A Place of Secrets

by Rachel Hore

  One of whom was Esther.

  The next storyboard featured a painting of Starbrough Hall and quoted what Esther reported Anthony had told her about finding her in the road as a baby, clutching Lucille’s star necklace. There was a certain amount of careful conjecture about what might have happened to the other little girl. Jude saw Euan frown.

  “Did Cecelia not think that the gypsy girl might be Esther’s sister?” he asked.

  “I wondered that. There just isn’t enough evidence, Euan.”

  “But Summer thinks she was. I suppose we can’t use dreams as evidence though.”

  Jude shook her head at him fondly. “Not really.”

  The third storyboard described Anthony’s stargazing hobby. Two of the observation journals lay open in a case, together with labels offering Jude’s transcript. There was a video, too, with a voice-over, taking the viewer up the folly, where Cecelia’s team had reconstructed the telescope now on display.

  The exhibition then moved on to explain carefully the importance of the Starbrough discoveries. Another video traced the story of Herschel’s identification of the seventh planet, Uranus, and in another case could be seen the entries in Esther’s handwriting that showed that she had seen it first. One of Josiah Bellingham’s letters and its transcription lay next to the journal in the case.

  Finally, in another video, Jude knew she would come face-to-face with herself, dressed in eighteenth-century costume and relating the story of what finally happened to Esther and why she was important. But there was someone already looking at the video. It was Claire!

  “Hello, stranger, have you just arrived?” Jude said, coming up and touching her arm.

  “Oh, sorry,” Claire said turning round with a smile. “I was just coming across to say hello and saw this. It’s so funny.”

  “Funny?” Claire was still capable of saying the wrong thing.

  “Oh, not funny ha ha,” she mumbled, seeing Jude’s face. “I meant it’s kind of weird…”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Summer will love it. Here she is now. Summer, come and look at Auntie Jude in fancy dress.”

  Jude swung around to see Summer marching in imperiously, little Georgie immediately leaving her mother’s side to pad adoringly behind. Then came Jon, his face as open as a spring day, carrying Summer’s backpack, for he’d become her humble page. Jude watched him and Euan shake hands enthusiastically before she found herself in his bearlike embrace.

  “Great pile this!” Jon said, meaning the house and grounds of Madingsfield. “A good place for a rock festival.”

  “I think Mozart is more Madingsfield’s thing,” Euan said. “But I agree with you. How you run a place like this as a business, I don’t know.” And they went off chatting to look round the exhibition, leaving Claire and Jude and the little girls together.

  “Ooh, while I remember,” Claire said, pulling an envelope and a package out of her handbag. “Happy Birthday two days ago. I forgot to put these in the post. It’s been so busy.”

  Jude opened the card first. “Happy Birthday to a real star!” it said on the front.

  “Summer chose that,” Claire said, then as Jude started to open the package she continued, “I hope you like what’s in there. I’d have done it before, but I thought you didn’t believe in it. I was worried you’d laugh. But now, well, I wanted to do it.”

  Jude pulled out the pretty presentation box, all covered in gold stars, and opened it, her heart flooding with joy. It was a star, her very own star. “Judith” it was called.

  Claire looked surprised at the strength of the hug Jude gave her. “Are you crying?” she said, disbelieving.

  “Oh, I’m just being silly. Thank you, Claire.”

  “And me,” Summer said.

  “Of course, Summer, and you. How are you, darling?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.” She turned to Georgie. “I’m going to be Auntie Jude’s bridesmaid.”

  Georgie looked amazed and immediately said, “I’m going to be her bridesmaid, too.”

  Euan was drifting past and heard. Jude shot him an anxious, querying glance and he mouthed, “Go on!” so she said to Georgie, “Would you like to be a bridesmaid? Summer will help you.” And Georgie, almost bursting with the news, ran to tell her mother.

  “They’ll be very sweet together,” Claire said.

  “How about Max as page boy?” Euan asked.

  “We can but ask him,” Jude replied. The Wickhams had kindly offered the Hall for the reception, so it seemed an obvious thing to include the children in the ceremony.

  “So have you worked out where you’re going to live?” Claire asked, ever practical.

  Jude and Euan, who were looking at Claire’s gift, smiled at one another.

  “It depends if a job offer works out,” Jude said. The acquaintance at the auction house in Norwich she’d consulted about valuing the necklace had slipped her the news that they were recruiting. She’d applied for the job and the final interview was next week.

  “You can’t persuade Euan to move to London, then?” Jon asked, his eyes twinkling with humor.

  “We would work something out, I’m sure,” Euan said. “But it would be great for Jude to get this job.”

  “It would be a step up. More responsibility,” Jude told Claire.

  Beecham’s had been an even more difficult place to work in for the past months. The Starbrough auction had been a big success, if not at the level her boss, Klaus, had predicted to senior management. But the recession was biting and there had been staff cuts in other departments. In addition, Klaus had put to rest recent speculation by announcing that he wouldn’t be retiring at all in the near future. Hence a job like the one she’d applied for was a real opportunity. It was strange how circumstances continued to rearrange themselves to persuade Jude finally to put her little house in Greenwich up for sale and to move toward a new life with Euan. If this new job didn’t work out, she had a strange feeling that something else would. And at some point in her life she thought she wanted to turn to research and writing, and that was certainly something she could do in the country.

  And now the exhibition room was filling up. Jude waved at Inigo, who was talking animatedly to one of Madingsfield’s protégées, an earnest-looking young woman who was hard at work, she knew, on writing a history of Madingsfield, and who seemed to share Inigo’s taste in dress. Jude had a sudden wicked thought about their two very similar work suits going together to the dry cleaner’s.

  “What are you smiling at?” Euan said.

  “Oh, nothing, just thinking what a lovely occasion this is.”

  “Jude, Euan, come and have a drink,” Lord Madingsfield said, walking over, waving his arm like a traffic policeman. “What do you think of it all?”

  “Really fabulous,” Jude replied. “It’s wonderful to think of Esther taking her place in history now.”

  “And to find we’re all family,” he said, with his slow vulpine smile.

  “Oh, the Bennetts are a very minor branch,” Jude replied hastily. It would never do to assume a grand manner with the great Lord M. “There’s only one thing that troubles us,” she told him. “And that’s what happened to Esther’s little sister. It’s a shame that there’s so little evidence.”

  “You haven’t seen the showcase with the astrological chart, then?”

  “No! I lent that to Cecelia some time ago. Where is it?”

  “Over here.” He took her over to a display near the end of the exhibition, and there it was, the small piece of parchment that she and Claire had pored over.

  “Cecelia showed it to some expert, who says it was cast in the autumn of 1763. Not a significant date for Amelie/Esther, who was born in the spring of 1762, but it was for her little sister Genevieve, born the year after.”

  “But how did it get into the hiding place in the folly?”

  “That, of course, we cannot say.”

  Jude turned and called to Claire, who came across with Summer.
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  “Claire, look. Lord Madingsfield says this chart I found must belong to Esther’s little sister.”

  “It’s been mended,” Claire said, staring at the document.

  “Can I see? Let me see.”

  Summer stretched on tiptoe, her breath misting the glass of the case. After a moment she said, “Oh, that’s Rowan’s. She hid it in the folly once.”

  And the grown-ups all stared at one another, speechless, as a little girl once more stole the show.

  Above them all, smiling out across the room, Lucille kept her secrets still.

  JULY 1765

  She thought about leaving them behind. They’d be safe, she knew, looked after by a triad of nursemaids, trained up in that narrow way deemed suitable for daughters of an English earl. She was hardly allowed near them as it was. ‘In case it tires you, my dear,’ was always her mother-in-law’s excuse and, indeed, on those days they made her take the medicine she saw the world as though from under the sea, wishing only to lie down and sink to the bottom. ‘Hysterical,’ she’d heard the doctor once describe her. ‘These foreign women often are. It’s in the blood, don’t you know.’ ‘St John should never have married her,’ the Countess snarled back. ‘A plot by the girl’s parents, we knew nothing of it.’

  Hysterical.

  Lucille felt warm tears surge down her cheeks. What seventeen-year-old would not be ‘hysterical’ after being ripped from her childhood home and the arms of a handsome young lover and forcibly married to a passing stranger, a man who could blow from hot passion to cold heartlessness in an instant, who dragged her off to a foreign land where the countryside rolled grey and featureless and the damp seeped into her bones? Two children were born of his cruel acts in the bedchamber that could never be called love-making, before his obsession with her beauty turned to indifference and he took a mistress. Then, like a flare of light, came a letter from her dear Guillaume, smuggled in by her little maid, Suzette. He was lately come into his inheritance, it told her. She was to meet him at the White Horse Inn in Great Yarmouth and they’d sail together for freedom.

  She would go or she must die.

  But she could not leave her daughters. Suzette would help her, fluffy little Suzette. She did.

  Carefully they made their preparations. The plainest of clothes, her valuables in a pouch under her cloak, a small valise containing clothes and essentials, a wallet of food and drink. It was a dark night with no moon when they slipped out of the dining-room window, she and Suzette, stumbling across the park, each with a bag and a sleeping child, to a door in the wall and the carriage Guillaume had sent her, driving away into the night.

  How did her husband find her? The inn at Lynn, she reckoned, where they stopped to change the horses. The landlord had stared at her curiously and muttered something to his wife. Yes, they’d remember a fine-featured foreign girl with a pert maid, two pretty babies and a wild expression, travelling without escort. And they’d have told Viscount St John where she’d gone, too. There were spies everywhere these days, the revenue men on the look-out for smugglers, the militia hunting down highway robbers. She urged the coachman to take a less known route.

  At Fakenham, Suzette simply vanished. Lucille gave her money to buy sleeping draughts for the children, but she never came back. Whether she’d run away or been murdered or kidnapped, it was impossible to tell. All she knew was she must hurry onwards or miss the assignation.

  It was on the road south of Holt that St John outrode the carriage, his pistols flashing silver in the twilight. ‘Hold you fast,’ he cried. ‘You have my wife.’ The coachman was terrified, the horses reared in panic. But while her husband dismounted and started to force the carriage round, she opened the door and out she tumbled with her daughters, then dragged them trembling and wailing towards the trees.

  She would not go back to Madingsfield, her prison.

  St John let go of the coach horses’ bridles and started in hot pursuit. His mistake.

  Taking his chance, the coachman whipped up his team and the carriage leaped forwards, rattling onwards and empty towards Yarmouth. Mustn’t look back. Not his business. He’d tell the gentleman his lovebird had changed her mind.

  At the fringe of the forest, Lucille caught her dainty foot in a rabbit hole, turned her ankle and lurched to the ground. ‘Run, mes petites,’ she cried, her eyes misting with pain. ‘Hide yourselves.’ She pulled out the pouch containing her jewels—a premonition, perhaps—and thrust it into Amelie’s hand. ‘Take this and run. I’ll … I’ll find you. Now run.’

  Sobbing but obedient, Amelie seized Genevieve’s tiny hand and they tottered off into the trees. ‘Come, Genna, it’s hide and seek,’ she soothed Genevieve, as she helped her crawl into a tunnel in the undergrowth.

  They heard the shot but they didn’t know what it meant.

  They never saw their mother’s body, and for that she would have blessed sweet Mary and all the saints.

  They heard the man called Father crashing about shouting their names. But they were too frightened to come out. When a long, long time had passed, they didn’t hear him any more.

  It was getting dark, very dark in the forest. Amelie and Genevieve rolled up together in their hiding place for comfort and warmth. By and by they fell asleep.

  Amelie woke in the middle of the night, shivering, and cried out, ‘Maman!’ But there was no answer. She lay whimpering for a while before drifting back into troubled sleep.

  When dawn’s cold light began to filter through the trees she woke once more. Needing to pee, she distangled herself from her still-sleeping sister and crawled out onto the path. ‘Maman,’ she called. ‘Maman!’ She clutched the pouch her mother gave her. Whatever happened she mustn’t lose that.

  She managed herself as best she could, then walked up the path a bit, calling for her mother. She didn’t come, though she’d promised she would, and it was very frightening. Was it this way they’d last seen her? Amelie stumbled on, hopeful, around the next corner and the next, but there was no Maman. She saw a bush with bright red berries on it, and she picked one and put it in her mouth. It tasted horrid. She spat it out. But she was very hungry so she took another and another, and swallowed them down.

  She heard a cry and remembered Genevieve, so she turned to go back, running along the path looking to left and right for their hiding place, but not finding it, and then the path became two paths and she wasn’t sure where to go. Another cry. It must be Genevieve, waking up wet and hungry and alone. She followed the sound but could never catch up with it. Perhaps it was a bird. And she couldn’t find that tunnel in the undergrowth where they’d slept. Soon, tired and terrified, her belly aching from the berries, she threw herself down on the path and gave way to hopeless, racking sobs.

  * * *

  The day passed in an endless torment of fitful sleep and cruel awakening. Once, as she lay curled up by the path a fox trotted too close and sniffed at her. It drew back when she screamed. Another time her skin prickled as a snake swished past, but it vanished under the leaves. Often she called out ‘Maman’ or ‘Genna,’ but as the hours passed and the shafts of sunshine moved slowly across the forest canopy this was uttered as a comforting mantra rather than with any hope of response. By the time the daylight dwindled, ‘Maman’ was the only word she could remember and when, half conscious, she staggered down a grassy bank and fell into a muddy lane, that too was forgotten.

  As if in a dream come the vibration of thudding hooves, the lively clink of harnesses and a man’s cry. Then strong arms sweep her up, the man says, “What have we here?” and another life begins.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The village of Starbrough, the Hall and its folly are products of my imagination, but they have grown out of the north Norfolk landscape. The area around the lovely Georgian town of Holt in particular has been an inspiration, as has the poor, ruined folly at Wickham, near Worsted, whose origins, strangely enough, lie in a tale of two jealous sisters. I have taken a small liberty with the geography
and the coaching route in the final scene.

  It was while I was developing my story about a stargazer and his adoptive daughter that I read about William Herschel and his sister, Caroline, in Richard Holmes’s marvelous history of eighteenth-century scientific endeavor, The Age of Wonder. Herschel discovered Uranus, the seventh planet, in 1781, and I was interested not only by Caroline’s huge contribution to her brother’s work but in the fact that at least one other astronomer before him had seen the bright object near Gemini but had not known what it might be. Suppose others had, too, and suppose one of those others had been a woman, what is more, a woman of no name, whose origins were mysterious. This is Esther’s story.

  I would like to thank a number of people who helped during the writing of this book, though any mistakes are my own. Dr. Hilary Johnson for her suggestions and support, Dave Balcombe, astronomer, for his excellent advice, Jaqi Clayton, who knows all about naming stars, staff at Bonham’s auctioneers, particularly Simon Roberts for information about procedure, staff at Sculthorpe Moor Community Reserve for information about moths, Cindy Hurn for visualization techniques. Great thanks are due as ever to my agent, Sheila Crowley, and her colleagues at Curtis Brown, all at Simon & Schuster, U.K., but especially Suzanne Baboneau, Libby Yevtushenko, Sue Stephens and Jeff Jamieson, and my copyeditor, Clare Parkinson. At Henry Holt, my U.S. publisher, I am grateful to my editor, Aaron Schlechter. Thank you to David, and also to Felix, Benjy and Leo, who, like little Max Wickham, will insist on playing with their football indoors!