Even the coffee shop on the corner was 'exclusive', serving food from the Farmer's Market in the old square behind it. No shrink-wrapped buns and sandwiches to be seen. Everything was fresh, but that wasn't why Ashley liked the place. There were pictures of the street as it had been two hundred years ago on the walls. She always liked looking at them and imagining what it must have been like back then. The old bookstore was in one of them, with the same gold lettering on its sign, and what could easily have been the same books on the shelves inside. Every now and then she even imagined the same old man with his leathery skin walked around dusting the shelves and arranged the books to look just so. Everything had its place, and everything was in that place.
Ashley put the paintbrush down in the saucer on the windowsill.
She turned around to look at her creation.
The mural spanned the entire wall.
She'd gone for a sort of puffy cloud effect around the edges, so it looked almost as though she was flying and looking down on the world below, with a giant castle in the middle dominating the painting. Well, it wasn't really a castle, it was like a giant spike or shard piercing the sky. Everything was so far away the people down there would have been smaller than anything even the tiniest flecks of paint could recreate. Seven moons floated over her world. In the middle of the wall she'd painted a huge, full silvery one. To the left of it she'd painted two smaller green moons, one in a waxing crescent, and on the far edge of the wall, a yellow moon. To the right of the silver moon Ashley had painted two large blue moons, one that was waning, the other full, and a single red moon that could have been mistaken for a sun.
Beneath the moons there were thirteen archipelago-islands, with lagoons and mountain peaks tipped with snow and dark smears of cities and huge spidery bridges that stretched from island to island to island, joining them all together, and right in the middle of the islands, a glorious city cast half in shadow, bathed half in light.
It had always been so vivid inside her imagination but now it was as thought it had come to brilliant colourful life on the wall.
Ashley smiled, enjoying the improbability of seven moons.
She could hear her mum downstairs, bustling about.
Meghan Hawthorne was a whirlwind. She never settled. There was always something to do. Something to clean or polish or put away, and if it wasn't housework it was something else. Ashley couldn't remember ever seeing her just sit down and veg out in front of the television. The bookmark she used to keep her place in the book on the coffee table hadn't moved in three weeks. It was unlikely to move in the next three, either. Meghan Hawthorne was plugged in. She was always sending an email or texting on her phone, as crisis after crisis seemed to engulf the people that worked for her and the world they all lived in. Whenever she actually answered a call it would be all dah-ling this and sweetie that as she coaxed the caller into doing exactly what she wanted them to do.
Meghan Hawthorne was very good at what she did.
Ashley knew that because she had the signed photos to prove it.
She owned a talent agency, called simply Talent, that looked after a very select pool of musicians, a few high profile actors with very recognisable faces, and one or two celebrity football players looking to transition into screen or print after their playing days were over. Everyone on her client list was a household name, a someone, and up until a couple of days ago Ashley had had a wall filled with their signed photos, but she was fed up of them all smiling down on her. Now she had the mural—or rather the beginnings of one. There was still so much left to paint. So many little things inside her imagination she wanted to bring to life to make it perfect.
She dipped the brush in the small cup of turpentine beside the saucer and then used a tissue to clean it until she'd got the worst of the paint out of its bristles.
Ashley sat on the pile of cushions she'd stacked up in the deep bay window, and looked out into the street.
She saw a couple of joggers already out for their early morning run, heading across the road into Hyde Park. They were wearing bright red tracksuits and disappeared behind a snake of equally bright red buses making their way through the traffic jams toward Marble Arch.
One of the buses down there was different, she noticed.
It seemed so much older and, well, just more old-fashioned than the others. It was like something from Wartime London. It didn't have any posters for movies on it, or books or hair products, or any of the other things that seemed to be advertised on buses. She hadn't seen one of these old busses for years. She remembered them from when she was small though and there were pictures of them everywhere, on postcards in souvenir stores, in old photographs in cafes and down on market stalls in Spitalfields.
A flicker of movement caught her eye.
She looked down to see a man bustle across the street, disappearing into the shadow of the huge Hilton tower that put half of the street into shade.
The postman came down the steps of the house across the street. Another door opened. An old man lived there. According to her mum he had been one of the most famous men in the world once upon a time, now he could shuffle down the steps in his dressing gown to collect the milk and morning newspaper and no one had the slightest idea who he was. He had been an actor. Ashley wondered if he still watched his old movies when they were on television, or if he couldn't bear to be reminded of who he'd been before the world left him behind? She watched him as he reached out for the iron railing and made his way awkwardly down one step at a time. His big bushy grey beard made him look like a mad wizard, but he didn't frighten Ashley. Actually, she felt sorry for him because she never saw him with anyone else.
She couldn't imagine ever being that old.
Three doors down there was a musician who didn't play music anymore. He'd written a musical that had been running in the West End for seven years and was still going strong, which according to her mum meant he'd found a goose to lay him golden eggs and would never have to work again, which was probably for the best given the added pressure that put on his next script. It was hard to tell if her mum was jealous when she said that, or if she felt sorry for the guy. Ashley couldn't imagine her mum not working all the hours God sent, so maybe she felt sorry for him?
Everyone in every one of the houses on the street was somebody—either somebody rich or somebody famous, or somebody who was both.
But not Ashley.
She was just… what was she? Young? Well, yes, she was still young, but that wasn't it. She was just different. She'd always felt that way, like she didn't belong. But then maybe that was just because, want it or not, she had it all? "It isn't easy being me," she said, laying on the self-pity and laughing at herself at the same time.
She plucked at the bristles of the paint brush, teasing out the ones she couldn't get the paint off.
She was different.
She wasn't beautiful. She wasn't graceful. She wasn't clever. She wasn't sporty. It wasn't that she was ugly, or that she was particularly clumsy or stupid. She wasn't any of those things. She was just average. Normal, for want of a better word. She wasn't particularly brilliant at anything. She had no discernable talents that she'd been able to discover thus far; nothing that set her apart from anyone else her age. But she was awkward and all elbows and knees and sharp angles. Megan said she'd grow into her looks. Every time she looked into the bathroom mirror it told her she still had a lot of growing to do.
She was just a normal fifteen-year-old kid, only when she looked at the ghost of her reflection in the window she didn't feel all that normal.
She could see the angry red blemishes of a smattering of spots on her chin and cheeks. Her hair was cut short in a shoulder length bob.
She sighed heavily. She knew what she looked like. Flame red hair and angry red spots. It was a cruel joke the world had decided to play on her. Someone somewhere was having a good old laugh at her expense.
"Ash, darling," her mother called up the four flights of stairs. "Get your skate
s on, we're going to be late." She always talked like that; get your skates on, not hurry up. Ashley wiped her hands on the scrap of torn bed sheet she was using as a cleaning cloth. She was managing her, just like she managed her clients. When she didn't answer, Meghan shouted again, "Chop, chop, kiddo! The taxi's outside and the meter's running!"
Ashley looked out of the window. The taxi wasn't outside so it was impossible for any meter to be running.
She wasn't about to argue, though. She hopped down from the window-seat and went out onto the landing. Her hair fell in front of her face as she leaned over the balustrade. It was a long way down. "Can't I just stay here? I've just started painting again. Please. I can go into school after first break."
"The letter from Aunty Elspeth's Executor was quite specific, love. She asked for you to be there with us, which means Aunt Elspeth left you something in her Will. Aren't you the least bit curious?"
Ashley shrugged. "Not really," which meant so much more than just not really. It meant: I didn't even know Aunt Elspeth, so no, I'm not really interested in what she wanted to give me, and it's Thursday morning, I'm supposed to be at school but I'd much rather carry on painting my wall, and this is all a bit silly really, isn't it?
"Well it's a good job I'm curious enough for the both of us then isn't it?" Even before she finished giving the orders her phone started ringing. "Meet you down here in two minutes," Megan said, and then she was walking away, her conversation moved on to the phone, "Ah, sweetie, so good to hear from you… Yes, yes, I heard… I know…"
Ashley went back to change out of her overalls into her school uniform, a knee-length pleated green skirt and blue petticoat, starched white shirt and royal blue vee-necked jumper with a yellow trim beneath a cropped green blazer.
She emerged just under two minutes later, a white smear of paint still on her cheek, wrestling with the knot of her school tie, and ran barefoot down the four flights of stairs.
Megan was waiting at the bottom. She looked rather theatrically at her watch as Ashley came down the final flight.
"What on earth have you done to yourself? Come here," Meghan licked her thumb and starting to try and smudge the paint off her daughter's cheek.
"Seriously gross, mum," Ashley objected, twisting away.
"You can't go out there looking like Adam Ant, babe, go wash your face."
"Paging the 1980s, can I have my mum back in 2012, please?"
"Funny girl. Go wash your face. Painted faces may be fine on the dance floor, they don't look so good in one of the most exclusive private schools in the country, and given that's where you are going, my point still stands, '80s reference or not. So go get reacquainted with soap and water. I'll wait."
Ashley sighed theatrically and ran back upstairs, taking them two and three at a time. She rushed past several generations of Hawthorne family portraits on the staircase. Some of the old oil paintings were more than three hundred years old, the subjects all on her dad's side. They always gave her the creeps, even in the old house. But it was worse here. Now, with so much space, they had become positively sinister. The thick layers of paint made it seem like those yellowed eyes followed her everywhere. So much for feeling safe in the bosom of the family, she thought, rolling her eyes as she passed the last of them. She resisted the urge to cross herself or spit three times. She wasn't quite that superstitious.
She banged open her bedroom door, ran straight through to the other side of the room and into her en suite bathroom. Bottles of all the stuff she didn't care about but was supposed to were scattered about the sink and shelf beneath the mirror; skin toners, make-up removers, a dozen different shades of nail polish, gloss, varnish, zit cream, cotton wool buds and pads, cleanser, moisturiser, power, hide-the-blemish and every other kind of make-up her mother brought home for her. There was a packet of unopened fake-it plastic glitz nails that were all spangled with fake sparkles. There were only two things on the shelf that Ashley had bought for herself, the zit cream and the concealer. The rest was all down to mummy dearest, who wanted her to look "Fabulous, Dah-ling," whenever she had an event on.
Ashley turned the taps on.
The house was old. It took a couple of minutes for the water to start to heat up as it chuntered through the rusty pipes. It sputtered, burping air, and then the steam started to come. That was the other problem with old pipes, they went from ice cold to scalding hot in three seconds flat. It took her a minute to get the perfect balance, by which time the mirror was completely fogged.
She wiped a hole in the steam with her hand, then quickly scrubbed the paint from her cheek, which was left looking red and angry by the time she'd finished. But that was fine, it wasn't as though the rest of her face wasn't already red and angry, was it? She squeezed some concealer out of the tube. By the time she'd managed to smooth it out it had only made things worse. Now it looked as if half of her face had spent a week in the Bahamas while the rest of her holidayed in Iceland.
"Come on, kiddo, mush mush!"
"Coming, mum!" she yelled back, trying to make the best of a bad job. In the end she just gave up and washed it all off.
Back in her bedroom she grabbed her iPod from the bedside table and slipped it into her pocket. There was no telling how boring the next few hours might be, so it didn't hurt to be a little prepared.
By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs Ashley looked like she'd been dragged through a hedge of poison ivy backwards.
"Well, aren't you a pretty picture?"
"Fit to be Picasso's muse," Ashley agreed, rooting around in the shoe racks for a pair of laced Victorian ankle-top boots. Getting into them was a bit of a mission, but she loved them. She fluffed her petticoat and skirt and sat on the lowest stair. Ashley unthreaded the laces with nimble fingers, teasing them out and making the boot wider so she could squeeze her foot in. It was an intricate form of torture, but they looked so good it was almost worth it. The boots were her one concession to the Fashionista's of Regent's Park Girl's School. They were originals, hand-stitched at the Mayfair Cobblers around the corner from their Curzon Street house over one hundred years ago and left unclaimed by the lady who had bought them. The leather was incredibly soft and supple, having been treated and oiled and waxed over and over to stop them from drying up. Even so, if she hadn't loved them, Ashley wouldn't have put herself through the whole agonising ritual of taking them off and putting them on again. Thirty minutes being stretched out on the rack would have been preferable.
Done, finally, she stood up and straightened out her skirts.
Meghan Hawthorne handed her daughter her satchel and together they left the house.
There was a black cab waiting at the bottom of the steps.
Ashley noticed a woman in an old fashioned topcoat with top hat and these funky looking brass goggles dangling around her neck crossing the road towards Shepherd's Market. She carried a set of juggling clubs in her hands. No doubt she was going to put on a performance for the breakfasters. That was one thing Ashley loved about living in London. There was always something happening. She clambered into the back of the cab. Her mum climbed in beside her and gave the cabbie directions to the Executor's offices down in Inner Temple, one of the last remaining Inns of Court in the city.
THREE
Smirke
The law offices of Sydney Smirke and Sons in Inner Temple were old and stuffy and covered in a layer of dust that looked like it had been gathering for the best part of a decade. Smirke's secretary, an octogenarian with the skin to match and bi-focal glasses perched on the end of her hawk-nose looked Ashley up and down disapprovingly. She smelled of lavender soap. "Master Smirke will be with you presently. If you would be so kind," she inclined her head in the direction of two battered leather armchairs.
"Of course," Meghan Hawthorne said.
Ashley had expected more people to attend the reading of Aunt Elspeth's Will, but so far there was only the two of them. Perhaps the others were already inside?
"Can I get you so
mething to drink?"
"No thanks, we're fine," her mum said, just as Ashley had been about to say she'd love a cup of tea.
So they sat and they waited.
Ashley put her here headphones on and put her iPod on shuffle. Her friends might have been into Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, but Ashley had a thing for bands like I Am Ghost and Drop Dead Gorgeous who understood what it was like being fifteen in 2012 and unhappy in your own skin. She disappeared into the music while she looked around the lawyer's chambers. The wood-panelled room looked like something out of a Charles Dickens novel, and smelled overpoweringly of furniture polish. There were all sorts of old-fashioned books without dust jackets crammed together on the shelves and between the towering stacks of bookcases a stag's head mounted on a wooden plinth. She counted the points. Nineteen. Before the hunters had killed it, it must have been King of the Forest. Even now there was something incredibly noble about it, despite the sadness of its predicament.
She didn't see Smirke arrive.
It was almost half an hour later.
The solicitor had deliberately made them wait just enough for the dozen people that had slowly gathered in his chambers to grow antsy. It was like something her mother would have done to win a negotiation. They were a motley crew, to say the least. Tall and short, fat and lean, old and, with Ashley, young. She couldn't see a single familial resemblance between the lot of them. There was one man who didn't look remotely like he belonged even among this band of merry misfits; he was a great bear of a man with a thick beard and a huge barrel chest. Forearms like ham hocks were folded across his chest. His eyes were glassy, like he'd been crying not so long ago. Ashley looked at them all, wondering if Auntie Elspeth had made a habit of picking up waifs and strays? After all, they weren't actually related to the strange old lady, at least not as far as she knew. Ashley called her auntie because she'd always called her auntie.
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