There is a lot of interest, too, in Fanny. She has become a tragic heroine, impossible though that is for one who knew her in life to believe. People speculate as to where ‘it’ happened. The newspaper reports were never clear, each one contradicting the other; and although there was more than one person at the house that day, their accounts were uncertain and history has managed to bury the details. I didn’t see it happen myself – I wasn’t in the room – but through a quirk of history I have been able to read the police reports. One of my previous visitors, Leonard, obtained lovely clear copies and we spent many a quiet evening together poring over them. Works of utter fiction, of course, but that’s how things were done back then. Perhaps they still are.
Edward’s portrait of Fanny, the one in which she wears the green velvet dress and a heart-shaped emerald on her pale décolletage, was brought in by the Association when they started opening for tourists. It hangs on the wall of the first-floor bedroom, facing the window that overlooks the orchard and the laneway that runs towards the churchyard in the village. I wonder sometimes what Fanny would think of that. She was easily excited and did not like the idea of a bedroom that looked onto gravestones. ‘It is just a different type of sleep,’ I can hear Edward saying, in an attempt to placate her, ‘nothing more than that. Just the long sleep of the dead.’
People pause in front of Fanny’s portrait sometimes, comparing it with the smaller image printed in the tourist brochure; they comment on her pretty face, her privileged life, her tragic end; they speculate on the theories as to what happened that day. Mostly, they shake their heads and sigh in contented lamentation; reflection on someone else’s tragedy being one of the most delicious of pastimes, after all. They wonder about Fanny’s father and his money, her fiancé and his heartache, the letter she received from Thurston Holmes the week before she died. This I know: to be murdered is to become eternally interesting. (Unless, of course, you are a ten-year-old orphan living on Little White Lion Street, in which case to be murdered is simply to be dead.)
The tourists also talk, of course, about the Radcliffe Blue. They wonder, with their wide eyes and their excited voices, where the pendant could have gone. ‘Things don’t just disappear,’ they say.
Sometimes they even talk about me. Again, I have Leonard, my young soldier, to thank for that, for it was he who wrote the book which first presented me as Edward’s lover. Until that time I was simply one of his models. There are copies of the book for sale in the gift shop and every so often I glimpse Leonard’s face on the back cover and remember his time in the house, the cries of ‘Tommy’ in the dead of night.
The tourists who walk about the house on Saturdays, with their arms behind their backs and studied expressions of self-conscious learning on their faces, refer to me as Lily Millington, which is understandable given how things worked out. Some of them even wonder where I came from, where I went to, who I really was. I am inclined to like those ones, in spite of their wrong-headed speculation. It is nice to be considered.
No matter how many times I hear the name ‘Lily Millington’ spoken out loud by strangers, it is always a surprise. I have tried whispering my real name into the air around their ears, but only a couple have ever heard me, like my little friend with the curtain of fine hair above his eyes. Not surprising: children are more perceptive than adults, in all the ways that count.
Mrs Mack used to say that those who seek to know gossip will hear ill about themselves. Mrs Mack said a lot of things, but in this she was correct. I am remembered as a thief. An imposter. A girl who rose above her station, who was not chaste.
And I was all of those things at different times, and more. But there is one thing they accuse me of which is not just. I was not a murderer. I did not fire the gun that day that killed poor Fanny Brown.
My current visitor has been here for a week and a half. A Saturday passed, which saw him scamper away from the house as early as he could – would that I were able to do the same – and another few days after that in which he continued with the same routines as last week. I had begun to despair of ever learning what it is he’s up to, for he is not communicative like some of the others have been: he never leaves papers lying around, from which I might glean answers, nor does he reward me by carrying out long, informative conversations.
But then, tonight, at last, a phone call. The upshot of which is that I now know why he is here. I also know his name. It is Jack – Jack Rolands.
He had spent the whole day out of the house, as is his habit, having set off in the morning with his shovel and camera bag. When he returned, though, I could see at once that he was changed. For a start, he took that shovel of his down to the tap on the side of the old outhouse and washed it clean. Evidently, there was to be no more digging.
There was something different in his attitude, too. A looseness to his joints; an air of resolution. He came inside and cooked a piece of fish for dinner, which was quite unlike him, having thus far proven himself more of a tinned soup sort of man.
The hint of ceremony put me further en garde. He has finished whatever it is that he came here to do, I thought. And then, as if to prove me right, there came the call.
Jack had apparently been expecting it. He had glanced at his phone a couple of times while he ate his dinner, as if to check the time, and when he finally picked it up he knew already who it was at the other end.
I was worried at first it would be Sarah, telephoning to cancel their lunch appointment tomorrow, but it wasn’t; it was, instead, a woman called Rosalind Wheeler, telephoning from Sydney, and the conversation had nothing at all to do with those two little girls in Jack’s photograph.
I listened from where I was sitting on the kitchen bench, and that is how I came to hear him speak a name that I know well.
The conversation to that point had been a brief and somewhat stilted exchange of pleasantries, and then Jack, who doesn’t strike me as one to mince words, said, ‘Look, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’ve spent ten days checking the places on your list. The stone isn’t there.’
There is only one stone that people mention with respect to Edward and his family, and thus I knew at once what he’d been seeking. I confess to being slightly disappointed. It is all so predictable. But then, human beings are, for the most part. They cannot help it. And I am hardly one to judge a treasure hunter.
I was interested, though, that Jack should think to seek the Radcliffe Blue here at Birchwood. I knew already, from listening to the museum’s day-trippers, that the diamond has not faded from thought – indeed, that a legend has grown around its whereabouts – but Jack is the only person ever to come looking for it here. Since the very first newspaper reports were printed, the general wisdom has been that the pendant made its way to America in 1862, where it promptly disappeared underground. Leonard nudged the idea even further, proposing that it was I who took the diamond from this house. He was wrong in that, of course, and deep down I am sure he knew it. It was the police reports that swayed him – the curious, wrong-headed interviews conducted in the days after Fanny’s death. Still. I had thought we had an understanding, he and I.
That Jack had come to Birchwood – sent by this woman, this Mrs Wheeler – to seek the Radcliffe Blue intrigued me, and I was pondering the fact when he said, ‘It sounds as if you’re asking me to break into the house,’ and my other thoughts fell away.
‘I know how much this means to you,’ he went on, ‘but I’m not going to break in. The people who run this place made it very clear that my accommodation is conditional.’
In my eagerness, I had moved too close without realising it. Jack shivered abruptly and left the phone on the table as he went to shut the window; he must have pressed a button on the device, because suddenly I could hear the other half of the conversation, too. A woman’s voice, not young, with an American accent: ‘Mr Rolands, I paid you to do a job.’
‘And I’ve checked all of the places on your list: the woods, the river bend, the hill in the clearing – all the sites mentioned in Ada Lovegrove’s letters to her parents.’
Ada Lovegrove.
Such a long time since I’d heard her name; I confess to a wave of deep emotion. Who was this woman on the other end of the phone? This American woman telephoning from Sydney. And what was she doing with Ada Lovegrove’s long-ago letters?