There came another of the breaks, and Michael got up to pour a drink from the decanter on the desk.
Luisa’s diary lay on the desk, the lamp casting a pool of soft light over its pages. The room was warm and the house was silent and unthreatening. Michael was even starting to feel a bit sleepy. But he would prefer not to actually fall asleep, and Luisa’s diary might help to keep him awake. He had no idea what he would do if he heard footsteps beyond this room, or if the door from the hall was slowly pushed open.
He reached for the diary again, seeing that the next entry was in slightly different ink, and that it appeared to have been made some considerable time after the previous one.
I see I ended my last entry with a reference to Fosse House’s darknesses. They were here before I was born, of course, so I grew up with them. I accepted them without thinking about them, as I accepted the other things that made up my life – the draughty rooms of the house, the exercises I was set by my governess, the sewing tasks allotted by Mother, Father’s fussiness about keeping doors locked and windows secured after nightfall. The vast wastelands of silence when my mother and father went away.
They returned from Liège and Holzminden two weeks ago, because, so they said, they did not want to miss my fifteenth birthday. We had a small lunch party for the occasion; some of the ladies from church attended, along with the vicar and his family and the curate. The ladies argued about the flower rota at St Augustine’s; the vicar and my father discussed Horace throughout all three courses to the exclusion of the rest of the guests, the vicar’s wife and two daughters enjoyed their usual Poor-Luisa-no-friends-no-life session, and the curate upset most of a bottle of Father’s wine over the tablecloth. Mother says the tablecloth is ruined, even though she soaked it in cold water and salt, damask never washes well, and it is enough to send a person straight into the arms of Rome.
But it was a small, welcome event, even with a little laughter when the vicar emerged from Horace for long enough to make a mild joke, and to wish me many happy returns of the day. Life resumed its ordinary pace after that.
Fifteen
It is November – when I look back I think it has always been November in this house, as if it might be trapped inside some kind of grey, hopeless Autumn of its own. And it’s evening. The house should be silent at this hour – as much as it ever is silent – but it is not. It is filled with the whisperings and soft footfalls that I have heard ever since I can remember. Mother often complains about them. Bad plumbing, she says. Ill-fitting windows, or the wind blowing through chinks in the roof. An army of carpenters and builders would never cure the problems, and how a person is expected to sleep at nights in such a ramshackle, ill-kept house is beyond her comprehension.
This afternoon, with a dull light creeping across the fens, I was in the little sitting-room, finishing some sewing. Presently, Mother would come in, as she always did at that time of the evening, and say please to tidy away my work and help lay the table for supper. She would wonder whether Father would join us in the dining room, or whether he would want a tray in the library, and grumble yet again about him being eccentric, and say that eccentricity was all very well in its place, but it made a great deal of extra work in a house. Then she would say she should have married her cousin Charles.
I was pretending that just this once she would say something different. ‘A young man has called for you, Luisa,’ she might say. Or, ‘I have invited neighbours for supper tonight, so put on a nice frock and brush your hair.’ Deep down I knew it would never happen, but I liked to imagine it.
But when the door opened it was not Mother, it was Father, and he was carrying the sketch he brought from Liège together with a sheaf of papers covered in his handwriting.
‘I’m glad you’re in here, Luisa,’ he said. ‘I need your help with a little project.’
This was instantly interesting because Father never asked anyone for help, or, if he did, it was never me.
‘It’s about my cousin,’ he said.
‘Stephen? The one in the war camp? In the sketch?’
He was pleased I had remembered. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if he really is in the sketch, but I’d like to think he is.’ He sat down, and I saw that he was holding the sketch in the way he had when he first showed it to me – smoothing his hands over and over the glass. Once he lifted it and pressed it against his chest, and once – this was quite disturbing – he raised it and laid his cheek against it.
Then he set it down and said, ‘I’ve had some papers sent to me by the curator of the museum in Liège – the place where I found the sketch. There are a couple of letters written by a German officer. My German isn’t as good as it might be, but I did study it briefly, you know, and I think I’ve got the sense of what the man wrote. And there are several articles written by a Russian journalist – I can’t read Russian, but some are written in French and those I can read. I expect I can find a Russian translator for the others. They both knew Stephen – the German, and the Russian journalist. It’s a real find, Luisa.’
‘What do they say?’
‘That Stephen came home. He escaped from the prisoner of war camp at Holzminden and somehow he got back to England. He came here to this house.’ He sat back, for once glowing with achievement, waiting for me to say something.
‘How did he escape?’
‘I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter,’ he said impatiently, and got up and went to the window to try the latch, as if reassuring himself it was fastened. He often did this, but until now I had never seen it as anything other than what Mother called his finickiness.