by Kate Morton
The room was dark; the lantern cast only the dimmest light across its threshold. In the centre Eliza could make out a bed of shiny black wood, four posts that looked to have upon them engraved figures climbing towards the ceiling.
On the bedside table was a tray with a piece of bread and a bowl of soup from which steam no longer rose. No meat to be seen, but beggars couldn’t be choosers as Mother used to say. Eliza fell upon the bowl and spooned the soup into her mouth so fast she swallowed a set of hiccups. She ran the bread around the bowl so as not to waste a smear.
Mrs Hopkins, who had been watching with a somewhat stunned expression, made no comment. She continued stiffly, set down the lantern on a wooden box at the foot of the bed and pulled back the heavy blanket. ‘There you are then, climb in. I haven’t all night.’
Eliza did as she was told. The sheets were cold and damp beneath her legs, sensitive after their fierce scouring.
Mrs Hopkins took the lantern and Eliza heard the door close behind her. And then she was alone in the pitch-dark room, listening as the house’s tired old bones creaked beneath its shiny skin.
The darkness of the bedroom had a sound, Eliza thought. A low, distant rumbling. Ever-present, always threatening, never coming close enough to be revealed as something harmless.
And then it started to rain again, heavy and sudden. Eliza shivered as a flash of lightning split the sky into two jagged halves and threw light across the world. In those moments of illumination, always followed by a crack of thunder that made the giant house shake, she scanned the room one wall at a time, trying to make out her surroundings.
Flash . . . crack . . . dark wooden wardrobe beside the bed.
Flash . . . crack . . . fireplace against the far wall.
Flash . . . crack . . . ancient rocking chair by the window.
Flash . . . crack . . . a window seat.
On tiptoes, Eliza crossed the cold floor. Wind slipped through the cracks in the timbers and rushed along its surface. She climbed onto the window seat that had been built into the nook and looked out across the dark grounds. Angry clouds had shrouded the moon and the garden sat beneath a cloak of troubled night. Needles of driving rain pelted the sodden ground.
Another flash of lightning and the room was lit once more. As the light faded, Eliza caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window. Her face, Sammy’s face.
Eliza reached out but the image had already faded and her fingers merely brushed the icy glass. She knew, in that moment more than any before, that she was a long way from home.
She went back to bed and slid between the cold, damp, unfamiliar sheets. Placed her head on Sammy’s shirt. Closed her eyes and drifted amongst the reedy fringe of sleep.
Suddenly she sat bolt upright.
Her stomach turned and her heart beat faster.
Mother’s brooch. How could she have forgotten? In all the hurry, with all the drama, she had left it behind. High up in the chimney cavity, in Mr and Mrs Swindell’s house, Mother’s treasure waited.
22
Cornwall, 2005
Cassandra dropped a teabag into a cup and switched on the kettle. As it worked itself up to steaming, she gazed towards the window. Her room was at the back of the Blackhurst Hotel, facing out to sea, and though it was dark Cassandra could still make out some of the rear gardens. A clipped kidney-shaped lawn sloped away from the terrace towards a line of tall trees, blue beneath the moon’s silvery light. That was the cliff face, Cassandra knew, those trees the last line of defence on this particular piece of earth.
Somewhere beyond the cove was the town itself. Cassandra hadn’t seen much of it yet. The train trip had taken most of the day and by the time the taxi wove its way through the back hills of Tregenna, daylight was fading quickly to darkness. Only briefly as the car mounted a crest had she glimpsed a circle of twinkling lights in the cove below, like a fairy village materialising with the dusk.
As she waited for the water to boil, Cassandra thumbed the dog-eared edge of Nell’s notebook. She’d had it out during much of the train trip, had imagined that her time could be well spent unravelling the next stage of Nell’s journey, but she had been mistaken. The theory was sound, its practice not so easily accomplished. She’d been in company most of the trip with her own thoughts, had been so ever since the dinner with Ruby and Grey. Though Nick and Leo were never far from Cassandra’s mind, having the fact of their deaths remarked upon so openly, so unexpectedly, had brought the fracturing moment crashing back.
It had been so sudden. She supposed such things always were. One moment she was a wife and mother, the next she was alone. And all for the sake of an uninterrupted hour in which to draw. She’d thrust a thumb-sucking Leo into Nick’s arms and sent them to the shops for groceries they didn’t need. Nick had grinned at her as he’d started the car down the driveway, and Leo had waved a chubby little hand, still clutching the silk pillowcase he’d taken to carrying everywhere. Cassandra had waved back absently, her mind already in her studio.
Worst of all was how much she’d relished the hour and a half before the knock came on her door. She hadn’t even noticed how long they’d been gone . . .
Nell had been Cassandra’s saviour for a second time. She’d come straightaway, brought Ben with her. He’d been able to explain what had happened, the words that had made no sense from the policeman’s lips: an accident, a swerving truck, a collision. A ghastly sequence of events so mundane, so ordinary, it was impossible to believe that they were happening to her.
Nell hadn’t told Cassandra it would be all right. She’d understood better than that, had known that it would never, could never, be all right. She’d come armed instead with pills to help Cassandra sleep. To deliver a blessed blow to her racing mind and make it all disappear, if only for a few hours. And then she’d taken Cassandra home with her.
It was better back at Nell’s; the ghosts weren’t as comfortable there. Nell’s place had its own set and the ones Cassandra brought didn’t have quite the same free run.
Time afterwards was a haze. Of grief and horror and nightmares that couldn’t be shed with the new day. She wasn’t sure which were worse, the nights that Nick filled her thoughts, his ghost asking, over and over, why did you make us go? Why did you make me take Leo? Or the nights when he wouldn’t come, when she was alone and the dark hours threatened to stretch interminably, the partial salvation of the dawn rushing away from her faster than she could ever hope to chase it. And then there was the dream. The hateful field with its promise of finding them.
During the days it was Leo who trailed her, the noise of his toys, a cry, a little hand grabbing at her skirt, begging to be lifted into her arms and held. Oh, the flicker of unabated joy in her heart, momentary, fractured, but real nonetheless. The split second in which she forgot. Then the thud of reality when she turned to scoop him up and he wasn’t there.
She had tried going out, had thought she might escape them that way, but it hadn’t worked. There’d been so many children everywhere she went. The parks, the schools, the shops. Had there always been so many? So she’d stayed home, spent the days in Nell’s yard, lying on her back beneath the old mango tree and watching the clouds waft overhead. The perfect blue sky behind the frangipani leaves, the fluttering of the palm fronds, tiny star-shaped seeds dislocated by the breeze to rain over the path below.
Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.
That was where Nell had found her on an afternoon in April. The season had just begun to turn, summer’s swelter had lifted and there was a hint of impending autumn in the air. Cassandra’s eyes were closed.
The first she realised that Nell was standing nearby was the loss of warmth from the skin on her arms and the slight darkening inside her eyelids.
Then a voice: ‘Thought I’d find you out here.’
Cassandra said nothing.
‘D’you think it might be time you started doing something, Cass?’
‘Please Nell. Le
ave it alone.’
Slower, more clearly enunciated. ‘You need to start doing something.’
‘Please . . .’ To pick up a pencil made her physically ill. As for opening one of her sketchbooks . . . How could she bear to risk glimpsing the swell of a plump cheek, the tip of an upturned nose, the arc of kissable baby lips . . . ?
‘You need to do something.’
Nell was just trying to help and yet there was a part of Cassandra that wanted to scream and shake her grandmother, punish her for this failure to understand. Instead, she sighed. Her lids, still closed, fluttered a little. ‘I hear it enough from Dr Harvey. I don’t need it from you, too.’
‘I don’t mean therapeutically, Cass.’ A brief hesitation before Nell continued. ‘I mean you need to start contributing.’
Cassandra’s eyes opened, she lifted a hand to block the glare. ‘What?’
‘I’m not a spring chicken, my love. I need some help. Around the house, in the shop, financially.’
The offending sentences shimmered in the bright air, sharp edges refusing to dissipate. How could Nell be so cold? So thoughtless? Cassandra shivered. ‘My family is gone,’ she managed finally, her throat aching with the effort. ‘I’m grieving.’
‘I know that,’ said Nell, easing herself down to sit by Cassandra. She reached out and clutched her hand. ‘I know that, my darling girl. But it’s been six months. And you are not dead.’
Cassandra was crying now. It was saying the words out loud that did it.
‘You are here,’ said Nell softly, squeezing Cassandra’s hand, ‘and I need help.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can.’
‘No—’ Her head was throbbing; she was tired, so tired. ‘I mean I can’t. I have nothing to give.’
‘I don’t need you to give me anything. I just need you to come with me and do as I ask. You can hold a polishing cloth, can’t you?’
Nell had reached out then to stroke Cassandra’s hair from her cheeks, sticky with tears. Her voice was low, unexpectedly steely. ‘You’ll beat this. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you will. You’re a survivor.’
‘I don’t want to survive it.’
‘I know that, too,’ Nell had said. ‘And it’s fair enough. But sometimes we don’t have a choice . . .’
The hotel kettle switched itself off with a triumphant click and Cassandra poured water over the teabag, hand shaking a little. Stood for a moment as it drew. She realised now that Nell really had understood, that she knew all too well the sudden, blinding emptiness of having one’s ties cut.
She stirred her tea and sighed quietly as Nick and Leo retreated once more. Forced herself to focus on the present. She was at the Blackhurst Hotel in Tregenna, Cornwall, listening as the waves of an unfamiliar ocean crashed upon the sands of an unfamiliar beach.
Beyond the dark heads of the tallest trees, a lone bird cut black across a navy sky, and moonlight rippled on the faraway ocean surface. Tiny lights winked at the shore. Fishing boats, Cassandra figured. Tregenna was a fishing village, after all. Strange, in this modern world it was a surprise to find a pocket where things were still done in the old way, on a small scale, as they had been done for generations.
Cassandra took a sip and exhaled warmly. She was in Cornwall, just as Nell had been before her. Rose and Nathaniel and Eliza Makepeace before that. As she whispered their names to herself, she felt an odd tingling beneath her skin. Like tiny threads all being pulled at the same time. She had a purpose here, and it was not to wallow in her own past.
‘Here I am, Nell,’ she said softly. ‘Is this what you wanted me to do?’
23
Blackhurst Manor, 1900
When Eliza woke next morning, it took her a moment to remember where she was. She seemed to be lying in a huge wooden sleigh with a deep blue canopy suspended above. Her nightdress was of the type to have Mrs Swindell rubbing her hands together with glee and Sammy’s dirty clothing was bunched beneath her head. Then she remembered: the Do-Gooders, Mr Newton, the carriage ride, the Bad Man. She was at her uncle and aunt’s house, there had been a storm, lightning, thunder and rain. Sammy’s face in the window.
Eliza scrambled onto the window seat and looked outside. Was forced to squint. The rain and thunder of the night before had been rolled away by the dawn, and the light, the air, was all washed clean. Leaves and branches lay strewn across the lawn and a garden seat directly beneath the window had been blown over.
Her attention was drawn to a distant corner of the garden. Someone, a man, moved amongst the greenery. He had a black beard and was dressed in overalls, a strange little green hat and black galoshes.
A noise behind her and Eliza turned. The door to the room was open and a young maid with emphatically curly hair was placing a tray on the bedside table. It was the same maid who’d received a scolding the night before.
‘Morning, miss,’ she said. ‘My name’s Mary and I’ve brought you some breakfast. Mrs Hopkins said you could have it in your room this morning on account of the long journey you took these past days.’
Eliza hurried to sit at the little table. Her eyes widened as she took in the contents of the tray: hot bread rolls with lashings of melting butter, white pots filled to the brim with the fruitiest conserves she had ever seen, a pair of kippers, a pile of fluffy egg, a fat, glistening sausage. Her heart sang.
‘That were quite a storm you brought with you last night,’ said Mary, strapping the curtains back. ‘I almost didn’t make it home. Thought for a time I were going to need to stay here the night!’
Eliza swallowed a lump of bread. ‘You don’t live here?’
Mary laughed. ‘No fear. Might be all right for the rest of them but I shouldn’t like to live—’ She glanced at Eliza, a pink glow warming her cheeks. ‘That is, I live in the village. With my ma and pa and my brothers and sister.’
‘You have a brother?’ As Eliza thought of Sammy the emptiness yawned inside her.
‘Oh yes indeed, three of them. Two older and one younger, though Patrick, the eldest, don’t live at home no more. Still works on the fishing boats with my pa though. He, Will and Pa go out every day, whatever the weather. The younger, Roly, he’s only three, he stays at home with my ma and little May.’ She plumped the cushions on the window seat. ‘We Martins have always worked on the sea. My great-grandfather were one of the Tregenna pirates.’
‘The what?’
‘The Tregenna pirates,’ said Mary, eyes widening with incredulity. ‘Have you not heard of them?’
Eliza shook her head.
‘The Tregenna pirates were the most fearsome bunch you’d ever find. They ruled the seas in their time, bringing back whiskey and pepper when the folk at home couldn’t get them otherwise. Only ever took from the rich, mind you. Just like what’s-his-name, except on the ocean, not in the forest. There’s passages winding right the way through these hills, one or two reach all the way to the sea.’
‘Where is the sea, Mary?’ said Eliza. ‘Is it near?’
Mary looked at her strangely again. ‘Well of course it is, poppet! Can’t you hear it?’
Eliza paused and listened. Could she hear the sea?
‘Listen,’ said Mary. ‘Whoosha . . . whoosha . . . whoosha . . . That there’s the sea. Breathing in and out as it always does. Could you really not hear it?’
‘I could hear it,’ said Eliza. ‘I just didn’t know it was the sea.’
‘Didn’t know it was the sea?’ Mary grinned. ‘What on God’s earth did you think it was?’
‘I thought it was a train.’
‘A train!’ Mary erupted into laughter. ‘You are the ticket. The station’s a way off from here. Thought the sea were a train indeed. Just you wait until I tell my brothers.’
Eliza thought of the few stories Mother had told about sand and silver shingles and wind that smelled like salt. ‘Could I go and look at the sea, Mary?’
‘I reckon you could. So long as you make sure and be back when Cook rings the
luncheon bell. The mistress is out visiting this morning, so she won’t be here to notice.’ A cloud came across Mary’s cheerful face when she mentioned the mistress. ‘Just you mind you’re back before she is, you hear? She’s one for rules and order, and not to be crossed.’
‘How do I get there?’
Mary beckoned Eliza towards the window. ‘Come over here and I’ll show you, poppet.’
The air was different here, and the sky. It seemed brighter and further away. Not like the grey lid that hung low over London, threatening, always threatening, to close upon it. This sky was lifted high by sea breezes, like a great white sheet on laundering day, with the air caught beneath it, billowing higher and higher.
Eliza stood at cliff’s edge looking out across the cove towards the deep blue sea. The very same sea her father had sailed upon, the beach her mother had known when she was a girl.
The storm of the night before had left driftwood scattered across the pale shore. Elegant white branches, gnarled and polished by time, emerged from the pebbles like the antlers of some great ghostly beast.
Eliza could taste salt in the air, just as Mother had always said. Out of the confines of the strange house she felt suddenly light and free. She took a deep breath and started down the wooden steps, scuttling faster and faster, eager to be at the bottom.
Once she reached the shore, she sat on a smooth rock and unlaced her boots, fingers tripping over themselves to complete the task. She rolled the hems of Sammy’s breeches so that they sat above her knees, then she picked her way towards the water’s edge. Stones, smooth and spiky alike, were warm beneath her feet. She stood for a moment, observing as the great blue mass heaved in and out, in and out.
Then, with a deep, salty breath, she skipped forward so that her toes, her ankles, her knees were wet. She followed the shoreline, laughing at the cool bubbles between her toes, picking up shells that took her fancy and, once, a piece of sea debris shaped like a star.
