The Winter Folly (38 page)

Delilah walked slowly inside, staring at the letter in her hand. She knew that Lord Northmoor had signed power of attorney over to John and that John was now in charge of everything. She should
hand this letter over to him and ask him what it meant. But she could see him now, whisking it away, his face taking on that shut-off expression as he told her briefly that it was nothing for her
to worry about, he would solve it. More secrets.

Before she could change her mind, she slid her finger under the gummed-down flap of the envelope and pulled it open. There! It was torn. There was no going back now.
Besides
, she told
herself,
I suppose I’m closer to being Lady Northmoor than anyone else. There’s a chance it was actually meant for me.

She removed the crisply folded white paper within and opened it out. At once she noticed that the address of the intended recipient at the top of the letter did not match the one on the
envelope. This one was a place in Greece, on the island of Patmos. The letter read:

It was signed off with humble best wishes by a partner of the legal company but pp’d by a junior hand.

Delilah read it over twice, amazed. What on earth could it mean? Except . . . was that really possible?

Her heart began pounding and dizziness swooped through her. She leant against the wall heavily, knocking a small oil painting of a dog askance on the wall but hardly noticing, putting out her
hand to support herself.

‘Oh my God,’ she breathed, hardly able to believe the implications. ‘I must be seeing things. It can’t be true!’

She read the letter again, trying to see if it could apply to herself in any way, but there was no way it could be meant for her.

Money. An allowance. To a Lady Northmoor living in Greece. She remembered the vault in St Stephen’s where John’s grandmother lay interred. There had only been one Lady Northmoor
since. John’s mother.

Can Alex be alive?

There was no other conclusion she could draw. She felt a rush of almost joyful excitement. Alex hadn’t been destroyed by the house after all, she had
survived
. It was incredible.
It felt like waking from a nightmare to find reality was safe and comforting in comparison. The horror that she’d thought had taken place on top of the folly had not happened. Tears prickled
her eyes for a moment.
Alive.

But then bewilderment came with a torrent of questions tumbling into her mind.
Alex didn’t jump? She just . . . went away? To Greece? How is that possible?

Her hands shook, and her breath came in panting gasps as adrenaline raced through her, leaving her fingertips tingling and her scalp prickling. She sank down onto a small chair, her legs unable
to support her under the onslaught of emotion, staring at the letter and absorbing the implication. How and why had all this happened? Why had such a dreadful lie been allowed to take root and grow
and become the truth? Who had allowed all this?

Then one awful thought pushed out all the others:
Should I tell John? Thank God he’s not here . . .

She closed her eyes, grateful she didn’t have to make the decision immediately, not while she was still overwhelmed by what she had read. Before she said anything to anyone, she would have
to be absolutely certain there was no mistake . . . She wondered again if she’d misread or misunderstood, but there was only one way the letter could be taken.

But I need proof
, she thought, trying to gather herself.
I need more than this.

She thought for a moment and then went to the hall table, picking up the telephone handset there with clumsy, shaking fingers. Her nervousness made her misdial the solicitors’ number twice
before she managed to get it to ring.

A receptionist answered.

‘May I speak to Gordon Evans?’ she asked, reading the typed name at the bottom of the letter.

‘He’s in a meeting right now. Can I put you through to someone else who can help?’

‘Yes, please.’ She was transferred to the tinny sound of a piano sonata, listening to her own breath down the handset until a voice spoke.

‘Hello, Sarah Hargreaves speaking. How can I help you?’

Delilah looked down at the paper in her hand. ‘I’ve received a letter today which I opened in error. It’s from your company to Lady Northmoor.’

There was a pause and the woman on the other end said, ‘Yes. We have recently written to Lady Northmoor. We send our correspondence to her address in Greece.’

‘Well, I’m afraid in this case you’ve sent it to Fort Stirling, where there’s been no Lady Northmoor for forty years. I’m Mrs Stirling.’

The pause was briefer this time and when the woman spoke again it was with a kind of anxious embarrassment. ‘Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry. That must have been my error. Oh dear
– I do apologise. Could I ask you to please destroy that letter? And would you mind not mentioning this to anyone? I could get into serious trouble.’

‘I understand,’ Delilah said, her voice stronger as she began to regain her equilibrium. ‘But I’ll need a little information in return.’

She walked out into the garden hardly seeing the riot of colour and the teeming life around her. It all seemed invisible, taking second place to the whirl inside her mind.

This letter had come in error – Sarah Hargreaves, embarrassed and rather panicked, had confirmed that. She had also confirmed that the Lady Northmoor currently living on Patmos was indeed
Alexandra Stirling. It was almost too much to take in.

John can’t know. I’m sure of it.
She tried to recall everything that John had said about his mother, and she was certain that he had said his mother had died. No one would
lie about such a thing, surely? And how could he be tormented by nightmares and so oppressed by misery if the horror of his mother’s suicide was a fantasy?

Delilah shook her head in disbelief. What would Alexandra be like? She wouldn’t be that sweet-faced girl in the photographs now, but an old woman. The portrait, like John’s
father’s, had stayed the same but the subject would have withered and changed. Delilah tried to picture her with grey hair, lined skin and a slight stoop. An old lady. She remembered the
solicitor’s letter. An old lady who enjoyed a generous allowance.

Delilah sat down on one of the stone benches, its rough surface still warm from the afternoon sun. The excitement and bewilderment of the discovery leeched out of her and anger began to boil up
in its place, as fierce as it was unexpected.

An image filled her head. It was Alex, passing her days in comfort in the sun, while her only son was left to cope with his loneliness and grief, believing his mother had killed herself.

Fury engulfed her. What kind of a mother would do that? Of course it was tragic to lose her daughter in whatever circumstances had happened, but to abandon a small boy and his father and simply
walk away? That was unforgiveable, wasn’t it? It was coldly, horribly selfish. There was no excuse.

She stood up and began to pace round and round the central flowerbed, seeing nothing as a torrent of thoughts crashed into her mind. She felt absurdly betrayed, not just on John’s behalf
but on her own. She had pitied Alex, felt for her, empathised with her. She had almost lived the other woman’s loneliness, the sense of being daunted by this place and everything that came
with it. She had experienced something of her terror and been horrified by the final act, the pity and horror of what Alex had done.

Except that she hadn’t done it.

‘I just don’t understand!’ she said out loud, coming to a halt and staring out over the woods towards the old folly, hidden from view by the trees.

She wanted, above all, to make sense of all this and how her life had come to be so bound up with what happened here. Ever since she’d come to Fort Stirling, she’d been looking for
answers to explain why she was in this house, trapped in its vast solitudes, powerless to change it, inside a marriage that was poisoned by the past.

She could see clearly now that to get the final answers, she would have to leave. They lay elsewhere, with the only person alive who could answer them.

Present day

The huge ferry made its way through shimmering heat across the bright blue waters of the Aegean Sea. There were crowds everywhere, mostly keeping inside or under the
ferry’s wide awning on the top deck, though a few hardy souls – tourists, for the most part – stood out in the blazing sunshine looking ahead eagerly to where they were going.

Delilah had spent some of the seven-hour journey dozing in the air-conditioned interior, recovering from her early start, and then breakfasting on black coffee and yoghurt in the restaurant. She
had arrived at daybreak, stepping out into suffocating heat at Athens airport, and from there caught a taxi to Piraeus where she’d boarded the ferry. They’d already stopped at various
island ports, the great hulking vessel sailing with surprising nimbleness between islands and outcrops of land into small harbours, where it manoeuvred itself up against slender docks to disgorge
passengers and take on new ones. Now, as they approached the island of Patmos, Delilah had climbed to the top deck and found a seat that faced out over the railings where she could marvel at the
extraordinary vivid blue of the sea as the ferry churned through it. The breeze that came up, tangy and salty, to lash her hair and beat her cheeks was pleasant after the artificial chill
inside.

She longed to arrive, and yet she was also apprehensive about what exactly she planned to do.

‘I’m just going away for a few days,’ she had told Janey. ‘While John’s on his fishing trip.’

‘That sounds lovely,’ Janey said, wiping up some dishes. ‘Are you going somewhere nice?’

She hadn’t wanted to lie but telling the truth would be dangerous, if Janey should mention it later. ‘I have a friend, Helen, who lives in Italy,’ she said, letting the
implication do its work. Helen did live in Italy but Delilah was not going there.

‘Italy – how beautiful,’ sighed Janey. ‘I’m envious. We had a lovely holiday there once.’

‘I’m only going for a short trip. I’ll probably be back before John is.’

‘Enjoy yourself. It’ll be good for you to get away from here.’

Janey had not known how true her words were, Delilah thought. The feeling that she ought to get away had almost been as strong as the compulsion to seek out the truth. Her body was refusing to
forget the way Ben had made her feel when they’d stood so close, the atmosphere charged with electricity, and she needed some space in which to consider how she really felt about him. She was
letting her reaction to Ben put her marriage at risk. Should she fight the attraction between them? Or was her marriage foundering anyway?

‘This is absolute bloody madness,’ Grey had said down the phone, when she told him of her intention to go to Greece – at least one person ought to know where she really was.
‘What on earth are you doing? Can you really be sure this woman is who you think she is?’

‘The lawyer was clear. It’s her.’

‘Well, why do you have to go there? Can’t you just telephone her or something?’

‘I think that’s an even worse idea,’ she replied. ‘I can just imagine how quickly she’d hang up on me.’

‘Delilah,’ Grey said in a worried voice, ‘you should just leave all this as it is. You’ll do no good meddling in it. I don’t want to see you getting hurt. I know
what you’re like – you want to sort everything out, make everyone happy – but it could backfire.’

‘I can’t leave it,’ she’d replied obstinately. He didn’t understand – no one else could. He hadn’t seen those pictures in the albums, or lived in this
house with all its ghosts and echoes of the past. He hadn’t known, as Delilah had, and as Alex had, what it meant to become a Stirling and belong to this huge old place. Alex understood.
Finding her seemed more than simply a way to get to the bottom of a mystery; it was also forging a link that might make sense of her own life. That was why she had to go.

‘What about John?’ Grey persisted. ‘Shouldn’t you at least ask his opinion on tracking down his dead mother?’

‘I can’t spring a shock like that on him without seeing her first, and knowing a bit more about why she did it. She needs to know how she’s made him suffer, and explain how she
could go and leave him like that, with him thinking she killed herself.’

‘You don’t think you’re going to be able to reconcile them, do you? Tell me you’re not thinking about trying something so foolish.’

‘Of course not,’ Delilah said, even though she had wondered if she might be able to do just that if it seemed that it might help John. ‘I’m doing this because I have to
know – for myself as much as for John.’

‘All right.’ He sighed. ‘I can tell there’s no stopping you. I just hope it doesn’t make this whole thing worse, that’s all. Keep in touch, darling.
I’ll come out and join you if you need me.’

She acted before she could change her mind, booking a flight, a ferry and a hotel in minutes – not cheap at such late notice in the summer, but still possible. She had left the following
day, with a sense that she was at last taking control after a long time of being at the mercy of other people and places.

Now here she was, a salty rime forming on her lips, feeling the slow rocking of the ferry as it cut through the water on its way to the port of Skala, and soon she would have to decide exactly
what she was going to do when she got there.

It was late afternoon by the time they arrived at last; the island stretched across the blue sea like a pair of open arms beckoning them into its bosom. As they approached, the embrace of the
island grew tighter so that they seemed to be surrounded by rocky hillside dotted with houses set among groves of olive trees. A mass of glittering white gradually resolved itself into the harbour
town, and now she could see that the island was not one thick land mass but a delicate lace of narrow connections and small bays. In the distance, high on the horizon, a jagged edge of dark rock
became the castellated border of an ancient building of brown stone that contrasted with the whites and pinks and pale yellows of the flat-roofed houses below. Around the bay were hundreds of
boats, from tiny sailing vessels to vast white yachts, moored along the seafront or against rickety wooden jetties poking out into the water.