Fiercombe Manor (20 page)

He leant over and held out his hand. I shook it, and it felt warm and dry. I wondered if mine was clammy after my dash from the glasshouse and wiped it surreptitiously on my skirt.

“So what am I to call you, if you're to be a baronet one day?” I smiled weakly.

“Call me Tom—all my friends do. Only Mother and Mrs. J insist on calling me Thomas. Besides, I think the baronetcy was more or less bought, sometime back in the 1600s. James the First needed some ready money to keep the Irish quiet, as I recall.”

He bit into another stale biscuit. “So for how long do we have the pleasure?”

“Well, I shall have the baby here”—I felt my cheeks heating again—“and then I'll go back to London.”

“How long is it until you . . . well, you know,” he said, raising his eyebrows again.

I smiled gamely back. “I've got a few months to go yet.”

“So there's no chance of me being called on to perform any heroics, then. I'll only be here for a few weeks, and I'll be gone for much of the time, perhaps you'll be glad to hear. I've got to spend some fearfully dull days with our estate manager over in Stroud, and Mother has also extracted a solemn promise from me that I will pay social calls on all the local families as though we were still in the middle of last century. Sorry, my manners are appalling.”

He held out the biscuit tin, but I shook my head. Instead, he poured the last of the tea into my cup. It was stewed, and he grimaced at it.

“I'll make some more,” he said. “And while I do it, you can tell me why you came in with your hair all tangled, looking as though you'd seen a ghost.”

He reached towards me, and I flinched as his hand went to my hair.

“Don't worry, I was only retrieving this.” He put a piece of twig down on the table.

I ran my fingers through my hair in case there was anything else lodged in it, wrenching painfully through the knots at the ends. “Sorry, I just . . .”

He didn't say anything, but his eyes were full of amusement. I took a nervous sip of tea and put the cup back down too hard. Taking up the twig again, he began stripping the bark off it. When he spoke, it was much more quietly than before.

“You know, something about the way you came in before, white as a sheet, your hair dishevelled and as if you'd been somewhere quite far away, reminded me of my brother. I don't talk about him much, but you don't forget. He used to sleepwalk sometimes. The first time he was found curled up in here by the range, sleeping on the mat like a puppy, having eaten most of a cold roast chicken from the larder. The second time, he thought the boot room was the lav and relieved himself in my father's Wellington boots.”

He smiled sadly at the memory. “It was the best couple of months of my childhood—for once it was Henry who'd been bad, while the incorrigible Thomas behaved like an angel. If he did it after that, he kept quiet about it.”

“I've never done it,” I said. “Where I grew up in London, I'd have been mown down by a bus. No, I just went for a walk, and well . . . something happened, something strange.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know. I can't explain it without sounding foolish. It was nothing, really. A barn owl flew over and screeched and, well, it gave me such a fright. It was a horrible sound—I've never heard it before.”

“Yes, well, I can see why that gave you a bit of a start,” said Tom. “There's something about that sound that makes me go cold. Perhaps it's the same one that lives in the graveyard up in the village.” He jabbed his thumbnail into the exposed flesh of the twig.

“It wasn't just that. The wind got up, and—”

“Oh, it comes and goes in this valley. It's odd like that, something to do with the shape of the land, I think. It's like a funnel. Look, it's as still as anything out there now.”

It was true. I had flung the kitchen door wide in my hurry, and it had stayed pushed back on it hinges. Through the doorway I could see Mrs. Jelphs's carefully tended herbs and flowers. They were unmoving, even the heavy plumes of the pink and lilac lupins that stood four feet high.

I let out a shaky breath as I remembered it. “I thought the trees were going to come down around me. Some of the branches—”

“Good job it was just this little one that got you, then,” he said, holding up the small, denuded twig with a smile. “Listen, I know what you need.”

He crossed to another cupboard and brought out a dusty bottle of brandy. “It's not the good stuff, but it'll calm those nerves. I think I'll join you.”

He poured out two generous measures, swirling the amber liquid expertly into a couple of mismatched glasses.

To be polite, I took a sip of mine, feeling the fire of it dissolve the last of my fear. When I looked up, he had drunk all his, and was pouring out more.

“You probably think it's too early, but for me it's actually very late.”

He sounded rather defensive, so I smiled. “It's your house and your brandy.”

“I'm not sure either of those statements are true,” he said with a frown. “The brandy belongs to Mrs. Jelphs, for medicinal or culinary purposes, and as for the house, well, I'd rather think of it as my father's. I'm quite content to wait for that particular responsibility to land on my shoulders. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm absolutely done in.”

He smiled before he left me alone in the kitchen, but it was a preoccupied sort of smile, and I wondered if he thought he had
said too much, not only to someone he'd just met, but someone his family had taken in as a favour.

I washed up the tea things and went back to my room to lie down for a little while. I didn't think Mrs. Jelphs would mind if I rested for an hour or so, and besides, it was still very early. My mind wasn't on the glasshouse as I felt my body sink into the old mattress. The last image that crept into my mind as I drifted into a light, dreamless sleep was of Thomas Stanton, with his ruffled hair and sad eyes.

M
ore tired than I realised, I slept away half the morning. By the time I had forced myself out of bed and crossed to the window, I saw that the shadows cast by the yew pylons at dawn had almost gone: the long, dark fingers that had pointed towards the glasshouse and Stanton House's remains in the east had now retracted. A grating sound by my leg made me put my hand in the pocket of my skirt, and I realised I'd brought some of Stanton House's rubble back with me. It felt cold and heavy in my hand, and I was glad to relinquish it, putting the pieces on the dressing table, towards the back where they were almost out of sight.

When I got downstairs, the kitchen was empty, but the door to the little garden was ajar. Mrs. Jelphs was outside, tending to her herbs and flowers, a wide-brimmed hat protecting her crepe-paper skin from the sun.

“Good morning,” I said brightly.

She looked at me for a long moment, as if deciding something. “Did I not tell you to stay away from the glasshouse?”

“I suppose Ruck must have told you,” I said, more carelessly than I felt. “I didn't go inside, I just went to have a look, and then . . . I won't be going back, don't worry about that.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” she said. “There are plenty of other places to walk in the valley.”

She turned back to her gardening, but I didn't want her to be angry with me, although that wasn't quite it. It was concern as much as anger.

“I met Thomas,” I said eventually, for something to say.

“Yes. I would have warned you he was coming, but as is the way with him, I didn't know myself until I got up and saw his motorcar.”

“He seems very nice,” I said, and to my horror felt myself colour. Fortunately Mrs. Jelphs was too busy with her flowers to notice.

“He is. He was quite naughty as a boy, I can tell you, but there's never been any malice in him. He can be a little careless, but what young man isn't?”

“Is he up, then?” I said lightly.

“Oh, yes. He never did need much sleep.”

“I suppose he's gone for a walk round the estate.”

“No, he went off in that little motorcar of his. He said something about visiting friends. I asked if he'd be back for dinner—he never seems to realise these things can't be produced out of thin air—and he said he might be, or he might stay away for the night and come back tomorrow. Away for the night!” She shook her head. “He's only just got here.”

To my annoyance, I felt disappointed. I hoped it didn't show.

The baby wasn't much of a kicker, but that day I could feel him shift and turn inside me. It felt like the movement of restless, roiling water rather than a growing creature of flesh and blood. Out under the sun, the temperature felt hotter than the previous day, and I stretched my arms out, waggling my fingers about in the bright light. Just beyond the kitchen garden, I could see Ruck raking the gravel. I wandered over to the low wall, hoping to make friends with him after our exchange by the glasshouse. I didn't
blame him for telling Mrs. Jelphs about me going there; she had probably asked him to keep an eye on me in the grounds, where she was unable to check on me herself.

“Hotter today, isn't it?” I called. My voice, intended to sound cheery, rang out rather falsely in the still air.

He glanced up from his work but didn't come any closer. “You might be right about that,” he said eventually. “It's set fair for the rest of the week too.” He looked up into the cloudless, pale blue sky as if he could read some sign there.

“Is there a thermometer here?” I said.

There had been one at the boardinghouse where my parents and I holidayed every August. Each morning after breakfast, my father and I always went to check it in a hopeful manner. Some fancy made me want to re-create this comforting ritual at Fiercombe. A combination of the valley's untouched and somehow mysterious beauty and what Mrs. Jelphs had told me of its history had already convinced me that I wouldn't be quite the same person once the summer had gone. Fiercombe was a place caught in the weft and warp of time's net, and oddly, it was those mundane weeks on the south coast that seemed a hundred years ago to me there, as I attempted to hold an easy conversation with Ruck over the kitchen garden wall.

There was a thermometer, old and sun-bleached and hanging on a nail gouged into the golden stone of the manor. Later I wrote the day's temperature down in my diary: 69 degrees. I have the record still, in the little book that's tucked away on a high shelf in my bedroom, the numbers as fresh as when I wrote them.

T
he next days passed uneventfully. The baby was settled and content inside me, and the weather mirrored him. There was
no wind in the valley at all, and the longer time wore on, the more the unsettling episode by the glasshouse took on the surreal ambience of a dream. Only the rather desolate expression I occasionally caught on Mrs. Jelphs's face when she looked at me ruffled my equanimity.

As for Tom, I saw him only once—and I suppose, if I'm honest, that also bothered me a little. He was coming down the stairs as I was about to start up them, and I saw him first. I was about to say hello when I caught sight of his face, which was drawn and miserable. When he did notice me, he nodded and smiled, though it didn't reach his eyes. Rather humiliatingly, I stopped, expecting to talk to him, but he continued distractedly on, leaving me alone in the hallway beneath the mocking eyes of the alchemist. Later, Mrs. Jelphs told me that something had come up, and he had gone back to London for the time being. I realised that my first conversation with him had probably been uncharacteristic in its intimacy, and felt a fool for having thought of him as a new friend.

I spent those quiet days polishing: finishing the cutlery quicker than expected and moving on to larger pieces: candelabras, salvers, and tureens. I knew they would be tarnished again before they were used, but found I didn't mind. I invented histories for each piece as I rubbed and buffed them: a chilled soup prepared for a garden party in one enormous tureen; a packet of letters delivered at breakfast on a salver engraved with the now familiar
S
. I hadn't wanted to prise anything else out of Mrs. Jelphs, fearing that it would stir up painful memories or invite her overprotectiveness as it had before, but Elizabeth was still in my mind, a figure I could see only from the back, however much I tried to summon her face in the old silver as I polished it.

This absorption was helpful when any thoughts of James hovered and threatened to land, not that I could always dismiss them.
When one did occasionally steal up, stealthy and cunning, it still had the power to feel like a blow. Tom's small, unthinking snub hadn't helped, making me wonder if I was particularly inept with men—reading far too much into what they probably meant to say quite casually. As for my thoughts about the baby, I simply tried not to have them. If I ever did try to picture my life once I had returned to London after the birth, I found I still couldn't, my imagination remaining stubbornly blank.

One evening, after a supper when Mrs. Jelphs had been at her most withdrawn and secretive, I decided to wander a little farther along the stream I had taken with her on my second day. By the time I had helped wash up, slipping outside before she could worry about where I was going, the twilight was deepening. The gloaming, I thought, the word coming back to me from a book I'd read years before. That indistinct point after the sun has slipped out of sight but before the darkness takes hold. I would have to be quick; I had already learnt that in the valley the black of night fell abruptly, like a candle suddenly snuffed.

The bank next to the stream was less boggy than it had been. The stream still rushed on with the same urgency I remembered, but I was sure the water level had gone down. I walked a little farther, and the proud little summerhouse came into view. I knew then why I had wanted to go that way.

I had come to the conclusion that Mrs. Jelphs must have regretted speaking to me more freely on my first nights at the manor; certainly she had been doing her best to make up for it since. There was no reason to suppose so, but I thought the summerhouse might have featured somewhere in Elizabeth Stanton's story. It was the way Mrs. Jelphs had gazed at it. I eased myself through the squeezebelly stile and then found my way round to it by a narrow path the stream must have flowed beneath. When I put my hand to the old
iron door handle, I braced myself for the disappointment of it being locked. Instead it swung silently inward, as though oiled regularly.