It was cold; cold enough for snow. Beneath my feet the ground was frost-hard and above the sky was dangerously white. I walked briskly. With my scarf wrapped round my face as high as my nose, I soon warmed up.
At the clearing, I stopped. In the distance, at the site, there was unusual activity. I frowned. What was going on? My camera was round my neck, beneath my coat; the cold crept in as I undid my buttons. Using my long lens, I watched. There was a police car on the drive. The builders’ vehicles and machinery were all stationary, and the builders were standing in a loose cluster. They must have stopped working a little while ago, for they were slapping their hands together and stamping their feet to keep warm. Their hats were on the ground or else slung by the strap from their elbows. One man offered a pack of cigarettes. From time to time one of them addressed a comment to the others, but there was no conversation. I tried to make out the expression on their unsmiling faces. Bored? Worried? Curious? They stood turned away from the site, facing the woods and my lens, but from time to time one or another cast a glance over his shoulder to the scene behind them.
Behind the group of men, a white tent had been erected to cover part of the site. The house was gone, but judging from the coachhouse, the gravel approach, the church, I guessed it was where the library had been. Beside it, one of their colleagues and a man I took to be their boss, were in conversation with another pair of men. These were dressed one in a suit and overcoat, the other in a police uniform. It was the boss who was speaking, rapidly and with explanatory nods and shakes of the head, but when the man in the overcoat asked a question, it was the builder he addressed it to, and when he answered, all three men watched him intently.
He seemed unaware of the cold. He spoke in short sentences; in his long and frequent pauses the others did not speak, but watched him with intent patience. At one point he raised a finger in the direction of the machine and mimed its jaw of jagged teeth biting into the ground. At last he gave a shrug, frowned, and drew his hand over his eyes as though to wipe them clean of the image he had just conjured.
A flap opened in the side of the white tent. A fifth man stepped out of it and joined the group. There was a brief, unsmiling conference and at the end of it, the boss went over to his group of men and had a few words with them. They nodded, and as though what they had been told was entirely what they were expecting, began to gather together the hats and Thermos flasks at their feet and make their way to their cars parked by the lodge gates. The policeman in uniform positioned himself at the entrance to the tent, back to the flap, and the other ushered the builder and his boss towards the police car.
I lowered the camera slowly, but continued to gaze at the white tent. I knew the spot. I had been there myself. I remembered the desolation of that desecrated library. The fallen bookshelves, the beams that had come crashing to the floor. My thrill of fear as I had stumbled over burnt and broken wood.
There had been a body in that room, buried in scorched pages, with a bookcase for a coffin. A grave hidden and protected for half a century by the beams that fell.
I couldn’t help the thought. I had been looking for someone, and now it appeared that someone had been found. The symmetry was irresistible. How not to make the connection? Yet Hester had left the year before, hadn’t she? Why would she have come back? And then it struck me, and it was the very simplicity of the idea that made me think it might be true.
What if Hester had never left at all?
When I came to the edge of the woods, I saw the two blond children coming disconsolately down the drive. They wobbled and stumbled as they walked: beneath their feet the ground was scarred with curving black channels where the builders’ heavy vehicles had gouged into the earth, and they weren’t looking where they were going. Instead they looked back over their shoulders in the direction they had come from.
It was the girl who, losing her footing and almost falling, turned her head and saw me first. She stopped. When her brother saw me he grew self-important with knowledge and spoke.
‘You can’t go up there. The policeman said. You have to stay away.’
‘I see.’
‘They’ve made a tent,’ the girl added shyly.
‘I saw it,’ I told her.
In the arch of the lodge gates, their mother appeared. She was slightly breathless. ‘Are you two all right? I saw a police car in The Street.’ And then, to me, ‘What’s going on?’
It was the girl who answered her. ‘The policemen have made a tent. You’re not allowed to go near. They said we have to go home.’
The blonde woman raised her eyes to the site, frowning at the white tent. ‘Isn’t that what they do when…?’ She didn’t complete her question in front of the children, but I knew what she meant.
‘I believe that is what has happened,’ I said. I saw her desire to draw her children close for reassurance, but she merely adjusted the boy’s scarf and brushed her daughter’s hair out of her eyes.
‘Come on,’ she told the children. ‘It’s too cold to be outdoors, anyway. Let’s go home and have cocoa.’
The children darted through the lodge gates and raced into The Street. An invisible cord held them together, allowed them to swing around each other or dash in any direction, knowing the other would always be there, the length of the cord away.
I watched them and felt a horrible absence by my side.
Their mother lingered next to me. ‘You could do with some cocoa yourself, couldn’t you? You’re as white as a ghost.’
We fell into step, following the children. ‘My name’s Margaret,’ I told her. ‘I’m a friend of Aurelius Love.’
She smiled. ‘I’m Karen. I look after the deer here.’
‘I know. Aurelius told me.’
Ahead of us, the girl lunged at her brother; he veered out of reach, running into the road to escape her.
‘Thomas Ambrose Proctor!’ my companion shouted out. ‘Get back on the pavement!’
The name sent a jolt through me. ‘What did you say your son’s name was?’
The boy’s mother turned to me, curiously.
‘It’s just – there was a man called Proctor who worked here years ago.’
‘My father, Ambrose Proctor.’
I had to stop to think straight. ‘Ambrose Proctor…the boy who worked with John-the-dig – he was your father?’
‘John-the-dig? Do you mean John Digence? Yes. That’s who got my father the job there. It was a long time before I was born, though. My father was in his fifties when I was born.’
Slowly I began walking again. ‘I’ll accept that offer of cocoa, if you don’t mind. And I’ve got something to show you.’
I took my bookmark out of Hester’s diary. Karen smiled the instant she set eyes on the photo. Her son’s serious face, full of pride, beneath the brim of the helmet, his shoulders stiff, his back straight. ‘I remember the day he came home and said he’d put a yellow hat on. He’ll be so pleased to have the picture.’
‘Your employer, Miss March, has she ever seen Tom?’
‘Seen Tom? Of course not! There are two of them, you know, the Miss Marches. One of them was always a bit retarded, I understand, so it’s the other one who runs the estate. Though she is a bit of a recluse. She hasn’t been back to Angelfield since the fire. Even I’ve never seen her. The only contact we have is through her solicitors.’
Karen stood at the stove, waiting for the milk to heat. Behind her, the view from the small window showed the garden, and beyond it, the fields where Adeline and Emmeline had once dragged Merrily’s pram with the baby still in it. There could be few landscapes that had changed so little.
I needed to be careful not to say too much. Karen gave no sign of knowing that her Miss March of Angelfield was the same woman as the Miss Winter whose books I had spotted in the bookcase in the hall as I came in.
‘It’s just that I work for the Angelfield family, ‘ I explained. ‘I’m writing about their childhood here. And when I was showing your employer some photos
of the house I got the impression she recognized him.’
‘She can’t have. Unless…’
She reached for the photograph and looked at it again, then called to her son in the next room. ‘Tom? Tom, bring that picture from the mantelpiece, will you? The one in the silver frame.’
Tom came in carrying a photograph, his sister behind him.
‘Look,’ Karen said to him, ‘the lady has got a photograph of you.’
A smile of delighted surprise crept onto his face when he saw himself. ‘Can I keep it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Show Margaret the one of your granddad.’
He came round to my side of the table and held the framed picture out to me, shyly.
It was an old photograph of a very young man. Barely more than a boy. Eighteen, perhaps, maybe younger. He was standing by a bench with clipped yew trees in the background. I recognized the setting instantly: the topiary garden. The boy had taken his cap off, was holding it in his hand, and in my mind’s eye I saw the movement he had made, sweeping his cap off with one hand, and wiping his forehead against the forearm of the other. He was tilting his head back slightly. Trying not to squint in the sun, and succeeding almost. His shirt sleeves were rolled up above the elbow and the top button of his shirt was open, but the creases in his trousers were neatly pressed, and he had cleaned his heavy garden boots for the photo.
‘Was he working there when they had the fire?’
Karen put the mugs of cocoa on the table and the children came and sat to drink it. ‘I think he might have gone into the army by then. He was away from Angelfield for a long time. Nearly fifteen years.’
I looked closely through the grainy age of the picture to the boy’s face, struck by the similarity with his grandson. He looked nice.
‘You know, he never spoke much about his early days. He was a reticent man. But there are things I wish I knew. Like why he married so late. He was in his late forties when he married my mother. I can’t help thinking there must have been something in his past – a heartbreak, perhaps? But you don’t think to ask those questions when you’re a child, and by the time I’d grown up…’ She shrugged, sadly. ‘He was a lovely man to have as a father. Patient. Kind. He’d always help me with anything. And yet now I’m an adult, I sometimes have the feeling I never really knew him.’
There was another detail in the photograph that caught my eye.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
She leant to look. ‘It’s a bag. For carrying game. Pheasants, mainly. You can open it flat on the ground to lay them in, and then you fasten it up around them. I don’t know why it’s in the picture. He was never a gamekeeper, I’m sure.’
‘He used to bring the twins a rabbit or a pheasant, when they wanted one,’ I said and she looked pleased to have this fragment of her father’s early life restored to her.
I thought of Aurelius and his inheritance. The bag he’d been carried in was a game bag. Of course there was a feather in it – it was used for carrying pheasants. And I thought of the scrap of paper. ‘Something like an A at the beginning.’ I remembered Aurelius saying as he held the blur of blue up to the window. ‘And then an S. Just here, towards the end. Of course, it’s faded a bit, over the years, you have to look hard, but you can see it, can’t you?’ I hadn’t been able to see it, but perhaps he really had. What if it was not his own name on the scrap of paper, but his father’s? Ambrose.
From Karen’s house I got a taxi to the solicitor’s office in Banbury. I knew the address from the correspondence I had exchanged with him relating to Hester; now it was Hester again who took me to him.
The receptionist did not want to disturb Mr Lomax when she found I hadn’t got an appointment. ‘It is Christmas Eve, you know.’
But I insisted. ‘Tell him it’s Margaret Lea, regarding Angelfield House and Miss March.’
With an air that said It will make no difference, she took the message into the office; when she came out it was to tell me, rather reluctantly, to go straight in.
The young Mr Lomax was not very young at all. He was probably about the age the old Mr Lomax was when the twins turned up at his office wanting money for John-the-dig’s funeral. He shook my hand, a curious gleam in his eye, a half-smile on his lips, and I understood that to him we were conspirators. For years he had been the only person to know the other identity of his client Miss March; he had inherited the secret from his father along with the cherry desk, the filing cabinets and the pictures on the wall. Now, after all the years of secrecy, there came another person who knew what he knew.
‘Glad to meet you, Miss Lea. What can I do to help?’
‘I’ve come from Angelfield. From the site. The police are there. They’ve found a body.’
‘Oh. Oh, goodness!’
‘Will the police want to speak to Miss Winter, do you suppose?’
At my mention of the name, his eyes flickered discreetly to the door, checking that we could not be overheard.
‘They would want to speak to the owner of the property as a matter of routine.’
‘I thought so.’ I hurried on. ‘The thing is, not only is she ill – I suppose you know that?’
He nodded.
‘But also, her sister is dying.’
He nodded, gravely, and did not interrupt.
‘It would be better, given her fragility and the state of her sister’s health, if she did not receive the news about the discovery too abruptly. She should not hear it from a stranger. And she should not be alone when the information reaches her.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘I can go back to Yorkshire today. If I can get to the station in the next hour, I can be there this evening. The police will have to come through you to contact her, won’t they?’
‘Yes. But I can delay things by a few hours. Enough time for you to get there. I can also drive you to the station, if you like.’
At that moment the telephone rang. We exchanged an anxious look as he picked it up.
‘Bones? I see…She is the owner of the property, yes…An elderly person and in poor health…A sister, gravely ill…Some likelihood of an imminent bereavement…It might be better…Given the circumstances…I happen to know of someone who is going there in person this very evening…Eminently trustworthy…Quite…Indeed…By all means.’
He made a note on a pad, and pushed it across the desk to me. A name and a telephone number.
‘He would like you to telephone him when you get there to let him know how things stand with the lady. If she is able to, he will talk to her then; if not it can wait. The remains, it seems, are not recent. Now, what time is your train? We should be going.’
Seeing that I was deep in thought, the not-so-very-young Mr Lomax drove in silence. Nevertheless a quiet excitement seemed to be eating away at him, and eventually, turning into the road where the station was, he could contain himself no longer. ‘The thirteenth tale…’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose…?’
‘I wish I knew,’ I told him. ‘I’m sorry.’
He pulled a disappointed face.
As the station loomed into sight, I asked a question of my own. ‘Do you happen to know Aurelius Love?’
‘The caterer! Yes, I know him. The man’s a culinary genius!’
‘How long have you known him?’
He answered without thinking – ‘Actually, I was at school with him,’ – and in the middle of the sentence a curious quiver entered his voice, as though he had just realized the implications of my enquiry. My next question did not surprise him.
‘When did you learn that Miss March was Miss Winter? Was it when you took over your father’s business?’
He swallowed. ‘No.’ Blinked. ‘It was before. I was still at school. She came to the house one day. To see my father. It was more private than the office. They had some business to sort out and, without going into confidential details, it became clear during the course of their conversation that Miss March and Miss Winter were the same pe
rson. I was not eavesdropping, you understand. That is to say, not deliberately. I was already under the dining room table when they came in – there was a tablecloth that draped and made it into a sort of tent, you see – and I didn’t want to embarrass my father by emerging suddenly, so I just stayed quiet.’
What was it Miss Winter had told me? There can be no secrets in a house where there are children.
We had come to a stop in front of the station, and the young Mr Lomax turned his stricken eyes towards me. ‘I told Aurelius. The day he told me he had been found on the night of the fire. I told him that Miss Adeline Angelfield and Miss Vida Winter were one and the same person. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter now, anyway. I only wondered.’
‘Does she know I told Aurelius who she was?’
I thought about the letter Miss Winter had sent me right at the beginning, and about Aurelius in his brown suit, seeking the story of his origins. ‘If she guessed, it was decades ago. If she knows, I think you can presume she doesn’t care.’
The shadow cleared from his brow.
‘Thanks for the lift.’
And I ran for the train.
Hester’s Diary II
From the station I made a phone call to the bookshop. My father could not hide his disappointment when I told him I would not be coming home. ‘Your mother will be sorry,’ he said.
‘Will she?’
‘Of course she will.’
‘I have to go back. I think I might have found Hester.’
‘Where?’
‘They have found bones at Angelfield.’
‘Bones?’
‘One of the builders discovered them when he was excavating the library today.’
‘Gracious.’
‘They are bound to get in touch with Miss Winter to ask her about it. And her sister is dying. I can’t leave her on her own up there. She needs me.’
‘I see.’ His voice was serious.
The Thirteenth Tale Page 32
