I follow him as far as the gate, where I watch him get into his car and leave.
I hope he isn’t gone too long.
For now, I am going to return to the malt house. Perhaps there will be something more from Rosalind Wheeler in the email. I crave to know how she came by Ada Lovegrove’s letters.
Poor little Ada. Childhood is the cruellest time. A place of extremes, in which one might this day sail carefree amongst the silvery stars, only to be plunged tomorrow into the black woods of despair.
After Fanny died and the police finished their investigation, the others left Birchwood Manor and all was still and silent for a long stretch. The house rested. Twenty years passed before Lucy returned. That is how and when I learned that Edward was dead and that he’d left this house, his most beloved possession, to his youngest sister.
It was a quintessentially Edward thing to do, for he adored his sisters, and they him. I know why he chose Lucy, though. He would have reasoned that Clare could take care of herself, by marrying well or convincing someone to look after her, but that Lucy was different. I will never forget my first glimpse of her, that pale watchful face in the upstairs window of the dark brick house in Hampstead, when Edward brought me home to the studio in his mother’s garden.
She will always be that child to me: the girl I knew who resented the strictures of London but blossomed as soon as she was set loose in the countryside, free to explore and dig and collect to her heart’s content. I have such a clear memory of her when we arrived at the house that summer, the walk from the railway, Lucy lagging behind because her trunk was loaded with precious books and she refused to send it on the carriage with the others.
What a surprise it was to see her when she turned up to inspect the house. Little Lucy turned into an austere and serious woman. Thirty-three years old and no longer young by the standards of the day. But still Lucy, wearing a long, practical skirt, the most unflattering shade of olive green, and a dreadful hat that caused me to suffer a wave of overwhelming fondness. Her hair beneath it was already coming loose – she never could keep a pin in place – and her boots were thick with mud.
She did not view all of the rooms, but then she didn’t need to; she knew the house and its secrets as well as I do. She only went as far as the kitchen before shaking the lawyer’s hand and telling him that he could leave.
‘But, Miss Radcliffe –’ a hint of bewilderment flecked his words – ‘would you not like me to show you the property?’
‘It won’t be necessary, Mr Matthews.’
She waited, watching him disappear along the coach way, and then she turned back towards the kitchen and stood very still. I went right up close to her, reading the fine lines now written upon her face. Behind them I could see the little Lucy that I knew, for people do not change. They remain, as they age, the people that they were when they were young, only frailer and sadder. I wished nothing more than to put my arms around her. Lucy, who had always been my ally.
All of a sudden she looked up, and it was as if she were staring right at me. Or through me. Something had disturbed her from her contemplation and she brushed me aside, crossing the hallway and starting up the staircase.
I wondered if she intended to live here at Birchwood Manor. I hoped against hope that she would stay. And then the deliveries began to arrive: first the wooden box, followed by the desks and chairs and small iron beds. Blackboards and trays of chalk, and eventually a severe-looking woman named Thornfield, whose desk plaque read, ‘Deputy Headmistress’.
A school. And I was pleased to see it. Little Lucy had always quested for knowledge. Edward would have been glad, for he was forever stopping in the street, dragging me with him into this bookshop or that, in order to choose a new tome for Lucy. Her curiosity was unquenchable.
Sometimes I can still hear those schoolgirls. Faint, faraway voices, singing, arguing, laughing, crying into their pillows, pleading for a mother or father to have a change of heart, to come back and reclaim her. Their voices became trapped in the weave of the house.
During the years that I lived with Mrs Mack and Martin and the Captain, I longed for my father to return for me, but I did not cry. The letter left with Mrs Mack had been very clear: I was to be brave, my father instructed, and to do my best to be good; I was to pull my weight and to make myself helpful; I was to do as Mrs Mack told me, for she had his complete confidence and could be relied upon to protect my best interests.
‘When is he coming back?’ I asked.
‘He will send for you when he’s established in his new situation.’
There is a wound that never heals in the heart of an abandoned child. It is something that I recognised in Edward and I wonder sometimes if it is that which first drew us together. For of course he was abandoned, too, as a boy. He and his sisters left with their disapproving grandparents while their mother and father travelled the world.
It is something that I recognised, too, in Ada Lovegrove.
I have thought often of her over the years. The unkindness of children. The way she pined. That day in the river.
So long ago, and yet it was yesterday. With only the merest effort I can see her now, sitting cross-legged on the bed in the attic, hot tears of anger on her cheeks, scribbling faster than her pen will permit, entreating her parents to please, please, please come back for her.
CHAPTER TEN
Summer, 1899
Ada Lovegrove had a tall, wealthy father and an elegant clever mother and she hated them both equally. The hatred was only new – she had adored them both as recently as April the twenty-fifth – but it was no less deeply felt for being novel. A holiday, they’d said, a little trip back to England. Oh, Ada-Bear, how you’ll adore London – the theatres and the Houses of Parliament! And just you wait until you see how soft and green the countryside is in summer! How gentle and floral, filled with honeysuckles and primroses, narrow laneways and hedgerows …
These foreign words, spoken with a romantic longing that Ada could not understand and did not trust, she had turned over with the dispassionate interest of an archaeologist building a picture of a distant civilisation. She had been born in Bombay, and India was as much a part of her as the nose on her face and the freckles that covered it. She didn’t recognise words like ‘soft’ and ‘gentle’ and ‘narrow’: her world was vast and sudden and blazing. It was a place of unspeakable beauty – of brilliant flowers on the terrace and sweet swooning fragrance in the dead of night – but also of mercurial cruelty. It was her home.
Her mother had broken the news about the upcoming holiday one afternoon in March when Ada was having her evening meal. She had been eating in the library because Mamma and Papa were hosting a dinner that evening and the grand mahogany dining table (shipped from London) was being set. The library was lined with books (also shipped from London) on whose spines were printed names like Dickens and Bront? and Keats, and at the end of the desk was the playbook from which Mamma had been teaching her The Tempest. The heat had made her hair stick to her forehead, and a lazy fly was turning loops around the room, its song droning like a barbless threat.
Ada had been thinking about Caliban and Prospero, wondering why Mamma’s forehead had creased disapprovingly when Ada said that she felt sorry for Caliban, when the words ‘little trip back to England’ broke her concentration.
As the lace curtains shrugged off a hot, moist breeze, Ada said, ‘How long will it take to get there?’
‘A lot less time than it took before the canal was opened. We used to have to go by rail, you know.’
Rail sounded preferable to Ada, who could not swim.
‘What shall we do there?’
‘All sorts of things. Visit family and friends, take in the sights. I’m looking forward to showing you the places I knew as a girl, the galleries and parks, the palace and gardens.’