The Lake House (14 page)

They'd eaten every meal outdoors, hard-boiled eggs and cheese from a picnic basket, and drank wine under the lilac tree in the walled garden. They'd disappeared inside the woods, and stolen apples from the farm next door, and floated down the stream in her little boat as one silken hour spun itself into the next. On a clear, still night, they'd dug the old bicycles out of the shed and cycled together along the dusty lane, racing, laughing, breathing in salt from the warm air as moonlight made the stones, still hot from the day, shine lustrous white.

It had been the perfect summer. She'd known that at the time. The long sunny spell, their youth, this new and all-consuming love they'd found; but there'd been larger forces at work, too. That summer was a beginning for the two of them—their new family, their life together—but it was also the end of something. They, along with the rest of humankind, had stood at a precipice; the rhythms of their lifetime, unchanged for generations, were about to be given a seismic jolt. There were people who'd glimpsed what was coming, but not Eleanor. The future had seemed unimaginable. She'd been happily cocooned in the sublime and heady present where all that mattered was today. But war clouds had been gathering, the future waiting in the wings . . .

The insect was still thrashing its wings against the leadlight windows and Eleanor endured another wave of grief as the present seeped back in. Theo. The reporter's questions, the photographer, Alice in the doorway. The look on Alice's face had been one that Eleanor recognised. It was the same expression she'd worn when Eleanor caught her scratching her name into the architraves of the house, the same as when Cook sent her upstairs as a tot for stealing sugar mice from the larder, as when she ruined her new dress with great splotches of black ink.

Alice had looked guilty, certainly, but there was more to it than that. She'd appeared to be on the cusp of speaking. But what could Alice have wanted to say? And to whom? Did she know something? She'd had her interview with the policeman, as had everyone in the house. Was it possible she had information about Theo's whereabouts that she hadn't yet mentioned?

“How could she?” came a voice in the dark. “She's still but a child herself.”

Eleanor hadn't intended to speak aloud and the realisation that she had was disquieting. She peered through the dim of the room. Her mouth was dry—an effect, presumably, of the medication Dr Gibbons had given her. She reached for the glass of water on the bedside table and the person beyond it clarified in the gloom: her mother, sitting in the brown velvet chair by the bureau. Eleanor said quickly, “Is there news?”

“Not yet.” Her mother was writing letters, her pen scratching across the vellum. “But the nice policeman, the older one with the poorly eye, told me they've received information that might be of assistance.”

“Information?”

Scritchety-scratch.
“Now, now, Eleanor, you know I haven't a head for details.”

Eleanor took a sip of water. Her hand shook and her throat burned. It had to be Alice. She could just picture her second daughter fronting up to the policeman in charge, confidence animating her eager features as she pulled out that journal of hers and proceeded to deliver crisp notes. Observations and theories she was “just positive' were relevant.

And maybe Alice really
could
help; perhaps she had seen something that would lead the police to Theo. The girl had developed an uncanny habit for being where she shouldn't.

“I need to speak to Alice.”

“You need to rest. Those sleeping tablets of Dr Gibbons pack quite a punch, or so I'm told.”

“Mother, please.”

A sigh. “I don't know where she is. You know what that girl's like. You ought to know; you were just the same at that age, each of you as stubborn as the other.”

Eleanor didn't deny the comparison. Neither, if she were honest, could she contradict the description, though “stubborn' was perhaps a lazy choice. There were plenty that were more suitable. Eleanor preferred to think of her younger self as tenacious. Devoted, even. “Mr Llewellyn then. Please, Mother. He'll know where to find Alice.”

“I haven't seen
him
either. As a matter of fact, the police were looking for the man. I heard they couldn't find him anywhere—there was talk he'd taken off. Very peculiar, but then he never was especially reliable and he's been jumpier than a cat lately.”

Eleanor tried to sit up. She didn't have the capacity today to admit her mother's ancient contempt for Mr Llewellyn. She was going to have to find Alice herself. Oh, but her head was thumping. She cradled it in her hands and Edwina whimpered at the end of the bed.

Just another minute or two to steady herself, that was all she needed. To stop her thoughts from jumbling, to make her head stop spinning. Constance was simply making mischief; Eleanor knew there was no way Mr Llewellyn would desert her at a time like this. He
had
been anxious over the past few weeks, that much was true, but he was her dearest friend. He was bound to be in the garden somewhere, taking care of the girls; it was the only thing that explained his absence from her side. And when she found him, she'd find Alice.

For no matter how muddy her mind, no matter how desperately she wanted to sink back into her bed and hide beneath the covers, to deny the horror of the day, Eleanor was determined to speak with Alice. Her daughter knew something about Theo's disappearance, Eleanor was certain of it.

N
ine

Cornwall, 2003

It had been almost a week since she first stumbled upon Loeanneth and Sadie had been back every day. No matter which way she headed out on her morning run, she always ended up in the overgrown garden. Her favourite place to sit was on the wide rim of a stone fountain overlooking the lake, and this morning as she sat down, she spotted a crude carving in the shadowy contour of the fountain base.
a-l-i-c-e
. Sadie ran her finger along the cool indentations of the letters. “Hello there, Alice,” she said. “It seems we meet again.”

They were all over the place, these engravings. On the trunks of trees, the soft wood of the windowsills, the slippery moss-green platform of the boathouse she'd discovered and explored the other day. Sadie had started to feel as if she and Alice Edevane were playing an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse across the decades, a connection accentuated by the fact that she'd been dipping in and out of
A Dish Served Cold
all week while she played at holidays (for Bertie's benefit) and tried to sort things out with Donald (she'd left six messages since Monday, made countless other calls, and still heard nothing back). Despite some initial doubts, reading had proved a surprisingly agreeable pastime. Sadie liked the crabby detective, Diggory Brent, and was taking an inordinate amount of pleasure in spotting the clues before he did. It was hard to imagine that the stern-faced woman pictured inside the back covers of the crime novels had once been a junior delinquent, defacing the family home, but it had made Sadie warm to Alice in some inexplicable way. It intrigued her, too, that a writer famous for inventing complex mysteries had been involved, however peripherally, in a real-life crime investigation, particularly one that had never been solved. She wondered which had come first, the choice of genre or the disappearance of a baby brother.

All week, faced with Donald's silence, while she battled a deep sense of impotence, Sadie had caught herself brooding on the neglected house and the missing child, intrigued by its puzzle. She would rather have been back in London at her real job, but anything was better than watching the clock count time away, and her interest had not gone unnoticed. “Solved it yet?” Bertie had taken to calling whenever she and the dogs clattered through the front door to his cottage. There was a smile in his voice when he said it, as if he were pleased to see her occupied but guardedly so. Apparently she had not altogether convinced him with her holiday-maker act. She caught him watching her sometimes, a thoughtful frown on his face, and she knew questions about her sudden visit to Cornwall, the highly unusual absence from her job, were damming up behind his lips. Sadie had got good at escaping the house, backpack slung over her shoulders and dogs at her heel, whenever it looked like that dam might be on the brink of bursting.

The dogs, for their part, were thrilled with the new arrangement. They raced ahead of Sadie, swapping places as they wove through the woods, before veering off the track together, chasing one another into the long grass and sliding beneath the yew hedge to take up yesterday's quarrel with the ducks. Sadie lagged behind, but then books weren't light and her backpack was full of them these days, care of her new friend Alastair Hawker, village librarian.

From the first time she'd met him, he'd been as helpful as his limited collection allowed. Unfortunately, that wasn't saying much. It was Hitler's fault. A bomb during the Second World War had destroyed the newspaper records for the years prior to January 1941. “I'm really very sorry,” Alastair had said. “They're not online but I can order them from the British Library, find you something else to get you started?”

Sadie had told him that suited her very well and he'd got down to business, tapping keenly on a computer keyboard and flicking through old file cards in a set of wooden drawers, before excusing himself to disappear at a brisk pace behind a door marked
Archives
.

“Success,” he said on his return, brushing dust from the top of a small stack of books. “
Notable Cornish Families
', he read, turning to the table of contents and running a long finger down the list, stopping at a spot midway. “Chapter eight: The deShiels of Havelyn.”

Sadie looked at him, unconvinced. “The house I'm interested in is called Loeanneth.”

“The Lake House, yes, but it used to be part of a much larger estate. I believe Loeanneth was originally the head gardener's residence.”

“And the deShiels?”

“They were local gentry, hugely powerful in their day. Same old story: strength and influence waned along with the family's bank balance. Some unwise business decisions, a few bad eggs, the obligatory series of aristocratic scandals.” He waved the book. “You'll find it all in here.”

Sadie had left with a shiny new library card, her first; a photocopy of “Chapter eight: The deShiels of Havelyn'; and Arnold Pickering's
The Edevane Boy
, a rapturously written account of the disappearance she had the dubious honour of being the first to borrow since August 1972. She'd also borrowed a well-thumbed copy of
A Dish Served Cold
.

That afternoon, while Bertie was busy baking pear cake, Sadie had set up in the courtyard of the cottage, listening to the sigh and heave of the sea and reading about the deShiel family. It was, as the librarian said, a tale of greatness and decline. Sadie skimmed through the first few hundred years—the knighting by Henry VIII of some seafaring deShiel who'd managed to pilfer great masses of gold from the Spaniards, the awarding of lands and titles, the various deaths, marriages and inheritances that followed—becoming interested again around 1850, when the family's fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse. There was the suggestion of a fleecing, something to do with a sugar plantation in the West Indies, and a great gambling debt, and then a fire on Christmas Day, 1878, that started in the servants' hall and went on to destroy much of the manor house. Over the next thirty years, the estate was carved into pieces and sold off bit by bit until all that remained to the deShiel family was the Lake House and its surrounding acres.

The Edevanes, it turned out, were just a footnote in the house's history. Three paragraphs from the end of the chapter the author noted that Eleanor deShiel, the last in the family line, had married Anthony Edevane in 1911, after which Loeanneth was restored and retained for use as their country residence. There was no mention of Theodore Edevane's disappearance, a fact that had surprised Sadie until she established that
Notable Cornish Families
had been published in 1925, almost a decade before the little boy went missing; indeed, a good eight years before he'd been born.

In the absence of this intrigue, the author had focused on Eleanor deShiel's status as the inspiration for Daffyd Llewellyn's
Eleanor's
Magic Doorway
, a children's storybook that had enjoyed great success in the first decade of the twentieth century. “If not for the unlikely rapport between Llewellyn and the perspicacious daughter of his friend, he might have remained a physician, never discovering his gift for storytelling, and generations of children would have been deprived of a treasured tale.” Llewellyn had continued to write and illustrate and in the 1934 Honours was awarded a posthumous OBE for services to literature. According to Alastair Hawker the book was still around but hadn't stood the test of time as well as some of its contemporaries. Sadie had had to take his word for it. She hadn't read the book as a child; there'd been a copy, she thought, a gift from her grandparents, but her mum and dad had declared it “nonsense', taking predictable exception to the magical elements of the story and filing it distastefully wherever the Enid Blytons went to die.

The edition she had now on her lap had been published in 1936. The paper was soft and powdery, interspersed with shiny picture pages that were starting to spot around the edge. Plates, Alastair had called them, when she borrowed it from him on Monday. The story was about a little girl who lived in a big, lonely house with her kind but ineffective father and an ice-cold, social-climbing stepmother. One day, when her parents were away in London, the girl was rattling around the draughty house and found herself before a door she'd never noticed. On the other side she found a wizened, white-haired man, “like Old Father Time himself', the walls around his bed covered from floor to ceiling in hand-drawn maps and carefully sketched landscapes. “What are you doing here?” she asked, as well one might; “I've been waiting for you,” he said in response, before beginning the tale of a far-off magic land in which once upon a time a terrible wrong was done that ruptured the peace and allowed war and strife to flourish. “There is only one person who can make things right, and that is you,” he said.

By following his maps, the girl discovered a tunnel in the overgrown garden that took her to the magic land. There she joined with a trusty band of oppressed locals and undertook a number of adventures and battles to trounce the wicked usurper and restore peace and happiness to the land. When at last she made her way back through the tunnel, it was to discover that no time has passed at all and yet her home had changed entirely. Her father was happy, her mother still alive, and the house and garden had lost their gloom. She ran to tell the old man of her success, only to find the room was empty. Her parents told her she must have dreamed the whole thing, and the girl almost believed them until she found, hidden beneath the wallpaper in the spare bedroom, a single map of the magic land.

Sitting on the rim of the fountain, Sadie took a bite of the cheese sandwich she'd brought in her backpack and held the book up in front of her, comparing an illustration of the storybook house to the real one behind. She'd asked Alastair to find her some additional information on the author, Daffyd Llewellyn. According to the preface at the beginning of the book, he was a close family friend to the Edevanes, and there was no doubting he'd taken his inspiration from Loeanneth. The house in Llewellyn's illustration was a dead ringer for the real thing; he'd even captured the leaning angle of the window on the far left-hand side. It had taken Sadie days of close inspection to notice that the window wasn't square. She turned to the plate marked
fig. ii
, an illustration of a wild-haired little girl in old-fashioned clothing, standing beside a stone pillar with a brass ring at its base. The sun's glare was impossibly bright and Sadie had to squint to read the line of text beneath the picture:
There, under the deepest, darkest, most whispering willow, Eleanor found what the old man's map had promised. “Pull the ring,” the air around her seemed to breathe, “pull the ring and see what happens.”

Sadie threw the crust of her sandwich to an insistent cluster of cygnets and wiped her hand on her track bottoms. From what she could gather, these kids' books were all alike. Isolated child finds doorway into magical world; adventures and heroism ensue. Evil is vanquished, old man storytellers are freed from the curses that detain them, and everything is made right with the world. It seemed a lot of kids dreamed about escaping childhood, of having power over their own destiny. Sadie could relate to that. Some went through the back of a wardrobe, others to the top of an enchanted tree, Eleanor had found an escape hatch in the garden. Unlike some doorways, Eleanor's had been real. Sadie had been chuffed when she found it on Tuesday morning, the brass ring and the pillar, just like the story said, hidden beneath a particularly virulent willow on the far side of the lake. Naturally, she'd tried to open it, but despite summoning all her strength, the trapdoor hadn't budged.

Their childhoods might have been decidedly different, but Sadie felt a kinship with Eleanor Edevane all the same. She
liked
the little girl in the fairy story, with her spirit of honour and bravery and mischief; she was just the kind of girl Sadie would have loved to be when she was small. But it was more than that, too. Sadie felt bonded to Eleanor because of something she'd found in the old boathouse the other day, down by the stream. She'd climbed through a broken window into a room that had been set up with a bed, a table and a few other basic furnishings. Everything was covered in dust and dirt and a moist blanket of age, and after a thorough search Sadie had turned up nothing useful and only one item that could rightly be termed interesting. The envelope had slipped behind the head of the bed and been lost for the better part of a century. Inside was a single sheet of paper with an elaborate design of deep green ivy leaves around the edges, the second page of a letter with Eleanor's name at the end.

It was a love letter, written while she was pregnant, in which, amid intimate declarations that his love had saved her life, she tried to convey to her husband the miraculous changes taking place as their baby grew—
a tiny mix of you and me
. Sadie had presumed at first that the baby was Theo Edevane, until she noted Eleanor's poignant lament that her love was too far away, that she wished he could be near, that she missed him desperately. She'd realised then that the letter must have been written when Anthony was in France during the First World War. According to “The deShiels of Havelyn', the Edevanes had had three daughters: Deborah born before the war, Clementine afterwards, and Alice smack bang in the middle. Thus, the baby whose birth Eleanor anticipated with such longing must be Alice. Passionate and honest, the letter provided such a strong insight into Eleanor's character that Sadie could almost hear the other woman's voice, clear and true, across the passage of ninety years.

Now, she closed the library book with a clap, sending a colony of dust spores hurtling. The sun was high and moisture was leaching from the lake's surface. Reflected light danced on the underside of leaning branches and leaves glistened, impossibly green. Despite the day's warmth, Sadie shivered as she looked up towards the house. Even without its link to
Eleanor's Magic Doorway
, this place still gave her the uncanny sense of having stumbled into the pages of a fairy story. The more time she spent in the Loeanneth garden, the more she learned about the house and the people who'd lived inside it, with each new imprint of
a-l-i-c-e
she discovered, the less she felt like an intruder. And yet she couldn't shake the feeling that the house was watching her.