“Look,” Sorrel said. “Let me get your mother’s permission before I start poking around, okay?”
“If you must be polite, but at least you know it’s here,” Poppy said. “Come on, let’s go sneak into the hall of horrors! You really must see the tapestries to get the full ‘pretty’ of my father’s cheery ancestors.” She pulled Sorrel out of Stella’s office and across to the only other door. It opened easily into a dark, cold room. Poppy fumbled for a light switch along the stone wall. To protect the panels and help keep the temperature uniform there were no uncovered windows in this room, no natural light or air. Finally, Poppy found a pull cord.
“This will either illuminate the room or flush a loo somewhere,” she said. “Can’t remember. I haven’t been in here in ages.”
Whatever explorer bravado Poppy and Sorrel possessed fell away as pin spots came on around the room. Across every wall hung a tapestry, jewel tones and faded glory picked out by the sharp light from the spots. More breathtaking in their beauty than Sorrel could have imagined and more pristine than Graham had promised. Still, what made both women literally gasp was the subject matter. There were six panels on these walls, each one so very like the famed unicorn tapestries in the New York Met Cloisters museum that Sorrel peered closer, looking for the mythical creature. But, whereas the Cloisters’ panels detailed the hunt, capture, and slaying of a unicorn, these depicted something strangely more real to Sorrel: A chase of men and hounds ranged through a forest, a field, through a maze and past castle barricades until, in a walled garden, they gathered around something before them. Graham was right: Never did the viewer see what or who was being hunted. There was a flutter of cloth in one panel, a hand grasping a cluster of plants in another, and in the last, a bloodied leg stretching out as if in midstride, just visible between the boots of the hunters. Surely a final panel would have revealed all, as it did in the unicorn tapestries, but without it, Sorrel could only think that this was the story of another kind of innocent altogether. Why anyone would wish to capture such ugliness for all time with silk thread, vibrant dyes, and stitches so fine the only way to know they were there was to run one’s hand across the surface, was a question. But there they were: six panels of such terrible beauty that Sorrel couldn’t decide whether to move closer or run from the room.
Poppy had her hand to her mouth, and Sorrel held the other as they stared.
“Yeah,” Poppy said. “They’re just as disturbing as I remembered.”
A faint rustle made them both wheel around. Gabe stood at the door; his eyes wide with shock and what looked to Sorrel like fear.
“I’m sorry,” Sorrel stammered, “I was just exploring, I didn’t want to wake Stella, I didn’t want to . . . Poppy and I . . .” Sorrel ran out of babble at the same moment she realized stupidly that Gabe probably couldn’t read her confused lips.
“Hello, Gabe,” Poppy said calmly. “We were just leaving.”
“Yes,” Sorrel said, “we’ll just go now.”
They sidled past him, Sorrel still apologizing. His face was guilt stricken as if it was his fault that an outsider had wandered into the Kirkwood family secret, or at least one of them.
As soon as they were down the stairs, Poppy started giggling.
“Ooooh, all that schoolgirl terror! Honestly you’d think you got caught smoking by the headmaster!”
“He scares me,” Sorrel said. “Or he did just then.”
“Gabe—a little power is a dangerous thing,” Poppy said. “I love him, but he does take his duties awfully seriously. He practically came with the house, you know. He and Dad are about the same age, and when Gabe lost his hearing while Dad was at uni, it was Dad who learned sign language first.”
“Does he speak at all?” Sorrel asked.
“Only to Dad. They understand each other like brothers.”
“Why was he so upset with us?” Sorrel asked. “I mean, aren’t I supposed to study the tapestries?”
“No one ever goes in there if they can help it, and only with Dad or Mum,” Poppy said. “Dad considers the tapestries proof positive of his ancestors’ barbarism.”
“What are they chasing?”
“Theories abound: a thief, a possessed child, a witch.”
“Now you tell me,” Sorrel said. “I understood that the tapestries would be useful in planning the garden, but I see that your father left out another very important detail. First the family curse and now the hall of horrors.” Sorrel stopped at the door to her room. “Is he always so cagey?”
“Yes, a master at withholding essential info,” Poppy said. “So, now that you’ve seen the artistic rendering of the origins of our family’s black thumb, let’s see what magic you brought from America to fix it.” Poppy opened Sorrel’s door and walked in as if it were her room.
“What, exactly, did Dad say when he invited you here?” Poppy asked and threw herself onto Sorrel’s bed. “Like, word for word.”
“I can show you the letter,” Sorrel said, digging in her suitcase. “But basically he hired me to re-create the Shakespeare Garden as it originally was. He thought the tapestries could be helpful, a template and a botanical reference. He said he knew my work through Fiona, and he mentioned that he knew about my sister’s trial and intimated that it would be good to have a project as therapy in a way.”
“Nothing about the Kirkwood weird and not-so-wonderful history? Nothing about the absolute worst Kirkwood ever, Thomas, the one who commissioned the tapestries? No words about how many landscape gardeners have tried and failed to restore the Shakespeare Garden, not to mention that every few generations or so some Kirkwood maiden gives it a go and promptly succumbs to, well, the garden, I reckon?”
Sorrel considered for a moment. Graham had written that his family had experience with the kind of chaos a witch hunt produced. And Stella had given Sorrel a taste of Thomas Kirkwood and certainly piqued her curiosity about Elizabeth.
“Surely there was enough all-purpose illness to go around over the years,” Sorrel said. “Plague, pox, flu, childbirth? Plus, I don’t suppose your dad had all the history at hand when he wrote me,” she said.
“Let me tell you something,” Poppy said. “My parents have delved deep into this family. There is very little they don’t know about the Kirkwoods and our house. If Dad left things out of his letter, it was for a reason, and that reason was to get you here before you twigged to the eccentricities of this bunch.”
Poppy hopped off the bed and looked at the bottles on Sorrel’s dresser. She held one up. “And this is?”
Sorrel looked up. “Um, my sister Patience sent me off with a bunch of her remedies.”