The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton (14 page)

‘I don’t know. It seems to somehow. I don’t have any family. My mother died when I was small so I don’t remember her. My father died recently, and I was an only child. My mother’s parents died before I was born. I don’t seem to have anybody and I don’t see why someone I have no memory of should leave me such a house. It’s so distinctive, so odd. I would very much like to find out why.’

‘What do you mean?’

She was so easy to talk to that he found himself telling her things he didn’t intend to.

He told her what it had been like to come back from war and find his father dead and everything left in a financial mess. How the banker was in touch with the solicitors’ and they were trying to sell what he owned.

‘I thought having the will might help, and it would give
me something to do – though I must find some work. I’m running out of money.’

Miss Charlton produced the will. They both read it in turn, but it didn’t tell them anything they didn’t know.

‘There are ways to find out,’ Miss Charlton said. ‘You could start with her death. It sounds awful, but perhaps she went into hospital or there was a doctor who tended her.’

‘I have been to the churches and the graveyards, the hospitals, everywhere I can think of.’

‘Is there nothing in the house which gives you a clue?’

‘No papers, no books that aren’t ordinary novels and only a few of those, just there.’ He hesitated and then he looked at her and said, ‘This is going to sound ridiculous …’ He hesitated; he had never told anybody this before and he couldn’t understand why he was doing it now other than the fact that he couldn’t stop himself. Was it the way that she looked at him? He didn’t know … ‘I’m starting to feel as though I was meant to come here.’

He hadn’t known that until he said it and was as surprised as she obviously was, though she hid it under a veneer of politeness. ‘I sometimes find that I get to places and then it was where I was meant to be.’ He glanced at her. ‘Do you think that’s stupid?’

Miss Charlton was staring at him. ‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘Who knows what people are capable of.’

‘They called me Lucky Joe when I was in France because I could judge things that … that I couldn’t see, but it doesn’t seem to work for me, only for other people and then not … not especially well.’

Miss Charlton gazed around the room. ‘It’s a sizeable house,’ she said, ‘there must be places you haven’t looked.’

‘I haven’t looked anywhere much. Where else is there?’

She glanced at him in question, and Joe said to her, ‘Help yourself,’ so she went over to the desk and opened it.

It was empty. Above it were several novels by well-known authors – Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen. She pulled them out one by one and flicked through them, but there was nothing. Joe had wandered into the other rooms.

*

Lucy saw the garden surrounding the tower house and how it had spectacular views of the cathedral across the river. It had been built in the manner of a fortress, she was sure, though on the wrong side of the river. She didn’t know whether Mr Hardy was right about his feeling that he was meant to be there, but there was something very special about it, like the knocker on the cathedral; it felt like a place of refuge, somewhere for people to run to when they needed safety.

She followed Mr Hardy upstairs, though it seemed a rather personal thing to do, so she left him behind on the first storey where through a door she could see a bed. It looked very impersonal and not slept in, as it was in the other rooms, all the doors being open. She took the stairs up again. This level had such a good atmosphere that she thought people living here must have been comforted. There wasn’t much furniture – Mr Hardy obviously didn’t use any of it, just the odd chair – but it was clean and what light existed at that hour from the city and the river and the sky poured in there like sweet oil.

She heard Joe take the stairs lightly. He appeared in the doorway.

‘Anything?’

She hadn’t really looked, she had been so taken with the views and the building itself, but really there was no place for anything to be secreted.

She went over to the window. ‘It is such a beautiful place,’ she said.

Joe went and stood beside her. The wind had got up and was blowing the water about, tossing little sprays of it in the air, like diamonds above the river. The window just along from them was banging in its frame, but the one in front of them was not because it was wedged with a piece of paper. Joe pulled it out to tear it in half because it was quite a big piece and would do for both windows but when he opened it he looked harder. It was a letter. It read:

There was an address at the top right-hand side of the page from some place called Allendale. It was dated more than twenty years ago.

They both read it and then again. Lucy could feel excitement rise in her. She smiled at him.

‘But I’ve no idea who she is,’ Joe said.

‘She must be the woman who owned the house, who left it to you. Perhaps she’s a distant relative or was a friend of the family.’

‘It doesn’t explain anything,’ Joe said.

‘But you must want to find out. It could tell you all kinds of things that you don’t know.’

Joe hesitated. He didn’t want to go looking for some distant relative who had died and left him this ridiculous house. He wanted to go back to London and have everything as it should be with his father and Angela alive, his inheritance somehow intact. Short of that he didn’t want to do anything; he felt as if life were dragging him along behind it and he wanted to run away. And then he thought, have I not run from London to here since I couldn’t find Angela? I’ve already run away once.

‘Allendale is not that far. Do you drive?’ she said.

Miss Charlton was turning out to be something of a pain, Joe thought, urging people on, him in particular. Her eyes were lit with curiosity and excitement. It had him wanting to go back to the chair in the sitting room which he had adopted as his, pretending there was still something of his father around him. He wanted not to bother, not to be part of anything, but she was standing there, waiting for his response. If he refused it would be slapping her somehow. He thought of her in her cold scruffy office and saw the thin cheap clothes she wore.

‘I’ll hire a car and go there,’ he announced, not knowing that he would and then, not knowing he was going to, he said, ‘Would you be able to come with me?’

She hesitated but only for a second and then she nodded.

‘I could do it on Saturday,’ she said.

*

Joe had not known that it was quite a long way to Allendale and that the countryside altered. Once out of the city there were various little villages and after half an hour the road dropped sharply into Weardale. Then it wound through the valley in its narrow state and in another half hour or so it appeared quite different to anything he had seen before in England.

In fact in some ways it looked like the rural parts of France he had been in, with stone houses, lush fields and small villages which were so pretty that he could think of himself living there, the grey stone walls and farmhouses set against the sides of the valley or right on the tops. There were not many trees away from the river, and up on the tops sheep dotted the fields. The dale went on and on and then they were up beyond it where the land was scarred from lead mining, ruined wheels and rusted machinery, buildings open to the weather and water. They tumbled past it, all deserted now. If there had been any wealth from mining it had long since gone to other places, just as the coal wealth had. There was no evidence of it here.

They approached a large village green surrounded by shops, houses and hotels. Allendale. Joe parked the hired car to the side of the street and they made their way almost to the bottom of the hill nearby. It wound down to the River East Allen, to where the house lay in which Priscilla Lee’s Uncle George lived. There stood an enormous house, so big that it took up most of Joe’s vision. He hadn’t seen such a
large house in such a small place; it was as if somebody were trying to impose his importance on the rest of the area.

It stood in grounds which reached down to the river and then right up across the bankside and into the town. The garden was a series of steps which went up, on and on, reminding Joe of some fairy tale where the stairs wound in circles tight enough to make you dizzy. The house had many windows and stood tall to the sky. It even had a huge spire-like construction on one wing of it, the likes of which Joe had seen only in Scotland. It reminded him just a little of the tower house, as though the buildings were cousins. He liked this idea; it made him smile. The slate roof glinted in the cold sunshine.

It was a steep climb to the entrance. He banged on the doorknocker, but nothing happened. Joe had not been able to admit to himself that with his luck Uncle George would be dead and gone years ago. Somehow to him the house looked empty. There were thick curtains at the windows which let in little light, but it had that air about it – nobody at home. Joe banged on the front door again and then went around and into the yard and banged on the back door. In the end he gave up. They trudged onto the front street to find a woman watching them.

‘He isn’t here, love. They took him away ages since.’

‘Where did they take him to?’ Lucy asked.

‘I don’t know. But his son lives just outside Alston. Angus Firbank.’

She gave them directions and they motored over the hills to where Alston lay, a narrow winding cobbled street leading to the bottom of the hill. They turned off and climbed back
up into a tiny lane through which the car could only just squeeze. At the end of it was another big house, very much the same as the other – Scottish-looking and with something forbidding about it, grey, tall and imposing. These people obviously had a great deal of money.

*

They got out of the car. Again Joe banged on the door and after a long wait a small, grubby maidservant opened it. Joe explained his business and after another lengthy wait they were ushered through the dark hall and into a darker drawing room, where a small fat man sat in an armchair. If Lucy had had to go there alone she thought she would have run away. There was something quelling about it; she didn’t know what it was, but she moved nearer to Joe. Then she remembered she was supposed to be sensible and independent and moved away.

Joe took the letter from his pocket and explained that he had inherited the tower house in Durham from a woman he had never met and was eager to know more about the family. He said that he was looking for Priscilla’s Uncle George, and at that the man got up from his chair with difficulty and said that he might be his father.

He asked them to sit down, but neither of them did. Joe stood in front of him while the man read the letter again. Lucy wandered about the room, though it was so cluttered with large ornate furniture of no consequence, that it wasn’t easy to do.

The corners of the room were too black for shadows and there were a number of other rooms beyond; all the doors seemed to connect, leading on to Lucy was not sure what,
but she didn’t like it. There was something about the house which reminded her of circular towers, going round and round to confuse people and render them vulnerable. It was ridiculous, she told herself.

She could see windows but no views, nothing but gloom and cobwebs and tiny spots of light which seemed to land nowhere. She wanted to go back to Joe and tell him that they had to leave.

She breathed carefully and watched Joe standing so confidently in the middle of the room, watching the man in his turn. She saw how guarded Joe’s eyes were, glittering like onyx. The man had had time to read the letter at least twice by now. When he looked up his face was not friendly but closed, forbidding.

‘This means nothing to me. I don’t know about this woman.’

‘Is your father still alive?’ Joe asked.

The man hesitated, obviously taken aback by the swift change of subject.

‘He went mad. I had him put in an asylum. He was always a queer bugger. He doesn’t talk much any more – he won’t be able to tell you anything. There’s no point in your going there. He saw things that didn’t exist and worse.’

‘What do you mean?’

The man shuddered. ‘He knew when babies were going to die, when folk were going to be hurt, and he thought he could talk to those who had died. We’re all good living people here, we don’t hold with such things, and I couldn’t work it out – we never had that kind of problem in our family. Somewhere somebody married wrongly.’

Joe nodded. All he said was, ‘Where is he?’

The man looked worried. ‘I said—’

‘Yes, but you didn’t say where.’

‘I don’t see that it’s any of your business.’

Joe sighed. Lucy wanted to pull him out, grab his hand and urge him away, but he didn’t seem bothered, nor even impatient. He stood as though the other man were the visitor and he were the owner, though why anyone would have cared to acknowledge such a thing she couldn’t think.

The place was dirty, she realized; the floor crunched under her shoes, the fire smoked and she could smell thick dust everywhere. She thought she heard a rustling in the corner. It was a mouse or a rat. She deliberately didn’t look that way, but she thought Mr Firbank could have done with a cat or two. Joe’s cats would have sorted it out in moments.

‘Where is he?’ Joe said.

The man laughed uneasily and then he looked more keenly at Joe. Lucy saw the expression which dawned in his eyes, something worse than unease: fear.

‘What do you mean by coming here and behaving like this? Who are you?’ he said, his voice quivering.

‘Where is he?’ Joe said again. Something about the way that he said it made Lucy want to run outside and gulp at fresh air.