“Yes, you do,” he said, newly contrite, unsmiling, staring back at her. “Always.”
“It’s important for a Theosophist to give back and to forgive,” she said, walking on.
Stephen smiled. “Remind me again what it’s all about.”
“It’s about the reciprocal effects the universe and humanity have on each other . . . the connectness of the external world and inner experience,” she said, stopping to pick up a tiny piece of bark and looking at it closely. “To acquire wisdom one has to examine nature in its smallest detail . . . Like this,” she said, stretching out her hand.
He took the bark, stared at it for a moment or two, then looked back at her. “What wisdom is there to be gleaned from this?”
“That’s for you to find out.”
He put it inside his jacket pocket and they walked on beneath the pines, then out into the beautiful wild expanse, following the old packhorse tracks of smugglers, sandy pathways through tall gorse and dark holly, juniper and thorn. Daisy spoke at length about what she had read of the case in the preceding days’ newspapers, pausing every once in a while to summarize her conclusions or pose a question to herself or simply to stare out across the wilderness and say, “Hmm, I wonder . . .”
It was shortly after midday when they sat down on the wall under the stunted tree by the deserted cottage some three miles from Eden Hall. Daisy lifted two hard-boiled eggs from the canvas fishing-tackle bag she had worn strapped across her, as well as a bottle of Mrs. Jessop’s homemade ginger beer.
“So very peculiar,” she said for the umpteenth time. “No sign of a struggle . . . no ransom . . . no body . . . no witnesses,” she went on. “And yet, I can’t help but feel the answer’s right in front of us all.”
Stephen said nothing.
Other than a child’s shoe—which, for some reason, Daisy had picked up and put into her bag—and, here and there, the remains of campfires and discarded bottles, they had found nothing. They had passed some of the other searchers, heading back in the direction of Eden Hall and shaking their heads, and walked through a small gypsy encampment where a grubby-faced boy had raised his hands to his ears and stuck his tongue out at them.
“Perhaps she’s taken a turn, like Noonie,” Stephen said, using the family’s nickname for Daisy’s grandmother, Mabel Forbes’s mother. “Perhaps she’s suffering from amnesia.”
Daisy turned to him. “But Mrs. Christie’s not old. She’s younger than my mother.”
“Just a thought . . . and I hope for your sake it’s not what I think it is. Otherwise, she’s made a bit of a laughingstock of us all.”
Daisy shook her head. She passed him the brown bottle. “This,” she said, “is no publicity stunt, Stephen, I can assure you. It’s gone beyond anything like that.”
They sat in silence for a while, peeling hard-boiled eggs, flicking small pieces of shell onto the sandy earth around them.
“You’re not still thinking of emigrating, are you?” Daisy asked.
It was an idea Stephen had only recently mentioned to her. He’d told her that he’d seen advertisements offering help with one’s passage to New Zealand, as well as help with finance to set up a farm.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “What do you think?”
“I told you, I think it’s an awful idea,” she said quickly. “Think how sad your mother would be.”
“And you?”
“Yes, and me . . . I’d hate it if you weren’t here.”
“Because?”
“Because,” she said, smiling back at him, “who would there be to annoy me?”
“I’m sure you’d find someone.”
High above, two birds fought with each other, ducking and diving, moving in circles, squawking loudly in the otherwise silent valley.
“I think it’s an awful idea,” Daisy said again. “To leave your home and go off to the other side of the world.”
Stephen turned to her. “But it’s not my home. It’s your home, and my parents’ home, I suppose. I don’t really know where I fit in here.”
“I thought you were happy, thought you loved this place.”
He nodded. “I do, I do, but . . . well, it’s hard to explain and probably impossible for you to understand.”
“Try me,” she said, reaching over and taking the bottle from his hand.
He sighed, pulled out his packet of tobacco and cigarette papers. “It’s complicated,” he said. “But I imagine I might feel differently if I’d known my real parents.”
“Ah, I see,” said Daisy, as though it all made perfect sense to her now.
“It’s not that I’m unhappy,” he said, glancing up at her.
“What is it, then?” she asked, watching his fingers roll the tobacco.
He shrugged. “Just the not knowing, I suppose.”
“I’ve told you before, you should ask your mother.”
Stephen shook his head. “I can’t. She’s never raised the subject with me, and I don’t want to upset her, don’t want her to think I need something more, or that she’s not been a good mother to me, because she has and I love her dearly,” he added, lighting his cigarette. “I love both my parents.”
“Then you can’t leave them. I know it would break your mother’s heart if you sailed off to another continent. She’d never see you again. You’d never see her.”
“Perhaps . . . perhaps,” he said, nodding, pondering, looking downward. “But I can’t stay here. Not if I want to do something with my life,” he added, looking up at Daisy.
By the time they set off back in the direction of Eden Hall, Daisy had forgotten about Mrs. Christie’s disappearance. The only disappearance she could think of was Stephen’s: suggested, impending and hanging in the damp, pine-scented air between them. But it was impossible for her to imagine the world—her world—without him in it.
To Daisy, Stephen Jessop belonged more to that place than she and her sisters, or even her mother and father. He knew every pathway, each copse and dell. Together, they had pioneered the woodland, fields and valleys around them. Together, they had named every plant and tree. He had been the one to teach her which mushrooms were poisonous and which were not, and about didicoys and travelers, and the legends of the Devil’s Punchbowl. He’d risked his life climbing up trees, crawling along branches, just to bring down a nest or eggs to show her; been the one who’d taken her to see the fox cubs and watch the badger set at dusk, the one who’d made her a slingshot and shown her how to use it, and the one who’d given her three marbles, a jar of tadpoles and a hawk-moth caterpillar for her tenth birthday.
And Stephen knew everyone, too, even those passing through, like the tramp who had once marched up and down at the crossroads with a stick on his shoulder, sometimes shouting up at the sky. Another casualty of the war, Stephen had explained.
“He thinks his name’s Fletch, but he can’t remember much else.”
“You mean he doesn’t know where he lives?” Daisy had asked.
“Where he lived,” Stephen had corrected her. “No, he can’t recall where he’s from, or where he was before the war, but he thinks it may have begun with a B. Of course, he thinks he’s still in the army, on duty, which is why he marches up and down like that. He’s keeping watch.”
“But he might have a family somewhere . . . looking for him.”
“Or more likely presuming him dead.”
Daisy had suggested that perhaps Captain Clark could help Fletch, but Stephen had said he didn’t think so, that Captain Clark, too, was “damaged.”
Captain Clark lived in the same lodgings as old Mrs. Reed, the former cook at Eden Hall, and was another who walked in that soldierly way, following a line, lifting his feet a little too high, his arms straight down by his sides. Daisy had seen plenty of war veterans, particularly up in town, where they slept on park benches and sat about on the pa
vement or in wheelchairs outside tube stations, selling matches or begging. And even those with limbs—without any obvious physical injury—were easy enough to spot because of that walk . . . or the strange haunted look in their eyes . . . or the tics.
It had been the previous winter, when food was disappearing from the larder and Nancy, the housekeeper, had told Mabel and Mabel had told Daisy and Daisy knew that it was Stephen—taking it for Fletch, because she had been the one to suggest it—that Captain Clark shot himself. He had gone in to lunch as usual, then gone for his constitutional up on the hill and put a bullet in his head. Mrs. Jessop had said it was sad but at least he had no family and hadn’t done it in poor Mrs. Reed’s earshot (which, and regardless of the pun, struck Daisy as a stupid remark because everyone knew Mrs. Reed was quite deaf). It had been in the newspaper, and there had been an inquest, which told them what they all knew anyway: that it had been suicide resulting from “unsound mind.” Shortly after that, Fletch had disappeared.
Long before Fletch, during the war, Stephen had attended lessons in the schoolroom with Daisy and a few other local children. And he had been included in every birthday party, each nursery tea: teas with the ruddy-faced, tartan-clad cousins from Scotland, and teas with the silent children recently moved to the area whom Daisy’s mother had taken a shine to. “New friends!” Mabel would say, clapping her hands together. Those had been the worst teas: tense affairs with spilled drinks and red faces and curious, resentful stares.
And then there were the pea-flicking, bread-throwing children from London.
They weren’t all orphans, Stephen had explained; some of them had parents, but they were too poor to look after them. These children had continued to come each summer during the war, and for a few years after it, sleeping in the night nursery—turned into a dormitory—at the top of the house, a different group each year. They were anything but silent. They came through windows rather than use doors and slid down the banisters rather than use the stairs. They loved fighting and swearing and climbing—walls, trees, drainpipes and the greenhouse roof, until two of them fell through. They all had nits, and rivulets of green running from their noses to their mouths, wiped onto their sleeves. Almost all of them smoked, and they liked to start fires and give people frights, and they were always hungry. “Bleedin’ starvin’,” they said, each day, at every time of day.
Everyone’s nerves were frayed to tatters by the time they left. But Stephen had been the go-between, able to understand them as well as he did Daisy and her sisters.
Even now, Daisy often thought of Janet Greenwell, whose head had been shaved and whose sad little legs were paler and thinner than any Daisy had ever seen. And she remembered the crippled boy, Neville, a caliper on his leg and such thick lenses in his spectacles that they made his eyes appear small. “Crippled Chinky,” the others had called him, shouted after him as he limped off up the brick pathway of the walled garden.
Only once had Daisy summoned the courage to confront them, only once had she shouted back at them that they were cruel bullies and then gone after Neville, whom she’d found slumped next to the rabbit hutch, his stiff leg stretched out in front of him, like a war veteran—but without any medals for bravery.
“They don’t mean to be vile; they’re just ignorant,” she’d said, sitting down next to him on the grass, longing to wrap her arms round him. He’d not said anything, had quietly wept, wiping his nose on his gray shirtsleeve, staring through his thick spectacles at his useless leg.
The day before Neville left, Daisy gave him the book she had won at the flower show for her vegetable animal (a horse, made from potato, carrots and peas, with ribbons of cucumber peel for its mane and tail, had earned her second prize and a “highly commended” badge from the judges). She had thought long and hard about which book to give him but plumped for A Shropshire Lad mainly because of that word, lad. Inside, she wrote, “Dear Neville, I hope I’ll see you again and that you’ll come back here one day without the others. Yours, Daisy M. Forbes.” When she told Stephen, he’d shaken her hand and told her that she was the kindest person he knew.
Always, after these children had gone, Eden Hall returned to its usual quiet and calm. It was a place of order and routine and of bells—to announce breakfast or lessons or lunch; the dressing bell, the dinner bell, each day had been punctuated by that sound. Months, seasons and years had passed and the bell still sounded. For Daisy, little had changed. But the thought of Eden Hall without Stephen, the idea of his not being there, of never seeing him again . . .
No, Stephen couldn’t emigrate, Daisy thought, watching him walk on ahead of her, pulling back gorse and holly and brambles as they made their way through thickets and knee-high heather. She would speak to her father, she decided; wait until he was home for Christmas, find the right time and speak to him about all of this then. After all, he’d been the one to sort the legalities of Stephen’s adoption, and he might even be able to offer Stephen a job at the factory . . . Either way, she concluded, her father would know what to do. He always did.
Chapter Two
Situated in a quiet enclave of the Surrey Hills known as Little Switzerland, Eden Hall was one of a number of newer mansions hidden from sight. Tall hedges, trees and banks of rhododendrons screened it from traffic passing along the road to its south, but its gated entrance and long curving driveway hinted at what lay beyond.
In autumn and winter, the house and its gardens were often lost, engulfed by the swirling mists and low cloud. But in early spring, when the mists cleared and before the trees were covered with leaves, a few of the upper rooms at Eden Hall commanded spectacular views across three counties: Surrey, to the north and east; Sussex, to the south; and Hampshire, to the west.
Howard Forbes claimed that, on a clear day, beyond the distant northerly ridge known as the Hog’s Back, one could even make out the dome of St. Paul’s—though more often than not, the only visible sign of the capital was the dense smog belched up from the city’s multitudinous chimneys and factories. But somewhere on that murky horizon stood a street named Clanricarde Gardens and the Forbes family’s London home: a stucco-fronted town house Howard had inherited at twenty-two years of age.
Eden Hall was different. For Howard, it represented his own achievements, the culmination of and testament to his hard work: his dream, his vision, built with the proceeds from his thriving business, Forbes and Sons. The company, passed down through three generations, manufactured white lead, oil paint and varnish at its large factory at Forbes’s Wharf in Ratcliff, Middlesex. Its products included special anticorrosive paints and antioxidation compositions for ships, as well as their famous patented white zinc paint, which was claimed not to stain or discolor.
At the dawn of the new century, shortly before his marriage and as a thirtieth birthday present to himself, Howard had purchased his acreage in Surrey, which included an old farm. Later, standing on the lofty site clutching the hand of his eighteen-year-old bride, Mabel, and with an emerging local architect named Edwin Lutyens, Howard Forbes had looked out over the far-reaching views and explained his vision to Mr. Lutyens: a substantial country house with impressive lines, tall chimneys and immense gabled rooftops. He had stipulated windows, lots of them—round ones, square ones, large and small—and doors a giant could walk through. He wanted something future generations could be proud of.
Howard got what he wanted: a grand country house in the medieval vernacular style, and with its double-height entrance hall, sweeping staircase and oak paneling, double-height drawing room and oriel windows, the place was every bit as impressive as Howard Forbes’s vision. And yet there was some humbleness about the place, too, Howard thought, for Mr. Lutyens had used only locally sourced timber, stone and bricks and had retained a few of the old barns and cottages from the original farm.
Despite its appearance, inside, Eden Hall was modern—twentieth-century modern: It had electricity, central heating and two bathrooms, w
ith running hot water, flushing lavatories and William De Morgan ceramic tiles. But it had been Mabel who’d been responsible for the interior decor, for the Morris & Co. bedroom wallpapers and curtains and for the velvets and silks and hand-printed linens. She had chosen every paint color and textile, each item of furniture. And having put her own stamp on the place, and with a natural preference for country living anyhow, Mabel decided early on to make Eden Hall the family’s primary residence.
Mabel had grown up in the country; it was what she knew, where she felt happiest and most comfortable. Howard, she said—and thought—would be able to divide his time between London and Eden Hall, and while he was working, she would throw herself into creating that home, a country idyll: a place her husband could escape to from the stresses and strains of the city, a place where their children could grow up with space and fresh air in abundance. She would, she’d conceded, visit London—particularly during the season, and particularly if they had daughters. They had both laughed at this.
Howard and Mabel had been fully committed to having a large family, and Howard—like any normal man, he’d said—wanted sons and needed them to carry on the business he had taken over from his father. But of the eight babies Mabel had conceived and the four she had carried to full term, only the three girls survived. Howard’s longed-for son and heir, born prematurely during the war and named Theo, after Howard’s father, had clung to life for only seven weeks.
But Howard and Mabel’s plans had been fulfilled, in part. For while Howard spent his weekdays in the city, Mabel had remained with her daughters at Eden Hall, establishing a home—that country idyll they had both longed for—managing the house and gardens and staff and attending to her charity work. And when Iris, their eldest daughter, moved out, Mabel’s mother moved in. Now newly married Lily also lived in London and only Daisy remained at home.
Like the interior of the house, the gardens at Eden Hall were a testament to Mabel. For a quarter of a century she had helped seed, sow and water; watched and waited. And, like Mabel, Eden Hall and its gardens had matured. The house’s honey-hued stone had mellowed to a silvery gray and its garden’s once inadequate shrubs had taken on more voluptuous shapes. The landscape overflowed with rhododendrons and hardy shrubbery, softened by the billowing herbaceous borders and broad, sweeping south lawns, where a gritted terrace stood guard like a moat between man and nature. And the Japanese garden, with its drooping wisteria, azaleas, bamboo and acers, its pond with water lilies, miniature stone bridge and stone lanterns, was Mabel’s pride and joy, and only just coming into its own, she claimed.
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