Fiercombe Manor (41 page)

I must've looked disappointed, because Nan nudged me gently.

“To be honest, he didn't seem that taken with her. She scarcely said two words. And when I say beautiful, really she was more like a china doll. It wasn't like she was a real person.”

“You're sweet to say it, Nan, but I don't care one way or the other. Tom's become a sort of friend to me. We've talked a little, that's all. Besides, look at me.” I laid my hand on my swollen abdomen.

“Oh, that wouldn't worry Thomas. He's always been the rebellious sort. He was nearly expelled from school when he was fifteen, for sneaking out with a friend and going to a pub. Not that they would serve him, of course—he still looked like a schoolboy. Sir Charles had to beg to keep him there. I think they only let him stay because of what had happened to his brother. I don't think Thomas cares what people think.”

“It's not just about that, Nan, and you know it. We come from entirely different backgrounds.”

“But you're clever, and you had a good job, didn't you? You're not like me,” she said, as if she knew what she meant but was at a loss to explain it.

Again, I felt something like an old-fashioned governess: neither one thing nor the other; no Mrs. Jelphs but hardly an Elizabeth Stanton either.

Nan helped me up, and we walked slowly back to the manor, keeping in the shade where we could. Once she had gone, I finished my own duties and then wandered around aimlessly, not able to settle in the airless house but uncomfortably hot sitting outside. In truth, I was nervous about seeing Tom the next day. I really didn't want to lose my head again, not like I had with James.

Mrs. Jelphs was still not back from Painswick, and I suddenly had the idea to go and visit Mr. Morton, who would surely be back from Cornwall. Judging by the sun's position, it had only just gone four o'clock. It seemed an age since I'd seen him, and the distraction from thoughts of Tom would do me good. If I walked very slowly and rested along the way, the journey wouldn't be too much for me. Besides, I was too stubborn to admit that I was becoming trapped down in the valley by my ever-growing bulk.

I caught sight of Ruck just before I got to where the easiest of the paths began. He was standing in the lane where I'd stood
with him before. Even knowing he could turn at any moment and catch me there, I couldn't help observing him for a moment or two. He was looking again at the rhododendrons' almost menacing beauty, apparently unable to tear himself away. His shoulders were hunched in what I took to be confusion, and he looked more shrunken and decrepit than I'd seen him.

The heat was a tangible force pressing in at me from all angles. Even under the shade of the beech trees, once I'd started on the path, there was little respite. The dappling effect of the leaves left me dizzy and off balance, and I had to rest half a dozen times, breathing heavily, the air smelling of rotting flowers. I wondered if I had turned a little mad in attempting such a walk, or whether I just needed to escape the somehow denser atmosphere of the valley.

When I finally got to Mr. Morton's house, I was even more dishevelled than I had been on my other visits. He answered the door almost immediately, as I was still trying to smooth down my hair, which was damp with sweat.

“Ah, Alice, it's you. I'm so glad.”

“Uninvited as usual,” I said sheepishly. “And even more unkempt.”

“Nonsense, come in. Are you quite all right? Surely you didn't walk here?”

“Oh yes, I like to walk. It makes me feel like I'm still the same person, somehow.”

He ushered me into the same sitting room we had sat in during my other visits. Just as then, I felt myself relax as I sank down into the armchair he gently pushed me towards.

“Did you have a nice holiday?” I said, when he returned from the kitchen with two tall glasses of ginger beer. A wafer-thin slice of lemon bobbed on the surface of each. It looked like heaven.

“Staying with my niece in Cornwall, you mean? Oh, yes. I like it down there. I love being by the sea. I thought I would end up there in my dotage, but I've never been able to bring myself to leave this place. I don't know why it is that I'm so attached to this part of the world, but I am.”

“You could go and live near your niece tomorrow. I'm sure she'd be glad to have you close by.”

“No, I couldn't, not really. I'm tied to this little corner of the world now.”

We sat sipping our drinks companionably. The cool liquid was refreshing as it went down.

“I was hoping you'd stop by,” he said suddenly. “I found a few things that might interest you. Some I had filed away and had forgotten about, one item I bought.”

“I hope you didn't spend any money on me.”

“My dear, don't worry. It was hardly a king's ransom. Besides, I was intrigued myself.”

I felt my interest light like dry kindling. During my last visits we had steered away from the valley's history by some sort of unspoken mutual consent, but I sensed that it would be different today. I felt I was up to it too. I needed to hear it. I suppose it was another reason I had struggled up the hill in the blazing heat.

He went over to a bureau in the corner, where he riffled through a pile of papers that had been gathered into a cardboard folder. I could see from where I was sitting that some of them were brittle and yellowed. He pulled out a pamphlet in pristine condition and handed it over: an auction catalogue dated February 1899.

“I thought you might find this interesting, as someone who has heard a little about Stanton House.”

Attached by paper clip to the front was a photograph I hadn't seen before. Taken far closer to the house than the image in Mr.
Morton's book, it showed in black and white the house at its newly completed best. An impossibly tall ladder had been placed against the facade, and up it was an estate worker. Presumably this was in the days when there were dozens of them. It looked as though he was replacing a roof tile. I put it aside to look at the catalogue, which was unmistakably of the period, with its bold black script, the name of Stanton House dwarfed only by the name of the auctioneers' firm.

I looked through the pages. As Mrs. Jelphs had told me, it seemed nothing had been too good—or too insignificant—to omit from the sale. Copper piping, wood panelling, brass door handles; it was all there, along with items that spoke more poignantly of circumstances brutally altered, objects once chosen and loved, things that had added up to a comfortable, privileged existence: an engraved silver-backed hairbrush, a mahogany-and-baize card table, a child's rocking horse.

“We haven't talked much about the Stanton family lately,” I said finally.

He nodded. “I suppose that's true.”

“Thomas Stanton has been back, you know,” I said, looking into my glass so I didn't give anything away.

“Yes, I heard. Quite literally, in fact. I've heard him zipping about in that lovely little motor of his.”

“He told me about his brother Henry. What happened at the lake.”

“Ah. Yes, that was a tragic thing, though I didn't know the boy well before he died. Charles is not like his older brother Edward was at all. He's always kept himself—and his family—to himself. They lived a quiet life down there, and now of course he and Lady Stanton are hardly there at all.”

“She doesn't like it here.”

“She was from London like you, and I think she would have been more suited to living there instead. It was always too quiet for her here, but I think she loved her husband, and of course her boys. Henry was said to be her favourite. After his accident, there was nothing left to love about Fiercombe for her.”

“I remember Ruck telling me on my very first day here that she had got ‘notions' about things, I think he said. That she didn't sleep well.”

Mr. Morton shook his head sadly. “After Henry died, she became convinced the valley was . . . ill-fated in some way.”

“She thought it was unlucky,” I said softly.

“I suppose so. This is only what I've heard. Though it's true that Henry is not buried in Fiercombe's graveyard, which you might say speaks volumes. He was laid to rest up here, in Stanwick, at his mother's insistence. You can imagine how much talk that generated.

“But then there have always been stories about Fiercombe. Its isolation, the very steepness of the valley, how it's cut off in winter when it snows. You know about Margaret of Anjou of course, but there was another Stanton ancestor, a much earlier one than Edward, sixteenth century, I believe, who was said to be an alchemist.”

“Yes, Mrs. Jelphs mentioned him. His portrait hangs on the stairs. I've no idea why anyone would want it up—it's a horrible thing.”

“And he was a horrible man, by all accounts. It's said that he pushed his wife down the stairs in a fit of pique. She broke her neck. Differing versions of the story have her paralysed or dead. His temper was legendary, and ruthless. There was barely a servant in the county who would work for him.”

Without thinking, my hand went to the bruise that Tom had spotted on my arm. It was fading slowly, purple to jaundiced yellow.

“There was a little girl once.” The words slipped out before I thought about it.

“Do you mean at Stanton House?” He turned over the auction pamphlet that I'd laid on the table between us. “Yes, there was. Isabel.”

Hearing her name for the first time made me feel cold. I put down my glass and flexed my chilled fingers.

“I suppose it would have been her rocking horse that was sold off in the auction,” he said.

I remembered a rocking horse a school friend of mine had owned when we were five or six. It was a battered old thing of dented tin, with a tangled mane of red wool, but I had envied her its ownership with a passion. We would take endless turns until her mother shouted up the stairs that she couldn't stand the creaking a minute longer.

“It's interesting you should ask about Isabel,” Mr. Morton went on, bringing me back to myself. “The other item I remembered I had—it's indirectly connected to her. It concerns her mother. Her mother being Elizabeth, of course.”

I had been reaching for my glass again, but I froze.

He looked at me strangely. “Really, Alice, I think you've overdone it coming up here on foot. You've gone a peculiar colour. Listen, you're not about to have . . . I mean, it's too early for . . .”

The sight of him worrying that I might give birth on his lovely old rugs took my mind off Isabel for a moment. I smiled as reassuringly as I could and took a deep breath.

“No, there's no chance of that, Mr. Morton. I've a month to go yet.”

“Thank god. But I wish you would call me Hugh,” he said.

I laughed. “I'm sorry I gave you a start. It's just that I saw a strange photograph of a little girl, and I think it's of Isabel. I didn't
know her name until you said it. I've wondered again and again what happened to her. To Elizabeth, too. Isabel especially has been lost somehow.”

He shook his head. “No one really knows what happened to either of them. Of course the few people that were left at Stanton House presumably knew, but up here in the village, though gossip was rife, nothing was confirmed. A doctor was seen going down into the valley not long after the last party I attended there, but his carriage swept through Stanwick without stopping. No one knew him anyway; he was from Oxford, I believe. I always got the feeling that something had been hushed up, and there was a lot of talk about money—or rather, Edward Stanton's sudden lack of it.

“Really, it was the oddest thing. There was that one last, glorious party I went to, on Midsummer's Eve, and everything seemed well enough then. Edward was clearly in love with Elizabeth, she was healthy and with child—not Isabel; she was a little girl by then, four or five, I'm no good at children's ages—and the estate appeared to be thriving. That must have been 1897—no, 1898. Some days later—no more than a week—the doctor was seen arriving. No one saw him leave, but perhaps it was in the dead of night. An old itinerant who always stopped at the pub here on his travels claimed that he saw a white carriage go down there around that time, in the first glimmers of dawn, but I'm not sure his word could be relied on by anyone.”

“A white carriage?” I said.

“White carriages were sometimes used instead of black when a small child or baby died.”

“Do you think Elizabeth lost her second child?”

“I have no way of knowing, I'm afraid. By 1900, everything had gone. All that was left for Charles Stanton to inherit was the old manor and the land.”

“But someone must know what happened to them?”

“Many people think they know. There are a multitude of theories, each more fantastic than the last.” He sighed. “Elizabeth was such a lovely woman, glowing with health, when I saw her for the last time. We talked about sunsets.” He tailed off, his eyes sad.

I sat enthralled, my mind racing through the possibilities.

“So do you have your own theory?” I felt rude for intruding on his thoughts, but I couldn't believe a mother, daughter, and tiny baby could have vanished from history so easily. “I mean, do you think they survived? Perhaps they were whisked away in the middle of the night.”

“As I said, there are many stories. Some say that Elizabeth died in childbirth, and that Isabel simply pined away, dying of a broken heart at the loss of her mother, to whom she was uncommonly close for those times. Elizabeth was ill after Isabel's birth, you know—well, we shall come to that shortly—and it meant that the little girl always clung to her. Others who spoke to some of the staff who were dismissed during that strange week swear that the new baby, delivered slightly prematurely, caught scarlet fever from the nurserymaid and died, and Isabel and Elizabeth were spirited off to London before Isabel could catch it, with Sir Edward—who certainly left Fiercombe for good within weeks of that last party—following her. It was all rather hazy and conflicting. Of course that has simply added to the mystery over the years.”