A Place of Secrets (23 page)

“It’s vital to defend the forest,” he said, “and Robert tells me the folly is listed. That’s a relief to know, at least.”

“I don’t think it’s as straightforward as that,” she replied, and explained about the
structure being dangerous. “What do you think?”

“It’s not dangerous enough for it to be knocked down,” he said. “Surely. I know I’m always making a fuss, but, honestly, I wouldn’t go up there if I believed it was going to collapse under me. It’s just that aspects of it need to be repaired. The stairs need to be made good, and the roof area safe.”

“Well you’ll have to get together with Robert
and construct a counterargument,” Jude said. “And if I can find out as much as I can about the history of the tower, it might strengthen your case.”

“I don’t want those holiday cottages, Jude, but I’d mourn the loss of the tower most of all.”

The phone rang and rang that morning. Other people in the village had also received letters, or had heard the news from someone else, and suddenly Robert
found himself the leader of a group to save Starbrough from an unpopular development. It had until recently been Starbrough territory, after all, and Robert, it turned out, was leader of the parish council.

“It’s not that we wouldn’t all value the extra business,” said Steve Gunn, the farmer from Starbrough Farm, who tramped up to the Hall in his Wellingtons rather than picking up his phone,
“but the traffic would be a blasted nuisance. They want an extra road built, don’t they? And the forest is the forest. It’s important in all sorts of ways. You know me, Robert, I might not agree with all these organic people, but we need the balance. They can’t go tearing up the countryside and thinking it don’t matter.”

“I’m with you on that one, Steve,” Robert said.

“So we need the parish
council to do something about it. And that’s you, Robert. Being the chairman and all.”

“And I intend to call an emergency meeting,” Robert said.

* * *

Chantal and Jude stood for a while in the silence of the garden, appreciating the birdsong and the sunshine. The warmth of the air and the scents of the garden imparted a sense of timelessness. All human activity came back to this: the endless
cycle of growing and dying, becoming one with the earth once more.

Chantal said, “This is where I came the summer William died. It was the only thing I could do for a while. Grow things. Here I could work and allow my mind to wander. It was very therapeutic. When the winter came, I would sit by the fire in the library and try to read Anthony’s diaries.”

“I’m not a gardener,” Jude confessed.
“It was my work that saved me.” She remembered those first awful weeks after Mark’s death.

Eventually, she found that she managed best if at some level she pretended that Mark was still in the world but not actually at home; that he was just off on one of his expeditions somewhere, one of his longer ones when he was right out of contact by e-mail or phone. And so she started to cultivate a little
fantasy haven of their home, kept his pictures on the wall, his clothes in the drawers, as though one day he’d walk back in. A therapist would probably say that this was a terrible idea, that she was only delaying grieving, but Jude didn’t care.

She recounted all this to Chantal now, knowing Chantal wouldn’t laugh at her or pity her, but would understand. And indeed the older lady listened intently,
respectful of Jude’s need to talk.

“There was no one I knew who was in my exact situation,” Jude said. “When someone young dies tragically people genuinely don’t know what to say. We all knew it wasn’t meant to happen. It was an accident. No one could be blamed, except perhaps Mark himself for doing these dangerous things. He knew the risks. There was always that comment hanging in the air. Yet
who would have stopped him? Not me. Not anybody. His adventures meant so much to him.”

“You do have to let people be themselves,” Chantal said. “Though it must have been hard for you being married to him. Every time he was away. The worry. William used to fly little planes. I refused to go up with him, and I hated it when he went, but I learned to put on the brave face.” She shook her head.

“Funnily enough, I didn’t worry when he was away,” Jude said. “It sounds arrogant, but I always knew he’d come back. He always did.” And he had. The whole story of their relationship had been about them being apart and coming back together. During school and university and after, they’d had other relationships, but part of her was always waiting for him. Because she’d known it was meant to be. And
he’d never let her down. There was only once, after they became engaged … a shadow … but it turned out to be a silly misunderstanding really. Why did she remember it now?

“What a perfect summer day…” Chantal was murmuring.

Summer. A picture of her little niece rose in Jude’s mind. It troubled her. Yes, she was worried about Summer.

“Chantal, there’s something I meant to tell you. You know I
described my niece’s dream? And about the bit in Esther’s memoir, when the workmen who built the folly found a grave or something and one of them thought they’d seen a ghost?”

“Yes, of course,” Chantal said. “And that there was digging there in the 1920s and maybe they found some bones and you wondered whether this was the ghost? Why, do you think there’s a connection to your niece? Surely not.”

“But it was her visit to the place that set off the dream.”

“Well, there have always been rumors about the place having an atmosphere. I don’t believe it’s a supernatural one. There is some kind of feeling about the tower, I agree, being deep in the forest like it is. And with its room at the top, it reminds one of Rapunzel’s tower in the fairy tale, yes?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jude said.
“It’s a very disturbing story. Imagine being locked in a tower with no door. And having someone climb up your hair would be unbearably painful. I always wanted to know why she didn’t cut her plait off and use it as a rope to escape.”

“I expect the story was written by a man, my dear,” Chantal said, and Jude smiled, though she knew the answer wasn’t so simple.

“But the stories about the folly,”
she persisted. “What do local people say? That it’s haunted?”

“English people like their ghost stories, don’t they? Some say they feel they are being watched. And Robert’s grandfather was always sure he’d had a strange experience there when he was a boy. He said he had a strong sense of something there, watching him. Nothing more specific. And somebody at the inquest for that young man talked
about there being an atmosphere. I’m sure I mentioned the accident?”

Jude did remember. “What happened exactly?”

“It was the summer that Robert was three—1970, that must have been. We were sailing up at Brancaster Staithe and we let him come with us in the boat for the first time. While we were away some young people broke into the folly one night and had a party there. Somebody fell from the
top and was killed. They were all on drugs at the time. The coroner was very clear. It was an accident and we weren’t liable in any way because the place had been locked up and they were trespassing. The young man’s family wanted the tower knocked down afterward, but others didn’t because it was so old and part of the history of the area.”

“What an awful accident. They don’t say that he’s one
of the ghosts, do they, the young man who fell?”

“I haven’t heard anybody say that, no. It was a terrible tragedy, of course—he was only twenty—and dreadful for the family, but young people do such stupid things and it’s difficult always to protect them.”

Jude thought of the risks that Mark had taken. They’d always been calculated ones, though; as far as she knew he’d always followed the rules.
On the occasion of his death the rock had unexpectedly crumbled under his foot and he’d slipped, dragging the following climber down with him. They’d not fallen more than twenty feet, but Mark landed awkwardly. It was bad luck, the mountain rescue people said. Many times she’d imagined it, tried to push the horror from her mind. The other man suffered no more than a broken ankle and bruising.

She thought of the young partygoer, and how it felt that first time, standing with Euan right at the top of the tower and looking down. She shuddered.

That night she dreamed about the tower, about mounting the steps endlessly, up and up, never reaching the top, but knowing there was something important up there that forced her to keep going. She awoke the next morning filled with the certainty that the folly, somehow, held all the answers. To Summer’s dreams, to the mystery of Esther. Everything came back to the folly. And now the
folly was threatened by Mr. Farrell and his horrible plans. She, Jude, must save the folly. It took a while for this after-dream sense of purpose to evaporate.

She still felt tired and heavy, as she took her now familiar seat in the library with her laptop, intending to transcribe the next bit of Esther’s memoir. But trying to make out the handwriting merely exacerbated the sharp pain growing
behind her eyes, so she gave up.

Instead she curled up on the sofa and mused about the tower and all the things that might have happened there over the centuries. The building of the folly had disturbed an ancient burial ground, set in ancient forest. In some ways that was as terrible an act of vandalism as the one John Farrell now proposed in knocking it down. Then Anthony Wickham had spent
night after night stargazing there. Maybe Esther, too, both of them imprinting their presence on the place. Down the years many others must have visited it, whether for the views of the house or just for the challenge of climbing it. Like ghosts, follies were an English speciality, appealing to the traditional eccentric amateur streak. And a spooky atmosphere would undoubtedly add to the appeal. She
imagined children daring each other to go up it. Then there were other things that had happened there. The archaeological dig would have disturbed the ancient burial ground. The awful death in 1970 … and those were just the things she knew about. The place had certainly had an eventful history.

There was still so much to make sense of. It was difficult to piece it all together logically. To begin
with, perhaps she should find out which pre-Roman tribe had buried their folk there. She made a mental note to ask Chantal whether she knew. Then she must contact the woman at the Norwich museum whose name—Megan someone—the Holt librarian had given her, and determine the nature of the finds at the dig. She needed to discover all she could about Esther and her mysterious origins. Was she really
a foundling, or could she be Anthony Wickham’s love child? And maybe other things had happened—oh, it was impossible to know where to start with those.

Perhaps she could amass enough information to put a case together for saving the folly. The possibility crossed her mind that Euan could help. He would be able to argue the importance of the woodland, but he knew about the tower as well. Although
she had promised herself not to seek him out too much, because of what Claire might think, she told herself this thing was important. The thought of seeing him was a pleasurable one, and that made her feel guilty.

She brushed the feeling off and called his number. He answered at once and her heart leaped when he sounded pleased to hear from her. “Come over this afternoon,” he said, when she’d
explained. “The boiler men are here at the moment, plus I’m trying to finish my word quota for the day.”

* * *

“Do you mind if we walk up to the folly again? I think I left one of my notebooks there the other night.”

“I was going to suggest we did anyway,” Jude replied. “It might help focus my mind for my work. And we ought to help put a case together to defend the folly.”

They talked
about strategy on the way. Euan said, “It’ll be important for someone to engage a structural engineer, but I’m sure the tower is basically sound. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’m not much use on the subject of its importance. That’s your area of expertise. What I know about is the natural history. There are any number of important species of insects and plants around there.”

When they climbed up to
the tower room, he couldn’t immediately find the notebook, so Jude waited while he climbed up to the platform above. She wandered across to the shelves where he’d stacked several books and picked one off the top, a paperback guide to British wildflowers. She browsed through the section about orchids, interested by how different the wild ones looked from the exotic waxy beauty of shop-bought ones.
As she replaced the book, she knocked the one below it and some pages became caught in a crevice at the back. She pulled them out carefully, then shifted the books to look at the wall. The brick behind, she saw at once, was loose. She guessed immediately what this was. Grabbing a battered tin spoon from a nearby shelf she teased away at the brick and edged it out, and then, seeing the one below it
was loose, too, she pulled it out as well. Behind, was a small cavity. Gran and Tamsin’s hiding place. It looked empty—no little messages or gifts. The space had been deliberately constructed when the tower was made, she decided, whether originally as a recess for a small lamp, or as a hiding place, she couldn’t say. She ran her fingers around inside and discovered that it wasn’t empty after all:
a thin black packet lay there. She scraped it up with her fingernails and inspected it, finding it to be an ancient piece of oiled canvas. Wondering if it was something to do with Tamsin, she tried to unfold it. “Damn,” she breathed as it started to tear.

“Euan,” she said, as she heard him start down the ladder.

“I found it,” he said, fitting the trapdoor back over the hole. “But some of the
pages needed rescuing. They’re a bit soggy.” He climbed down and came across. “What have you got there?”

She showed him the hole and held out the little package. “It might be nothing,” she said. “I think Gran used this hiding place when she was a girl.”

“It might be something,” he replied, taking it from her and studying it. “How curious.”

* * *

It was something, but something much older
than the 1930s. Back at Gamekeeper’s Cottage Euan left the package to warm on his new solar-heated water tank, and after that it was easier to open. Inside was a folded piece of vellum, which, when Euan had eased it apart with his penknife, turned out to be two small torn halves. Side by side they’d have fitted onto a postcard. Across them was sketched a complex diagram in faded sepia-colored ink.