A Place of Secrets (20 page)

When they returned to Gran’s little house a text pinged into Jude’s phone. Summer got to her aunt’s handbag first.

“It’s from Euan,” she cried, passing the phone to Jude, who scanned the screen quickly.

“It’s about the stargazing,” she explained to Claire, watching her small, bitter face. “He says tonight would be good. I’ve got to meet him at
midnight. I wish you could come.”

“Well I can’t, can I?” Claire snapped, glancing at Summer. It was as though a fissure had yawned wide open between them.

Angry with Claire, and telling herself she genuinely needed to experience stargazing at the folly for her research, Jude resolved to go, but it was hardly a difficult decision to make. She was already eager to see Euan again.

It was several minutes past midnight when she emerged from the trees by the folly and a three-quarter moon was rising, its missing segment a ghostly sketch.
She was late because she’d become absorbed in reading Euan’s new book, so she’d had to drive rather than walk, and when she’d got out of the car in Foxhole Lane her flashlight decided to die on her.

A tall figure stepped from the shadows by the tower. For a moment her heartbeat wavered, then the figure said in a voice she knew, “Jude, I was worried you’d lost your way.”

“Sorry. I nearly did.
My pesky flashlight.”

He stood back to let her pass into the tower first, shining his own flashlight to bathe the stairs in a red glow. “Red light’s better for stargazing,” he explained as they ascended. “It doesn’t destroy your night sight.”

She climbed more confidently this time, with the light and Euan a comforting presence behind her, and it didn’t seem very long before they emerged into
the little turret room. She glanced about, Gran and Tamsin’s little hiding place a vague thought in her mind, but now wasn’t the time. A square of moonlight on the floor announced that the trapdoor was open.

“Take your time with the ladder,” Euan said, “and mind your head at the top.”

She was surprised to find that the summit of the tower was so confined—perhaps a dozen feet in diameter, and
despite the waist-high parapet all round she felt vertigo kick in. She had to force herself to leave the ladder, and sat on the floor to adjust to her surroundings. The floor was of the ubiquitous crumbling brick and she was sure the tower was moving in the slight breeze, which made her feel nauseous. She tried closing her eyes but the sensation was worse so she opened them again to find Euan sitting
beside her looking concerned, close, but not touching. She could feel the warmth of his body in the darkness and reached for his arm to steady her.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded.

“It was weird for me the first time. It gets better when you’re used to it. Look up!”

She did and gasped in surprise.

“We’re almost among the stars! I’ve never seen so many.”

“It’s even better when there’s no
moon.”

Though this platform once had a canopy, now only a few of the brick supports remained and so it was open to the sky. And what a sky. Up above the trees, it was as though they were thrust up into a sparkling, shimmering dome.

“You really get the sense that we’re on a planet, turning in space, don’t you?” Euan murmured. “Especially when the moon shows she’s a sphere like that, not a flat
disc.”

“It’s as though the stars are alive and burning.”

“They are, most of them. I expect you know that being millions of light-years away, we are seeing them as they were in the past. Some may not exist anymore and what we’re seeing are the ghosts of them.”

“It’s too big a concept for us to grasp really, isn’t it?” she replied, her voice husky in the cold air.

She saw, as though properly,
for the first time, the misty ribbon of Earth’s own galaxy, the Milky Way, made up, she knew, of hundreds of billions of stars, all eons of light-years away. Giant words like eternity and infinity that people bandied around every day had suddenly taken physical shape before her.

She glanced down for reassurance at the humble reality of her old jeans and sneakers and became intensely aware of
this other man, a near stranger in a scruffy anorak, who sat quietly, hands on knees, on the brick beside her. Studying those hands, considering their strength and their gentleness, brought her back into the world she knew, the tiny little world in which she could believe she was important.

“Are you all right?” he asked gently. “You haven’t said anything for ages.”

“Yes,” she replied. “I think
I’m all right.”

“Come on.” Euan pushed himself to his feet in one light movement, then helped her up, and moved to the telescope he’d set up on a tripod to one side of the platform.

“Is it safe?” Jude asked, eyeing the parapet.

“I think so, but I wouldn’t lean on the side just in case,” he said, glancing absently, already absorbed by whatever he was looking at through the lens.

She shuffled
toward him for safety, but merely catching a swooping view down toward the trees was alarming enough. She stopped and had to cast from her mind a sudden fearful image of Summer up here. But he hadn’t brought her up, had he? She remembered what Chantal said about the accident that had happened once, forty years ago. It would be easy to fall, especially if you were drunk or high on drugs. The mere
thought made her dizzy and she sat down on the floor again.

Euan said firmly, “You need to come and look at this.” He helped her up again and held her by the shoulders as she found the eyepiece.

“I can’t see anything. I’m too frightened. No, wait, hang on.”

What swam into focus looked like a topaz set in a heavenly wreath of mist and light.

“Oh my God. What is it?” she breathed.

“Arcturus,”
he replied. “The guardian of the bear. It’s one of the nearest of the bright stars in the sky. Try looking at it with the naked eye. There.” Jude squinted to where he was pointing. “You see a sort of kite shape? Well Arcturus is the bottom of that constellation, which is called Boötes, the Herdsman.”

“What’s the sort of semicircle to the left?” She was all right if she didn’t look down, and he
was holding her securely. She felt his breath in her hair.

“Northeast, you mean? Corona Borealis. The Greeks claimed it as the crown of Ariadne—the daughter of the King of Crete.”

“He of the Minotaur?”

“Yes. Now the biggest star in the Corona is a reverse nova. Every hundred years or so it’ll fade suddenly, then recover. It’s because of dark material erupting in it. I don’t know very much about
astrophysics so don’t test me on exactly what dark material is.”

“Isn’t it important for your book? I’m enjoying your new one, by the way.”

“Thank you. Only to some extent. I am interested, but as I told you my focus is our cultural response to the stars over the centuries: why we stargaze and why it’s been so important to us to understand the cosmos. It’s probably the oldest branch of scientific
inquiry, you know, not that our distant ancestors would have understood our concept of science.”

“It puts us in our place, looking at the stars,” Jude whispered, but whereas just now she’d experienced dizziness and terror, this had settled to a kind of pleasant awe. With him holding her she didn’t feel so nervous now; she was enjoying starting to make sense of the mass of dancing light above
her.

They continued to look at the stars for a further half hour or so and then, seeing she was shivering, Euan said he had a flask of coffee downstairs. “Will you be all right on your own for a second?” he asked.

“Yes, I’ve found my stargazing legs,” she said, and it was true. She was quite happy here now, high above the troubled trees. And though it must be past one, she didn’t feel the least
bit tired.

She stood staring around the great bowl of stars overhead, observing the moon’s progress across the sky and thinking how quiet it was. She tried to imagine Anthony Wickham sitting up here alone in the frozen night, calculating the movements of the celestial bodies. What was he hoping to discover? Cecelia hadn’t found out much about him, or whether his findings had contributed to the
great body of knowledge being built about the stars. What motivated him? She couldn’t say. Though now she was beginning to understand the allure of the night skies.

Euan reappeared. “This’ll warm the cockles of your heart,” he said, pouring her a brimming cup. He’d put sugar in the coffee and she welcomed the sweetness. She took several sips, then passed it to him, and he drank, too.

“Do you
come up most nights?” she asked.

“Only sometimes, if there’s a clear sky. I found this place soon after I moved here, when I was casting around for an idea for a new book. I climbed up here on a night like this and was immediately struck by inspiration. I knew a fair amount about the stars already, and the whole idea for the book came into my mind practically ready made. It’s quite rare for that
to happen. And of course my publisher loved it. It’s a magical book to research and write.”

“It’s lovely when your interests are also your job. It’s a bit like that for me, too. Or it would be if there weren’t all the politics and the pressure to make money.”

She saw his teeth flash white. “Well, we all have that, don’t we? Food, mortgages…”

“Tell me how you got into nature study and writing.
I’ve got this vision of you as a snotty-nosed boy trapping insects in matchboxes and hatching lizards on the dressing table.”

He laughed. “It was a bit like that. I had what you might call a free-range childhood, out and about on my bike every day, and a very inspiring teacher who ran the natural history club. I read zoology at uni and became a lab rat for a bit—you know, research—but it didn’t
suit. So I moved back here and took a job in conservation.” He paused. “It went on from there really.”

His words drifted off and she sensed he’d reached difficult territory. Telling her about writing his first book might mean talking about his marriage. He wasn’t a man who was easy to know. He was friendly and open, and she felt so relaxed and natural with him, but there was still a part of himself
he didn’t easily give up. She respected that. Everyone had their own timing. She certainly did.

And so did nights of stargazing. A cloud was drifting over the moon. She drank the last of the coffee and suddenly felt very weary. “I think I ought to get back.”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself.”

“Oh yes,” Jude said fervently, watching as he dismantled the telescope
and packed it into a bag.

“Good,” he said, and again that smile flashed in the darkness. He helped her onto the ladder, then came down himself, closing the trapdoor.

“You must come again,” he said, his voice echoing, as they went down the stairs. “You’re a good stargazing companion.”

“Thank you. I don’t mind taking notes for you, if it helps.” Now why had she thought to offer that? It felt
resonant of Anthony and Esther.

“How very kind. Are you staying long in Norfolk?”

“Apart from needing to pop up to London for a day or two sometime—oh, another couple of weeks.”

Such a short time really, she thought as she drove back toward the Hall. She must get on with more of that transcript tomorrow. She needed to start drafting her article for Bridget. And do something about that necklace
in her handbag.

The next morning after breakfast Cecelia telephoned. “I’ve been reading those diaries,” she said. “Jude, they are a really fascinating record of astronomical observation at that time. Wickham’s most important contribution is these new telescopes he made. They meant he was able to look at the stars with significant magnification. I can also tell you that he was a very careful, objective
observer. You can really get the impression of the development of scientific method.”

“That sounds encouraging,” Jude said doubtfully.

“But as to actual discoveries, this ‘story’ you’re looking for to help the sale, I don’t know. He certainly identified a number of so-called double stars, but that’s not going to sound very exciting, is it? I suppose what is interesting is what happens when the
daughter, Esther, takes over from him. Her notes, though careful, are much more lyrical and passionate. She talks about the sky being ‘an ocean of stars’—that’s a lovely image, isn’t it? And she says here, wait a moment, that she feels ‘like a traveler among them.’ You really get a sense of her. But there is something else. Listen to this. She’s talking about some object she’s seen in the sky near
the constellation of Gemini. ‘It is there again tonight. At magnification 460 I can see it has no tail so I question my Father’s observance. It is no comet. I feel earnestly that it is something new.’”

“I read about that. What was it?”

“I have my suspicions. If I’m right, well, it would be amazing. But I need to read to the end and check some other things before I say anything, and I might be
a few more days doing that. Danny is over from Boston for a week and we promised ourselves a little trip to Paris.”

Jude was disappointed, but dredged up enough warmth to say, “You lucky things,” and to mean it. Paris made her think of Caspar, but she felt no twinge of regret. It was curious that those few months with him already seemed an eon away.

She thanked Cecelia and said good-bye.

It
was with renewed enthusiasm that she returned to Esther’s memoir. She was quickly entranced by the young girl’s voice.

It was nearing Christmastide Anno Domini 1772. One frosty afternoon I was amusing myself with the doll’s house in my room when, glancing from the window at the sound of hooves, I beheld a carriage and pair swaying along the drive, the horses’ breath billowing up in the icy air. The vehicle pulled up before the house and a youth sprang down to still the horses. The coachman handed from the carriage first a tall angular lady in a feathery hat then a skinny boy perhaps a year or two older than my ten summers. The lady stood glaring up at the house, as though inspecting it for deficiencies. I, it seemed, was one. For a moment her expression had softened, as though something in the mild lines of sandstone had appeased her, then her basilisk’s eye caught my curious one through the glass and her whole body stiffened. I flinched as though struck and stepped aside. When I looked again she’d gathered her skirts and was marching towards the steps, the boy tagging after.