A Place of Secrets (48 page)

“Look at that, what
on earth’s that great thing?” Jude cried, seeing a big furry golden moth.

“That’s a drinker. It’s named for its thirsty caterpillar,” he told her. “Go on, write down
drinker
.”

She did so obediently. “And this one is a common emerald.” A small, bright-green moth. She wrote that down, too. “Two peppered moths, three satin whites.”

“Oh, they’re gorgeous,” she breathed. “I love those best.”

“Another
two here. And look at this one coming. An elephant hawk moth.”

“Oh, it’s marvelous.” She stared at the large, furry pink and brown creature that whirred around frantically before landing on the Plexiglas.

He put down one egg carton and picked up another. “These tiny ones are more primitive. They’re known as micro moths, as opposed to the more evolutionarily advanced macro ones. Ah.”

He scrabbled
in a bag of plastic specimen pots and, taking one out, neatly potted what Jude took to be a tiny, nondescript insect. “I’m glad I’ve seen one of these. A pinella. It proves my point about migration. This little guy must have flown some distance. There aren’t any pine trees round here—not till you get near the village.”

“How will it get home?”

“It won’t, I’m afraid. Adult moths don’t live very
long. They breed quite quickly after emerging from their pupas, and then their job is done.”

“All that effort to become moths, just to breed and die? That’s awful!”

“Is it?” he said, pretending to study the pine moth. “Mmm, I rather like the idea.”

She laughed, then broke off. “Oh look!” It was now jet black beyond the circle of the lamp, and more and more moths were crowding in, dropping on
the sheet outside the box, or circling madly above the light. Many plunged into the box and fluttered about before crawling into an egg compartment, ready and waiting to be identified. Euan called out name after name, and Jude scribbled them down, writing the foreign words phonetically if she didn’t know how to spell them.

By eleven o’clock she’d written down fifty-six species. By midnight they
had one hundred ten.

“That’s incredible,” she said, when they’d counted them up.

“And there are different ones at different times of year,” he told her. “Since I arrived here I’ve found nearly five hundred species just in these woods.”

“I’d no idea there were so many.”

“There are twenty-seven hundred species in the U.K.,” he told her. “And only sixty-four kinds of butterfly. We are losing
one or two to climate change or whatever, but then we get sightings of new ones.”

“Do you log all these results, then?”

“Oh yes. There’s quite a moth fan club in the area and we pool our knowledge. Now, I think we’ve seen enough, don’t you? If you’ve got that lantern ready I’ll switch off the light and we’ll put everything away.”

She held the lantern and watched him dismantle the trap with
deft fingers, shaking out the moths that refused stubbornly to leave egg box or sheet. There were moths in their hair and their clothes and they brushed them off one another, laughing, before gathering everything together, ready to take back to the car.

Overhead, the last shreds of cloud cover were blowing away.

“Look at the stars,” Jude cried. “Oh, look at the stars!”

They stood together with
their arms around each other, gazing at the light show above their heads. “There are so many tonight.” And there were. Hundreds and hundreds. They felt dizzy just looking.

“Here.” Euan found the sheet they’d used for the moths, shook it out again and spread it out on the ground. They lay on it together, holding hands and staring up at the sky.

“An ocean of stars,” Euan whispered.

“I’m sure
they’re moving. The whole sky is moving,” Jude cried.

He laughed and squeezed her hand. “Not the sky, Jude, the Earth. The Earth is turning.”

“Yes, of course.”

“‘
Rolling onward into light
.’” That’s from a hymn, I think.”

“I saw something. What was that?”

“A shooting star. It’s the Perseids. A meteor shower. Oh, there’s another.”

And now she was looking for shooting stars, they were everywhere,
sudden little trails of light, like sparks from fireworks, that shone briefly then vanished.

“It’s an odd feeling, as though they’re performing just for us,” she whispered.

“They are,” he said firmly.

They lay in silence, each thinking their own thoughts. And there came into Jude’s mind another time where she’d stared up at the stars and felt supreme happiness. It had been after the school
dance, with Mark, when he had promised on a star always to be friends. It had been one of the most important moments of her life. And now she had to accept that it was gone. Long gone. Into the past, like Mark had gone into the past. She tried to recapture the happiness she’d felt then, and the two moments, then and now, briefly merged with an intensity that made the tears start. Mark had gone, passed
into the care of the Keeper of the Stars, but the stars were still there. And now, now there was Euan close beside her, waiting.

She rolled over to lie in the crook of his arm and soon he began to kiss her again. They loved each other as the Earth turned under the ancient stars.

* * *

She stayed at Euan’s that night, not that they slept much.

* * *

In the morning they drove to the
Archive Center in Norwich to find out what had happened to Amelie Madingsfield, who’d become Esther Wickham, and, finally … there it was on the microfiche. Stella Brundall, née Esther Wickham, who had been buried in Starbrough churchyard on 10 March 1815. There was just the name, nothing further.

“Do you know what I’ve remembered?” Jude asked Euan later, as they shared supper at the table in
the new kitchen. “That
Atlas of the Heavens
in the Starbrough collection—you might not remember seeing it, but it’s full of the zodiac pictures that inspired the ceiling painting in the Starbrough Hall library.”

“I don’t remember, but you told me it was the origin of the painting.”

“There’s something I puzzled over.”

“Only one thing? It seems as though we’ve had to solve a lot of puzzles.”

“We have, haven’t we?” She leaned forward and ruffled his hair, and he pulled her to him and kissed her. When she’d recovered her breath she went on. “Well, this puzzle is a handwritten dedication in the front of the book. It said ‘AW from SB.’ I thought the AW was Anthony Wickham. But suppose it was Augustus Wickham—Chantal said that Augustus changed his name to Wickham—and SB was Stella Brundall?”

“What, you mean that they became friends after everything that had happened?”

“I know we can’t prove it, it’s a whimsy.”

“Castles in the air.”

“A mere folly…”

“But it’s a good hypothesis.”

That night, as she lay in that enchanted country between waking and sleep, she tried to imagine how it might have happened.

* * *

They met again one day, as she always knew they would.

At first after
her marriage she kept herself to herself in their cottage in Felbarton, away from prying eyes, but as the years passed and her fear of discovery faded, there were occasions when some errand or a social invitation took her near the Hall. Once she was driven past it in a carriage, leaning forward in her seat to scan the beautiful lines of the building, curiously, as one seeking to rouse feelings
long buried by examining the face of an old lover. She hoped for signs of its occupants—Susan shaking a duster from a window maybe, or Sam tending the grass—but in vain. They rolled past and she felt desolate.

Then, one Whitsun, nearly nine and a half years after Anthony’s death, returning home after a night with Hugh’s father, they passed Starbrough church, and the carriage was forced to slow
because the service had ended and people were spilling out into the road. Hugh nudged her arm and pointed out a solemn-eyed young lady in a cape of sky blue, dark curls escaping from her bonnet, shepherding two tussling small boys toward a waiting carriage. “That’s Mistress Wickham,” he whispered. And then, emerging from the crowd to join his wife, came Augustus. She knew him at once, though he
was no longer the shy, skinny boy she remembered but a thin, awkward man with a dazed expression. The carriage bowled on and the scene dwindled. But troubled images began once more to haunt her sleep.

Another year passed and there came a glorious summer’s afternoon when she walked across the fields with her two little daughters and their nursemaid, Molly, to visit Hugh’s married sister at Holt.
Where the footpath skirted the woods she saw a man approaching, a man walking with bent head and a dreamy pace, and as he drew closer she saw he was reading a book. They nearly passed without acknowledgment, so deep was he in his text, but then she recognized him. She almost let the moment go, but at the last could not bear to.

“Augustus,” she cried.

He stiffened and looked up, then stopped,
staring at her as though she were some chimera, come to life from his book. “Esther?” he whispered.

“I’m Stella now,” she replied, cursing Molly’s curiosity. The little girls, however, deciding him to be of no interest, started prodding a butterfly that lay spread exhausted on the muddy track.

“Stella,” he repeated. “Still a star.” His smile was feeble.

“Molly,” she said in a bright voice,
“will you walk ahead with the children? Mr. Wickham and I are old friends and wish to speak with one another.”

She watched the girls dance away, the elder bearing the dying butterfly aloft on a stick like a captured pennant.

“What happened to you?” Augustus asked, his tone urgent, almost desperate. “I thought … I was afraid you were dead. And that it was all my fault.”

“Your fault? How could
that be? We were children, Gussie. We were powerless. Your mother—”

“You know my mother is dead?”

“No, I’m…” But no, she couldn’t say she was sorry, not when she felt such a rush of relief. “When?”

“Three, no four summers ago. Of a disease of the throat. In her last few weeks she could not speak.”

That must have been wonderful, Esther thought, but of course did not say. “And your father?”

“Still lives, but he does not leave Lincolnshire. Esther … Stella … Why Stella, for God’s sake?”

“I had to change my name. I did not kill Trotwood, Augustus, but Dr. Brundall advised caution. I married his son, Hugh. We live very quietly. I wish to cause no trouble to anyone. Least of all to you and your family.”

He cried, “Yet, though unwitting, you have caused me trouble enough for a whole
lifetime.”

“How so?” she cried in horror, then, remembering those terrible events of ten years before, she was filled with cold anger. It was she who had endured trouble. Homeless, an outlaw, she had wandered with the gypsies for many months, frequently hungry, always shivering with cold, often ill with exhaustion. She gave them the necklace in payment for sheltering her—such a pity she’d lost
one of the charms—so then she had nothing. And she saw a mystery: Rowan was not one of them at all, they’d disguised her as Romany by painting her hair. Whether she’d been a foundling like herself, or a changeling stolen from some rich family’s ancestral cradle, they did not tell and she knew it was no good to ask.

Finally, after her pleadings, they delivered Esther to the door of the only person
in the world she thought would help her: Jonathan Brundall. And he had looked after her for the sake of his old friend Anthony, and been generous when Hugh fell in love with her, when many another father might have forbidden the union. Hugh, after years of study, established a practice in a neighboring parish and it was there that eventually they were quietly married.

“How have
I
caused
you
trouble,
Gussie?” she asked again, her voice low, passionate. “It was
you
who took my inheritance,
your
family who made me homeless, nameless. If I caused you trouble, it must have been by my very existence, and I can hardly apologize for that.”

He could not meet her eye. She was right when she blamed the influence of his mother. It was greater than Esther ever knew and the shame would always be with
him.

* * *

It pleased him, now that he’d found her, that they should meet again. An invitation arrived to dine at the Hall and Hugh judged it wise that they accept. After dinner, Augustus took her to her father’s library and made it known she might visit it as often as she wished. And sometimes she did. He’d kept it exactly as she remembered and it comforted her to sit there and think of
her father. There was no other place she could do that. Augustus sometimes went to view the stars, but never again, all her life long, would she agree to visit the folly. To her it had become a place of violence and terror.

However, as a peace offering and in memory of her father she gave Augustus a book for the library, a new printing of the
Atlas Coelestis
, which delighted him, but he never
found the courage to tell her his secret … the secret of what nearly cost Esther her life. Instead, after her death of influenza, he commissioned the wonderful painted ceiling, the library’s crowning glory. And among her papers Hugh found a thick envelope addressed: “To be stored in the Library at Starbrough Hall.” He opened it and read, “An Account of Esther Wickham.” He took it to Augustus in person.
And after he read it, Augustus, shaken, confessed to Hugh what he had done.

* * *

Through the half-open door, Augustus had glimpsed her stuff Bellingham’s letter into the writing desk and was intrigued. Later in the day he found it there and read it, not understanding more of its contents than that his rival for the prize of Starbrough Hall was plotting something secret, something that could
upset his mother’s plans.

All the rest of that day he watched Esther, saw her secret preparations, and when she crept out to visit the folly that night he followed her. Once she disappeared up the stairs of the tower with the last bit of telescope, and the trolley stood empty, it was as though he heard his mother’s voice in his ear: “
You know what to do, boy
.”