Bill – you’re fired.’ She pressed the button to end the call. It felt good. She felt free.

  Humming a few lines of music under her breath, she went into the library. The heating had not yet started to make an impression on the room. It felt cold and unwelcoming and the shelves were thick with dust. In her grandparents’ time the books had all been catalogued and sorted by topic like in a proper library system. Her grandfather had been a keen antiquarian collector with a particular interest in local history. Lizzie’s father had let all of that go; in fact, she thought he had probably only kept such an esoteric collection of books to give the impression that he was cultured. Plenty of the stacks had drinks stains and cigarette burns on them.

  She found what was left of the history section. Roman Britain mingled on the shelves with the history of the Habsburg Empire and Fatimid Egypt. She searched in vain for something on the Tudor period, resolving to go down to the Burford library as soon as she could to find a book about Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley. Then she saw a slim volume with a worn red leather cover and rough-cut pages. On the spine, in gold lettering it read: An Historical Account of Cumnor – with some particulars of the Death of the Countess of Leicester by Hugh Usher Tighe. The date at the bottom was 1821. Lizzie wrapped her grandfather’s big thick jumper more closely around her and settled down in the leather armchair to read.

  Hugh Tighe, she quickly discovered, had been a huge fan of Sir Walter Scott. Scott had based his book Kenilworth on the story of Amy Robsart and this had heavily influenced Tighe who saw Amy as a tragic and ill-treated heroine, the victim of a ruthless and ambitious man. For all Lizzie knew this could well have been the case but she thought Amy sounded rather feeble. Whilst Robert Dudley was living it up at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, Amy pined away, neglected and alone in the Oxfordshire countryside. Eventually Robert, keen to be rid of his inconvenient wife in order to marry the Queen, had allegedly arranged Amy’s murder. ‘The corpse of their wretched victim was precipitated down a flight of stone stairs, which led from the long gallery to the hall below, under the hope that it might give a plausibility to a tale by which they intended to conceal their crime,’ Lizzie read in Tighe’s lurid prose. ‘From this time the vengeance of heaven appears to have fallen, not only on the perpetrators of this atrocious murder, but also on the house in which it was committed.’

  Lizzie shivered violently. This was close to the story that Avery had told of an emotional memory being held captive in the very fabric of Cumnor Hall and subsequently transferred to Oakhangar, where the curse had repeated itself with Amelia falling down the stairs and breaking her neck in precisely the same way that Amy had. Except that Amy’s death had apparently been murder… She wondered if that was true. She wondered if Johnny knew the story and if so, what he had thought of it. Parallels, echoes of history, memories captured in stone…

  She could hear Johnny’s voice: ‘This was once the site of a royal palace, you know. It was called Baynard’s Castle. The foundations are right under this building.’ Down by the river he had caught her hand and pulled her over to the wall to show her the plaque. When she had touched it, Johnny had been right beside her. She had seen his shadow in the vision, cutting across the sun…

  She thought about the CCTV footage and the explosion of white light. Perhaps that had been a manifestation of the psychometry that couldn’t be caught by the naked eye, in the way that spirit orbs were apparently captured on camera. She knew very little about that sort of thing but it might explain the lack of any physical evidence at the scene. Nothing, though, could explain why Johnny had been there one moment – caught in the frame – and the next, he had gone. Unless… She could see him sitting in the kitchen that night, the chocolate cup in front of him, spoon in hand, and he had asked her if she had the gift of time travel as well as the gift of psychometry. And she had laughed it off because of course time travel was a fantasy, wasn’t it?

  Johnny the fey one, the one with the telepathic gift. He had seemed so much more at ease with the psychic stuff than she was. He knew she possessed the gift of psychometry. He’d seen her read the stone angel when he had only been six years old. He’d seen her read Arthur’s mind that day at the flat. He knew she could read objects and people, and he had suggested that her gift was a great one and that she shouldn’t be afraid of it. Perhaps he had already suspected that she could connect to the memories captured in buildings as well as in objects. Perhaps he had wanted to test that theory by taking her down to the remains of Baynard’s Castle and seeing if she could call a memory from the stone. It would explain why he had asked her to go with him that night.

  The book clattered to the floor as Lizzie jumped to her feet. She didn’t notice. She walked over to the window, touching the cold, cobwebbed panes, trying to clear her mind. Johnny understood her psychic powers so much better than she knew them herself. There could be a number of explanations for that but given that he had admitted to being telepathic himself, one reason might be that he was a great deal more gifted than she was. She had assumed that his talent for telepathy worked only with Amelia – it certainly hadn’t existed with her, and Arthur had referred to it as Johnny and Amelia’s party trick. She hadn’t imagined that Johnny might have other paranormal abilities as he hadn’t mentioned them to her at all. But perhaps that had been deliberate. Perhaps he had not wanted her to know. He had told her enough so that she had thought they were kindred spirits but not so much that he would scare her.

  She saw again the picture from the Embankment. Johnny had been beside her. She had touched the stone and inadvertently called up the vision of the old palace, and then Johnny was gone. She could hear Arthur telling her that his brother had a habit of disappearing, and behind that was the memory of something that Dudley had said; something about Johnny vanishing practically in front of his eyes. She’d assumed it was a figure of speech – but perhaps it was not.

  Lizzie pressed her forehead to the glass and closed her eyes. She remembered Johnny talking about Amelia’s death, the desperation in his voice and the pain:

  ‘Millie’s death hurts like hell on Earth. I’d do anything to bring her back, anything I could.’

  When she’d picked up Johnny’s green notebook, she had felt the echo of those same emotions from him. She closed her eyes, trying to conjure once more the sense she had when she had held the notebook in her hand. She needed to speak to Arthur, needed the notebook back. All the clues would be in there, she was sure, and if she held it again, she would know.

  She bent to pick up the book about Amy Robsart. She thought about Avery telling her that there was a curse on the Robsart family that had repeated down the years for centuries, a curse that had now claimed Amelia. If Johnny wanted to break that curse would he stop at nothing to do it? Would he go back in time to try to save Amelia? Or would he need to go back further still, to a palace that had been built hundreds of years before, to find Amy Robsart and save her in order to stop the whole pattern from repeating down through time?

  Lizzie turned the idea over in her mind very carefully, half afraid that she was losing her own sanity. No one could ever believe such an irrational theory. She acknowledged it. If psychometry sounded fanciful, time travel was surely impossible, utter madness. Yet Johnny had vanished without trace; Johnny, who was psychic, who had a habit of disappearing at will, who wanted to save his sister’s life.

  Lizzie knew she was right. She sensed it.

  She also had no idea how to find Johnny and she knew she had even less chance of bringing him back.

  Chapter 20

  Amy: Melford Hall, Suffolk, May 1559

  It was a long journey from Throcking into Suffolk, further than I had gone to carry Robert’s me
ssages to the Princess Elizabeth in Hatfield, further than I had travelled alone before. I say alone, but of course I was not; I had a maid with me and a groom and I had the escort of William Hyde himself. He had little choice but to fall in with my plans, not when I had told him that I knew he was robbing my lord of sums of money considerably larger than those I stole myself.

  William had been quite unable to believe me when I had told him that if he did not accommodate my plans, I would tell Robert about his dealings. He had goggled at me as though the curtains themselves had spoken, so accustomed was he to thinking I was of no account. Although at first, he had laughed.

  ‘He will not believe you,’ he said contemptuously. ‘Sir Robert knows that I am his loyal servant.’

  ‘I have copies of the accounts, Mr Hyde,’ I said sweetly. ‘Did you think I could not read, could not count? What did you think I did with all my time here in the back of nowhere? Oh, of course, you never considered it. Well, now you know.’

  He had goggled at me some more. He had blustered. But when I asked him to apprise me of Robert’s exact whereabouts – for naturally Robert had not seen fit to tell me himself – he gave in.

  ‘Sir Robert is in Suffolk,’ he said sulkily. ‘He has business there.’

  ‘The Queen’s business?’ I asked, and saw by the way his gaze slid from mine that my guess was correct. He had gone to meet with Elizabeth in secret. This interested me, for the past six months had been full of nothing but gossip of how he was forever in her company at court. They danced together, rode together, dined together. Whilst I was left to rot in the country, they made Elizabeth’s new kingdom their playground. They made no secret of their preference for each other’s company, so whatever had taken Robert on this clandestine journey had to be very important.

  ‘You will escort me into Suffolk then,’ I said. ‘For I too have business with him.’