‘I’m not sure yet. When I came as a child I was always welcome. I could talk to Sam or Georgie or Robert. But they’re not there. They’re hiding. There’s something else.’ She stood up, her movements restless and quick. Looking out of the window she shook her head. ‘There’s too much here now. It’s confused. I’m going to need some time. Let’s go back to the great hall.’
A few minutes later standing in front of the fireplace she shook her head again. ‘I can feel so much anger and so much pain.’ She put her hands to her temples. ‘It’s filling my head. I can’t sort out the voices.’
Joss shivered. There was something in her own head as well – an echo, nothing more; an echo she couldn’t quite hear.
K atherine
It was the name from the shadows.
‘Katherine,’ she whispered. ‘Is she a part of this?’
Natalie frowned. She half raised a hand to silence Joss, still listening hard to something Joss could not hear.
Katherine, my love. You were meant to be mine forever
Katherine! Where are you?
Natalie was nodding. ‘Katherine is part of the grief. His mourning is trapped in every stone and timber and tile of this house.’
‘Whose mourning?’ Joss whispered. ‘Is it the king?’
Natalie’s eyes focused sharply. ‘So you know? You’ve seen him?’
Joss shrugged helplessly. The shutter had suddenly come down in her mind again; the black wall she could not penetrate. ‘I think so. Yes. My little boy calls him the tin man because of his armour.’
Natalie gave a small puzzled smile and nodded. ‘It is odd, isn’t it, to wear armour in his lover’s house.’
‘That’s what I thought. But he’s an angry, bitter man. Why else should he kill?’
‘Ssh.’ Natalie lifted her hand sharply. ‘Perhaps we can get him to speak to us. But not now.’ She shook her head. ‘Let’s go outside. Do you mind?’
There was no sign of Jimbo or Luke in the coach house as they walked out and into the garden, Natalie wearing a pair of Lyn’s boots and an old jacket of Joss’s over her smart office clothes.
Once on the grass she shook her neat, glossy hair out in the wind and took a couple of small childish skips across the grass.
‘Sorry. The atmosphere in there was so oppressive I couldn’t think straight. I could feel them listening all round me. Better to talk out here and decide what to do in private as it were.’
‘Tom and Ned are in danger, aren’t they.’ Joss was walking beside her slowly, her hands in her pockets as they headed towards the lake.
‘I think if the past history of this place is anything to go by, you must assume so, yes.’
‘But why? Why does he hurt the boys?’ She paused for a moment then she looked up. ‘Did you mean it? Can you get him to speak to us?’
Natalie shrugged. ‘I can try.’ She sighed. ‘I wish I wasn’t feeling so tired. I feel as though I’m being drained.’
They had reached the lake. She stood staring down into the water. ‘You know, I said in there I couldn’t sort out the voices. There were more than I expected. Not the children’s voices, not the lost boys or the men who have died. Other voices, powerful voices.’
‘Men’s voices or women’s!’ Joss was watching the moorhen scurrying back and forth between the water lily leaves.
‘That’s the strange thing. I’m not sure. I can hear snatches of words – powerful words, but I can’t make them out. It’s like fiddling with the dial on a radio. One flashes backwards and forwards through the stations – some are loud, some faint and there is lots of static – then occasionally – just occasionally – one finds a station where one can understand the language and the reception is good and for a while one can tune in, then something happens – perhaps the wind changes or the antennae in my head move slightly and it’s gone and I can’t find it again.’
There was a long silence. Joss was shivering. ‘You can hear them, but can they hear you?’
‘Why do you think I came out here?’
‘You think they’re trapped within the walls of the house; that they can’t travel?’
Natalie shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ She gave a grimace. ‘But I feel safer out here.’
Joss pulled up the collar of her jacket. ‘Luke and I have just returned from France. We went over there to see Paul Deauville, my mother’s second husband. He gave me her last diaries. She mentioned Edward by name. She said she dreamed that he was looking everywhere for her here. He couldn’t reach her in France. Then she made a strange entry: she said, “I was so sure she could not cross water”.’
‘She?’
‘What kind of person can’t cross water? A vampire? A dead person?’
‘A witch?’ Natalie’s voice was very thoughtful.
‘Margaret de Vere was accused of witchcraft; accused of trying to kill the king,’ Joss went on slowly. ‘She was Katherine’s mother; Katherine, who we think was the king’s lover. Here.’ The moorhen took flight suddenly. Flapping its wings wildly it ran across the top of the lilies until it was airborne and dived out of sight behind the hedge. ‘While we were in France I found out that Katherine – a Katherine no one except my mother saw – visited her when she was dying. She took my mother white roses. Paul says that a Katherine had been the mistress of the man who became my mother’s lover here at Belheddon, and that her rage and jealousy were so great she hunted my mother down across the water.’ She was staring sightlessly down at the slowly spreading ripples beneath a wind-spun leaf. ‘I’m trying to work this out, and it makes no sense. Are we saying that King Edward of England, a man who had been dead for five hundred years, was my mother’s lover?’ She looked up and held Natalie’s gaze. ‘That is what we’re saying, aren’t we? But it can’t be. It can’t.’
‘They were both lonely, Joss. Your father had died. And he, Edward, had lost his Katherine.’
‘But he was dead!’ Joss was revolted.