The Secret of Nightingale Wood

by Lucy Strange

  Father raised his eyebrows quizzically.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Pickersgill replied, with a smile. ‘I do apologize, Miss Abbott.’ He turned towards Father. ‘Your daughter came to tell me something and I was rather blunt, I’m afraid. It was – shocking news, you see, and I was convinced that she was wrong . . . But it turns out that she was right.’ He looked back at me and smiled again. ‘Mrs Berry came to see me first thing this morning. This news is – not unrelated to the reason for my visit, as a matter of fact.’

  I held my breath. Was he going to tell Father everything? That I had befriended a person believed to be dead . . . That the late Mrs Young was actually alive – and living in our woods?

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about your requested extension of the tenancy contract, Mr Abbott. I feel obliged to warn you that there is a possibility that Hope House may not be available for rent in the future.’

  Father frowned.

  ‘The legal owner has recently . . . come to light, shall we say, and it is not impossible that, in time, she may choose to live here once more.’

  Moth, he was talking about Moth. How wonderful it would be for her to return to Hope House – but how terrible if we had to leave . . .

  ‘I thought you said the house was owned by people in Ireland,’ Father said.

  ‘Yes. Well, it was until – I mean, technically it still is . . . Oh dear, I’m afraid it’s rather complicated. The legal owner was thought to be dead, you see. She disappeared in 1916, after her son was killed in the war, but it seems . . .’ He shrugged, and his smile was helpless but undeniably happy. ‘It seems that she is alive after all.’

  ‘She disappeared after her son’s death?’ Father’s words were quite haunting. Perhaps he was thinking of Mama.

  ‘Yes. She always said that he was her whole world. He was her son.’

  Father nodded, confused. The point seemed obvious.

  ‘No – her sun,’ Mr Pickersgill repeated. He gestured to the summer sky outside the window.

  Father’s jaw tightened and, with a flutter of dismay, I saw that he was trying not to cry.

  Quickly, and with an air of apology, Mr Pickersgill chose this moment to reread one of the documents he had brought with him. He muttered about the complexities of property law, all the while keeping his eyes glued to the paper. Father stared at the window, breathing and blinking.

  I allowed myself to be soothed by the sound of Mr Pickersgill’s voice, and my thoughts turned to Mama. Father was going to take her to Doctor Berger’s hospital in London that afternoon. I tried to erase the images of Helldon that haunted my mind: locked doors, barred windows, dark corridors. I tried to paint over these horrors with what Father had told me about his friend’s new clinic in Bloomsbury: open windows, books, gentle voices . . .

  After a minute, and with a quick glance at Father, Mr Pickersgill brought his rambling to an end. He shuffled his papers, stood up, and smiled warmly at us both. He twinkled kindly and said, ‘The owner’s wishes are not known at present, Mr Abbott, but I will keep you informed about any developments. The house is, of course, yours until the end of October, as per the original tenancy agreement. If it transpires that you need to find another property in the area after that, I shall do everything I possibly can to help you and your family.’

  Father thanked him. I saw how grateful he was for Mr Pickersgill’s tact and kindness. I saw that they might, perhaps, become good friends.

  ‘And now,’ started Mr Pickersgill, ‘I need to talk to your daughter concerning . . . a mutual friend of ours. Shall we take a turn around the garden, Miss Abbott?’

  Father smiled a pleasantly confused smile, and looked at me with surprise and pride. He shook Mr Pickersgill’s hand, turned back to his desk, and started opening a pile of letters.

  ‘So, you believe me now?’ I said as we stepped through the kitchen door and out on to the terrace. ‘You believe that Moth is Mrs Young?’ It was a bright morning, with a fresh breeze. A flotilla of white clouds sailed across the broad blue sky. We walked side by side down the length of the lawn.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Mr Pickersgill conceded, keeping his eyes on his shoes. Then he smiled drily. ‘Mrs Berry told me all about your mysterious Aunt Susan.’

  I blushed. I tried to keep step with him as we headed towards the pond. The lawn felt deliciously cool beneath my bare feet. I scrunched my toes through the dew-damp grass. We sat down on the moss-covered bench.

  ‘I wasn’t just the family solicitor, you know. I tutored her boy, Alfred,’ Mr Pickersgill said. ‘Did I tell you that before, when you—? No, perhaps I didn’t.’

  ‘No, you didn’t tell me,’ I said.

  ‘Freddie was an ambitious boy – when he was about twelve he decided that he wanted to become an admiral in the Navy. His mother asked me to help him with his school work in the holidays. After I had taught Freddie, Niamh and I would sit together in the library and talk – about books usually . . . We became very good friends.’

  ‘Niamh?’ I had never heard the name before.

  ‘Niamh.’ He said it again so I could pronounce it properly: ‘Nee-uhv.’ It was a strange and lovely word. Niamh. Not Moth. Niamh Young.

  ‘It’s an Irish name,’ Mr Pickersgill said. ‘It means bright. Radiant.’

  It was perfect for her.

  Mr Pickersgill shook his head, but he kept talking. Perhaps he felt the same compulsion I did: the same desire for things to finally make sense – to connect.

  ‘We became close. A bit like a family really. The family I never had. But when I returned from the war last winter, they were both gone. Both of them.’

  Mr Pickersgill was grasping a brown envelope in his hands and it was becoming crushed and dog-eared as he spoke. I took it from him, gently, and smoothed the corners.

  He drew in a long, deep breath.

  ‘In the space of just a few years – while I was stuck in that hell – Freddie grew up and went to war, and Niamh vanished from the face of the earth.’

  ‘When Mrs Young disappeared,’ I said, ‘she left a note?’

  Mr Pickersgill nodded. ‘It said she couldn’t go on and asked me to look after Hope House. After the coroner’s verdict the house was passed to her family – distant cousins in Ireland – but I took care of all the administration and maintenance. They wanted to sell it, but I persuaded them not to. Ridiculous really . . . Part of me refused to believe she had gone. Hope is a funny thing, Miss Abbott. If you cling on to it for too long, it can become something cruel.’

  ‘But you were right,’ I said. ‘You were right to hope.’

  ‘To think that all that time . . .’ He shook his head, slowly. ‘She was so near . . . If I’d only known . . .’

  We were both quiet for a while, our eyes moving from the murky pond to the colourful chaos of the flower beds, the ruins of the gazebo, and finally to Hope House itself, shambolic and beautiful, leaning slightly towards us, as if it were a friendly eavesdropper.

  ‘Freddie was the closest thing to a son I ever had,’ Mr Pickersgill said, with a smile. ‘And – well, with his father having died so young, he became very attached to me too. He used to call me Oncle Fidèle.’

  ‘Fidèle? That means faithful, doesn’t it? Loyal?’

  ‘Oncle Fidèle was a little joke of Freddie’s. Just a little joke, but it stuck somehow. Fidèle was his schoolboy-French translation of my Christian name.’

  Truman Pickersgill. True man. I smiled. Freddie and Robert would have got along very well together.

  Mr Pickersgill had taken the envelope back from me and was staring at it now. He seemed nervous. There was something he wasn’t telling me.

  ‘I was hoping you would take me to see her, Henrietta,’ he said. ‘There is a great deal of paperwork to do with the Hope House estate,’ he said. Then he looked me in the eye. ‘And there is something else too . . .’

  As we entered the woods, I saw that the spindle tree at the edge of the forest was already starting to ripen its bright red fruit, and I won
dered how long it would be before the whole tree was ablaze with autumn colour. Not long, perhaps. The summer was almost over.

  It was cool beneath the shade of the trees, and quiet, too. I pulled my cardigan tightly around myself, stepping carefully on the path with my bare feet. A breeze pushed and pulled at the leaves of the outermost trees so that they said, ‘Shhhh, shhhh,’ and everything beyond them obeyed. The birds were silent. Nothing could be heard apart from the tread of our four rather mis matched feet. I realized that I had not hesitated even for a moment before entering the darkness of the woods. It seemed that I was not the slightest bit afraid any more.

  Mr Pickersgill, on the other hand, was behaving very strangely. He kept checking his watch and looking over his shoulder, as if to see if someone was following us. What had he meant by ‘there is something else too’? He had refused to explain.

  ‘Is everything all right, Mr Pickersgill?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Quite all right,’ he said, clearing his throat nervously. ‘This is just – a little odd. I don’t know what I shall say to her.’

  ‘I’m sure you will know when you see her,’ I said. ‘You were good friends, after all. She’s still the same person.’

  ‘But how could she possibly be the same person?’ he asked, looking all around. ‘Imagine three years on your own . . . Three winters in this forest . . . It would change you into a different creature entirely.’

  I understood. But for me it was the other way around: it was Moth I knew; Niamh Young was the unknowable creature.

  ‘Have you changed that much?’ I asked, carefully pinching a stray bramble and moving it from our path.

  ‘War changes people,’ he said, after a moment. ‘War and loneliness . . .’ I looked back at him and saw the corners of his mouth lift a little. ‘But, now that you mention it, Miss Abbott, I do believe that, somewhere deep down inside, I feel exactly as I did when I was your age. Perhaps there is a part of us that always remains true.’

  Moth was sitting beside her fire, singing to herself and darning holes in a particularly threadbare blanket.

  ‘Your father is home, Henrietta,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He is.’ And I felt a wave of joy surge through me at the thought of his return.

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Getting stronger,’ I said.

  She smiled her crooked smile and held her hands out to me. Then she noticed that I wasn’t alone.

  Mr Pickersgill walked into the centre of the clearing and stood quite still, waiting. Moth didn’t say anything at all, and neither did I. I sat down beside the fire. Mr Pickersgill shuffled awkwardly, then he folded his long legs and sat down next to me. His trousers rode up to reveal a pair of bony shins clad in brightly patterned socks. I saw that he was shaking, and he clasped his knees tightly. Moth’s eyes followed his every movement.

  We were all silent.

  Somewhere in the depths of the forest, a woodpecker drilled at a hollow tree.

  Mr Pickersgill looked at the papers, and they quivered in his hand. He nodded and cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet I could barely hear it over the popping of the fire.

  ‘Hello, Niamh,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Truman,’ Moth replied softly.

  ‘When Miss Abbott told me she thought Mrs Young was living here, in the woods, I said, No, Mrs Young died three ago. She is dead. Her name is on a gravestone. I put flowers . . .’ His voice broke and he stopped. He looked into Moth’s eyes for the first time.

  My heart tightened and I held my breath.

  ‘I put flowers. . .’ he said again, hoarsely.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Moth said. ‘I’m so sorry, Truman. After Freddie – I just couldn’t . . .’

  They stared at each other for a moment, heartbreak brimming in their eyes.

  ‘I know,’ Mr Pickersgill said at last. ‘I understand.’ He leant forward and passed her the envelope, taking her hand for a moment. ‘There is money that is yours, Niamh,’ he said. ‘A house that is yours. You can come home now.’

  She shook her head. ‘That house is no good to me.’

  ‘You can’t spend another winter alone in the woods,’ I said. ‘Mr Pickersgill just wants to—’

  ‘My answer is no, Henrietta. It’s hard here in winter, very hard, but – how could I just go back? I’ve been dead for three years – I can’t go back.’

  I didn’t understand what she meant. She had been so brave. She had left the woods and walked to Helldon. She had confronted Doctor Hardy . . .

  ‘It was different at Helldon,’ she said, reading my mind. ‘I was playing a part. To help you, Henrietta. It wasn’t real life, was it? That’s the difference. And when Hardy recognized me, I . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t just go back to being Mrs Young of Hope House, paying the butcher’s bill and chatting with the postman as if nothing ever happened. I don’t know how to be that person any more. I’ve been free. I’ve been part of the forest . . .’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Hope House is my past, Henrietta. My last memories of that place are terrible – lonely, haunted . . . But your family have a future there. You can be happy – you and your parents and your little sister.’

  ‘Please, Niamh,’ Mr Pickersgill said. ‘Just think about it.’

  Moth sighed, and then opened the brown envelope.

  It was a wad of paper: copies of property deeds, lists of accounts, statements from a bank.

  ‘I will take care of everything,’ Mr Pickersgill said quietly, trying not to make her angry. ‘I promise to be discreet . . . No fuss or fanfare.’

  Moth shuffled through the papers, shaking her head.

  ‘This all belongs to me?’ she said, and I thought that something was softening.

  ‘Yes – all of it.’

  ‘Then it is mine to do with as I please.’

  Mr Pickersgill looked flustered.

  Moth just shook her head, smiled her crooked smile and said firmly, ‘I’m not going back there, Truman.’

  She put the papers down on the ground and went back to her darning.

  I looked at the pile of documents. The deeds for Hope House were on the top, but they seemed to be attached to another set of deeds. I picked them up and looked more closely: Gamekeeper’s Cottage, Frith Meadow.

  ‘You own that old house?’ I said. ‘At the edge of the forest?’ It was the tumbledown cottage I had found on the day I had got so lost.

  ‘It was part of the Hope House estate,’ Moth said. ‘An old ruin – just like me.’ And she smiled again.

  ‘But you could live there,’ I said. ‘If you wanted to, I mean . . . You would be with the birds and the animals, still part of the forest, still miles away from anybody, but you would be safe and warm. It would be a proper home for you.’

  Mr Pickersgill nodded encouragingly. ‘A wonderful idea! I could get it all fixed up for you to move into before the winter comes . . .’

  Moth looked at the ramshackle caravan, with its rotten roof and dirty, broken windows. Then she nodded very slowly. ‘All right, then,’ she said at last. ‘Thank you.’

  Mr Pickersgill took the pile of documents from me, satisfied. ‘And there’s something else, Niamh,’ he said. His voice had changed slightly.

  Moth watched him, wary. ‘Something else?’ Then Moth quickly moved her head and stared into the forest behind me. Her face froze. I heard dead leaves crunching, twigs snapping.

  Someone was coming.

  There was a thump behind us as Moth’s cat leapt up on to the roof of the caravan, his thin body arched with fear. He hissed. He was staring at something I couldn’t yet see, something moving towards us through the trees . . .

  Then I saw it. A dark shape twisting through the shadows. A stick, a black boot, a dark collar turned up over the jaw of a white face.

  It was the limping man.

  My skin prickled with fear – he had hunted us down – the limping man had found us. I had thought this man was D
octor Chilvers, but I had been wrong. Who was he, then? I wanted to run away; I wanted to scream at him to leave us alone. I wanted to throw stones.

  Before I had a chance to do anything at all, the limping man came into the clearing. Mr Pickersgill stood up, walked over to him and shook his hand. Then they came towards us and Moth stood up too, slightly crouched, like an animal ready to leap into the undergrowth.

  ‘Mrs Young?’ the limping man said.

  Moth’s mouth twitched, ready to deny it. She hesitated, looked at Mr Pickersgill, then nodded.

  I saw the man’s face properly for the first time – the predatory, hooded eyes, the missing eyebrows, the skin pulled tightly across his features like a mask. And then I understood. His face was scarred. He had been badly burnt.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know quite how to begin,’ he said. His voice was not the voice of a deranged doctor or a cruel predator at all – it was much more gentle than I was expecting. ‘My name is David Stark. Please forgive my intrusion, Mrs Young. I have been looking for you for some time now. But I was told that you were – that you had died.’

  ‘Ah. Yes,’ Moth said, somewhat unhelpfully.

  David Stark continued: ‘Mr Pickersgill contacted me at my hotel—’

  ‘A little hotel by the sea?’ I asked, interrupting him. ‘With pine trees and sand dunes and blue-green grass?’ He nodded, confused.

  ‘I saw you there,’ I said, a note of accusation in my voice. ‘And I saw you at Hope House too.’

  He nodded again but he didn’t seem to remember seeing me. I wasn’t sure he even saw me now. He turned back to Moth.

  ‘Perhaps we should sit down,’ he said. He waited until everyone had settled themselves by the fire again. Then he took a deep breath. ‘I’m here because of Freddie, Mrs Young. I served with your son in the Navy.’

  Moth’s pale face became even paler. ‘You . . . knew my Freddie?’ she whispered.

  ‘In the Navy, yes,’ he said. ‘We were very good friends.’

  ‘Friends.’ Moth nodded, her mouth open.

  ‘I wanted to find you. I was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, you see, until the end of the war, and I’ve been in hospital since then . . .’ He gestured towards his leg with a half-smile. ‘I was in something of a state when they sent me home.’