A Place of Secrets (46 page)

Jude sat thinking hard. So Esther had escaped, as she’d dreamed, but Mr. Trotwood had died. The coroner’s report questioned whether the two events were linked,
and it certainly seemed likely. She was sure Mr. Trotwood had denied locking Esther in the folly in the first place, and this sounded believable. Certainly to lock her in and wait three days and nights before visiting her there was a sneaking act that didn’t seem to fit with her image of Trotwood, which was as someone direct, a man of action. Surely if he’d wanted Esther dead he would have dispatched
her without delay, like he would a rabbit found in a snare or Anthony’s poor decrepit greyhound. Why would he want her dead anyway? Unless Alicia had paid him to be rid of her unfortunate obstacle to the ownership of Starbrough Hall. The question remained then: who had locked the door to the folly?

She searched some of the subsequent issues of the
Norwich Mercury
, but nothing else of relevance
caught her eye.

While she was waiting for a photocopy of the article, something else occurred to her. Esther had been found as a very small child in July 1765. It had been thought she was about three years old. There were two questions that she had asked herself, but never followed up. First, why did Anthony Wickham not try to find out who this child was and to whom she belonged? In Esther’s
journal he’d claimed not to want to. Perhaps he’d felt fond of her at first sight. Second, had anyone been searching for a lost child, especially one in rags of silk?

She returned to the shelves and found the volume containing issues for the
Norwich Mercury
for 1765. It would seem sensible to start looking in July—21 July had been given as her “birthday,” but it was quite possible that Esther
had been missed by her family earlier than that. She therefore began reading papers from the middle of June.

She read and read but there was nothing about lost children, and practically nothing about Starbrough and the vicinity that seemed even remotely relevant. A jealous footman had murdered a maid at a country house near the coast. Two small girls had been left orphaned by the death of a wealthy
merchant at Great Yarmouth, but they were older, nine and seven. She trawled through all of July, but the only event deemed interesting to the
Norwich Mercury
for the area near Starbrough was the grisly discovery of a woman’s body in woodland near Holt. She was some weeks dead, the physician who attended the inquest testified, and killed by a single shot in the chest that had entered her heart.
Her identity was shrouded in mystery, though her hair and clothing suggested she was not of working stock. She still wore a plain gold wedding band, which might indicate robbery not to have been the motive, but the fact that the body had been stripped of any evidence of her identity clearly puzzled the coroner. Jude turned the pages of the next few weeks’ papers, hoping for some further mention
of this, but there was none. Still, it troubled her. She returned to the office with photocopies of both articles.

* * *

It was while she was putting the finishing touches to her magazine article that Inigo, who’d been sitting quietly working at his computer, said, “I’ve remembered where I’ve seen that necklace before.”

Madingsfield Hall, Lincolnshire, is the seat of the Earls of Madingsfield, a line unbroken since Sir Thomas Madingsfield entertained Elizabeth I with such munificence that she almost bankrupted him. She bestowed in recompense the welcome prize of a peerage and the office of Gentleman Usher to the Royal Court.

Jude was reading the guidebook Inigo had lent her.

“James is the fifteenth
Lord M.” Inigo kept turning to brief her as he drove them down to the Hall. He was not a good driver, hunched up on his cushion, too close to the wheel of his tiny black car, zigzagging between other cars down the motorway as though on a bumper car park. “He was the younger son, actually. Smart bloke. Eton, double first in Modern History at Oxford, the City—Barings in fact, before they went under.
Made an absolute killing in the eighties, then, when his elder brother fell off a horse one Boxing Day, he inherited the Hall. The finances were in a terrible mess. Turning it into a tourist attraction and arts festival venue has been the best thing for it.”

Lord Madingsfield was also famed as a collector and a canny dealer in arts and antiques, and, despite Inigo’s recent disappointment, continued
to be a figure that Beecham’s courted, albeit a slippery one. Madingsfield, in turn, needed Beecham’s.

So when Inigo rang him and asked if he could bring a colleague up to see some of the paintings for reasons of research, he was affability itself, and suggested an afternoon early the following week.

So here they were, parking in the huge tourist car park, but instead of joining the queue at
the kiosk for tickets they walked through one stable yard and then another, around to a door marked “Private”—the estate offices of Madingsfield. There the receptionist led them down a corridor and up a staircase to the large, elegant reception room that Lord Madingsfield used as his office. Madingsfield, a short, dapper man in a milky-brown suit, with a hooked nose and a clever, mobile face, was
sitting behind his desk, but when they were shown in he stood immediately to shake their hands. It was a cliché, Jude thought, as she felt the grip of his fingers, but the man really did exude power and a sort of mercurial energy.

She brought out the star necklace and laid it on the desk, then briefly told her story.

He studied it, then looked up at her and gave a very broad smile indeed. “I
think you’ve just solved a great family mystery,” he said warmly. “How clever of you to come.”

* * *

“Who was she?” Jude asked.

They were standing beneath a painting, a portrait that hung in a chronological line of other family likenesses, in a mahogany-paneled library that stretched the whole width of the house. It was a full-length picture of a young woman in eighteenth-century dress.
She was pretty this one, very pretty, with fair, flowing hair, a pink and white complexion and huge, soft, emotional brown eyes. Her bodice was low cut, and round her slender neck she wore a necklace of stars. The very same necklace Jude held in her hand.

“‘The Lady with the Star Necklace.’ Her name was Lucille. Lucille de Fougeres,” Lord Madingsfield said. “But the family always refer to her
as
La Fugitive
—French for the Bolter. You’ll appreciate the joke.”

Inigo smiled politely but Jude stared at her, unable to speak, a great line of connections falling into place in her mind.

“I take it she was French?” Inigo asked.

“
Très française
, I gather. Viscount St. John, later the ninth earl, met her on a Grand Tour sometime in the 1750s, I forget the precise date. It was he who commissioned
the necklace and made a present of it to her on their betrothal. They married in 1759, but in 1765, a few years after this portrait was painted, she vanished with their two infant daughters. The story went about that she’d had a lover before she married, and the pair were still passionate about each other and eloped. Of course, the family searched for her; though I wonder how hard—the scandal
would have been dreadful. But there was never any trace of them found again. When seven years passed the courts declared her dead and St. John, now raised to the earldom, married his secret mistress, one Hester Symmonds. Look, here she is, in masquerade dress. Quite the little flirt, I always thought. What a nest of singing birds, they all were.” Lord Madingsfield’s expression was rather indulgent
of them, Jude thought, but her mind was running free.

How curious. Two infant daughters. Not one. If one of them had indeed been Esther—and if so how did she end up on a muddy road in the middle of Norfolk—what had happened to the other? Had Lucille escaped with her, and where on earth had they gone? Back to France, perhaps. And how had the child who was Esther become lost? Too many unanswered
questions. The only thing she could say with certainty was that now they had a strong idea, at least, of whose child Esther might have been.

“Why would Lucille have gone to north Norfolk?” she asked. She remembered suddenly the unidentified dead woman. Who was she? Another piece in the jigsaw maybe.

“On her way to a port, I suppose. Great Yarmouth, perhaps?”

“Would that really have been the
most direct route to France?”

“We’ve no information about who the lover was or where they intended to go. We can’t assume it was France; the Low Countries, perhaps. If you’re interested, I have copies of one or two letters from that period that I consulted for our catalog of paintings—people often ask about Lucille; they find her a romantic figure—but I fear there is little in them you’ll find
relevant.”

“I feel I ought to look at them anyway,” Jude decided, “to be thorough.”

“And maybe while you’re doing that I could show Inigo here something that might just interest him.” An amused smile played about Lord Madingsfield’s lips.

“Of course,” Inigo said, perking up suddenly.

Oh Lord, Jude thought, I hope the wily old fox isn’t going to wind Inigo up all over again. As they went downstairs
she mouthed, “Watch out,” at Inigo and he signaled his understanding with a nod.

* * *

The letters Lord Madingsfield mentioned were in a file of correspondence from the period. Jude sat in the air-conditioned archive room in the basement where the Earl kept any paperwork to do with the estate, though most of the Madingsfield papers were in archives in Cambridge now, he’d explained. She turned
the plastic pockets in the file until she came to them. They were both dated 1764 and were from the Countess of Madingsfield, Lucille’s mother-in-law, to her son the Viscount, who was clearly in London on business. It took some effort to get used to the handwriting, which was more florid than Esther’s. The first letter was mostly about the old Earl’s weakening health, social events and estate
business, until the bottom of the second page:

I have conveyed to Lucille our decision that she may not leave the house on any pretext whatsoever. She received the message quietly and indeed has spent most of the week in her apartments, only walking in the gardens in the afternoons, when the weather allows.

The second letter was dated a month later and made reference to some “new medication”
prescribed for Lucille which “seems to have beneficial effect. She is calmer and more manageable.”

As though she were a horse, it occurred to Jude, indignant. If there had been correspondence about Lucille’s disappearance a year later, it must be lost or in Cambridge, for there were no more letters for the period in the file.

She sat back in her chair, tapping the end of her pen against her
lips, thinking. Lucille must have been very unhappy, confined to this huge palace prison, having goodness-knows-what administered to her. There had been no mention of the little daughters. She should ask about a family tree in case it gave their names. She rang the bell on the offices’ reception desk, where she and Inigo had come in, and a woman let her into another file room where there was a huge
framed chart on the wall. Together they located the ninth earl and his wives, Lucille, and Hester, the mother of sons, but the line of descent from Lucille only said “two daughters, died in infancy.”

“Oh, they don’t even have names,” Jude said, rather shocked to see the assumption that they’d died. It was as though they’d been tidied out of history.

“They were called Amelie and Genevieve,” came
the voice of the Earl behind her, making her jump. “My researcher scoured the parish records and discovered the entries for their baptisms.”

“He must have loved her enough to let her call them by French names,” Jude said. She explained what she’d found in the letters.

“Ah yes,” said the Earl, “but they were only daughters. I shouldn’t think he was much bothered.” Behind him, Inigo gave a neighing
laugh.

* * *

“I’m going to work on the hypothesis that Esther was Lucille’s elder daughter, Amelie,” Jude told Inigo on the way home. “Three when she was found. But how she ended up lost in the Norfolk countryside, and what happened to Lucille and the other girl, I haven’t a clue.”

“What about that dead woman?”

“Inigo, we’re getting a bit close to that lorry. Ooh. You mean—?”

“You said
you read in the newspaper library about some local murder of an unknown woman.”

“Yes. She was thought to be well born. But that would be pure conjecture.”

“It could be another good hypothesis to start with.”

“I suppose so. How did you get on with His Lordship?”

She watched a slow smile spread across Inigo’s face. “Old Madingsfield? Eating out of my hand.”

“Inigo, you’ve got to watch him.”

“I know what you’re going to say, Jude,” he said, swerving into the fast lane and sailing past a sports car that must itself be breaking the speed limit, “but life is full of risk. He has a collection of Elizabethan explorers’ maps he wants us to sell and he thinks we’d do better with them than Sotheby’s. I think he’s quarreled with his cousin there about something.”

“Klaus will be pleased. Well
done. But watch the old fox, Inigo.”

“I intend to,” Inigo said, coasting across two lanes to join the North Circular. “Like a hawk.”

Any faster around this bend and he’ll be on two wheels, Jude thought, closing her eyes.

A text pinged into her phone. She opened her eyes and saw it was from Euan.

“Any chance 2C you this w/e?” it said. “Found a clue. Also, moth hunt on Friday.”

Happiness bubbled
up. She’d ring him as soon as she got home—there was so much to tell him about! To tell everyone!

It was a perfect night for moths and stars, Jude mused, as she took the road out of Starbrough. This time she drove straight past Starbrough Hall, only glancing up quickly at its graceful lines, her attention really elsewhere. Ahead of her, above the hill, the sinking sun glowed amber in a sky of lambent gold, and when she parked the car in the lay-by outside Gamekeeper’s Cottage and
got out, she paused for a moment, listening to the forest settle into its evening routines around her, the air light and still and filled with the chattering of birds. Above her head swifts darted and dived and something in her responded, flying with them, exhilarated and free.