A Place of Secrets

by Rachel Hore

  My countenance must have showed a kaleidoscope of my feelings, for they stared at me, Alicia, her husband and son, with horrified fascination as my father’s words found their mark. I watched her face grow dark as the sky outside and then the storm broke loose.

  ‘That one is not fit to be your daughter,’ she screeched. ‘She’s some pauper’s brat and the world will know her as such. Give her money, if you like. Pay her off. Find her some rich Johnny who will discount bad blood for the sake of a pretty face. How can you betray your family and your good name? Think of Augustus, think of your noble father…’

  ‘You may provide for Augustus, you’ve wealth enough. Esther has nothing. And damn my drunken father’s memory. My lands are mine to dispose of as I will, I tell you, and I plan to give them to someone I care for. All my life I’ve suffered your bullying, hectoring ways and your letter today was the last of many last straws. I have no quarrel with Augustus. He’s turned out remarkably well considering his parentage, but I … have … had … enough.’

  Never had I known him show such emotion. Nor, it seemed, had Alicia, for she sat there, the breath punched out of her, able only to say, ‘Well … well…’

  They left again the next morning, Augustus’s half-turned face a ghostly half-moon through the rain-spotted window of the carriage. And I felt sorry for him then.

  My father did not turn out to see them go, nor did he leave his study for that entire day, and I dawdled miserably, stepping out in the garden between showers, to quarrel with Sam who forgot himself and called me ‘come-uppity’, and wondering what everything meant.

  But as evening came and warm gusts wicked away the storm clouds my father stepped forth to view the stars, and I with him, hurrying to match his eager pace.

  What did you mean last night, Father? I wanted to ask. How can I ever become your daughter? But something in his demeanour dissuaded such questioning. Only when we reached the tower room, made splendid and otherworldly by tongues of liquid gold from the setting sun, did he speak with a gravity and eloquence I’d never known before.

  ‘It is true,’ he said, ‘that I drove to Norwich yesterday and hailed my attorney as he left the court to dine. I have ordered him to draw up documents to name you my daughter and my heir. The deed is not yet done, however. He insists he must study his papers and books for impediments and such fiddle-faddle—but it will be done and done soon. I am tired of Alicia’s greed and her constant haranguing. And I desire you to have Starbrough Hall and to continue my work when I am gone.’

  ‘When you are gone? Don’t speak of it, Father,’ I said with sudden alarm. ‘You’re not ill, are you?’ Is that what hurried him?

  ‘Nay, I am not ill, child, just weary. And those who study the stars come to know of how small and insignificant we are, like ants or beetles on the face of lonely rocks spinning eternally in infinite space. How the hand of fate might strike us in our futile insect purposes without warning or pity.

  ‘When I found you, Esther, it was one of those moments of destiny. I have no wife, nay, nor ever wanted one.’ He chuckled then. ‘Suppose she turned out to be like my sister, what peace would I have in life?

  ‘I was returning from a meeting in London one evening in July in 1765, and as we passed through the forest the driver—not our man Jan but another—stayed the horses and informed me there was a child in the road. Curious, despite myself, I stepped down to see. The man brought to me the most pitiful bundle and I saw it was a tiny trembling girl. Your clothes were shredded, my dear, into filthy rags; your tender skin was scratched and bloodied, your hair a matted tangle, your eyes huge with terror. Stricken with pity, I took you in my arms and wrapped you in my blanket but your trembling did not cease. I ordered the driver to continue our journey and in the rocking of the carriage you slipped finally into exhausted sleep. It was then I noticed you clutched something tightly to your chest. Gently I unpeeled your tiny fingers and brought it out to see. It was this.’

  He went over to the wall and I was surprised to see him remove a brick from it, to reveal a secret recess. From this he took a velvet-covered box and held it out to me. ‘Here,’ he told me quietly. ‘The time is right. Take it, it’s yours.’

  At first I thought I’d opened a box of living, sparkling starlight, then I saw it was a necklace, a necklace of stars. Seven of them. Seven diamonds set in gold, hung on a golden chain. For a long moment I could not speak.

  Jude, who was sitting on her bed, reread the sentence with the sensation that she was falling. A necklace of seven stars. Like Gran’s, but complete. It couldn’t possibly be the same one. It was a coincidence, that’s all. But the mystery of Esther’s origins—at least, the mystery of how she came to Starbrough Hall—was finally solved. Esther had been a foundling. A foundling in silk rags. She sat back against the pillows for a moment as she gathered her racing thoughts, then eagerly read on.

  ‘I know not where you came from, Esther, nor, to tell you all truth, did I seek to learn. Of that I am ashamed. I believed the hand of destiny delivered you to me, I, who had no one and thought I needed no one. But I was no use as a father. I kept you as a possession, had no sense of how to treat a child. It was enough for me that you were fed and clothed and cared for by a good woman like Susan, who loved you. You were there, mine, but I was free to continue my life as I had made it. I kept you as you had kept that necklace, a treasure I could take out and look at as I wished. God forgive me.’

  His account bewildered me. I was too naïve then to know how parents and children should be. He had never hurt me and I always believed he had cared for me, even if from afar. Just as he accepted me, I accepted him for what he was. And we had come to know each other in our own time and our own way and now, for the first time, the love between us was acknowledged, made real.

  He drew me to him, awkwardly, pressed my head uncomfortably against his collar bone so my cap fell off, but I minded not. ‘Little Esther,’ he murmured. ‘I named you after my mother, whom I lost when I was small, and because while some say Esther translates as “myrtle,” others say it means “star.” You might know that the myrtle plant bears a star-shaped flower, so the two meanings are in nature wrapped into one.’ He was the dry scholar always, but I felt the warmth of his lips through my hair.

  We returned the necklace to its hiding place and set to work. That night we swept the skies together with a new sense of closeness and endeavour. Lyra, I remember, the great lyre of Orpheus, was particularly bright, as though it sang not to lure the dead from hell but the living into new life and happiness. And for the first time he trusted me to write notes in his journal to his dictation.

  There seemed to be nothing more written about the necklace for the moment. Jude, still clutching Esther’s book, pushed herself out of bed and took the box containing the necklace from the top drawer of the chest. She spread it out on the white duvet and found the place again in the text. “A necklace of stars … Seven diamonds set in gold, hung on a golden chain.” Of course, one was now missing and the description was frustratingly vague, but still, every instinct screamed to her that the two necklaces were one and the same. But she couldn’t know that, could she? The testing, scientific part of her mind insisted that she could not. Gran’s might be a later copy, or one of several made at the time. She noticed again the goldsmith’s mark on one of the stars, very faint, but there nonetheless. She’d have to ask Gran’s permission, of course …

  * * *

  The following day, Wednesday, after one call to a colleague at Beecham’s and another to an auction house in Norwich, she drove into the city, parked the car in a multistory car park and made her way through the backstreets to a brightly lit jeweler’s shop near the cathedral.

  “Would you be able to give me some information about this?” she asked the woman behind the counter, who, by her tailored suit and assertive air, Jude took to be someone of seniority. She unwrapped the necklace to show her.

  “You’re not looking to sell, are you? We only do valuations for i
nsurance purposes,” the woman said briskly, studying the necklace briefly through a magnifying glass, then scrutinizing Jude as though judging whether she was a jewel thief disposing of loot.

  “I completely understand,” Jude said, holding the woman’s gaze, and wondering if it would make the situation worse or better if she said she worked for an auctioneer’s and so knew something of these things. “I don’t want to sell, though it would be useful to know its value. This is something that’s been in the family and I’d like to know more about it. When it was made and, if possible, by whom. You’ll have noticed the goldsmith’s mark here.” She turned over the central star.

  “Mmm,” the woman said, after taking another look. “It’s a nice piece—or would have been but for the damage. Have you ever thought about getting it cleaned and having a replacement star made?”

  “I’ve only just been given it,” said Jude, “so, no.” She couldn’t tell the woman the truth, that it didn’t, if Gran were to be believed, belong to her family at all.

  “We’re very busy at the moment. I can get back to you in a week.” The woman wrapped up the necklace and pulled a pad of forms toward her. “Your name?” she asked.

  Jude gave the details required.

  “Any quicker than a week and I’d be most grateful,” said Jude. A week seemed an age to wait. “My grandmother is most anxious to know,” she added quickly. “She’s very unwell at the moment, and worry makes her worse.” This wasn’t completely untrue. Remembering Gran’s concern that she didn’t let the necklace out of her sight she’d rung her that morning to tell her what she was planning. Gran had been slightly doubtful about handing it over to strangers—even a reputable jeweler’s—but had reluctantly agreed on the basis that it might help trace Tamsin.

  Jude emerged from the shop with a receipt for the necklace and a guilty conscience, but also relief that the woman had promised to be as quick as she could. What should she do now? She checked her watch and saw it was only midmorning. A coffee would be nice, and maybe a bit of shopping. But as she walked up through the cobbled streets she glimpsed the castle and remembered something else she should do. She flicked through her notebook and found the name. Megan Macromber.

  CHAPTER 26

  “This is all I can find.” Megan Macromber, an assistant curator at the Castle Museum, had glowing plum lip gloss, serially pierced ears and a formidable knowledge of Norfolk history. She placed a cardboard box that had once held twenty-four baked bean cans on the table between them and offered Jude a chair. Jude sat down and read the grimy label pasted on the top of the box: “Starbrough Folly, Holt, June 1923.” While Megan began to unwrap packages from the box, Jude pulled out a newspaper cutting she spied tucked down one side. The picture on it showed a middle-aged man, the hair from whose head seemed all to have flown to his upper lip, posed on one knee at the foot of the folly, displaying some old bits of pottery and bone with all the pride of an angler with a prizewinning fish. “Cambridge archaeologist braves local legends to uncover the past,” the heading said.

  “What have you got there?” Megan glanced at the cutting as she laid some shards of pot on the table and started to unwrap another package.

  “It says, ‘Tradition has it that the area is haunted,’” Jude read out, “‘and locals advised Mallory not to dig there.’”

  “Mallory?” Megan said to herself. “Charles Mallory. Where’ve I heard of him?”

  She resumed unpacking the contents of the box. A ring made of bone, some ancient coins, a couple of gun cartridges of more recent origin, all these she laid on the table. Then came a small, tightly wrapped parcel, which took ages to unroll.

  “Wonder what this was off!”

  Jude, seeing what Megan held out in the palm of her hand, drew a sharp breath. It was tiny—the size of a 5p coin. The gold setting was twisted, and it needed a good clean, but there was no doubt in her mind. It was a star. A star studded with diamonds.

  “Megan,” she gasped, “you’re not going to believe this, but I know what this comes from. It’s part of a necklace I’ve just handed over for valuation. My gran’s had it in her possession for years and years,” she quickly explained.

  Megan held up the little twisted star and said, “It would seem sensible for you to have it, though of course I can’t just give it to you. Look, you say the necklace is with a jeweler. When you’ve got it back, why don’t you bring it in for me to see? By then I’ll have found out the procedure. There must be forms and things in these cases.”

  Jude said ruefully, “There always are.”

  “But this necklace,” Megan persisted. “You said it’s connected to the Wickham family? If you want to find more about this Esther, have you looked around the church in Starbrough? It would be a start. And the parish records will undoubtedly be in the archive at County Hall.”

  * * *

  On the way back to Starbrough Hall, Jude, still marveling that she’d found two clues about the necklace in quick succession—in Esther’s account and in the box at the museum—returned to Starbrough Hall through the village, and decided to follow Megan’s advice. There wasn’t much to the village center: a huge church loomed over a half square of eighteenth-century cottages, and the green with the ancient oak and its encircling bench that she remembered seeing as a teenager. She parked the car by the church and opened the lych-gate to the churchyard.

  The church itself, fortunately unlocked, was light and airy. Its central point of interest was a huge medieval stone font at the beginning of the aisle, with a figure carved on one side. Jude stood back to view this properly. It was of a man with unkempt hair and a beard, brandishing a clublike weapon. A cardboard label resting on the lid of the font explained that it was a woodwose—a wild man of the woods, its pagan-sounding purpose to chase away evil spirits. It seemed to be the oldest part of the church, she discovered as she wandered around. The choir stalls with their beautiful carved decoration were fifteenth century, according to another label, but most of the memorials around the walls dated from the eighteenth century onward. She was interested to see several for members of the Wickham family—a Victorian magistrate named William, a Richard Wickham who’d died of his wounds in the Boer War. She could see nothing for Anthony or for anyone called Esther. Having looked at everything, she left the building, pulling the door closed behind her.

  The oldest part of the graveyard was dominated by a large tomb ringed by iron palings on which faint details about various Victorian Wickhams were recorded, but nothing further back than that, indeed there were not many eighteenth-century gravestones at all. There were no Esthers, not even Anthony’s mother, only a Stella, the wife of Hugh or Hugo someone, the dates too faint to read confidently, and an Essie George, who’d died in 1850. Around the other side of the church were the twentieth-century graves; she supposed her Bennett great-grandparents, the gamekeeper and his wife, were among them. At the far side of the burial ground an old man in shirtsleeves was clipping a hedge and she made her way between the graves toward him. At her greeting he lowered his shears and took a moment or two to consider the question she asked.

  “They’ll be somewhere over there,” he replied, pointing his shears at an area she’d not searched very thoroughly. “My da passed away in 1957 and that’s where he got put. My ma, too, when she couldn’t stand being without him anymore.” He shuffled along the rows of graves, his shears swinging dangerously from one sinewy hand, and she followed at a safe distance. They found the grave quickly enough: the stone cross reading “James and Rose Bennett,” and giving their dates. At the base was a memorial flower vase that had obviously housed nothing but spiders for years. Jude vowed to come back sometime with some cut flowers or a plant. It gave her an odd feeling standing here looking at the names that she had a special connection to the people buried in this place she’d never visited before, people she had never met but who still belonged to her.

  The old man was walking slowly back to his work, when she thought to ask something. “’Scuse me.�
� He turned, with an inquiring look. “Do you know of any travelers, any gypsies buried here? There’s one in particular I want to find, Tamsin Lovall. I don’t suppose that name means anything to you?”

  He thought for a long moment, then said, “Not Tamsin Lovall, no, but there’s maybe another Lovall. Come with me.”

  He led her through a gate in the hedge and out onto the green.

  The wooden seat around the ancient oak tree was made up of different sections bolted together, some newish, others with broken arms or missing slats, silver with age so they appeared almost part of the tree itself. Some of the seat backs bore small metal memorial plates in varying states of legibility.

  “See if you can make out that one,” said the old man, pointing to a mottled plaque on one of the older sections.

  “Ted Lova…”

  “Could be Lovall, d’you think? There was a Ted Lovall.”

  “Could be,” Jude said uncertainly. She walked around the tree, looking for other names. There was only one that really interested her.

  “Marty Walters,” Jude read aloud, “1950 to 1970. Only twenty.”

  “Summer of 1970, it happened,” the old man said. “Nearly the whole village put in something for the seat. They were sorry for his family, you see. Terrible accident, terrible.”

  “He was the boy who died at that party,” Jude said, with a sudden sense of shock. “Where did his family live?”

  “Now you’ve got me. Up Sheringham way, I believe. Somewhere on the coast, anyhow. But he died at the folly.”

  * * *

  The church hadn’t, after all, told her anything about Esther. There were still the parish records, she supposed, but she didn’t have any definite dates to help her there.

  Back at the Hall, there was nobody about, so she went to the library where she’d left her laptop. She paced the room restlessly for a while, looking out of the window to the point where the folly must be, trying to link up all the connections in her head. It was no good. Sitting down at the desk she took a piece of paper and wrote down what she knew: