A Place of Secrets (2 page)

“We have some of his instruments, as well. Bits of telescope. And a whatnot … One of those spherical models of the solar system.”

“An orrery, you mean?” This whole thing was beginning to sound worth a journey. She shuffled books and papers with her free hand, looking for her desk diary.

“Orrery. That’s it,” Robert Wickham continued. “Shows the planets going round the sun. So you’d be
prepared to make a visit?”

“Of course,” she replied. She caught sight of the diary in her in tray, under the mess of proofs Inigo had left. “When would suit you?” She turned the pages. Could she get away next week? If Wickham was threatening to show other auction houses as well, she needed to be ahead of the game.

“I’m away now for a few days,” he said, “so it’ll have to be after that.” They
agreed that she would visit Starbrough Hall on Friday, in a week’s time. “You’ll be driving, will you? I’ll e-mail directions. It’s too complicated for the phone. The nearest place of any size is Holt. And you can stay overnight if you like. Plenty of room here and my mother and I would be delighted to entertain you. My wife will be away with the children, so you’ll have some peace and quiet.”

“That’s very kind. I probably won’t need to stay,” Jude said. “I’ve got family in the area, you see.” She hadn’t been home to Norfolk for ages. It would be a good opportunity. Perhaps her boyfriend, Caspar, would come, too.

After she put down the phone she prowled the department, unsettled. The Starbrough Hall collection was important, she was absolutely sure, though she couldn’t put her finger
on why she felt this. And if it was important and she could secure it for Beecham’s it would look good. And looking good was important right now, because Klaus Vanderbilt was approaching retirement age and Beecham’s would need a new head of department.

She was mulling over, as she often did, what her own chances of promotion were against Inigo’s, when her eye fell on her notepad and the words
“Starbrough Hall.”

She still couldn’t visualize the place. Going across to the department’s reference shelves she extracted an outsize volume entitled
Great Houses of East Anglia
and laid it on Inigo’s desk. When she turned to “S” she found a grainy black-and-white photograph. Starbrough Hall was a graceful, if stark-looking Palladian villa with a gravel forecourt and a great featureless expanse
of lawn. “Two miles from the village of Starbrough. Built 1720,” said the short text, “by Edward Wickham Esq. on the burned-out ruins of the old manor house of Starbrough.” Starbrough. That was very near Claire. She had certainly driven through Starbrough village at some point; she remembered the outsize church, a green with a pretty village sign and a bench girdling a mountainous oak tree. Gran’s
father had been gamekeeper on the Starbrough estate, she believed, but she didn’t know where they’d lived.

She sat musing for a moment in the empty office, then reached for the phone to ring Gran.

* * *

The old lady drowsed in the afternoons now. The coastal village of Blakeney was busy with holidaymakers, but if she removed her hearing aid the sounds of people and boat trailers passing
her window subsided to a soothing background murmur. Long-ago voices, skirls of happy laughter, bubbled up in her memory as fresh as spring water.

She drifted back to consciousness, dimly aware of a distant ringing, fumbling with her hearing aid as she made her way to the phone.

“Judith!” She would hesitate to say that Jude was her favorite grandchild, but she felt a closeness to her she never
quite felt with Claire, dear cross little Claire.

“I’m going to Starbrough Hall next Friday, Gran. Can I stay with you on Thursday night?” Jude was saying. “I’d love to ask you about the place.”

“Starbrough?” Jude heard Jessie’s surprise, but all the old lady said next was, “It would be lovely to see you, dear. Will you get here for tea?”

When she put down the phone, Jessie leaned against the
sideboard. Starbrough Hall. She’d thought about the wild girl a great deal recently. And now her grandchild was going there. Why? She hadn’t said. Starbrough. Perhaps the opportunity had come to make things right again.

* * *

Later in the afternoon, after an irritating couple of hours in which the phones didn’t cease ringing, and a pedantic argument with Inigo over the Bloomsbury first editions,
Jude finished writing her copy, then took refuge in the storeroom next door to sort books into lots for auction. Musing about the Starbrough Hall collection she suddenly thought of her old friend Cecelia. They’d met at university, but whereas Jude had gone out into the Real World of work, Cecelia was still burrowing away in university libraries researching the scientific revolution of the
late eighteenth century. When they’d last met, for a drink a year or so ago, she was sure Cecelia had said something to do with a book she was writing about astronomy of the period. She’d have to get in touch with her.

What seemed a very short time later, Suri put her head around the door. “I’m off now, Jude. We’re going straight down to my parents’ in Chichester and the traffic will probably
be awful. Have a lovely weekend.”

“Heck, it’s nearly six. I mustn’t be long either!” The storeroom had no windows, which could be disorienting.

“We’re going to dinner with some friends of Caspar’s tonight,” she told Suri, as they returned to the main office. “Did I tell you, we’re all going on holiday to France in a couple of weeks? I’ve only met them twice. Mad, aren’t I?”

“It’s brave, if
you don’t know them,” said Suri, looking unsure whether she was expected to agree. “What happens if you don’t get on?”

“I expect we will,” Jude said, trying to sound positive. “They seem good fun. Anyway, lots of vino always oils the wheels.”

After Suri had left, Jude tidied her desk, returning books to shelves in swift, deft movements and straightening the piles of paper. She wasn’t sure she
liked what she had seen in Suri’s gaze—a kind of pity. At twenty-six and newly engaged to a boy she’d met at uni, Suri still saw life with a fresh innocence. Her world was wonderful, full of color and hope and happiness, and Jude loved her for it. Even Inigo’s patronizing comments rarely managed to cloud Suri’s lovely, glowing aura.
I was like that once
, she realized, with a little stab of self-pity.

Half-past six found her pushing her way through the aimless summer crowds choking the alley that ran alongside Charing Cross railway station down to Embankment tube.

Even if she hadn’t known him, her eye would have been drawn to the figure leaning against a pillar, tapping something into his BlackBerry. Caspar was a powerfully built man in a navy designer suit and starched white shirt. Five years
older than Jude’s thirty-four, he was handsome and lively, with dark, curly hair combed back into submission with the merest slick of gel. She’d met him a few months ago at a friend’s drinks party. She, touching five feet ten, and voluptuous, was a good physical match for him. He was drawn by her soft, dark eyes and the cloud of wavy strawberry-blonde hair, which she wore clasped at the nape
of her neck. “Quite a Madonna, you are. You looked sad, but then you smiled,” he said, when she once asked him teasingly why he’d been drawn to her that evening. “So many people only smile with their mouths, but you smiled with your eyes like you cared. I liked that.”

She in turn had liked the way he moved fluidly among this sophisticated group of city dwellers, so obviously enjoying himself,
belonging. He’d never married, nor indeed had many of his large network of friends truly settled down. They were too busy working hard at careers they loved—Caspar and his friend Jack ran the New Media advertising consultancy—and playing hard, too. Even his married friends, on the whole, didn’t have children. This was another thing that drew her to him, she knew, this living for the moment. They
never talked about the future, but then the present was still all she could manage. When he asked her to come on holiday with some of his friends she hesitated, then thought, why not? “It’ll be a laugh,” he said. “We’ll have a great time.” She had every reason to believe him, but a worm of worry still wriggled inside her.

All her own friends, it seemed—the ones who witnessed her marriage to Mark
six years before—were sending invitations to their own weddings, or announcements of the births of their children. She already had another godchild and was about to attend the christening of a third, as well as a niece, six-year-old Summer.

“Hi. Sorry I’m late,” she said, her hand briefly resting on Caspar’s tailored sleeve.

“You’re not,” Caspar replied, pulling her to him for one of his quick
but expert kisses. His dark eyes gleaming, his gaze flicked over her appreciatively, and she was glad she’d bought the trouser suit—and skipped lunch to fit it. “Pretty earrings,” he commented, recognizing them, and she touched one of the elegant silver cube studs he’d given her for her birthday at Easter, soon after they’d first met.

“Luke and Marney want us at eight,” he said. “Let’s go get
a drink.” They found a wine bar nearby where Caspar magically secured the last table. After the first few mouthfuls of syrupy Burgundy on her empty stomach, Jude felt light-headed.

“How did your presentation go?” she asked him. He and Jack were pitching for a teenage sports-fashion account.

“Good,” he replied. He’d drained his glass already and was pouring his next. “They went crazy for the
movie-clip idea. If we find the right kids for the shoot, it could be amazing. Jack’s started going through the agencies. How’s the dusty world of dead-tree technology?” He was always teasing her that her job involved handling old books when the future of modern media was online. The prices they sold at impressed him, though.

“Something quite beguiling has cropped up,” she told him. “It’s the
collection of an eighteenth-century astronomer. I’m going up to Norfolk on Friday. It’s funny really, it’s just where Gran was brought up. Caspar, I wondered…” The alcohol gave her courage to ask. “We weren’t doing anything next weekend, were we, you and me? I’m staying with Gran on Thursday night and working on Friday, so I mean Friday and Saturday nights. I’ve got to go to Milo’s christening on
Sunday, but that’s doable. You could drive down and meet me in Norfolk on Friday evening. Or earlier, if you like. And come to the christening. I know Shirley and Martin would love to meet you.”

“Friday’s the fourth, right? I think it’s Tate and Yasmin’s flat-warming—no, that’s the Saturday.” He picked up his BlackBerry and started pressing keys. “Yeah, but we don’t have to do that.”

“Really?
Only we could see my sister, Claire, and her little girl. You haven’t met them, you see, and I thought … Their place is too tiny for both of us, but there’s a bed and breakfast in the village or maybe we could go out to the coast. The countryside’s beautiful; we could go walking…” She stopped, aware that he wasn’t listening.

Caspar’s eyes narrowed as he stared at his BlackBerry, the blue light
from the screen flickering eerily across his face. He seemed tense, worried.

“Ah,” he said, suddenly cheered by something he’d found. “I’m really sorry, Jude, but I’m due in Paris on the Sunday for a presentation on Monday. Jack and I’ll need Saturday to prepare.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. You haven’t met my family. I particularly thought you’d like Claire.”

“She’s … the disabled one?”

“She has
a slight limp, that’s all.” Disabled is not how Jude thought of her sister. Pretty, feisty, outspoken, an astute businesswoman, yes, but never disabled. She’d been born with one leg slightly shorter than the other; something that had meant a childhood punctuated by hospital operations. “Her little girl’s called Summer. I haven’t seen them properly for weeks.”

“I thought you all met up at the
airport last week.” They’d gone to see their mother off to Spain with her new husband, Douglas, who was renovating a villa in the hills behind Malaga.

“Stansted Airport is hardly a relaxing place for a chat.”

“Well, I’ll have to meet Claire and Summer—cute name—another time.”

Now he’d worked his way into the part, he managed to look sincerely sorry, but Jude was disappointed. It wasn’t the
first opportunity he’d turned down of meeting her family, and it mattered to her. Come to think of it, she hadn’t met any of his relations either. This hadn’t struck her as odd before, but now it did.

One of the little earrings was hurting. She put a hand up and loosened it carefully. It came apart. She caught the bits just in time.

Coming home to the white terraced house in Greenwich was always a pleasure. She elbowed the door shut and dumped her supermarket bags in the kitchen. She’d stayed at Caspar’s in Islington the previous night, but, although today was Saturday, he had some things to sort out at the office, so she had traveled back into town with him on the tube and they went their separate ways at King’s
Cross. They hadn’t spoken much. He’d looked the worse for wear—he’d had far too much to drink the previous night, the dinner party having gone on until the small hours. Jude had enjoyed the evening even less than she’d feared. The six other people there, who encountered individually had seemed friendly and amusing, proved dreary en masse. Last night they talked about restaurants she hadn’t been
to, and designer names she didn’t care about, and old university friends she’d never met and she’d quietly picked at her food, feeling excluded and mutinous. The thought of spending a fortnight in their company was frankly depressing. When, at one gap in the conversation, she had asked about sightseeing near Brantôme, their hostess, languid Marney, had wrinkled her nose and said that they usually
passed their days by the villa’s pool, only emerging in the evening to find somewhere for dinner. “It’s usually too hot for walking around anyway,” she drawled.

“And let’s face it,” broke in plump, giggly Paula, “once you’ve seen one chateau you’ve seen the whole bloody lot.” Everybody laughed and Jude forced a polite smile.

Jude, whose pale English skin turned scarlet in the sun, hated lying
around by pools. Her ideal holiday involved exploring tranquil towns and villages, and finding out about their histories, which were often surprisingly colorful and violent. It looked as if she’d be doing it on her own this time.