Hearts and Diamonds (3 page)

Jenna took some cups from the cupboard.

‘I know we all love the Harvilles,’ she said. ‘But we shouldn’t go making assumptions. I wish I did know though. Lawrence did mention something about a tragic first wife somewhere in the family tree who committed suicide. It could be her, couldn’t it? I mean, the vicar would have refused to bury her in consecrated ground. Perhaps they just couldn’t think of anything better to do with her.’

Jason snorted. ‘They’ve got a bloody huge garden. Might have been better than leaving her down there with the rats.’

‘True. It does smack of something that they wanted to hide. Whoever “they” might be. Oh God, I hate mysteries. I’m not sure I can cope with this one. I want to know who she is.’

‘Perhaps darling Lawrence could help,’ said Jason with a sniff.

‘Er, I don’t think he’s going to have a lot to say to me, not now. Why don’t we go down into the cellar again? See if there are any other clues in there.’

‘Don’t you think those forensic guys will have done that already?’

‘No, and they aren’t coming back. The body’s been found to be too old for them to pursue it. I mean, we’ve all heard of cold cases, but this one is bloody freezing. They’ll leave it to amateur detectives like us rather than waste their own resources.’

‘Speak for yourself. When did I ever claim to be an amateur detective?’ Jason folded his arms, apparently displeased with the entire affair.

‘I’ll go down by myself, then,’ said Jenna, misgivings striking her as soon as she spoke the words. Did she really want to do that?

He raised his eyebrows at her but said nothing.

She swallowed. This had become a challenge.

‘Seriously,’ she said, but her voice faltered. ‘Unless . . . you want to come with me?’

He laughed. ‘No, no, sweetheart. This is your baby. I’ll be upstairs finishing off my frescoes.’

‘Right. I’ll, ah, go and get changed then. Into something I can get cobwebs all over without caring.’

She turned and marched up the stairs.

‘Hope there’s nothing worse than cobwebs,’ he called after her. ‘Maybe some tough gloves in case of rat bites.’

She almost vomited on the step but managed to keep her gorge down. It was a good point, though, and she put on her toughest jeans, thickest socks and a pair of leather driving gloves, just in case. She covered her head with a scarf to avoid getting too much dirt in her hair, and put on a dust mask, thankful for the decorating supplies she had in the house.

Jason, happily, had gone by the time she emerged from the room, dressed for combat. He would have laughed at her, she was sure.

But when she came out to the kitchen patio, she felt his absence with a pang. It would have been good to have a companion for this task. Even though the bones were gone, she couldn’t help feeling that there would be a disturbing vibe down there. It could be a murder scene, for all she knew.

Her skin crawled with dread as she crouched to tug at the iron ring in the floor. It was no longer locked, as it had been since she moved into the house. Now its darkest secret had been given up, there didn’t seem much point in keeping it secure. Jenna hadn’t given the remaining contents of the cellar much attention after the bones had made themselves so horribly evident, but she had a vague sense of lots of boxes and shelves, mainly containing paper and old books.

The slab took its time coming up, Jenna making sure she kept her spine straight and knees bent as she tugged. Jason had made it look easy, but then there was deceptive strength in that wiry frame. She thought about how impossible it was to escape from him when he had her pinned against the wall and the pleasurable memory did a little to dispel the scalp-tingling horror.

At last the paving slab eased up and Jenna was able to remove it. Seeing the black maw beneath it, she doubted herself all over again. Could she really go down into that gloom by herself? She activated the torch app on her phone, which reminded her of the time she’d done it last, going up into the attic and finding Jason.

What a moment that had been. She should have been scared then – after all, a living, breathing fugitive in your loft space was surely more frightening and definitely potentially more dangerous than a few dusty old notebooks and some mice. Yet she couldn’t see it that way. Jason in the attic should have been alarming, yet it wasn’t anywhere near as creepy as this subterranean vault.

It must be to do with the unknown, she decided. After all, once she had seen Jason, she knew the worst. It was the not knowing . . . but even that didn’t make sense, because they’d been down there once before, when they found the bones. They’d seen the worst of the cellar too. Or had they?

She thought of the little message they had uncovered beneath the bedroom wallpaper while they were stripping it. ‘Help me’. Something or someone in this house had driven somebody to scrawl those words. And what about the noises Jason said he had heard during the night? Sobbing sounds, coming from somewhere lower down, under the floors.

If an unquiet spirit haunted the house, perhaps the removal of those bones might have satisfied it. Perhaps it would all be all right now.

What are you thinking, Jenna? Ghosts, unquiet spirits. You don’t believe in any of that stuff.

Perhaps this place had turned her head. Life had certainly been overwhelming since she had come back to Bledburn. She was fatally disorientated. And people thought LA was the place that led to disconnection from reality. No way. To her, it was a place of substance, almost mundane compared to this drab little ex-mining community on the borders of Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire.

It was Bledburn that was making her go gaga, not LaLa.

She took a deep breath, shone her torch into the inky depths and located the top rung of the iron ladder set into the narrow brick chute leading to the cellar.

She lowered one foot in its hi-top Converse sneaker and waggled it around until it landed on the narrow metal. OK. She had taken the first step. Now she just had to keep on going.

She clipped her phone to her belt so that the torch continued to shine downwards and made slow, painstaking progress down the ladder. It was a matter of no more than about half a dozen rungs and she soon stood on the cellar floor, its flagstones disturbingly uneven and crunchy underfoot. She supposed it might be mouse bones or beetle shells – she didn’t particularly want to check, so she shone the beam upwards, where boxes and trunks stood stacked against the slimy walls.

She tried not to focus on the spot where the bones had been found, but it was still cordoned off with police tape, so it was difficult to ignore. She edged around it, grateful for her dust mask which kept the worst of the thick, musty air from clogging her throat. She lifted one of the boxes from the top of the pile and noticed an index card inside a little gilt frame on the side:

‘
Harville Hall: Bills etc. 2006–2008
.’

Inside appeared to be a number of photocopies and originals of paperwork, mostly dealing with finances and legal issues. It was dull enough but in good condition despite mouldering down here for so long. There were many such boxes, and Jenna decided to look at each one. Most were, like the first one, full of official correspondence. Jenna shuddered at the thought that somebody had brought the boxes down here and walked past those bones – in absolute plain sight – in order to stack them. What did these archivists think of their resident skeleton? Had no member of the successive generations thought it might be a nice idea to remove the bones and give them a decent burial?

‘Bloody Harvilles,’ she said out loud. ‘Bad to the bone. Bad to the
bones
.’ Her little giggle at this silly piece of word play sounded deeply inappropriate and she apologised under her breath to who knew whom. And after all, she only did it to try and keep her dwindling stocks of bravado going. It was so
dark
down there, and so horrible. She could never be a subterranean dweller.

Box after box of printed matter was examined and discarded, the pile slowly diminishing until she came to very old documents. 1960s . . . 1950s . . . 1940s . . . on and on she went, occasionally taking off a lid to see inside, but never investigating much further than that. What she wanted was material dating to the time when the owner of those poor bones had died. Something must yield a clue – and if she found nothing, then she would laboriously and painstakingly sift through all these other boxes of more recent date, to find a reference, however oblique or obscure, to what must have happened here.

1930s . . . 1920s . . . 1910s . . . and now she felt her pulse quickening as she drew closer to the kind of time frame in which the death must have occurred. The final few boxes went very far back indeed, and contained the original documents relating to the building of the Hall. She picked up the oldest of the boxes, intent on taking it up with her to perform a detailed analysis of the contents. But perhaps she should get somebody from the Bledburn Museum to help – after all, she was no expert when it came to old documents. She might be ruining valuable artefacts. She would take the box upstairs, ring the museum and then . . .

She was still running through the options in her mind when her eye was caught by a loose brick, sticking out behind where the lowest row of boxes had been ranged. It had definitely been dislodged, and that was strange, because surely it had been hidden behind these boxes for decades. Who or what could have caused it?

She reached out with gloved fingers and pulled at it. It came away, grinding against the neighbouring bricks, slowly at first, then falling loose and revealing a cavity behind it.

She thought she might vomit into her dust mask. There was something in there, something bound in cloth and tied at the neck. Perhaps an object related to the bones, perhaps not – but whatever it was, somebody had wanted to hide it.

Jenna took hold of the knotted top and removed the item, as gently as possible, from its place of concealment. Inside the cloth was a rectangular object, hard to the touch – probably a book or ledger of some sort, she thought. The material surrounding it was oilcloth, tough and virtually unblemished despite the long years in hiding.

Forgetting the document box for the moment, Jenna hurried back to the chute and climbed it one-handed, holding the oilcloth wrapper and its contents to her chest.

She placed it on the patio wall, replaced the paving slab that granted access to the cellar and sat down, breathing hard and shaking the dust and the feeling of crawling insects from her scalp. It had been cold down there but she noticed that she was soaked in sweat. She needed a shower, and now.

But not before she had seen what had been hidden down there. She picked it up, untied the loosely knotted neck and unwrapped the oilcloth, which was wound around the rectangle in layers. What she found inside was a book. It was in perfect condition, bound in morocco leather and decorated with a frame of gilt curlicues. There was no title or other information on the cover or spine, so Jenna opened it to the first page and held her breath.

‘The Thoughts and Ideas of Frances Elizabeth Manning, Nottingham, 1886.’

Frances? Wasn’t that the real name of Fairy Fay?

SHE SHUT THE
book at once, ran into the kitchen and began opening and shutting drawers. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for – perhaps some kind of thin protective glove, better than these goalkeeper numbers, to keep the dry paper from desiccating under her fingertips. Marigolds hardly seemed any more suitable. She pulled off the thick gloves and looked at the red, sweating skin at her wrist. It would be OK to read the book as it was, wouldn’t it? After all, there were volumes just as old in many libraries, and this was hardly a priceless artefact, just some ordinary girl’s diary. Except the ordinary girl was destined to be a Harville, and just might have ended up badly. If it was even her. Didn’t everyone have the same names in Victorian times, after all? So many Annes and Victorias and Charlottes. Frances would have been just as common. Really, it could have been one of the higher servants, or . . .

Shut up, Jenna, and just read
.

The first page revealed the book to be a diary, with a page for each day. Riffling through, Jenna noticed that some pages were full to overflowing, carrying on to the next day’s page, while others were blank. Frances, it seemed, only wrote when something was worth writing. Not a bad plan, she thought. It didn’t seem that there would be pages of dinner menus or terse accounts of who had visited and what was spoken of.

January 1st, though, as was traditional, held a page of reflections and resolutions.

I hereby express my certitude that 1886 will be the year my life begins in earnest. Every one of the preceding nineteen has been a kind of overture or curtain-raiser to this, the true performance.

For in 1886 I shall marry. I feel sure of it. It is what the gypsy lady at Goose Fair told me and I believe her, truly. What a great deal she knew of me, without my letting slip a single word in corroboration. She knew of Father’s tribulations in business, and she knew of Mary’s illness and she even knew of my fondness for books and music, though she could not name my favourite author. But then, perhaps she has not heard of Mrs Corelli. Her line of work, after all, is in the reading of palms, not novels.

But the words she spoke inhabit my imagination even now, echoing in my thoughts before I sleep and when I wake. ‘Not a twelvemonth shall pass before you are wed, and he shall be a stranger to you.’ So nobody I yet know. I still thrill with each contemplation of it. She could not have made it plainer.

But what shall his name be, and what then shall mine be? All will be known, soon enough.

I have made some resolutions, as follows:

1) I must not eat so many sweets or my stay laces may burst and then my new husband may turn his face from me.

2) I must try to be more patient with Mary.

3) I must practise at the piano for an hour of each day.