House of Shadows (10 page)

‘You’d have to ask your grandfather if he knows anything,’ Hester said. ‘I think he did some work on Ashdown Park years ago. He was writing an article on mediaeval deer parks of Berkshire and Oxfordshire, or something equally obscure.’

Holly smiled. Unlike Hester, her grandfather was the archetypal old-fashioned academic whose vagueness about life outside of his ivory tower had frequently driven his more practical wife to fits of irritation. Holly vividly remembered a trip to the supermarket with him when she had been about fourteen and her grandfather had seemed incapable of finding anything on the shopping list.

‘Mediaeval?’ she said now. ‘But I thought Ashdown Park was later than that.’

‘The house was,’ Hester said, ‘but the estate was based on a mediaeval hunting forest. I imagine there’s been a mill on the site since the Domesday Book.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Holly said slowly. She thought of the thick ranks of trees, secretive and close, the gnarled oaks and fluttering beeches. No wonder there was an otherworldly atmosphere about the place. It was ancient. And the mill had been a part of that history for hundreds of years.

‘I think the mill itself went out of use shortly after Ashdown
Park burned down,’ Hester said. She cut herself a piece of Brie from the platter on the low table in front of her and nibbled at it. ‘That was in the early nineteenth century. Once there was no big house on the estate there was no need of a village to support it. Everything would have changed …’ She shifted a little. ‘More than the house died that day.’

It was an odd choice of phrase and it sent a shiver rippling up Holly’s spine. A log broke apart in the grate in a shower of sparks. Bonnie stretched out towards the warmth.

‘I didn’t realise that the house burned down either,’ Holly said. ‘I don’t suppose, as a child, I was curious about these things. I just enjoyed playing in the woods. I definitely need to find out more about it.’ She reached for a cheese biscuit herself, with cheddar, strong and smooth. ‘I assume they rebuilt the house though?’ she said, her mouth full. ‘I saw it the other day. Tall, white stone, with a gold dome on the roof.’

Hester looked startled. ‘Ashdown Park? No, it was demolished after the fire. Surely you knew that? No house has stood there for two hundred years.’

‘But—’ Holly stopped. She had seen the house, or so she had thought – the flash of white walls through the trees, the moonlight glinting on the windows. It was disconcerting to hear that what she thought she had seen was a ghost house.

Hester was looking at her with concern shadowing her eyes. She would have to back-pedal or her grandmother would be asking if she was so stressed and exhausted that she needed to see a doctor.

‘I must have confused it with one of the other houses on
the estate,’ she said. ‘They’re renovating the old stable block and some of the other buildings, aren’t they?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Hester said. Her expression relaxed. ‘They’ve decided to convert it for housing. Mark Warner’s company are managing the project.’

‘Mark?’ Holly jumped. She could not help herself. ‘Do you know him?’

Her grandmother looked up quickly and Holly moderated her tone. The words had come out more sharply than she had intended.

‘His godmother is a friend of mine,’ Hester said, after a moment. ‘Army connections.’

‘Oh, of course,’ Holly said. Something shifted in her memory and finally she realised why Mark had seemed so familiar. He had been on the cover of any number of newspapers a few years back, wearing dusty army combats, his smile a white flash in his tanned face, his eyes narrowed against a sun far brighter than an English one. A hero, the papers had called him, an army officer who had risked his own life to rescue one of his men injured under fire and bring his patrol safely out of an ambush. There had been pictures from Buckingham Palace too, when he had been awarded some sort of gallantry medal, his wife smiling as she hung on his arm, his parents speaking of their pride in him. The media had loved him. He had run the London marathon and hiked to the South Pole for charity with a team of veterans and one of the royal princes. It had all been very high profile. But that must have been four years ago, maybe five, and since then Holly could not remember seeing his picture. He had dropped
out of the public gaze and there had been nothing but silence.

He’d told her he had travelled with his job, which was a hell of way to describe his army career. And he had failed to mention that he was the developer who was converting the stable yard. She felt a stab of annoyance. If she had been economical with the facts then he had been almost as bad. She wondered about his wife and felt even more annoyed and upset.

Her grandmother was watching her and she quickly tried to compose her expression.

‘You don’t like him,’ Hester said, after a moment.

‘We only exchanged a few words,’ Holly said. ‘Not enough for me to judge one way or the other.’ Her face burned. She hoped Hester would put it down to the heat from the fire. ‘Did his wife and family move to Ashdown with him?’

‘He’s divorced,’ Hester said. ‘No children, but he does look after his younger siblings, I think. Their father works abroad and their mother …’ She shrugged expressively. ‘I forget what the problem was there. Anyway, I think Mark wanted a fresh start so he set up a company that specialises in old buildings and redeveloping historic sites like Ashdown Park.’ She sat forwards. ‘If you really are going to follow up Ben’s research then maybe Mark could help you? I expect he’s discovered loads of interesting documents about the place as a result of all the background he’ll have done for the project.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of troubling him,’ Holly said hastily. ‘I’m sure he’s far too busy.’

There was a moment of quiet.

‘You really don’t like him,’ Hester said.

‘It’s not that,’ Holly said. ‘I … We got off on the wrong foot.’ And that, she thought, must be the understatement of the year.

‘I hear the development is going to be very exclusive,’ Hester said, pushing the cheese and the grapes towards Holly. ‘The place has been falling down for years, of course, so it will be a vast improvement.’ She paused. ‘I expect there were a few objections. There always are around housing issues these days and …’ She paused. ‘Well, I remember your grandfather once saying that there are a lot of superstitions and legends about Ashdown Park.’

‘Superstitions?’ Holly said, frowning.

‘Stories, ghosts …’ Hester waved a dismissive hand. ‘You know how much people like the supernatural.’ She drained her wineglass and placed it carefully on the table. Bonnie was having a dream, paws twitching, chasing rabbits in her sleep.

‘I don’t,’ Holly said, thinking of Espen Shurmer’s stories of the pearl and the mirror. She wondered whether one of the legends of Ashdown Park involved the Winter Queen’s lost pearl. What had Ben discovered? Curiosity pricked her and something that felt like a lost memory twitched at the corner of her mind.

‘Would you like anything else to eat?’ Hester asked.

‘Oh, no thanks,’ Holly said. ‘I’d burst. I’ve had too much cheese as it is. I’ll make some coffee if you like, though.’

‘I’ll do it in a moment,’ Hester said. She gave Holly an indulgent smile that somehow made her feel as though she
was a child again. ‘Go and fetch your bags,’ she added. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

Later, in the comforting surroundings of the room she had occupied since she was a child, Holly pulled back the heavy curtains and opened the sash window to let in some fresh air. The room faced west and the faintest hint of sunset was fading from the May sky, a mere sliver of dark blue against the inky black of the night. The steady drone of cars still passed by on the Banbury Road. Holly drew the curtains together, wrapping herself in the warmth of the familiar room. Bonnie was already asleep on the rug by the bed.

There was a small shower room off the bedroom and Holly dropped her clothes in a pile, turned the shower on and stepped under the blast of water. She let the strength of it beat down on her head, closed her eyes and tilted her face up into the stream. The water was powerful – Holly visualised it as huge teardrops running down the side of the glass. She deliberately kept her mind clear of thought, concentrating on sensation alone, translating it into pictures, engravings in shades of grey.

She reached for a towel and stepped out into the bedroom, shivering a little as the air touched her bare skin. The wooden floor was cool and her damp feet clung to it slightly. She rubbed herself briskly and brushed her hair back ruthlessly from her face. The long, arched mirror on the opposite wall reflected her image back at her, pale and dark shapes, blurred at the edges, brown and white. Holly had always thought that she looked like a sparrow – pale skin, brown hair, hazel eyes and freckles that looked super-imposed.
She never tanned, just turned more freckled, like an egg. Her grandmother had said it was a throwback to her red-haired great-great-grandfather.

Oddly, after such a long and difficult day, she no longer felt tired. She slid a clean nightshirt over her head then prowled across to the bookcase looking for something innocuous enough to send her to sleep quickly. There were a handful of the children’s adventure stories that she and Ben had devoured when they were young. On the shelf above were back copies of
The Georgian Journal
belonging to her grandfather. Holly was about to select one at random when her eye fell on a battered leather-bound volume with no title or lettering of any kind that was wedged into the corner. She took it out. The leather was smooth and worn under her fingertips. In the lamplight it gleamed deep green.

Curious, Holly opened it. The pages were stiff. The book smelled of faded lavender and old dust. At first she thought it was some sort of ledger, because it was hand written in ink that had paled to brown over the years, the words swirling extravagantly over the pages. Then she realised it was not an accounts book but some sort of diary. There were pencil drawings too; on the first page was a delicately detailed flower, a pale faded mauve with long stems and tiny petals.

‘The Memoirs of Lavinia Flyte.

Written at Ashdown Park in January of the year 1801.’

Holly jumped to read the familiar place name. She felt odd: A sensation of excitement gripped her, butterflies in her stomach.

A rectangular compliments slip fluttered to the floor and she bent automatically to retrieve it. There was writing on
the back, Ben’s neat black lettering. She recognised it at once. She had always teased him for having such neat handwriting when doctors were reputed to scrawl. It looked like a list of names.

William Craven

Robert Verity

Elizabeth Stuart

Lavinia Flyte

Holly turned the paper over between her fingers. Elizabeth Stuart, she thought, might be Elizabeth of Bohemia, although there were plenty of other people of that name. The other names were unknown to her.

At the bottom there was Ben’s name and a question mark.

Holly turned the paper over again. There was a name on the reverse in blue gothic lettering:
The Merchant Adventurers.
There was nothing else; no address or telephone number.

She turned back to the text and read on.

‘I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of sixteen, the mistress of Lord Downes and embarked upon a life of vice. Or perhaps I shall relate it after all, for I suspect that a report of my amorous career is precisely the reason that many a reader will pick up these memoirs.

So here is my tale.

I was christened Lavinia Jane Flyte at St Andrew’s Church in the City of London on 24th January 1783. My mother called me Lavinia because she thought it a pretty name. It means purity. Poor mama, what an inappropriate choice that proved to be.’

Holly smiled. Head bent, still reading, she carried the book across to the bed and slid under the covers.

My father was a costermonger, selling fruit and vegetables from his stall in Covent Garden. How I grew to hate the smell of rotting fruit. It was as though it seeped from his very pores. Our poky little house in Bell Alley off Coleman Street stank too, of stale vegetables and dust and my mother’s misery. I knew from the earliest age that such a life would not do for me and I planned to escape.

It was fortunate that I was very pretty. I make no bones about it. There is no place for false modesty in this account. My face and my figure were my key to fortune and I was determined to use them to full advantage. I had already observed that when I was on my father’s stall we traded double the amount of wares that he would normally sell. Indeed, the gentlemen barely glanced at the fruit for they were too busy ogling me and I could encourage them to spend prodigiously. Perhaps there was less trade from ladies on those days, for they surely resented my beauty, but that did not matter to me. I do not need the good opinion of women to do well in my profession. Indeed, it would be positively odd if they bestowed it on me – or perhaps not, since I do them a great favour in entertaining their tedious husbands and sending them home in a better temper than when they left.

But I digress. It is a fault of mine, I fear, as will become apparent to you reading this memoir.

I had met Downes whilst selling him some oranges so, it was only a small step further to selling myself. He was handsome and young and spoke charmingly to me, and at that age that was all the incentive I required. I was desperate to get away from my father’s house and Downes was desperate to have me, and so it came about.

Downes installed me in rooms at Oxford whilst he studied at the university there (I say he studied, but I saw little evidence of any great industry. It was all drinking and dancing and flirting,
and most pleasant it was too). Alas, I had made a poor bargain though, because this stripling lord was not of age and as soon as his guardian became aware of his infatuation with me he cut off poor Downes’ allowance whilst his tutor threatened to send him down for immoral behaviour. Downes swore he loved me, but he started to crumble beneath this twin onslaught and soon he was begging me to tell him what he should do, for he said he would die if he could not be with me and yet he wanted his money too.