House of Shadows (17 page)

‘Majesty, it simply will not do. To claim sickness would merely serve to draw attention. The court would be swarming with rumour and speculation. Everyone would be thronging your chambers waiting for news of your condition.’

Elizabeth sighed. She knew he was right. Just for once, though, she had wanted to do something active. Sitting at her desk, writing letters, sending messengers, picking her way through the endless tricky business of diplomacy felt tedious and restrictive. Why was it only men who could take action?

‘Send me,’ Craven said again. ‘You can trust me, Majesty.’

He put out a hand and took hers in a strong grip. ‘I will not fail you,’ he said. ‘I will never fail you.’

Her doubts flickered again like shadows crossing the sun. She repressed them.

‘Thank you,’ she said, returning his clasp, interlocking her fingers with his. ‘I know I can trust you.’

T
he phone call had been untraceable, number withheld. Holly imagined that the police would probably be able to discover who had called but as she had purloined Ben’s phone she wasn’t in a position to ask them unless she handed it over. She hesitated only because she wondered about the caller. There had not been anything that felt threatening about the call but she had felt that person’s quiet desperation. She wanted to find them and, in an odd way, she wanted to reassure them. Except she could offer no reassurance.

She thought about it a lot the following day as she worked on the design for a set of glasses that she was producing for an anniversary present. The work was detailed and precise, the kind of thing she loved normally; the kind of thing that was supremely difficult when her concentration was shot to pieces as it was now. It was something of a relief when there was a tentative knock at the workshop door and a girl came
in. She was skinny and beautiful, dressed in low-slung combat trousers, a cutaway green top and a pair of navy blue wedge mules; the girl Holly had seen at the bus stop on the day she had met Mark.

‘Hi.’ She edged around the display shelves, walking in a slightly concave manner, like someone in a china shop. Holly had noticed that plenty of people did this. It was as though the presence of the glass made them uneasy. ‘Fran sent me. She said you might be able to help me.’ She was holding a plastic carrier bag, which she laid on Holly’s desk. The contents were wrapped in tissue paper, which she very carefully unwrapped. Holly could see that it had once been a glass bowl. Now it was a jumble of shattered fragments. The faint, dusty sunshine slid through the studio window and scintillated off its spiky edges.

‘Oh.’ Holly pushed her goggles up into her hair and bent to examine the pieces. ‘Oh dear.’

‘Can you mend it?’ The girl asked. There was hope and eagerness in her eyes.

‘No,’ Holly said regretfully. ‘I’m afraid I can’t. It’s too badly smashed.’

The girl did not seem surprised but her narrow shoulders slumped under the green top. ‘Bloody, bloody Joe,’ she said gloomily. ‘I told him to be careful.’

‘What happened?’ Holly asked. Not that it made any difference knowing how the bowl had been broken. She could tell from looking at the shards that it had been a high quality piece, Caithness or Dartington Crystal perhaps. It would have been very beautiful.

The girl thrust her hands into the waistband of the combat trousers.

‘Like I said, it was Joe’s fault. He was messing about and he just bumped into the table and sent it flying. I’m Flick Warner, by the way. Joe’s my younger brother. Older than me, I mean, but the younger of the two.’

‘Which must mean that Mark is your brother, too,’ Holly said. She should have seen it at once. Whilst Flick’s hair was blonde, she had the same brown eyes and breathtaking angles to her face that Mark had. On Flick, though, they were softened so that she looked spectacularly pretty but slightly sulky too.

‘It’s Mark’s bowl.’ Flick looked awkward. ‘He won it for one of those charity endurance events he did. So it’s really important, sentimental value as well as being expensive …’ She trailed off unhappily. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Why don’t you tell him what happened?’ Holly suggested. ‘I’m sure he’d rather know the truth and since it isn’t fixable—’

‘But you could make a replacement, couldn’t you?’ Flick broke in. She blushed and Holly suddenly wondered if she was younger than she had thought. ‘It’s just that I can’t tell him.’ She knotted her hands together, twisting her fingers so the knuckles showed white. ‘Mark’s great and I don’t want to upset him. He’d hate me.’

Holly smiled at the teenage over-exaggeration. ‘Mark’s not that scary is he? I mean I know he can be a bit abrupt, but you’re his sister. I’m sure he’d understand it was an accident.’

‘It’s complicated.’ Flick was avoiding her eyes now. ‘I live
with Mark during term time, you see, and Joe comes to visit some weekends from uni and neither of us want to piss him off in case he throws us out and we have to go back to living with our parents.’ There was an edge of desperation to her voice. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Dad’s fine but he travels a lot so it’s just Mum and me, and trust me that is not a good combination …’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘Could you help us out? Make something similar? That way, Mark need never know.’

She fumbled anxiously in the raffia bag slung over her shoulder. ‘Fran recommended you, you know, she says you’re really good.’

She saw the look in Holly’s eye and rushed on. ‘Look, I’ve brought some photographs. I thought it was a good idea … So you can see what it was like—’

She tossed them onto the desk. Holly picked one up slowly, scanned it. It showed the bowl in all its glorious detail, down to the engraved lettering on the base, which stated that it had been awarded to Captain Mark Warner for completing the Antarctic Endurance Trek. It was decorated with beautifully engraved laurel leaves symbolising victory.

With a sigh Holly turned to another of the photos. It was a typical family snapshot – Sunday lunch or someone’s birthday – and the family was gathered around a big walnut dining table with the crystal bowl in the middle. There was an older man wearing a grey suit, jovial smile and slightly strained expression and a gracious-looking lady in shift dress and pearls, whom Holly guessed must be Mrs Warner.

‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you that honesty is the best policy?’ Holly knew she was really too young to sound like
somebody’s mother, but she had to try. ‘It really would be better to own up …’

Flick grinned. She had pleasingly uneven teeth and an engaging smile. Holly could feel herself weakening.

‘I’m frequently told that. I couldn’t possibly let Joe get into such trouble, though.’

Joe was also in the photo, lounging at the foot of the table next to a woman Holly did not recognise. Holly thought that he looked well able to take care of himself. Again there was the resemblance to Mark but in Joe’s case he looked like a raffish eighteenth-century poet after a long night in the coffee house. Flick was sitting next to her father. Mark wasn’t in the shot so perhaps he had been the one taking the photograph.

‘Hmm,’ Holly said. ‘Well, I’d love to be able to help you but—’

‘Great! We’ll pay you—’

‘But I shouldn’t. It’s unethical.’

Flick screwed her face up. ‘I know! And I shouldn’t be asking you, but—’ She pushed her long, fair hair away from her face. ‘It’s just that it’s irreplaceable in the true sense, isn’t it? I mean, we’d never get another one like it.’

‘No.’ Holly came to a decision. She put the photographs back on the table and sat down slowly. Her swivel chair was high, like a dentist’s stool. She leant her elbows on her work desk and rested her chin on her hand. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I don’t know Mark well but I’m willing to bet he would far rather know what had happened than you spend good money on a fake that will never look exactly the same anyway.’

Flick’s shoulders slumped. ‘I know you’re right. OK.’ She straightened. ‘I’ll do it. Only—’ She looked anxious. ‘You won’t say anything to Mark, will you? It was stupid of me to think I could get around it like this but I’d rather tell him in my own way.’

‘As long as you do,’ Holly said, trying not to sound pompous. ‘And tell him it was Joe who did it. He shouldn’t have left you in the lurch in the first place.’

Flick’s expression lightened and she gave Holly a spontaneous hug. ‘Thanks!’ She backed towards the door, narrowly missing knocking over a box of paperweights.

‘Oops!’ Flick said. She cast a look around. ‘It’s very different in here now, isn’t it? You wouldn’t know it was the same place.’

She paused like a bird on the edge of flight and for a second Holly had the oddest sense that she wanted to say something else but then with a casual wave she was gone. There was silence for a long while and then a car door slammed; there was a roar of a powerful engine that sounded intrusive in the quiet. Holly caught sight of a flash of colour as a sports car shot off down the track to the village.

Shaking her head, Holly righted the box and went back to her work desk. She thought about Flick’s hug and felt slightly bemused. She didn’t think she invited closeness, not because she was unfriendly but because she was reserved. Flick must be the sort of person who rode roughshod over those kinds of reservations, which was lovely but surprising.

Or perhaps this was what life was like in the village. Really she had no idea. She’d never lived anywhere like Ashdown before.

Tomorrow she was determined to go down to Mark’s office and ask very nicely if he could show her the maps and documents that Ben had been studying. Fran had been right. She did need to start behaving normally around him.

She reached above her work desk and opened the window shutters. Pale light filtered into the room. The wood was warm where the sun had beaten against it all day and the air in the workshop was still heavy with heat. Holly leaned over the workbench and picked up the glass she had been working on before Flick had interrupted her. She tilted it so that the light from window struck the glass. She was her own hardest critic, but she was pleased with the work. There was a pattern of honeysuckle beneath the surface, entwined and grasping upwards on woody stems. It reached towards her, forever blocked by the smooth glass. Holly turned the glass around and touched the letters cut into the other side.

‘Anne and Henry,’ the inscription read. ‘Congratulations on 25 years of unmarried bliss.’

Holly smiled. She loved the process by which she matched the gift to the recipient. In this case her client had been Henry’s sister, who had told her that the couple ran a nursery and loved plants and nature, and preferred simple uncluttered styles to fussiness. Holly studied the pattern on the glass. It was pretty, perfect and ready to be packaged in the morning.

She pulled the workshop door closed behind her, wondering as she did so whether Flick Warner would summon up the courage to tell Mark what had happened to the glass bowl. She hoped so but she wasn’t sure. There had been something fragile about Flick.

Holly walked slowly along the path to the mill. It was not much cooler outside but it was fresher. A slight breeze ran through the trees bringing with it the scent of cut grass and the call of birds.

Oddly, the door of the mill was ajar. Holly knew she had not left it like that and her heart started to race. She pushed it wide.

‘Ben!’

Her call fell into silence. She waited a second then shouted again. There was no reply. She ran up the stairs, quickly checking each room. There was nothing, only Bonnie, standing looking up at her enquiringly, wagging her tail in hope of a walk.

Holly sat down abruptly on the top step. She could feel the mad scramble of her heart start to subside and a wave of sick disappointment wash over her. Briefly she put her head in her hands. Perhaps she had been mistaken and had left the door off the latch. A cursory glance about the room suggested that nothing was missing, and Bonnie would surely have barked if there had been any intruders.

Slowly, feeling suddenly tired, she took Bonnie’s lead from the shelf and they went out, taking a path that plunged deep into the wood. The path took them along wide grassy rides and through tunnels of lime and oak trees, crossing other paths, intersecting, dipping down through hollow ways that felt older than time. Bonnie played with her ball on a rope in the wide clearings. They arrived in the village and Holly saw that the door of the tea room was still ajar so she pushed it and went in.

‘Fran!’

Fran looked up from the till. Her lips moved. ‘Seventy five, eighty … Damn it, Holly, I’d nearly finished and now it’ll take me another half hour!’

‘Stick it in the safe and count it up tomorrow,’ Holly suggested, coming inside and closing the door behind her. ‘How come you’re so late anyway?’

‘I got chatting,’ Fran said vaguely. ‘No worries – all I’m missing is the church roof fund committee meeting. They’re getting terribly excited about the barn dance.’ She took off the ridiculously sexy glasses that she used for figure work and regarded Holly thoughtfully. ‘You are going to come, aren’t you, Holly?’

‘I have two left feet,’ Holly said. ‘Please don’t make me inflict them on the unsuspecting members of the village.’

‘It’ll be fun,’ Fran said. ‘Anyway, it’s not until October. Plenty of time to learn the Dozy Do.’ She disappeared into the stock room and Holly heard the heavy clunk of the safe closing.

Fran re-emerged and started to pull down the metal blinds.

‘Did Flick Warner come to find you?’ she asked. ‘She said she needed a glass engraver.’

Holly looked at her. There was more than a hint of curiosity in Fran’s voice but she chose to ignore the hint. ‘She did. Thanks.’

Fran narrowed her eyes. ‘So what’s it all about?’

‘Oh,’ Holly said, deliberately vague, ‘just an enquiry, but thanks for recommending me.’

Fran glared. ‘You’re short-changing me …’

‘Yeah …’ Holly grinned at her. ‘Client confidentiality …’

Fran snorted. ‘You just use that as an excuse for keeping secrets. Don’t think I don’t know!’