I hadn’t told anyone, but that was no more a barrier for him now than it had been twenty-five years ago. ‘No, I am. Why?’
Somewhere upstairs, where they had renovated Dad’s study into a new, bigger parlour, Cecily had taken over the music. She played the violin and she had begun the same carol Keita had been playing, but she was pretending not to know all of it and, in the joking way musical people can, bridged the gaps with ‘Ode to Joy’. The fireplaces here and there lined up and I could hear people laughing through the chimney.
‘Could you send me some of the pollen from the forest? Only a vial.’ He paused. ‘I’m making some fireflies.’
I laughed. ‘To Tokyo?’
‘No, Knightsbridge, please.’ He gave me a piece of paper with an address on it. Filigree Street.
‘Holiday?’ I said.
‘No, to live. Not for very long, only a few years.’
‘Lovely,’ I said, and waited to see if he would say anything else, but he didn’t. For his country he was a tall man, and he held himself like one, but every so often there was a fragility around him when he was coming up to something that seemed especially insurmountable. I poured him some more tea and watched the moving steam catch his eye and tug him slowly into the present.
‘Is she playing “Ode to Joy”?’ he asked at last.
‘She is. She’s joking. She means you should go upstairs and say hello.’ They had met before. Minna had come on holiday to Japan once when Cecily was about four. Keita had taught her to read, in about two afternoons, with the efficiency of someone who didn’t like children and wanted a proper human being to talk to.
‘What?’
‘Keita? Joy?’ I said gently. He knew the translation of his own name but he still looked far away.
‘Oh, yes.’ He came back to himself properly. I saw him studying the possible recent future, the one with Cecily in it in full Christmas swing. He looked worried. ‘I’d rather not.’
I laughed. ‘Christmas spirit. It’s why you’re here, on you go. I’ll come up in a bit. I just want the last of the light.’ I motioned at Charles’s old study.
His black eyes caught on the door. I thought he smiled, as if there were an enormous surprise party waiting inside, but he turned away too quickly for me to be sure and when I leaned in round the edge of the door, nobody burst out from behind the ferns.
I’d been excavating for a month. Charles had kept everything, from old, irrelevant account books to octogenarian financial newspapers, but it all had to be gone through. An accountant from Truro had been helping me, because I’d never kept a proper ledger in my life and I had no idea how it worked, and I didn’t understand what bonds or trusts were, or how investment differed from gambling. What money I had, had come here, and what was left had gone to the bank in London, where the account was too little for them to bother asking me much. The India Office paid well, but well in modern terms; to fully restore a vast twelfth-century estate, created and then expanded in times when noblemen had been the equivalent to the millionaires of this century, was long work, and would have been even on the Prime Minister’s salary. I was happy doing it, though.
We had found a lot of things: failed investments from Dad’s time, where he had tried to get some of the mortgage money back by betting on the tin mines, which had promptly run dry, and a few from Charles too. He had never told me about those, too ashamed I suspected, though it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference to me. The mortgage on the house had been astronomical and I’d only paid off the last of it a few years ago. I was trying to keep chipping at the records for an hour or so a day, even during the holidays, so that the idea of it couldn’t grow too monstrous on the fertile soil of absence.
Carefully, because I still couldn’t quite bring myself to trust the strength of the whitewood round my thigh even after twenty years wearing it, I climbed up on a chair to take a random pile of dusty things from the top shelf. I dropped them on to the desk and crumpled down after them. It was much nicer than usual, though, with the music coming through the ceiling, and happy voices, and the candles sparkling all along the stairs. The puppy yipped at me under the table. I lifted her out.
‘I wondered where you’d gone.’ She was barely a dog yet; at first glance she was an enormous ball of fluff with ears. Like a baby would have, she emerged with her paws curled up. I laughed and hugged her. She was called Quixote, because I was working my way through books as well as dogs. She was Gulliver’s great-granddaughter. ‘Come and help me read all this rubbish. What have we got, do you think? Oh. Could it be as exciting as – old receipts for lamp oil? I think it might.’
She fell asleep hanging over my arm. I laid her across my lap so she wouldn’t hurt her back like that and held her to keep my hands warm while I read. I frowned when I realised that the pile was nothing to do with Charles. They were much older accounts in Harry’s writing: ordinary household stuff. I put the first ledger aside. The next thing down was a slim envelope. When I opened it, the documents inside were flowery and official, in Spanish. The seal of the Peruvian government was at the bottom. My Spanish was good enough to scan them and my lungs caught when I first guessed the meaning, but I wasn’t sure. After I’d spent another quarter of an hour with a dictionary, I knew I wasn’t wrong. Not quite able to breathe properly, I went upstairs and looked through rooms full of festively dressed people until I found Sing. He was talking to one of Minna’s friends.
‘Could I borrow him?’ I asked.
‘If I can borrow that dog.’
‘Yes. Trade.’ I gave her the dog. Sing followed me out.
‘Was I just bought for a St Bernard?’
‘Comparable weight of goods. I, um . . .’ We were in the corridor, still surrounded by music, but I couldn’t wait. ‘These are land deeds.’
Sing didn’t speak Spanish, but he understood what he was looking at straightaway. There must have been a standard format for the documents, or else, he recognised how the numbers were laid out. Acres, price, tax. From what I could tell, the land had been bought just after Peru had won independence from Spain. The new government must have been selling off land in the interior to help recharge the treasury.
‘So this is what your grandfather did with the money,’ he said, after looking through a few pages. ‘This must cover thousands of acres. All beyond the Andes.’
‘This one is for all the land around Bedlam.’ I fished out a deed from the middle of the sheaf to show him. Nueva Bet., it was abbreviated to, but it was there. ‘Raphael told me that Martel had a landlord who had stopped asking for money years ago. I mean – that must have been Dad, he must have known about this, but I never thought . . . this is what I think it is, isn’t it?’