A Place of Secrets (10 page)

“Would you like to come in?”

“I’d love to. What about you, Summer?”

“I’ve seen it loads of times,” she said in a superior tone. “And I’ve cooked supper on the stove. It’s called a queenie stove,
you know.”

“Fit for a princess, then,” Jude said, trying not to laugh. She followed Euan up the ladder, and cried out with pleasure to see the roof’s beautiful painted underside. “Imagine drifting off to sleep looking at this ceiling.”

“It’s not quite the Sistine Chapel,” Euan said.

“Well, you’re probably not allowed to sleep in the Sistine Chapel.” Jude took in the wide bed and the painted
chest and the little stove. Euan kept everything beautifully neat and clean. There was a heap of books by the bed and a hurricane lamp. Only the laptop computer on the bed placed the wagon in the twenty-first century.

“A cousin lent this caravan to me,” Euan said. “It had sat in his barn for years. Chickens nested in it. We gave it a thorough scrub and a lick of paint on the outside and it was
as good as new.”

“I love it!”

“I want to sleep in it. Why can’t I?” Summer whined. She had climbed up to look.

“She’s always asking,” Euan told Jude. “Maybe sometime when Darcey’s here,” he said to Summer. “Darcey’s my niece. I sometimes babysit her when my sister’s busy.”

Jude nodded, remembering.

“She goes to my school. Euan, can we show Auntie Jude the animals?”

“Certainly, Miss Grasshopper-brain,”
he said. Summer led them back through the gap in the hedge and beneath the transparent-plastic roof of a large carport toward the other side of the cottage. This was full of cages and glass tanks. The grass snake was coiled lazily on a stone in one of the tanks, basking in a patch of sunshine. Summer gazed at it, mesmerized. Jude went around peeping into some of the cages. There was
a young rabbit with a bandaged paw in one. “I found it in a snare,” explained Euan. “The idiot who had set it hadn’t bothered to check whether they’d caught anything, so the poor thing was catatonic and half-starved.”

In one of the larger cages, two downy owlets blinked sleepily.

“A neighbor brought me these. They’d fallen out of the nest. Usually it’s best to leave baby owls for the parents
to rescue, but their dog would have got them.”

Euan went into the cottage to make tea, and when he returned Jude was amused to see he obviously kept a stock of pink grapefruit juice for Summer. Summer took this act of homage as an appropriate moment to make her request.

“Would you make me an Auntie Jude doll for the doll’s house?” Jude thought her tone a touch imperious, but Euan promptly agreed.

“An Auntie Jude doll? Of course, why not?” he said, looking Jude up and down as if memorizing her, which gave her an odd feeling. “It’ll take me a day or two.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Jude. “Isn’t it, Summer?”

“Thank you, Euan,” Summer sang out, with the air of a bored princess.

Little monkey, thought Jude, but Euan seemed amused at being bossed about by a nearly seven-year-old girl.

“It’s my pleasure,” he said, and gave a mock bow.

“I’m very interested by your cottage,” Jude said. “Especially because I think my grandmother lived here as a child. Is it still part of the Starbrough estate?”

“No,” he said. “I bought it from Steve Gunn, the farmer next door. His father acquired it from the Wickhams along with the farm. I’d an idea it was connected to your family somehow. Claire
mentioned your gran. Would you like to look around?”

“Love to,” Jude said, and, taking her tea, she followed Euan and Summer inside.

“The kitchen, you can see, is in a state of, er, transition.” This was a polite term for the fact that all the old fittings had been torn out and nothing had yet been installed to take their place. On a battered table, an old whistle kettle crouched on a double
gas ring that was supplied by an ugly blue gas canister underneath. “There’s a scullery through there where I keep a cool box for some of the food. I’m learning to cope with prewar conditions.”

“Like Gran’s family must have done,” Jude remarked.

The situation was much the same upstairs, where there were three bedrooms and a smaller room that was being turned into a bathroom. “At least the shower’s
usable now,” Euan said, and let Summer test the basin taps. The bedrooms had been rewired and replastered and there was a single bed in one of the bedrooms, and a desk with a laser printer and what looked like one of Euan’s pictures in progress. “At least I can use the electricity up here now,” he said. “I sleep in this room when it’s really cold outside.”

“It’ll be lovely when it’s finished,”
said Jude, “but it must feel permanently like camping.” As she was leaving the bedroom, a stack of books on a shelf by the door caught her eye. They were multiple copies of the same title:
The Path through the Woods
. It sounded familiar and then she saw the author’s name, Euan Robinson, and something clicked in her mind.

“This is you!” she exclaimed, picking one up and admiring the book’s jacket,
a woodcut picture of trees. “Claire said you were a writer, but not that you were a famous one. I read a review of this only last week. A good one.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “And I’m not famous, I assure you.”

“Oh, but you wrote
The Lonely Road
, didn’t you? I loved that book.” It was about living in the Norfolk salt marshes and beautifully, lyrically written. His books
were nonfiction, part natural history, part literary memoir, and gave a wonderful impression of place.

“Did you?” he said, looking pleased. “We were living up near Cley then. It was a wonderful, remote place out of season, and a marvelous book to write.”

Jude noticed the “we” and remembered Claire said he was divorced. Euan turned away, muttering about checking where Summer had gone. She returned
the book to the pile and, with a last glance around his spartan bedroom, followed him downstairs.

Summer, bored with DIY, had gone back out into the garden to see the animals. Jude and Euan watched her from the kitchen window and Euan said, “I’d show you the folly, like I promised, but I don’t like to take Summer.”

“I can understand that,” she said fervently.

“There’s the shooting, yes,” he
said. “As I say, that started a few weeks ago; it must have been about the time that I took her up to look at the outside of the folly. Fiona, my sister, brought Darcey over for the afternoon and I thought it would be nice to ask Summer along. We went for a walk. I wouldn’t have let them go up the folly, of course, but it’s an impressive sight from the outside. The thing is, they didn’t like it much.
Said the place was spooky. Summer’s face was quite ashen.”

“How strange. What was it she didn’t like, do you think?”

“I don’t know. The place does have an atmosphere, but I’d never found it threatening.”

“Did you mention it to Claire?”

“No, I forgot about it, to be honest. The children were completely fine by the time we came back here. So, no folly—unless you’re around tomorrow?”

“I wish.
But I have to drive back in the morning,” she said, with a regretful look. “I’ve a christening to get to. I’m going to be a godmother for the third time.”

“Congratulations!” Euan said. “Well, perhaps you’ll be coming down again?”

“I hope to,” Jude said. “Certainly if this business at Starbrough Hall comes off I’ll be back quite soon.”

“Good,” he said. He sounded as though he meant it.

Just
then, Summer stomped in looking furious. “One of those owls tried to peck me. Can we go to the beach now?”

“I didn’t think you wanted to, you funny thing,” said Jude, examining Summer’s still-perfect finger. “But, yes, of course.”

“Will you come, Euan?” Summer asked, but Euan shook his head.

“No, I’ve got things to do. You spend some time with your aunt,” he replied.

Jude and Summer passed
a most enjoyable couple of hours on the sands at Wells-next-the-Sea. Summer made friends with a young boy there with his grandparents, the children playing together in a shallow lagoon, trying to trap little fish and building a castle, which they decorated with stones.

It was as though the sea wind and the wide expanse of shore and the cries of seabirds had the power to blow all troubles from
one’s mind, or so it felt to Jude. Caspar, Mark, work, might all be a million miles away, matters of as little importance as she was on this vast beach. High above, wisps of clouds blew south, leaving a sky of luminous blue. The rising tide surged into the lagoon and the children abandoned the castle with shrieks of mock terror. On the way home, Summer fell asleep in the car.

Glimpsing the child’s
peaceful face in the driving mirror, Jude thought again about the strange dreams. It was interesting what Euan had said. That Summer hadn’t liked going to the folly a few weeks ago. That might have been half-term. Claire had pinpointed half-term as the time that the dreams had started. Was the folly visit just a coincidence or had something about the place really frightened her?

That night Jude
was woken by Summer murmuring in her sleep, and lay, listening and anxious, but the girl didn’t wake and after a few minutes she quieted. Still, Jude couldn’t sleep, and her worries bored deeper. Maybe the answer lay at the folly? Perhaps there’d be time to visit it in the early morning, on her way through to St. Alban’s. Deciding this, she felt more peaceful, and she slept.

Stepping over the barbed wire and into the forest clearing was like breaching some magic circle. Early morning sunlight filtering through the branches striped the grass. The dew was nearly gone and the air smelled delicious, of earth and wood and vegetation. Once again, Jude was struck by the fancy that the tower was growing out of the ground like the trees, for the loose stones and
bricks around its wide base suggested roots, and ivy clutched the walls.

The “Keep Out” sign was propped up next to a ragged wooden door. If there had been a keyhole it had long since rotted, but she was dismayed to see an iron bolt with a rusty padlock. She should have thought that it might be locked. Maybe Euan had a key. She pulled at the padlock in frustration and, to her joy, the mechanism
sprang open. The possibility of adventure flowered in her mind. She looked quickly about. There was no one to tell her she was trespassing. No one and nothing, only the conversation of birds and the sough of the wind in the leaves.

The bolt shifted easily enough, but when Jude pulled the door it resisted, and she saw its top hinge was broken. Lifting the door by the bolt allowed her to shuffle
it open and she passed at last into the tower.

She hadn’t a clear picture of what to expect, but something more attractive than what she now saw. The floor inside comprised chunks of brick embedded in bare ground to make a herringbone pattern. It was damp and uneven so that she stumbled in the half darkness and almost fell. The smell was awful: damp, mildewy, earthy, old. Out of the shadows,
a brick staircase wound upward into cold darkness. A pale finger of sunlight fell across the bottom step, showing it to be crumbling and sploched with moss. From above came a scuttering sound. “Hello?” she called up, not really expecting an answer. She waited. The tower waited. There was silence. Of course there was no one, she berated herself. Jude placed a hand on each wall of the staircase and
one foot tentatively on the lowest step. It held, so she tried the next. She’d stop if it seemed dangerous, she told herself.

As she climbed, the darkness thickened and her skin prickled. She transferred her hands to the steps above and walked on all fours, like an animal, her sense of balance gone, so that every few steps she felt as though she was falling backward. She counted the stairs, nine,
ten, eleven. They were comfortably deep, not too high. Fifteen, sixteen. She passed into a little patch of light from a window like an arrow hole. She peered out, but all she could see was light glinting on foliage. On she went and her heart plunged in her chest as her hand missed its hold—a brick had gone. She edged round the gap carefully with her foot. Twenty-nine, thirty. What made her attempt
this madness? Thirty-nine, forty. Now a pale, dreary light filled the air. She must be nearly there. Forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven. She was cold now, shivering with nerves. Another ten steps. She must be nearly at the top. And suddenly she emerged into a little round room. She sat on the floor, trembling, trying to calm herself and take in her surroundings.

The floor, like the rest of the
folly, was brick. Wooden shelves and cupboards, some split and rotten, lined the walls. There were four small windows, spaced at equal distances around the room—one for each compass point, she thought—and a ladder in the middle that went up to what appeared to be a small trapdoor. Once perhaps, the windows had been glazed, but now they were open to the elements. Rays of sunlight poured in through
one, and from the forest all around came an ecstasy of birdsong. Under the sunny window were a table and chair, both modern folding ones. Someone had been working there, for they’d left several sheets of paper and a reporter’s notebook. She got to her feet and idled over to discover newspaper articles printed from the Internet, and read about an expected meteor shower. The notebook was filled with
scrawled notes and diagrams. And suddenly she felt that she wasn’t just trespassing on someone else’s land, but intruding on something more personal: their work. Two hundred-odd years ago, this was where Anthony Wickham had worked. Now someone else came up here to think about stars. There was a strong sense of these people’s presence. She felt uncomfortable, as though she should apologize and leave.

Crossing the floor back to the stairs, she passed objects on the shelves. There were a couple of paperback books, curled up with damp, a pen pot with a spray of dusty pencils. There were odder things, too. A great slice of knapped flint—the head of an axe or another tool, she supposed, picking it up and examining it. A pair of men’s spectacles glared at her, the tortoiseshell frames scuffed and
dull. The elderly binoculars hanging on a nail nearby proved irresistible. She walked around to the windows with them, one by one, looking for a view. Only through one could she see anything but trees. Amazingly, this window gave onto a vista of Starbrough Hall, like a doll’s house in the distance. She scrubbed at the grimy lenses with spit and the hem of her shirt, and, looking again, could make
out the library and the tiny figure of Robert walking away from his car and under the arch. It surprised her that she could see the house from the tower, but not the tower from the house. She wondered if this had always been the case or if the growth of the trees had lately made it so.