She stood straighter and appraised him over the top of her fine wire spectacles. ‘Tell me, Mr Gilbert, what do you think of Birchwood Manor?’
It was Leonard’s turn to be surprised: she knew his name. But then the village was small and he had it on good authority that news travelled quickly in such circumstances. He told her he thought very highly of Birchwood Manor; that he’d read a lot about it before he arrived, but the reality had far surpassed his imaginings.
She listened, blinking occasionally, but otherwise giving no indication that she approved or disapproved of what he was saying. When he stopped speaking she said only, ‘It was a school once, did you know. A school for girls.’
‘I’d heard that.’
‘It was a terrible shame what happened. It was going to be revolutionary. A new way of educating young women. Edward used to say that education was the key to salvation.’
‘Edward Radcliffe?’
‘Who else?’
‘You knew him.’
Her eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I did.’
It took every ounce of restraint Leonard could rally to sound casual. ‘I’m a research student up at Oxford. I’m working on a thesis about Radcliffe and this village, the house and his art. I wonder whether you’d mind speaking with me?’
‘I had thought that’s what we were doing, Mr Gilbert.’
‘We are, of course—’
‘You meant that you would like to speak with me about Edward, to interview me.’
‘I’ve had to rely to this point largely on letters from the archives and accounts written by his friends, you see, people like Thurston Holmes—’
‘Pah!’
Leonard flinched at her vehemence.
‘Of all the self-aggrandising weasels! I shouldn’t rely upon a word that fell from his pen.’
Her attention had been caught by another weed and she was loosening it now with the end of her cane. ‘I don’t like talking,’ she said between stabs. ‘I don’t like it at all.’ She reached to pluck the weed from the rubble, shaking it fiercely to rid the roots of dirt before throwing it into the bushes. ‘I can see, though, Mr Gilbert, that I am going to have to speak with you, lest you publish more lies. There have been enough of those over the years.’
Leonard had started to thank her, but she’d waved her hand with imperious impatience.
‘Yes, yes, you may save all that for later. I am doing this against my better judgement, but I shall see you at teatime on Thursday.’ She gave him her address, and Leonard was on the cusp of saying goodbye when he realised that he hadn’t even asked her name. ‘Why, Mr Gilbert,’ she said with a frown, ‘whatever is the matter with you? My name is Lucy, of course; Lucy Radcliffe.’
He should have guessed. Lucy Radcliffe – the younger sister who had inherited her brother’s beloved house; who had loved him too well to allow it to be sold to someone who might not care for it as he had done; Leonard’s landlady. Leonard had gone home directly after their meeting, bursting through the front door into the late afternoon dim of the house, heading straight to the mahogany desk in the room with the mulberry fruit-and-leaf wallpaper, across which he’d spread his research. He’d had to sort through hundreds of pages of handwritten notes, quotes he’d jotted down in libraries and private houses over the years, from letters and journals; ideas he’d scribbled and then circled, attached to diagrams and arrows.
He found what he was looking for late that night when the lantern had burned for long enough that the room smelled like kerosene. Amongst notes he’d taken from a collection of documents kept in the private collection of a family in Shropshire was a series of letters exchanged between Edward and his youngest sister while he was at boarding school. They had come to rest in this place, in a trove of other old family correspondence, through a series of marital twists and turns stemming from the middle Radcliffe child, Clare.
The letters had seemed unimportant to Leonard at the time; they hadn’t concerned the house or Radcliffe’s art; they were personal letters between siblings, one nine years older than the other; he’d only copied out their contents because the family had intimated that his visit was an inconvenience and he wouldn’t be permitted a second look at their papers. But as he reread the exchanges – funny anecdotes, enchanting and frightening fairy stories, childish gossip about family members – and viewed them in the context of the old woman he’d just met, unsteady on her feet and yet still walking across the village to lay fresh flowers on her brother’s grave fifty years after his death, he saw another side to Edward Radcliffe.
All of this time, Leonard had been focused on Radcliffe the artist, the spirited thinker, the writer of the manifesto. But the long, engaging letters of a boy who was miserable at school to an earnest little sister who begged – rather precociously for a five-year-old it seemed to Leonard – for books about ‘how the stars were born’ and ‘whether it is possible to travel through time’, had added a new aspect to the man. Furthermore, they’d hinted at a mystery Leonard had thus far been unable to resolve. For both Lucy and Edward referred on more than one occasion to ‘the Night of the Following’ – always capitalised – and ‘the house with the light’, the context making it clear that they were speaking about something that had happened to Edward.
At the archives in York, Leonard had puzzled over the letter Edward wrote to Thurston Holmes in 1861 announcing his purchase of Birchwood Manor and admitting that he was no stranger to the house; now he was beginning to think that the two sets of correspondence were linked. Both made allusions to a mysterious event from the past, and Leonard had a feeling that whatever had happened on ‘the Night of the Following’ had led to Radcliffe’s obsession with Birchwood Manor. It was one of the foremost questions on the list of those he intended to ask Lucy at their meeting.
Leonard stood and lit a cigarette. The ground was still rough from where she’d plucked at the weeds the other day, and he smoothed over the spot with his foot. As he returned the lighter to his pocket, his fingertips grazed the cool edge of Tom’s lucky tuppence. He had never stood at the end of his own brother’s grave. He hadn’t seen the point; he knew Tom wasn’t there. Where was he? Leonard wondered. Where had they all gone? It seemed impossible that it could all just end like that. Impossible that so many young men’s hopes and dreams and bodies could be buried in the earth and the earth remain unchanged. Such an almighty transfer of energy and matter must surely have affected the world’s balance at an essential – an elemental – level: all of those people who had once been, suddenly gone.
A pair of birds swooped from one of the boughs of an enormous oak to perch at the top of the steeple and Leonard whistled for Dog. They left the churchyard together, circling back towards the pitted stone plinth known locally as ‘the crossroads’.
The triangle-shaped green was just beyond, a large oak at its centre and an elegant two-storey pub called The Swan on one of the corners opposite. A woman was out on the pavement sweeping around a bench beneath the window. She lifted a hand to wave at Leonard and he returned the gesture. He took the narrowest of the three roads, passing the memorial hall building to arrive at a row of terraced cottages. Lucy Radcliffe had told him number six, which was the furthest one along.