‘I don’t think that’s crazy, Joss. It’s obvious to everyone, including you.’ He sounded very bleak. ‘You can’t deny it.’
She was silent for a moment. ‘He’s fond of me, I know. And I of him.’ She met Luke’s eye defiantly. ‘That doesn’t mean we’re planning a raging affair, Luke. You’re the man I love. You’re the man I married, the father of my children.’ She rested her hand on her stomach for a moment. ‘Luke.’ She hesitated. ‘Did this start off as a row over some flowers?’
Luke shrugged. ‘A rose is usually a love token, I believe.’
‘A rose.’ She went cold all over.
‘He left a rose on your pillow.’ Luke’s face was set with anger. ‘Come on, Joss, even you can see the significance of that.’
She swallowed. The rose, when she had found it on her bedside table had been cold and dead. She knew it had not come from David.
For a long time she said nothing else about the house or the family, reading her mother’s diaries in private and, between stints of writing, climbing to the attics only when Luke was out or safely ensconced beneath the car. David did not come again that term, nor did he send her any more cuttings or notes gleaned from his research.
Taking advantage of Lyn’s baby sitting and making visits to Mothercare and research for the book her excuse, Joss made one or two trips to Ipswich and Colchester. She went to libraries, looking at books on local history, borrowing tomes on medieval costume and food and fifteenth-century politics. Given the all clear by Simon, on the condition she rested whenever she felt tired she drove around the countryside, astonished to find that, away from the house and the strained atmosphere with Lyn, she felt happier and more positive than she had for months.
Coming home exhilarated and inspired she wrote and wrote, hearing the story inside her head almost as if it were being dictated to her by Richard himself. She began to think that the story was like a charm. As long as she thought about it and stopped thinking about the family into which she had been born, the house remained gentle and benign, content to sleep with its memories, content perhaps, she sometimes wondered, that she was weaving its story into her novel and exorcising its legends by putting so much of it down on paper.
Sometimes, when it was her turn to do the lighter chores she was still allowed she would straighten up from sorting clothes or dusting or washing up and listen intently, but the voices in her head were only those of her own imagination. Perhaps the ghosts had gone. Perhaps, they had never been there at all.
A few weeks later Gerald Andrews came. On the back seat of his car was a pile of books. ‘I thought I would leave them for you. Just for when you have time. No rush to give them back.’ He shrugged. ‘I am hoping to go into hospital next month. When that’s all over may I come again and bring my friends? I so want to be there when they see the vaulting.’ He smiled conspiratorially and she said she would look forward to seeing him. She put the books in the study, in a pile behind the chair. Luke would never notice a few more amongst so many.
For several days she ignored them, then she realised they could be fruitful sources for her novel. One by one she brought them out when she wasn’t writing and scoured the pages for information.
It was all there – especially in the Victorian guide books to East Anglia. The legends, the rumours, the ghost stories. Belheddon Hall had had a reputation as long as it had stood.
Outside, a short grey February leached into March. Her stomach had at last rounded a little as though acknowledging that spring was on the way. There were golden whips on the willow trees, hazel catkins in the hedge. Snowdrops and primroses gave way to daffodils. Hidden under her steadily growing manuscript was her family tree. She had filled in details covering more than a hundred years now – births, marriages and deaths. So many deaths. It was compulsive. She pushed the pile of paper aside and read about the house again. Her excursions became fewer, and as she moved around the house with dustpan and brush or piles of clean clothes and towels for the various cupboards and drawers or took her turn – less often because she hated cooking as much as Lyn loved it – at the hot stove in the kitchen, she found she was again listening for voices.
Climbing to the attics, almost against her will, when Lyn or Luke and Tom were all out in the stableyard she moved slowly through the empty rooms, listening intently. But all she could hear was the wind, soughing gently in the gables and she would go back down to the bedroom or to the study with a sigh.
She was mad, she knew that. To want to hear the voices again was idiotic. But they were the voices of her little brothers; her only contact with a family that had gone forever. She began to ignore her writing, deliberately challenging her theory that the intensity of her concentration on the book had driven Georgie and Sammy away, but without her writing there was an empty space inside her – that thought made her smile wryly as she patted her steadily swelling stomach – an empty space which left her feeling frustrated and unfulfilled.
Luke noticed her restlessness and tried to help. ‘Lyn wondered if it would be fun to take Tom to the zoo. He’s had so few excursions since we moved here. Shall we make a day trip of it? All of us go? It’ll get you out of the house.’ He had noticed that her own private excursions had stopped.
She felt her spirits rise. ‘I’d like that. It would be fun. Tom will love it!’