Father appeared to think the curator was viewing matters through rose-tinted spectacles, but the sale had been agreed very amicably, and the sketch carefully wrapped up by the curator’s assistant. Father said he was going to hang it on the main staircase of Fosse House as a little memorial to his dead cousin, and what did I think?
What I thought was that the prospect of having to see such a sketch every time I went up or down the stairs was horrifying; I did not think I had ever seen anything so disturbing in my entire life. The sketch was of a long, bleak room, with narrow beds and wooden lockers, and men in uniform sitting or lying around. The windows were small and somehow mean, and they all had thick bars across them, as if this might be a prison. So from that aspect alone it is a sad picture, somehow filled with despair, even though several of the young men look cheerful. One is sitting apart from them, and there is such hopelessness and fear in the tilt of his head that I wanted to cry for him. But the really bad part – the part I stared at in father’s library with such repulsion – is that clustered at one of the barred windows are several more men, all wearing a different kind of uniform, all staring into the room with a dreadful eagerness. There is almost hunger in their eyes as they look at the men in the room. They terrified me the minute I saw them, and I know if I look at the sketch again they will still terrify me.
‘What do you think?’ said my father again, and I mumbled something about it being very interesting, and asked exactly what it was.
‘It’s an old prisoner-of-war camp,’ he said. ‘You see where someone has written Holzminden in that corner, and the date? November 1917. There was a camp at Holzminden for captured officers at the end of the Great War – mostly British officers, they were. I believe my cousin Stephen was there – he was captured early in 1917 and held prisoner. So I thought he might be one of the young men in the sketch. That’s why I bought it from the museum.’ He sort of brooded over it, almost lovingly – if lovingly is a word that can ever be applied to my father.
I said, ‘You know a lot about him.’ Father did not often talk about his research or his family, so I was careful how I asked because I wanted to hear more and I was afraid of sending him back into his shell.
‘Oh yes, I do. He was older than me – I always thought of him as a heroic figure because he went off to the war. That war wasn’t like the one we’ve just been through, Luisa. It was crueller than you can imagine, and the young men who fought – they had no idea what they were going into. They went off laughing and singing – some of them lied about their ages to get into the army. Brass bands played at the railway stations as their trains went out, and people waved flags and hung out bunting, and cheered and sang patriotic songs. But all the time they were going into a darkness – into mud and blood and terror. So many of them died.’
‘Including your cousin?’
‘People have laughed at me or belittled me for trying to find out what happened to him,’ he said, still staring at the sketch. ‘None of them understood. I’ve always needed to know what happened, ever since I came to this house, because—’ His eyes flickered to the window, and he got up to try the latch, as if to make sure it was secure. But even when he sat down again, he lowered his voice as if he feared someone might be standing outside, listening. ‘But even after all these years, I still don’t know,’ he said, and there was such sadness in his voice that I wanted to put my arms round him. I did not though. He would have hated it, and we would both have been embarrassed.
Instead I tried to think of something to say that would make him go on talking, but before I could do so, he said, ‘I do know Stephen was sentenced to death in Holzminden, though. I found the execution order in Liège in the museum. That’s why I went to Holzminden from Liège. But I couldn’t find out if the sentence was actually carried out. I needed to know, you see. You do see that, Luisa?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, not seeing at all. ‘Did it say why he was sentenced to death?’
‘No. That’s one of the things I couldn’t find out, and I must find out, Luisa, I must—’
He was staring down at the sketch, passing the palm of his hand over and over its surface, as if he was trying to draw from it the living essence. His eyes had a look I had never seen before – it made me uncomfortable. It was as if the real person – my father, Booth Gilmore – had been squashed into a dark forgotten corner, and something else was looking out from behind his eyes.
Is that how I look when Leonora tries to push me into my own dark corner so she can take over my mind?
Now I am sitting in my bedroom, staring out over the walled garden, and I am thinking that a young man – perhaps one of the very young men in the grisly sketch – perhaps a young man who looked like the early photographs we have in the drawing room of my father – had been imprisoned and sentenced to death. Would they have hanged Stephen, like they hang murderers here? Or shot him because they believed him to be a traitor or a spy? Perhaps he had been a spy. Spies are rather romantic.
I have made up little stories about Father’s cousin Stephen, about him spying and being heroic and romantic. It stops me wondering what happened to him, and how he died. It stops me, as well, from remembering the look in Father’s eyes as he studied the sketch.
The more I think about Stephen, the more clearly I can see him. I can see him crouching in a small stone room, and I think he is waiting for his execution, because he is dreadfully afraid.
Is this more of the madness? Is it something to do with Leonora? Did she know Stephen? Was she with him when he died? But I am not Leonora, I must cling to that undoubted fact. I am not Leonora …