And what did come with the job? Long hours and a sense of being close to the beating heart of government. The happiness of knowing that Peter depended on her, and the pleasure that came from the time she spent with his son. It was the only aspect of her employer’s character that Greta couldn’t relate to. He neglected the boy, and Greta couldn’t understand it. At first she tried to get Peter to change, but the subject of Thomas always made him irrationally angry. He seemed to blame his son for not loving him, when he had given the boy no chance to do so. Greta soon came to realize that there was nothing she could do except give Thomas her own affection. And he warmed to her in response. They spent hours walking together on the beach at Flyte exchanging stories, while they held themselves steady against the rush of the wind off the sea. Thomas appealed to Greta’s imaginative, dreaming side — the side that Peter could never know.
In the early days, long before the murder, Greta had often wondered at her growing attachment to Thomas. Eventually she had come to the conclusion that it must be, in part at least, a long-delayed reaction to her own infertility. Certainly there was a sense in which she thought of Thomas as the child she would never have. She cared for him without showing it too much, because she knew what the boy’s mother thought of her. Lady Anne resented anyone becoming close to her son, especially a factory worker’s daughter from an industrial town up north.
Then suddenly Anne was murdered and everything changed. Greta could never forget Thomas’s searing hatred when she had rushed to comfort him in Christy Marsh’s cottage. She had somehow gotten through that terrible drive up from London with Peter getting drunk on whisky in the passenger seat, but then Thomas had thrown his mug at her and screamed for her to get out. He’d been like someone possessed.
She had gotten out. Left on the train and stayed away just like they’d all told her to. She’d been questioned and searched and questioned again by that pig Hearns until she couldn’t bear it anymore, until finally she’d had enough. On the first weekend in October she drove down to Carstow School to see Thomas.
Perhaps it would have been better if Greta had planned out what she was going to say. But the only way she could get to Carstow was on a wave of emotion, so she drove fast down the motorway and opened the windows all the way. The big wind blew away all her mixed-up thoughts like cobwebs.
She’d dressed carefully. After much debate, she’d finally selected the dark gray business suit that she’d worn on that magical spring day in London when they’d had the picnic together in the park. She wanted to remind Thomas that there was another time before his mother’s murder, when she’d meant something very different to him.
Greta didn’t tell the woman in the school office her name, because she thought that Thomas wouldn’t come if she did. She just said that she was a friend of the family, and then sat down on a hard-backed chair to wait.
She felt hot in the suit and wished that she’d worn something more comfortable. Beads of sweat trickled down her arms, but she kept her jacket on and drummed her fingers on a school prospectus. The minutes ticked by, and Greta felt stifled by the waiting room. She allowed her head to drop and lost all sense of time and place. She looked up bemused when someone said her name. Thomas stood facing her in the doorway.
For a moment she didn’t recognize him. He was thinner than when she had last seen him, and the school had given him a military haircut. It allowed Greta to see for the first time that Thomas had inherited the set of his father’s head. She recognized Peter’s rigid determination in his son’s forehead, and for a moment she quailed.
At least Thomas didn’t turn and leave. He didn’t go forward or back. Greta couldn’t read his expression. He seemed resolute and vulnerable all at the same time, and she was stirred by a great longing for the past. She stood up, putting her arms out toward him, and there were tears in her eyes.
The effect on Thomas was instantaneous. “Get away from me!” he screamed, putting his hands up in front of him to make a barrier.
“Thomas, don’t get upset. I only want to explain. You’ve got it all wrong. You know you have. What happened to your mother had nothing to do with me.”
Greta spoke in a rush as if she knew that he would only give her a little time.
“You liar!” he shouted. “You sent them. I know you did.”
“No, I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, Tom. I care about you, can’t you see that?”
Greta waited a moment for an answer, but there was none. Thomas remained hidden behind his hands.
“You need me,” she said. “You know you do.”
“I need my mother.” The words escaped from Thomas with a cry, as if they had been pulled out of him by brute force.
“Of course you do. But she’s not here anymore, Tom. I am. I’m here for you.”
Greta moved toward Thomas again and took hold of his hands, pulling him close just like she had done on that afternoon in his mother’s bedroom a year before. And perhaps he would have given in if they hadn’t been interrupted. But their raised voices had brought the school secretary to the door asking if everything was all right, and her question broke the connection between them forever.
“Get away from me!” Thomas shouted. “I’m in hell because of you. I hate you.”
The venom in his voice forced Greta back. The color drained from her cheeks, and the words dried up in her throat. When Thomas spoke again, his voice was cold and quiet. Not like she’d ever heard it before.
“I’m going to make you pay, Greta,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing at all.”
Thomas turned on his heel, leaving Greta behind. She did not try to follow.
Two weeks later he went to London with his friend Matthew Barne and found the locket in the secret drawer of his father’s desk.
Chapter 20
On that same Monday afternoon, the third day of the trial, Thomas roamed restlessly from room to room in the House of the Four Winds, unable to settle down to any occupation. He could hear the murmuring voices of Aunt Jane and the detective from Carmouth coming from behind the half-closed door of the kitchen, but he did not try to make out what they were saying. He knew that Aunt Jane would be talking about the trial down in London; she’d talked about nothing else since she’d gotten back to Flyte the previous evening until Tom didn’t want to hear any more about Greta’s fat barrister and his tricks and the jury that watched everything and said nothing. Thomas knew that he would have his turn the next day. For now he didn’t want to think about it.
He stopped his pacing and stood in the center of the wide hallway midway between the open front door and the staircase behind him. He looked out beyond the yew trees into the hot summer’s day, and suddenly it was as if there were voices all around him, snatches of conversation drifting in and out of earshot like specks of dust on the air.
Thomas recognized some of the voices or thought he did, but they were gone before he could be sure. He thought he heard his mother saying something about a dress, but it was his mother younger than he had ever known her, with an eager voice that had no awareness of responsibilities. Then there was a voice behind him that was like his mother’s but richer, talking about a horse. Thomas turned but there was nothing, only the sound of a man crying and the name Sarah wrenched from somewhere deep down inside.
The voices were above Thomas now: a man talking in clipped tones about India and another voice, an older woman’s cursing. Her words came from very far away, and Thomas could barely make them out.
He stood rooted to the spot, unable to tell if the voices were real. They had been calling him to climb the stairs, which he had avoided for so many months. At the top he could see the bookcase where he had hidden, but he couldn’t get to it without crossing the place where his mother had died. They had taken up the carpet and laid a new one since, but he knew where the bloodstains had been. He’d had to step over her when he ran to Christy Marsh’s cottage.
Thomas closed his eyes
and realized his mistake. The voices hadn’t been calling to him from the hiding place at all. They were coming from somewhere else. Slowly he began to climb the stairs and the voices came down to meet him. The older woman and the military man were arguing about a present.
“It’s mine, I tell you. It’s mine. To do with as I please.”
“Stephen, Stephen,” came the woman’s querulous voice, but again it faded away on the air, replaced by the voice of his mother speaking to him in the car on the way to London the previous year when he had struggled to hear her above the sound of the wind: “I do so wonder what she was like, Tom. I do so wonder what she was like.”
Curiously Thomas felt his fear and anxiety leave him as he climbed the stairs. He had not been this way in over a year, but his mother’s death was far from his mind as he passed over the place where she had died. He knew where he was going now and turned toward the bedroom without a glance at the great bookcase on his left. He wondered for a moment if Aunt Jane would have locked the door, but the handle turned easily and he went in.
Thomas knew that some of the paintings in the bedroom had been damaged by the men when they ransacked the room looking for the safe, but the portrait of his grandmother had been restored to its former position over the fireplace. She was as he remembered her. Flashing eyes and a flashing smile, a face full of energy and freedom, although there was love in her dark eyes too. Thomas stared up at her, this Lady Sarah Sackville whom he had never known. He felt an overwhelming sense that the portrait had something to tell him, but he could not fathom what it was. His grandmother looked out on a world he knew nothing about. Artist and sitter were long dead, leaving behind this picture, a relic to gather dust.
It was just as Thomas turned away toward the windows that he realized what it was he had been looking for in the portrait. It was the ring on his grandmother’s finger glowing midnight blue, just like it had on that day in the car when his mother had worn it and he had shivered in the sunlight.
Her words came back to him as if they had been spoken only yesterday: “She always wore it. Her father gave it to her when she was twenty-one. There’s that old story I told you about it. About where it came from in India. I’ve got a letter about it somewhere. I’ll have to dig it out…”
As far as Thomas knew, his mother had never dug it out. London and Macbeth and Greta had driven it out of their minds, and then had come the murder. Lady Anne was gone as far away as her mother now. Both dead at forty, leaving only whispers behind.
Thomas looked about him. His mother’s clothes still hung in the dressing room, and it came to him that nobody would have gone through her little walnut wood desk in the corner of the bedroom if the killers had not done so. Sir Peter had stayed away from the House of the Four Winds since the funeral, and Aunt Jane had a horror of anything involving documents.
Thomas crossed to the desk and opened it. The contents were undisturbed. He thought back to that defining moment with Matthew the previous autumn when he’d remembered his mother’s voice telling him about the secret drawer in the desk in London. He’d gone into the drawing room and opened that desk almost as an afterthought. All that time searching in the basement and on the computer and then upstairs in his father’s bedroom before he stopped on the first-floor landing and remembered his mother calling him: “Come here, Tom… There’s something I want to show you… It’s a secret.”
He’d pressed the knobs on the bottom drawers gently just like she’d shown him until the recess opened and he found the locket. He remembered it all: holding it up, opening it, showing it to Matthew, moving across the room to the doorway and seeing Greta on the stairs with that crazy look in her eyes.
Thomas shook himself, banishing Greta and the locket from his mind. They could wait until tomorrow. Greta’s fat barrister would no doubt have plenty of questions to ask about his visit to the house in London.
Thomas returned his attention to his mother’s desk. There was no secret drawer here. Just letters and papers neatly filed into the pigeonholes or tied up in rubber bands. On the top was an unfinished letter to a garden center in London ordering a rose with an extravagant Latin name. It was dated May 31, 1999: the day of his mother’s death.
Thomas hardly knew what he was looking for as he unpacked the papers onto the floor so that he soon became a human island in a sea of documents. In the end he found it in the bottom drawer: the letter folded round a small black jewelry box. Thomas knew what would be inside the box before he opened it, but the perfection of the dark blue stone still shocked him. The sapphire glowed in his hand, drawing his eyes down into its dark mysterious interior like a magnet.
Why had his mother not put it in the safe with her other jewels? Perhaps the paper might provide a clue. It was folded four ways, and Thomas opened it carefully. The once white vellum writing paper had turned yellow with age, and for a moment Thomas was filled with a superstitious fear that the black ink would disappear in the sunlight or that the paper would crumble to dust in his hands.
It was indeed a letter, written under the heading “The House of the Four Winds” and dated November 28, 1946. It was signed “Daddy,” but Thomas soon realized that the writer was his great-grandfather, Sir Stephen Sackville, whose portrait hung downstairs in the drawing room. Sir Stephen had lived the longest of the modern Sackvilles, and the portrait had been painted in honor of his eightieth birthday. He would have been fifty-eight when he wrote this letter to his daughter, and she would have just turned twenty-one.
My dear Sarah,
You asked me to tell you a little about the Sultan’s sapphire, as the jewel that I gave you for your twenty-first birthday is called. It does indeed come from India, where it was owned by a nawab in one of the wild northwestern provinces near the Afghan frontier. I know nothing of the Sultan that once owned the jewel and nothing of how the nawab came into possession of it. The sapphire was, however, famous throughout northern India for its perfection, and I had long been curious to see it when chance brought me into contact with its owner. The dark glow of the jewel is in my opinion quite extraordinary. I have never seen one the like of it, and you know me for a keen collector of precious stones.
Thomas looked up from the dry words to the portrait of his young grandmother with the sapphire on her finger put there by her father. Wearing the ring had made Thomas’s mother feel close to her own mother, but the jewel he held in his hand now felt foreign and dangerous. This heirloom passing down the generations had brought no luck to the Sackvilles who had owned it.
Thomas turned back to the letter:
I had been posted to the northwestern frontier and found clear evidence that the local nawab had been conspiring against the British. There was no alternative but to act quickly and decisively, and I led a small troop against the nawab’s palace, as he called his rather ugly fortified house. He was mortally wounded in the short skirmish that followed and I had in fact taken him to be dead when I entered his quarters and found the famous sapphire. The old rascal had, however, more life in him than I thought and followed me into his private rooms. He had an ornamental dagger in his hand, but I am relieved to say that he lacked the strength to throw it very far. The effort was too much for him and he died soon after, although not before he had seen the sapphire in my hand. His last words were to curse me and all my descendants, but I paid this no attention. Some might say that I should not have taken the jewel, but I have always thought that I had a right to it, having risked my life to deal with its owner’s treachery.
I also draw a sense of justification from the four years of hard service to my King and country in the trenches of Flanders that followed my return from India. I certainly have no doubt that the Sultan’s sapphire sits better on your beautiful finger, my dear, than it would in the back of some dusty case in the British Museum.
You should therefore feel no qualms that the jewel is rightfully mine to give and yours to receive and the sapphire’s romantic history should make you value it more and not less.
/> I asked Cartier in London to set the jewel in a golden ring, and I hope that you will agree that they have made excellent work of the commission. Our family’s name is engraved on the inside, and I hope that the ring will become a Sackville heirloom.
Thomas read the letter two more times, and each time he was more struck by the self-justifying tone of the writer. The document was not the romantic history that it purported to be but rather an unsuccessful attempt to defend actions that clearly still troubled his great-grandfather more than thirty years after they had occurred. It was surely significant that Sir Stephen let slip in the first paragraph that he already knew about the sapphire before he met its owner. Was the nawab’s alleged treachery just a pretext for murdering him and stealing the jewel? If so, setting the sapphire in a golden ring did not change what had happened.
Thomas walked over to one of the high windows that looked down toward the sea and held the ring up to the sunlight. Sure enough, SACKVILLE was engraved on the inside in flowing script, but the engraving did not make the sapphire the property of Thomas’s family. Murder and theft did not create property rights, whatever old Sir Stephen might say to the contrary.
The killing of the nawab on the other side of the world almost a hundred years before and his mother’s death on the landing outside became connected in Thomas’s mind. He felt as if there were a purpose behind his discovery of the jewel and the letter. It was as if they had been left there by his mother for him to find. The great blue stone was a test. He saw that now. It was for him to choose what to do with it.
Thomas tried to imagine the scene described by his great-grandfather in his letter. For some reason he thought of the nawab as a handsome young man dressed in a crimson tasseled jacket and white baggy trousers, perhaps because that was what the sultan of Baghdad was wearing in Thomas’s old copy of The Arabian Nights, given to him by his mother for his seventh birthday. The nawab had dark, almost olive skin, and his hair was concealed under the folds of a turban. There was a yellow canary in the palace that sang while the nawab ate Indian delicacies served by girls with long black hair and high breasts. Outside there was a fountain of stone dolphins where foaming silver water splashed down onto the marble paving stones of the nawab’s courtyard.
Final Witness Page 22
