And so, here she was. It had taken five months to reach this point, but she was ready.
‘Do I need to sign something?’ she said as the lawyer led her into the kitchen, where the square pine table was still in place. Lucy half expected to see Emma Stearnes coming through the parlour door, shaking her head in bemusement at whatever strange behaviour she’d witnessed on the other side.
The lawyer looked surprised. ‘What sort of thing?’
‘I’m not certain. I’ve never been given a house before. I presume there is a deed of title?’
‘There is nothing to sign, Miss Radcliffe. The deed, as it were, is done. The papers have been finalised. The house is yours.’
‘Well, then’ – Lucy held out her hand – ‘I thank you, Mr Matthews. It has been a pleasure to meet you.’
‘But, Miss Radcliffe, would you not like me to show you the property?’
‘It won’t be necessary, Mr Matthews.’
‘But having come all this way—’
‘I trust that I am able to stay behind today?’
‘Well, yes, as I said, the house is yours.’
‘Then thank you kindly for accompanying me, Mr Matthews. Now, if you will excuse me, I have much to get on with. There is going to be a school, did you hear? I am going to open a school for promising young ladies.’
But Lucy did not get on at once with preparations for the school. There was something more pressing that she had to do first. A task as awful as it was essential. For five months she had turned it over in her mind. Longer than that, to be honest. For almost twenty years now she had been waiting to discover the truth.
She closed the door behind the young Mr Matthews, whose countenance left little doubt as to his dejection, and watched each step of his retreat from behind the kitchen window. Only when he had cleared the garden path and latched the wooden front gate did Lucy let out the breath that she’d been holding. She turned away from the window and stood for a moment with her back against the glass, surveying the room. Uncanny though it seemed, all was exactly as she remembered. It was as if she had merely stepped out for a walk to the village, become waylaid, and returned two decades later than expected.
The house was quiet, but it did not feel still. Lucy was reminded of a story Edward used to read to her from a book by Charles Perrault, ‘La Belle au bois dormant’, about a princess cursed to sleep within her castle for a hundred years, the inspiration for his Sleeping Beauty painting. Lucy was not a romantic person, but she could almost imagine, as she stood by the kitchen window, that the house knew she was back.
That it had been waiting.
Indeed, Lucy had a most disconcerting sense that she was not alone in the room.
She reminded herself, however – even as the hairs on her forearm tensed – that she was not of a suggestible disposition, and that to begin to fall prey to superstition here and now would be a deeply regrettable slip. Her mind was playing tricks on her; the reason was clear.
Steeling herself to her purpose, she crossed the hallway and started up the central staircase.
The bentwood chair was exactly where she’d last seen it, on the corner of the landing where the stairs made their turn. The chair was angled towards the large glass window overlooking the back garden and beyond it the meadow. Sunlight spilled through the glass and countless motes of dust drifted in unseen currents.
The chair was warm when Lucy sat gently on its edge. The landing itself, too. She remembered now that it had always been so. The last time she had sat here, the house had been filled with laughter and passion; the air had thrummed with creativity.
But not today. It was just Lucy and the house. Her house.
She let the air of the old place settle around her.
Somewhere out there in the great green beyond, a dog was barking.
Closer by, in the Mulberry Room downstairs, the wall clock was keeping count. Lily Millington’s clock, still ticking. Lucy supposed that the lawyer, Mr Matthews, had made sure that it was wound. She still remembered when Edward had bought it: ‘Lily’s father was a clockmaker,’ he’d announced, whisking the package into the hall in Hampstead. ‘I saw this on the wall of a fellow in Mayfair and exchanged it for a commission. I’m going to surprise her.’
Edward had always been a giver of gifts. He thrilled in the gratification of selecting well. Books for Lucy, a clock for Lily Millington – it was he who had given Thurston the rifle: ‘A genuine Baker, carried by a member of the 5th Battalion of the 60th Regiment during the Napoleonic Wars!’
Impossible to believe that she was sitting here now because Edward was dead. That she would never see him again. Somehow she had always supposed that one day he would come home.
They had not seen much of one another after the summer at Birchwood Manor, but Lucy had known that he was out there. Every so often a note would arrive, scratched on the back of a piece of card, usually begging a few pounds to pay a debt that he’d gathered in his travels. Or else word would be passed along the grapevine that someone had seen him in Rome, Vienna, Paris. He was always on the move. He travelled in order to escape his grief, Lucy knew, but she wondered sometimes whether he also believed that by moving fast enough, often enough, he might find Lily Millington again.
For he had never given up hope. No matter the evidence to the contrary, he never could accept that she had been involved in a deception – that she had not loved him with every bit as much devotion as that with which he had loved her.
When they met that last time in Paris, he had said, ‘She’s out there somewhere, Lucy. I know it. I can feel it. Can’t you?’
Lucy, who had not felt anything of the sort, had merely taken her brother’s hand and held it tight.
After climbing into the hallway hideaway, the next thing Lucy had remembered was opening her eyes in a bright room that she did not recognise. She was in a bed, not her own. She was in pain.
Lucy blinked, taking in the yellow-striped wallpaper, the leadlight window, the pale curtains hanging either side. The room smelled faintly of something sweet – honeysuckle, perhaps, and gorse, too. Her throat was parched.
She must have made a sound, for Edward was suddenly beside her, pouring water from a small crystal jug into a glass. He looked terrible, more dishevelled than usual, with a drawn face and anxious features. His loose cotton shirt was hanging limply from his shoulders, giving the appearance of clothing that had not been removed in days.
But where was she and how long had she been here?
Lucy was not aware that she had spoken, but as Edward helped her up to drink, he told her that they’d taken rooms for a few days in the public house in the village.
‘Which village?’
His eyes studied hers. ‘Why, the village of Birchwood. Can you really not remember?’
The word was vaguely familiar.
Edward tried to reassure her with an unconvincing smile. ‘Let me call for the doctor,’ he said. ‘He’ll want to know that you’re awake.’
He opened the door and spoke quietly to someone on the other side, but he did not leave the room. He came back to sit on the mattress beside Lucy, encasing her hand in one of his, stroking her forehead lightly with the other.
‘Lucy,’ he said, a look of pain in his eyes, ‘I have to ask you, I have to ask about Lily. Did you see her? She went back to the house to fetch you, but no one’s seen her since.’
Lucy’s thoughts were swimming. Which house? Why was he asking her about Lily? Did he mean Lily Millington? She was his model, Lucy remembered, the one with the long white dress. ‘My head,’ she said, realising that it ached on one side.
‘You poor love. You fell, you’ve been out cold, and here I am asking you questions. I’m sorry, I just –’ He raked a hand through his hair. ‘She’s gone. I can’t find her, Lucy, and I’m terribly worried. She wouldn’t just leave.’
Lucy had a flash of memory then, a gunshot in the dark. It had been loud and there’d been a scream. She’d run and then—Lucy gasped.
‘What is it? Did you see something?’