House of Shadows (14 page)

Fran really was excelling herself today. Holly winced. Then she realised Mark had seen and misread her involuntary movement.

‘You don’t need to waste any pity on me,’ he said. ‘I’m over my particular traumas.’

‘Great!’ Holly said. ‘Though I always think it’s better not to confuse pity with empathy.’ She stood up, regardless of the fact that her coffee was only half finished. ‘Sorry, Fran, I’ve got to go.’

Fran looked bewildered, seemingly utterly unaware of the shimmer of antagonism in the air. ‘Why are you rushing off? We haven’t had time to talk properly!’

Paula, Fran’s business partner, bustled out from the back of the shop, wiping her hands on a tea towel. Her face was pink, though whether that was with the heat from her baking or the pleasure of seeing Mark, Holly was not sure. Paula had never struck her as a fluttery person before but she was fluttering now as she served Mark, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear, smoothing her apron, fussing with the coffee grinder.

‘Your usual, Mark?’ Paula asked, a proprietary edge to her voice.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Latte would be great.’ Fran came round the counter and caught Holly by the arm, pulling her back down into her seat. ‘Don’t go, Holly,’ she urged. ‘Mark can tell you all about the renovation project while he’s here.’

Judging by Mark’s expression, Holly thought he would enjoy that as little as she would.

‘That’s OK,’ she said quickly. ‘I really do have to get back to work.’

‘I’ve got to get back too,’ Mark said. ‘We’ve just found pipistrelle bats in the stables so there’s going to be more delays whilst the ecological consultants do a survey.’

‘Wait!’ Fran said. ‘Don’t rush off!’ She looked from Holly’s face to Mark’s studiously blank one. ‘We wanted to ask you about Ben’s research, Mark,’ she said.

‘I didn’t,’ Holly said.

Fran ignored her. ‘Did you know that Ben was researching his family history?’ she demanded.

‘He did mention it to me.’ Mark had paused in the doorway, giving the impression that he was itching to get away. ‘I don’t know much about it, I’m afraid.’ There was a complete lack of regret in his tone. ‘He came to the office a couple of times to look at our maps and some papers, and I pointed him in the direction of the Records Office but as to what he found out …’

‘Perhaps your family is descended from the Cravens,’ Fran said, swinging around to look at Holly. ‘A lot of people come here looking for their ancestral roots.’

She met Holly’s gaze and raised her eyebrows. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing,’ Holly said. ‘I only just found out about the Craven connection to Ashdown House. I was surprised you knew, that’s all.’

Fran looked smug. ‘Oh, we all know about the Cravens around here. It’s part of local history.’ She put her head on
one side, studying Holly thoughtfully. ‘Hmmm. You don’t really have an aristocratic look about you so perhaps you’re just one of the local peasants like me … Mark though …’ She grinned at him. ‘Yes, he’s got the nose for it. Roman, do they call it? And those cheekbones!’

‘Mark could be the model for a church memorial,’ Holly agreed dryly. ‘Carved in stone.’

Mark gave her a look that brought the hot colour into her face. OK, so he had not been cold and passionless when they had last met. Holly shifted in her seat.

‘I don’t think any of us can be descended from the Earl of Craven,’ she said a little at random, remembering Lavinia’s memoir. ‘He didn’t have any direct descendants. His estates went to a distant relative.’

‘Pity,’ Fran said. ‘It would really have been something if you’d been descended from the Winter Queen.’

‘What?’ Holly said blankly.

‘Elizabeth of Bohemia,’ Fran repeated. ‘She was married to William Craven.’

‘Elizabeth of Bohemia was married to Frederick of Bohemia,’ Holly said. ‘The clue is in the name.’

Fran threw her a look that was half-irritated, half-triumphant. ‘Yes she was, first. She married William Craven after Frederick died. He built Ashdown Park for her. We know all about the Winter Queen here. Like I said, it’s part of local history’.

Holly stared at her. She felt a sudden chill ripple across her skin and shivered. The sun was bright and hot but she could not feel it any more. She felt as though she had been dipped in ice.

‘We don’t know for sure they were married,’ Mark said. ‘There’s no proof.’

‘I didn’t …’ Holly’s voice was husky. She cleared her throat. ‘I didn’t realise that Elizabeth of Bohemia had any connection to Ashdown Park.’

She remembered the name Elizabeth Stuart on Ben’s list. So it had been the Winter Queen.

‘She never came here,’ Mark said, ‘but it’s true that William Craven built the house as a hunting lodge for her. She died before it was completed.’

‘Buried in Westminster Abbey,’ Fran said, adding with relish, ‘on a wild February night as a mighty thunderstorm crashed overhead. Buried with fire and water, as one of the chroniclers said.’

‘Fire and water,’ Holly repeated softly. The cold seemed to be inside her, intensifying, setting her shaking. Elizabeth and William Craven, the crystal mirror, the mill, the ghostly house, Lavinia’s memoir, Ben’s research … They were all threads in a pattern she could not yet see clearly but she knew it was there.

‘Fran!’ Paula was calling sharply from the kitchens. ‘You said five minutes and you’ve already been out there for ten.’

‘Oh dear,’ Fran said. ‘I must learn to pull my weight. Mark—’ She leaned an elbow on the table, ‘who would be the best person for Holly to talk to if she wants to find out more information? Is there anyone on your team who could help?’

‘Oh no,’ Holly said quickly, ‘I wouldn’t want to bother anyone—’

‘Relax,’ Mark said, a glint in his eyes. ‘I won’t be
volunteering. I don’t have the expertise.’ He turned back to Fran. ‘What about Iain? He’s been working with us on the restoration project here.’

Iain, Fran’s husband, was the county archaeologist but Fran dismissed him with a flick of the hand. ‘Iain’s specialist subject is Bronze Age long barrows and the bones in them,’ she said. ‘I’m talking about the history of people who haven’t been dead thousands of years.’

Mark took a sip of his coffee and grimaced, reaching for a sachet of sugar. ‘Archaeologists don’t just work on pre-history,’ he objected. ‘You know that.’

‘Honestly,’ Holly put in, ‘I don’t want to put anyone to any trouble. I just wanted to know—’ She hesitated, trying to find the words to explain why she felt such a strong need to continue Ben’s research. Mark saved her the trouble.

‘You desperately want to hold on to a connection to Ben,’ he said. ‘It’s a common phenomenon when someone goes missing.’

‘Ouch,’ Holly said. It was true but he could have put it less brutally. She saw a flicker of regret in Mark’s eyes. He opened his mouth and she thought he was going to apologise and for some reason that made her feel worse. She didn’t want him pitying her because she was clutching at straws.

Her phone buzzed suddenly, urgently, in her pocket and she jumped, groping for it, feeling the customary lurch of hope and expectation. Fran, busy now with a couple who had just come in and wanted tea and walnut cake, had not noticed. Mark, though, was watching her with his unnervingly direct dark gaze and it felt to Holly as
though he could read her thoughts. She deliberately turned a shoulder towards him. She felt vulnerable and edgy.

The text was from an old client enquiring about an engraving commission. Holly supposed she should be grateful that new work was coming in but as always when it was not Ben getting in touch, she felt a sick rush of disappointment.

When she looked up Mark had gone and Fran was standing hands on hips watching him walk away across the courtyard.

‘Can’t you just get past it?’ she groused.

‘What?’ Holly said.

‘The two of you,’ Fran said. ‘Mark all aloof and Mr Darcy-ish and you—’ she waved her hands about in exasperation, ‘like a Victorian lady who thinks he’s a bounder.’

Holly laughed. ‘I guess we’ve discovered we just don’t like each other very much.’

‘No.’ Fran pointed her butter knife accusingly at her. ‘That was not dislike going on there.’

Holly sighed. Fran had known her a long, long time and for all her tactlessness she could be surprisingly acute.

‘I just feel … awkward around him,’ she admitted. ‘It’s hardly surprising. I treated him badly and I feel guilty about it and clearly he doesn’t like me for it either.’

‘Hmm.’ Fran sounded unconvinced. ‘That’s all true, of course—’

‘Thanks.’

‘But perhaps you could build on it,’ Fran said. ‘Get together.’

Holly shook her head. ‘I’m not in the market for a
relationship. You know that.’ She got up and put her empty coffee mug down on the counter.

‘I know,’ Fran said, her voice emerging, muffled, from the fridge. ‘Mark’s had a rough time, too. He hasn’t had a relationship in all the time he’s been down here.’

Holly absorbed that for a moment. ‘So leave the matchmaking alone then,’ she said. She picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder just as a group of walkers erupted through the coffee shop door, talking and laughing. ‘I’ll see you later, Fran,’ she said. ‘I need to get back to the mill. There’s still so much stuff to sort out.’

‘You know the short cut back to the mill, don’t you?’ Fran asked. ‘Across the courtyard, take the path along the edge of the paddock and up to the Pearlstone—’

Holly felt a flutter of emotion beneath her breastbone, awareness, a sense of inevitability that stole her breath.

‘Pearlstone?’ she said.

‘It’s a sarsen stone.’ Fran was reaching for another roll, slicing it expertly, and spreading the butter. ‘It stands by the path. You can’t miss it.’

‘It’s an unusual name,’ Holly said. Like a whisper, she heard Espen Shurmer’s voice:

‘The Sistrin … A powerful pearl said to possess great magic …’

Legend had it that the crystal mirror and the Sistrin pearl had been used together to conjure magic. Ben’s disappearance had brought her to Ashdown Park where there was a sarsen called the Pearlstone. Could the sarsen be named for the Sistrin, the very pearl Shurmer thought Ben might have found and if so, did it offer a clue to the whereabouts of the
jewel itself? She did not know. She was not even sure if she was being fanciful to imagine it.

Holly went out into the yard. The sky was a crisp pale blue with wisps of cloud shredded very high. There would be no rain today. Following Fran’s directions, she crossed the cobbled stable yard and went through a gate into the paddock behind. A huge oak tree stood in the centre of the field with two horses sheltering in its shade. Both of them turned to watch Holly but neither moved towards her, as though they were too hot to be interested. The path climbed up the edge of the hill, a narrow chalky line between high grass and cow parsley and nettle. Elderflower overhung the path, just coming into white blossom. Holly had a sudden memory of her mother making elderflower wine in the kitchen of their house in Manchester. She could only have been six or seven at the time, and she had stood on a stool at the sink to help her mother wash the flowers. Hester had been there, too, and the three of them had chatted and laughed as they worked, while the scent of lemon and sugar and the creamy floral smell of the flowers had mingled and filled the kitchen with sweetness.

She stopped walking for a moment as a sharp pang of nostalgia caught her. She thought about her parents every day but not usually with such acute emotion. When they had died the chasm of loss had been so vast she had not dared to explore it in case she fell apart and could not put herself back together again. She had tiptoed around it ever since, letting the years lay a superficial veneer over the hurt until Ben’s disappearance had exposed the raw feelings once again. She wished she could talk to him. He would
tell her she was not going mad, seeing ghostly houses, making patterns where none existed. He would talk about the power of memory and the way the mind made connections to explain things. He would tell her she was not insane but that there was something important here, threads she needed to connect to make the whole story. Then she would understand.

She started to walk with renewed energy up the path. She could see the cool edge of the wood beckoning and standing beside the path a huge grey sarsen, the Pearlstone. It was shaped like a pear with a rounded base and narrower top, exactly like an enormous version of the Sistrin that she had seen in the portrait of Elizabeth. It was therefore the same shape as the Bohemian mirror too.

The pearl, the stone, the mirror.

Now that she saw the stone, she remembered it from when she and Ben had played in the woods as children though she had not known its name at the time. It had seemed even more enormous then and they had scrambled all over it and it had felt as ancient and immoveable as time itself.

Holly hesitated then placed her hand on it. The stone was warm where the sun beat down on it, and surprisingly smooth against her palm, its surface yellow and green with lichen, the grey of the sarsen containing tiny flecks of silver. From here there was a view down towards the village in one direction and into the heart of the wood in the other, where a path disappeared into the green tunnel of the trees.

After a moment Holly let her hand fall, feeling foolish. There had been no visions or thoughts that had come to her
in that moment to point the way towards Ben’s work and the elusive Sistrin. But she could hardly expect a signpost. She needed to do some research. Even so, as she turned away from the stone, she thought she heard a whisper of voices far away and felt a memory stir that she could not pin down.

She carried on along the path, plunging into the wood’s cool shade. On one side she could see a field full of huge white daisies. On the other the wood stretched away, a secret world of tangled paths and deep shadows. Holly had the strangest sensation of being watched but when she turned to look back through the trees there was only the Pearlstone, standing silent and tall, as it had done for centuries.

By the time she reached the mill she felt hot and sticky from the humidity of the day. She could almost imagine the splash of water over the mill wheel beckoning her to plunge into the pool to cool down but a drought had set in and there was no more than a trickle of water. The edge of the pool was thick with dust and dried grass. The sun was relentless.