A Place of Secrets (34 page)

* * *

It was just a kids’ sleepover, Jude remonstrated with herself as she lay awake later that night. But Claire was being so odd at the moment, and she guessed she’d be intruding.

She’d warned herself to stand back, though it was ridiculous to think she needed to. Just a couple of weeks ago she had broken off from Caspar because of her allegiance to Mark; it didn’t
make sense to be resentful of Claire’s interest in Euan. And … now it came back to her, what she’d tried so hard to forget, the very thing Claire must have been hinting at when she said Mark hadn’t been perfect. Jude had trampled it down in her mind for years, believing it best, the only way forward if she wanted to keep Mark. And of course once Mark died, forgetting was part of the process of his
sanctification in her memory. And now she’d taken the lid off the memory, there was no replacing it.

* * *

Their father had died nearly eight years before in October 2001, just after she and Mark had become engaged. He was sixty-one, their mother still only fifty-four. Mark and Jude, who were due to marry the following June, spent practically every weekend between the funeral and Christmas
visiting Valerie, and Claire often deserted her rented bedsitter to keep their mother company. What Mark must have thought of this household of weeping women, he was too sympathetic and tactful ever to have voiced, but he noticeably took every opportunity to get out of the house by volunteering to make supermarket trips, fill Valerie’s car with gas, fetch dry cleaning or go on myriad other errands.
These were all tasks that Valerie’s long-suffering husband had performed and which Valerie had neither the energy nor the desire to attempt herself yet.

Claire tried to help by washing and ironing and helping their mother with her hair and makeup, but all too often she found herself snapped at and rebuffed.

“You have a go with her, then,” she’d moan to Jude and retreat to her old bedroom with
her tarot cards and a box of tissues. Valerie didn’t try all that harder with Jude, but Jude didn’t mind so much and kept calm.

She was very much aware that Mark seemed able to manage Claire. He’d tease her in what Jude had assumed was a brotherly manner; he would put his arm round Claire easily. He had a sister, Catherine, a year or two younger than himself, and showed a friendly way with women
that Jude had always appreciated. So she didn’t take much notice of how he and Claire were with one another.

But it was now that a certain cameo rose out of the confused images of that awful period, a period that she usually tried to blot from her mind.

She and Valerie had left to drive over to Gran’s for the afternoon, but a mile or two out of the city, Valerie realized she hadn’t got her handbag
and insisted Jude turn around to fetch it. Jude was annoyed; why couldn’t her mother exist without her handbag for the afternoon? She slewed the car to a halt out in the road, then, remembering that the key was in the handbag and Mark was out seeing an old school friend, stomped down the side path to find the spare key in its hiding place in the greenhouse. She glanced in through the living-room
window and a flicker of movement caught her eye. She stared, and Mark stared back. He was lying on the sofa, and Claire was stretched out across him. Numb with shock, Jude got the key, grabbed the handbag from the hall and tore off without speaking.

Later that evening he insisted to Jude that Claire was exhausted from crying. He had been preparing to go out when she had come to the front door,
and finding everyone out had sat down to talk to him about their father and how difficult Valerie was being, and ended up weeping uncontrollably. What else could he do but comfort her? That was all. Jude was overreacting.

Jude was so angry and uncertain, she spent that night on the sofa bed in the tiny spare bedroom. She just wanted to be on her own, she told Mark, while she thought things out.
But as Mark stuck to his version, and her memory of what she’d seen faded into all the other confused events of that time, she came to accommodate it and let the matter go. Anyway, Claire started referring to someone called Jon she’d met through her evening job behind the bar in the arts center and soon the crisis was over.

It’s funny. It was only now, thinking about Claire and Euan, that she
remembered it at all. If Claire had been trying to bring the matter up, what on earth were her motives—kind or unkind? Was it really some strange attempt to knock Mark off his pedestal and make Jude come to terms with the fact that he’d gone? Was she trying some trick of one-upmanship in the game of love? Or was there something else she was trying to convey?

The revelation that struck her then
was too awful to be borne, and she thrust it away.

On Saturday morning, Jude felt tired and grouchy. Tonight she’d agreed to go camping and she didn’t think Claire would be that pleased. She was weary. In some ways she thought she’d be better off going away. She’d been at Starbrough Hall two weeks, two of her precious three weeks of working holiday, and she ought to decide what she was going to do with the rest. It was difficult to
see how she could take a proper holiday as such. She could pass the time in Greenwich, she supposed. There was research she could do from there, then make arrangements for the books and the scientific instruments to be packed up and brought to the office. Yet part of her felt bad at the idea of leaving Summer when she was so troubled. And there were so many ends left untied—the business of Tamsin
Lovall, for one.

Perhaps she ought to stay. Despite assurance from Chantal, she felt squeamish about letting the Wickhams have her for a third week. They must be pretty fed up with their guest by now, though they were kind enough not to show it. And staying with Claire was not, at the moment, a comfortable proposition, and not just because of the lumpy mattress.

She turned on her laptop to see
if she had any messages. It seemed not, until she noticed that an e-mail from Cecelia dated the day before was sitting in her spam box. It must have gone there because the title was in capital letters with half a dozen exclamation marks. YOU MUST READ THIS!!!!!! She clicked on it quickly, and the message she read made her forget all her thoughts about leaving.

Hey, Jude,

I went to the British Library after we spoke, and just for fun I fed “Josiah Bellingham” into the catalog search engine. And what came up—ta da!—but his unpublished diary. I ordered it up straightaway and—well, you won’t believe what I found. I’ve copied out the relevant bits for you and here they are!

Jude quickly downloaded the attachment and began to read.

From the unpublished diary of Josiah Bellingham, maker of optickal instruments and supplier to the Astronomer Royal.

31 December 1778

I left my sister Fawcett’s this morning after breakfast and rode for two hours, reaching Starbrough Hall at eleven. There I found my journey to be wasted, Wickham being several days dead, God rest his soul, the girl vanished, and Wickham’s harpy of a sister, one Mrs Adolphus Pilkington, in situ with her husband and their son, a thin bookish spawn by the name of Augustus. None recalled seeing the letter dispatched two days before announcing my impending arrival. I stated my business: to learn more about a strange comet or nebula the woman Esther had seen in the sky. I had written to the gentlemen of the Astronomical Society on the matter, I told the Pilkingtons, and they had bid me explore it further. Mr Pilkington, a genial enough gentleman, though he limped badly from gout, bade me dine with them, which we did well on mince pie and rabbits smothered in onion. On questioning them both I learned a sorry tale. Wickham, being a childless bachelor and a person of solitary habits, had come, in the manner of a foolish old man, to dote on a poor foundling girl he’d rescued from the roadside and she had used her wiles to tame him like a lamb on a string. He had lately named her his adopted daughter. Since his terrible accident in the tower, of which I was already acquainted and which left him helpless, she had made him her puppet and refused to entertain his beloved sister and the bookish nephew, being the rightful heir. Here Madam Pilkington muttered in aside that the girl had been in some way involved in the accident, but her good husband assured me later in private that there was no evidence for this. I enquired after the whereabouts of the girl. ‘Gone,’ was all they’d say. It appears that soon after the Pilkingtons arrived, she’d fled the scene they knew not where or what goods or money she might have taken with her. ‘She was a wicked girl,’ Madam Pilkington asserted, ‘and Starbrough Hall is well rid of her.’ I do not think I like Madam Pilkington.

At this outburst the maid waiting on us at table dropped her burden of plates with a crash and fled the room weeping. ‘You’ll see how distressing even the mention of Esther is to them,’ intoned the wretched dame as she rose from the table. Only I saw the look of pure hatred the butler darted her as he hurried to repair the mess.

My instincts screamed at me to leave, but my intellectual curiosity was not yet satisfied. Were there notebooks, I asked, which I might consult regarding my mission? Madam Pilkington didn’t know and by her tone didn’t care, but she gave me leave to enter Anthony Wickham’s library. I was struck at once by the beauty of the room, its unusual oval shape and the range of scholarship displayed on its shelves. Luxuriant as a cow in clover I grazed the shelves, lifting out one delight after another, then examined the collection of spyglasses, marvelling how he had constructed such wonderful instruments from the lenses I’d ground for him. That I’d not met with him again before his death seemed suddenly tragic, and the girl’s mysterious disappearance a damned nuisance and a puzzle, for I discerned that this pair, the Pilkingtons, were hiding information from me. Still, what could I, a mere acquaintance of the dead man, do about any of this? I discovered several journals stacked on one shelf. Two more lay on the desk. I perused all these and noted their contents, but the most recent entry was from over a year ago and there was no mention of the strange celestial object of which the girl had written to me. Any more recent volume, I discerned, must be missing, and a further search proved fruitless.

My work here was done.

‘Should the girl Esther reappear, I should be glad to correspond with her,’ I told the Pilkington harpy. ‘Or if you discover the final journal book, send for me. It may be that your brother’s work yields discoveries germane to our knowledge of the skies, and if so I should be glad to represent it to the authorities on his behalf. Your servant, sir, madam,’ and so I departed with mixed feelings—of relief at leaving these people, but also of deep unease.

I passed the night at the market town of Attleborough. At one o’clock I was woken by a huge storm of hail and snow and a wind so great I felt with a great terror my bedstead rock under me. It was another day and a night before the weather turned clement enough for me to set forth for London once more and home.

So Bellingham did come, Jude told herself, closing the file. But what on earth happened to Esther? She missed showing him the planet that she and her father had found; that was awful. She e-mailed Cecelia, asking, “What you’ve found is both wonderful and terrible. Is that all? Were there no further
relevant diary entries?”

There was no immediate reply. She rang Cecelia’s mobile, but only got a message to say she should try again later. She prowled up and down the library, thinking and thinking what she should do next. In particular, had Esther written any more, and if so had it survived?

She stared at the cupboard. She’d found the wedge of pages fallen down a gap at the back. What if she
hadn’t got them all out? She opened the doors, took out all the charts and pushed her hand through the gap at the back, trying to feel about. The arc her fingers traced met with nothing but brick and mortar dust. She retreated, nursing scraped knuckles, and considered the possibilities. Of course, if need be, she could ask Robert about removing the back of the cupboard, but that seemed an act of
vandalism and she ought to try to see if it was justified. Surely, she thought, anything that had dropped through the gap couldn’t have fallen very far. If only she could see …

She went to find Alexia and asked to borrow a flashlight and a hand mirror. Alexia, whom she found on her hands and knees clearing up the playroom, came immediately to help. At first Jude, angling the mirror and shining
the flashlight about, could see nothing much at all, but then … there was some paper lying just out of reach. Eventually, using a wire coat hanger and some double-sided sticky tape Alexia brought her, she netted a dozen more pages in the familiar handwriting.

“But that really seems to be it,” she told Alexia.

“Thank goodness,” Alexia said. “I don’t like loose ends.” And she went back to sorting
toys.

Jude eagerly began to read.

I can hardly bear to write of those last days. As the season of Advent prepares us for news of a joyful birth at Christmas, in Starbrough we prepared ourselves for my father’s passing. He was too weak to be taken outside that autumn, nay he had lost the will to sweep the skies and he ordered the great telescope to be returned to the tower, though I kept the precious specula in their box in the library for polishing. I tended him carefully those days, as though he were an infant, helping him eat what little he would, and washing him, with Betsy’s help to turn him, though he was light now and so pitifully wasted you could see the blood move in his veins.

He slept much of the day and near Christmas Dr Brundall visited and told me it was only a matter of time. I should send for his sister, and though it riled me, so I did. None could say I shirked my duty there.

They did not come immediately, the Pilkingtons. They dallied. Only later did I find out why. And so it came to pass that their carriage drew up outside just after the post-horse left Starbrough Hall bearing letters announcing its master’s death. With them was Mr Atticus, an attorney from Norwich. Not Father’s ancient Mr Wellbourne, but a young man with a plausible manner and a mercurial brain. They all crowded into my father’s bedroom and contemplated his poor meagre body with a horrifying disinterest. Only Augustus showed distress, turning as pale and inert as the corpse. I drew him from the room and tried to comfort him with what few broken words I could find.