Fiercombe Manor (49 page)

After a few minutes, the pockets of her mother's dress were full. She stood up and brushed the masonry dust off on her dress as Isabel stared, not understanding the game yet but straining to understand so she could join in. She watched closely as her mother looked out across the water. Her face and hands were pale against the black fabric of the new dress.

Then, still without looking back or noticing Isabel, she began to wade out into the lake, the stones in her skirts grating together as she moved.

Isabel found her voice. “Mama, come back! Please, Mama. Wait for me.”

But she didn't seem to hear over the rain and whatever else she was listening to.

Isabel thought her chest would burst with panic. She glanced in the direction of the house, wondering whether she had time to run back for help. Through the downpour she could scarcely even see its grey stones. If she took too long, like last time, she knew her mother would be gone.

She seemed a long way out now. The lake was deep; Isabel had been warned often enough not to get too close and fall in. Beyond the shallow edges that were beginning to flood, the bottom of it fell away steeply. Already she could see that her mother had tilted her chin up to keep the water out of her mouth. Her hair had come down and was swirling around her like weeds. The swell of the water turned her slowly around so that Isabel could see the side of her face. She did not look frightened; she looked perfectly calm.

The thought that struck Isabel then did so with such force that her knees buckled slightly.
She is leaving me here so she can be
with my little brother.
It felt like the truth. She cried out again, but there was not a flicker of a response. Her mother's eyes were closed.

She thought about taking her boots off, but they were so new that she didn't want to go without them. The water when she stepped into it was colder than she expected, and her teeth began to chatter immediately. The mud and sodden grasses beneath her were treacherous, and she slid further in without warning, taking down a sour gulp of the water as she did. Out of her depth, she thrashed around, reaching out to grasp at a clump of rushes that came away in her hand, useless.

Her dress and petticoats were dragging her down, and she opened her eyes wide under the murky water for a terrifying instant, unidentified shadows tangling in her boots. With all her might she broke the surface of the water and shrieked out for her mother, who finally opened her eyes and turned to her child.

“Come, then,” she said and, not so far away after all, reached out and pulled Isabel to her.

T
he manor is quiet tonight, as I finish writing my account. It is such a very old house; a survivor of five or more centuries, and you can usually hear it settle and sigh after sunset on midsummer days like this one, the heat stealing out of its timbers and the damp creeping in to take its place. But tonight it waits patiently for me to finish. It was high time I set it all down—I have only been waiting till I knew the truth about them. The truth about Elizabeth and Isabel; the last piece of the puzzle that has haunted me from my first days in the valley.

It was Mrs. Jelphs who gave me the answers, and in the end, it was just a little thing that finally made her expose the truth she has been shielding all these years. A little thing, but also a fitting thing.

A few weeks ago, the two of us were sitting in the Tudor garden, admiring the newly trimmed yew pylons. Mrs. Jelphs's embroidery hoop was forgotten for the moment in her lap, as was my book in mine, and little Isabel was sound asleep in the old perambulator that had once transported Tom, and Henry before
him. Joseph had been playing peacefully on the topmost terrace, but now began to cry.

“What is it, darling?” I called as I got to my feet and went to help him down the stone steps. “What's happened?”

“My hare,” he said thickly, and held aloft the velveteen toy he wouldn't be separated from. It was missing one of its black bead eyes.

I picked him up and went back to where he had been. It took a few minutes on my hands and knees, but then I spied it, rolled into a cushion of moss, its polished surface glinting in the morning sun.

“Here it is, Joe!” I cried triumphantly. “Mrs. Jelphs will have it sewn back on for you in half a minute.”

He was already distracted by another toy, and so I took the bead over to her, watching her face close slightly as I handed it and the little hare over. Laying her embroidery aside, she reached over to her sewing box and lifted the lid.

“Do you remember I asked you about that box the first day I was here?” I said gently.

She glanced up at me. “I was sharp with you, wasn't I?”

I smiled. “I'm sure I deserved it, being nosy.”

She shook her head. “You weren't to know who she was to me.”

Her direct reference to Elizabeth surprised me, and I kept silent so that I didn't scare her off, just as I had learnt to do in my early days at Fiercombe.

“You gave me such a start, saying her name, I remember that,” she continued softly. “I hadn't heard it spoken aloud for so long. It hurt to talk of her, but it was something of a relief too.” She brushed the soft nap of the little hare with her fingertip. “She made this, you know. She wouldn't let me; she wanted to make it herself. For Isabel.” Glancing over at the pram, she smiled. “For the first Isabel.”

Her openness was disarming, and I found I couldn't keep quiet then.

“Mrs. Jelphs, there's something I want to tell you. I shouldn't have done it, I had no business looking.”

She looked up from stroking the hare.

“On the day I arrived, when you left me in the small parlour, I didn't just look at the sewing box, I looked in it. The secret compartment—I'd seen one like it before, and so I knew how to open it. There was a flower inside, and a note to you. I'm afraid I read it. That was what made me ask over supper that evening—not the library book. I'm sorry.”

She didn't say anything but tucked a skein of silks deeper into the box to reveal the small brass button, which she pressed. The platform of satin shifted, just as it had for me three years earlier. She took out the note, and I saw her eyes move over the words, though I'm sure she knew them by heart.

“I should have told you the truth about her—and Isabel too,” she said eventually, and so quietly that I found myself leaning towards her. I held out my hand, and when she took it, her fingers were as soft and cool as I remembered them from that first day.

“I couldn't tell you—or anyone—because I have always blamed myself. I thought that if I never talked of it again, then it wouldn't be quite so true, somehow. Only Ruck and I are left now of those who knew, and we have never spoken of it. Never. People up in Stanwick wanted to know what had happened, but we would never have said. It was none of their business.

“I remember the weather breaking on the day you gave birth to Joseph. Nearly three years ago now—how fast it's gone. I think the rain of the previous two months must have fallen in a couple of hours. The rhododendrons bent their poor heads, some of them eventually snapping off under the force of it. The stream burst its banks, and what with the water running down off the escarpment, Fiery Lane soon turned into a river.

“When we found you there—and we nearly missed you, because you'd hidden yourself almost inside the hedgerow—I thought it was happening all over again. I saw again like it was yesterday the image of Elizabeth on the banks of the lake, just after Ruck had pulled her out. Unlike you, she wasn't breathing.”

“Elizabeth drowned?” I saw her lovely face, the eyes closed, her long hair flowing around her.

Mrs. Jelphs nodded, just once. “They both did. We didn't find the child at first. No one knew she was missing. But then Ruck saw her little boot in the reeds at the edge. I kept it afterwards, though the sight of it broke my heart. Years later, when Thomas's parents had virtually moved away, I took it with the other things from my room and hid them in the nursery. It was a relief—just a tiny fraction of a relief—to no longer keep them so close. With the little boot was a portrait of Elizabeth that Edward Stanton had never liked, a blanket I had knitted for the new baby, and a photograph of Isabel I could never look at.”

“I've seen it,” I said quietly. “I found it all.”

She sighed. “Well, you'll know then. The photograph was taken at Dr. Logan's suggestion, and what a morbid one too. He arrived a few hours after . . . after we found them. I like to think that I wouldn't have let him take Elizabeth away again, if she'd still been alive to take, but really, what could I have done? I would have said nothing, just as I had the time before. I have always said nothing. Until now.”

“Where are they?” I said.

She looked down. “Sir Edward was not thinking straight. At least, that's what I chose to think. He was expecting to bury his tiny son that afternoon. Instead, he buried his whole family. He was full of rage, and there was no one to blame. I believe he was actually mad with grief, easily as ill as his wife had ever been. He sent Dr.
Logan away and then dismissed most of the staff. He sent them from the valley in the space of a few hours, telling them a month's pay would follow.

“By evening, there were no more than half a dozen of us left, it seemed. We stayed below stairs, none of us going to bed at all. I was completely numb with the shock of it, I'm sure we all were. Our mistress, little Isabel, both gone. Those who remained didn't intend to stay. Already there was talk of a curse in the valley. It's all a dreadful blur now.”

“I couldn't find them in the churchyard,” I said. “I looked for them on the day I went into labour with Joseph, just as the storm was breaking. I've looked since, but they are nowhere. I thought of asking you more than a few times, but then . . . I just couldn't.”

Mrs. Jelphs gripped my hand tighter. “I should have told you. Not speaking up has never helped anyone here. Not just then, but in the years that followed, too. When Thomas lost his brother, he was scarcely allowed to speak of him again. When you came, we—Ruck and I—thought we could keep you safe, not by warning you but by watching you.”

She bowed her head.

“Where are they?”

She dragged in her breath. “They are buried in the Great Mead. The graves aren't marked. I don't know precisely where; it was done before we knew about it. Sir Edward said they had sinned. It . . . it wasn't an accident, you see. There were rocks found in her pockets—pieces of Stanton House used to weigh her down.” She shook her head. “He said Elizabeth had sinned for taking Isabel's life as well as her own. I don't know how he thought a tiny girl had sinned, but he partly blamed her for the baby's death, I know that much. It was written all over his face in those terrible days after the stillbirth.”

I closed my eyes and thought about the corner of the Great Mead I had found myself drawn towards on the day Joseph was born. They were there, I knew it. They had always been there.

S
ince that day, when Isabel's little hare helped to draw out her awful confession, Mrs. Jelphs has been different, altered and lightened by the liberation of it. I see now that she hasn't always been so reserved and careful—that the naive, cheerful Edith who came through in Elizabeth's diary had been locked away with all her secrets. Now that she can talk freely of Elizabeth, whose portrait has replaced the horrible oil of the alchemist, she is quite changed. She even looks different: younger and less brittle. She is Edith again.

I was glad of her confession, not only because I finally knew what had happened to Elizabeth, but because of Isabel. At least a few people had remembered her mother, mourned her all this time, but Isabel had almost been forgotten. Now her name, handed down to my daughter, is spoken aloud in the manor again, and it has made something in the atmosphere of the valley shift and realign.

Their stones were laid early this morning, the air still fresh, the sky already a vaulted ceiling of blue. The stonemason had suggested granite, saying it would weather better than the soft, pale golden stone I wanted, but I had shaken my head firmly. “Not granite for them.”

They lie in a secluded and lovely corner of the Great Mead, where the wildflowers bloom first in summer and the jewels of frost linger longest in winter. Now that it is midsummer again, I will walk out there each evening and watch as the tiny lamps of a thousand glowworms are lit, earthbound stars all around them.

T
hanks to all my family and friends who have supported me during the writing (and guilt-ridden not-writing) of this book. Special thanks, however, must go to my mum, for being a stalwart champion and early reader, and to Darren, who suffered without complaint my writing every weekend as the deadline approached. I also want to thank my fellow Cheltenham writers—Hayley, Helen, Amanda, and John—for their company and encouragement, and Jade and Andy for being firm friends throughout. My dog Morris is also due an honourable mention: lying across my keyboard didn't help much, but keeping me warm on the colder days did.