Eden's Garden (28 page)

‘Really?’ said Carys.

‘Oh, yes. Been in New Zealand. Only came back a couple of years ago. Didn’t half put Jon Phelps’ nose out of joint. Someone who still had a claim to the family name, that is.’

‘Oh, you mean someone
now
,’ said David, who was feeling slightly Victorianed-out, and had been waiting for a dark tale of murder, complete with Jack-the-Ripper and Sherlock Homes hanging over some boiling sea, as a group of smugglers brought in the brandy down below.

‘Oh, yes.’ Margaret nodded. ‘She came here once. Left her card.’ Margaret lifted a brightly coloured business card down from a notice board. ‘Runs one of these new local-
grown-flowers
businesses over near St Austell. Just outside the Lost Gardens of Heligan. Ethical flowers for weddings, that sort of thing. She doesn’t seem to have shown much interest in the family history, but she might have something that’s been handed down. You never know.’

‘Thank you.’ Carys reached in her bag for a pen.

‘No, no, it’s fine. Take it with you,’ said Margaret. ‘She left a little pile of them. In fact, I’m not sure that wasn’t her main reason for popping in here. No one seems to remember her asking any questions about the family.’

‘Thanks.’ Carys smiled, placing the little card safely into the innermost compartment in her bag.

‘Well, and let me know if you find anything,’ said Margaret, as she turned to help a newly arrived family with two small boys, who were heading firmly for anything remotely related to Vikings, pirates and smugglers.

‘We will.’ David took a last look at the drawing of the old woman as Carys finished photographing the sketches.

With the family happily sent in the direction of ‘The Smugglers of St Ives Bay’ for the children, accompanied by ‘Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall’ for their mother, Margaret turned her attention back to the drawings. ‘Wales, eh?’ She began to put the sketches back in their folder. ‘Funny that.’

‘Oh?’ said David.

‘Someone was asking about Ann Treverick, not so long ago. On the phone, they were. Didn’t say where they came from, but I could have sworn the accent was Welsh. We used to stay with my aunt in Betws-y-Coed when I was little,’ she added in explanation. ‘It was nice, hearing the old accent again. Never gave a name, and I never thought to ask. You never do, at the time, do you? Rather strange, it was. Something to do with statues,’ she added, folding bubble wrap around the folders once more and tearing off new strips of sellotape from the roll on her desk to secure it. ‘Ring any bells?’

‘When was this?’ demanded David.

‘Some time ago.’

‘Twenty years?’

She laughed. ‘Good Lord, no. Whatever made you think that? A year or so ago, maybe. No; maybe not that long. It was just after the museum opened. I’d only just started as a volunteer. Six months, perhaps? A year, at most.’

‘And they definitely mentioned statues?’ said Carys.

‘That’s right. It seemed such a funny thing to be asking about.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, it wasn’t just
about
them. It was about the making of them, and if there were any in the grounds. Of course, there are no statues here. I mean, I can’t see any of the women here being allowed anywhere near a hammer and chisel, can you?’

‘No, not at all,’ said David slowly.

 

‘It could be someone just researching statues,’ said Carys, as she followed the SatNav’s directions to the Cornwall Centre. ‘Ketterford doesn’t exactly advertise that it was once a lunatic asylum, and people ask museums all sorts of things.’

‘Bit of a coincidence,’ David muttered.

‘Just because someone speaks with a Welsh accent doesn’t mean they live in Wales now.’

‘Yeah. Right,’ he returned. ‘You don’t believe that either.’

Carys grinned. ‘Let’s say I’m keeping an open mind. And, anyhow, don’t you find it just a little bit exciting? I could get into this chasing down of clues, like a proper history detective. I don’t care if this Ann Treverick has nothing to do with Plas Eden at all. Now we’ve started, I want to know what happened to her.’

David smiled. He’d been vaguely irritated by traipsing from one place to another without it seeming to lead anywhere. And especially with blue sky and miles of cliff waiting there, all ready to walk. But this was Carys on a mission. Carys on a mission, he remembered, had always shown an unexpectedly stubborn streak.

He’d believed that side of Carys had gone, banished by the grown-up duties of career and mortgage. And he was, he had to confess, as he watched the green roll of the Cornish countryside pass by, rather enjoying having it back again. When Carys got the bit between her teeth, it was best to just lean back and go along for the ride. David relaxed into his seat feeling strangely liberated by the prospect of not being responsible for once. It felt almost like being a teenager again.

With the SatNav determined to take them down the narrowest and most winding lanes it could find, and an alarming tendency to go round in circles in the cause of following the shortest route, Carys concentrated fully on driving. This was more like it. She’d forgotten how much fun they’d had, the two of them, before hormones and the seriousness of life had kicked in.

When they’d been kids, the lawns and the cherry trees around the house – where Rhiannon could keep an eye on them – had become a jungle of dens and secret encampments. The neglected part of the house had been a world of mystery in itself. In summer this had expanded to major expeditions in the rowing boat, discovering dragons and America in equal measure, while remaining within shouting distance of home.

They’d tried their best to include Huw, but he’d squirmed at their more outrageous flights of imagination, preferring instead to build dams in the stream feeding the lake.

She missed that sense of life being an adventure. It was probably a sign of getting old and viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles, she told herself with an inward sigh. She should get a grip before she landed herself into all sorts of trouble. Grown-up trouble. The kind that doesn’t go away with a sticking plaster and a slab of homemade chocolate fudge cake.

 

Once in the safer territory of urban streets, the SatNav came into its own, locating the Cornish Centre without fuss. David and Carys soon found themselves in the Cornish Studies Library, in possession of adjacent microfilm readers.

‘So what, exactly, are we looking for?’ whispered David, as they scrolled their way through separate years of the
Treverick Times
, captured for eternity on microfilm.

‘No idea,’ replied Carys. ‘Anything to do with the Trevericks, I suppose.

‘They seemed to have judged plenty of flower shows and opened their fair share of fetes,’ he complained.

‘Trust you to go straight to the Lord of the Manor stuff,’ she retorted, forgetting to whisper. A couple of fellow researchers looked round at this, but appeared more amused than irritated. Clearly taking this exchange as a lover’s tiff, thought Carys, fighting the sudden colour down from her face. She glanced at David. But he was deep in the petty thievery and advertisements for tooth powder of Victorian Cornwall and seemed not to have noticed. Apart from the faint smile on his face. Male vanity, thought Carys, trying to be indignant.

Just for a moment, her mind went back to Joe. A subject she had been almost-successfully keeping out of her mind since they had left Chester. She could just see him settled into his new office in central London and already at the centre of things. And no doubt smiling that gentle smile of his at the young women around the water cooler.

Damn all male vanity. Even if it was nothing to do with her any more. It was still close enough in her memory to be personal.

She turned back to the microfilm, determinedly focussing on scanning the lines of newspaper print and grainy photographs. They would, they had agreed in the car, work in opposite directions from the date Margaret had told them Ann Treverick had been first admitted to Ketterford Asylum. Carys had bagged going backwards, on the principle that it was her idea in the first place and there was more likely to be information before the time of Ann’s committal. Apart – as David had pointed out – from the fact that she was supposed to have escaped from the lunatic asylum for a while, and that sounded like a story in itself.

Several hours of fruitless searching later, Carys was feeling decidedly cross-eyed, and not a little hungry. The centre was busy, and once in possession of a microfilm reader, it seemed uncharitable to abandon it for more than a quick dash to the loo.

‘Anything?’ she murmured to David.

He blinked and shook his head. ‘Not a dickybird. There’s plenty of mention of William Treverick, and a couple of his sister opening things. But nothing about anyone called Ann. Or the asylum. I suppose they wouldn’t exactly have broadcast the fact that she was there. Or that she had left. Or escaped, for that matter. Especially not if she escaped. And definitely no mention of paintings, drawings, or statues. What about you?’

‘The same. Apart from nothing really about Judith Treverick. I suppose she’d have been too young in these ones to open things. It’s weird. It’s as if Ann Treverick didn’t exist at all.’

David yawned. A couple of students, of the vaguely Goth variety, had walked past the now fully occupied microfilm readers at least twice in the past ten minutes, with meaningful glares in the general direction of the occupiers of the chairs. Tough. They were probably local and could come back tomorrow, and anyhow there was a sign telling all and sundry of the need to book your reader to be assured of one. All the same, the glares were a reminder of just how long they had been sitting there.

‘Ten more minutes?’ he suggested. ‘Then perhaps we should go and get something to eat. I don’t think my eyes will take much more. We can always book a couple of readers and come back tomorrow.’

‘Okay,’ agreed Carys. Her brain had stopped taking in information she realised, as she came to the end of yet another year. She began to scroll through faster, trusting her eyes would pick up any mention of the Treverick name, or that the image of the Hall would catch her eye. She could always go through more systematically tomorrow.

When it came, she nearly missed it. She shot several pages forward before she could stop and retrace her tracks, not quite certain where the headline had been. Or even if she had read it correctly. Then there it was. ‘Dreadful Events at Treverick’, accompanied by the familiar view of Treverick Hall. Carys settled the page in front of her on the microfilm and began to read.

She was still sitting there, unmoving, when David finished with his reader and came to join her.

‘Carys?’

‘I’ve found her,’ replied Carys, her eyes still on the screen. ‘Ann Treverick. It’s all here, in the article.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

Carys shook her head. ‘No it isn’t. Not at all. Poor woman: no wonder she lost her mind.’

 I found him in the dawn, where the tide had brought him.

There was a cruel illusion of life from the water lapping at his coat sleeves, and the wind stirring the fairness of his hair. But even as I ran towards that tiny, lonely figure stranded in the vastness of the beach, I knew he was gone. He had always been a timid child, afraid most of all of water. Even I knew he would not have lain so long, rocked by the incoming waves, had there been any life left in him to drag himself out of their reach.