A Place of Secrets (17 page)

“Thanks, I might do that,”
Jude said, scribbling the name down in her notebook. It wasn’t an immediate priority, but it might come in handy to know what was dug up in the 1920s.

* * *

Returning to Starbrough Hall, she spent a quiet few hours in the library there, cataloging, then started in earnest the cumbersome job of transcribing Esther’s memoir. The section she’d already read was an easy job, but when she came
to the next part it took longer, not least because she kept stopping to think about the story evolving beneath her hand. Esther’s voice, timid and formal at first, was growing in strength and confidence as she proceeded.

For my eighth birthday my father sent me a hand-painted book of pictures of birds and flowers and animals of our kingdom. I passed many hours turning the pages, whispering the names to myself and wondering at the delicate colours. I showed it to Sam, who had taught me the country names of flowers, milksop and lords and ladies, how to tell a male from a female jay, but he shook his head over the Latin words in my book and declared them cold and dead.

It was always as the sky turned from the deepest imaginable ultra marine to an exquisite indigo suffused with gold, out of which stars began to wink. This breathtaking moment when the secrets of the upturned bowl of the night sky began tantalizingly to reveal themselves, that Susan would summon me to bed. So on one of these evenings we planned the final details of our adventure.

The chosen day was in the middle of August. I stole bread and cold ham from the larder while Mrs Godstone’s back was turned, wrapping it in oilcloth and hiding it in a crock in the coolest recesses of the dairy, lest hunger should strike us. At bedtime I stowed warm clothes under my pillow. After Susan blew out my candle and I heard the squeak her left boot always made as she retreated down the corridor, I got out of my bed and pulled on my dress and jacket, and played silently with my dolls in the near-darkness until the house quietened. Then I counted to sixty slowly, thirty times, to be certain. When I slipped out of my room, the door clicked shut behind me, and I waited to see that no one had heard before flitting down the stairs, through the kitchen and the dairy, where I rescued my package, and out through a window that I’d left secretly unlatched. Some of the ham I threw to the dogs to silence them. I listened to them snuffle about, their chains clinking in the dead air, then hastened across the cobbled yard and out into the park, where the sky spread out before me, the moon a glimmering slither amid the stars.

Matt was waiting for me, hidden in the ha-ha as he’d promised. We walked together across the wide park and up the path through the woods feeling we were the only people left in the world. Gradually our eyes grew used to the darkness and we moved with confidence like other night creatures. Matt was certain of the route because he had consulted his father on the matter cleverly so as not to arouse his suspicion. ‘I pretended an interest in the orchids,’ was his explanation.

The path through the trees was at first narrow and brambly, then, as they became more widely spaced—beech and oak and chestnut—our progress became easier. Yet my foreboding grew. With every step my chest tightened. I clung to Matt’s arm, unsure of the source of my fear.

‘Esther,’ he whispered. ‘Stop it, you’re hurting me.’

‘I don’t like it,’ I managed to say.

‘There’s nothing to be frightened of.’ But he clung to me, too, and I could tell I was making him nervous. ‘Come on,’ he said, his voice turning to a squeak. ‘I think we’re nearly there. Father said … Oh!’

Before us opened a clearing and in its centre moonlight fell on what appeared at first to be a gigantic tree thrusting upwards, taller than anything I’d ever seen. It was the folly: sinister, strange, fiercely alone. For a moment we could not move for awe, then Matt pulled at my arm and we stepped out of the shelter of the trees.

When we spoke of it later, we knew it to have been only a bat, but to see our terror when the thing broke out of the darkness upon us, you might have believed it the devil himself. I cried out and ran blindly. ‘Essie, don’t,’ I heard Matt say, but I tripped and fell heavily, striking my head, and for a long moment knew only darkness and confusion, and Matt’s voice crying, ‘Wake up! Someone’s coming.’

Then came a door banging and a man’s voice—surprised, angry—and Matt shouting, ‘Run, Essie,’ though clearly I could not.

I felt a hand on my head, gently stroking my hair, and heard what I knew to be my father’s voice: ‘God dammit, it’s the child.’ I dared not move but felt his fingers search my wrist for a pulse, then he carefully rolled me over until my head rested in the crook of his arm. I opened my eyes and soon the shadowy contours of his countenance came into focus. ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked and he must have heard my whispered nay, for he carefully raised me to my feet. But my head throbbed and I staggered, so he steadied me and after a moment I felt better.

‘Why in God’s name do they let you roam the country in the dead of night?’ he spoke, almost to himself. ‘Have they sent you with some message, perhaps?’ he asked. ‘Is someone ill, or worse?’

‘A message? No,’ I stuttered, bewildered, then remembered our ham, grateful for an excuse. ‘Though … I have supper for you.’ I rescued the oilskin package, now somewhat crushed. He looked at it puzzled, but pushed it into his pocket. I glanced round but of Matt there was no sign. I prayed that he was safe and reassured myself that he must have run off home.

‘Why would they send the child?’ my father said to himself, but I could see his concentration was wandering. He felt inside his coat, pulled out a fob watch and angled it until it caught enough light to read it by. ‘Come,’ he said, putting the timepiece away. He took my cold hand in his warm one, and led me towards the folly. Now I was with him, I was no longer afraid.

‘I’ll take you home, but first I have some measurements to procure.’

He led me through the door at the base of the tower and immediately we were plunged into cold darkness. ‘Wait,’ he said, and his voice was curiously deep-timbred in that place. There came the scrape of flint and sparks flared into flame. I watched him light a small lantern and wondered at the waves of light and shadow lapping round the walls. A neat spiral of brick steps rose before us and he gestured to me to go first. So up I went, feeling my way on hands and knees, my fingers frozen with cold and fear. I climbed for what felt like for ever, then suddenly we emerged into a circular room with windows all about. There was a table by a wall, on which another lantern burned, and it was by the light of this that I first saw the world of this room in which I now sit.

It was, I imagined at the time and do still, like a cabin in a great ship might be. It gave me also the sickening sensation I’d once felt when I climbed a great beech tree as a dare of Matt’s and felt it sway in the wind. A wooden ladder led up to the ceiling and a square of pale light. ‘Up once more,’ came my father’s voice behind me, and because I desired to impress him I overcame my reluctance and placed my hands on the ladder rail. ‘I won’t let you fall,’ he said gently, sensing my fear, and so I climbed, glad of his shepherding presence behind.

We came out onto a small brick platform, with a low parapet around it and a canopy overhead and there—oh wonder! He had rolled back the canvas to allow a telescope longer than a hay rake and thicker than a man’s thigh to point to the sky.

“Sit,” he commanded, indicating a small bench, and I sank down thankfully on account of the swaying sensation and watched him arrange himself on a high stool and compose his features, as he grasped the spyglass and pressed it to his eye. Several minutes passed thus with him staring through the glass, and I peeped covertly about me all the while. Beyond the rim of the tower, the tops of trees sighed and tossed in the darkness, nor did they ever cease. An owl called, another answered. From a long way distant, a vixen barked, an ugly sound. There was a small table by my father’s side, on which were laid a large notebook, his pocket watch and some queer-shaped instruments and I watched him take one of these, hold it up to the sky and read aloud some figures from it. Then he scratched quickly in his book with a pen. This he repeated several times.

‘I’m done,’ he said finally, consulting his watch and dropping the pen back in its pot. He got off the stool, making to close the canopy. At this a great longing overwhelmed me.

‘Oh may I see first?’ I burst out, my shyness quite forgotten.

He contemplated me, again with that puzzlement, then shrugged and said, ‘Why not?’ I had to stand on his stool while he held me by the waist. When I applied my eye to the glass, at first everything was blurred, and then my mind must have grasped the trick, because I saw a bright smudge of bluish light. The intimate face of a star. My cry was involuntary.

‘What do you see?’ my father asked and holding the scope steady he looked where I had looked. ‘Vega,’ he muttered. ‘One of the brightest stars in the sky. It’s part of Lyra.’

‘The magical lyre of Orpheus,’ I breathed. Miss Greengage had read us the story of Orpheus in the Underworld, searching for his beloved Eurydice.

‘You know the story?’ He was amazed.

I nodded. ‘It was given him by his father Apollo and his playing enchanted men and wild beasts alike.’

This amused my father for some reason. He adjusted the telescope. ‘There,’ he said, pointing to the sky. ‘A line of four stars, and to the left a line of six. A box of four between. See it?’

‘I think so.’ He bade me peer through the telescope again to see the nebula of Hercules.

‘Hercules. Do you know the tale of Hercules?’

I did not. Miss Greengage’s mother had urged her to read to us from the Bible in recent months. I knew of Noah and his great Ark and Job covered in boils. I asked, ‘Is there an Ark for Noah in the skies?’

He looked surprised, then divining the sincerity of my question, said, ‘No, these star names are far older than Noah. Hercules the Strong was placed by his father Jupiter in the heavens in honour of his twelve labours.’ He pulled the canvas canopy across its frame, then dismantled his spyglass and began to gather up his measures. ‘Bring the journal, will you?’ he asked, and I clutched it to my chest with my free arm as I descended the steps after him. I helped him lay out the tools of his study on the desk in the tower room, then he extinguished one lantern and raised the other to light our way downstairs and out.

‘They call you Esther, as I asked?’ he said, as he turned a great iron key in the door.

‘Essie sometimes, sir,’ I said.

‘Esther, I prefer. After my mother,’ he said. ‘It was the name of a beautiful Jewish queen.’

I vowed never to be mere Essie again, but always Esther.

We set off through the forest together, he sure of his way despite the darkness. In his presence I felt no trace of my previous fears, but by the time we gained the park I was cold, hungry and exhausted. As he closed the gate I slipped into a faint. ‘Here,’ he said, offering me a strong drink from a flask, but I choked and spat it out, so he lifted me in his arms and carried me home. I remembered no more.

When I awoke, I was lying in my own bed, the sun pouring in through the open curtains, and Susan was staring down at me in alarm. ‘Why, you’re dressed already,’ she observed. ‘Why did you go back to bed? Does something ail thee?’ I did not disabuse her and slept most of the morning.

All the rest of that day I moved around in a haze. Part of me feared that last night had been a dream. ‘Vega,’ I whispered to myself. ‘Lyra. Hercules.’ These names were real enough and I clutched at them.

I looked for Matt that afternoon, but found only Sam, pruning the low hedges in the herb garden. ‘Mam couldn’t wake him this morning. He’s taken a chill, she says.’ I hoped fervently he would be better soon. At least I knew that he had reached home safely.

Jude reached this natural break in the text, marked her place and closed the journal, her mind filled with Esther’s voice. Anthony Wickham sounded like such an intriguing man—lonely, or at least alone, but tender and kind,
and clearly obsessed with the stars. She wondered if he really was Esther’s father—somehow Esther’s descriptions of him didn’t give the impression of a guilty Lothario hiding a secret love child—and if indeed he wasn’t, where and why had he acquired her?

“The moon has a face like the clock in the hall.” The line from a childhood poem rose in Jude’s mind the next day as she waited for Claire to finish serving a customer. They were going to have lunch together before visiting their grandmother in Blakeney. Jude was studying the clock on the back wall of the Star Bureau. Its face was designed like a large full moon, with small piggy features
set in an expression of mock surprise. It stared down at the half-dozen visitors browsing the items on display as though saying, “Well really, who do you all think you are?” It was vivid, witty, and though customers had often tried to buy it, not for sale. And looking at it allowed her to watch her sister out of the corner of her eye.