A Place of Secrets (16 page)

OK. Take care,

Cx

Jude immediately clicked on the link Cecelia had given. The page that opened up described a batch of letters belonging to an eighteenth-century grinder of optical lenses and amateur astronomer, a Londoner named Josiah Bellingham. A dozen of these,
the website said, were to Bellingham from Anthony Wickham, dated at various points in the 1770s. She clicked again to read the list of letters and couldn’t believe her eyes.

Quickly she returned to Cecelia’s e-mail and replied:

Cecelia, if you could get me photocopies of these letters, that would be brilliant. I think we’re on to something here. Did you see that the last six letters are from
Esther
Wickham? She really DID exist! The mystery thickens!

“He’s never asked
me
to go stargazing,” was Claire’s petulant comment as she seized a piece of junk mail and tore it in two. She made stargazing sound like a euphemism for some louche assignation, Jude thought, but stopped herself from saying so out loud. It would only make matters worse.

She had arrived at Blacksmith’s Cottage for supper to find her sister not long home and venting
her tiredness and irritation from a mad Saturday in the shop on an innocent pile of post.
Rip
—there went a credit-card circular.

“I’m sorry,” Jude said, almost regretting she’d mentioned visiting Euan. But if she hadn’t said anything and Claire had found out, she’d have been in even worse hot water. “I’m sure he would ask you if he knew you wanted to go. I suppose it’s because of all the Anthony
Wickham stuff. He can see it would be useful to me.”

“And don’t
I
run a shop called the
Star
Bureau?” was Claire’s whiplike comment as she yanked the plastic off a magazine, chucking the publication on the table.

Soul and Destiny
, Jude read. “Have you lived before?” ran one of the shoutlines. I hope not, she thought, one lifetime is trouble enough.

Claire glanced at her watch. She was due to
fetch Summer from a birthday party down the road shortly.

“I won’t go stargazing if you mind about it,” Jude said with a sigh.

“Why should I mind?” Claire replied.

“Something tells me you’re keen on him.”

“Damn. House insurance renewal time already?” Claire cried, snatching up another envelope and tearing it open. “Bills, bills, bills. What did you say?”

“We were talking about Euan,” Jude
said. “Claire, I’m trying not to put my great size sixes in this one.”

“There’s nothing for you to put them in,” she replied. “He’s a lovely guy. I think Summer is trying to get us together.”

“Just Summer?” wheedled Jude, but Claire sidestepped the question.

“She misses having a dad, Jude. You should see them together.”

“I have. And I see what you mean. But what about you?”

“Oh, I don’t think
he’s interested in me,” Claire said, tearing a flier about a sofa sale into several pieces and letting them flutter into the recycling box. “Anyway, anything he went into would be too serious, by all accounts. He doesn’t play around. Darcey’s mum, Fiona, said—”

At precisely that interesting moment the telephone rang and Claire snatched up the handset. Jude mused that she’d need to go carefully
with Euan. She didn’t want to upset her sister by leading him on in any way. She must keep everything on a strictly friendly basis.

“Hello? Hello?” Claire was saying down the phone. “If you’re the double-glazing people again I told you I don’t … Oh, Gran, hi! How are you? Is everything all right?”

She met Jude’s eye. Both women switched into alert at the possibility of a crisis.

“You’re fine.
Good. Yes, Jude’s here,” Claire said, visibly relaxing. “Do you want to speak to her?” She passed the handset over to her sister. “I’ve got to fetch Summer,” she mouthed to Jude, who nodded.

Jude waited until the front door slammed—Claire never just closed doors—before saying, “Gran, hello, it’s Jude. How are you?”

“I’m surviving, thank you, Jude. Just because I telephone doesn’t mean I’m dying.”
Gran was unusually brisk. “I want you to come and see me. I’ve got something for you.”

“Oh, what is it?”

“You’ll find out when you come. I’ve been searching for it ever since you came last.”

“How intriguing!” Jude suddenly remembered that when she stayed there, over a week ago now, she’d heard Gran opening and closing drawers in her room after they’d gone to bed.

“It was such a stupid place
to put it,” Gran muttered to herself.

“Gran? Can you still hear me?”

“Of course I can.”

“Are you free at all tomorrow?” She’d been invited to Sunday lunch at Starbrough Hall, but she could escape after that.

“Free? Where would I be going?”

“I can come late afternoon, if that’s any good. Shall I bring Claire and Summer?”

“No, just yourself. Tell Claire it would be lovely to see them another
time.”

What was up with Gran? Jude thought, and hoped fervently that Claire wouldn’t feel excluded.

* * *

“It’s … exquisite.” Jude held the necklace up so the evening light flashed on the row of gold stars studded with what looked like, but couldn’t be, diamonds. There were six of them. “Oh, what a shame, one’s missing.” A link was damaged at one end of the row, as though a seventh had
been torn off.

“Tamsin never knew when that happened,” Jessie said. “She told me it had always been like that.”

“Seven for the seven stars in the sky,” Jude murmured, remembering the counting song her grandfather used to sing. The necklace was so dainty. “These aren’t real, are they, these stones? They must be zircons or something.”

Gran looked outraged. “Of course they’re real.
She
told me
they were. I knew I’d put it somewhere safe, but I couldn’t remember where. I hid it when that new plumber came, but it wasn’t in any of the usual drawers, so I’ve had a fine old turnout. I went through the pockets of my old coats, and that fake tin I keep in the cupboard—oh, all the places I’ve ever put it when I’ve had men in—then this morning when I woke up the answer fell into my mind. Next door
had a burglary a few weeks ago, and I had a bit of a panic. I’d put it where no burglar would ever look.”

Jude, trying to assimilate all of this, just smiled and shook her head.

“Under the carpet in the spare room,” Gran said triumphantly. “In the corner, so there was no danger of anyone stepping on it.”

Jude laughed. Despite this tale of confusion, Gran’s mind seemed sharper today. Perhaps
it was remembering the challenge of outwitting all those poor, undoubtedly innocent tradesmen and the excitement of the find.

“Is it something you inherited?” she asked, studying the five-pointed stars. One, she saw now, had a goldsmith’s mark on the back. It was gold, then, though the mark was very worn. It would take a specialist to make sense of it.

“Oh no, it’s not mine at all. That’s the
whole problem.” Jude stared curiously at her grandmother, who went on, “It belongs to the wild girl, you see. The girl I told you about. I’ve had it all these years.”

Jude felt bewildered. “The wild girl? You mean Tamsin?”

“Yes, I told you, I took something from her.”

“But—a
diamond necklace
?”

Gran’s expression hardened. She reached out her hand for the necklace and Jude gave it to her. “She
left it behind, Jude. It didn’t seem like stealing at the time. We had a hiding place for it, you see, in the folly. And when she went away that last time and didn’t come back, I found it. I told myself I was looking after it for her. I’d have given it back if she’d come and asked for it, but she never did. It was so pretty. I had wanted it from the moment she first showed it to me. So I put it
in a little box under the floorboards in my bedroom and kept it there. Not even my sister knew about it.”

Jude thought of the refurbished floorboards in Gamekeeper’s Cottage. Gran’s hiding place would be gone now, nailed down and sanded. “I went there yesterday, Gran,” she said, carefully watching for the old lady’s reaction. “To your old home.”

“There’s a young man lives there now,” said Gran.
“I know about him. Claire’s told me.”

“What did she say?” Jude asked, hoping to have some insight into what Claire thought of Euan, but Jessie was only thinking about her childhood home.

“That he’s making something of the place.” Her expression was unhappy. It’s upsetting her, Jude realized. Of course it would, imagining her old home being torn up and rearranged to suit modern purposes.

“But
you’ve never been back there?”

Gran shook her head. “Not since my parents died. I wouldn’t want to. Better to remember it how it was. They were happy times mostly, oh yes, and I like to think of those. Until…” She stopped. For a moment she toyed with the necklace, held it up to see once more how pretty it was. Then she reached out and, taking her granddaughter’s hand in hers, tipped the necklace
into her palm. “Take it,” she said, closing Jude’s fingers over it. “I want you to find out what happened to Tamsin.”

“Gran,” Jude said softly. “She would be so very old, and there’s no guarantee—”

Jessie interrupted. “Yes, of course, she’s probably dead. Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. But there’s a chance, isn’t there? And, anyway, she might have children.”

“There’s a chance,” Jude
agreed, though privately she believed it to be a slim one. And any children would be getting old themselves by now. “But I need to know more about her. What was her other name?”

Gran thought for a moment then said, “Lovall. She must have been the same age as me, though she didn’t know exactly when her birthday was. She was in my class at Starbrough, I told you that. She was such a gentle person,
and quiet, but in natural history she knew the names of the animals and flowers, but sometimes they weren’t the right names, they were the Romany ones.”

A name, a school, and a rough date of birth—Gran had been born in 1923. That was all the information Jessie could give about a girl she’d met in a forest nearly eighty years ago. A Romany girl with no permanent address, who had probably changed
her name on marriage and was more than likely dead now. Oh well.

Jude wrapped the necklace in its tissue, and tucked the package safely in her bag. “I can’t promise anything, Gran, but I’ll try.” It was all she could offer, but the expression of relief in her grandmother’s eyes was reward enough.

We’re halfway through July already, Jude realized on Monday morning as she wrote a note to accompany the poor, savaged final volume of the observation journal. She packed it up and drove to Holt, where she dispatched it at the post office to Cecelia, at her Barbican address. Then, since she’d arranged to meet Claire in her shop the following day, she browsed instead in some other antiques
shops and galleries for an hour. There was a lovely watercolor seascape with boats, which she bought to give as a thank-you present to the Wickham family when she eventually left. In the bookshop, she found a copy of Euan’s new book. Then, walking back along the winding streets toward the car park, she noticed a small public library. “Discover the history of where you live,” a poster announced
on the door. Deciding to do just that, she stepped inside.

“Where’s your local section, please?” she asked a woman of about fifty who was pinning photographs onto a display.

“Right this way,” the woman replied and took her over to the shelves. “Anything you were looking for in particular?”

“Do you have anything on Starbrough village or Starbrough Hall?” Jude asked.

“No specific book,” the
librarian replied. “But there might be something in these ones about Norfolk and Holt.”

“Thanks. I’ll root around, then,” Jude replied, flashing a smile, and the librarian returned to her display.

Jude picked out the local volume of Pevsner’s architectural history and turned to the index. The reference to Starbrough Hall was cursory and there was no picture so she put it back. A history of the
area, published in 1998, proved more helpful. There was a page and a half that expanded on the information she’d read in the
Great Houses
book in her office—namely, that the house dated back to 1720 when Edward Wickham, presumably Anthony’s grandfather, built it on the site of Starbrough Manor, which had been destroyed by fire ten years earlier, only two years after the disastrous fire of 1708
that devastated most of Holt. Edward, it seems, was originally a local man who had retired to the area having made a fortune as a merchant of the East India Company. “Edward’s grandson Anthony built the tower in 1769,” she read with a leap of sudden interest, but a great deal of the rest of the information she knew already.

Its position, on a hill in the forest belonging to the house, was controversial, not least because it’s always believed to have been the site of a burial ground dating back to the pre-Roman period. Unlike many other eighteenth-century follies, its purpose does not appear to have been merely decorative. References from Anthony Wickham’s own writing indicate that he used it to view the night sky.

But then came something new.

In the 1920s an attempt was made to excavate the area around the tower and some items of interest from various periods were found, including Celtic jewelry, and these now reside at the Castle Museum in Norwich. At the time of writing, the Hall and the woods around are still in the possession of the Wickham family, but the farmland was sold off in the early sixties.

So there had been an archaeological dig, after all.

She went over and asked
the librarian, “You don’t have anything more about this excavation, do you?” She showed her the passage in the book.

The woman spent a few minutes searching on a computer terminal before saying, “It looks as though we don’t, I’m afraid. Why don’t you contact the museum in Norwich? A friend of mine there would be a good person to try first. Her name is Megan Macromber.”