House of Shadows (34 page)

T
hey buried Robert Verity in Ashdown churchyard on a grey afternoon a week later when the trees that sheltered the plot were tossed by a cold wind from the northeast. The grave was in a corner, sheltered by a group of sarsen stones that had made up the circle of megaliths called the Sistrin.

A number of Mark’s colleagues attended including the team who had raised Robert Verity’s body from the pit. Mark had researched Robert’s army record and requested military honours, and he was buried with the union flag draped on his coffin. Holly had loved Mark for that; for the care and thought he had put into making special this loneliest of farewells for a man out of his time. Even so, it felt sad and sombre, and Holly huddled under Fran’s black umbrella as the rain started to fall. She watched Mark’s face; he looked forbiddingly handsome today in his black funeral clothes and she wondered suddenly how many times he had
stood beside a grave for a fallen comrade. She slid her hand into the crook of his arm and he covered it with his and gave her a faint smile.

‘I wonder what his family thought,’ Fran said as they walked slowly back down the uneven path, through the black iron gates and out into the car park. ‘Robert Verity wasn’t an orphan, was he? There must have been people who wondered what had happened to him after he just disappeared.’

Holly had been thinking about that too. She had not told Fran, or anyone else other than Mark, that she thought it was Lord Evershot who had murdered Robert Verity since she could not explain how she knew, but on the basis of the remains and the pentant found on the body plus Lavinia’s memoir, they had agreed it was likely to be him.

‘The family line ended with him,’ Holly said. ‘According to the records, no one knew what had happened. He just disappeared.’

‘It’s so sad though. For Lavinia, I mean,’ Fran said. ‘She lost the chance of a future with him, didn’t she.’ She glanced at Holly. ‘I like to think they would have been happy together. From what you told me, they were soul mates, like Elizabeth Stuart and William Craven.’

‘That’s why I’m longing to know what happened to Lavinia afterwards,’ Holly said, with a sigh, ‘but I can’t find anything out.’

‘Why not come back to the café for a cup of tea?’ Fran asked. ‘We could raise a toast to Robert Verity.’

‘I’d love to but I have to get back to work,’ Holly
said. ‘I’ve got a commission for an anniversary present I’m working on.’ She hugged Fran. ‘I’ll see you later.’

Back at the mill, though, she felt restless and upset, unable to concentrate. She picked up various pieces of work, made mistakes with them and put them down in exasperation. Only a tiny slip of the drill here or a millimetre’s inaccuracy there would spoil the work. Probably no one else would notice, but Holly knew and she could not sell pieces that were less than perfect.

She took Bonnie out for a long walk on the Downs, where the sharp wind was colder still and chilled her face. They passed Verity’s Folly, shuttered with ivy and overgrown with nettles and grasses. Holly could not tell if her sadness was for Robert’s death or because of Ben. He felt so close to her here, where she could almost hear the echo of their childhood shouts and laughter.

Back at the water mill she managed to do a couple of hours of work then took out her laptop intent on trying to make more progress with her investigations into the complicated tangle of relationships that had connected William Craven and Robert Verity. She was searching Internet genealogy records for the woman who had been William Craven’s mistress, the one Lavinia had said had borne his illegitimate child and been Robert’s great-great grandmother. Lavinia had said that the crystal mirror had come to Robert as a family heirloom. It was a reasonable supposition then to imagine that Elizabeth had given the mirror to William Craven, and that for some reason he had given it as a gift to his mistress. Holly wondered if Elizabeth had known. The thought troubled her. Craven had by all
accounts been utterly devoted to Elizabeth. How had a piece of such value, of reputed magical power, fallen out of his hands?

By dint of persistent searching rather than anything else she uncovered rumours of various mistresses during Craven’s time in The Hague at the court of the Winter Queen, but only one name – Margaret Carpenter, not Margaret Verity. There was one reference to her in the 1630s and then she had disappeared. So Holly went looking for Margaret Verity instead and found a woman whose birth dates were slightly different, who had married in the late 1620s John, 3rd Lord Verity. A note in the text of the document recorded that John Verity was rumoured to be insane but that he and Margaret had produced one son, Robert, to carry on the family name. Digging further for information, Holly found a rather florid and diverting Victorian history of the Barony. The author clearly disapproved of Margaret and had referred to her as a ‘woman of light morals’. There were, he said, rumours about her fidelity, in particular during a period of time she had spent at the court of the Winter Queen in The Hague in the 1630s.

‘She was said to have consorted with a number of lovers and to have borne a son to Lord Craven, but as his lordship never made any claim on the child he was recognised as heir to the Verity title,’ the historian wrote frostily.

Holly closed her laptop, cutting off the bright white light from the screen. Night had fallen whilst she had been working. She had been so wrapped up in her research that she had forgotten to turn on the lamps.

She sat quietly for a while and thought about William
Craven and Margaret Carpenter. So much of what she had found out could only ever be rumour and speculation. It was the secret history that slipped through the gaps of the record.

On an impulse she called up the ebook again, wanting to see if there was any reference as to what happened to Margaret Verity. She missed it on the first read through as it was in a footnote, but on a second read she saw the tiny lettering at the bottom of the page:

‘John, 3rd Baron Verity outlived his spouse by fourteen years. She died in the Great Fire of London of 1666, the only aristocrat to do so, found in her husband’s house near Bridewell, overcome by smoke but without a scratch on her.’

Holly stood up a little stiffly and crossed to the windows to pull the curtains closed. She snapped on a lamp and the room immediately swam into comforting light. It was impossible not to wonder whether the crystal mirror, with its reputation of bringing destruction through fire, had wreaked some kind of macabre revenge on Margaret Carpenter.

It was pouring with rain again outside, the drops beating against the old tiles of the roof, gurgling in the pipes and splashing from the mill wheel into the pond. The wind was rising too. The mill mechanism creaked and groaned like a foundering ship. Suddenly there was a crash below Holly’s feet. She felt the floor shift. Bonnie woke up, raising her head, poised to bark. There was another sound, a sliding, scraping crack of wood giving way.

‘Damn.’

Holly knew what had happened. The increase in water over the wheel had loosened the mechanism down in the machine room below and something had come free. Perhaps a spar on the wheel had broken. It was old and rotten and she had been nagging Ben to get it fixed for years. It had happened once when she had been a child. She remembered her father opening the steps down to the cellar, the smell of old wet wood and musty cold that floated up from the dark depths, the chill that had touched her skin like clammy fingers and the thick sense of gloom like a living thing. She had vowed at the age of seven never to go down there, but now she had little choice. If she did not check the mill might flood.

Cursing under her breath she grabbed her torch from the dresser and made her way into the pantry. A trapdoor in the floor led down via an iron ladder into the machine room. That much she knew.

It was hard to lift the door. It was heavy and seemed to have stuck firmly shut. In the end she had to get a crowbar from under the sink to prise it up. Immediately there was the stench she remembered, the stagnant air and the damp cold. She pressed a hand over her face and tried not to breathe in the noxious smells. Tentatively she switched on the torch and peered down the shaft. She could see nothing below but fusty darkness. Cursing even more she leaned over the edge and shone the beam around, trying to work out where the walls were and how far down it was to the floor. It felt as though she was peering into an empty void. She knew that the sensible thing would be to climb down the iron ladder but it looked rusty and dangerous and she felt fear welling
up in her throat as though she were seven again. She did not want to go down there. She did not want to see the monsters lurking in the shadows …

She told herself not to be so stupid. The police had been down here only a couple of weeks ago when they had been searching for Ben. There was nothing to fear.

Holly set her foot to the first rung of the ladder. It shifted alarmingly under her weight. She hesitated for one fatal second and by then it was too late. She felt her feet go from under her and she fell in a bone-jarring, bruising tumble, down into blackness.

Debris was falling around her, showering her, dust filling her nose and choking her. She landed hard, and with a splash. The torch, which she had been clutching for dear life, rolled away.

Grabbing it with hands that shook even more now, Holly tried to sit and promptly banged her head on what felt like a curving roof. Through the pain in her skull she forced herself to breathe calmly, hearing the blood pounding in her head and waiting for the dust to clear from her lungs. She knew she was not trapped. There was no need to panic. In a moment, when she stopped feeling so sick and dizzy, she would be able to find her way back to the hatch and scramble out.

She flicked the torch back on and looked around. The beam had never been particularly powerful and now the torch was making a disturbing hissing noise. The water must have got into it. She was afraid that the beam would flicker and go out.

The pale light picked out a roof of arched brick closer
above her head than she had expected. The ladder had come away from the wall and was dangling a few feet above her head in a sickening fashion. To her right were broken spars of timber and the remains of what had once been a door. Holly had not known it was even there, let alone where it led. It looked like another water mine. The water was lapping through the jagged opening, dark and cold, rising all the time.

She shone the torch through the gap and saw a long, narrow passageway that stretched away into darkness. At the end of it was a pool of water unnaturally flat and glassy that reflected the light back at her like a mirror.

It felt then as though a breeze moved along the tunnel, ruffling the stagnant water into tiny ripples, stirring the surface to reveal something gold. Holly focussed the torch on the flash of colour and it grew stronger, floating closer, links in a chain that seemed to ebb and flow with the tide, until it washed up beside her. Holly put out a hand and touched it. The golden chain was battered and barely recognisable and the clasp, where once an enormous pearl had hung, was empty.

The edge of the beam of light caught something else then, something paler and horrible, and what looked like a face. With a strangled cry Holly recoiled, almost dropping the torch for a second time. The light flashed across an arm, hanging like a dead weight in the water, casting grotesque shadows against the brick wall of the tunnel, lapping closer all the time.

Nausea grabbed Holly. There was a sickening fear in the pit of her stomach but it was as nothing to the sudden
inexplicable sense of evil that paralysed her. The presence of it grew until she felt as though she was being swallowed in darkness. She could hear the roar of water in her ears and smell the scent of death. She felt as though she was drowning, sucked down into the depths until she could no longer breathe. Her lungs were bursting. She was suffocating in water, a great flood of it racing to claim her and break over her head …

Somewhere high above her she heard Bonnie bark sharply, over and over, and the sound pulled her out of the nightmare and somehow she forced her trembling legs to move. The torch went out and she left it behind, scrambling across the waterlogged floor, reaching for the first rung of the steps, not caring that they swung wildly as she hauled herself up, desperate, shaking, thinking of nothing but the next handhold, slipping, wrenching her muscles, clinging on in desperation until finally she pulled herself out of the hatch and collapsed onto the kitchen floor.

She lay there, sick, winded, her heart pounding, whilst Bonnie licked her face. Eventually she sat up and noticed that she was completely drenched as though she had swum through a flood. She gave Bonnie a huge hug and staggered to her feet, leaving wet footprints across the floor as she ran for her phone and called the police.