Thorn

Table of Contents

A selection of titles by Sarah Rayne

Title Page

Copyright

Author's Acknowledgements

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Epilogue

BLOOD RITUAL*

DEVIL'S PIPER*

THE BURNING ALTAR*

CHANGELING: AN IMMORTAL TALE*

WILDWOOD: AN IMMORTAL TALE*

PROPERTY OF A LADY

THE SIN EATER

*Originally published under the pseudonym of Frances Gordon

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

First published in 1997 by

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

a division of Hodder Headline PLC

338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH

This eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn House Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 1997 by Frances Gordon

The right of Frances Gordon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0070-9 (epub)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being

described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this

publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons

is purely coincidental.

This eBook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited Falkirk,

Stirlingshire, Scotland

My grateful thanks are due to Dr C J Cooper, Consultant Psychiatrist, who patiently guided me through the medical and psychiatric aspects of this book, and to Chris Emery of William Emery & Sons, who provided such excellent help and information on the legalities of practices surrounding burials and funerals in England.

‘She shall fall into a profound sleep which shall last a hundred years . . .'

Charles Perrault,
The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood

A
lmost the entire family went to Edmund's funeral. Imogen's father said it was a time for supporting one another, and the aunts all agreed.

‘The Ingrams closing ranks with an audible click,' said Great-Aunt Flora tartly, but no one paid much attention because Great-Aunt Flora was often tart. Eloise, Imogen's mother, said ‘tart' was a very good word, because Flora had had a great many lovers when she was a girl in the thirties and forties, and it had coarsened her.

‘I don't know why she's even here,' said Eloise, irritably.

‘I think she's here to be with me.' Imogen said this carefully, because she had been in the car with her cousin Edmund when he crashed it, driving too fast, and if she had been sitting in the front instead of in the back she would have been chopped up as well. She was trying not to think about it too much, and she was trying very hard to forget the sight of Edmund's body. Edmund had been showing off with the new car his mother had given him for his eighteenth birthday. Imogen had not liked him very much but nobody ought to die smearily like that, crushed into his seat and cut to pieces by glass.

‘Your father and I are with you,' said Eloise in response to this. ‘You don't need that mad old woman as well.'

‘Make sure to put a warm coat on before setting off,' said Imogen's father. ‘There's a very cold wind today. Haven't you a warm woollen scarf?'

‘Yes, you don't want to catch flu again, Imogen. I remember I was prostrate with nursing you last year. Dr Shilling said at the time it was exactly the kind of strain I should avoid.'

‘I think we should have got Shilling to take a look at her again. The shock of the crash – I might still give him a ring.'

They did not want Imogen to go to the funeral. They never wanted her to go anywhere. It had been a long time before Imogen had seen that they always managed to block invitations from schoolfriends or suggestions from teachers that she join the school choir or orchestra or drama group. She would quite like to have done all of these, or even just one of them, but in the end it had not been worth Mother's migraines and palpitations and Father's worried frowns, or the aunts' twitterings. There had even been the suggestion of trying for a university place during her last year at school, but Father had not seemed to like the idea, and had had an interview about it with her headmistress. The aunts had all joined in, saying, oh dear, all that way from home, and supposing she was ill again? And then Mother had suffered some kind of collapse and lay around on daybeds and sofas looking ethereal, and Dr Shilling had said she must not be caused any kind of anxiety. And as for Imogen leaving home, well, it was not to be thought of.

The aunts did not want Imogen to go to Edmund's funeral either. There had been worried discussions for days beforehand – ‘All that emotional strain straight after the car crash,' said Aunt Rosa who was thin and slightly acidulated and did not believe in shirking facts – and there had been much telephoning and anxious consultations as to what would be the best thing to do.

‘Better for her to stay safely at home,' said Aunt Dilys, who was Rosa's younger sister and lived with her in Battersea. Aunt Dilys was short and plump and addicted to sugary puddings and Barbara Cartland novels and a nice gin and tonic before her lunch.

‘I daresay Royston and Eloise will already have decided that,' said Rosa.

‘Oh yes, probably they've called in that nice Dr Shilling. Of course, he's known the Ingrams for a good long while – don't you recall
his
father being called in when Royston's father died? Mother said how very kind he was. And Royston and Eloise are both very careful of Imogen, although I've never seen any signs of . . .
you know
.'

‘Neither did Lucienne Ingram's brother,' said Rosa caustically.

‘Well, no, but they say she was really quite happy in – well, in that place they put her.'

‘Thornacre,' said Aunt Rosa, and Aunt Dilys shuddered. ‘And Sybilla Ingram's husband,' Aunt Rosa went on inexorably, ‘didn't see any signs of anything out of the ordinary either.'

‘Dear me, no. That was Waterloo year, wasn't it?'

‘Trafalgar.'

Imogen knew about Lucienne who was supposed to have done something appalling to her brother around the time that Edward VII had been on the throne, and whose photographs had been systematically destroyed by the family so that if you ever looked through old albums you kept coming across unexpected blanks. She knew about Sybilla as well, who looked slyly out of an oval frame in the dining room, and had glossy golden hair twisted into ringlets and a narrow red velvet ribbon round her neck to show sympathy with guillotined French aristocrats. Imogen had always disliked being alone in the room with Sybilla's portrait, especially on dark winter afternoons before the lights were switched on. As she and Edmund grew up, it occurred to her that Sybilla looked at you from the corners of her eyes with the exact same smile Edmund wore when he was about to do something particularly cruel – like the day of his ninth birthday, when he had held the cat over the kitchen range for five solid minutes. Then he had blandly gone into his birthday tea with Mother and the aunts, his jersey still smelling of scorched cat fur and cat sick. Imogen had not been able to eat anything, even though there was strawberry shortcake and cream trifle.

The aunts always beamed on Edmund and admired his golden hair, and said, oh,
wouldn't
his father have been proud if he could have lived to see him, and wouldn't it be rather suitable if one day he and Imogen . . .

‘Wouldn't it be rather suitable' meant, of course, that Imogen and Edmund might one day get married. Being married to Edmund would be absolutely the worst thing in the world, and Imogen would have done anything to stop it happening.

Looked at sensibly, it was not really such a very bad thing that Edmund was dead.

Great-Aunt Flora, sweeping into the Hampstead house ten minutes before everyone was due to leave, brushed aside all the ditherings and said energetically that of course Imogen was going to the funeral. ‘And don't press your temples and look sorrowful, Eloise.'

Somebody – Imogen thought it was Dr Shilling – murmured something about migraine and the strain of the occasion, and Great-Aunt Flora said, ‘Rubbish. The only thing wrong with you, Eloise, is rampant hypochondria.'

Everyone at once looked to see how Eloise would field that one, but Eloise declined the bait. She leaned back in her chair and half closed her eyes, but Imogen thought the headache or the dizzy spell would not develop because Mother had bought a new suit in Knightsbridge earlier in the week to wear today. Aunt Dilys had already commented how very smart it was – ‘And so
youthful
' – but Great-Aunt Flora had asked if Eloise thought it really suitable to wear such short skirts at her age.

‘She's decked out like a black widow spider,' remarked Flora to Imogen as they set off. ‘Silly creature. I told your father at the time not to marry her, but he would do it.'

One of Flora's lovers had been a racing driver and he had taught her to drive at breakneck speeds. They dashed along the road to the church like bats escaping hell, but Imogen did not mind. The funeral was going to be pretty harrowing, but when you were hurtling round bends at sixty miles an hour, at least you were not worrying about minced-up bodies in coffins.

‘Cheer up, child,' said Flora as they drew up outside the church. ‘There's still the inquest to come. You can dress up to the nines for that – I bet your mother will – that family always did over-dress, everyone used to comment on it. The press will probably be there. You might find you're questioned by a good-looking journalist. Or even a policeman.'

‘Father would put a barbed wire fence round me within the hour. Or whisk me out of the country the next day.'

‘He worries because you aren't very strong.' If it was possible for Great-Aunt Flora to sound hesitant, she sounded it now.

‘I'm strong enough to enjoy being questioned by a good-looking policeman.'