A Place of Secrets

by Rachel Hore

  “You don’t have a particular routine, do you?” Jude observed. “After all, you said you’re up half the night sometimes.”

  “Yes, what with stars and moths and bats. I’ve been told I’m incredibly annoying to live with,” he said. “Not least by Carla, my ex-wife. We married very young and then … Well, we found we wanted different things in life.” He smiled, but there was a ruefulness about the smile that made Jude wonder. “It’s not good for a sense of routine for me to live alone. I’m awake at odd hours, writing when I feel like it. Then someone might ring up and invite me to go and do something interesting that means I’m away for a couple of days and I have to find someone to come and feed the animals at no notice … Oh, by the way, I let that rabbit go yesterday. I took him to a warren near where I found him, and turned him loose.”

  “How did he do?”

  “He scuttled over to his brothers and sisters and started eating grass. No hesitation. Anyway, it’s amazing really that those books get written at all. But they have to be or the bills wouldn’t get paid.”

  “Do you have to go and do talks and so on?” Jude asked.

  “Oh yes, plenty of that,” he said. “And the journalism. Especially when a new book is out. Shall we wander back now?”

  They walked in silence for a while, and as if at the thought of returning to civilization, the whirl of anxiety started up in Jude’s mind once more. Euan was stopping every now and then to inspect the insect life behind a piece of bark or to listen to the cry of some bird. When she became aware that he was looking at her, Jude turned with a smile and said, “What? I’m not part of the wildlife!”

  “Of course you’re not,” he said, looking embarrassed. “It’s just that sometimes you look so sad.” He spoke lightly, but his expression, usually calm and confident, was suddenly vulnerable, as though she’d touched something in him.

  “Do I?” she said. “I’m sorry. There seems a great deal to be sad or worried about at the moment.”

  “I wondered … forgive me. Claire told me about you losing your husband. That must be extremely difficult to recover from.”

  She realized then that they hadn’t spoken of the matter properly before.

  “It was. It is,” she said. “There are so many people, kind people who love me, telling me I’ve got to move on. But … I can’t…” she trailed off. “It’s as though … I don’t know, I haven’t had the courage.” She laughed, not very convincingly. “I expect I will, one day.”

  He nodded, and she was relieved that he didn’t mutter some cliché about time healing things.

  “Actually, though, I wasn’t thinking about Mark just now. I was thinking about Summer and what on earth to do.”

  “Oh, Jude, I’ve been worrying about her, too. Claire was explaining the latest. I wish I’d never taken her to the folly now, but I’ve never had a hint of a suspicion of anything about it myself, so how was I to guess?”

  “I don’t think you can blame yourself, Euan. But it certainly makes me want to unravel this mystery as quickly as I can because perhaps then I can help her.”

  “How are you getting on with the necklace story?”

  “Not very far. Gran’s told me a bit more about a boy who used to bully the gypsy girl, but that’s all. I meant to tell you, she used to keep the necklace under the floorboards in your house. You didn’t find any other hidden treasures, did you, when the bedrooms were being renovated?”

  He shook his head. “No, and the men didn’t mention anything. Tell me more about this other gypsy girl.”

  Jude filled him in on the bits of Tamsin’s story she had been able to get out of Gran.

  “I’d like to meet your gran,” said Euan, letting the millipede escape, and standing up. “Seeing as she was brought up in my house. Claire’s talked about her a lot and it sounds as though she must have a few good stories to tell.”

  The second mention of Claire for some reason irritated Jude and she said impetuously, “Why don’t you come with me this afternoon, then? You might have better luck with Gran than I’m having.”

  * * *

  Jude rang Gran at lunchtime to ask if it was all right if she brought someone, but when they got to Blakeney she rather wished she hadn’t mentioned that she was bringing Euan. Gran had clearly gone to a great deal of trouble to prepare for him, donning the pretty blue frock she’d worn at her birthday party and buying two kinds of cake from the village store.

  “He seems very nice,” Gran whispered to her in the kitchen where Jude was helping her with the tea. Even the best teapot was ready, and a set of dainty tea plates.

  “He is, Gran, and it’s awfully kind of him to help us look for Tamsin.”

  “Very kind,” said Gran, giving her granddaughter a worried smile. “You are looking after that necklace, aren’t you?” she asked. “I wouldn’t like to think of anyone else having it.”

  “I’ve got it here, Gran,” Jude said patiently, indicating her handbag. Later she took it out and laid it on the table and Euan, who hadn’t seen it before, couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  “How do you think your Tamsin got hold of it in the first place?” he asked Jessie over tea. “It’s a very valuable thing for a small girl to have.”

  “She said her grandmother had given it to her, that it had been passed down through the family for years. It had never been sold, she told me, because it carried very good luck. They’d kept it safe, but no one knew where it had come from originally.”

  “Why would she have hidden it in the folly? I’m a bit confused because you also said that she wore it a lot.”

  “Gran,” Jude said suddenly, “why did it get left in the folly? We found the hiding place in the upstairs room, did I say?”

  “Yes, you did. We left presents for each other sometimes, and once when I borrowed the necklace I left it there for her to find.”

  “And did she find it?”

  “Yes, she did that time.”

  Jude and Euan exchanged looks. They weren’t getting very far with this line of inquiry, and Gran was crumbling a piece of cake on her plate, agitated. Jude changed the subject, asking her grandmother if she’d heard from her daughter in Spain. Yes, Valerie had rung a day or two ago. “She’s complaining about how hot it is,” Gran said. “I told her before she went, but she never listens. Never did, you know.”

  “Oh, Gran, Mum is sixty now,” Jude exclaimed. “Old enough to make her own decisions.”

  “You never forget that your child is your child,” Gran said severely, “and I do think it’s very silly of her to have gone. Particularly at her time of life. But then I never could tell Valerie anything. Now I’m sure poor Mr. Robinson would prefer that we change the subject.”

  “I wish my grandmother were still alive,” replied Euan. “She’s been dead for over fifteen years, and I still miss her stories. You’d have liked her, I think.”

  “Gran,” Jude said, having a sudden thought, “might you have any photographs of Tamsin?”

  “I don’t remember one. There’s a box of photographs in the loft. I can’t get it down by myself, but you’re welcome to try.”

  “We’ll get it down. Where d’you keep the hook for the trapdoor?”

  The loft ladder was stiff from disuse, but they coaxed it down and Jude found the box behind a suitcase of Christmas decorations. They cleared away the tea things and placed the box on the table in front of Gran.

  She lifted out some manila envelopes, which bulged with curled-up papers, and put them to one side. Then she picked up a small brown photograph album.

  “My brother Charlie took these with his Box Brownie.”

  The album contained page after page of black-and-white pictures and Euan and Jude perused them together. Some were a little out of focus, where the distance had been wrongly judged. Under each photo Charlie had written some jokey caption in white ink on the black sugar paper: “Sparky’s been at the cider again…” under a portrait of a dog rolling on its back, “Snap!” below two girls, obviousl
y sisters, in identical best dresses. “That’s Sarah and the bigger one’s me,” declared Gran, after fumbling with her glasses.

  “Look, it’s the cottage!” cried Euan.

  There were several pictures of Gamekeeper’s Cottage, smoke coming from the chimney. Gran pointed out that in one the back garden was a vegetable patch, in another that the two children swinging on the gate were Sarah and her friend Ruth, that the man in a cap, smoking a pipe, in a photo entitled “Da off duty” was definitely her father.

  “No hedge back then,” Euan noted, looking at a shot taken of the road from the top of the house.

  “And this is you?” Jude asked, showing Gran a solemn girl with dark hair and eyes, several years older than she was in the picture with Sarah and clutching a school satchel.

  Gran peered at it. “Nine or ten I must have been,” she pronounced. The caption was “The dog ate my homework, Miss,” and indeed little Jessie’s expression was anxious.

  There were no pictures of Tamsin.

  “Gran, what else can you remember about her?” Jude asked. “I mean, it’s difficult to find out anything without a bit more information. You said her name was Tamsin Lovall. Can you remember her birthday or her parents’ names, anything like that?”

  “She thought her birthday was in September, and when she said at school that she didn’t know, the teacher chose a date for her, the twentieth. It’s funny, isn’t it, how I can remember that from all those years ago and I can’t keep my own great-granddaughter’s birthday in my head?”

  “She’s seven next month, Gran. August the twenty-sixth.”

  Toward the end of the album were some shots taken up in the forest of Gran and some other children fooling about on a fallen log. “Look, there’s the folly,” cried Jude, pointing. “And here it is again.”

  “Oh, yes. My, that’s Sarah, of course, and Ruth, and my friend Beth, and there’s Charlie’s friend Donald.”

  The folly was in the background. Against it was the very faint impression of another figure, but it was so blurred and faded it was impossible to say more than that it was probably female. “Who’s that?” asked Jude.

  “Pass it here, dear,” Gran said, and she squinted at the picture for some time. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “It’s not Tamsin. Who would be wearing a long dress in that weather?”

  Jude took the album back and stared. It was a long dress, it hadn’t struck her at first, the figure was so faint.

  “She’s overexposed,” Euan said, having a look himself. “Or perhaps she moved at the wrong moment.”

  And for some reason, as she stared at the figure, a shiver passed through Jude. “Can we borrow this, Gran?” she asked. “Just in case it jogs someone’s memory?”

  “Of course, dear. I know you’ll look after it.”

  * * *

  The shadowy figure from the photograph remained to trouble Jude all that evening. It was of course, quite common, for a figure from one picture—whether accidentally or deliberately—to become superimposed on another, and she knew she shouldn’t leap to silly conclusions. She was more worried about its relevance to Summer’s experiences.

  She sat in her room for an hour or so browsing Internet sites about the meaning of dreams and about stories of people who thought they’d lived before, but found nothing very useful to this situation. Summer certainly wasn’t presenting her stories as personal memories but as tales about someone else, someone separate from her. And none of the sites she’d looked at mentioned dreams being heritable.

  “I still think you’re making too much of it,” Claire said the next evening, Tuesday, when Jude visited and showed her Gran’s photograph album, but Jude saw fear in her eyes. She could understand that. Who would want to believe that their little daughter might be being … well, haunted by something. It sounded medieval or like a scene out of a ridiculous horror film. Not that whatever was going on seemed in any way malevolent—thank heavens. She thought about the lost dream. The terror of it was about being lost, cut off from one’s mother in a dark forest. A very small child might feel similar feelings after running off in a supermarket.

  “There is something a little strange going on, you have to admit that,” Jude said.

  “Don’t, Jude,” Claire said, looking away.

  “If I hadn’t had that dream myself I would be saying the same as you—that children sometimes have periods of night terrors, and not to worry, they’ll get over them.”

  “I’m sure it’s the fairy stories,” Claire muttered.

  “Surely a lot of the old stories haven’t been imposed on children by adults. They go way back and address stock situations like stepmothers who prefer their own children and the penniless youngest son seeking his fortune. And you can’t exclude fear of darkness and loss from life. Even the very youngest children have these fears, surely. Didn’t you?”

  “Oh yes,” Claire said. “Do you know, my constant fear when I was little was that I didn’t belong to the family at all? That I’d been a foundling, but no one dared tell me.”

  “Really?” Jude asked, rather shocked. “I’d no idea.”

  “I suppose it’s a common childish imagining, Jude, but I really, really believed it. It’s certainly true I never felt … that I fitted in with you and Mum and Dad. I convinced myself at another point that I was adopted, but that no one dared tell me.”

  “But that’s nonsense,” Jude said. “Of course you weren’t adopted, and of course you were part of the family.”

  “You may tell me it’s nonsense, Jude, and it might indeed be nonsense. I probably knew the truth all along, but that didn’t stop me making up the fantasy. I’m just telling you that that’s how I felt. You don’t listen, do you?”

  “Sorry,” said Jude meekly. “I was trying to reassure you.”

  “You don’t need to reassure me. Just accept my feelings about things. Mum and even Dad never did. I didn’t fit into their boxes, you see. That’s something I’m determined never to do to Summer—to expect her to feel or act a certain way. I want her to be herself.”

  “She’s certainly her own little person.”

  “She is, isn’t she? But it’s funny, she’s quite conventional in many ways. Liking dolls and animals and pretty clothes.”

  “She’s very imaginative,” said Jude, thinking of the stories she acted out with the doll’s house.

  Claire picked up the photograph album and studied the picture with the strange, shadowy figure. “It does look very weird, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Jude said, “but there’s undoubtedly some rational, technical explanation involving camera optics and chemicals.”

  “Yeah,” Claire said, dropping the album on the table. “I’ve really had enough of all this. Jude, you’ll tell me this sounds mean, but I’d rather you hadn’t come and stirred everything up. I’m sick of it all.”

  Jude felt as though she’d been struck. “Me?” she said. “I didn’t—”

  “Everything was all right before you came. Now there’s all this nonsense about the folly, and Gran’s stupid necklace. It’s causing trouble. Summer was okay before you started digging up all this stuff about the folly.”

  “No she wasn’t. She’d been having strange dreams. You’ll have to blame Euan for that. He’s the one who took her to the folly.”

  At that Claire turned her face away. Euan once again hung fire between them.

  Outside, the skies opened and it began to pour down in torrents.

  CHAPTER 25

  It was a summer rainstorm that swept Alicia to our door the July I turned fifteen. She brought her fat little countryman husband and Augustus with her and the three of them stood dripping miserably in the hall while the driver’s lad dragged in their baggage.

  I waited uncertainly on the stairs, wondering if, my new station in the household considered, they would acknowledge me. They would not. Augustus gave me one of his grave smiles, but his parents studiously ignored me and by now I had developed a sufficient sense of m
y own dignity to take umbrage.

  Alicia walked with a stick now, since a fall from a horse that broke a bone in her foot some months before. This did nothing to improve her temper. Her husband limped, too, plagued by gout that etched lines of pain on his rabbity face. Only Gussie stood straight and tall, a quiet boy, too thin, with a book in his hand, altogether more like his uncle than ever.

  ‘Where is my brother?’ Alicia snapped at Mr Corbett.

  ‘Why, he’s gone to Norwich today, Mistress,’ the butler replied.

  He’d left at ten o’clock that morning, having received Alicia’s letter informing him of her impending arrival. He’d not otherwise disclosed its contents, but whatever it was it sent him into a dark mood and instead of retiring to his study as usual after breakfast, he called for the carriage. Snapping rudely to Mrs Godstone’s requests about dinner with a ‘Whatever you think best,’ and with no more than a glance at me, he issued forth.

  From my window I glimpsed him striding back in, his clothes shiny wet, at past five that afternoon. He sought me out at once where I lay on my bed pretending to read, and brought me into the drawing room where Alicia, her husband and Sam were waiting, as though I was really his daughter, to be shown off to a doting aunt. At his order I sat down hesitantly on a couch.

  ‘Well,’ said Alicia, looking down her nose at me as though I were Monday’s fish. ‘If this is indeed how matters stand, we were right to come, were we not, Adolphus?’

  ‘It seems so, it seems so,’ Adolphus groaned, the poor man too preoccupied with finding a comfortable position for his painful foot even to look at me.

  ‘It is indeed how matters are, Sister,’ my father said, coming to stand behind me and placing a reassuring hand on my shoulder. ‘I intend naming Esther my adopted daughter and my heir.’