Stella took the diary up to her study. She’d have much preferred to sit in her bedroom by the fire and carefully turn the pages until she understood what was missing, what Elizabeth was telling her with the words she had not written. But sitting under the bright light at her desk, Stella found it was easier to see and knowing that she had only a day, at best, before the book was scooped up by conservators, she bent low and went to work.
What Stella needed was some clue to Elizabeth’s state of mind after the garden was destroyed. What she’d love was the story of Anna’s disappearance. Surely when a village midwife goes missing, every pregnant woman notices? Did she flee Thomas’s wrath at her meddling? Or, and this would be a lovely story, did Anna fall in love and make a life of her own far from the Kirkwoods? Of course, with the tapestries in her mind Stella had to discount that fairy tale. Surely Elizabeth would have been distraught at the loss of her friend and mentor, no matter how she left. Stella went to the very end of the diary and worked backward. Then she started from the section where Elizabeth obliquely described the death of the garden.
Thomas announced to one and all that nature is a cruel mistress the day after my garden fell to ruin. I know that from experience, but it is Thomas who is cruel to use those words now. Crueler still, he has ordered the youngest children and me to London and then on to Brussels to hurry the nuns along, to Antwerp to chide Horemans about our portrait and lastly Delft to collect the pottery. Days away from solstice I cannot think of worse places to be when the sun is high, or worse errands to fill. And, who will champion the garden while I am gone? Who will mend the damage and start anew? Without my remedies, how will I care for my children? Without Anna, how will I bear my life?
That Elizabeth was learning from Anna was clear. Anna was gone, perhaps dead, as Stella suspected, perhaps only scared off by Thomas, and with Elizabeth in London, he would have no impediment to finish what he’d started, the complete destruction of the Shakespeare Garden.
After some entries about her trip abroad, an inventory of the blue and white pottery, an approval of the portrait and a single sentence on the tapestries, Awful, but I have corrected the worst of the mistakes, Elizabeth returned to Kirkwood Hall and took up the garden narrative again. Thomas had, in fact, ripped the entire thing out, leaving a walled desert in its stead. He forbade Elizabeth from attempting to revive it. There was an entry telling how the villagers and staff were particularly anxious and timid around Lord Kirkwood and a mention of the death in childbirth of the butcher’s wife; then there were several weeks without a word. When Elizabeth picked up her story, she was already ill and there were only three entries before she died. None of the entries made much sense; in fact, Stella found the text disjointed, nightmarish even, and assumed that fever had stolen Elizabeth’s thoughts until she came to a scrawled section nearly at the end of the diary. Here Lady Kirkwood made reference to the chapel window, which as Stella suspected, never existed. It will tell the story I cannot, she wrote, it will be my epitaph.
With a mixture of horror and awe Stella understood that Elizabeth had damned her husband and told Anna’s story in the only way she could by weaving clues into the tapestries themselves. That it took hundreds of years for the truth to surface was heartbreaking but now that it had, Stella prepared to spread the word.
She rewrapped the diary and placed it in an archive box and turned out her desk light. In the room’s darkness the stars were stark in the sky through the window. Stella thought, not for the first time, that those stars had seen the truth play out beneath them, all the truths of Kirkwood Hall for centuries, and now they kept the secrets even better than her husband.
CHAPTER 15
Carnation
Andrew packed up his vestments and shoved some shorts into the side pocket of his garment bag. His meetings had been uncomfortable; he felt as if he’d been called into the headmaster’s office after fulfilling a particularly harsh detention. It wasn’t that his overlords weren’t benevolent, exactly; it’s just that they so obviously both pitied and were embarrassed by him. There would be a place for him in service, of course, they insisted, if he felt he was ready. Only the picture of Sorrel waiting for him at Kirkwood made the muddle of his thoughts tolerable. His bishop (a man only a few years older than Andrew and already Bishop of Kensington and father to four boisterous children whose pictures rebuked Andrew as he sat in in the office) had been mildly empathetic when he assured Andrew that the past was past and, perhaps in a veiled bid to convince Andrew to stay in the countryside and out of the tabloids, he promised to attend the solstice service in Kirkwood Chapel himself. Andrew suspected that his boss wanted a day out and a chance to hobnob with the landed gentry and the Bishop of Salisbury. Still, the consecration and dedication ceremony, the first in over 150 years was something to celebrate. There was no set in stone service for the consecration of a disused Anglican church; each diocesan bishop was free, within the constraints of the faith, to create his own. Andrew had planned to watch the Bishop of Salisbury preside and then face up to the next step away from Sorrel. He’d expected to feel put out by his boss’s suggestion that he bide a wee more at his sister’s home, but as he thought about it, Andrew dreamed of Sorrel and began to wonder if Kirkwood Chapel might be where he belonged after all.
This visit to London had grated on him; even Christ Church seemed cloying, smelling of candle wax, and furniture polish instead of Sorrel’s phlox and delphinium. He had spoken the truth when he told Sorrel his confidence was returning, his certainty that he was of use to a parish again. But he suspected that the venue was about to change. Would Sorrel find this good news?
Andrew’s step was light as he left his flat. He hadn’t called Sorrel at all and as he threw his things into the car, he knew he didn’t have time if he wanted to arrive while the day was still fair. Better to apologize in person and he’d see her soon enough. I’ve been given another chance, he thought, let’s not bollocks it up. What he needed now was to have his time and his love back. What might transpire beyond that he couldn’t think, so he shifted his bag over to make room for Wags’s new bed. The car started with a wheeze.