Finding Secrets

by Westwood, Lauren

  But as I read on, I learn that the disease is often less severe in women. It’s possible that neither Robin nor her mother realised just how serious it could be. Also, because it’s a recessive genetic trait, often females are only carriers, not sufferers.

  My thoughts wander back over my own life. Did I ever feel tired, bleed a lot, or bruise easily? Not that I know of, and surely Mum would have said. Maybe I’ve got lucky. But just to be sure, I’ll make an appointment with the doctor.

  I stay up until almost 4 a.m. reading accounts of haemophiliacs and their sufferings. It’s unpleasant, and yet grimly fascinating. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, haemophilia was known as the ‘royal disease’ because it affected several of the royal houses of Europe. Apparently, the gene was passed on by two of Queen Victoria’s daughters and one of her sons, who married into other royal families. Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, ‘Alix of Hesse’ was a carrier of the disease, and it was she who married Tsar Nicholas II and gave birth to Prince Alexei, the heir apparent. The prince suffered from the disease, which placed many restrictions on his life. Had he survived, would he have had the wherewithal to correct the errors of the past and restore the people’s faith in the Russian monarchy? Or would he have sunk into the same decadence and brutality of his father ruling a country on the brink?

  History will never have an answer. Instead, he and his family were imprisoned, and taken out into a snowy yard and shot. The accounts differ slightly, but one thing seems certain – they all died.

  Not necessarily true, however, for their cousins – including the child, or children – of Michael Alexandrovich Romanov, who was mentioned in the newspaper article as the possible father of Marina. According to my research, he had one legitimate child – a son. But if Marina was his illegitimate child, how could she have inherited the defective gene?

  As I read on, a possible – the only possible – answer presents itself. Michael Alexandrovich had a love affair with Queen Victoria’s ninth child – her daughter Princess Beatrice. The two would have married, but were denied permission because they were first cousins. Princess Beatrice later married into the Spanish royal line, where she was the mother of several children with haemophilia.

  It sounds crazy, but it explains everything. A doomed love affair that led to an illegitimate daughter – Marina. A child raised at the Russian court, who managed to escape during the revolution. Not a child of the Tsar, but a Romanov through and through, as well as a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. A royal child, right down to the defective gene. A gene passed on to my grandmother, who seems to not show any effects, and to my mother, Robin, who did.

  I close down the website and go over to the sofa, sprawling out on it. I stare up at the slanted skylight, grey with near-dawn light. I know I won’t sleep so I don’t even bother to try. I feel like I’ve been hit by a very large bus. I untuck the jewelled locket from my shirt and grip it tightly in my hand. I can feel the blood – pulsing, pulsing, pulsing, in my veins…

  - XIV -

  15th November 1940 – 12:14 a.m.

  I turned and walked away, expecting to be knocked from behind at any moment – a blade plunged into my back. Robbo lowered his camera and moved out of the alleyway. The blood screamed in my head. He grabbed my arm to keep me upright.

  ‘Did you get that?’ I gasped. ‘On film?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  His words made me stumble in relief. Spider jumped out of the ambulance – our getaway car – to help me.

  ‘We… need…’ I tried, ‘we… need… to go to the police.’

  As I collapsed on the seat, Robbo grabbed me by the collar. ‘You sure that’s what you want to do? You think the police are going to bother trying to find the rightful owner of that loot?’ His laugh was bitter. ‘You could put a decent little nest egg away for yourself – and your family if you have one.’

  I coiled back my arm and tried to punch him. I missed, of course, and hit the dashboard instead. I put my head in my hands and began to weep. Spider, grim and silent in the driver’s seat, put the siren on, and we sped away.

  As we raced through the desolate city, Flea’s voice drifted in and out of my head: ‘All’s fair in love and war’, and ‘I’ve got one in the oven’. And then I thought about the girl, ‘crying her eyes out’ for her trinket – that I took from her. Granted, it was for her own good – to keep it safe. But since then, I’d held it in my hands, feeling the heat of it, the power. I’d wrestled with demons inside myself. ‘All’s fair in love and war’…‘all’s fair…’

  I drifted – everything unreal as we drove through the familiar streets. And then we stopped, and I was walking, though I couldn’t feel my legs beneath me. Spider spoke to a man behind a desk, and we were ushered into a small room. And Robbo was talking to someone, and he gave them the film from his camera. There was a clock on the wall – a plain white face with large numerals. I watched the second hand go round and round, the minute hand jerking onwards.

  Another man came in and took my statement. He frowned at me – like I was the criminal. I was grassing on my friend; turning in a fellow public servant. I don’t know if I was expecting some kind of reward or pat on the back, or not. Either way, I wasn’t going to get it.

  Eventually, it was over. I’d done my bit – turned in my friend, handed over the evidence. Robbo stayed behind, and Spider and I went to my flat. We didn’t speak – we’d both lost too much. In the dingy kitchen, I poured each of us a slug of brandy. Tears ran down his face. ‘They’ll string him up, Badger,’ he said. ‘He was our friend.’

  I slammed my fist on the table. ‘He’s a disgrace,’ I said. ‘And so is the judge who will give him a few months in Holloway, then he’ll be back out on the streets. Him – and all the others like him. And meanwhile, they’ll prattle on about the “Blitz Spirit” and how brave we all are. Such a crock of shit.’ I think of Marina, lying there in the wreckage. I think of a little girl … Catherine – a girl without a mother. A girl with my eyes. Suddenly, I feel weighted down. By the jewelled bird in my pocket, and by… what I feared I might be capable of, when all was said and done.

  - Chapter 44 -

  It’s fully light by the time I wake up, exhausted and disoriented, feeling like a too-tightly wound spring. The locket – I’d fallen asleep with the chain coiled around my neck, the key digging into my skin – feels heavy and portentous. As reality filters back, I sit bolt upright. I need to tell Mrs Fairchild the good news about Frank Bolton – and the bad news about what I’ve learned about Robin and her condition. Both things are an important part of our shared history and, at the very least, she has a right to know. Then I remember the previous night – when I’d gone into the main house and found her… I shake my head. I don’t want to think about it. As I get in the shower, I resign myself to finally meeting her ‘friend’ if he’s around at breakfast. Now that things are back on between them, I’ll have to, sooner or later.

  Instead of going in the staff entrance, I go around the back to my grandmother’s little private kitchen where she and her friend might be having breakfast, but I don’t find them. Following my nose towards the smell of fresh baking coming from the café, I ask Chloe if she’s seen Mrs Fairchild, and am told that she’s already up, and out gardening. Reading between the lines, I conclude that the ‘friend’ must have left either very late the previous night, or early this morning. The relief I feel makes me a little ashamed. Why can’t I just be happy for her new relationship?

  I take a bite of the scone that Chloe gives me, and savour its rich, buttery fluffiness on my tongue. Maybe I’ll feel better about the whole thing when I finally meet the mystery man and start getting to know him. I’ll ask my grandmother if she’ll arrange it.

  On my way out to the garden, I duck into the estate office to check for messages. As soon as I step inside, my heart jars out of rhythm. There’s that feeling – that slight change in the current of the air that tells me someone’s been here. That he’s been here.


  I rush over to my desk and start riffling through the piles of papers, but I know it’s futile – and my own fault. What he’s taken was left out in plain sight. The folder with the newspaper clipping, my notes on the Romanovs, and the auction house records from Chris.

  My skin prickles with goosebumps as I rush out of the house. I must find my grandmother – the ‘uninvited guest’ has made it even more urgent that I tell her everything I’ve found out. The day is grey and cool with a strong northerly wind. The silver birch trees along the river bow and sway. A few early-bird tourists are browsing the plants for sale outside the gift shop, and I glimpse a coach pulling up in the car park. But for the moment, the garden seems unusually quiet. Even the bees seem to be holding their breath in case it starts raining.

  ‘Grandmother?’ I call out, but there’s no reply. I check each of the various garden rooms, making my way through the arches in the hedges. The white garden is past its peak, but the roses in the secret garden that Mrs Fairchild keeps so carefully deadheaded are at their peak. Just beyond is the water garden. The focal point is a rectangular lily pond flanked by topiary dolphins and a curvy-backed sea monster. I enter through the arch, just in time to catch a glimpse of a person going out the opposite end – a dark blur that is quickly gone. I peer around the topiary dolphins expecting to see the familiar wide-brimmed hat. ‘Grandmother?’ I call out again. ‘Are you there?’

  I’m almost at the other end of the garden when all of a sudden, I do spot the hat – lying on the ground behind the edge of the fountain and sprinkled with red petals. It’s only then that I spot my grandmother lying motionless on the grass. My heart freezes. The ‘petals’ on the hat are drops of crimson blood.

  ‘No!’ I scream, running towards her. I kneel down and fumble to remove her glove and feel for a pulse on her wrist. There’s a faint flicker beneath her blue-veined skin. A moment later, she begins to stir. ‘Don’t move, Grandma,’ I say. ‘I’ll get help.’ I grope in my jacket pocket for my mobile phone. But I forgot to put it in my pocket this morning after talking to Mum last night.

  ‘Help!’ I yell. I check my watch. There should be some visitors wandering through the gardens by now. I try again, ‘Help! I need an ambulance.’

  After what seems like time immemorial but is probably less than half a minute, a couple in matching tweed hats and Barbour waxed jackets come through the arch.

  ‘Can you go for help?’ I call out frantically. ‘There should be someone in the gift shop. My grandmother needs an ambulance.’

  But the couple goes one better. The woman reaches into her pocket and takes out a mobile phone. She rings 999 and hands the phone to me. The man bends over Mrs Fairchild and checks her pulse.

  By the time I’ve given the information to the ambulance dispatch, more people have come into the garden in response to my yelling. Having got there first, the tweed hat couple take charge of the scene. ‘Please keep back,’ the man shoos the onlookers. ‘Give her some space.’ The woman helps me to a bench. From another pocket of her raincoat, she produces a small thermos of tea.

  ‘Thank you for helping,’ I half-gasp, half-sob. I sip from the cup she hands me. The tea is hot and sweet. ‘I… I can’t lose her. I just can’t.’

  ‘There, there.’ The woman pats my hand. ‘Us oldies are tougher than we look.’

  ‘But there’s so much blood.’

  Blood. A chill wracks my body. So much blood. Based on what Mum told me, I have to assume my grandmother has the gene for haemophilia. But is she a carrier or a sufferer?

  ‘Here.’ Reaching into another pocket the woman takes out a silver flask and pours its contents into the tea. I take a sip, my face crumpling from the strong taste of brandy. The burning sensation in my throat is oddly calming.

  ‘Alex!’ Edith comes running into the garden, white-faced and stricken. Behind her, two paramedics in green uniforms come through the arch carrying a stretcher. ‘Is she going to be okay?’ Edith says.

  ‘I…’ I drown out my lack of an answer with another sip of brandy tea. Jumping up from the bench, I rush over to the paramedics and let them know that my grandmother may have a blood disorder.

  ‘Thanks for the heads-up,’ one of them says. ‘We’ll handle her carefully.’

  I hover as the paramedics load Mrs Fairchild onto the stretcher. The next few minutes are a blur of green and colour as I lead them out of the maze of bright beds and hedges, around to the front of the house where the ambulance is parked, its blue lights flashing. I bend over and kiss my grandma’s pale, cool cheek and summon a silent prayer from the murky depths of fear. The men load her into the back.

  ‘Do you want to ride along?’ one of the paramedics says to me.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, then hesitate as the next few hours of my life flash before my eyes. Sitting in a hospital waiting room wringing my hands – or – staying here and doing my job – managing the crowds, offering everyone a free cup of tea and a scone or a slice of cake the way my grandmother would have wanted…

  The decision is taken out of my hands as a police car pulls up. I turn to Edith who has stuck by me the whole time, her presence solid and comforting. ‘You go,’ I say to her. ‘I’ll need to make a statement.’ And make sure the culprit has left the premises, I don’t say. While I’m fairly sure that having accomplished what he set out to do, the ‘uninvited guest’ will have long scarpered, I have a duty to make sure that the visitors are safe. ‘I’ll come as soon as I can,’ I say.

  ‘Okay,’ Edith says. She climbs inside and the paramedic shuts the door.

  I turn away, tears flooding my eyes. The ambulance roars off with its siren wailing.

  - Chapter 45 -

  The next hour is an unpleasant blur. Somehow I manage to marshal the staff together to manage all the moving parts. While the visitors are being offered free tea and ten per cent off in the gift shop, I show the two policemen where I found my grandmother, and tell them that I saw a person in dark clothing leaving the garden at the other end towards the orchard. As they analyse the ‘scene’ and take the statements of Mr and Mrs Tweed Hat, I spill the beans on the fact that we’ve had an ‘uninvited guest’ about the place before.

  The older officer looks at me sharply. ‘And have you reported this “uninvited guest’s” activity to the police?’

  ‘No.’ I carefully avoid any recount of my arrest. ‘It just seemed like someone making mischief.’ I think of the upsetting diary entries, the cancelled grand opening, the ransacking of the attic, stealing the photo and my folder, and all of the other little pranks that seemed meant to annoy – or, at most, frighten – us. ‘That is, until now.’

  ‘And you say that you have security cameras?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I confirm. ‘But there are no cameras out here.’

  The older policeman closes his notebook as the younger one takes a picture of the place where my grandmother was found.

  ‘To be honest, Miss Hart,’ the older officer says, ‘I don’t think there’s much here to pursue. It seems most likely that your grandmother slipped and hit her head on the fountain.’

  ‘What?’ I gape at him, astonished. ‘No – someone hit her from behind. I told you, I saw someone leaving through the arch —’

  ‘I think we have all we need here.’

  ‘That’s it? You’re going?’

  The older man nods to his colleague. ‘Write this up as an isolated incident. Most likely an accident.’

  ‘But you’re wrong!’ I yell. ‘If she hit her head on the fountain, then where’s the blood?’

  ‘Make a note that the scene was contaminated prior to arrival,’ he says to the younger man.

  ‘You’re useless!’ Fury surges in my chest. ‘An elderly woman is attacked – practically murdered, and you say it’s an accident? She needs to be guarded – she could still be in danger.’

  ‘If anything else occurs, Miss Hart,’ the older policeman says, ‘I suggest you call us.’

  ‘Between you and me,’ I snap,
‘I don’t think I’ll bother.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Gesturing for his colleague to follow, he turns and walks out of the garden.

  I stay behind, struggling to compose myself. How dare the police be so dismissive of what happened? And what of the danger to my grandmother? I hurry back to my flat and get my mobile, then go back to the main house. I check that everything is okay at the gift shop and café, and then ring Edith at the hospital.

  ‘And they just did nothing?’ she says when I tell her what happened. ‘That’s appalling.’

  ‘You got that right,’ I say.

  She tells me that Mrs Fairchild has been seen by the doctor, and that she has a mild concussion. ‘She woke up briefly,’ she says. ‘But they gave her some morphine for the shock, and she’s sleeping now.’

  ‘They stopped the bleeding?’

  ‘Yes,’ Edith confirms. ‘Apparently it’s just a shallow wound. She’s going to be fine.’

  ‘Thank God.’ Silently, I do just that. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ve got to cover the gift shop at lunchtime, so I should be there around half one.’

  ‘Okay,’ Edith says. ‘I’ll call you if there’s any change before then.’

  I hang up, feeling a little better. Then I call Chris, just needing to hear his voice. But I only get his voicemail. I leave a message asking him to call me.

  At lunchtime I cover the gift shop, answering questions about whether the nettle soap is hypoallergenic, which Horrible Histories book I recommend for a ‘grand niece’, and whether I can order a pair of men’s Scottie dog wellies in a size 13. As I’m in the middle of ringing up a Tudor-house-shaped tea cosy, my mobile rings next to the till. I jump about two feet in the air before grabbing it, expecting it to be Chris, or maybe Edith. At that thought, panic sets in. Has my grandmother taken a turn for the worst?