After Clare Page 25

  That funny old tree. Not ‘the Hecate tree’. Spells, magic, witchcraft, none of it meant anything to him. Clare had not, then, passed on her obsession. Had the trauma of finding herself with a baby, unmarried and virtually penniless, knocked all that nonsense out of her, as Nanny Kate, all those years ago, had said was needed?

  ‘The drawings are all yours, Edmund. Please take them, and everything else, if you wish.’

  ‘Then this seems like a fair exchange.’ He lifted a bulky parcel from the carpet bag he had brought with him, spreading out on the chest of drawers half a dozen small framed watercolours. ‘Some of her later paintings.’

  Emily didn’t have the expertise to judge whether they would be classed as beautiful works of art by those who knew about these things; for her they did have beauty, and revealed a tenderness, unexpected and astonishing in Clare, which made her heart turn over. She saw at once they were more mature and assured than the few earlier paintings she had selected, and the subjects more varied and interesting: fishermen in oilskins and sou’westers, a fishing fleet setting out to sea at twilight, a small lighthouse in the distance; brown sails, wet sands, barefoot children playing in rock pools, crab-pots and fishing nets spread out to dry; a glinting sun, a light over it all that was almost translucent. ‘Thank you, I shall treasure these. They’re – lovely,’ she said, inadequately.

  ‘Many people thought so. But because she was so adamant about not selling them, neither shall I. The rest I have can hang back on my cottage walls now,’ he said wryly. ‘I took them down when Hugh showed too much curiosity about the sketch I had hanging there of my mother.’

  ‘Yes, I know about that. So she took that with her, then. Its companion is in my bedroom here.’

  ‘Then we shall both have one.’ He hesitated. ‘He was a proficient artist, the man who did them.’

  She nodded.

  ‘My father, it seems.’

  She said nothing for a moment. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Your father . . . was a charmer.’

  ‘Was he? The only time she ever spoke of him to me, it was with scorn – though probably as much at herself as him. She could never forgive herself for that one lapse.’

  ‘I can believe that.’ Clare would never have admitted to having fallen from grace, not even – or perhaps especially – to her nearest and dearest. How had that happened to Clare – to Clare, of all people? Allowing herself to be taken in, seduced? Yet somehow Emily could not admit romantic feelings had been involved, any more than she could erase the memory of Clare’s eagerness – wilfulness, if you like – for the pursuit of new experiences. Whatever it was, it had shamed her into secrecy for the rest of her life. If Clare’s rebellious spirit would ever allow shame. Contrition, maybe. The wish to protect her son from disgrace? Or another, more compelling reason?

  The truth didn’t always come in a flash, or even through reasoned, patient seeking out. Sometimes it happened gradually without one being aware of it, seeping into one’s consciousness until it lay there, waiting to be acknowledged. A certainty that this was how it had happened, an acceptance of hurt . . .

  ‘Lady Fitz—Emily, are you all right?’

  ‘What? Oh, yes.’ Indeed, she felt as though she had been asleep all her life and had only just woken up. ‘She sent me birthday cards every year, you know. When they stopped, I knew what had happened.’

  ‘She was ill for such a short time, just a few weeks, and then she died peacefully in her sleep.’

  ‘Were you left alone?’

  ‘No, my father was still alive, Ethan Sholto, the man she married to provide me with a father. He was a good, honest man, you know, a chapel goer, but they suited each other well. It wasn’t a husband she wanted, really – she never had much opinion of men as a whole, and he – he only wanted a companion, but I do think they were—’ He broke off.

  ‘Happy?’

  After some consideration, he said, ‘I’m not sure that happiness was something you’d ever associate with my mother. But I think she was content with what she had made of her life and she kept rigidly to her own code of behaviour – which was very strict,’ he added ruefully. ‘She would probably have made a good nun, had she been of a religious turn of mind.’

  If Clare’s gods had not been of a different order, taken up when she was young and easily swayed. Talk of Hecate, the Otherworld, dark magic and arcane lore had been heady stuff for the sort of impressionable young girl she had been. The sort of mumbo-jumbo that had drawn her to the yew.

  Yet the old tree had duality, Anthony had always said – properties of good and evil. If you believed that, it was possible to believe, as Marta Heeren had, that it had sheltered Peter’s body after his death, that her pitiful secret would be protected deep inside its hollow heart.

  Ever since Marta’s arrest, thoughts like that had been haunting Emily.

  ‘What will happen to her?’ she had asked Novak.

  ‘She won’t hang,’ he had replied after a while. ‘They won’t hang somebody who is not altogether sane.’

  Mad? Sad, deluded Marta?

  He had held out his hand. ‘I’ll say goodbye. I’m going back to the Smoke, where I belong. I don’t want any more cases like this.’

  So Novak wasn’t just a detecting machine. She had felt his sympathy for Marta, and saw she had misjudged him, taken face value on his appearance. ‘Thank you, Mr Novak,’ she had said, shaking his hand. ‘Thank you for giving me my sister back.’

  Epilogue

  The chief emotion Emily had felt at abandoning the idea of permanently residing in Madeira was relief, and she knew instinctively that Hugh felt the same. It had once seemed to both of them like the solution to a problem, but that no longer existed. Now, Leysmorton was waiting for them, to occupy and cherish it, until in due time it would be passed on to Rosie.

  He tucked her arm under his, and clasped her hand as well, as if he wasn’t going to let her go again, not this time. On her other hand, that held the basket, her shiny new gold wedding ring gleamed. Absurd at my age, she told herself, not believing it for one moment, as they walked in the winter garden on this crisp, cold day, on their way to gather holly to decorate the hall at Leysmorton, for their first Christmas together.

  The garden was not at its best in December, the disadvantage of having so many roses. Roses are not beautiful in winter. Nothing more than a boring bunch of twigs, Clare used to say. But worth it for the promise of later glory, Anthony would reply. It almost required a suspension of disbelief to have faith that, looking so dead in their winter dormancy, they would ever awake again to all that beauty . . .

  Hugh said suddenly, ‘Do you remember Bertie Featherstone, by any chance?’

  ‘Who? Oh, Boring Bertie, the soldier? Of course. He was such a fool.’

  ‘Yes, but he got a VC fighting the Boers.’

  ‘Bertie did?’

  ‘Lost an arm. I hadn’t seen him for years, but I met him at my club one day. I gave him lunch.’

  ‘What made you think of him now?’

  He shrugged. ‘Oh, you know, no particular reason. As one does.’

  They walked on a little, then she said, ‘Memory’s a funny thing. Where it starts, where it ends. What you know, what you think you know . . .’ She didn’t finish, and he wondered . . . Sometimes, he thought Clare had not been the only secretive one in that family.

  Bertie Featherstone, invalided from the army, had been glad of company and in the mood for reminiscence. They talked about people they had known and Paddy Fitzallan’s name had come up, Hugh had forgotten now in what context, but giving him an unpleasant jolt. Of course Bertie had known him – he’d known everybody. ‘Married the Vavasour girl, didn’t he?’ he said. ‘Landed in clover, marrying money. Always knew he would, lucky devil.’

  Hugh had been incautious after pheasant and a shared bottle of Margaux. ‘Depends how you look at it. Emily’s hardly in clover, marrying him.’

  ‘Emily? No, got it wron
g, old boy. It was the other one he was running around with, the arty one – when she could escape that dragon of an aunt,’ he guffawed.

  After that conversation, occurring just before his meeting with Emily in Paris, Hugh was more convinced than ever that he’d been right to agree to Clare’s request to forward those birthday cards. If he hadn’t done so, he was sure Clare would have tried to find someone else who would, somebody who might have been less discreet.

  He had sworn he would never tell Emily what Bertie had said. But sometimes, lately, he had felt almost certain that she already knew. Whether she had, and had perhaps forgiven, if not forgotten, he couldn’t tell. But if that was the way she wanted it, he was not the man to raise questions.

  She was releasing her hand and arm from his. ‘Wake up, Hugh, and put those gloves on,’ she said briskly, tapping him smartly on the arm. ‘We’re here.’

  He saw they had reached the end of their journey, the copse where the holly grew, near the shadow of the great yew which had outlived Clare, would outlive himself and Emily, and might well outlive Leysmorton itself.