Authors: Susanna Kearsley
Claire was pleased. We hadn’t seen her for a few days, she’d been keeping to herself, and after supper I had walked out to the cottage for a visit, with the little mongrel Samson at my heels. The dog was lying in a warm contented coil now underneath the narrow table that Claire used for mixing paints in her bright studio. I’d always liked to watch her work. I liked the mingled smells of oil paint drying slowly on the canvases, and brushes left to soak in jars of turpentine, and underneath all that the fainter scent of coffee sitting somewhere in a mug and growing cold because she had forgotten it as usual when she began to paint.
I liked her paintings too. The landscapes had a quality of fantasy about them, as though she’d taken what was there in front of her and shaped it as it could have been. The Christmas cards she’d sent to us each year while both my parents were still living had been painted by her own hand, printed privately, so beautiful they’d sat out on our mantelpiece long after all the other decorations of the season had been cleared away. I wondered what had happened to them. After the death of my parents so many of those little links with the past had been lost.
Claire swept an edge of sunset color underneath a cloud and said, ‘I’m glad you got to spend some time with Oliver.’
‘I nearly didn’t recognize him.’
‘Yes, he’s changed a little, hasn’t he?’ Her sideways glance was twinkling. ‘On the inside, though, he’s still the same old Oliver he ever was. Where did you go for lunch?’
‘The tearoom by the harbor. And Felicity was right, the woman there can’t make a scone to save her life. She’ll be no competition for Susan.’ Which was, I thought, as good a starting point as I was going to get for what I’d really come to talk about. I said, ‘Aunt Claire?’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘If I ask you something, will you give an honest answer?’
The motion of her brush stopped on the canvas as she turned to me with eyes that seemed to know already what I was about to ask her. ‘Always.’
‘How much money would it take for Mark and Susan not to lose Trelowarth?’
She blinked and set the paintbrush down. ‘However did you hear of that?’
‘I’m not allowed to say.’
Claire crossed to put the brush in turpentine and slowly cleaned her hands. And then, because she’d made a promise to be honest, she explained how the investments had diminished and the taxes had increased. ‘Mark’s not in debt yet,’ she assured me, ‘but he will be this time next year if he can’t turn things around.’
‘I want to help,’ I said.
‘You are helping.’
‘I mean really help. Financially. I know that Mark would never take my money, but it isn’t mine,’ I justified. ‘Not really. It’s Katrina’s. And she wouldn’t want to see Trelowarth struggling if her money could prevent it.’ I paused long enough to glance at Claire and satisfy myself that she agreed with that before I carried on. ‘I thought if I were to set up a trust, Mark and Susan could draw on the funds when they needed them, keep the place going, and know that the trust would be there for their children as well, and their grandchildren.’
I waited for Claire’s arguments and braced myself against them. There was no way I could properly explain in words why this was so important to me, why it seemed so right to me that something of my sister should remain here, something tangible.
Claire looked at me a long and silent moment. ‘I think,’ she said finally, ‘that would be a lovely legacy. Katrina would be pleased. How can I help?’
We talked it over while we moved into the kitchen from the studio, and Claire made some suggestions as she put the kettle on to boil, and by the time she’d filled the Wedgwood teapot we had worked the whole thing out between us.
‘I’ll go see Mr. Rowe at the bank in Polgelly tomorrow,’ I said. ‘He can help me get everything organized.’
Claire smiled. ‘You’ll have to fortify yourself then, for the climb back up afterwards. Which biscuits would you like? I’ve coconut or chocolate.’
As she set the biscuit tin down on the table I shook my head. ‘I’ll have to walk up and down The Hill ten times a day, if I keep eating these.’
‘Nonsense. You’re too thin as it is.’
‘There’s no such thing in California as “too thin��.’
Claire’s dry and wordless glance said much about her view of California and its fashions, but she didn’t say a word. She only opened up the biscuit tin and tilted it towards me till I took one. It was coconut. I shared it with the dog, who’d come to join us with expectant eyes and wagging tail. He settled by my chair as I asked, ‘Have you seen the greenhouse yet?’
‘I haven’t, no.’
‘They’ve painted. It looks wonderful.’ I filled her in on everything Felicity and Susan had been doing, while we sat and drank our tea.
I liked this kitchen, liked the feel of it, the cozy warmth and comfort that owed more to Claire herself than to the decorating. She changed the feeling of the rooms that she was in. She made them welcoming.
And maybe that was why I felt my sister’s presence here as well, this evening. It didn’t take a great stretch of imagination to picture Katrina in the empty chair just at the table’s end, with her chin propped on one hand the way she’d always sat when she was following the flow of conversation.
And when we took our tea into the sitting room I felt her come along and curl herself into the sofa at my side, so that I felt no need or inclination to get up, and when Claire told me I looked tired and brought a pillow and a blanket so that I could ‘rest my eyes’ I didn’t argue, only lay my head back happily, still feeling that Katrina was right there with me.
Perhaps she was.
But when I woke, she’d gone.
I’d slept much longer than I’d meant to. It was morning, and the smell of toast still hovered in the kitchen. Claire had left a note:
Gone walking with the dog. Help yourself to what you like.
But she had cleaned the kitchen and I didn’t want to spoil its spotlessness, and having slept the whole night in my clothes I felt rumpled. My breakfast could wait, I decided, until I’d got back to Trelowarth and showered. I wrote my own note underneath Claire’s, thanking her, and propped it back up on the table.
Then taking my coat, I slipped out the front door. It had rained in the night, and the leaves in the woods all held loose beads of water and when the wind chased through the branches and set them to shivering, light little showers came scattering down on my shoulders and head, and my boots slipped a bit in the mud of the path, but I didn’t much mind. And as I came out the far side of the woods there was sunlight at least breaking through the clouds over my head, and Trelowarth itself standing waiting to welcome me, and Susan coming out now to walk round to the greenhouse. I’d go out myself after breakfast and help her, I thought. And then I’d go down to the bank.
When I took my next step, though, the heavens suddenly opened with a fury, and a torrent of rain blown by wind struck me full in the face out of nowhere. I struggled to regain my footing, steadying myself against the onslaught of the sudden storm, and made a dash towards the house and shelter.
The wind was like a wild thing pursuing me. It shrieked as I blew through the back door and slammed it shut behind me, and the blast of rain that followed pounded on the wood like fists demanding entry.
I had water running in my eyes. I pushed my hair back from my forehead, stripped my jacket off, and shook it out and turned to hang it on its hook with all the other coats.
Except there were no other coats. No row of hooks. No rack of boots.
The realization hit me with the same force as the storm and just as suddenly. I let my jacket drop. It made a puddle on the flagstone floor as, stepping from my muddy boots, I padded in on stockinged feet.
In the kitchen, the gnarled branches of the apple trees were scraping at the window and their dripping leaves cast ever-changing shadows in the dimness. All the dishes had been cleared away; the pots scoured clean and set to wait upon the fireless hearth that smelt of cold dead ashes. No one had been cooking here this morning.
Very quietly, I took my sodden coat and boots and stored them out of sight beneath some sacking in the little room that Fergal called the ‘scullery’, which looked to simply be a place for storing things and washing up, with wooden boxes, woven sacks, and empty jugs shoved up against the walls, one small scrubbed table and a tall freestanding cupboard with an iron lock.
Then slipping from the scullery I tiptoed back across the kitchen to the narrow back staircase that might let me get to the safety of ‘my’ room before someone saw me. I didn’t have to worry about Daniel or Fergal, of course, but they weren’t the only people living here, and they’d both said that Daniel’s brother Jack might be returning any time. For all I knew, he might be home already.
I kept that thought in mind as I creaked lightly up the steep slope of the stairs to the first floor and crept past the closed door of the room that Daniel had informed me was his brother’s. It was closed, as were the other doors up here, but I was still relieved to reach the large front corner room and shut myself inside it.
And relieved again to find the blue gown draped across the chair before the writing desk, where I had left it. This time it was easier to dress myself, though fastening the bodice with the pins still took some time and patience. But I could do nothing with my hair yet except comb my fingers through it and allow it to hang loose.
Prepared now, I sat on the bed’s edge patiently and waited.
Maybe I’d come back too early in the morning. It was difficult to judge the time with dark rain sluicing down the windows, driven hard against the glass by a rough wind that rose and wailed and died again into a weeping moan. It was a lonely sound.
The minutes passed. My shoulders stiffened, unaccustomed to the damp, and I got up and paced a little in an effort to get warm. I thought for certain that my pacing would wake Daniel in the next room, but the house stayed silent. Finally, after what seemed an interminable time, I raised the courage to cross over to the door between our rooms and very gently eased it open. If he was in there asleep, I thought, I’d simply close the door again and wait.
But the blue-curtained bed was empty.
Moving cautiously past it, I knocked at the next connecting door, but that room too had no one in it. That discovery and the need for movement made me bolder, and in time I had repeated the maneuver with the other upstairs rooms, and then with those downstairs, and found that, for the moment, there was no one in the house but me.
I might have gone outside to see if they were there, but I remembered Daniel saying clearly that it was not safe for me to leave the house, and I agreed. I really didn’t want to meet the constable alone.
The problem was, it had been a while now since I’d woken up at Claire’s and come away without my breakfast, a decision I regretted now. It wasn’t just the food—I could go hungry for a while with no real ill effects—but I had never coped too well with thirst. The more I tried ignoring it, the deeper it took hold, and if I didn’t find some water soon I knew I’d get a headache.
I’d seen Fergal dipping water from a pail beside the kitchen hearth, but when I checked the pail I found it empty. I stood frowning for a moment till a blast of rain against the kitchen window gave my thoughts a jolt. Taking the pail with me, I went to open the back door and set the pail out in the rain. It took several minutes before I’d collected enough for a small drink of water, but that was enough. With my thirst partly satisfied, I put the pail back outside to get more, just in case I got thirsty again before Daniel or Fergal came back.
They’d be back soon, I thought. They had left the doors open, and surely they wouldn’t have done that unless they’d been somewhere close by. In the meantime I felt sure they wouldn’t begrudge me a handful of food.
And a handful of food was the most I could find in the scullery. One of the sacks held the barley that Fergal had used for his broth, but uncooked it was hard and inedible, and in the other sack there was just coarsely ground flour. I found two soft apples in one corner of an otherwise empty box under the worktable, but all the other food must have been in the tall cupboard, and that was locked.
I ate one apple, saving the other for later, and went in search of something that would help me pass the time.
It felt strange being in that house with no one else around. I wasn’t used to it, and even with the wind and rain, Trelowarth had a multitude of voices—stairs that creaked with no one on them, joists that settled with a sigh, and unseen mice that scrambled through the walls with tiny furtive noises.
What had Daniel’s wife done on the days he was at sea, I wondered? True, she would have likely had the house to keep and clean, and meals to make, if only for herself. And housework might have filled her waking hours with no time left for boredom. But for me this was a foreign country, really, coming from a place where I could flip a switch and instantly have music or the hourly news to chase away the loneliness.
I wondered whether Daniel’s wife had ever gone upstairs, as I did now, to seek the comfort of the study where the fragrance of his pipe smoke lingered as though he were not far off. I scanned his books in search of something I might know. The books themselves were lovely things to look at, bound in half-calf leather so the scent of them alone enhanced the beauty of the room. Some had their titles stamped in gilded printing on the spine, and curious, I picked out a copy of Jonathan Swift’s poems, so recently printed that I could still smell the sharp scent of fresh ink on the pages. As I read the satirical lines I was struck by the strange realization that Jonathan Swift was alive right now somewhere and walking around, maybe forming ideas for
Gulliver’s Travels
, a book that he hadn’t yet written.
Now I’d noticed it, several of the books in this room were by writers who would have been very much alive in 1715: Alexander Pope and William Congreve and the poet Matthew Prior. It was thrilling just to hold those books in the same form in which the authors would have held them, in what likely were the first editions published, with their covers smooth and new and all the pages crisply cut.