At twenty-two Delphine fell in love with Arthur Burden, whose family owned the shabby but comfortable five-room inn and pub in the village. Together they refurbished the place themselves after his father retired. They did this through hard work, late nights, and early mornings, and with anonymous financial help from the Kirkwoods (Delphine thought that Arthur had a heretofore undiscovered trust, and Arthur thought the same of Delphine). It was while she was pregnant with her daughter (a secret she had not yet told Arthur and one that gave her such a thrill that her cheeks were a permanent rosy pink) that Delphine and Graham made their discovery. Graham, a dashing and, he thought, sophisticated university student in his last year and his last June half-term break, found the Kirkwood tapestries rolled and stacked like old rugs in a storeroom on the third floor. Delphine had agreed to tutor Graham for his French finals—her mother tongue had settled into Graham’s bones, and he continued to study it right through university. Both of them had remarkably short attention spans when it came to homework and had decided to take a breather by reliving their explorer days. It was chucking down rain, so any kind of outdoor adventure was out. The two decided to have a wander on the third floor, which was shortly to be restored to its former glory and so was a bit of a hoarder’s mess at the moment. Eventually it would become part of the public rooms after the house was opened as a museum, which wouldn’t happen until years later, as it turned out, shortly before Graham took over the estate.
It would not be telling tales out of school to say that Graham had always had a bit of a crush on Delphine. She was five years older than he, but those years had only added to her allure when she was au pair to Fiona and her older brother. Now, although she was a married woman and a business owner, Delphine could still work her significant charms on Graham. She could always make him laugh, and when a pastry accompanied an unpleasant task, both Graham and Fiona were helpless before her. On that afternoon, she put these wiles to good use as soon as she realized that the dusty, filthy “rugs” were in fact tapestries woven by Belgian artisans. Graham, for his part, felt a chill the moment Delphine began to toe the first tapestry open. He had heard the stories of the series commissioned by Thomas Kirkwood upon his return from the trip to France and Belgium. His arrogance knew no bounds as he instructed his agent in Brussels to ensure his tapestries would rival the La Rochefoucauld family’s centuries-old unicorn hangings at their chateau in Charente. After seeing them, dragging Elizabeth from panel to panel, even as she cringed, he insisted that only fifteenth-century recipes for the dyes be used, that the methods and appearance of his wall hangings would make them look as close to the unicorn tapestries as possible, as ancient as a family of great and old wealth deserved. Perhaps the brutality of the La Rochefoucauld hangings, their mixture of Christian and pagan iconography appealed to Thomas’s own ruthless drive for dominion over his world. Inventory of the Kirkwood treasures listed seven panels in the early eighteenth century but the tapestries were never mentioned again in any of the documents Stella found. Graham’s father Richard had always told him they were lost, and his mother had cautioned him that this was a story a Kirkwood shouldn’t share. But here he was watching as a chattering Delphine knelt beside a panel that startled him with its color and depth. He was powerless to stop her as she flitted from one image to the next, running her hands gently over stitches so fine they all but disappeared into the whole. When she saw his pale face and the look of disgust he gave the tapestries, Delphine reached into her basket and withdrew a bottle of fizzy lemonade wrapped in a tea towel and a slightly squashed éclair.
“Come then,” she said. “Let’s share this and then we will be fortified on our quest for the truth of the tapestries.”
Graham found himself with sticky chocolaty fingers and no way to refuse Delphine.
“Wait, wait,” Sorrel said, putting her hand on Andrew’s arm. “Graham’s father hid the tapestries, Graham found the tapestries, is revolted by the tapestries, restored the tapestries, hates the tapestries, and now keeps them in a Mrs. Rochester room upstairs?”
“That does sound odd, but it’s what happened,” Andrew said.
Delphine convinced Graham and Gabe to unroll the tapestries and hang them from dowels in that same storeroom so at least the worst of the dust and grime might fall away. Gabe was unenthusiastic at best, and his silence and scowls were enough to rattle even Delphine. Still, up they went and there they stayed for close to five years behind the lock Gabe installed. Delphine held the key to the room and spent those years studying the tapestries, carefully cleaning what little she could, tacking up the decaying linen and muslin backing, tucking in frayed threads and making sure no harsh light got to them other than her little anglepoise lamp. The truth was that Delphine knew she had no business tampering with the weavings so, after getting reluctant permission from Richard, Lord Kirkwood, she called in a textile team from the Victoria and Albert Museum to restore each panel. There was an agreement signed, a confidentiality contract that ensured no one would speak of the subject matter but only of the restoration project itself. “Let people think we’ve found ourselves another set of unicorns,” Graham’s father said the day the museum restorers arrived to transport the tapestries.
As the rolls, lined with archival tissue in huge sheets and laid upon cotton shrouds, were brought down to the truck, Delphine wondered as she watched the six panels being loaded if, like the unicorns in France, there was a seventh panel in the Kirkwood series as well. But, Graham was adamant that six was more than enough to brand his ancestors barbarians; no need to go looking for anything more. The truth is that Graham’s father had whisked a seventh panel away before he’d had the rest shoved unceremoniously into the storeroom. He had seen it, shrank back in horror and then determined that the ultimate unpleasantness would never come to light on his watch. This was the panel that could have so easily solved the mystery of the victim’s identity. But since it was nowhere to be found and Graham was becoming angry with her persistence, Delphine kept her suspicions to herself and decided that, in her story, the purported witch escaped through the Shakespeare Garden and went on to live a long and happy life far, far away. Had that been the case, there would have been no tale to tell all these centuries later.
“Delphine based the new altar cloth at St. Mary’s on the plants in the tapestries,” Andrew said. “Her embroidery has only improved with time.”
During the years Delphine built up the inn and spent her spare moments on her own needlework, she also raised her daughter, Mathilde who, everyone agreed, was as lovely as her mother and as mischievous as well. If Delphine and Graham were intrepid explorers with the tapestries as their greatest find, Mathilde was a friendlier, smaller version of a conquering army. She swept through garden and field at Kirkwood Hall, gathering wildflowers and unnameable herbs to weave into crowns, place in jelly jars throughout the inn, and scatter in her sweater drawers to discourage moths. She spent time learning how to bake at her mother’s side and how to ride the smallest horse in the stables with Graham. She was fearless and twice broke her wrist climbing the oldest, tallest oak on the estate. Graham often looked at Mathilde with a real sense of longing. To have a daughter as wild and game as this girl would be a fine thing, he thought. And so he would, although Poppy and Mathilde were never to meet.
But first, Graham and Fiona finished university, fell in and out of love several times each, and eventually found their soul mates and hearts’ desires. Fiona and John Hathaway took off for America, and Graham and Stella took over Kirkwood Hall when his father chose to retire to the South of France with Graham’s stepmother and a herd of small, nasty dogs. Graham’s mother had divorced his father for the curator of the Hans Sloane collection at the Natural History Museum in London. The entire tumultuous, gossip-fueled event was so unexpected that no one had the time or energy to be angry.