What had happened to that house, and that family? The picture-postcard tranquility she had seen in that photograph, tea on the lawn, like something from an Agatha Christie novel, all that had vanished—swallowed up in decay and something stranger and more worrying. It was not just the sense she had of a house long neglected. It was something darker, the feeling of a place hiding secrets, where people had been terribly unhappy, and no one had come to comfort them.
Wrapped in her thoughts, Hal crunched across the frosted lawn, feeling the frozen blades of grass crackle beneath her boots. The air was crisp and cold, and she huffed out, watching her white breath disappear. When she stopped to look back at the house, she realized how far she had come, and how large the grounds really were—from her attic room it had been hard to see where the garden ended and the surrounding countryside began; but now that she had walked almost to the copse at the bottom of the lawn she was a good couple of hundred yards from the house, and she could see that the copse itself formed part of the grounds—a cluster of trees with something at the center. Hal thought she could see something dark glinting through the trees. Could it be water?
“Admiring your domain?”
The voice, coming from behind her up the slope, made Hal jump, and she jerked her head around to see Abel walking down across the lawn, his hands in his pockets.
“No!”
The word slipped out defensively, before Hal had properly considered her reply, and she felt her cheeks flush with something that was not just cold; but Abel only laughed. He pulled at his mustache.
“I’m not Harding, you don’t need to worry about me on that score—there’s no ill feeling on my part, I assure you. I had no expectations anyway.”
Hal wrapped her arms around herself, unsure of what to say. It struck her that for someone who kept stressing how very unconcerned he was about being cut off, Abel talked about it a lot. She remembered Mitzi’s words in the library: Oh, Abel, stop being such a saint! Was anyone really that selfless? Could someone survive being disinherited by their only parent and honestly feel no bitterness at all?
Abel seemed to feel her equivocation, or at least her discomfort about the topic, for he changed the subject.
“But tell me, what happened at breakfast?”
“At breakfast?” Hal faltered. She remembered Harding and Ezra’s near fight, and felt herself hedging, unwilling to get caught in the complicated web of resentments and loyalties she sensed between the brothers. “I—I’m not sure what you mean. Harding and Ezra had . . . well . . . a bit of a . . . disagreement.”
“Oh, you needn’t worry about them,” Abel said with a laugh. He fell into step beside her. “They’ve been sparring since Ezra could first talk. By the way, if we head to the left here, I can show you the maze.”
“There’s a maze?”
“Not a very good one. It’s over there.” He pointed away from the copse of trees, towards the far side of the lawn. “But that wasn’t what I meant, actually—I was talking about the plumes of smoke floating up the stairs.”
“Oh, that!” Hal said. She echoed his laugh, relieved to be on less touchy ground. “The toaster caught fire.”
“Oh, was that it. I thought perhaps Mrs. Warren had tried to burn the house down rather than let it pass to the unworthy.”
Hal felt her cheeks flush in sudden shock at the word, and Abel’s face changed.
“Oh God, Harriet, I’m sorry—that was incredibly crass of me. I didn’t mean you—I just meant—well, look, Mrs. Warren’s always had a touch of the Mrs. Danvers about her. I don’t think she would have been happy with any of us inheriting—except maybe Ezra.”
“It’s okay,” Hal said stiffly. She could hardly admit how close to the bone Abel’s remark had struck. “Why does she like Ezra so much?” she managed after a moment’s awkward silence.
Abel blew into his hands, sending a cloud of white breath gusting ahead of them, as if thinking about her question.
“Who knows,” he said at last. “There’s no reason—on paper, at least. He’s always been charming, but heaven knows, Mrs. Warren is pretty resistant to stuff like that. He was always Mother’s favorite too. Youngest child syndrome, maybe. Youngest boy, at least. Your mother was actually the youngest, of course—by a few hours, anyway.”
“They were twins?” Hal said unguardedly, and then wanted to bite her tongue off. She had got to stop saying the first thing that came into her head. She had never thought of herself as a particularly garrulous person—quite the reverse, in fact; people who knew her often remarked on how self-contained she was, how little she volunteered. But she had not understood before coming here how impossible any conversation at all would be, how every chance remark could be a trap. It wasn’t just a case of not giving away too much of herself, and concealing the gaps in her knowledge—every step she took was on false ground that could give way at any moment. She could not afford to forget that.
Fortunately, though, Abel didn’t seem to have noticed the oddness of her question. He only nodded.
“Fraternal, of course. They were . . . they were very close. I was four years older, and Harding older still—he’s eight years older than me, so he was away at school by the time they could walk. But Maud and Ezra . . . that’s why, I think, he never really got over her disappearance. He was always a tempestuous personality, but after she ran away . . . I don’t know, Harriet. Something changed. It was like all that fire turned inwards, onto himself. He spent years looking for her, you know.”
“I’m so sorry,” Hal said. Her throat was stiff and sore with falsehood.
Abel put a gentle hand on her shoulder. She felt as if his touch should have burned her, but it did not.
“She—she was a remarkable woman,” he said softly. “I don’t know how much she told you about her childhood, but it can’t have been easy being here with Mother after Harding and I had broken away. Ezra was at boarding school for most of the time, and even when he was at home, he somehow always managed to escape the worst of it, but . . . well, my mother wasn’t an easy person to cope with at the best of times, and she got stranger and more irascible as she got older. I think in the end Mrs. Warren was really the only person who could stand to be in her company—and I’m not sure she really got away unscathed. But listen.” He stopped, cleared his throat, and drew a breath, then smiled determinedly. “The reason I came to find you—I found something in my room, and I thought you . . . well. I thought you might like it.”
They had stopped walking, and Abel reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled photograph, folded and dog-eared, and yellowed with that strange golden haze that always seemed to come over photographs a few decades old.
“I’m sorry, it’s not in very good condition, but—well, you’ll see.”
Hal took the piece of paper from Abel, and bent over it, trying to make it out.
When she did, her breath caught in her throat, and she almost choked.
“Harriet?” Abel said uncertainly. “I’m sorry—maybe this isn’t—”
But Hal couldn’t speak. She could only stare at the photograph in her hand, pressing her fingers together, so that their shaking couldn’t betray her shock.
For there, on the lawn outside Trepassen House, was a little group of four people—two girls, a boy, and a slightly older man in his early twenties.
The man was Abel—his honey-colored hair cut into a painfully nineties Brit-Pop crop, and his clothes very far from the expensively cut outfit he was wearing today, but unmistakably him.
The boy was Ezra, his black hair and curving smile making him instantly recognizable—and sitting next to him was a fair-haired girl wearing battered Doc Martens, laughing at him. She must be his long-lost twin sister—the missing Maud.
But the fourth member of the group—the last girl, sitting on her own a little way from the others, her dark eyes looking directly at the camera and at the person taking the photograph . . . that girl was Hal’s mother.
Hal found she was not breathing, and she made herself inhale, long and slow, and let it out again, trying not to let her trembling breath give away how badly shocked she was.
Her mother had been here—but when? How?