Lucy spent the next few hours digging. She’d found a shovel in the field barn and carried it up to the front garden. Her muscles ached, unaccustomed to the repetitive motion, and she had to stop every so often to rest. She realised, though, that stopping only made it harder to start again, and forced herself to push on until the cavity was deep enough.
At last it was time to fill the coffin. First, Lucy enclosed the copy of Daemonologie, which contained the letter by Nicholas Owen and the plans for Birchwood Manor explaining the priest holes. She had climbed into the attic and been glad to find the box of costumes where they’d left it. The white dress that Lily Millington had been wearing when she modelled for Edward was still amongst them, and Lucy had wrapped the bones from the priest hole carefully within it; now, she set the bundle gently inside the box. Twenty years had not left much behind.
Last, but not least, she put in a letter that she had written (cotton paper, non-acidic), outlining what she knew of the woman whose mortal remains now lay inside the coffin. It had not been easy to learn the truth, but finding information about the past was what Lucy did best, and she was not the kind of person to give up an enquiry. She had needed to rely on almost everything that Lily Millington had told her, and everything that Edward had reported, and the details that came back over time from what the man, Martin, had said that afternoon at Birchwood Manor.
Bit by bit, she had put the story together: the house above the bird shop on Little White Lion Street, the pair of rooms in the shadow of St Anne’s, the early years spent by the river; slipping back across time to the birth of a baby girl in June 1844, to a woman named Antonia, the eldest daughter of Lord Albert Stanley, and a man called Peter Bell. A clockmaker, who had lived at number forty-three Wheatsheaf Lane, Fulham.
Lucy sealed the lid just as the sun was starting to slip behind the gables. She realised that she was weeping. For Edward and for Lily; for herself, too, and the guilt from which she would never be free.
The porter had been right – the coffin was very heavy – but years spent in nature had made Lucy strong. She was also determined, and so she managed to heave the box into the ground. She filled in the dirt and patted it down hard on top.
Any latent religious inclinations that Mr Darwin had not killed, Lucy’s life experience had vanquished, and so she did not say a prayer over the fresh grave. Nonetheless, the moment called for ceremony and she had given much thought as to how she might best mark the spot.
She was going to plant a Japanese maple tree on top. She had already procured it, a lovely sapling with pale bark and the most elegant limbs, long and even, fine but strong. It had been one of Edward’s favourite trees, the leaves were red in spring, turning by autumn to a most beautiful bright copper colour, just like Lily Millington’s hair. No, not Lily Millington, she corrected herself, for that had never been her real name.
‘Albertine,’ Lucy whispered, thinking back to that mild Hampstead afternoon when she had seen the shock of red in the glass house at the bottom of the garden and Mother had instructed her to take two cups of tea ‘in the finest china’. ‘Your name was Albertine Bell.’
Birdie, to those who loved her.
Lucy’s attention was on the patch of flattened dirt in the garden bed by the front gate, so she did not notice; but by some strange trick of the dusk, just as she spoke the words, the attic window seemed ever so briefly to glow. Almost as if a lamp had been switched on inside.
XI
I told you. I do not understand the physics of it and there is no one here to ask.
Somehow, without understanding how or why, I was out of the hideaway and in the house again. Moving amongst them as before, and yet nothing like before.
How many days passed? I do not know. Two or three. They were no longer sleeping here when I returned.
The bedrooms were deserted at night, and during the day one or another would arrive to fetch an item of clothing or some other personal effect.
Fanny was dead. I heard the policemen talking about ‘poor Miss Brown’, which explained the gunshot but not the thump.
I heard them speaking, too, of the Radcliffe Blue and the tickets to America.
The policemen also spoke of me. They collected everything they could pertaining to me. To Lily Millington.
When I realised what they believed, I was aghast.
What did Edward think? Had he been told the same theory? Did he accept it?
When he finally came back to the house, he was pale and distracted. He stood at the desk in the Mulberry Room, staring out towards the river, turning to gaze sometimes at my clock, the minutes sliding by. He ate nothing. He slept not at all.
He did not open his sketchbook and seemed to have lost all interest in his work.
I stayed with him. I trailed him wherever he went. I cried, I shouted, I begged and pleaded, I lay down beside him and tried to tell him where I was; but my abilities in that area have grown with time. Back then, in the beginning, it just exhausted me.
And then it happened. They all left and I could not make them stop.
The carriages retreated along the coach way and I was alone. For such a long time, I was alone. I evaporated, returning to the warmth and stillness of the house, slipping between the floorboards, settling with the dust, disappearing into the long, dark quiet.
Until one day, twenty years later, I was pulled back together by the arrival of my first visitor.
And as my name, my life, my history, was buried, I, who had once dreamed of capturing light, found that I had become captured light itself.
PART FOUR
CAPTURED LIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY
Summer, 2017
Day broke with the sort of electric clarity reserved for the morning after a night of storms.
The first thing Jack noticed was that he wasn’t in the godawful uncomfortable bed in the malt house. He was somewhere even less comfortable and yet he felt far more buoyant than usual.
The lush tangle of green and purple wallpaper told him where he was; ripe mulberries, and an engraving above the door that read, ‘Truth, Beauty, Light’. He had slept on the floor of the house.
A stirring on the sofa beside him and he realised that he wasn’t alone.
Like a kaleidoscope shifting into place, the night before came back into focus. The storm, the failure of the taxi to come and pick her up, the bottle of wine he’d bought on a whim at Tesco.
She was still asleep, delicate, with her short dark hair cut around her ears. She was like one of those teacups in fancy places that Jack had a knack for breaking.
He tiptoed down the hallway and into the kitchen in the malt house to make them tea.
When he carried the two steaming mugs back, she was awake and sitting up, the blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
‘Morning,’ she said.
‘Morning.’
‘I didn’t go back to London.’
‘I noticed.’
They had talked all night. Truth, beauty and light – the room, the house, had some sort of magic in it. Jack had told her about the girls, and Sarah. About what had happened in the bank, just before he left the police force, when Jack had gone in against orders and come out with seven rescued hostages and a gunshot wound to the shoulder. He had been a hero, all the papers said so, but it had been the last straw with Sarah. ‘How could you, Jack?’ she’d said. ‘Didn’t you think about the babies? The girls? You could have been killed.’
‘There were babies in the bank, too, Sar.’
‘But not yours. What kind of a father are you going to be if you can’t even see that there’s a difference?’
Jack hadn’t had an answer. Not long afterwards, she’d packed up the girls and told him that she was going back to England to live closer to her parents.
He’d told Elodie about Ben, too, who had died twenty-five years ago on Friday, and how it had broken his dad. Elodie, in turn, told him about her mother’s death – also twenty-five years ago – and her own father, who was similarly weighed down by grief, but with whom she’d decided she was finally going to speak when she returned to London.