There was a single light burning in one of Quire’s windows until very late that night. If Bryony curled up on the windowsill of her bedroom she could see it shining through the trees. Was it Thomasina who was wakeful up there worrying about where her cousin might be? Byrony was not inclined to think so; she did not think Thomasina ever worried about anything very much.
Everyone said Quire was a beautiful house, but it was a bit too symmetrical for Bryony’s taste. That was probably because she could remember the sprawling old house on Ireland’s west coast, where sunshine poured in through the latticed windows and the gardens were a romantic wilderness of wild primroses and broken stone statues crusted with lichen.
‘You’re seeing it through rose-tinted spectacles,’ Cormac had once said when Bryony was in a nostalgic mood. ‘The house was falling down around our ears–there wasn’t a whole brick in the place or a sound tile on the roof, and most of the furniture was nearly in matchsticks from woodworm. It’s all probably crumbled into nothing by now.’
But they both knew the Irish house would not really have crumbled into nothing, and Bryony thought that children did not really notice or care about crumbling roofs or worm-eaten furniture. When she thought about the house she only remembered how the rooms had been scented with beeswax from when there had still been housemaids to polish the furniture, and how, if you stood on the terrace and looked across to the west, you could see the purple smudge of mountains and the glint of the sea…
Her father said that when he was a boy his mother used to walk in the gardens wearing a huge shady hat and cutting sheaves of lilac. ‘As unruffled as if she had all the time and money in Christendom and all the leisure in the world,’ he said, but then he would add, ‘And as if there were no bailiffs permanently camping out in the kitchen, or men arriving with a distraint on the furniture three times a week.’
When he talked like this, Bryony told him he had no romance in his soul, to which he usually replied that their family had kept the noble profession of debt collectors in business for at least two decades. He always sent her his slant-eyed smile when he said this, and Bryony thought they both knew that one day they would find a way to go back to that house.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The photocopied papers Antonia had brought from Quire House did not seem to be in any particular order. The first set appeared to contain financial statements and accounts, mostly relating to maintenance of the fabric: repairs to the roof and gutters, to broken windows and kitchen supplies. Antonia flipped through these rather perfunctorily, pausing over a set of accounts headed Forrester Benevolent Trust, which appeared to be a specially created trust fund for the benefit of patients at Latchkill Insane Asylum who for some reason could not be admitted to the paupers’ ward, but who had no money of their own for the private section.
There was an exchange of letters between a local doctor and Latchkill’s matron. They did not seem to be in chronological order, which might have been because someone had thrust them carelessly into a box or an envelope twenty or even a hundred years earlier, or it might be down to haphazard photocopying by the sullen Greg Foster. Who cares about the dates on a load of boring old letters, he had probably thought. But it was easy enough to put them in sequence. Some of them were in a small, rather mean-looking hand, and others appeared to have been dashed off by somebody who was either in a hurry or was exasperated with the intended recipient.
The earliest was one of these exasperated in a hurry letters. The date was October 1899 and the address was Bracken House, Amberwood. Antonia wondered if Bracken House still existed. She would make enquiries tomorrow.
She began to read.
Bracken Surgery
Tuesday p.m.
My Dear Matron