House of Shadows (3 page)

Craven shifted, the table creaking as he leaned his weight against it. ‘Prince Maurice said I was reckless,’ he corrected gently. ‘It’s not the same.’

‘He spoke of your bravery and skill,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Take the compliment when it is offered, Lord Craven.’

He inclined his head although she was not sure whether it was simply to hide the laughter brimming in his eyes. ‘Majesty.’

There was no doubt, the man lacked deference. As the grandson of a farm labourer he should not have had a manner so easy it bordered on insolence. Yet Elizabeth found she liked it. She liked the way he did not flatter and fawn.

The silence started to settle between them. It felt comfortable. She knew she should go before the ceremony ended; before Frederick came looking for her. She had told him she wanted no part of the ceremony tonight and to be found here would invite questions. Yet still she did not move.

‘You are not one of the Order?’ she asked, gesturing towards the door to the water chamber.

He shook his head. ‘Merely a humble squire. I don’t believe—’ He broke off sharply. For the first time she sensed constraint in him.

‘You don’t believe in the principles of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘You don’t believe in a better world, in seeking universal harmony?’

His face was half-shadowed, his expression difficult to read. ‘Such ambitions seem worthy indeed,’ he said slowly, ‘but I am a simple man, Your Majesty, a soldier. How might this universal harmony be achieved?’

Ten years earlier, Elizabeth might have told him it would be through the study of the wisdom of the ancient past, through philosophy and science. She had believed in the
cause then, believed that they might build a better world. But the words were hollow to her now, as was the promise that the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross had held for the future.

‘… Scrying in the waters.’ Craven’s voice drowned out the clamour of her memories. He sounded disapproving. ‘Sometimes it is better not to know what the future holds.’

Elizabeth agreed with that. If she had known her future ten years ago she was not sure she would have had the strength to go forwards towards it.

‘The Knights have powerful magic.’ She could not resist teasing him. ‘They can read secret thoughts. They can pass through locked doors. They can even turn base metal into gold.’

She thought she heard him snort. ‘As the son of a merchant, I know better than most how gold is made and it is not from base metal.’

Their eyes met. Elizabeth smiled. The silence seemed to hum gently between them, alive with something sharp and curious.

‘Are you wed, Lord Craven?’ she asked on impulse.

Craven looked surprised but no more so than Elizabeth felt. She had absolutely no idea as to why she would ask a near stranger such an impertinent question

‘No, I am not wed,’ Craven answered, after a moment. ‘There was a betrothal to the daughter of the Earl of Devonshire—’ He stopped.

A Cavendish, Elizabeth thought. He looked high indeed for the son of a merchant. But then if he was as rich as men said he would be courted on all sides for money, whilst those
who sought it sniped at his common ancestry behind his back.

‘What happened?’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘I preferred soldiering.’

‘Poor woman.’ Elizabeth could not imagine being dismissed with a shrug and a careless sentence. That was not the lot of princesses. If they were not beautiful men pretended that they were. If they were fortunate enough to possess beauty, charm and wit then poets wrote sonnets to them and artists had no need to flatter them in portraits. She had lived with that truth since she was old enough to look in the mirror and know she had beauty and more to spare.

‘Soldiering and marriage don’t mix,’ Craven said bluntly.

‘But a man needs an heir to his estates,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Especially a man with a fortune as great as yours.’

‘I have two brothers,’ Craven said. His tone had eased. ‘They are my heirs.’

‘It’s not the same as having a child of your own,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Do not all men want a son to follow them?’

‘Or a daughter,’ Craven said.

‘Oh, daughters …’ Elizabeth’s wave of the hand dismissed them. ‘We are useful enough when required to serve a dynastic purpose, but it is not the same.’

His gaze came up and caught hers, hard, bright, challenging enough to make her catch her breath. ‘Do you truly believe that? That you are the lesser sex?’

She had never questioned it.

‘I heard men say,’ Craven said, ‘that King Charles believes he gets better sense from you, his sister, than from his brother-in-law.’

Insolence again. But Elizabeth was tempted into a smile.

‘Perhaps my brother is not a good judge of character,’ she said.

‘Perhaps you should value yourself more highly, Majesty.’ His gaze released hers and she found she could breathe again.

‘History demonstrates the truth.’ Craven had turned slightly away, settling the smouldering log deeper into the fire with his booted foot. ‘Your own godmother, the Queen of England, was a very great ruler.’

‘I think sometimes that she was a man,’ Elizabeth said.

Craven looked startled. Then he gave a guffaw. ‘In heart and spirit perhaps. Yet there are plenty of men lesser than she. My father admired her greatly and he was the shrewdest, hardest judge of character I know.’ He refilled the cup with water; offered it to her. Elizabeth shook her head.

‘Did not the perpetrators of the Gunpowder Treason intend for you to reign?’ Craven said. ‘They must have believed you could be Queen of England.’

‘I would have been a Catholic puppet.’ Elizabeth shuddered. ‘Reign, yes. Rule, most certainly not.’

‘And in Bohemia?’

‘Frederick was King,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I was his consort.’ She smiled at him. ‘You seek to upset the natural order of things, Lord Craven, by putting women so high.’

‘Craven!’ The air stirred, the door of the chamber swung open and Frederick strode in, his cloak of red swirling about him. In contrast to Craven, austere and dark, he looked as gaudy as a court magician. Craven straightened, bowing. Elizabeth felt odd, bereft, as though some sort of
link between them had been snapped too abruptly. Craven’s attention was all on Frederick now. That was what it meant to rule, even if it was in name only. Frederick demanded and men obeyed.

‘The lion rises!’ Frederick was more animated than Elizabeth had seen him in months. Melancholy had lifted from his long, dark face. His eyes burned. Elizabeth realised that he was so wrapped up in the ceremony that he was still living it. He seemed barely to notice her presence let alone question what she was doing alone in the guardroom with his squire. He drew Charles Louis into the room too and threw an arm expansively about his heir’s shoulders.

This is our triumph
, his gesture said.
I will recapture our patrimony.

‘The lion rises!’ Frederick repeated. ‘We will have victory! I will re-take Heidelberg whilst the eagle falls.’ He clapped Charles Louis on the shoulder. ‘We all saw the visions in the mirror, did we not, my son? The pearl and the glass together prophesied for us as they did in times past.’

A violent shiver racked Elizabeth. The mirror and the pearl had shown Frederick a war-torn future. She remembered the flames reflected in the water, turning it the colour of blood.

‘The lion is the Swedish king’s emblem,’ she said. It was also Frederick’s heraldic device but she thought it much more likely that it would be Gustavus Adolphus whose fortunes would rise further whilst Frederick would lie where he had fallen, unwanted, ignored. He was no solider. He could not lead, let alone re-take his capital.

She caught Craven’s gaze and realised that he was thinking
exactly the same thing as she. There was a warning in his eyes though; Frederick was frowning, a petulant cast to his mouth.

‘It was
my
emblem,’ he said, sounding like a spoilt child. ‘It was my lion we saw.’

Craven was covering Elizabeth’s tactlessness with words of congratulation.

‘Splendid news, Your Majesty,’ he said smoothly. ‘Do you plan to raise an army to join the King of Sweden’s forces immediately?’

‘Not now!’ Elizabeth said involuntarily. The room seemed cold of a sudden, a wind blowing through it, setting her shivering. Her hand strayed to her swollen belly. ‘The baby …’ she said.

Frederick’s face was a study in indecision. ‘Of course,’ he said, after a moment. ‘I must stay to see you safely delivered of the child, my dear.’ His kiss on her cheek was wet, clumsy. It felt as though his mind was already far away. ‘I will write to his Swedish Majesty and prepare the ground,’ he said. ‘There is much to plan.’

The cold inside Elizabeth intensified. She tried to tell herself it was only the shock of their fortunes changing after so many impotent years, but it felt deeper and darker than that. She knew with a sharp certainty that Frederick should not go. It was wrong, dangerous. Although she had not seen the future, she felt as though she had. She felt as though she had looked into the mirror and seen into the heart of grief and loss, seen a landscape that was terrifyingly barren.

‘The winter is no time for campaigning,’ Craven was watching her face. There was a frown between his brows.
‘Besides, there is much to do before we may leave. Troops to send for, supplies to arrange.’ He stopped, started again. ‘Your Majesty—’

Elizabeth realised that he was addressing her. The grip of the darkness released her so suddenly she almost gasped. It felt like a lifting of a curse; she was light-headed.

‘We should get you back to the palace, madam,’ Craven said. ‘You must be tired.’

‘I am quite well, thank you, Lord Craven,’ Elizabeth snapped. She was angry with him. She had thought she had seen something different in him, yet here he was fawning over Frederick like every other courtier she had known. And for all his compliments to her earlier, he spoke to her now as though she were as fragile and inconsequential as any other woman.

Immediately his expression closed down. ‘Of course, Majesty.’

‘Frederick,’ Elizabeth said. ‘If I might take your arm …’

Frederick was impatient. Elizabeth could feel it in him, in the deliberation with which he slowed his steps to help her up the spiral stair, in the tension in the muscles of his arm beneath her hand. He wanted to be back at the Wassenaer Hof, writing letters, planning a conqueror’s return to Germany. She held him back, with her pregnant belly and her woman’s fears. He was solicitous of her, masking his irritation with concern, but she had known him too long to be fooled. War was coming and that was man’s work.

Charles Louis trailed along behind them through the scented garden, scuffing his boots in the gravel, his expression sulky. He appeared to have caught none of his
father’s excitement. Elizabeth could hear Craven talking to him. Their voices were too low for her to hear the words, but soon Charles Louis’ tone lifted into animation again. His quicksilver volatility was not easy to control and Elizabeth admired the way Craven had been able to distract him.

The Knights of the Rosy Cross had gone. The gardens were empty; a checkerboard of moon and shadow. Frederick was still talking, of the fall of the city of Leipzig to Gustavus Adolphus, of the destruction of his hated enemy the Spanish general Tilly, of the visions in the mirror, the lion rampant, the walls of Heidelberg rising again, of their future, suddenly so bright.

Elizabeth crushed her doubts and followed her husband into the Wassenaer Hof. The light enveloped them; for a second there was a hush and then Frederick’s blazing enthusiasm seemed to flare like a contagion through the crowds of courtiers and everyone was talking at once, laughing, lit by feverish excitement even though they did not know why they were celebrating. It was then that the cold came back to her, like the turning of a dark tide, setting her shaking so that she had to clutch the high back of one of the chairs to steady herself. The wood dug into her fingers, scoring the skin.

Frederick had not noticed. He was too busy thrusting his way through the crowd, turning to answer men’s questions. It was Craven who was watching, Craven who gestured impatiently for some of her women to come forwards to help her.

‘Lord Craven.’ Elizabeth put her hand on Craven’s arm to halt him when he too would have hurried away.

‘Madam?’ She could not read his expression.

‘You are an experienced soldier.’ Elizabeth spoke abruptly. ‘Watch over my husband for me. Keep him safe. He does not know how …’ She stopped before she betrayed herself, betrayed Frederick, too far, biting back the words on her tongue.

He does not know how to fight.

‘Majesty.’ Craven bowed, his expression still impassive.

‘Thank you,’ Elizabeth said.

He took her hand in his, kissed it. It was a courtier’s gesture, not that of a soldier. His touch was warm and very sure.

He released her, bowed again. She watched him stride away through the throng of people. He did not look back.

London, the present day.

H
olly was asleep when the call came through on her mobile. She had been working all day and most of the evening on pieces for her latest collection of engraved glass and she was exhausted. She had left her little mews studio and workshop at ten o’clock, had grabbed a quick sandwich and gone to bed.

She swam up from the depths of a dream, groping for the phone that lay on the bedside table. The bright light of the screen made her wince. Normally she switched it off overnight, but she must have forgotten. She and Guy had been quarrelling over her work again. He had stomped off to the spare room, slamming the door, making a theatrical performance of his annoyance. Usually, Holly would have lain awake and fretted that they were arguing again. Just now she was too damned tired to care.

The icon on the screen was her brother’s picture. The time was two seventeen in the morning. The phone rang on and on.

Frowning, Holly pressed the green button to answer. ‘Ben? What on earth are you doing calling at this time—’

‘Aunt Holly?’ The voice at the other end of the line was already talking, high-pitched and breaking with fear, the words lost between sobs and gulps. It was not Ben but his six-year-old daughter, Florence.

‘Aunt Holly, please come! I don’t know what to do. Daddy’s disappeared and I’m on my own here. Please help me! I—’

‘Flo!’ Holly sat up, reaching for the light, her hand slipping in her haste as her niece’s terror seeped into her consciousness and set her heart pounding. ‘Flo, wait! Tell me what’s happened. Where’s Daddy? Where are you?’

‘I’m at the mill.’ Florence was crying. ‘Daddy’s been gone for hours and I don’t know where he is! Aunt Holly, I’m scared! Please come—’ The line crackled, the words breaking up.

‘Flo!’ Holly said again, urgently. ‘Flo—’ But there was nothing other than the rustle and hiss of the line and then a long, empty silence.

‘Are you mad?’

Guy had emerged from the spare room two minutes previously wearing only his crumpled boxer shorts, bleary-eyed, his hair standing on end in bad-tempered spikes.

‘You can’t shoot off to Wiltshire at this time of night,’ he said. ‘What a bloody stupid idea.’

‘It’s Oxfordshire,’ Holly said automatically. She checked the clock, pulling on her boots at the same time. The zip stuck. She wrenched it hard. Two twenty-seven. She had already wasted ten minutes.

She had rung back repeatedly but there had been no reply. The mill house, Ben and Natasha’s holiday cottage, did not have a landline and the mobile reception had always been patchy. You had to be standing in exactly the right place to get a signal.

‘Have you tried Tasha’s mobile?’ Guy asked.

‘She’s working abroad somewhere.’ Ben had told her but Holly couldn’t remember exactly where. ‘I left her a message.’ Tasha had a high-powered job with a TV travel show and was frequently away.

‘Ben’s probably turned up again by now.’ Guy sat down next to her on the bed, putting what she supposed was meant to be a reassuring hand on her arm. ‘Look, Hol, don’t panic. I mean maybe the kid got it wrong—’

‘Her name’s Florence,’ Holly said tightly. It irritated the hell out of her that Guy seldom remembered any of her family or friends’ names, mostly because he didn’t try. ‘She sounded terrified,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to do?’ She swung around fiercely on him. ‘Leave her there alone?’

‘Like I said, Ben will have turned up by now.’ Guy smothered a yawn. ‘He probably crept out to meet up with some tart, thinking the kid was asleep and wouldn’t notice. I know that’s what I’d be doing if I was married to that hard-faced bitch.’

‘I daresay,’ Holly said, not troubling to hide the edge in her voice. ‘But Ben’s not like you. He—’ She stopped. ‘Ben would never leave Flo on her own,’ she said.

She stood up. The terrified pounding of her heart had settled to an anxious flutter now, but urgency still beat through her. Two thirty. It would take her an hour and a half to get to Ashdown if there was no traffic. An hour and a half when Flo would be alone and fearful. The terror Holly had felt earlier tightened in her gut. Where the hell was Ben? And why had he not taken his phone with him wherever he had gone? Why leave it in the house?

She racked her brains to remember their last phone conversation. He’d told her that he and Florence were heading to the mill for a long weekend. He’d taken a few days off from his surgery in Bristol. It was the early May Bank Holiday.

‘I’m doing some family history research,’ he’d said, and Holly had laughed, thinking he must be joking, because history of the family or any other sort had never remotely interested her brother before.

She was wasting time.

‘Have you seen my car keys?’ she asked.

‘No.’ Guy followed her into the living room, blinking as she snapped on the main light and flooded the space with brightness.

‘Jesus,’ he said irritably, ‘Now I’m wide awake. You’re determined to ruin my night.’

‘I thought,’ Holly said, ‘that you might come with me.’

The genuine surprise on his face told her everything she needed to know.

‘Why go at all?’ Guy said gruffly, turning away. ‘I still don’t get it. Just call the police, or a neighbour to go over and check it out. Isn’t there some old friend of yours who lives near there? Fiona? Freda?’

‘Fran,’ Holly said. She grabbed her keys off the table. ‘Fran and Iain are away for a couple of days,’ she said. ‘And the reason I’m going—’ she stalked up to him, ‘is because my six-year-old niece is alone and terrified and she called me for help. Do you get it now? She’s a child. She’s frightened. And you’re suggesting I go back to bed and forget about it?’

She picked up her bag, checking for her purse, phone, and tablet. The rattle of the keys had brought Bonnie, her Labrador retriever, in from her basket in the kitchen. She looked wide-awake, feathery tail wagging.

‘No, Bon Bon,’ Holly said. ‘You’re staying—’ She stopped; looked at Guy. He’d forget to feed her, walk her. And anyway, it was comforting to have Bonnie with her. She grabbed Bonnie’s food from the kitchen cupboard and looped her lead over her arm.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’ In the doorway she paused. ‘Shall I call you when I know what’s happened?’ she asked Guy.

He was already disappearing into the bedroom, reclaiming the space she had left. ‘Oh, sure,’ he said, and Holly knew she would not.

Holly rang Ben’s number every couple of minutes but there was never any reply, only the repeated click of the voicemail telling her that Ben was unavailable and that she should
leave a message. Eventually that stopped, too. There was no return call from Tasha, either. Holly wondered about calling her grandparents in Oxford. They were much closer to Ashdown Mill and to Florence than she was, though the car was eating up the miles of empty road. The mesmerising slide of the streetlights was left behind and there was nothing but darkness about her now as she drove steadily west.

In the end she decided not to call Hester and John. She didn’t want to give either of them a heart attack, especially when there might be no reason to worry. Even though she was furious with Guy, she knew he might be right. Ben could have returned by now and Florence might be fast asleep again and, with the adaptability of a child, have forgotten that she had even called for help.

Holly had not wanted to call the police for lots of reasons ranging from the practical – that it could be a false alarm – to the less morally justifiable one of not wanting to cause problems for her brother. She and Ben had always protected each other, drawing closer than close after their parents had been killed in a car crash when Holly was eleven and Ben thirteen. They had looked out for each other with a fierce loyalty that had remained fundamentally unchanged over the years. Their understanding of each other was relaxed and easy these days, but just as close, just as deep. Or so Holly had thought before this had happened, leaving her wondering what the hell her brother was up to.

She pushed away the unwelcome suspicion that there might be things about Ben that she neither knew nor understood. Guy had planted the seed of doubt, but she crushed it angrily; she did know that Ben and Tasha were
going through a bad patch but she could not imagine Ben being unfaithful. He simply wasn’t the type. Even less could she imagine him neglecting his child. There had to be some other reason for his disappearance, if he had actually vanished.

But there was Florence, who was only six, and she had been alone and terrified. So it was an easy decision in the end. Holly had called the local police, keeping her explanation as short and factual as possible, sounding far calmer than she had felt. If anything happened to Florence and she had not done her best to help, she would have failed Ben as well as her niece.

The sign for Hungerford flashed past, surprising her. She was at the turn already. It was twelve minutes to four. Ahead of her the sky was inky dark, but in her rear-view mirror she thought she could see the first faint light of a spring dawn. Perhaps, though, that was wishful thinking. The truth was that she didn’t feel comfortable in the countryside. She was a city girl through and through, growing up first in Manchester and then in Oxford after her parents had died, moving to London to go to art college and staying there ever since. London was a good place for her glass-engraving business. She had a little gallery and shop in the mews adjoining the flat, and a sizeable clientele.

At the motorway roundabout she turned right towards Wantage then left for Lambourn. She knew the route quite well, but the road looked deceptively different when the only detail she could see was picked out in her headlights. There were curves and turns and shadowed hollows she did not recognise. She was heading deep into the countryside
now. A few isolated cottages flashed past, shuttered and dark. She took the right turn for Lambourn and plunged down into the valley, the car’s lights illuminating the white-painted wooden palings of the racehorse gallops that ran beside the road. The little town was silent as she wove her way through the narrow streets. As the stables and houses fell away and the fields rolled back in, Holly had the same feeling she always had on approaching Ashdown; a sense of expectancy she had never quite understood, a feeling of falling back through time as the dark road opened up before her and the hills swept away to her right, bleak and empty, crowned with a weathercock.

She and Ben had raced up to the top of Weathercock Hill as children, throwing themselves down panting in the springy grass at the top, staring up at the weather vane as it pierced the blue of the sky high above. The whole place had felt enchanted.

Ben. Her chest tightened again with anxiety. She was almost there. What would she find?

The lights picked out a huge advertising hoarding by the side of the road. The words flashed past before she could make out more than the first few:

‘Ashdown Park, a select development of historic building conversions …’

Trees pressed close now to the left, rank upon rank of them like an army in battle order. There was a moment when the endless wood fell back and through the gap in the trees Holly thought she saw a gleam of white; a house standing tall and foursquare with the moonlight reflecting off the glass in the cupola and silvering the ball on the roof.
A moment later and the vision had gone. The woods closed ranks, thick and forbidding, swallowing the house in darkness.