by Lily Graham
I learned sometimes he worried that his father’s black turns would drown them all, and I discovered that it was one of the reasons he was always outdoors.
I told him how I dreaded the idea of living like Rose, and how disappointed they were when I hadn’t been the boy they so longed for. How my name was meant to have been Mathew, and how they had to call me Matilda instead.
Our letters kept me sane on those endless days of monotonous lessons and Rose’s endless tirades against Father’s refusal to allow us to dress in the season’s latest fashions.
With the arrival of spring, the fields became a golden horizon, with daffodils as far as the eye could see. My favourite place to view them was from Old Tom; it was like being surrounded by a sea of sunshine.
With the promise of summer came the first storms. Fen opened the door to the shed one night and found me shivering.
‘You’re soaked to the skin, goose,’ he said in sympathy. ‘Come in.’ He hustled me inside, shrugging out of his coat and wrapping it around me.
My teeth chattered as I tried to speak. ‘D-didn’t think it would come down so hard.’
Fen was exhausted from the long hours at the farm, but he wanted to hear everything that had happened since my last message to him. We waited for the storm to subside, but it only intensified. Well after when I would usually leave, we were still trapped in the shed. We sat against the wall and there in the quiet, with the rain beating a steady tattoo outside, he slipped his hand in mine, and I smiled under cover of night.
In the morning, they found us fast asleep, curled around each other like spoons. When I opened my eyes there was a clatter and a shout and the first thing I saw was Rose’s smug, scornful smile and the look of horror on my mother’s face as she snatched my hand away from Fen’s.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Present day
‘Did you hear about Graham Waters?’ asked Angie, as I took a seat at the little table with the potted fern, which also held one of the illicitly created and curated piles that subverted her anarchic filing system. This one I’d started myself, with a selection of novels set in the Wild West.
Her long grey hair was loose, and today she had on a T-shirt that said, ‘Save the Rhinos’.
The store was busier than usual, and I’d taken refuge with my cappuccino – a first for The Floating Bookstore. Before Angie and I had become friends she’d only believed in plain, percolated coffee, but it seems things had changed in my brief absence.
‘What happened?’ I asked, fearing the worst.
‘Adam took him to Truro yesterday, and it looks like the new treatment is working. They’re running some more tests and keeping him down there for a few days, but Adam said that it’s looking good.’
‘I’m so glad,’ I said. ‘I know how worried Adam has been.’
She nodded. ‘Have you seen him yet?’
I shook my head. ‘Not yet.’
‘You must have passed each other?’
Before she could start asking me about him, or his possible fiancée, I changed the subject. ‘Did you get a new coffee machine?’
She shrugged, trying and failing to look innocent.
I looked at her. ‘Is this your way of saying you missed me?’
She snorted. ‘Don’t be so soft.’ But she couldn’t quite hide her smile.
‘So… I met Jenna,’ said Angie.
‘Oh?’ I said. It was my turn to feign innocence.
‘Yes, seems like she’s driving Gilly bonkers down at the Black Horse Inn. Apparently she’s written several complaints and even demanded that she get in someone from London to look at the heating system. Gilly was apoplectic.’
‘I’ll bet,’ I sighed. So Jenna was still here. I’d hoped that while I’d been in London, she would have just disappeared, but it looked like I was out of luck.
‘Well, the one good thing is that at least she’s not staying with Adam.’
That was true. Though I remembered how she’d told me he’d begged her to stay.
‘So you haven’t spoken to him at all?’ Angie persisted.
‘No, but I will. I’d rather hoped to today, but he’s in Truro, and I don’t want to do it over the phone.’
She cut me a rather large slice of chocolate pecan cake.
I shook my head. ‘You’re bad for my waistline,’ I said, though I ate it anyway.
There was the telltale scent of burnt sage lingering in the cottage. I suspected the Bishop had let himself in to perform the cleansing ritual.
The tangy scent of herbs mixed fragrantly with that of fresh paint. I was covered in paint splatters, and my shoulders ached, but I was satisfied.
For the first time in decades the walls in the sea room were freshly painted and free of damage, not a vine or a leaf in sight. I stood and looked at my progress, gazing upon the blue-green ocean through the large, round window with a contented sigh. We were still far from finished, but it was starting to look more like a home every day.
Jack and Will had left earlier but I carried on, wanting to see the room completed. It was close to 10 p.m. when I finished.
My neck and shoulders were stiff and sore, but still I cleaned the brushes I’d used, along with the roller, with turpentine, then went to the kitchen to wash my hands. I was surprised when I heard a knock at the door, so late at night.
‘Adam?’ I said in surprise.
‘Hi,’ he greeted me. He was wearing that blue jumper I loved, the one that made his eyes look almost electric. ‘What are doing here?’ I asked.
‘I – well, I came to see you,’ he said. ‘Um, obviously.’
‘Right. Come in,’ I said, opening the door. ‘Coffee?’
‘Love a cup,’ he said, his eyes taking in the room. ‘Can’t believe how different it looks. It’s amazing.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, switching on the kettle. ‘So Angie told me about your uncle. I meant to call, it’s great news.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s made such a difference,’ he said, coming to stand behind me.
I swallowed as his hands traced the splodges of paint on my arms, a gentle caress. I stepped away quickly and he frowned while I levelled ground coffee into the cafetière and filled it with boiling water.
‘So I met Jenna,’ I said, not looking at him.
‘I see,’ he said, folding his arms. ‘I thought that might be the case.’
I looked up at him.
‘Well, after the other night I didn’t hear from you for days, even though I kept trying to call and text, and I had to wonder what happened.’
‘I ran into your fiancée is what happened.’
‘Ex-fiancée,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you just call me?’
I looked at him in disbelief. ‘I find your fiancée in your boat, first thing in the morning, and she tells me that you guys are going to work things out, that it was all a little misunderstanding between you – but I’m the one who should have called you?’
‘Yes, actually. Because if you had, then you would have known that I told her to take a short walk to hell. Instead you did what you do best, right? You decided to avoid me, and my calls, and run off to London for a week.’
My mouth fell open. He was angry. I couldn’t believe it.
‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? I mean, I told you how my ex had an affair with her boss, skipped out on our wedding and left me to try and sell the house we’d just bought together, and you think that just because she showed up here I’d go running into her arms. Christ, I mean, after all this time we’ve spent together, I thought you knew me.’
‘And I thought you knew me! I mean, I moved to Cornwall after my husband had an affair, and I’m supposed to just think the best when I find another woman in your home? Especially one you’ve got a history with?’
‘Yes – especially when you knew what I had gone through. If Mark had showed up here, my first thought wouldn’t be that you’d got back together,’ he said, turning on his heel.
‘Even if he told you that we had?
’
‘Yes, even then!’
‘Then you’re lying to yourself!’ I shouted, but he’d already left.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Cornwall, 1908
Tilly
For the first time in my life, the whispers I heard in my secret refuge behind the library curtains were about me.
I heard, ‘Imagine if she wasn’t still a child?’ whispered more than once, and it wasn’t only Martha who pointed out that thirteen wasn’t quite as young as all that. ‘Girls that young get into trouble all the time. What if something happened?’
I’d lived in the countryside long enough to know what they meant.
Aside from that scandalous speculation, the question everyone kept asking, while I became a ghost in my own house, was what would be done with me. Mother wouldn’t look me in the eye and Rose gloated as if she’d won some great victory, not realising that her own life would change, too, as my parents were forced to consider their options.
Mother insisted that the Waters family be removed. Father, thankfully, refused.
But that didn’t stop Mother, or Mr Waters, apparently, as I heard later that Fen had been sent to live with his aunt in Yorkshire the next day.
I was devastated, and I wasn’t the only one. Mrs Price took it the hardest. From my perch behind the curtain in the library, I heard Edmund tell Martha, ‘And why shouldn’t Mrs Price be upset? She has every right. Fen’s her nephew, isn’t he? She was that glad to think they’d come to live here. And now this? I don’t think it’s right that they sent him away like that.’
‘I know,’ whispered Martha. ‘If you ask me, it’s the young miss who should have paid the price. It was she who was found at their cottage, she who was sneaking about at night.’
‘Aye, but he was sneaking too, they’re both to blame,’ said Edmund.
‘Yes, but it’s not like she’s getting punished, is she?’
Later that day, I approached the kitchen in trepidation. ‘Mrs Price?’
She looked up, her face folded into a frown. ‘Oh, ’tis you, is it?’
I noted her tone. We’d been friends of a kind before, when she used to pack me lunches that I would take on my adventures with Fen, but perhaps all that had changed now.
Her manner became brusque. ‘I don’t know nothing about it, so don’t ask. What you two did…’ She shook her head. ‘Well, I thought you had more sense.’
‘Please, Mrs Price. No one will tell me anything. I haven’t had a chance to say goodbye, even. If you could just give me his address, maybe I could write—’
‘And risk my job?’ she cried, horrified. ‘No disrespect, miss, but I’m not daft. You can’t ask me to take that kind of a chance for you.’
I hadn’t thought of it that way. Mrs Price sighed. ‘Now, look, lass, I don’t wish to be cruel, I really don’t, but haven’t you done enough?’
I blinked back tears, while she continued, ‘That family has been holding on by a feather. A feather. You don’t know the half of it. And sending Fen away now? Well, I just don’t know what will happen. She won’t forgive them this, I can tell you.’
‘Who? What do you mean?’
She put her hands in her hair and gave a vigorous shake of her head. ‘Never mind that, I shouldn’t have said anything about it. Only it seems unfair, is all. It’s he who will suffer most. Your lot never suffer, do they? Not when it comes to this sort of thing. I told him that, right from the start.’
Mrs Price’s words, ‘your lot never suffer’, would prove false soon enough, though it brought little consolation. A few days later, I was sent to the Amelia Laurens School for Young Ladies.
What was worse, and it was hard to imagine anything worse than having Fen torn out of my life and the pair of us being sent away from our homes, was that in the crossfire, Celine became our casualty. She was summarily dismissed without any references, though I had railed and cried and tried to get my parents to understand that it wasn’t her fault.
‘I did warn you, Matilda,’ said Mother coldly, ‘that if you persisted, Celine would pay the price. You made your choice.’
I’d made my choice and in the process Rose had got her revenge. She’d been the one who betrayed me, biding her time until she could ensure that I was well and truly caught, even if it meant that she too had to lose her governess. ‘You can say what you like, Tilly, it all comes down to the fact that you did it. Perhaps next time you’ll think twice about attacking me,’ she said on the day of my departure.
‘I will,’ I agreed. ‘Next time I won’t let you recover.’
Father took me to the school himself. He seethed with suppressed anger during the train journey, his jaw clenched; the scar on his hand glowed white as he balled his fist.
I was to understand later that I’d done something that to him was even more unforgivable than sneaking out against their wishes: I had risked Idyllwild.
‘You don’t even realise what could have happened, what you put in danger,’ he said at last, as we arrived that cold morning at the school gates. ‘And now you get to have what you have always desired,’ he added, referring to my wish to receive a proper education, ‘while I must go home and attempt to deal with the damage.’
It would be two years before I saw him again, and many more before I truly understood what he meant, and that actually it had very little to do with the fact that I had dared to fall in love with a boy who no one thought I should.
My time at the Amelia Laurens School for Young Ladies got off to an ominous start when I was assigned a room with a girl who made Rose seem sweet. Her name was Katie Thorpe, and her face looked as if it had been permanently set into a scowl, at odds with her wispy blonde hair and syrupy-sweet voice.
When Miss Laurens showed me into my room, Katie magnanimously welcomed me by announcing that she had readied my side of the room.
The headmistress beamed at her. ‘That’s what you’ll find here, Miss Matilda – great friends, willing spirits and an appetite for learning.’
My smile was thin. All I could see was that the girl had ensured that my part of the room appeared to be a rather barren cell in comparison to hers. There was even a thin white ribbon tacked down the centre of the carpet, which clearly marked where her space ended and mine began. I noticed that mine did not include the small sofa or the chest of drawers.
Miss Laurens took my case from me and put it on the bed. The finality of it made me want to howl. ‘It’s alright to be a little homesick,’ she said kindly.
If this was what homesick was, I didn’t know how anyone recovered.
When Miss Laurens left, Katie fixed me with an appraising look and dropped the helpful demeanour; whatever she saw, she seemed to find me wanting. ‘I don’t like wet, whiny girls. So if you’re going to cry, I suggest you take yourself off someplace else.’
‘I’m not going to cry,’ I said, though I had been on the verge. My chin began to wobble in a way that mortified me.
She shot me a look of revulsion, while I clamped my Judas chin with my hand and quickly looked down.
‘See that you don’t. Furthermore,’ she said, with a smirk, ‘we aren’t going to be “chums”, just so you know. Not after what I heard about why you’re really here, what you did. Miss Laurens might make an exception based on the amount of money your father gave her, but the Thorpes will not.’
The one advantage of having Katie Thorpe as my roommate was that the enemies she’d boiled with her burnt-sugar voice had formed an outsiders’ club that welcomed me as one of their own from the start. This mainly consisted of one, Alice McKibbon. She was shy, kind and had a stutter that made any sort of speech painfully difficult to witness. As a result, she was the person Katie Thorpe despised the most.
What I discovered upon meeting Alice was that it was terribly difficult to keep feeling sorry for yourself when someone so clearly had it much worse that you did.
Alice was short and pudgy and had hair that on a good day liked to frizz. But she was smart and funny an
d quick to stand up for others. ‘Ignore K-Katie. We all do,’ she said.
Later, I discovered that she had cousins who could easily rival Rose in their vapidity, and were every bit the type of girl Mother wished I’d been. The Hammond twins – Rebecca and Emily – were, I discovered, one of the reasons Mother had agreed to send me away to this particular school when they were searching for a solution for what to do with me.
The Hammond family were exactly the sort of people that my mother wished to be associated with: rich, connected, highly regarded by the monarchy and one of the oldest families in the south. Mother particularly liked the idea of the twins’ brother, the future Earl of Monthesay, Charles Hammond, as a match for Rose.
Their father, Arnold Hammond, had been a general in the South African war, and as such, shared some common ground with Father. Unfortunately, it proved difficult to get my father to act in any way upon this connection.
I should have realised that sending me here was not solely as a consequence of my friendship with Fen. Rather, it was a calculated decision to bring our family closer to the Hammonds. And, unknowingly, when I befriended their cousin, poor Alice, I played my own part in my mother’s scheme.
The Hammond twins’ room was two doors down from mine, and only the very lucky were invited in. They both had chestnut curls and bright green eyes, but they weren’t identical. Emily’s features were more delicate, and they matched her mild, soft-spoken manner. Rebecca, though not as classically beautiful, was the one who captured your attention. There was something about her, a kind of charisma that made her hard to deny, like a force of nature.
The first night she invited me into their room, she ushered me in with Alice, and we took a seat on a plush velvet chaise before the fireplace. It was easily one of the biggest rooms in the estate, furnished extravagantly.
‘So,’ said Rebecca, looking at me. ‘You’re Rose’s little sister?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
