Fiercombe Manor (36 page)

“On the first afternoon—the ‘first swim of the summer' in the photograph—we had been roaming around, taking pictures of trees, trying to be artistic. We had our bathing suits with us but wanted to get really hot and bothered before going in, to enjoy it all the more. ‘You really have to savour the first one,' Henry always said. Eventually we gave in and headed for the lake.”

He paused to pour another few fingers of scotch, and I wondered how much he drank every day to remain as sober as he seemed.

“When we got there, Crawford went ahead and dived in before Henry and I had even stripped off. It was stupid, but I was furious.
The water had been perfectly still and dark, and I had wanted Henry and me to go in and break the surface first. It was our lake, and over the years it had become a bit of a ceremony for me. It sounds ridiculous now, I know, but I was so furious that I even picked up a stick to throw at Crawford. I suppose I just wanted my brother to myself. The holidays were all I had—he didn't speak to me at school, you see.”

“What, not at all?”

“Older boys never spoke to their younger brothers. It just wasn't done. If he ever had to he'd call me ‘Stanton.'”

I smiled, hoping to lighten the atmosphere. “Ah, the vagaries of English public schools,” I said.

“Mock all you like, but it was that sort of discipline that built the Empire,” he said drily, though his eyes were still troubled.

“So, did you hit Crawford with the stick?”

“No, and if Henry hadn't intervened, I expect it would have been me who came off worse. Crawford was thin but sinewy. He had muscles in his arms like steel cables.

“Anyway, Henry took the stick off me before I had a chance to throw it and told me to stop being an ass. He did it quite gently, though. He knew why I was being like that, though he would never have embarrassed me by saying so.

“From that day on we fell into a rhythm. They always let me tag along. We'd swim and then lie on the grass to dry off till we were too hot again. The weather was like it is now. Well, perhaps not quite as hot, but almost.

“At the end of July, war broke out on the Continent, and from then on we were just waiting for England to join in. The waiting charged the atmosphere somehow. We couldn't imagine it not happening but we couldn't imagine anything changing in the valley either. We all felt some kind of heightened awareness. I began a
diary—I don't think it's in the box, I must have lost it—and I was no diarist. I wanted that summer set down, though.”

“Written down as proof,” I said, thinking of Elizabeth's pencil marks, rubbed out in places.

“Yes, I think that was it. The spell seemed unbreakable, but at the same time it was inevitable that it would be.”

“And then Henry,” I said softly.

“And then Henry.” He stopped.

“You don't have to tell me,” I said.

“I know I don't. But I felt lighter the other day, after we'd been to the meadow. I'm never allowed to mention Henry in front of my parents. No one has ever forbidden it as such—it simply goes without saying. Mrs. Jelphs doesn't like it mentioned either. I suppose they think it's better locked away and therefore . . . contained. But it's not, it's worse. He's with me all the time. I dream about him every night—I dream about what happened every night, again and again, as though someone's put it on a loop in my head. Do you remember we talked about ghosts last time we were here?”

I nodded. In the soft light, he was grey and as exhausted-looking as I'd seen him yet.

“Well, all that talk of Margaret of Anjou and her ilk is nonsense, of course—the ermine-tipped gown and the wafting scents, the headless horsemen and the hovering spectres on the stairs. That's not what a true haunting is. The real ghosts are the ones that take up residence in your mind and that's what Henry had done in mine until I came back this time. It had been getting worse over the last few years—I think because the time when I will inherit is getting closer. It had got to be that the only way I could get to sleep at night was to drink myself into a stupor.”

He ran his finger around the rim of his tumbler until the crystal let out a low, sonorous hum.

“It's always been worst here, in the valley. After that summer, I jumped at any chance to stay with school friends rather than come home at the end of each term. Now I have to take care of things for my father, I can't escape it.

“Do you know, I always drive too fast on the way here from London. I always seem to set off at night, at the eleventh hour, putting the damned duty off until the last possible moment. I can't count how many times I have come within inches of wrapping myself around a tree in a pitch-dark lane. I flirt with it, I suppose. Death, I mean. I picture the end as a sort of black blanket of peace. Sometimes I can't think of anything more appealing.”

He looked up at me and half smiled.

“But then I came back this time and found myself mentioning him here and there to you—and even to Mrs. Jelphs. After the first time I just kept doing it, as a sort of test. And nothing happened. Well, nothing terrible. One night I didn't dream at all.

“My mother believes that never coming to Fiercombe—never even catching sight of the word written down—will eventually damp down the grief. But she's wrong, it won't. I have to live with what I did that day—what I didn't do—but it doesn't help anyone to pretend that Henry never existed. He deserves more than that.”

He sat back in his chair, and a great sigh escaped him. The sharp lines of his face softened a little.

“Tell me what happened,” I said softly.

“Yes, I'm still skirting around it, aren't I? Where were we?”

“The war had broken out.”

“Ah, yes. So, it wasn't the war that changed everything after all, not for me. It was well into August when it happened. It was just an ordinary day, like all the others. I suppose they always are.

“We'd got up early—before breakfast—but it was already hot, sweltering, and so Henry and I had gone to the lake already
changed into our bathing things. Crawford was still asleep—we'd left him snoring on his camp bed in Henry's room, and I was full of glee that I'd got my brother to myself for once.

“Henry was in the water, and I was taking photographs on the Box Brownie we shared. In fact, it was Henry's, but he always let me borrow it. I remember I was trying to capture the way the sun was dappling the water. Mother had told me off for wasting film, so I was trying to ration myself, getting the angle just so before actually pressing the shutter.

“When I noticed the shadow falling across the lake, I saw it like that, through the viewfinder. It was distorted by the moving water but looked like a figure to me. I glanced up at the bank opposite, half expecting to see Crawford standing there. But there was nobody. ‘Did you see anyone?' I called to Henry, but he didn't hear me. He was right out in the middle of the lake, treading water and then diving down to see how long he could stay under. He'd broken his own record most days that summer, though perhaps that was because he was generally doing the counting himself, in his head.

“I took a photograph of him like that then, his dark head and back bobbing clear of the water's surface. The shadow was there again, but I didn't take much notice because I'd suddenly thought of a trick he had played on me the previous summer. We'd both of us forgotten it. I put down the camera and ran round the lake to the folly. It was in there that the pump for the fountain was hidden, out of sight. It was a big thing and hardly used since we had lived in the valley. I hadn't been able to turn it by myself the year before, and I wasn't sure I could this time.

“Inside the folly it was cold. Not just cool from the shade; it was cold and dank like a cave deep underground. It smelt strange too, sort of sharp and green. Like mildew but somehow . . . alive. The
pump handle was at the back, covered in cobwebs. I didn't much like spiders so I jabbed at the webs with my foot. I felt ticklish all over then and thought I felt something fluttering across the skin of my shoulder blades. I don't know why I didn't run out then—my hackles were up. I was determined to do it, though. I wanted to be the one to play the old trick—and do it before Crawford got there.

“I threw my weight against the handle as hard as I could, and of course it wouldn't shift. I wrenched at it uselessly, my hands on the freezing metal growing purple with the strain and cold. Quite suddenly it came loose, all in a rush, so that I crashed down onto my knees and scraped them so they bled.

“I almost fell out through the door in my rush to get back out into the sunshine and there it was, a great jet of rusty water. It sounds morbid, but it was precisely the colour of old blood. The force of it grew as I watched, until it arced over almost the whole lake. It was then that I noticed that Henry was still holding his breath. I couldn't believe he hadn't come up when he felt the water on his back. I stood and watched it pelt him, rivulets of reddish water staining his skin.

“It should've run clear, but it didn't. I remember I looked up at the sky and it was as though it were twilight, not morning. It was such a strange colour; I can still see it now. The sun had gone, and it was yellow and purple, like a bruise. I don't know how long I stood there, as if in some sort of trance, looking up at the sky and the water of the fountain against it like a simpleton.

“I didn't even hear Crawford arrive, though apparently he shouted at me, called my name again and again. It was like the sound had been turned off in the whole valley. By the time I noticed him, he had already taken off his clothes and was running towards the water. He dragged Henry out. He tried to revive him, but it was too late.”

Tom fell quiet and looked away from me, his face hidden in shadow.

“I'm so sorry,” I said eventually. “How strange, though.”

“What's strange?” he said sharply.

I coloured, wishing I had thought before speaking. “Well, everything,” I said in a rush. “The sky and the shadow. And—”

“I was a cowardly sort of child, Alice. I told you already how I hated that nursery. The strange sky was a brewing storm. The rain started just as my father arrived at the lake to see his eldest son drowned on the banks of it. As for what I saw through the camera, well, you must have heard of the child who is scared of his own shadow. That was me, in this case quite literally.”

He laughed bitterly and picked up his glass.

“The simple fact is that I stood there like a fool while my brother drowned. Do you think Crawford would have been afraid of spiders in the folly, or of the sun going in? No, of course he wouldn't. He didn't hesitate for a moment.”

I reached out my hand and squeezed his arm. I thought he'd shake me off, but he didn't, and we sat like that for a time.

“There's something left of it all, isn't there? I've always thought so,” I said quietly, not knowing if it would anger him further.

“What do you mean?”

“The past. It's here still, in a way. I mean, I didn't know Henry or anyone else who was here once, but I can feel them sometimes. Like you said before, it's not that they're ghosts. For me, it's more of an echo through time.”

I was thinking about Elizabeth's diary. My eye strayed to the sewing box. I could just make out the ornate
E
in the low light.

Neither of us spoke for a while. Tom let his head fall back against one of Mrs. Jelphs's embroidered antimacassars and closed his eyes.
When he spoke again, his tone was lighter than it had been, and I hoped it was because he'd been able to tell someone about Henry.

“Tell me what you've been doing,” he said. “We've been listening to my voice for far too long.”

All I could think of was the nursery, and my fall after the second visit to it.

“Well, I . . . went for a walk and saw the rhododendrons earlier,” I said after a pause.

He rolled his eyes. “We'd better stop the presses for that.”

I laughed. “You did ask.”

“What did you mean before, when you said the past was still here?”

The sewing box was still visible in the corner of my eye.

“I suppose I've got rather caught up in the history of the valley, that's all I meant.”

“Margaret of Anjou, you mean? Sorry, I didn't mean to ruin the story earlier. It is a good one, and it's possible, even probable, that she did come through here on the way to Tewkesbury.”

I nodded. “Yes, I know. Hugh Morton told me.”

“I didn't realise you knew him. He's a good sort, Hugh. I haven't seen him in ages. The last time I did, he was walking one of the bluebell paths with his dog. Can't think when that was.”

I smiled. “Sammy; that was the dog. He died last year, and I don't think Mr. Morton has wanted to replace him.”

“So what other tales did Hugh tell you about Fiercombe then?”

“Well, he showed me a book that had a few old photographs in it. They had been taken at the turn of the century.”

Tom looked thoughtful. “Just before my father's tenure. I know so little about any of that.”

I pushed my hair behind my ears. I wanted to be honest with him, as he had so painfully been with me.

“Listen, Tom, I hope you don't mind, but I went and explored the old nursery yesterday. I just got the urge to, and I'd seen the key hanging up when Mrs. Jelphs showed me where they're kept.”

“Ah, the nursery. Scene of my childhood nights, not all of them happy, as you know. I haven't looked in there for years. Is there anything still there?”

That's when I remembered.

“Oh! I forgot all about it.”

Tom looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“I found some things in the cupboard in the window seat. A picture and . . . well, there was something I didn't manage to look at.”