Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor (11 page)

All morning, they’d kept the door of the stable propped open, and the fresh air stirred the decades of dust and dirt. Sweat coated Heather’s forehead, and she tried to wipe it off with her sleeve. When she looked over at Ella, her daughter laughed at her. “You just smeared dirt across your face.”

“Do you have a problem with dirt?”

“Not particularly, but I didn’t think you were a fan.” Ella lifted the lid off another box. “It looks like you were caught in some sort of storm.”

Her gaze roamed over the remaining seventy-two containers stacked on the floor, and she felt as if she’d been trapped in the perfect storm. She and Ella had been working hard for five days, cleaning out the closets in the upstairs bedrooms first before tackling the ground floor and then diving into the storage here. After she finished, she still had to sort through her parent’s things in the basement.

Ella had been disappointed that they hadn’t found anything about Oliver Croft yet, but she kept searching, determined to find out what happened to the young man who’d lived next door.

When her daughter’s phone beeped, she pulled it out of her pocket, a smile crossing her face as she read her husband’s text.

Nick had texted Heather a handful of times this week, mostly with questions about restoration projects and then frustration that she planned to stay the entire two weeks. He seemed to miss her expertise more than her company though, and if she was honest, she didn’t particularly miss his company either.

Ella was right—Nick was stuffy and a bit pompous. But he was also safe. Her daughter didn’t understand Heather’s need for a safe friendship. Nick Davis might not make her smile, but he would also never break her heart.

While Ella texted Matthew back, Heather lifted out another file and skimmed through a set of her father’s articles about the production of penicillin in Clevedon. Her parents rarely talked about their years living in that town, about seventy miles southwest of Bibury, though her mum told her she’d lived with a family in Clevedon after being evacuated from her family’s neighborhood in South London during the war. Mum must have been terrified to take the train west by herself at such a young age, but she’d never told Heather about her journey or about her years growing up in the coastal town.

Ella slid her phone into her back pocket and started rummaging through the box in front of her.

Heather glanced at her watch. “Isn’t Matthew supposed to be sleeping?”

“He wanted to make sure I was really flying home tomorrow.” Ella smiled again. “He said he’s about to jump on a plane headed this way.”

“Maybe he could help us finish this,” Heather quipped.

“He would help us carry it all to the dump.”

Heather glanced around at the fifty years’ worth of accumulation. There was a towering pile of books by the door to sell or give away and another stack of files with old newspaper articles ranging in topic from the threat of communism to how to make a gelatin salad with green olives and cabbage.

But the rest of the task still felt daunting.

“Finally!” Ella exclaimed, holding a book in her hands.

Heather glanced up. “What is it?”

“Something interesting.”

Heather scooted around the boxes until she was at Ella’s side. Instead of folders in this box, there was a stack of photo albums. And a manila envelope packed with more pictures.

Ella flipped through the pictures in one of the photo albums, most of them from Heather’s years as a child. Heather glanced at the pictures over her daughter’s shoulder. It seemed her parents recorded every milestone of hers, great or small, through the lens of their camera. There was a picture of her crawling on the linoleum in their kitchen. Planting flowers in the beds behind the cottage. Picnicking in what Mum had deemed their “secret garden.”

It was no wonder that Heather once thought magical things happened in gardens.

Ella opened the envelope and dumped the contents onto the lid of another box before quickly flipping through them. “Is this you?” she asked, lifting up a black-and-white picture of Heather’s parents when they were much younger, each holding the hand of a girl wearing a pleated skirt and bolero jacket. The girl’s long hair was held back with a wide headband.

“No.” Heather studied her parents and then the face of the child. “This was taken before I was born.”

“Do you know who the girl is?”

“Her name was Libby,” Heather said slowly as she studied the picture. “She was my sister.”

Ella glanced up. “You never told me I had an aunt.”

“She died when I was a baby.”

Ella leaned back against a box. “How did she die?”

“She was sick.”

Ella’s eyebrows climbed. “Like the measles?”

“I don’t know.” Heather sat down on one of the boxes. “I asked my mother over and over about Libby growing up, but my questions made her so sad that I finally stopped.”

There were more pictures of Libby in the cottage gardens and one behind what looked like Ladenbrooke Manor. Heather studied the photo of Libby on the bench in Mum’s secret garden.

Her sister had passed away at the age of fifteen, and she wished her parents had told her more about Libby’s childhood. And what took her life.

When she was a girl, Heather had longed for a sibling, and for a season—a very long season—she conjured up a sister named Beatrix after her favorite author. Beatrix was practically perfect unless Heather did something wrong. Then Beatrix was her scapegoat. In hindsight, her parents had been incredibly kind to oblige her whims. Heather maintained Beatrix’s presence until she was eleven, and then she pretended for years that Christopher’s siblings were her siblings as well.

When Ella was seven, she conjured up a sibling for herself too, and Heather had accommodated her. Every girl, she figured, needed a sister, imagined or not.

Ella began flipping through another photo album and held out a page to Heather, tapping on it. “Who’s the guy?”

Heather’s stomach plunged as she stared at the picture of her and Christopher at the dance at Henderson Court. August 1988. A week before he’d asked her to marry him.

This was a question she didn’t want to answer.

Heather looked up from the picture, forcing a smile on her lips. “It’s my date, of course.”

“Does this date have a name?”

Part of her wanted to make up a story, but she’d promised herself long ago that she would never lie to her daughter. Dodging the truth, she’d determined, was not the same as deception though. Sometimes omission was the best for everyone.

“His name is Christopher,” she said simply. No need for further explanation.

But Ella wouldn’t let it go. “Christopher who?”

“Christopher Westcott.”

Ella placed the open album on top of another box, examining the picture. “Was he stuffy?”

Heather turned the page and there was a silly picture of Christopher making a face as he pinned a rose on her dress. She laughed again as she had done many years before. “Not a bit.”

When she looked up, Ella was searching her face. “Why didn’t you marry him?”

“At the time, my parents didn’t like him much.”

Ella crossed her arms over her chest. “Your parents didn’t like Dad either.”

“It didn’t matter to me or to your father what my parents thought.”

Ella glanced back down at the picture. “But it mattered to Christopher—”

“I suppose it did.” There was much more, but she didn’t want to tell Ella how she thought she would marry Christopher, no matter what her parents said. She’d never had the opportunity to marry him. Instead of fighting for her, he’d broken her heart.

“Whatever happened to Mr. Westcott?” Ella asked.

“He went to one of the colleges in Oxford,” Heather said, trying to sound much more casual than she felt.

“So he turned stuffy?”

Heather shrugged. She didn’t want to think about Christopher anymore.

When Ella reached for another album, Heather stepped toward the open door. Excusing herself, she walked along the overgrown stone path to the gardens behind the house. Two chairs and a table were on the back patio, protected by mildew-stained covers. She zigzagged among the new weeds and tufts of old flowers, the perennials that somehow survived without her mum’s care.

Mum had died twenty-three years ago, not long after Heather moved to the States. She had grieved in this garden while her father grieved in the house. Her mother’s presence was deeply rooted in every corner of these beds, in every flower that continued to bloom long after its caregiver was gone.

Memories began to flood back. Dad pushing her in the swing that hung from the giant oak. Mum spreading out a picnic of tomato-and-cheese sandwiches, fresh plums, and bread with blackberry jam. Each of her parents holding one of her hands as she waded in the fractured threads of the river down in the forest. She’d been born to her parents later in their marriage, and they’d poured their love into her.

Even though Ella had been raised in Portland, Heather tried to gift her daughter with the same happy childhood she’d had in England.

A rushed archway cut through the overgrown hedges surrounding her mum’s secret garden. Heather pushed away the vines draped over the arch and entered the place that had once been a haven for Mum and for her.

She sat on a stone bench and looked up at a tower above the hedge. It was impossible to see Ladenbrooke Manor from the main road, but from here, she could catch a glimpse of it.

When she was a child, she’d often wondered about the old manor. Some said the place was haunted, but she thought it mysterious. Sometimes when she was a girl, she would wander through the wrought-iron gate along Ladenbrooke’s stone wall. The fragrance from flowers on the other side captivated her along with the beauty of the gardens. The butterflies reminded her of the fairies she’d loved as a child and, when she was older, of the fairies dancing through the magical garden in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

Shakespeare was born forty miles from here. In Stratford-upon-Avon. Perhaps the gardens in the Cotswolds inspired him as they once inspired her.

When Heather was growing up, her mum told her the Croft family used to allow the community to explore their gardens for one day each summer, but after Oliver died, they’d moved away and never opened their gardens to the public again. As a child, she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to keep all of that beauty to themselves, but she understood now as an adult. Oliver’s parents were probably trying to preserve their son’s legacy.

She also remembered an overgrown maze near the bottom of the gardens at Ladenbrooke, with a brick wall surrounding three sides of it. In the middle was a tower crafted to look like one of the three towers on the manor. When she was a girl, she’d tried to find the path to the garden tower but instead had become lost near the maze. That day, a young woman found her and guided her home.

Or at least, she thought there had been a woman. Sometimes she wondered if it had been only a dream.

The shadows began to crawl across the hedge, toward her bench. As if they were chasing her. Leaning back, she refused to run, basking instead in the trailing rays of sun.

“Mom?” Ella called out.

“I’m back here.”

Ella turned the corner around the archway and stepped into the garden. She held up her iPhone and tapped on the screen. “He’s a professor of theology at Wycliffe Hall.”

Heather held out her arms to soak in the last of the sunlight. “Who are you talking about?”

“Christopher Westcott.” Ella sat on the bench next to her. “If he wasn’t stuffy before, I guarantee you he is now.”

“It doesn’t matter to me whether he’s stuffy or not.”

Ella kept scrolling down on her phone. “He’s written a bunch of magazine articles.”

Heather already knew Christopher was a professor at one of the colleges in Oxford. A few years ago, she’d searched for him online to find out what happened to him. She’d found his biography and then surfed from one article to the next, reading about his views on everything from ecclesiology to eschatology. Then she’d closed her laptop and vowed never to check up on him again. Curiosity was one thing. Obsession was quite another.

She’d wanted to ask about Christopher when she came to visit her father, but there was no good reason, she figured, to inquire about him. Her father never mentioned Christopher though he’d talked about the Westcotts on occasion, telling her when Christopher’s siblings had married or when Mr. and Mrs. Westcott became grandparents.

“There’s nothing about a wife or children in this article,” Ella said.

“I’m sure he married a long time ago.”

Ella slipped her phone back into her pocket. “You should drive to Oxford and see him while you’re here. Get a pint together.”

“I hate beer.”

“Then take tea.” Ella tilted her head. “And don’t tell me that you hate that as well.”

“His wife probably wouldn’t appreciate that.”

“You don’t know he’s married—”

“Even so,” she said with a sigh. “I’m not stalking a boyfriend I haven’t seen in almost thirty years.”

“It would be reconnecting, not stalking.”

Heather glanced at her watch. “Don’t you have to pack?”

“I’m finished. All I have left to do tonight is call Matthew.”

Heather smiled. “You do realize you’ll be seeing him in two days.”

“Yes, but that seems like an eternity.”

Heather sighed. “I’m going to miss you.”

Ella kissed her cheek. “I’m going to miss you too.”

Her daughter had grown up years ago, and yet every time they said good-bye, Heather still had trouble letting her go. But Ella had a home and a husband now, far from Portland. Heather had her studio in Oregon and plenty of peace.

She stood, and they began walking back to the house. Four in the morning would be excruciating, but they had to leave early for Ella’s flight.

With her daughter gone, she’d work even harder to finish the daunting task before her. Instead of going to Oxford, she would finish her work at the cottage as soon as possible and then return to Oregon for good.

PART TWO

Looking back over my life, the answers seem so clear, but it’s meaningless—perhaps even dangerous—to see the past clearly without using that 20/20 of hindsight to sculpt the future.