The House at Riverton aka The Shifting Fog - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Kate Morton (PART 4) #6

PART 4 HANNAH’S STORY

It is time now to speak of things I didn’t see. To push Grace and her concerns aside and bring Hannah to the fore. For while I was away, something had happened. I realised as soon as I laid eyes on her. Things were different. Hannah was different. Brighter. Secretive. More self-satisfied.

What had happened at number seventeen, I learned gradually, as I did so much of what went on that final year. I had my suspicions, of course, but I neither saw nor heard everything. Only Hannah knew exactly what occurred and she had never been one for fervent confessions. They were not her style; she had always preferred secrets. But after the terrible events of 1924, when we were shut up together at Riverton, she became more forthcoming. And I was a good listener. This is what she told me.

I

It was the Monday after my mother’s death. I had left for Saffron Green, Teddy was at work, and Deborah and Emmeline were lunching. Hannah was alone in the drawing room. She had intended to write correspondence but her paper box languished on the lounge. She found she had little spirit for writing copious thankyou letters to the wives of Teddy’s allies and was instead looking out over the street, guessing at the lives of the passers-by. She was so involved in her game she didn’t see him come to the front door. Didn’t hear him ring the bell. The first she knew was when Boyle knocked on the morning-room door and made his announcement.

‘A gentleman to see you, ma’am.’

‘A gentleman, Boyle?’ she said, watching as a little girl broke free from her nanny and ran into the frosty park. When was the last time she had run? Run so fast she felt the wind like a slap on her face, her heart thumping so large in her chest that she almost couldn’t breathe?

‘Says he has something belonging to you that he’d like to return, ma’am.’

How tiresome it all was. ‘Could he not leave it with you, Boyle?’

‘He says not, ma’am. Says he has to deliver it in person.’

‘I really can’t think that I’m missing anything.’ Hannah pulled her eyes reluctantly from the little girl and turned from the window. ‘I suppose you’d better show him in.’

Mr Boyle hesitated. Seemed to be on the verge of speaking.

‘Is there something else?’ said Hannah.

‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Only that the gentleman… I don’t think he’s much of a gentleman, ma’am.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’ said Hannah.

‘Only that he doesn’t seem entirely respectable.’

Hannah raised her eyebrows. ‘He’s not in a state of undress, is he?

‘No, ma’am, he’s dressed well enough.’

‘He’s not saying obscene things?’

‘No, ma’am,’ said Boyle. ‘He’s polite enough.’

Hannah gasped. ‘It’s not a Frenchman; short with a moustache?’

‘Oh no, Ma’am’

‘Then tell me Boyle: ‘What form does this lack of respectability take?’

Boyle frowned. ‘I couldn’t say, ma’am. Just a feeling I got.’

Hannah gave the appearance of considering Boyle’s feeling, but her interest was piqued. ‘If the gentleman says he has something belonging to me, I had best have it back. If he gives any sign of wanting respectability, Boyle, I’ll ring for you directly.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Boyle with great importance. He bowed and left the room, and Hannah straightened her dress. The door opened again and Robbie Hunter was standing before her.

She didn’t recognise him at first. She had only known him briefly, after all; one winter, almost a decade before. And he had changed. He had been a boy when she knew him at Riverton. With smooth, clear skin, wide brown eyes and a gentle manner. And he had been still, she remembered. It was one of the things that had infuriated her. His self-possession. The way he came into their lives with no warning, goaded her into saying things she oughtn’t, and proceeded, with such ease, to woo their brother from them.

The man who stood before her in the morning room was tall, dressed in a black suit and a white shirt. It was ordinary enough clothing, but he wore it differently to Teddy and the other businessmen Hannah knew. His face was striking but lean: hollows below his cheekbones, and shadows beneath his dark eyes. She could see the lack of respectability to which Boyle referred, and yet she was at just as much of a loss to articulate it.

‘Good morning,’ she said.

He looked at her, seemed to look right inside her. She’d had men stare before, but something in the focus of his gaze caused her to blush. And when she did, he smiled. ‘You haven’t changed.’

It was then she knew him. Recognised his voice. ‘Mr Hunter,’ she said incredulously. She looked him over again, this new knowledge colouring her observation. The same dark hair, the same dark eyes. Same sensuous mouth, always slightly amused. She wondered how she’d missed them before. She straightened, stilled herself. ‘How nice of you to come.’ The moment the words were out, she regretted their ordinariness and longed to pull them back.

He smiled; rather ironically it seemed to Hannah.

‘Won’t you sit down?’ She indicated Teddy’s armchair and Robbie sat perfunctorily, like a schoolboy obeying a mundane instruction unworthy of defiance. Once again she had an irksome sense of her own triviality.

He was still looking at her.

She checked her hair lightly with the palms of both hands, made sure the pins were all in place, smoothed the pale ends against her neck. She smiled politely. ‘Is there something amiss, Mr Hunter? Something I need to fix?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve carried an image in my mind, all this time… You’re still the same.’

‘Not the same, Mr Hunter, I assure you,’ she said, as lightly as she could. ‘I was fifteen when last we met.’

‘Were you really so young?’

There was that lack of respectability again. Oh, it wasn’t so much what he said-it was a perfectly ordinary question, after all-it was something in the way he said it. As if he concealed a double meaning she couldn’t grasp. ‘I’ll ring for tea, shall I?’ she said, and regretted it immediately. Now he would stay.

She stood and pressed the bell button then hovered by the mantle, straightening objects and collecting herself, until Boyle was at the door.

‘Mr Hunter will be joining me for tea,’ said Hannah.

Boyle looked at Robbie suspiciously.

‘He was a friend to my brother,’ Hannah added, ‘in the war.’

‘Ah,’ said Boyle. ‘Yes, ma’am. I’ll have Mrs Tibbit fetch up tea for two.’ How deferential he was. How conventional his deference made her seem.

Robbie was looking around, taking in the morning room. The Art Deco furnishings that Deborah had selected (‘the latest thing’) and Hannah had always tolerated. His gaze drifted from the octagonal mirror above the fire to the gold and brown diamond-print curtains.

‘Modern, isn’t it?’ Hannah said, striving for flippancy. ‘I’m never quite sure I like it, but my husband’s sister says that’s the point of modernity.’

Robbie seemed not to hear. ‘David spoke of you often,’ he said. ‘I feel that I know you. You and Emmeline and Riverton.’

Hannah sank onto the edge of the lounge at mention of David. She had schooled herself not to think of him, not to open the box of tender memories. And yet here sat the one person with whom she might be able to discuss him. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘tell me about David, Mr Hunter.’ She steeled herself. ‘Was he… did he…’ She pressed her lips together, looked at Robbie. ‘I’ve often hoped he forgave me.’

‘Forgave you?’

‘I was such a prig that last winter, before he left. We weren’t expecting you. We were used to having David to ourselves. I was rather stubborn, I fear. I spent the entire duration ignoring you, wishing you weren’t there.’

He shrugged. ‘I didn’t notice.’

Hannah smiled wistfully. ‘Then it seems I wasted my energy.’

The door opened and Boyle appeared with the salver of afternoon tea. He laid it on the table by Hannah and stood back.

‘Mr Hunter,’ said Hannah, aware that Boyle was lingering, eyeing Robbie. ‘Boyle said you had something to return to me.’

‘Yes,’ Robbie said, reaching into his pocket. Hannah nodded to Boyle, assured him everything was in hand, his presence no longer required. As the door closed, Robbie withdrew a piece of cloth. It was tatty, with threads loose, and Hannah wondered how on earth he thought this might belong to her. As she watched she realised it was an old piece of ribbon, once white, now brown. He peeled the ribbon open, fingers shaking, and held it toward her.

Her breath caught in her throat. Wrapped inside was a tiny book.

She reached over and plucked it gingerly from its shroud. Turned it over in her hands to look at its cover, though she knew well enough what it would say. Journey Across the Rubicon.

A wave of reminiscence: being chased through the Riverton grounds, drunk on the thrill of adventure; whispered secrets in the shadowy nursery. ‘I gave this to David. For luck.’

He nodded.

Her eyes met his. ‘Why did you take it?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘David would never have given this away.’

‘No, he wouldn’t, he didn’t, I was only ever its messenger. He wanted it returned, the last thing he said was take it to Nefertiti. And I have.’

Hannah didn’t look at him. The name. Her own secret name. He didn’t know her well enough. She closed her fingers around the little book, dropped the lid on memories of being brave and untamed and full of prospect, lifted her head to meet his gaze. ‘Let’s speak of other things.’

Robbie nodded slightly and pushed the ribbon back into his pocket. ‘What do people speak of when they meet again like this?’

‘They ask each other what they’ve been doing,’ said Hannah, tucking the tiny book inside her escritoire. ‘Where their lives have taken them.’

‘Well then,’ Robbie said. ‘What have you been doing, Hannah? I can see well enough where life has taken you.’

Hannah straightened, poured a cup of tea and held it out to him. The cup jiggled against its saucer in her hand. ‘I’ve married. A gentleman called Theodore Luxton, you might have heard of him. He and his father are in business. They collect companies, or so I believe.’

Robbie was watching her, but gave no indication that Teddy’s name was familiar to him.

‘I live in London, as you know,’ Hannah continued, trying to smile. ‘Such a wonderful city, don’t you think? So much to see and do? So many interesting people…’ Her voice trailed off. Robbie was distracting her, watching her as she spoke with the same disconcerting intensity he’d offered the Picasso all those years ago in the library. ‘Mr Hunter,’ she said with some impatience. ‘Really. I must ask you to stop. It’s quite impossible to-’

‘You’re right,’ he said softly. ‘You have changed. Your face is sad.’

She wanted to respond, to tell him he was wrong. That any sadness he perceived was a direct consequence of having her brother’s memory resurrected. But there was something in his voice that stopped her. Something that made her feel transparent, uncertain, vulnerable. As if he knew her better than she knew herself. She didn’t like it, but she knew somehow it would do no good to argue.

‘Well, Mr Hunter,’ she said, standing stiffly. ‘I must thank you for coming. For finding me, returning the book.’

Robbie followed her lead, stood. ‘I said I would.’

‘I’ll ring for Boyle to show you out.’

‘Don’t trouble him,’ said Robbie. ‘I know the way well enough.’

He opened the door and Emmeline burst through, a whirl of pink silk and shingled blonde hair. Her cheeks glowed with the joy of being young and well connected in a city and a time that belonged to the young and well connected. She collapsed onto the sofa and crossed one long leg over the other. Hannah felt old suddenly, and strangely faded. Like a watercolour left by error in the rain, its colours washed into each other so only the barest outline remained.

‘Phew. I’m pooped,’ Emmeline said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any tea left?’

She looked up and noticed Robbie.

‘You remember Mr Hunter, don’t you, Emmeline?’ said Hannah.

Emmeline puzzled for a moment. She leaned forward and rested her chin on the palm of her hand, wide blue eyes blinking as she gazed at his face.

‘David’s friend?’ said Hannah. ‘From Riverton?’

‘Robbie Hunter,’ said Emmeline, smiling slowly, delightedly, hand dropping into her lap. ‘Of course I do. By my count, you owe me a dress. Perhaps this time you’ll resist the urge to tear it from me.’

At Emmeline’s insistence, Robbie stayed for dinner. It was unthinkable, she said, that he be allowed to leave when he had only just arrived. So it was, Robbie joined Deborah, Teddy, Emmeline and Hannah in the dining room of number seventeen that night.

Hannah sat on one side of the table, Deborah and Emmeline on the other, Robbie the foot to Teddy’s head. They made amusing book ends, Hannah thought: Robbie the archetype of the disillusioned artist, and Teddy, after four years working with his father, a caricature of power and plenty. He was still a handsome man-Hannah had noticed some of his colleagues’ young wives making eyes at him, little use it would do them-but his face was fuller and his hair was greyer. His cheeks, too, had taken on the blush of plentiful living. He leaned back against his chair.

‘So. What is it you do for a crust, Mr Hunter? My wife tells me you’re not in business.’ That an alternative existed no longer occurred to him.

‘I’m a writer,’ said Robbie.

‘Writer, eh?’ said Teddy. ‘Write for The Times, do you?’

‘I did,’ said Robbie, ‘amongst others.’

‘And now?’ said Teddy.

‘I write for myself.’ He smiled. ‘Foolishly, I thought I’d be easier to please.’

‘How fortunate,’ said Deborah breezily, ‘to have the time to give oneself over to one’s leisure. I wouldn’t recognise myself if I wasn’t rushing hither and yon.’ She began a monologue on her organisation of a recent masked society ball, and smiled wolfishly at Robbie.

Deborah was flirting, Hannah realised. She looked at Robbie. Yes, he was handsome, in a languid, sensuous sort of way: not at all Deborah’s usual type.

‘Books, is it?’ said Teddy.

‘Poetry,’ said Robbie.

Teddy raised his eyebrows dramatically. ‘“How dull it is to stop, to rust unburnished rather than to sparkle in use.”’

Hannah winced at the mishandled Tennyson.

Robbie met her eye and grinned. ‘“As though to breathe were life.”’

‘I’ve always loved Shakespeare,’ said Teddy. ‘Your rhymes anything like his?’

‘I’m afraid I pale by comparison,’ said Robbie. ‘But I persist nonetheless. Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.’

‘Quite so,’ said Teddy.

As Hannah watched Robbie, something she had glimpsed came into focus. Suddenly she knew who he was. She inhaled. ‘You’re RS Hunter.’

‘Who?’ said Teddy. He looked between Hannah and Robbie, then to Deborah for clarification. Deborah lifted her shoulders affectedly.

‘RS Hunter,’ said Hannah, eyes still searching Robbie’s. She laughed. She couldn’t help it. ‘I have your collected poems.’

‘First or second?’ said Robbie.

‘Progress and Disintegration,’ said Hannah. She hadn’t realised there was another.

‘Ah,’ said Deborah, eyes widening. ‘Yes, I saw a write-up in the paper. You won that award.’

‘Progress is my second,’ said Robbie, looking at Hannah.

‘I should like to read the first,’ Hannah said. ‘Tell me the name, won’t you, Mr Hunter, so I may purchase it.’

‘You can have my copy,’ said Robbie. ‘I’ve already read it. Between you and me, I find the author quite a bore.’

Deborah’s lips curled into a smile and a familiar glint appeared in her eye. She was assessing Robbie’s worth, cataloguing the list of people she could impress if she produced him at one of her functions. By the keen way she rubbed her glossy red lips together, his value was high. Hannah felt a surprising jolt of possession then.

‘Progress and Disintegration?’ said Teddy, winking at Robbie. ‘You’re not a socialist, are you, Mr Hunter?’

Robbie smiled. ‘No, sir. I have neither possessions to redistribute, nor desire to acquire them.’

Teddy laughed.

‘Come now, Mr Hunter,’ said Deborah. ‘I suspect you’re having fun at our expense.’

‘I’m having fun. I hope it’s not at your expense.’

Deborah smiled in a way she thought beguiling. ‘A little birdie tells me you’re not quite the stray you’d have us think.’

Hannah looked at Emmeline, smiling behind her hands; it wasn’t difficult to deduce the identity of Deborah’s little birdie.

‘What are you talking about, Dobby?’ said Teddy. ‘Out with it.’

‘Our guest has been teasing us,’ said Deborah, voice rising triumphantly. ‘For he isn’t Mr Hunter at all, he’s Lord Hunter.’

Teddy lifted his eyebrows. ‘Eh? What’s that?’

Robbie twisted his wineglass by its stem. ‘It’s true enough my father was Lord Hunter. But the title isn’t one I use.’

Teddy eyed Robbie over his plate of roast beef. Denying a title was something he couldn’t understand. He and his father had campaigned long and hard for Lloyd George’s ennobling. ‘You sure you’re not a socialist?’ he said.

‘Enough politics,’ said Emmeline suddenly, rolling her eyes. ‘Of course he’s not a socialist. Robbie’s one of us, and we didn’t invite him so we could bore him to death.’ She fixed her gaze on Robbie, rested her chin on the palm of her hand. ‘Tell us where you’ve been, Robbie.’

‘Most recently?’ said Robbie. ‘Spain.’

Spain. Hannah repeated it to herself. How wonderful.

‘How primitive,’ said Deborah, laughing. ‘What on earth were you doing there?’

‘Fulfilling a promise made long ago.’

‘Madrid, was it?’ said Teddy.

‘For a time,’ said Robbie. ‘On my way to Segovia.’

Teddy frowned. ‘What’s a fellow do in Segovia?’

‘I went to Alcázar.’

Hannah felt her skin prickle.

‘That dusty old fort?’ said Deborah, smiling broadly. ‘I can’t think of anything worse.’

‘Oh no,’ said Robbie. ‘It was remarkable. Magical. Like stepping into a different world.’

‘Do tell.’

Robbie hesitated, searching for the right words. ‘Sometimes I felt that I could glimpse the past. When evening came, and I was all alone, I could almost hear the whispers of the dead. Ancient secrets swirling by.’

‘How ghoulish,’ said Deborah.

‘Why would you ever leave?’ said Hannah.

‘Yes,’ said Teddy. ‘What brought you back to London, Mr Hunter?’

Robbie met Hannah’s eyes. He smiled, turned to Teddy. ‘Providence, I suspect.’

‘All that travelling,’ said Deborah, in what Hannah recognised as her beguiling voice. ‘You must have some of the gypsy in you.’

Robbie smiled, but he didn’t answer.

‘Either that or our guest has a guilty conscience,’ said Deborah, leaning toward Robbie and lowering her voice playfully. ‘Is that it, Mr Hunter? Are you on the run?’

‘Only from myself, Miss Luxton,’ said Robbie.

‘You’ll settle down,’ said Teddy, ‘as you get older. I used to have a bit of the travel bug myself. Entertained notions of seeing the world, collecting artefacts and experiences.’ By the way he ran his flat palms over the tablecloth either side of his plate. Hannah knew he was about to launch a lecture. ‘A man accumulates responsibilities as he gets older. Gets set in his ways. Differences that used to thrill when he was younger start to irritate. Take Paris, for instance; I was there recently. I used to adore Paris, but the whole city is going to the dogs. No respect for tradition. The way the women dress!’ He shook his head. ‘No way a wife of mine would be allowed to get about like that!’

Hannah couldn’t look at Robbie. She focused attention on her plate, moved her food about and set her fork to rest.

‘Travelling certainly opens one’s eyes to different cultures,’ Robbie was saying. ‘I came across a tribe in the Far East in which the men carved designs into their wives’ faces.’

Emmeline gasped. ‘With a knife?’

Teddy swallowed a lump of half-masticated beef, enthralled. ‘Why on earth?’

‘Wives are considered mere objects of enjoyment and display,’ said Robbie. ‘Husbands think it their god-given right to decorate them as they see fit.’

‘Barbarians,’ said Teddy, shaking his head, signalling to Boyle to refill his wine. ‘And they wonder why they need us to civilise them.’

Hannah didn’t see Robbie again for weeks after that. She thought he’d forgotten his promise to lend her his book of poetry. It was just like him, she suspected, to charm his way into a dinner invitation, make empty promises, then vanish without honouring them. She was not offended, merely disappointed in herself for being taken in. She would think of it no more.

Nonetheless, a fortnight later, when she happened to find herself in the H-J aisle of the little bookstore in Drury Lane, and her eyes happened to alight on a copy of his first poetry collection, she bought it. She had appreciated his poetry, after all, long before she realised him a man of loose promises.

Then Pa died, and any lingering thoughts of Robbie Hunter’s sudden return were put aside. With news of her father’s death, Hannah felt as if her anchor had been severed, as if she had been washed from safe waters and was at the whim of tides she neither knew nor trusted. It was ridiculous of course, she hadn’t seen Pa for such a long time: he had refused to see her since her marriage and she’d been unable to find the words to convince him otherwise. Yet despite it all, while Pa lived she had been tied to something, to someone large and sturdy. Now she was not. She felt abandoned by him: they had often fought, it was a part of their peculiar relationship, but she had always known he loved her specially. And now, with no word, he was gone. She started to dream at night of dark waters, leaking ships, relentless ocean waves. And in the day she began to dwell once more, upon the spiritualist’s vision of darkness and death.

Perhaps it would be different when Emmeline moved permanently to number seventeen, she told herself. For it had been decided after Pa’s death that Hannah would serve as guardian of sorts for Emmeline. It was just as well they keep an eye on her, Teddy said, after the unfortunate business with the film-maker. The more Hannah thought about it, the more she looked forward to the prospect. She would have an ally in the house. Someone who understood her. They would sit up late together, talking and laughing, sharing secrets the way they had when they were younger.

When Emmeline arrived in London, however, she had other ideas. London had always agreed with Emmeline and she threw herself further into the social life she adored. She attended costume balls every night-‘White Parties’, ‘Circus Parties’, ‘Under the Sea Parties’-Hannah could never keep count. Emmeline took part in elaborate treasure hunts that involved the pilfering of prizes, from beggars’ cups to policemen’s hats. She drank too much and smoked too much, and considered the night a failure if she couldn’t find a shot of herself in the society pages the next day.

Hannah found Emmeline one afternoon entertaining a group of friends in the morning room. They had shifted the furniture to the edges of the walls and Deborah’s expensive Berlin rug lay by the fire in a haphazard roll. A girl in flimsy lime chiffon, whom Hannah had never met, sat on the rolled rug smoking lazily, dropping ash, watching as Emmeline tried to teach a baby-faced young man with two left feet to dance the shimmy-shake.

‘No, no,’ Emmeline said, laughing. ‘You shift on the count of three, Harry darling. Not two. Here, take my hands and I’ll show you.’ She restarted the gramophone. ‘Ready?’

Hannah picked her way around the room’s rim. She was so distracted by the casualness with which Emmeline and her friends had colonised the room (her room, after all) that she had quite forgotten what it was she came for. She made pretence of digging around in the writing bureau as Harry collapsed on the sofa, saying, ‘Enough. You’re going to kill me, Em.’

Emmeline fell next to him, threw her arm around his shoulders. ‘Have it your way, Harry, but you can hardly expect me to dance with you at Clarissa’s party if you don’t know the steps. The shimmy-shake is all the rage and I’m going to dance it all night.’

‘And all morning,’ said the girl in the lime chiffon.

All morning was right, thought Hannah. More and more, Emmeline’s late nights were becoming early mornings. Not content with dancing the night away at the Berkley, she and her friends had taken to continuing the party at someone’s house. Even the servants were beginning to talk. The new housemaid had been cleaning the entrance hall when Emmeline swept in at six the other morning. Emmeline was just lucky neither Teddy nor Deborah knew. That Hannah made sure they didn’t.

‘Jane says Clarissa’s serious this time,’ said lime chiffon.

‘Think she’ll actually go through with it?’ said Harry.

‘We’ll see tonight,’ said Emmeline. ‘Clarissa’s been threatening to bob her hair for months.’ She laughed. ‘More fool her if she does: with that bone structure she’ll look like a German drill sergeant.’

‘Are you taking gin?’ said Harry.

Emmeline shrugged. ‘Or wine. Hardly matters. Clarissa intends to throw it all into the bath so people can dip their cups.’

A bottle party, thought Hannah. She’d heard of those. Teddy liked to read her reports from the newspaper when they were at the breakfast table. He’d lower the paper to attract her attention, shake his head with weary disapproval and say, ‘Listen to this. Another of those parties. Mayfair, this time.’ Then he’d read the article, word by word, taking great pleasure, it seemed to Hannah, in describing the uninvited guests, the indecent decorations, the raids by police. Why couldn’t young people behave as they had when they were young, he’d say? Have balls with supper, servants pouring wine, dance cards.

Hannah was so horrified by Teddy’s insinuation that she herself was no longer young that although she thought Emmeline’s behaviour a little like dancing on the graves of the dead, she never said as much to her.

And she made particular care to ensure Teddy didn’t know Emmeline attended such parties. Much less help to organise them. Hannah became very good at inventing excuses for Emmeline’s nocturnal activities.

But that night, when she climbed the stairs to Teddy’s study, armed with an ingenious half-truth about Emmeline’s dedication to her friend Lady Clarissa, he was not alone. As she neared his closed door, Hannah heard voices. Teddy’s and Deborah’s. She was about to turn, to come back later, when she heard her father’s name. She held her breath and crept toward the door.

‘You have to feel sorry for him, though,’ said Teddy. ‘Whatever you think of the man. Dying of stroke, at his age. Not even fifty.’

‘Stroke? Drink more like.’ This was Deborah. Hannah’s lips tightened as she continued. ‘Oh yes. He’d been doing his best to drown his liver for some time. Lord Gifford told me one of the servants found him when she took his breakfast: propped against the pillows, empty bottle of whisky on the mattress beside him. Place stank like a brewery.’

Lies, thought Hannah, her breaths grown hot.

‘That so?’ said Teddy.

‘So says Lord Gifford. Oh, the servants were doing their best to cover the fact, but Lord Gifford reminded them it was his job to protect the family’s reputation and that he needed the facts to do so.’

Hannah heard glass scraping against glass and then the burbling of sherry being poured.

‘He was still in his clothes,’ said Deborah in an eager whisper, ‘and his room was a mess. Papers everywhere.’ She laughed. ‘You’ll love this, what do you think was lying in his lap?’

‘His will?’

‘A photograph,’ said Deborah. ‘An old formal photograph from late last century. Family and servants.’ The last was said meaningfully, Hannah thought, though she couldn’t understand why. She knew the type of photograph to which Deborah referred. Grandmother had insisted on one each year. Was it so strange that in his last hours Pa would seek solace in the faces of the people he’d loved?

‘Lord Gifford had quite a time finding Frederick’s will,’ Deborah was saying.

‘He found it, though,’ said Teddy quickly. ‘There were no surprises?’

‘It was as we discussed,’ said Deborah. ‘He was true to his word in that.’

‘Excellent,’ said Teddy.

‘Going to sell the place?’ said Deborah.

There was a pause and the squeak of leather as Teddy rearranged himself in his desk chair. ‘I don’t think I will,’ he said. ‘I’ve always fancied a place in the country.’

‘You could seek nomination for the seat of Saffron,’ said Deborah. ‘Country people do love their lord of the manor.’

There was a pause and Hannah held her breath, listening for footsteps. ‘By God, Dobby, you’re a genius! I’ll call Lord Gifford immediately,’ said Teddy breathlessly, and the telephone cradle rattled. ‘See if he’ll have a word with the others on my behalf.’

Hannah pulled away then. She had heard enough.

She didn’t speak to Teddy that night. In any event, Emmeline was home by the comparatively early hour of two. Hannah was still awake in bed when Emmeline stumbled along the hall. She rolled over and closed her eyes tight, tried not to think any more about what Deborah had said, about Pa and the way he had died. His desperate unhappiness. His loneliness. The darkness that had claimed him. And she refused to think of the letters of contrition she’d never quite managed to finish.

And in the isolation of the bedroom Deborah had decorated for her, with Teddy’s contented snores drifting from the room beyond, noises of night-time London muffled by her window, she fell into dreams of black water, abandoned ships and lonely foghorns floating back to empty shores.

II

Robbie came back. He gave no explanation for his absence, simply sat down in Teddy’s armchair as if no time had passed and presented Hannah with his first volume of poetry. She was about to tell him she already owned a copy when he drew another book from his coat pocket. Small, with a green cover.

‘For you,’ he said, handing it to her.

Hannah’s heart skipped when she saw its title. It was James Joyce’s Ulysses, and it was banned everywhere.

‘But where did you-?’

‘A friend in Paris.’

Hannah ran her fingertips over the word Ulysses. It was about a married couple, she knew, and their moribund physical relationship. She had read-rather Teddy had read her-extracts from the newspaper. He’d called them filth and she had nodded agreement. In truth, she’d found them strangely affecting. She could imagine what Teddy would have said if she’d told him so. He’d have thought her ill, recommended she see a doctor. And perhaps she was.

Yet, though thrilled to have opportunity to read the novel, she wasn’t certain how she felt about Robbie bringing it for her. Did he think she was the type of woman for whom such topics were ordinary fare? Worse: was he making a joke? Did he think her a prude? She was about to ask him when he said, very simply and very gently,

‘I’m sorry about your father.’

And before she could say anything about Ulysses, she realised she was crying.

No one thought much of Robbie’s visits. Not at first. Certainly there was no suggestion that anything improper was passing between him and Hannah. Hannah would’ve been the first to deny it if there had. It was known to everyone that Robbie had been a friend to her brother, had been with him at the end. If he seemed a little irregular, less than respectable, as she knew Boyle continued to maintain, it was easily enough put down to the mystery of war.

Robbie’s visits followed no pattern, his arrival was never planned, but Hannah started looking forward to them, waiting for them. Sometimes she was alone, sometimes Emmeline or Deborah was with her; it didn’t matter. For Hannah, Robbie became a lifeline. They spoke of books and travel. Far-fetched ideas and faraway places. He seemed to know so much about her already. It was almost like having David back. She found she longed for his company, became fidgety between times, bored with whatever else she’d been doing.

Perhaps if Hannah had been less preoccupied she would have noticed she was not the only one for whom Robbie’s visits had come to hold attraction. May have observed that Deborah was spending more time at home. But she did not.

It came as a complete surprise one morning, in the drawing room, when Deborah put aside her crossword puzzle and said, ‘I have a ball organised for next week, Mr Hunter, and wouldn’t you know it? I’ve been so busy organising I haven’t had time even to think about finding myself a partner.’ She smiled, all white teeth and red lips.

‘Doubt you’ll have trouble,’ said Robbie. ‘Must be heaps of fellows looking for a ride on society’s golden wave.’

‘Of course,’ said Deborah, mistaking Robbie’s irony. ‘All the same, it’s such late notice.’

‘Lord Woodall would be sure to take you,’ said Hannah.

‘Lord Woodall is abroad,’ Deborah said quickly. She smiled at Robbie. ‘And I couldn’t possibly go alone.’

‘Going stag is all the rage according to Emmeline,’ said Hannah.

Deborah appeared not to have heard. She batted her lids at Robbie. ‘Unless…’ She shook her head with a coyness that didn’t suit her. ‘No, of course not.’

Robbie said nothing.

Deborah pursed her lips. ‘Unless you’d accompany me, Mr Hunter?’

Hannah held her breath.

‘Me?’ Robbie said, laughing. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’ said Deborah, ‘We’d have a great old time.’

‘I’ve none of the social graces,’ said Robbie. ‘I’d be a fish out of water.’

‘I’m a very strong swimmer,’ said Deborah. ‘I’ll keep you afloat.’

‘All the same,’ said Robbie. ‘No.’

Not for the first time, Hannah’s breath caught in her throat. He had a lack of propriety quite unlike the affected vulgarity of Emmeline’s friends. His was genuine and, Hannah thought, quite stunning.

‘I urge you to reconsider,’ said Deborah, a note of determined anxiety screwing tight her voice, ‘everybody who’s anybody will be there.’

‘I don’t enjoy society,’ said Robbie plainly. He was bored now. ‘Too many people spending too much money to impress those too stupid to know it.’

Deborah opened her mouth, shut it again.

Hannah tried not to smile.

‘If you’re sure,’ said Deborah.

‘Quite sure,’ said Robbie cheerfully. ‘Thanks all the same.’

Deborah shook the newspaper onto her lap and gave the appearance of resuming her crossword. Robbie raised his eyebrows at Hannah then sucked his cheeks in like a fish. Hannah couldn’t help herself, she laughed.

Deborah looked up sharply and glanced between them. Hannah recognised the expression: Deborah had inherited it, along with her lust for conquest, from Simion. Her lips thinned around the bitter taste of defeat. ‘You’re a wordsmith, Mr Hunter,’ she said coldly. ‘What’s a seven letter word starting with ‘b’ that means an error in judgement?’

At dinner a few nights later, Deborah took revenge for Robbie’s blunder.

‘I noticed Mr Hunter was here again today,’ she said, spearing a pastry puff.

‘He brought a book he thought might interest me,’ Hannah said.

Deborah glanced at Teddy, who was sitting at the head, dissecting his fish. ‘I just wonder whether Mr Hunter’s visits might be unsettling the staff.’

Hannah laid down her cutlery. ‘I can’t see why the staff would find Mr Hunter’s visits unsettling.’

‘No,’ said Deborah, drawing herself up. ‘I rather feared you wouldn’t. You’ve never really been one for taking responsibility where the household is concerned.’ She spoke slowly, enunciating each word. ‘Servants are like children, Hannah dear. They like a good routine, find it almost impossible to function without. It’s up to us, their betters, to provide them one.’ She leaned her head to the side. ‘Now, as you know, Mr Hunter’s visits are unpredictable. By his own admission, he doesn’t know the first thing about polite society. He doesn’t even telephone ahead so you can give notice. Mrs Tibbit gets herself into quite a flap trying to provide morning tea for two when she’s only been prepared for one. It’s really not fair. Don’t you agree, Teddy?’

‘What’s that?’ He looked up from his fish head.

‘I was just saying,’ Deborah said, ‘how regrettable it is that the staff has been unsettled lately.’

‘Staff unsettled?’ said Teddy. It was, of course, his pet fear, inherited from his father, that the servant class would one day revolt.

‘I’ll speak to Mr Hunter,’ said Hannah quickly. ‘Ask him to telephone ahead in future.’

Deborah appeared to consider this. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’m afraid it’s too little too late. I think perhaps it would be best if he were to cease visiting at all.’

‘Bit extreme, don’t you think, Dobby,’ Teddy said, and Hannah felt a wave of warm affection for him. ‘Mr Hunter’s always struck me as harmless enough. Bohemian, I’ll grant you, but harmless. If he calls ahead, surely the staff-’

‘There are other issues to consider,’ Deborah snapped. ‘We wouldn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea, would we, Teddy?’

‘Wrong idea?’ Teddy said, frowning. He began to laugh. ‘Oh Dobby, you can’t mean that anyone would think Hannah and Mr Hunter… That my wife and a fellow like him…?’

Hannah closed her eyes lightly.

‘Of course I don’t,’ Deborah said sharply. ‘But people love to talk and talk isn’t good for business. Or politics.’

‘Politics?’ Teddy said.

‘The election, Tiddles,’ said Deborah. ‘How can people trust you to keep your electorate in check if they suspect you’re having trouble keeping your wife in check?’ She delivered herself a triumphant forkful of food, avoiding the sides of her lipsticked mouth.

Teddy looked troubled. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

‘And neither should you,’ Hannah said quietly. ‘Mr Hunter was my brother’s good friend. He visits so that we might speak of David.’

‘I know that, old girl,’ said Teddy with an apologetic smile. He shrugged helplessly. ‘All the same, Dobby has a point. You understand, don’t you? We can’t have people getting the wrong end of the stick.’

Deborah stuck to Hannah like glue after that. Having suffered Robbie’s rejection, she wanted to be sure he received the directive; more importantly, that he realised from whom it came. Thus the next time Robbie visited, he once again found Deborah on the drawing-room sofa with Hannah.

‘Good morning, Mr Hunter,’ Deborah said, smiling broadly while she plucked knots from the fur of her Maltese, Bunty. ‘How lovely to see you. I trust you’re well?’

Robbie nodded. ‘You?’

‘Oh, fighting fit,’ said Deborah.

Robbie smiled at Hannah. ‘What did you think?’

Hannah pressed her lips together. The proof copy of The Waste Land was sitting beside her. She handed it to him. ‘I loved it, Mr Hunter. It moved me immeasurably.’

He smiled. ‘I knew it would.’

Hannah glanced toward Deborah, who widened her eyes pointedly. ‘Mr Hunter,’ said Hannah, tightening her lips, ‘there’s something I need to discuss with you.’ She pointed to Teddy’s seat.

Robbie sat, looked at her with those dark eyes.

‘My husband,’ began Hannah, but she didn’t know how to finish. ‘My husband…’

She looked at Deborah, who cleared her throat and pretended absorption in Bunty’s silky head. Hannah watched a moment, transfixed by Deborah’s long, thin fingers, her pointed nails…

Robbie followed her gaze. ‘Your husband, Mrs Luxton?’

Hannah spoke softly. ‘My husband would prefer that you no longer call without purpose.’

Deborah pushed Bunty off her lap, brushed her dress. ‘You understand, don’t you, Mr Hunter?’

Boyle came in then carrying the tea salver. He laid it on the table, nodded to Deborah, then left.

‘You will stay for tea, won’t you?’ said Deborah, in a sweet voice that made Hannah’s skin crawl. ‘One last time?’ She poured the tea and handed a cup to Robbie.

With Deborah as gay conductor, they managed an awkward conversation about the collapse of the coalition government and the assassination of Michael Collins. Hannah was hardly listening. All she wanted was a few minutes alone with Robbie in which to explain. She also knew it was the last thing Deborah would permit.

She was thinking this, wondering whether she would ever have opportunity to speak with him again, realising just how much she’d come to depend on his company, when the door opened and Emmeline came in from lunching with friends.

Emmeline was particularly pretty that day: she’d had her hair set into blonde waves and was wearing a new scarf in a new colour-burnt sienna-that made her skin glow. She flew through the door as was her way, sending Bunty scuttling beneath the armchair, and sank casually into the corner of the lounge, resting her hands dramatically on her stomach.

‘Phew,’ she said, oblivious to the room’s tension. ‘I’m as stuffed as a Christmas goose. I truly don’t think I’ll ever eat again.’ She lolled her head to the side. ‘How’s tricks, Robbie?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. She sat up suddenly, eyes wide. ‘Oh! You’ll never guess who I met the other night at Lady Sybil Colefax’s party. I was sitting there, talking with darling Lord Berners, he was telling me all about the dear little piano he’s had installed in his Rolls Royce, when who should arrive but the Sitwells! All three Sitwells. They were ever so much funnier in the flesh. Dear Sachy with his clever jokes, and Osbert with those little poem things with the funny endings-’

‘Epigrams,’ Robbie mumbled.

‘He’s every bit as witty as Oscar Wilde,’ said Emmeline. ‘But it was Edith who was most impressive. She recited one of her poems and it brought the whole lot of us to tears. Well you know what Lady Colefax is like-an absolute snob for brains-I couldn’t help myself, Robbie darling, I mentioned that I knew you and they just about died. I dare say they didn’t believe me, they all think I’ve a talent for invention-I can’t think why-but you see? You simply have to come to the party tonight to prove them wrong.’

She drew breath and in one swift movement withdrew a cigarette from her bag and had it lit. She exhaled a rush of smoke. ‘Say you’ll come, Robbie. It’s one thing to have people doubt one when one’s lying, quite another when one’s speaking the truth.’

Robbie paused a moment, considering her offer. ‘What time should I collect you?’ he said.

Hannah blinked. She’d expected him to decline as he always did when Emmeline tossed him one of her invitations. She’d thought Robbie felt the same way about Emmeline’s friends as she did. Perhaps his disdain did not extend to the likes of Lord Berner and Lady Sybil. Perhaps the lure of the Sitwells was too much to resist.

‘Six o’clock,’ Emmeline said, smiling broadly. ‘What a thrill.’

Robbie arrived at five-thirty. It was an irony, thought Hannah, that someone who made a habit of arriving without announcement should become so excessively polite when meeting someone even less reliable than he.

Emmeline was still dressing so Robbie sat in the drawing room with Hannah. She was pleased finally to have opportunity to explain about Deborah, the way she’d goaded Teddy into making his decree. Robbie told her to forget it, that he’d guessed as much. They spoke then of other things and time must have flown, because suddenly Emmeline appeared, dressed and ready to go. Robbie nodded goodbye to Hannah, then he and Emmeline disappeared into the night.

For a time it continued thus. Hannah saw Robbie when he came to collect Emmeline and there was little Deborah could do to change things. Once, when she made a half-hearted attempt, Teddy only shrugged and said it seemed only proper that the mistress of the house entertain guests who called for her younger sister. Would she have the fellow sit by himself in the drawing room?

Hannah tried to satisfy herself with precious snatched moments, but found herself thinking about Robbie between times. He’d never been forthcoming about what he did when they weren’t together. She didn’t even know where he lived. So she started imagining; she’d always been good at games of imagination.

She managed, rather conveniently, to ignore the fact that he was spending time with Emmeline. What did it matter anyway? Emmeline had an enormous group of friends. Robbie was just one more.

Then one morning, when she was sitting at the breakfast table with Teddy, he flicked his hand against his open newspaper and said, ‘What do you think of that sister of yours, eh?’

Hannah braced, wondering what disgrace Emmeline had caused this time. She took the paper as Teddy passed it across the table.

It was only a small photograph. Robbie and Emmeline leaving a nightclub the previous evening. A good shot of Emmeline, Hannah had to concede, chin lifted, laughing, as she pulled Robbie by the arm. His face was less obvious. He was in shadow, had looked away at the critical moment.

Teddy took it back and read the accompanying text aloud: ‘The Honourable Miss E Hartford, one of society’s most glamorous young ladies, is pictured with a dark stranger. The mystery man is said to be the poet RS Hunter. A source says Miss Hartford has hinted an engagement announcement is not too far away.’ He laid the paper down, took a forkful of devilled egg. ‘Quite the dark horse, isn’t she? Didn’t think Emmeline was the sort to keep a secret,’ he said. ‘Could be worse, I suppose. Could have set her cap at that Harry Bentley.’ He dabbed his thumb at the corner of his moustache, wiped away a clot of egg. ‘You’ll talk to him though, won’t you? Make sure everything’s above board. I don’t need a scandal.’

When Robbie came to collect Emmeline the following night, Hannah received him as usual. They spoke for a time as they always did, until finally Hannah could stand it no longer.

‘Mr Hunter,’ she said, walking to the fireplace. ‘I must ask. Do you have something you wish to speak with me about?’

He sat back, smiled at her. ‘I have. And I thought I was.’

‘Something else, Mr Hunter?’

His smile faltered. ‘I don’t think I follow.’

‘Something you wanted to ask me about?’

‘Perhaps if you told me what it is you think I should be saying,’ said Robbie.

Hannah sighed. She collected the newspaper from the writing bureau and gave it to him.

He scanned it and handed it back. ‘So?’

‘Mr Hunter,’ Hannah said in a quiet voice. She didn’t want the servants to hear if they happened to be in the entrance hall. ‘I am my sister’s guardian. If you wish to become engaged, it really would be polite for you to discuss your intentions with me first.’

Robbie smiled, saw that Hannah was not amused and coached his lips back into repose. ‘I’ll remember that, Mrs Luxton.’

She blinked at him. ‘Well, Mr Hunter?’

‘Well, Mrs Luxton?’

‘Is there something you would like to ask me?’

‘No,’ said Robbie, laughing. ‘I have no intention of marrying Emmeline. Not now. Not ever. But thank you for asking.’

‘Oh,’ said Hannah simply. ‘Does Emmeline know that?’

Robbie shrugged. ‘I don’t see why she’d think otherwise. I’ve never given her reason.’

‘My sister is a romantic,’ said Hannah. ‘She forms attachments easily.’

‘Then she’ll have to unform them.’

Hannah felt sympathy for Emmeline then, but she felt something else too. She hated herself as she realised it was relief.

‘What is it?’ Robbie said. He was very close. She wondered when he’d moved to stand so close.

‘I’m worried about Emmeline,’ Hannah said, stepping back a little, her leg grazing the sofa. ‘She imagines your feelings more than they are.’

‘What can I do?’ said Robbie. ‘I’ve already told her they’re not.’

‘You must stop seeing her,’ said Hannah quietly. ‘Tell her you’re not interested in her parties. It won’t be too much of a hardship for you, surely. You’ve said yourself you have little to speak of with her friends.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Then if you don’t feel anything for Emmeline, be honest with her. Please, Mr Hunter. Break it off. She’ll come to harm otherwise and I can’t allow that.’

Robbie looked at her. He reached out and, very gently, straightened a piece of hair that had come loose. She was frozen to the spot, was aware of nothing but him. His dark eyes, the warmth coming from his skin, his soft lips. ‘I would,’ he said. ‘This minute.’ He was very close now. She was aware of his breaths, could hear them, feel them on her neck. He spoke softly. ‘But how would I ever see you?’

Things changed after that. Of course they did. They had to. Something implicit had become explicit. For Hannah the darkness had started to recede. She was falling in love with him, of course, not that she realised it at first. It sounds impossible, but she’d never been in love, had nothing with which to compare. She’d been attracted to people before, had felt that sudden, inexplicable pull, had felt it once with Teddy. But there is a difference between enjoying someone’s company, thinking them attractive, to finding oneself helplessly in love.

The occasional meetings she had once looked forward to, snatched while Robbie waited for Emmeline, were no longer enough. Hannah longed to see him elsewhere, alone, somewhere they might speak freely. Where there wasn’t the constant risk that someone else might join them.

Opportunity came one evening in early 1923. Teddy was in America on business, Deborah at a country-house weekend, and Emmeline out with friends at one of Robbie’s poetry readings. Hannah made a decision.

She ate dinner alone in the dining room, sat in the morning room after and sipped coffee, then retired to her bedroom. When I came to dress her for bed, she was in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the elegant claw-foot tub. She was wearing a delicate satin slip; Teddy had brought it back from one of his trips to the continent. In her hands was something black.

‘Would you like to take a bath, ma’am?’ I said. It was unusual, but not unheard of, for her to bathe after dinner.

‘No,’ said Hannah.

‘Shall I bring you your nightdress?’

‘No,’ she said again. ‘I’m not going to bed, Grace. I’m going out.’

I was confused. ‘Ma’am?’

‘I’m going out. And I need your help.’

She didn’t want any of the other servants to know. They were spies for Deborah, she said matter-of-factly, and she wanted neither Teddy nor Deborah-nor Emmeline, for that matter-to know she’d been anywhere but home all evening.

It worried me to think of her out alone at night, keeping such a thing from Teddy-worse, Deborah. And I wondered where she was going, whether she would tell me. Despite my misgivings, however, I agreed to help. Of course I did. It was what she’d asked of me.

Neither of us spoke as I helped her into a dress she’d already chosen: pale blue silk, with a fringe that brushed her bare knees. She sat in front of the mirror, watching as I pinned her hair tight against her head. Plucking at the fronds of her dress, twirling her locket chain, biting her lip. Then she handed me a wig: black, sleek and short, something Emmeline had worn months before to a fancy-dress party. I was surprised-wigs were not her habit-but I fitted it, then stepped back to observe. She looked like a different person. Like Louise Brooks.

She picked up a bottle of perfume-another of Teddy’s gifts-Chanel Number 5, brought back from Paris the year before, then changed her mind. Returned the bottle to its place and regarded herself. It was then I saw the piece of notepaper on her bureau: Robbie’s Reading, it said. The Stray Cat, Soho, Saturday, 10 pm. She grabbed the paper, stuffed it into her clutch purse and snapped it shut. Then, in the mirror, her eyes met mine. She said nothing; she didn’t have to. I wondered why I hadn’t guessed. Who else would have her this alert? This jittery? So full of expectation?

I went ahead, making sure the servants were all downstairs. And then I told Mr Boyle I’d noticed a stain on the glass pane in the entrance vestibule. I hadn’t, but I couldn’t have any of the staff hearing the front door open for no reason.

I went back upstairs and signalled to Hannah, standing at the turn of the stairs, that the way was clear. I opened the front door and through she went. On the other side we stopped. She turned to me, smiled.

‘Be careful, ma’am,’ I said, silencing my rumblings of foreboding.

She nodded. ‘Thank you, Grace. For everything.’

And she disappeared into the night air, silently, shoes in her hands so as not to make a noise.

Hannah found a taxi on a street around the corner and gave the driver the address of the club in which Robbie was reading. She was so excited she could hardly breathe. She had to keep tapping her heels on the floor of the taxi to convince herself it was really happening.

The address had been easy enough to obtain. Emmeline kept a journal into which she clipped pamphlets and advertisements and invitations, and it hadn’t taken Hannah long to find it. She needn’t have bothered as it turned out. Once she’d told the taxi driver the name he needed no further instruction. The Stray Cat was one of Soho’s better known clubs, a meeting spot for artists, drug dealers, business tycoons and bright young members of the aristocracy, bored and idle, keen to shake off the shackles of their birth.

He pulled up the cab and told her to be careful, shook his head as she paid him. She turned to thank him, and watched as the club’s reflected name slid off his black cab as he disappeared into the night.

Hannah had never been to such a place before. She stood where she was, took in the plain brick exterior, the flashing sign and the crowds of laughing people spilling onto the street outside. So this was what Emmeline meant when she talked about the clubs. This was where she and her friends came to play in the evenings. Hannah shivered into her scarf, kept her head down and went inside, refusing the valet’s offer to take her wrap.

It was tiny, little more than a room, and it was warm, full of jostling bodies. The smoky air smelled sweetly of gin. She stayed near the entrance, close to a pillar, and scanned the room, looking for Robbie.

He was onstage already, if stage it could be called. A small patch of bare space between the grand piano and the bar. He was sitting on a stool, cigarette on his lips, smoking lazily. His jacket was hanging on the back of a nearby chair and he wore only his black suit pants and a white shirt. His collar was loose and so was his hair. He was flicking through a notebook. In front of him, the audience lounged around small round tables. Others had crowded onto bar stools or draped themselves against the edges of the room.

Hannah saw Emmeline then, sitting in the middle of a table of friends. Fanny was with her, the old lady of the group. (Married life had proven something of a disappointment for Fanny. With the children appropriated by a rather tedious nurse and a husband who spent his time dreaming up new ailments to suffer, there was little to keep her interest. Who could blame her for seeking adventure at the side of her young friends?) They tolerated her, Emmeline had told Hannah, because she was so genuine in her pursuit of fun, and besides, she was older and could get them out of all sorts of trouble. She was especially good at sweet-talking police when they were caught in after-hours raids. They were all drinking cocktails in martini glasses, one of them ran a line of white powder on the table. Ordinarily, Hannah would have worried for Emmeline, but tonight she was in love with the world.

Hannah inched closer to the pillar but she needn’t have bothered. They were so engrossed with one another they had little time to look beyond. The fellow with the white powder whispered something to Emmeline and she laughed wildly, freely, her pale neck exposed.

Robbie’s hands were shaking. Hannah could see the notebook quivering. He rested his cigarette across an ashtray on the bar beside and began, giving no introduction. A poem about history, and mystery, and memory: ‘The Shifting Fog’. It was one of her favourites.

Hannah watched him; it was the first opportunity she’d ever had to gaze at him, to let her eyes roam his face, his body, without him knowing. And she listened. The words had touched her when she’d read them, but to hear him speak them was to see inside his own heart.

He finished, and the audience clapped, and someone called out, and there was laughter, and he looked up. At her. His face didn’t betray him, but she knew he saw, recognised her despite her disguise.

For a moment they were alone.

He looked back at his notebook, turned a few pages, fumbled a bit, settled on the next poem.

And then he spoke to her. Poem after poem. About knowing and unknowing, truth and suffering, love and lust. She closed her eyes and with every word she felt the darkness disappearing.

Then he was finished and the audience was applauding. The bar staff swept into action, mixing American cocktails and pouring shots, and the musicians took their seats, broke into jazz. Some of the drunk, laughing people improvised a dance floor between the tables. Hannah saw Emmeline wave to Robbie, beckon him to join them. Robbie waved back and pointed to his watch. Emmeline jutted her bottom lip, an exaggerated gesture, then whooped and waved as one of her male friends dragged her up to dance.

Robbie lit another cigarette, shrugged into his jacket and tucked his notebook into the inside pocket. He said something to a man behind the bar and headed across the room toward Hannah.

In that moment, as time slowed and she watched him walking, drawing closer, she was faint. She experienced vertigo. As if she were standing on the top of an enormous cliff, in a strong wind, unable to do anything but fall.

Without a word, he took her hand and led her out the door.

It was three in the morning when Hannah crept down the servants’ stairs of number seventeen. I was waiting for her, as I’d promised, my stomach a knot of nerves. She was later than expected, and darkness and disquiet had conspired to feed my mind with awful scenes.

‘Thank goodness,’ Hannah said, slipping through the door as I opened it. ‘I was worried you’d forget.’

‘Of course not, ma’am,’ I said, offended.

Hannah floated through the servants’ hall and tiptoed into the main house, shoes in hand. She’d started up the stairs to the second floor when she realised I was still following. ‘You don’t need to see me to bed, Grace. It’s far too late. Besides, I’d like to be alone.’

I nodded, stopped where I was, stood on the bottom step in my white nightie like a forgotten child.

‘Ma’am,’ I said quickly.

Hannah turned. ‘Yes?’

‘Did you have a nice time, ma’am?’

Hannah smiled. ‘Oh, Grace,’ she said. ‘Tonight my life began.’

III

They never met at his house. As far as Hannah knew he didn’t have one. They met in borrowed locations, wherever it was that Robbie happened to be staying. It only added to the adventure so far as she was concerned. She found it thrilling to escape into someone else’s house, someone else’s life. There was something delicious, she thought, about captured moments of intimacy in a strange place.

It was easy enough to arrange. Robbie would come to collect Emmeline and while he waited would slip Hannah a note with an address, a time, a date. Hannah would scan the note, nod agreement, and they would meet. Sometimes it was impossible-Teddy would demand her presence at a political event, or Deborah would volunteer her for this committee or that. On such occasions, she had no way of telling him. It pained her to imagine him waiting in vain.

But most of the time she did make it. She would tell the others she was meeting a friend for lunch, or going shopping, and she would disappear. She was never gone for long. She was careful about that. Anything beyond two hours was liable to raise suspicions. Love makes people devious and she soon became adept: came to think quickly on her feet if she were seen somewhere unexpected, by someone unexpected. One day she ran into Lady Clementine on Oxford Circus. Where was her driver, asked Lady Clementine. She’d come out on foot, said Hannah. It was such beautiful weather they were having and she’d felt like a walk. But Lady Clementine didn’t come down in yesterday’s shower. She narrowed her eyes and nodded, told Hannah to be sure and be careful as she went. The street had eyes and ears.

After that, Hannah was always sure to make a purchase on her way home-a new hat, a pair of gloves, a ticket to an exhibition-so that she might hold it up to show where she had been, why she was later than expected.

And so they met. She would leave number seventeen and make her way to wherever the most recent note had told her, careful not to encounter any of Deborah’s spies. Sometimes it was an area she knew, other times it took her to a distant part of London. She would find the street, then the house or flat. Would make sure no one was watching, and then, breath catching in her throat, would ring the bell.

He always came directly. Opened the door and let her in. They’d go upstairs then, away from the world and into their own. Sometimes they didn’t make it upstairs so quickly. He would close the door and kiss her before she could speak.

‘I’ve been waiting so long,’ he would say as they stood forehead to forehead. ‘I thought you’d never get here.’

And then she would hold a finger between their lips, remind him of the need for quiet, and then, oh then, they would go upstairs.

Sometimes, afterwards, they would lie together on the bed and she would guess at the kind of person who might live in such a place. A writer, she would say, eyes scanning the loaded bookshelf. ‘He must be a writer.’

‘He?’

Hannah would look at him. ‘Or she. Is it a she?’ She was jealous then of this phantom woman who lived in her own flat, who was friends to Robbie and saw him when she, Hannah, could not.

He would laugh at her then. ‘You’re telling this story.’

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘It’s a he. But he’s not a writer. He’s a doctor.’

‘A doctor?’

‘Only a doctor would have an entire shelf of anatomical books.’ She would look at him triumphantly, certain she had guessed it right this time.

‘True,’ he would say. ‘Unless he’s an artist. Artist’s need to know anatomy.’

She would nod seriously. ‘I like that. An artist.’ And then she would grin at him. ‘And I was right. Ha! You said “he”. It is a man’s flat.’

After a while they stopped playing guessing games and began playing house. One day, in a tiny bedsit in Hampstead, Hannah was making Robbie a cup of tea and he was watching, amused, as she stumbled with the tea leaves, wondered aloud whether they would still work being so dry and crispy.

‘If we lived here,’ said Hannah, ‘I’d need to work somewhere. To pay the rent.’

‘A sewing shop,’ Robbie said. He knew how badly she stitched.

‘A bookshop,’ she said, eyeing him sternly. ‘And you… you’d write beautiful poems all day, sitting here beneath the window, and you’d read them to me when I came home.’

‘We would move to Spain to escape the winters,’ Robbie said.

‘Yes,’ said Hannah. ‘And I’d become a toreador. A masked toreador. The greatest in all of Spain.’ She placed his cup of weak tea, leaves swimming on top, on the bedside table and sat next to him. ‘People everywhere would guess at my identity.’

‘But it would remain our secret,’ said Robbie.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It would be our secret.’

One drizzly day in October they lay curled up together. It was a dingy flat, dark and poky, belonging to a writer friend of Robbie’s. Hannah was watching the clock on the mantle, counting off the time before she had to leave. Finally, when the unfaithful minute hand reached the hour, she sat up. Retrieved her pair of stockings from the end of the bed and began to drag the left one on. Robbie walked his fingers along the base of her spine.

‘Don’t go,’ he said.

She bunched her right stocking and slipped it over her foot.

‘Stay.’

She was standing now. Dropping her slip over her head, straightening it around her hips. ‘You know I would. I’d stay forever if I could.’

‘In our secret world.’

‘Yes,’ she smiled, kneeled on the edge of the bed and reached out to stroke the side of his face. ‘I like that. Our own world. A secret world. I love secrets.’ She exhaled, she’d been thinking about this for some time. Wasn’t sure why she wanted so keenly to share it with him. ‘When we were children,’ she said, ‘we used to play a game.’

‘I know,’ said Robbie. ‘David told me about The Game.’

‘He did?’

Robbie nodded.

‘But The Game is secret,’ said Hannah automatically. ‘Why did he tell you?’

‘You were about to tell me yourself.’

‘Yes, but that’s different. You and I… It’s different.’

‘So tell me about The Game,’ he said. ‘Forget that I already know.’

She looked at the clock. ‘I really should be going.’

‘Just tell me quickly,’ he said.

‘All right. Just quickly.’

And she did. She told him about Nefertiti and Charles Darwin, and Emmeline’s Queen Victoria, and the adventures they went on, each more extraordinary than the one before.

‘You should have been a writer,’ he said, stroking her forearm.

‘Yes,’ she said seriously. ‘I could have made my escapes and adventures at the sweep of a pen.’

‘It’s not too late,’ he said. ‘You could start writing now.’

She smiled. ‘I don’t need to now. I have you. I escape to you.’

Sometimes he bought wine and they would drink it from someone else’s glasses while they sat wrapped in someone else’s sheets. They would eat cheese and bread, and when there was a gramophone they would listen to music. Sometimes, when they were sure the curtains were closed, they would dance.

One such rainy afternoon he fell asleep. She drank the rest of her wine, then for a time she lay next to him, listened to his breaths, tried to match her own to his, succeeded finally in catching his rhythm. But she couldn’t sleep, the novelty of lying next to him was too great. The novelty of him was too great. She knelt on the floor and watched his face. She’d never seen him sleeping before, in all the time they’d been meeting.

He was dreaming. She could see the muscles around his eyes tightening at whatever it was playing on his closed lids. The twitching grew fiercer as she watched. She thought she should wake him. She didn’t like to see him like this, his beautiful face contorted.

Then he started to call out and she was worried someone in one of the neighbouring flats might hear. Might realise there were people there who shouldn’t be. Might contact someone. The police, or worse.

She laid her hand on his forearm, ran her fingers lightly over the familiar scar. He continued to sleep, continued to call out. She shook him gently, said his name. ‘Robbie? You’re dreaming, my love.’

His eyes flashed open, round and dark, and before she knew what was happening she was on the floor, he on top of her, his hands around her neck. He was choking her, she could barely breath. She tried to say his name, tell him to stop, but she couldn’t. It only lasted a moment, then something in him clicked and he realised who she was. Realised what he was doing. He recoiled. Jumped off.

She sat up then, inched quickly backwards until her back hit the wall. She was looking at him, shocked, wondering what had come over him. Who he had thought she was.

He was standing against the far wall, hands pressed against his face, shoulders curved. ‘Are you all right?’ he said, without looking at her.

She nodded, wondered whether she was. ‘Yes,’ she said, finally.

He came to her then, knelt beside her. She must have flinched, for he held his hands up by his shoulders and said, ‘I won’t hurt you.’ He reached out, lifted her chin to see her throat. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, more firmly this time. ‘Are you-?’

He held a finger to her lips. He was still breathing quickly. He shook his head absently, and she knew he wanted to explain. Couldn’t.

He cupped the side of her face with his hand. She leaned into his touch, eyes locked with his. Such dark eyes, full of secrets he wouldn’t share. She longed to know them all, determined to earn them from him. And when he kissed her throat, oh, so lightly, she swooned, as she always did.

She had to wear scarves for a week after that. But she didn’t mind. In some way it pleased her to have his mark. It made the times between more bearable. A secret reminder that he really did exist, that they existed. Their secret world. She would look at it sometimes, in the mirror, the way a new bride looks repeatedly at her wedding ring. Reminding herself. She knew he would have been horrified if she’d told him.

Love affairs, in the beginning, are all about the present, the moment. But there’s a point where the past and the future come back into focus. For Hannah, this was it. There were other sides to him. Things she hadn’t known before. She’d been too full of the wonderful surprise of him to look beyond immediate happiness. The more she thought about this aspect of him, of which she knew so little, the more frustrated she became. The more determined to know everything.

One cool afternoon in April, in a bedsit in Islington, they were sitting together on a bed beneath a window watching the street below. There were people walking this way and that, and they’d been giving them names and imagined lives. They’d been quiet for a while, had been content just to watch the passing procession from their secret position, when Robbie hopped out of bed.

She remained where she was, rolled over to watch him as he sat himself on the kitchen chair, one leg curled beneath him, head bent over his notebook. He was trying to write a poem. Had been trying all day. He’d been distracted while he was with her. Had been unable to play the game with any enthusiasm. She didn’t mind. In some way she couldn’t explain, his distraction made him more attractive.

She lay on the bed, watching his fingers clutching his pencil, directing it in flowing circles and loops in one direction across the page, only to stop, hesitate, then backtrack fiercely across its previous path. He tossed the notebook and pencil onto the table and rubbed his eyes with his hand.

She didn’t say anything. She knew better than that. This was not the first time she’d seen him like this. He was frustrated, she knew, by his own failure to find the right words. Worse, he was frightened. He hadn’t told her, but she knew. She’d watched him, and she had read about it: at the library and in newspapers and journals. It was a trait of what the doctors were calling shell shock. The increased unreliability of memory, the numbing of the brain by traumatic experiences.

She longed to make it better, to make him forget. Would give anything to make it stop; his relentless fear that he was losing his mind. He took his hand from across his eyes and reached once more for the pencil and paper. Started again to write, stopped, scratched it out.

She rolled over, onto her stomach and watched the people passing on the street below.

In the winter he managed to find them somewhere with a fire. It was little more than a sitting room, with a sofa and a sideboard. They were sitting on the floor while the fire flickered and hissed in the grate; their skin was warm and they were drowsy with red wine and warmth and each other.

Hannah was watching the fire when she said, ‘Why won’t you talk about the war?’

He didn’t answer; instead he lit a cigarette.

She’d been reading Freud on repression and had some idea that if she could get Robbie to speak about it, perhaps he would be cured. She held her breath, wondered if she dared to ask. ‘Is it because you killed somebody?’

He looked at her profile, took a drag of his cigarette, exhaled and shook his head. Then he started to laugh softly, without humour. He reached out to lay his hand gently along the side of her face.

‘Is that it?’ she whispered, still not looking at him.

He didn’t answer and she took another tack.

‘Who is it you dream about?’

He removed his hand. ‘You know the answer to that,’ he said. ‘I only ever dream of you.’

‘I hope not,’ said Hannah. ‘They’re not very nice dreams.’

He took a drag of his cigarette, exhaled. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said.

‘It’s shell shock, isn’t it?’ she said, turning to him. ‘I’ve been reading about it.’

His eyes met hers. Such dark eyes. Like wet paint; full of secrets.

‘Shell shock,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wondered who came up with that. I suppose they needed a nice name to describe the unspeakable for the nice ladies back home.’

‘Nice ladies like me, you mean,’ said Hannah.

‘You’re not a nice lady,’ he said, teasing.

She was put out. Was not in the mood to be fobbed off. She sat up and slipped her petticoat over her head. Started to pull her stockings on.

He sighed. She knew he didn’t want her to leave like this. Angry with him.

‘You’ve read Darwin?’ he said.

‘Charles Darwin?’ she said, turning to him. ‘Of course.’

‘Ought to have known,’ he said. ‘Smart girl like you.’

‘But what does Charles Darwin have to do with-’

‘Adaptation. Survival is a matter of successful adaptation. Some of us are better at it than others.’

‘Adaptation to what?’

‘To war. To living by your wits. The new rules of the game.’

Hannah thought about this.

‘I’m alive,’ Robbie said plainly, ‘because some other bugger isn’t. Plenty of others.’

So now she knew.

She wondered how she felt about it. ‘I’m glad you’re alive,’ she said, but she felt a shiver from deep down inside. And when his fingers stroked her wrist she withdrew it despite herself.

‘That’s why nobody talks about it,’ he said. ‘They know that if they do, people will see them for what they really are. Members of the devil’s party moving amid the regular people as though they still belong. As if they’re not monsters returned from a murderous rampage.’

‘Don’t say that,’ said Hannah sharply. ‘You’re not a murderer.’

‘I’m a killer.’

‘It’s different. It was war. It was self-defence. Defence of others.’

He shrugged. ‘Still a bullet through some fellow’s brain.’

‘Stop it,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t like it when you talk like that.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have asked.’

She didn’t like it. She didn’t like to think of him that way, and yet she found she couldn’t stop. That someone she knew, someone she knew intimately, whose hands had run gently, lightly, over her body, whom she trusted implicitly, should have killed… Well, it changed things. It changed him. Not for the worse. She didn’t love him any less. But she looked at him differently. He had killed a man. Men. Countless, nameless men.

She was thinking that one afternoon, watching him as he stalked about a friend’s apartment in Fulham. He had his pants on, but his shirt was still draped across the bed end. She was watching his lean muscled arms, his bare shoulders, his beautiful, brutal hands, when it happened.

A knock at the door.

They both froze, stared at each other; Robbie lifted his shoulders.

It came again. More urgent this time. Then a voice, ‘Hello, Robbie? Open up. It’s just me.’

Emmeline’s voice.

Hannah slid off the side of the bed and quickly gathered her clothing.

Robbie held his finger to his lips and tiptoed to the door.

‘I know you’re in there,’ said Emmeline. ‘There’s a lovely old man downstairs who said he saw you come in and that you haven’t been out all afternoon. Let me in, it’s bloody freezing out here.’

Robbie signalled Hannah to hide in the water closet.

Hannah nodded, tiptoed across the room, snibbed the door quickly behind her. Her heart was pounding against her rib cage. She fumbled with her dress, pulled it over her head and knelt to peer through the keyhole.

Robbie opened the door. ‘How’d you know I was staying here?’

‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ said Emmeline, sauntering into the centre of the room. Hannah noticed she was wearing her new yellow dress. ‘Desmond told Freddy, Freddy told Jane. You know how those kids are.’ She paused and ran her wide-eyed gaze over everything. ‘Basic but homely.’ She raised her brows when she saw the tangle of sheets on the bed and turned back to Robbie, smiling as she assessed his state of undress. ‘I haven’t interrupted anything?’

Hannah inhaled.

‘I was sleeping,’ said Robbie.

‘At quarter to four?’

He shrugged, found his shirt and put it on.

‘I wondered what you did all day. Here was I thinking you’d be busy writing poetry.’

‘I was. I do.’ He rubbed his neck, exhaled angrily. ‘What do you want?’

Hannah winced at the harshness of his voice. It was Emmeline’s mention of poetry: Robbie hadn’t written in weeks. Emmeline didn’t seem to notice any unkindness. ‘I wanted to know if you were coming tonight. To Desmond’s place.’

‘I told you I wasn’t.’

‘I know that’s what you said but I thought you might have changed your mind.’

‘I haven’t.’

There was a silence as Robbie glanced back toward the door and Emmeline looked longingly around the flat. ‘Perhaps I could-’

‘You have to go,’ said Robbie quickly. ‘I’m working.’

‘But I could help out,’ she used her purse to lift the edge of a dirty plate, ‘tidy up or-’

‘I said no.’ Robbie opened the door.

Hannah watched as Emmeline forced her lips into a breezy smile. ‘I was joking, darling. You didn’t really think I’d have nothing better to do on a lovely afternoon than clean house?’

Robbie didn’t say anything.

Emmeline strolled toward the door. Straightened his collar. ‘You’re still coming to Freddy’s?’

He nodded.

‘Pick me up at six?’

‘Yeah,’ said Robbie, and he closed the door behind her.

Hannah came out of the bathroom then. She felt dirty. Like a rat slinking out of its hidey-hole.

‘Perhaps we should leave it a while?’ said Hannah. ‘A week or so?’

‘No,’ said Robbie. ‘I’ve told Emmeline not to drop around. I’ll tell her again. I’ll make sure she understands.’

Hannah nodded, wondered why she felt so guilty. She reminded herself, as she always did, that it had to be this way. That Emmeline wasn’t being harmed. Robbie had long ago explained that his feelings were not romantic. He said she’d laughed and wondered why on earth he ever imagined she thought otherwise. And yet. Something in Emmeline’s voice, a strain beneath the practised flippancy. And the yellow dress. Emmeline’s favourite…

Hannah looked at the wall clock. There was still half an hour before she had to leave. ‘I might go,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Stay.’

‘I really-’

‘At least a few minutes. Give Emmeline time to find her way.’

Hannah nodded as Robbie came toward her. He ran a hand over each side of her face to grip the back of her neck, then pulled her lips to his.

A sudden, jagged kiss that caught her off balance and silenced, utterly, the niggling voices of misgiving.

An afternoon in December, when they were sitting one each end of a deep bath, Hannah said, ‘I won’t be able to meet for two weeks.’ She ran a washcloth over his hand. ‘It’s Teddy. He has guests from America for the next fortnight and I’m expected to play the good wife. Take them places, entertain them.’

‘I hate to think of you like that,’ he said. ‘Fawning all over him.’

‘I certainly don’t fawn all over him. Teddy wouldn’t know what was happening if I did.’

‘You know what I mean,’ said Robbie. ‘Living with him, sleeping with him.’

‘We don’t,’ said Hannah. ‘You know we don’t.’

‘But people think you do,’ said Robbie. ‘They think you’re a pair.’

She reached to take his fingers in the soapy water that was fast becoming cool. ‘I hate it too,’ said Hannah. ‘I’d do anything so that I never had to leave you.’

‘Anything?’

‘Almost anything.’ She stood, shivered when the cold air hit her wet skin. She climbed out of the bath and wrapped herself in a towel. Sat on a wooden seat by the window. ‘Arrange to see Emmeline sometime next week; let me know when and where we can meet, after New Year?’

He slid deeper beneath the water so that only his head was visible. ‘I want to break it off with Emmeline.’

‘No,’ said Hannah, looking up suddenly. ‘Not yet. How will we see each other? How will I know where to find you?’

‘Wouldn’t be a problem if you lived with me. We’d always be able to find one another. We wouldn’t be able to lose each other.’

‘I know, I know.’ She pulled her slip over her head. ‘But until then… how can you think of breaking it off?’

‘You were right. She’s becoming too attached.’

‘No,’ said Hannah. ‘She’s ebullient. It’s just her way. Why? What makes you say that?’

Robbie shook his head.

‘What is it?’ said Hannah.

‘Nothing,’ said Robbie. ‘You’re right. It’s probably nothing.’

‘I know it’s nothing,’ said Hannah firmly. And in that moment she believed it. Would have said it even if she didn’t. Love is like that. Urgent and insistent; it conquers easily one’s sense of satisfaction.

She was dressed now, and it was his turn to sit on the chair wrapped in a towel. She knelt before him, slipped his left shirt sleeve up over his arm. ‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘Here.’ He shrugged his right arm into the shirt and Hannah started on the buttons. She didn’t look at him when she said, ‘Teddy wants us to move back to Riverton.’

‘When?’

‘March. He’s going to have it restored, build a new summer house.’ She spoke dryly. ‘He imagines himself quite the country squire.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t want to think of it,’ she said helplessly. ‘I kept hoping he’d change his mind.’ She reached the top button, slipped it through and ran her hand down the middle of his chest. ‘You have to keep contact with Emmeline. I can’t invite you to stay, but she can. She’s bound to have friends up for weekends, country parties.’

He nodded, wouldn’t meet her eyes.

‘Please,’ said Hannah. ‘For me. I have to know you’re coming.’

‘And we’ll become one of those country-house couples?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘We’ll play the same games as countless couples before us. Sneak around in the night, pretend to be distantly acquainted in the day?’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

‘They’re not our rules.’

‘I know.’

‘It’s not enough,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said again.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘But only for you.’

One evening in early 1924, with Teddy away on business and Deborah visiting friends, they arranged to meet. It was a part of London Hannah had never entered. As the taxi wended its way deeper into the tangled East End, she watched out the windows. Night had fallen and for the most part there was little to see: grey buildings; horse-drawn carts with lanterns suspended over their top; occasional red-cheeked children in woollen jumpers, tossing jacks, rolling marbles, pointing at the taxi. Then, down one street, the shock of coloured lights, people thronging, music.

Hannah leaned forward, rapped on the screen behind the driver. ‘What is this? What’s happening here?’

‘New Year festival,’ he said in a heavy cockney accent. ‘Bloody barmy, the lot of ’em. Middle o’ winter; should be inside.’

Hannah watched, fascinated, as the taxi crawled down the street. Lights had been strung between buildings so that they zigzagged right the way along. A band of men playing fiddles and a piano accordion had gathered quite a crowd, clapping and laughing. Children wove between adults, dragging streamers and blowing whistles; men and women mingled around great metal drums, roasting chestnuts, drinking ale from mugs. The taxi driver had to hit his horn and call out at them to clear the way. ‘Mad, the lot of ’em,’ he said as the taxi emerged at the other end of the street and turned the corner into a darkened road. ‘Stark raving.’

Hannah felt as if she’d passed through a sort of fairyland. When the driver pulled up finally at the address she’d given him, she ran breathlessly to find Robbie. To tell him what she’d seen.

Robbie was resistant but Hannah pleaded, convinced him finally to accompany her back to the festival. They got out so little, she said, and when might they have opportunity again to visit a party together? No one would know them here. It was safe.

She led the way from memory, half convinced she’d be unable to find it again. Half convinced the festival would have disappeared like a fairy ring in a children’s tale. But soon enough, the frenetic strains of the violin band, children’s whistles, jovial shouts, and she knew it lay ahead.

Moments later they turned the corner into wonderland, began to wander down the street. The cool breeze brought with it mingling wafts of roasting nuts, sweat, and good cheer. People hung out of windows, calling to those below, singing, toasting the new year, farewelling the old. Hannah watched wide-eyed, held tightly to Robbie’s arm, pointing this way and that, laughing with delight at the people who’d started dancing on a makeshift floor.

They stopped to watch, joined the growing crowd, found seats together on a plank of wood stretched across timber boxes. A large woman with red cheeks and masses of dark curling hair perched on a stool by the fiddlers, singing and slapping a tambourine against her padded thigh. Whoops from the audience, shouts of encouragement, flowing skirts whipping past.

Hannah was enthralled. She’d never seen such revelry. Oh, she’d attended her fair share of parties, but compared to this they seemed so orchestrated. So tame. She clapped, laughed, squeezed Robbie’s hand vehemently. ‘They’re wonderful,’ she said, unable to shift her eyes from the couples. Men and women of all shapes and sizes, arms linked as they swirled and stomped and clapped. ‘Aren’t they wonderful?’

The music was infectious. Faster, louder, seeping through each pore, flowing into her blood, making her skin tingle. Driving rhythm that tugged at her core.

Then Robbie’s voice in her ear. ‘I’m thirsty. Let’s go, find something to drink.’

She hardly heard, shook her head. Realised she’d been holding her breath. ‘No. No, you go. I want to watch.’

He hesitated. ‘I don’t want to leave you.’

‘I’ll be fine.’ Vaguely aware as his hand held firm a moment, then detached from hers. No time to watch him go, too much else to see. To hear. To feel.

She wondered later whether she should have noticed something in his voice. Whether she should have realised then that the noise, the activity, the crowds were pressing in on him so that he could hardly breathe. But she didn’t. She was captivated.

Robbie’s place was soon filled, someone else’s warm thigh pressed against hers. She glanced sideways. A short, stocky man with red whiskers; a brown felt hat.

The man caught her eye, leaned close, cocked his thumb toward the dance floor. ‘Take a spin?’

His breath was tinged with tobacco. His eyes were pale, blue, trained on her.

‘Oh… No,’ she smiled at him. ‘Thank you. I’m with someone.’ She looked over her shoulder, scanned for Robbie. Thought she saw him through the darkness on the other side of the street. Standing by a smoking barrel. ‘He won’t be long.’

The man tilted his face. ‘Come on. Just a little one. Keep the both of us warm.’

Hannah peered behind again. No sign now of Robbie. Had he said where he was going? How long he would be?

‘Well?’ The man. She turned back to him. Music was everywhere. It reminded her of a street she’d seen in Paris years before. On her honeymoon. She bit her lip. What would it hurt, just a little dance? What purpose life if not to seize at opportunity? ‘All right,’ she said, taking his hand. Smiling nervously. ‘Though I’m not sure I know how.’

The man grinned. Pulled her up, dragged her into the centre of the swirling crowd.

And she was dancing. Somehow, in his strong grip, she knew the steps. Knew them well enough. They skipped and turned, swept up in the current of the other couples. Violins sang, boots stomped, hands clapped. The man linked an arm through hers, elbow to elbow, and round they spun. She laughed, couldn’t help herself. She’d never felt such rushing freedom. She turned her face toward the night sky; closed her eyes, felt the kiss of cold air on her warm lids, warm cheeks. She opened them again, looked for Robbie as they went. Longed to dance with him. Be held by him. She stared into the sea of faces-surely there hadn’t been so many before?-but she was spinning too fast. They were a blur of eyes and mouths and words.

‘I…’ She was out of breath, clapped her hand to her bare neck. ‘I have to stop now. My friend will be back.’ She tapped the man’s shoulder as he continued to hold her, continued to spin. Said, right into his ear: ‘That’s enough. Thank you.’

For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to stop, was going to continue, round and round, never letting her go. But then she felt a loss of momentum, a rush of dizziness, and they were near the bench again.

It was full now of other spectators. Still no Robbie.

‘Where’s your friend?’ said the man. He’d lost his hat in the dance, ran his hand through a mat of red hair.

‘He’ll be here,’ said Hannah, scanning strange faces. Blinking to rid herself of giddiness. ‘Soon.’

‘No sense sitting out in the meantime,’ said the man. ‘You’ll catch a chill.’

‘No,’ said Hannah. ‘Thank you but I’ll wait here.’

The man gripped her wrist. ‘Come on. Keep a fellow company.’

‘No,’ said Hannah, firmly this time. ‘I’ve had enough.’

The man’s grip loosened. He shrugged, ran his fingers over his whiskers, his neck. Turned to leave.

Suddenly, out of the darkness, movement. A shadow. Upon them.

Robbie.

An elbow in her shoulder and she was falling.

A shout. His? The man’s? Hers?

Hannah collapsed into a wall of onlookers.

The band continued; the clapping and stomping too.

From where she fell she glanced upward. Robbie was on the man. Fist pounding. Pounding. Again. Again. Again.

Panic. Heat. Fear.

‘Robbie!’ she called. ‘Robbie, stop!’

She pushed her way through endless people, grabbing at anything she could.

The music had stopped and people had gathered to the fray. Somehow she pressed between them, made her way to the front. Clutched at Robbie’s shirt. ‘Robbie!’

He shook her off. Turned briefly toward her. Eyes blank, not meeting hers. Not seeing hers.

The man’s fist met Robbie’s face. And he was atop.

Blood.

Hannah screamed. ‘No! Let him be. Please, let him be.’ She was crying now. ‘Somebody help.’

She was never sure exactly how it ended. Never learned the fellow’s name who came to her assistance, to Robbie’s assistance. Pulled the whiskered man off; dragged Robbie to the wall. Fetched glasses of water, then of whisky. Told her to take her old man home and put him to bed.

Whoever he was, he’d been unsurprised by the evening’s events. Had laughed and told them it wouldn’t be a Saturday night-or a Friday, or a Thursday, for that matter-if a couple of lads didn’t set one against the other. And then he’d shrugged, told them Red Wycliffe wasn’t a bad sort-he’d seen a bad war, that was all, hadn’t been the same since. Then he’d packed them off, Robbie leaning on Hannah for support.

They attracted hardly a glance as they made their way along the street, leaving the dancing, the merriment, the clapping behind them.

Later, back at Robbie’s flat, she washed his face. He sat on a low timber stool and she knelt before. He’d said little since they’d left the festival and she hadn’t wanted to ask. What had overcome him, why he’d pounced, where he’d been. She’d guessed he was asking himself the same sorts of questions, and she was right.

‘What might have happened?’ he said eventually. ‘What might have happened?’

‘Shhh,’ she said, pressing the damp flannel against his cheekbone. ‘It’s over.’

Robbie shook his head. Closed his eyes. Beneath his thin lids, his thoughts flickered. Hannah barely heard him when he spoke. ‘I’d have killed him,’ he whispered. ‘So help me God, I’d have killed him.’

They didn’t go out again. Not after that. Hannah blamed herself; berated herself for not listening to his protestations, for insisting they go. The lights, the noise, the crowds. She had read about shell shock: she should have known better. She resolved to care better for him in future. To remember all he’d been through. To treat him gently. And never to mention it again. It was over. It wouldn’t happen again. She’d make sure of it.

A week or so later they were lying together, playing their game, imagining they lived in a tiny isolated village at the top of the Himalayas, when Robbie sat up and said, ‘I’m tired of this game.’

Hannah propped herself on one side. ‘What would you like to do?’

‘I want it to be real.’

‘So do I,’ Hannah said. ‘Imagine if-’

‘No,’ Robbie said. ‘Why can’t we make it real?’

‘Darling,’ said Hannah gently, running a finger along his right cheekbone, across his recent scar. ‘I don’t know whether the fact had slipped your mind, but I’m already married.’ She was trying to be light-hearted. To make him laugh, but he didn’t.

‘People get divorced.’

She wondered who these people were. ‘Yes, but-’

‘We could go somewhere else, away from here, away from everyone we know. Don’t you want to?’

‘You know I do,’ said Hannah.

‘With the new law you only have to prove adultery.’

Hannah nodded. ‘But Teddy hasn’t been adulterous.’

‘Surely,’ Robbie said, ‘in all this time that we’ve…’

‘It isn’t his way.’

‘But when you said that you and he weren’t… I presumed…’

‘It isn’t something he thinks about,’ said Hannah. ‘He’s never been particularly interested.’ She ran a finger over his lips. ‘Not even when we were first married. It wasn’t until I met you that I realised…’ She paused, leaned to kiss him. ‘That I realised.’

‘He’s a fool,’ said Robbie. He looked at her intensely and ran his hand lightly down her side, from shoulder to wrist. ‘Leave him.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t go to Riverton,’ he said. He was sitting now, had hold of her wrists. God he was beautiful. ‘Run away with me.’

‘You’re not being serious,’ she said uncertainly. ‘You’re teasing.’

‘I’ve never been more serious.’

‘Just disappear?’

‘Just disappear.’

She was silent for a minute, thinking.

‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘Why?’ He released her wrists roughly, left the bed and lit a cigarette.

‘Lots of reasons…’ She thought about it. ‘Emmeline-’

‘Fuck Emmeline.’

Hannah flinched. ‘She needs me.’

‘I need you.’

And he did. She knew he did. A need both terrifying and intoxicating.

‘She’ll be all right,’ said Robbie. ‘She’s tougher than you think.’

Hannah sighed. ‘It’s not so simple. She’s my responsibility.’

‘Says who?’

‘David, Pa…’ She shrugged. ‘It’s just something I know.’

He was sitting at the table now, smoking. He looked thinner than she remembered. He was thinner. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed before.

‘Teddy would find me,’ she said. ‘His family would. They have long memories.’ She shivered.

‘I wouldn’t let them.’

‘You don’t know them.’

‘We’d go somewhere they wouldn’t think to look. The world’s a big place.’

He looked so fragile sitting there. Alone. She was all he had. She stood by him, cradled him in her arms so that his head rested against her stomach.

‘I can’t live without you,’ he said. ‘I’d rather die.’ He said it so plainly she shivered, disgusted herself by deriving some pleasure from his statement.

‘Don’t say that,’ she said.

‘I mean it.’

‘You’re trying to upset me.’

‘I need to be with you,’ he said simply. ‘I’ll die without you.’

‘Let me think about it,’ said Hannah. She had learned that when Robbie got like this it was best to go along with him.

And so, she let him plan it. Their great escape. He’d stopped writing poetry; his notebook only ever pulled out now to sketch escape ideas. She even helped sometimes. It was a game, she told herself, just like the others they’d always played. It made him happy, and besides, she often got swept up in the planning herself. Which faraway places they could live in, what they might see, the adventures they might have. A game. Their own game in their own secret world.

She didn’t know, couldn’t know, where it would all lead.

If she had, she told me later, she’d have kissed him one last time, turned and run as fast and as far as she could.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

I have said it before: sooner or later secrets have a way of making themselves known. Hannah and Robbie managed to keep theirs long enough: from the end of 1922, right through the following year, and into the beginning of 1924. But, as with all impossible love affairs, it was destined to end.

Downstairs, the servants had started to talk. It was the new housemaid, Caroline, who lit the match. She was a snoopy little miss, come from serving at the house of the infamous Lady Penthrop (rumoured to have tangled with half the eligible lords in London). She’d been let go with a glowing recommendation, extracted, alongside a pretty sum, after catching her mistress in one too many compromising positions. Ironically, she needn’t have bothered: she didn’t need the reference when she came to us. Her reputation preceded her and it was her snooping rather than her cleaning that inclined Deborah to employ her.

There are always signs if one knows where to look, and know where to look she did. Scraps of paper with strange addresses plucked from the fire before they burned, imprints of ardent notes left on writing blocks, shopping bags that contained little more than old ticket stubs. And it wasn’t difficult to get the other servants talking. Once she invoked the spectre of Divorce, reminded them that if scandal broke they’d likely find themselves without employment, they were pretty forthcoming.

She knew better than to ask me, but in the end she didn’t need to. She learned Hannah’s secret well enough. I blame myself for that: I should have been more alert. If I hadn’t had my mind on other things, I would have noticed what Caroline was up to, I could have warned Hannah. But I’m afraid at that time I was not a good lady’s maid, was sadly remiss in my responsibilities to Hannah. I was distracted, you see; I’d suffered a disappointment of my own. From Riverton had come news of Alfred.

Thus, the first either of us knew, was the evening of the opera, when Deborah came to Hannah’s bedroom. I’d dressed Hannah in a slip of pale French silk, neither white nor pink, and was just fixing her hair into curls about her face when there came the knock at the door.

‘Almost ready, Teddy,’ said Hannah, rolling her eyes at my reflection. Teddy was religiously punctual. I drove a hairpin into a particularly errant curl.

The door opened and Deborah swanned into the room, dramatic in a red dress with butterfly-wing sleeves. She sat on the end of Hannah’s bed and crossed one leg over the other, a flurry of red silk.

Hannah’s eyes met mine. A visit from Deborah was unusual. ‘Looking forward to Tosca?’ said Hannah.

‘Immensely,’ said Deborah. ‘I adore Puccini.’ She withdrew a makeup compact from her purse and flicked it open, arranged her lips so they made a figure eight and stabbed at the corners for lipstick smears. ‘So sad, though, lovers torn apart like that.’

‘There aren’t many happy endings in opera,’ said Hannah.

‘No,’ said Deborah. ‘Nor in life, I fear.’

Hannah pressed her lips together. Waited.

‘You realise, don’t you,’ said Deborah, smoothing her brows in the little mirror, ‘that I don’t give a damn who you’re sleeping with when my fool of a brother has his back turned.’

Hannah’s eyes met mine. Shock made me fumble the hairpin, drop it on the floor.

‘It’s my father’s business I care about.’

‘I didn’t realise the business had anything to do with me,’ said Hannah. Despite her casual voice, I could hear her breaths grown shallow and quick.

‘Don’t play dumb,’ Deborah said, snapping her compact closed. ‘You know your part in all of this. People invest with us because we represent the best of both worlds. New technology and business approaches, with the old-fashioned assurance of your family heritage. Progress and tradition, side by side.’

‘Progressive tradition? I always suspected Teddy and I made rather an oxymoronic match,’ said Hannah.

‘Don’t be smart,’ Deborah said. ‘You and yours benefit from the union of our families just as much as we do. After the mess your father made of his inheritance-’

‘My father did his best.’ Hannah’s cheeks flushed hotly.

Deborah raised her brows. ‘Is that what you call it? Running his business into the ground?’

‘Pa lost his business because it burned down. It was an accident.’

‘Of course,’ Deborah said quickly, ‘an unfortunate accident. Left him with little choice though, didn’t it? Little choice but to sell his daughter to the highest bidder.’ She laughed lightly, came to stand behind Hannah, forcing me aside. She leaned over Hannah’s shoulder and addressed her reflection. ‘It’s no secret he didn’t want you to marry Teddy. Did you know he came to see my father one night? Oh, yes. Told him he knew what he was up to and he could forget about it, that you’d never consent.’ She straightened, smiled with subtle triumph as Hannah looked away. ‘But you did. Because you’re a smart girl. Broke your poor father’s heart, but you knew as well as he that you had little other choice. And you were right. Where would you be now if you hadn’t married my brother?’ She paused, cocked an overplucked brow. ‘With that poet of yours?’

Standing against the wardrobe, unable to cross to the door, I wished to be anywhere else. Hannah, I saw, had lost her flush. Her body had taken on the stiffness of one preparing to receive a blow but with little idea from where.

‘And what of your sister?’ said Deborah. ‘What of little Emmeline?’

‘Emmeline has nothing to do with this,’ said Hannah, voice catching.

‘I beg to differ,’ said Deborah. ‘Where would she be if it weren’t for my family? A little orphan whose daddy lost the family’s fortune. Whose sister is carrying on with one of her boyfriends. Why, it could only be worse if those nasty little films were to resurface!’

Hannah’s back stiffened.

‘Oh yes,’ said Deborah. ‘I know all about them. You didn’t think my brother kept secrets from me, did you?’ She smiled and her nostrils flared. ‘He knows better than that. We’re family. Not to mention he couldn’t make half the decisions he makes if it weren’t for my counsel.’

‘What do you want, Deborah?’

Deborah smiled thinly. ‘I just wanted you to see, to understand how much we all have to lose from even the whiff of scandal. Why it has to stop.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’

Deborah sighed, collected Hannah’s purse from the end of the bed. ‘If you won’t stop seeing him of your own accord, I’ll make certain that you can’t.’ She snapped the purse shut and handed it to Hannah. ‘Men like him-war-damaged, artistic-disappear all the time, poor things. No one thinks anything of it.’ She straightened her dress and started for the door. ‘You get rid of him. Or I will.’

Hannah met Robbie for the last time that winter in the Egyptian room at the British Museum. I was sent with the letter. He was taken aback to see me in Hannah’s stead, and none too pleased. He took it warily, peered into the hall to check I was alone, then leaned against the doorframe, reading. His hair was dishevelled and he hadn’t shaved. His cheeks were shadowed, as was the skin around his smooth lips, which were moving softly, speaking Hannah’s words. He smelled unwashed.

I had never seen a man in such a natural state, didn’t quite know where to look. I concentrated instead on the hallway wall beside him. When he got to the end his eyes met mine and I saw how dark they were, and how desperate. I blinked, looked away, left as soon as he said he’d be there.

So it was, on a rainy morning in March 1924, I pretended to read news articles about Howard Carter, while Hannah and Robbie sat at opposite ends of a bench before the Tutankhamen display, looking for all the world like strangers who shared nothing more than an interest in Egyptology.

A few days later, at Hannah’s behest, I was helping Emmeline pack for her move to Fanny’s house. Emmeline had spread across two rooms while at number seventeen, and there was little doubt that without help she had no hope of being ready in time. Thus, I was plucking Emmeline’s winter accessories from the shelves of soft toys given her by admirers, when Hannah came to check our progress.

‘You’re supposed to be helping, Emmeline,’ said Hannah. ‘Not leaving Grace to do everything.’

Hannah’s tone was strained, had been that way since the day in the British Museum, but Emmeline didn’t notice. She was too busy flicking through her journal. She’d been at it all afternoon, sitting cross-legged on the floor, poring over old ticket stubs and sketches, photographs and ebullient youthful scrawlings. ‘Listen to this,’ she said, ‘from Harry. Do come to Desmond’s else it’ll be just we three fellows: Dessy, yours truly and Clarissa. Isn’t he a scream? Poor Clarissa, she really shouldn’t have bobbed her hair.’

Hannah sat on the end of the bed. ‘I’m going to miss you.’

‘I know,’ said Emmeline, smoothing a crinkled page of her journal. ‘But you do understand I can’t come to Riverton with you all. I’d simply die of boredom.’

‘I know.’

‘Not that it will be boring for you, darling,’ Emmeline said suddenly, realising she may have caused offence. ‘You know I don’t mean that.’ She smiled. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, the way things turn out?’

Hannah raised her eyebrows.

‘I mean, when we were girls, you were always the one who longed to get away. Remember you even talked about becoming an office girl?’ Emmeline laughed. ‘I forget, did you ever go so far as to ask Pa’s permission?’

Hannah shook her head.

‘I wonder what he would have said,’ said Emmeline. ‘Poor old Pa. I seem to remember being awfully angry when you married Teddy and left me with him. I can’t quite remember why.’ She sighed happily. ‘Things have turned out, haven’t they?’

Hannah pressed her lips together, searched for the right words. ‘You’re happy in London, aren’t you?’

‘Do you need to ask?’ said Emmeline. ‘It’s bliss.’

‘Good.’ Hannah stood to leave then hesitated, sat again. ‘And you know that if anything should happen to me-’

‘Abduction by Martians from the red planet?’ said Emmeline.

‘I’m not fooling, Emme.’

Emmeline cast her eyes skyward. ‘Don’t I know it. You’ve been a sourpuss all week.’

‘Lady Clementine and Fanny would always help. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Emmeline. ‘You’ve said it all before.’

‘I know. It’s just, leaving you alone in London-’

‘You’re not leaving me,’ said Emmeline. ‘I’m staying. And I’m not going to be alone, I’ll be living with Fanny.’ She flourished her hand. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘I know,’ said Hannah. Her eyes met mine, she pulled them away quickly. ‘I’ll leave you to it, shall I?’

Hannah was almost at the door when Emmeline said, ‘I haven’t seen Robbie lately.’

Hannah stiffened, but she didn’t look back. ‘No?’ she said. ‘No, now that you mention it, he hasn’t been around in days.’

‘Deborah said he’d gone away.’

‘Did she?’ said Hannah, back rigid. ‘Where did she say he’d gone?’

‘She didn’t.’ Emmeline frowned. ‘She said you might know.’

‘How should I know?’ said Hannah, turning. She avoided my eyes.

‘That’s what I said,’ said Emmeline. ‘Why would Robbie tell you and not me?’ She shook her head. ‘Why would he go at all, and without saying anything?’

Hannah lifted her shoulders. Dropped them again. ‘He was like that, don’t you think? Unpredictable. Unreliable.’

‘Well, I’m going to find him,’ said Emmeline determinedly. ‘I have before.’

‘Oh no, Emmeline,’ said Hannah quickly. ‘Don’t go looking for him.’

‘But I have to,’ said Emmeline.

‘Why?’

Emmeline smiled at her, rolled her big blue eyes. ‘Because I love him, of course.’

‘Oh, Emme, no,’ said Hannah softly. ‘No you don’t.’

‘I do,’ said Emmeline. ‘I always have. Ever since he first came to Riverton and he bandaged my arm for me.’

‘You were eleven,’ said Hannah.

‘Of course, and it was just a childhood crush then,’ said Emmeline. ‘But it was the beginning. I’ve compared every man I’ve met since to Robbie.’

Hannah pressed her lips together. ‘What about the film-maker? What about Harry Bentley, or the half-dozen other young men you’ve been in love with this year alone? You’ve been engaged to at least two of them.’

‘Robbie’s different,’ said Emmeline.

‘And how does he feel?’ Hannah said, not daring to look at Emmeline. ‘Has he ever given you reason to believe he might feel the same way?’

‘I’m sure he does,’ Emmeline said. ‘He’s never once missed an opportunity to come out with me. I know it’s not because he likes my friends. He’s made no secret of the fact he thinks they’re a bunch of spoiled and idle kids.’ She nodded resolutely. ‘I’m sure he does and I’m going to find him.’

‘Don’t,’ said Hannah with a firmness that took Emmeline by surprise. ‘He’s not for you.’

‘How do you know?’ said Emmeline. ‘You barely know him.’

‘I know his type,’ said Hannah. ‘Blame the war. It took perfectly normal young men and returned them changed. Broken.’ I thought of Alfred, the night on the stairs at Riverton when his ghosts had come for him, then I forced him from my mind.

‘I don’t care,’ said Emmeline stubbornly. ‘I think it’s romantic. I should like to look after him. Fix him.’

‘Men like Robbie are dangerous,’ said Hannah. ‘They can’t be fixed. They are as they are.’ She exhaled, frustrated. ‘You have so many other suitors. Can’t you find it in your heart to love one of them?’

Emmeline shook her head stubbornly.

‘I know you can. Promise you’ll try?’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘You must.’

Emmeline looked away from Hannah then, and I saw something new in her expression: something harder, more immovable. ‘It’s really no concern of yours, Hannah,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m twenty. I don’t need you to help make my decisions. You were married at my age and Lord knows you didn’t consult anyone on that decision.’

‘It’s hardly the same thing-’

‘I don’t need a big sister watching over everything I do. Not any more.’ Emmeline exhaled and turned again to face Hannah. Her voice was lighter. ‘Let’s agree, shall we, that from this point on we’ll let one another live the life she chooses? What do you say?’

Hannah, it turned out, had little to say. She nodded agreement, and closed the door behind her.

On the eve of our departure for Riverton, I packed the last of Hannah’s dresses. She was sitting by the windowsill, watching over the park as the last of the day’s light faded. The streetlights were just coming on when she turned and said to me, ‘Have you ever been in love, Grace?’

Her question startled me. Its timing. ‘I… I couldn’t say, ma’am.’ I laid her fox-tail coat along the base of the steamer trunk.

‘Oh, you’d know if you had,’ she said.

I avoided her gaze. Tried to sound indifferent; hoped that it would cause her to change the subject. ‘In that case, I’d have to say no, ma’am.’

‘Probably a lucky thing.’ She turned back to the window. ‘True love, it’s like an illness.’

‘An illness, ma’am?’ I certainly felt sick enough then and there.

‘I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things.’

‘And now, ma’am?’

‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘Now I do. It’s an illness. You catch it when you least expect. There’s no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it’s fatal.’

I let my eyes close briefly. My balance faltered. ‘Not fatal, ma’am, surely?’

‘No. You’re probably right, Grace. I exaggerate.’ She turned to me and smiled. ‘You see? I’m a case in point. I’m behaving like the heroine in some awful penny novelette.’ She was quiet then but must have continued to think along the same lines, for after a while she tilted her head quizzically and said, ‘You know, Grace, I always thought that you and Alfred…?’

‘Oh no, ma’am,’ I said quickly. Too quickly. ‘Alfred and I were never more than friends.’ The hot sting of a thousand needles in my skin.

‘Really?’ She pondered this. ‘I wonder what made me think otherwise.’

‘I couldn’t say, ma’am.’

She watched me, fumbling with her silks, and she smiled. ‘I’ve embarrassed you.’

‘Not at all, ma’am,’ I said. ‘It’s just that…’ I clutched at conversation. ‘I was just thinking of a recent letter I received. News from Riverton. It’s a coincidence you should ask after Alfred just now.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ I couldn’t seem to stop. ‘Do you remember Miss Starling that used to work for your father?’

Hannah frowned. ‘That thin lady, with the mousy hair? Used to tiptoe about the house with a typing machine?’

‘Yes, ma’am, that’s her.’ I was outside myself then, watching and listening as somehow I gave every appearance of carelessness. ‘She and Alfred were married, ma’am. Just this last month past. They’re living in Ipswich now, running his mechanical business.’ I closed her trunk and nodded, kept my gaze low. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, ma’am, I believe Mr Boyle needs me downstairs.’

I closed the door behind me and I was alone. I clamped my hand to my mouth. Clenched my eyes shut. Felt my shoulders shaking, moist clicks in my throat.

My skeleton seemed to lose some crucial integrity and I crumpled. Seeped, shoulder first, into the wall, longing to disappear into the floors, the wall, the air.

There I remained. Immovable. I had vague visions of Teddy or Deborah finding me in the darkened hallway when time came for them to make their way to bed. Mr Boyle being called to arrange for my removal. And I felt nothing. No shame. No duty. For what did it matter? What did any of it matter any more?

Then somewhere downstairs, a crash. Plates and cutlery.

A breath caught in my throat. My eyes opened. The present rushed upon me, refilled me.

Of course it mattered. Hannah mattered. Now more than ever she needed me. The move back to Riverton, being without Robbie.

I exhaled shakily. Levelled my shoulders and swallowed. Forced my throat to relax.

Little use would I be if I gave myself over to self-indulgence, became so weighed down with self-pity I was distracted from my duties.

I pushed away from the wall, smoothed my skirt and straightened my cuffs. Wiped my eyes.

I was a lady’s maid. Not a petty housemaid. I was relied upon. Could not be given to episodes of such imprudent abandon.

I exhaled again. Deeply. Purposefully. Nodded to myself and walked large, definite steps down the hall.

And as I climbed the stairs to my room, I forced closed the horrid door in my mind through which I’d briefly glimpsed the husband, the hearth, the children I might have had.

RIVERTON REVISITED

Ursula has come as promised. We are driving the winding lane toward the village of Saffron Green. Any moment now we’ll take a bend and there’ll be tourist signs welcoming us to Riverton. I glance at Ursula’s face while she drives; she smiles at me then returns her attention to the road. Any misgivings she might have had about the wisdom of our excursion, she has pushed aside. Sylvia wasn’t pleased, but she agreed not to tell Matron, to stall Ruth if needs be. I suspect I am giving off the stench of last opportunities. It is too late to worry about preserving me for the future.

The metal gates are open. Ursula turns the car into the driveway and we weave our way toward the house. It is dark, the tunnel of trees is strangely still, strangely silent, as it always was, listening for something. We turn the last corner and the house is upon us. Just as it has been so many times before: my first day at Riverton, fourteen years old and green as a gardener’s thumb; the day of the recital, rushing from Mother’s, full of expectation; the evening of Alfred’s proposal; the morning in 1924 when we returned to Riverton from London. Today is a homecoming, of sorts.

There is a concrete car-parking space nowadays, after the driveway and before the Eros and Psyche fountain. Ursula winds her window down as we approach the toll booth. She has a word with the guard who waves us through. On account of my obvious frailty, she is given special dispensation to drop me off before finding a parking space. She drives around the turning circle-bitumen now, rather than gravel-and stops the car at the entrance. There is a little iron garden seat by the portico, and Ursula leads me to it, settles me, then returns to the car park.

I am sitting there, thinking of Mr Hamilton, wondering how many times he answered the Riverton front door before his heart attack in the spring of 1934, when it happens.

‘Good to see you back, young Grace.’

I squint up into the watery sun (or is it my eyes that are watery?) and there he stands, on the top step.

‘Mr Hamilton,’ I say. I am hallucinating, of course, but it seems churlish to ignore an old comrade, no matter he’s been dead sixty years.

‘We’ve been wondering when we might see you again. Mrs Townsend and I.’

‘You have?’ Mrs Townsend passed soon after him: a stroke in her sleep.

‘Oh, aye. We always like it when the young ones return. We get a little lonely, just the two of us. No family to serve. Just a lot of hammering and knocking and dirty boots.’ He shook his head and cast his eyes upward to take in the arch of the portico. ‘Aye, the old place has seen a lot of changes. Just wait till you see what they’ve done with my pantry.’ He smiles at me, down his long burnished nose. ‘And tell me, Grace,’ he said gently. ‘How are things with you?’

‘I’m tired,’ I say. ‘I’m tired, Mr Hamilton.’

‘I know you are, lassie,’ he says. ‘Not long now.’

‘What’s that?’ Ursula is by my side, pushing her parking ticket into her purse. ‘Are you tired?’ Concern knots her brow. ‘I’ll see about hiring a wheelchair. They’ve put lifts in as part of the renovation.’

I tell her perhaps that might be best, and then I sneak a glance back at Mr Hamilton. He is no longer there.

Inside the entrance hall a sprightly woman dressed like the wife of a 1940s country squire welcomes us and announces that our entrance fee includes the tour she’s about to start. Before we can demur, we are herded into a group with six other unwitting visitors: a couple of daytrippers from London, a schoolboy researching a local history assignment, and a family of four American tourists-the adults and son in matching running shoes and T-shirts that read I escaped the tower!, the teenage daughter tall, pale and dour, dressed all in black. Our tour leader-Beryl, she says, tweaking her name badge to verify the fact-has lived in the village of Saffron Green all her life and we are to ask her anything we’d like to know.

The tour starts downstairs. The hub of any English country house, says Beryl with a practised smile and a wink. Ursula and I take a lift installed where the coat cupboard used to be. By the time we reach the bottom, the group is already crowded around Mrs Townsend’s kitchen table, laughing as Beryl reads through a comic list of traditional English dishes of the nineteenth century.

The servants’ hall looks much as it did, yet it is unaccountably different. It has lost its friendly, frowsty ambience. It’s the lighting, I realise. Electricity has swept away the flickering, whispering spaces. We were without for a long time at Riverton. Even when Teddy had the place wired in the mid-twenties it was nothing like this. I miss the dimness, though I suppose it wouldn’t do to keep it lit as was, even for historical effect. There are laws about that sort of thing now. Health and safety. Public liability. No one wants to be sued because a daytripper accidentally misses his step on a poorly lit staircase.

‘Follow me,’ chirps Beryl. ‘We’ll take the servants’ exit to the back terrace, but don’t worry, I won’t make you put on uniforms!’

We are on the lawn above Lady Ashbury’s rose garden. It looks, surprisingly, much as it always did, though ramps have been constructed between the tiers. They have a team of gardeners now, says Beryl, employed continuously on grounds maintenance. There’s a lot to look after: the gardens themselves, the lawns, the fountains, other various estate buildings. The summer house.

The summer house was one of the first changes Teddy made when Riverton fell to him in 1923. It was a crime, he said, that such a beautiful lake, the jewel in the estate, had been allowed to fall to disuse. He envisaged boating parties in the summertime, planetary-observation parties in the evenings. He had plans drawn immediately and by the time we came from London in April 1924 it was almost complete, the only hold-ups a tardy shipment of Italian limestone and some spring rain.

It was raining the morning we arrived. Relentless, drenching rain that started as we drove through the outer villages of Essex and didn’t let up. The fens were full, the forest soggy, and when the motor cars crawled up the muddy Riverton driveway, the house wasn’t there. Not at first glance. So shrouded was it by low-lying fog that it only appeared gradually, as if an apparition. When we drew close enough, I wiped the palm of my hand against the misty motor-car window and peered through the cloud toward the etched glass of the nursery window. I had an almost overwhelming sense that somewhere inside that great dark house Grace of five years ago was busy preparing the dining room, dressing Hannah and Emmeline, receiving Myra’s latest wisdom. Here and there, then and now, simultaneously, at the capricious whim of time.

The first motor car stopped and Mr Hamilton materialised from the front portico, black umbrella in hand, to help Hannah and Deborah alight. The second car continued on to the rear entrance and stopped. I attached my raincoat to my hat, nodded to the driver and made a run for the servants’ hall entrance.

Perhaps it was the fault of the rain. Perhaps if it had been a clear day, if the sky had glittered blue and sunlight had smiled through the windows, the house’s decline would not have been so shocking. For though Mr Hamilton and his staff had gone to their best efforts-had been cleaning around the clock, said Myra-the house was in poor condition. It was a tall order to make up so promptly for years of Mr Frederick’s determined neglect.

It was Hannah who was most affected. Naturally enough, I suppose. Seeing it in its demoralised state brought home to her the loneliness of Pa’s last days. Brought back, too, the old guilt: her failure to mend the bridges between them.

‘To think he lived like this,’ she said to me that first evening as I readied her for bed. ‘All the while I was in London and I didn’t know. Oh, Emmeline made jokes every so often, but I never for a minute imagined…’ She shook her head. ‘To think, Grace. To think of poor old Pa being so unhappy.’ She was silent for a moment then said, ‘It goes to show, doesn’t it, what happens when a person isn’t true to their own nature?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said, unaware that we were no longer speaking of Pa.

Teddy, though surprised by the extent of Riverton’s decline, was not perturbed. He had planned a full renovation anyway.

‘Just as well to bring the old place into the twentieth century, eh?’ he said, smiling benevolently at Hannah.

They’d been back a week by then. The rain had cleared and he was standing at one end of her bedroom, surveying the sunlit room. Hannah and I were sitting on the chaise longue, sorting through her dresses.

‘As you like,’ was her noncommittal answer.

Teddy looked at her, his face a sketch of bewilderment: wasn’t it exciting to restore her ancestral home? Didn’t all women relish the opportunity to put their feminine stamp on a place? ‘I’ll spare no expense,’ he said.

Hannah looked up and smiled patiently, as one might at an overeager shop assistant. ‘Whatever you think best.’

Teddy, I’m sure, would have liked it if she’d shared Deborah’s enthusiasm for meeting with designers, debating the merits of one fabric over another, if she’d delighted in obtaining an exact replica of the King’s own hall stand. But he didn’t make a fuss. He was used, by now, to misunderstanding his wife. He just shook his head, stroked hers, and dropped the subject.

Hannah, while not interested in the renovations, displayed a surprising elevation of mood when we returned to Riverton. I had expected that leaving London, leaving Robbie, would devastate her, had prepared myself for the worst. But I was wrong. If anything, she was of lighter spirit than usual. While the renovations were taking place she spent much time outside. She took to strolling over the estate, rambling all the way to the back meadows and returning for lunch with grass seeds on her skirt and a glow in her cheeks.

She had given Robbie up, I thought. Love it might have been, but she had decided she would live without. You will think me naïve, and I was. I had only my own experience to guide me. I had given Alfred up, had returned to Riverton and adjusted to his absence, and I supposed Hannah had done the same. That she too had decided her duty lay elsewhere.

One day I went looking for her; Teddy had won the Tory nomination for the seat of Saffron and Deborah had organised a lunch with Lord Gifford. He was due in thirty minutes and Hannah was still on one of her walks. I found her, finally, in the rose garden. She was sitting on the stone stairs beneath the arbour-the same that Alfred sat upon that night, all those years before.

‘Thank goodness, ma’am,’ I said, out of breath as I approached. ‘Lord Gifford will be here any minute and you’re not dressed.’

Hannah smiled over her shoulder at me. ‘I could have sworn I was wearing my green dress.’

‘You know what I mean, ma’am. You’ve yet to dress for lunch.’

‘I know,’ she said. She stretched her arms out to the side and rolled her wrists. ‘It’s just such a beautiful day. It seems a shame to sit inside. I wonder if we might convince Teddy to dine on the terrace?’

‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Mr Luxton would like that. You know how he is with insects.’

She laughed. ‘You’re right, of course. Ah well, it was a thought.’ She stood up, gathered her writing pad and a pen into her arms. On top was an envelope without a stamp.

‘Would you like me to have Mr Hamilton post that for you, ma’am?’

‘No,’ she said, smiling and hugging the writing pad to her chest. ‘No thank you, Grace. I’ll go into town this afternoon and post it myself.’

So you see why I supposed her happy. And she was. She was. But not because she’d given Robbie up. I was wrong there. Certainly not because she’d rediscovered a flame for Teddy. And not because she was back in her family home. No. She was happy for another reason. Hannah had a secret.

Beryl leads us now through the Long Walk. It is a bumpy ride in the wheelchair, but Ursula is careful. When we reach the second kissing gate there is a sign attached. Beryl explains that the bottom of the south garden is closed for renovation. They’re working on the summer house so we won’t be able to look closely today. We can go as far as the Icarus fountain but not beyond. She swings the gate and we begin to file through.

•

The party was Deborah’s idea. It was as well to remind people that, just because they were no longer in London, the Luxtons hadn’t slipped off the social scene. Teddy thought it a splendid proposal. The main renovations were almost complete and it was an excellent opportunity to show them off. Hannah was surprisingly acquiescent. Beyond acquiescent: she took a hand in organising it. Teddy, surprised but pleased, knew better than to ask questions. Deborah, unused to having to share the plan-making, was less impressed.

‘But surely you don’t want to concern yourself with all the details,’ she said as they sat down to tea one morning.

Hannah smiled. ‘On the contrary. I’ve a great many ideas. What do you think of Chinese lanterns?’

It was at Hannah’s urging that the party turned from an intimate affair for a select few into the huge extravaganza it became. She produced guest lists and suggested they bring a dance floor in for the occasion. The midsummer’s night party had once been a Riverton institution, she told Teddy; why shouldn’t they resurrect it?

Teddy was delighted. Seeing his wife and sister work together was his fondest dream. He gave Hannah free rein and she took it. She had her reasons. I know that now. It is much easier to go unnoticed in a large energetic crowd than a small gathering.

Ursula wheels me slowly around the Icarus fountain. It has been cleaned. The blue tiles glimmer and the marble gleams where it never did before, but Icarus and his three nymphs are still frozen in their scene of watery rescue. I blink and the two ghostly figures in white petticoats lounging on the tiled rim disappear.

‘I’m the king of the world!’ The young American boy has clambered onto the harpist nymph’s head and is standing with his arms outstretched.

Beryl sweeps the scowl from her face and smiles with determined pleasantness. ‘Come down from there now, lad. The fountain was built to be looked at, not clambered over.’ She waggles her finger toward the little path that leads to the lake. ‘Take a walk along there. You can’t go beyond the barricade, but you’ll be able to glimpse our famous lake.’

The youngster jumps from the fountain rim and lands with a thud at my feet. He shoots me a glance of diffident scorn then scuttles on his way. His parents and sister follow him down the path.

It is too narrow for the wheelchair but I need to see. It is the same path I followed that night. I ask Ursula to help me walk. She looks at me uncertainly.

‘Are you sure?’

I nod.

She wheels me to the entrance of the path and I lean against her as she hoists me up. We stand a moment as Ursula catches our balance, then we go slowly. Little stones beneath my shoes, long grass reeds brushing along my skirt, dragonflies hovering, then dipping in the warm air.

We pause as the American family files back toward the fountain. They are lamenting loudly the restorative process.

‘Everything in Europe’s under scaffold,’ says the mother.

‘They should give us a refund,’ says the father.

‘The only reason I came on this trip was to see where he died,’ says the girl in the heavy black boots.

Ursula smiles wryly at me and we proceed. The sound of hammers becomes louder as we go. Finally, after numerous pauses, we reach the barricade where the path terminates. It’s in the same place as the other barricade, all those years ago.

I hold onto it and look toward the lake. There it is, rippling lightly in the distance. The summer house is hidden, but the sounds of construction are clear. It reminds me of 1924, when the builders rushed to have it finished for the party. Vainly, as it turned out. The limestone had been held up by a shipping dispute in Calais and, much to Teddy’s chagrin, did not arrive in time. He had hoped to have his new telescope in place so party guests could come down to the lake and take a look at the night sky. Hannah was the one to reassure him.

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Better to wait until it’s finished. You can have another party then. A proper observation party.’ You notice she said ‘you’, not ‘we’. Already she had ceased to see herself in Teddy’s future.

‘I suppose,’ said Teddy, sounding rather like a petulant boy.

‘It’s probably for the best,’ said Hannah. She inclined her head to the side. ‘In fact, it might not be a bad idea to put barricades along the path to the lake. Stop people from wandering too close. It could be dangerous.’

Teddy frowned. ‘Dangerous?’

‘You know builders,’ said Hannah. ‘They’re just as likely to have left some other part unfinished. Best to wait until you’ve had time to give it a proper going-over.’

Oh yes, love can make a person devious. She convinced Teddy easily enough. Raised the spectre of law suits and ghastly publicity. Teddy had Mr Boyle arrange for signs and barricades to keep the guests from the lake. He’d have another party in August for his birthday. A luncheon party in the summer house, with boats, and games, and striped canvas tents. Just like the painting by that French fellow, he said; what was his name?

He never did have the party, of course. By August 1924 the last thing on anyone’s mind was throwing a party. Except perhaps for Emmeline, but hers was a particular kind of social exuberance then, a reaction to the horror and the blood, rather than despite it.

The blood, so much blood. Who’d have imagined there could be so much? I can see the spot on the lake’s bank from here. Where they stood. Where he stood just before…

My head lightens, my legs fail. Ursula’s arms grip mine, keep me steady.

‘Are you all right?’ she says, dark eyes worried. ‘You’re very pale.’

My thoughts are swimming. I’m hot. Dizzy.

‘Would you like to go inside for a bit?’

I nod.

Ursula leads me back along the path, settles me in the wheelchair and explains to Beryl that she needs to take me to the house.

It’s the heat, says Beryl knowingly, her mother’s just the same. Such unseasonable warmth. She leans toward me and smiles so that her eyes disappear. ‘That’s it, isn’t it, darl, the heat.’

I nod. There is no use arguing. Where to begin explaining, it is not the heat that oppresses me but the weight of ancient guilt.

•

Ursula takes me to the drawing room. We don’t go all the way inside, we can’t. They have strung a red cord right the way across, four feet from the doorway. I suppose they can’t have everyone wandering through, dragging their dirty fingers along the back of the lounge. Ursula parks me against the wall and sits beside on a bench installed for observers.

Tourists straggle by, pointing at the elaborate table setting, oohing and ah-ing at the tiger skin on the back of the chesterfield. None of them seems to notice that the room is full of ghosts.

It was in the drawing room that the police held their interviews. Poor Teddy. He was so bewildered. ‘He was a poet,’ he told the police, clutching a blanket around his shoulders, still in his dinner suit. ‘He knew my wife when they were younger. Nice enough fellow: artistic but harmless. He went about with my sister-in-law and her group.’

The police interviewed everyone that night. Everyone except Hannah and Emmeline. Teddy made sure of that. It was unfortunate enough they’d witnessed such a thing, he told police officers; they didn’t need to relive it. Such was Teddy’s influence, I suppose; the officers acceded.

It was of little consequence so far as they were concerned. It was very late at night and they were anxious to get back to their wives and their warm beds. They’d heard all they needed to. It was not such an unusual story. Deborah had said it herself, there were young men all over London, all over the world, who found the adjustment back to ordinary life an ill fit after everything they’d seen and done at war. That he was a poet made it all the more predictable. Artistic types were prone to extravagant, emotional behaviour.

Our tour group has found us. Beryl bids us rejoin the party and leads us to the library.

‘One of the few rooms not destroyed by the fire of 1938,’ she says, clip-clipping purposefully down the hall. ‘A blessing, I assure you. The Hartford family owned a priceless collection of antique books. Over nine thousand volumes.’

I can vouch for that.

Our motley group follows Beryl into the room and spreads out. Assorted necks crane to take in the domed glass ceiling and the shelves of books reaching all the way into the loft. Robbie’s Picasso is gone now. In a gallery somewhere, I suppose. Gone are the days when every English house had works of the great masters hanging freely on the walls.

It was here that Hannah spent much of her time after Robbie died: full days curled up in a chair in the silent room. She didn’t read, merely sat. Reliving the recent past. For a time I was the only one she’d see. She spoke obsessively, compulsively, of Robbie, recounting to me the details of their affair. Episode after episode. Each account ending with the same lament.

‘I loved him, you know, Grace,’ she would say. Her voice so soft I almost didn’t hear.

‘I know you did, ma’am.’

‘I just couldn’t…’ She would look at me then, eyes glazed. ‘It just wasn’t quite enough.’

Teddy and Deborah accepted her withdrawal to begin with-it seemed a natural consequence of having seen what she’d seen-but as the weeks passed, her failure to acquire the stiff upper lip that was her nation’s renown grew tiresome.

Everyone had an opinion as to how she should behave, what should be done to restore her spirits. There was a round-table discussion one night, after supper.

‘She needs a new hobby,’ said Deborah, lighting a cigarette. ‘I don’t doubt it was a shock to see a man top himself, but life goes on.’

‘What sort of hobby?’ said Teddy, frowning.

‘I was thinking bridge,’ said Deborah, flicking ash into a dish. ‘A good game of bridge has the ability to take one’s mind off just about anything.’

Estella, who’d stayed on at Riverton to ‘do her bit’, agreed that Hannah needed distraction, but had her own ideas as to what kind: she needed a baby. What woman didn’t? Couldn’t Teddy see what he could do to give her one?

Teddy said he’d do what he could. And, mistaking Hannah’s compliance for consensus, he did.

To Estella’s delight, three months later the doctor declared Hannah pregnant. Far from taking her mind off things, however, she seemed to grow more detached. She told me less and less of her affair with Robbie, and eventually stopped calling me to the library at all. I was disappointed but, more than that, worried: I had hoped confession would free her somehow from her self-imposed exile. That by telling me everything about their liaison, she might find her way back to us. But it was not to be.

On the contrary, she withdrew from me further; she took to dressing herself, looking at me strangely, almost angrily, if I so much as offered assistance. I tried to talk her round, remind her it wasn’t her fault, she couldn’t have saved him, but she only looked at me, a bemused expression on her face. As if she didn’t know of what I spoke or, worse, doubted my reasons for saying such a thing.

She drifted about the house those last months like a ghost. Myra said it was like having Mr Frederick back again. Teddy became even more concerned. After all, it wasn’t just Hannah at risk now. His baby, his son, the Luxton heir deserved better. He called in doctor after doctor, all of whom, fresh from the war, diagnosed shock and said it was only natural after what she’d seen.

One of them took Teddy aside after his consultation and said, ‘Shock all right. Very interesting case; completely out of touch with her environment.’

‘How do we fix it?’ said Teddy.

The doctor shook his head ruefully. ‘What I wouldn’t pay to know.’

‘Money’s no object,’ said Teddy.

The doctor frowned. ‘There was another witness?’

‘My wife’s sister,’ said Teddy.

‘Sister,’ said the doctor, noting it on his pad. ‘Good. Close are they?’

‘Very,’ said Teddy.

The doctor pointed his finger at Teddy. ‘Get her here. Talking: that’s the way with this sort of hysteria. Wife needs to spend time with someone else who experienced the same shock.’

Teddy took the doctor’s advice and repeated invitations were sent to Emmeline, but she wouldn’t come. She couldn’t. She was too busy.

‘I don’t understand,’ Teddy said to Deborah after dinner one night, ‘How can she ignore her own sister? After all Hannah’s done for her?’

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said Deborah, raising her eyebrows. ‘From what I hear, it’s as well she stays away. They say she’s become quite vulgar. Last to leave every party. Getting about with all the wrong sorts.’

It was true: Emmeline had thrown herself back into her whirlwind social life in London. She became the life of the party, starred in a number of films-love films, horror films; she found her niche playing the misused femme fatale.

It was a shame, society types whispered eagerly, that Hannah couldn’t bounce back the same way. Strange that she should take it so much harder than her sister. It was Emmeline, after all, who’d been going around with the fellow.

Emmeline took it hard enough, though. Hers was just a different way of coping. She laughed louder and she drank harder. Rumour had it, the day she drove her car into the tree out at Preston’s Gorge, police found a bottle of brandy open on the seat beside her. Teddy had that hushed up. If there was one thing money could buy back in those days, it was the law. Perhaps it still can; I wouldn’t know.

They didn’t tell Hannah at first. Deborah thought it too risky and Teddy agreed, what with the baby being so close to term. Solicitors were called in to make statements on Teddy and Hannah’s behalf.

Teddy came downstairs the night after the accident. He looked out of place in the drab servants’ hall, like an actor who’d walked onto the wrong stage set. He was so tall he had to duck his head to avoid knocking it on the ceiling beam above the last step.

‘Mr Luxton,’ said Mr Hamilton. ‘We didn’t expect-’ His voice tapered off and he leapt to action, turning to us, clapping silently then raising his hands and motioning as if conducting an orchestra in a very fast piece of music. Somehow we formed a line and stood, hands behind our backs, waiting to see what Teddy would say.

What he said was simple. Emmeline had been involved in an unfortunate motor-car accident that had taken her life. Myra clutched my hand behind my back.

Mrs Townsend shrieked and sank onto her chair, hand across her heart. ‘The poor dear love,’ she said. ‘I’m all atremble.’

‘It’s been a terrible shock for all of us, Mrs Townsend,’ said Teddy, looking from one servant to the next. ‘There is, however, something I have to ask of you.’

‘If I may speak on behalf of the staff,’ said Mr Hamilton, ashen-faced, ‘we’re only too happy to assist in any way we can at this terrible time.’

‘Thank you, Mr Hamilton,’ said Teddy, nodding gravely. ‘As you all know, Mrs Luxton has suffered awfully over the other business at the lake. I believe it would be kindest if we kept this most recent tragedy from her for the time being. It doesn’t do to upset her further. Not while she’s with child. I’m sure you’ll all agree.’

The staff stayed silent as Teddy continued.

‘I’d ask then that you refrain from mentioning Miss Emmeline or the accident. That you make special effort to ensure newspapers are not left lying about where she might see them.’

He paused, glanced at each of us in turn.

‘Do you understand?’

Mr Hamilton blinked to attention then. ‘Ah, yes. Yes, sir.’

‘Good,’ said Teddy. He nodded a few times quickly, realised there was nothing left to say, and left with a grim smile.

After Teddy had disappeared, Mrs Townsend turned, round-eyed, to Mr Hamilton. ‘But… does he mean not to tell Miss Hannah at all?’

‘It would seem that way, Mrs Townsend,’ said Mr Hamilton. ‘For the time being.’

‘But her own sister’s death-’

‘Those were his instructions, Mrs Townsend.’ Mr Hamilton exhaled and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Mr Luxton is Master of this house just as surely as Mr Frederick was before him.’

Mrs Townsend opened her mouth to debate the point but Mr Hamilton cut her off. ‘You know as well as I that the Master’s instructions must be observed.’ He removed his glasses and polished them fiercely. ‘Never matter what we think of them. Or him.’

Later, when Mr Hamilton was upstairs serving supper, Mrs Townsend and Myra approached me in the servants’ hall dining room. I was at the table mending Hannah’s silver dress. Mrs Townsend sat one side, Myra the other. Like two guardsmen arrived to accompany me to the gallows.

With a glance to the stairs, Myra said, ‘You have to tell her.’

Mrs Townsend shook her head. ‘It isn’t right. Her own sister. She should know.’

I wove my needle into the silver thread reel and set my stitching down.

‘You’re her maid,’ said Myra. ‘She’s fond of you. You have to tell her.’

‘I know,’ I said quietly. ‘I will.’

Next morning I found her, as I expected to, in the library. In an armchair on the far side, looking through the huge glass doors toward the churchyard. She was intent on something in the distance and didn’t hear me approach. I came up close and stood quietly beside the matching chair. Early sunlight floated through the glass and bathed her profile, giving her an almost ethereal look.

‘Ma’am?’ I said softly.

Without shifting her gaze, she said, ‘You’ve come to tell me about Emmeline.’

I paused, surprised, wondered how she knew. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘I knew you would. Even though he’s told you not to. I know you well after all this time, Grace.’ Her tone was difficult to read.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am. About Miss Emmeline.’

She nodded slightly, but she didn’t take her eyes from that distant point in the churchyard. I waited for a while, and when it seemed clear she didn’t want company, I asked if there was anything I could bring her. Tea perhaps? A book? She didn’t answer at first, appeared not to have heard. And then, seemingly out of the blue, she said, ‘You can’t read shorthand.’

It was a statement, not a question, so I did not answer.

I found out later what she meant, why she spoke to me then of shorthand. But not for many years. On that morning I was still innocent of the part my deception had played.

She shifted slightly, retracted her long bare legs closer to the chair. Still didn’t meet my eyes. ‘You may go, Grace,’ she said, her voice tinged with a coldness that made my eyes sting.

There was nothing more I could say. I nodded and left, unaware it was the last conversation I would have with her.

•

Beryl brings us to the room that was Hannah’s at the end. I wonder at first whether I’ll be able to continue. But it is different now. It has been repainted and refurnished with a Victorian suite that was not amongst the original furniture at Riverton. It is not the same bed on which Hannah’s baby was born.

Most people thought it was the baby that killed her. Just like Emmeline’s birth had killed their own mother. So sudden, they said, shaking their heads. So sad. But I knew better. It was a convenient excuse. An opportunity. True enough, it wasn’t an easy birth, but she had no will left. What happened on the lake, Robbie’s death and Emmeline’s so soon after, killed her long before the baby got itself stuck in her pelvis.

I had started in the room with her, but as the contractions came harder and faster and the baby began to force its way out, she had surrendered more and more to delusion. Had stared at me, fear and anger in her face, shouted at me to leave, that it was all my fault. It was not uncommon for birthing women to lose their grasp, the doctor explained as he bid me do as she ask, to give themselves over to fantasy.

But I couldn’t leave her, not like that. I retired from her bedside but not from the room. As she lay on the bed and the doctor started to cut, I watched from the door and I saw her face. As she laid back her head, she breathed a sigh that looked an awful lot like relief. Release. She knew that if she didn’t fight it, she could go. It would all be over.

No, it wasn’t a sudden death; she’d been dying for months.

Afterwards, I was broken. Bereft. In an odd way, I had lost myself. That is what happens when you give your life and service to another person. You’re bound to them. Without Hannah, I was without function.

I had no capacity for feeling. Was emptied, just as surely as if someone had slit me open like a dying fish and scooped out everything inside. I performed perfunctory duties, though with Hannah gone there were few enough of those. I stayed a month like that, steering myself from one interchangeable location to another. Until one day I told Teddy I was leaving.

He wanted me to stay; when I refused he begged me to reconsider, for Hannah’s sake if not for his, for her memory. She had been fond of me, didn’t I know? Would want me to be a part of her daughter’s life, of Florence’s life.

But I couldn’t. I had no heart for it. I had no heart. I was blind to Mr Hamilton’s disapproval, Mrs Townsend’s tears. Had little concept of my own future, other than to know for certain it didn’t lie at Riverton.

How indescribably frightening it would have been, leaving Riverton, leaving service, if I’d had any sensation left. Better for me that I hadn’t: fear might have triumphed over grief and tied me forever to the house on the hill. For I knew nothing of life outside service. Was panicked by independence. Wary of going places, doing the simplest things, making my own decisions.

I found a little flat in the Marble Arch, though, and proceeded to live. I took what jobs I could-cleaning, waiting tables, stitching-resisted closeness, left when people started to ask too many questions, wanted more of me than I was able to give. In such occupation, I passed a decade. Waiting, though I didn’t know it, for the next war. And for Marcus, whose birth would do what my own daughter’s could not. Return to me what had been emptied by Hannah’s death.

In the meantime, I thought little of Riverton. Of all I had lost.

Let me rephrase: I refused to think of Riverton. If I found my mind, in a quiet moment of inactivity, roaming the nursery, lingering by the stairs in Lady Ashbury’s rose garden, balancing on the rim of the Icarus fountain, I quickly sought occupation.

But I did wonder about that little baby, Florence. My half-niece, I suppose. She was a pretty little thing. Hannah’s blonde hair but not her eyes. Big, brown eyes, they were. Perhaps they changed as she grew. That can happen. But I suspect they stayed brown, like her father’s. For she was Robbie’s daughter, wasn’t she?

I have given it quite some thought over the years. It is possible, of course, that despite Hannah’s failure to fall pregnant to Teddy all those years, she fell swiftly and unexpectedly in 1924. Stranger things have happened. But at the same time, isn’t it too convenient an explanation? Teddy and Hannah shared a bed infrequently in the latter years of their marriage, but Teddy had been anxious for a child at the beginning. For Hannah not to fall suggests, doesn’t it, that there was a problem with one of them? And as she proved with Florence, Hannah was able to conceive.

Isn’t it more likely then that Florence’s father was not Teddy? That she was conceived on the lake? That after months of being apart, when Hannah and Robbie met that night, in the near-finished summer house, they were unable to resist? The timing, after all, was right. Deborah certainly thought so. She took one look at those big dark eyes and her lips tightened. She knew.

Whether it was she who told Teddy, I don’t know. Perhaps he worked it out for himself. Whatever the case, Florence didn’t stay long at Riverton. Teddy could hardly be expected to keep her: a constant reminder of his cuckolding. The Luxtons all agreed it was best he put the whole sorry affair behind him. Settle down to running Riverton Manor, staging his political comeback.

I heard they sent Florence to America, that Jemima agreed to take her as sister to Gytha. She had always longed for more than one. Hannah would’ve been pleased, I think; would’ve preferred to imagine her daughter growing up a Hartford than a Luxton.

The tour ends and we are delivered to the entrance hall. Despite Beryl’s keen encouragement, Ursula and I bypass the gift shop.

I wait again on the iron seat while Ursula fetches the car. ‘I won’t be long,’ she promises. I tell her not to worry, my memories will keep me company.

‘Come again soon?’ Mr Hamilton says from the doorway.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so, Mr Hamilton.’

He seems to understand, smiles briefly. ‘I’ll tell Mrs Townsend you said goodbye.’

I nod and he disappears, dissolves like watercolour into a dusty streak of sunlight.

Ursula helps me into the car. She has bought a bottle of water from a machine in the ticket booth and opens it for me when I am buckled into my seat. ‘Here you are,’ she says, feeding a straw into the spout and wrapping my hands around its cold sides.

She starts the engine and we drive slowly out of the car park. I am aware, vaguely, as we enter the dark leafy tunnel of the driveway, that it’s the last time I will take this particular journey, but I don’t look back.

We drive in silence for a time, until Ursula says, ‘You know, there’s one thing that’s always niggled me.’

‘Mmm?’

‘The Hartford sisters saw him do it, right?’ She sneaks a sideways glance at me. ‘But what were they doing down by the lake when they should have been up at the party?’

I do not answer and she glances at me again, wondering if perhaps I have not heard.

‘What did you decide?’ I say. ‘What happens in the film?’

‘They see him disappear, follow him to the lake and try to stop him.’ She shrugs. ‘I looked everywhere but I couldn’t find police interviews with either Emmeline or Hannah, so I had to sort of guess. It made the most sense.’

I nod.

‘Besides, the producers thought it more suspenseful than if they stumbled on him accidentally.’

I nod.

‘You can judge for yourself,’ she says. ‘When you see the film.’

I had once thought to attend the film’s premiere, but somehow I know it is beyond me now. Ursula seems to know too.

‘I’ll bring you a copy on video as soon as I can,’ she says.

‘I’d like that.’

She turns the car into the Heathview entrance. ‘Uh-oh,’ she says, eyes widening. She places a hand on mine. ‘Ready to face the music?’

Ruth is standing there, waiting. I expect to see her mouth sucked tight around her disapproval. But it isn’t. She is smiling. Fifty years dissolve and I see her as a girl. Before life had a chance to disappoint her. She is holding something; waving it. It is a letter, I realise. And I know who it is from.

SLIPPING OUT OF TIME

He is here. Marcus has come home. In the past week he’s been to see me every day. Sometimes Ruth comes with him; sometimes it’s just the two of us. We don’t always talk. Often he just sits beside me and holds my hand while I doze. I like him to hold my hand. It is the most companionable of gestures: a comfort from infancy to old age.

I am beginning to die. Nobody has told me, but I see it in their faces. The pleasant, soft expressions, the sad, smiling eyes, the kind whispers and glances that pass between them. And I feel it myself.

A quickening.

I am slipping out of time. The demarcations I’ve observed for a lifetime are suddenly meaningless: seconds, minutes, hours, days. Mere words. All I have are moments.

Marcus brings a photograph. He hands it to me and I know before my eyes focus which one it is. It was a favourite of mine, is a favourite of mine, taken on an archaeological dig many years before. ‘Where did you find this?’ I say.

‘I’ve had it with me,’ he says sheepishly, running a hand through longish sun-lightened hair. ‘All the time I was away. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘I’m glad,’ I say.

‘I wanted a photo of you,’ he says. ‘I always loved this one, when I was a kid. You look so happy.’

‘I was. The very happiest.’ I look at the photo some more, then hand it back. He positions it on my bedside table so that I can see it whenever I care to look.

I wake from dozing and Marcus is by the window, looking out over the heath. At first I think Ruth is in the room with us, but she is not. The dark figure by the curtains is someone else. Something else. She appeared a little while ago. Has been here ever since. No one else can see her. She is waiting for me, I know, and I am almost ready. Early this morning I taped the last for Marcus. It is all done now and all said. The promise I made is broken and he will learn my secret.

Marcus senses I have woken. He turns. Smiles. His glorious broad smile. ‘Grace.’ He comes away from the window, stands by me. ‘Would you like something? A glass of water?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

I watch him: his lean shape housed in loose clothing. Jeans and a T-shirt, the uniform of today’s youth. In his face I see the boy he was, the child who followed me from room to room, asking questions, demanding stories: about the places I’d been, the artefacts I’d unearthed, the big old house on the hill and the children with their game. I see the young man who delighted me when he said he wanted to be a writer. Asked me to read some of his work, tell him what I thought. I see the grown man, caught in grief’s web, helpless. Unwilling to be helped.

I shift slightly, clear my throat. There is something I need to ask him. ‘Marcus,’ I say.

He looks sideways from beneath a lock of brown hair. ‘Grace?’

I study his eyes, hoping, I suppose, for the truth. ‘How are you?’

To his credit he doesn’t dismiss me. He sits, props me against my pillows, smooths my hair and hands me a cup of water. ‘I think I’m going to be all right,’ he says.

There is so much I would like to say, to reassure him. But I am too weak. Too tired. I can only nod my head.

•

Ursula comes. She kisses my cheek. I want to open my eyes; to thank her for caring about the Hartfords, for remembering them, but I can’t. Marcus looks after things. I hear him, accepting the video tape, thanking her, assuring her I’ll be glad to see it. That I’ve spoken highly of her. He asks if the premiere went well.

‘It was great,’ she says. ‘I was nervous as anything but it went off without a hitch. Even had a good review or two.’

‘I saw that,’ says Marcus. ‘A very good write-up in the Guardian. “Haunting”, didn’t they say, “subtly beautiful”? Congratulations.’

‘Thank you,’ says Ursula, and I can picture her shy, pleased smile.

‘Grace was sorry she couldn’t make it.’

‘I know,’ says Ursula. ‘So was I. I’d have loved her to be there.’ Her voice brightens. ‘My own grandmother came though. All the way from America.’

‘Wow,’ says Marcus. ‘That’s dedication.’

‘Poetic actually,’ says Ursula. ‘She’s the one who got me interested in the story. She’s a distant relation to the Hartford sisters. A second cousin, I think. She was born in England but her mother moved them to the States when she was little, after her father died in the First World War.’

‘That’s great she was able to come and see what she inspired.’

‘Couldn’t have stopped her if I’d wanted to,’ says Ursula, laughing. ‘Grandma Florence has never taken no for an answer.’

Ursula comes near. I sense her. She picks up the photograph on my bedside table. ‘I haven’t seen this before. Doesn’t Grace look beautiful? Who’s this with her?’

Marcus smiles; I hear it in his voice. ‘That’s Alfred.’

There is a pause.

‘My grandmother is not a conventional woman,’ says Marcus, fondness in his voice. ‘Much to my mother’s disapproval, at the grand age of sixty-five she took a lover. Evidently she’d known him years before. He tracked her down.’

‘A romantic,’ says Ursula.

‘Yeah,’ says Marcus. ‘Alfred was great. They didn’t marry but they were together almost twenty years. Grace used to say she’d let him go once before and she didn’t believe in making the same mistake twice.’

‘That sounds like Grace,’ says Ursula.

‘Alfred used to tease her: he’d say it was just as well she was an archaeologist. The older he got, the more interested in him she became.’

Ursula laughs. ‘What happened to him?’

‘He went in his sleep,’ Marcus says. ‘Nine years ago. That’s when Grace moved in here.’

A warm breeze drifts in from the open window, across my closed eyelids. It is afternoon, I think.

Marcus is here. He’s been here some time. I can hear him, near me, scratching away with pen and paper. Sighing every so often. Standing up, walking to the window, the bathroom, the door.

It is later. Ruth comes. She is at my side, strokes my face, kisses my forehead. I can smell the floral of her Coty powder. She sits.

‘Are you writing something?’ she says to Marcus. She is tentative. Her voice strained.

Be generous, Marcus; she’s trying.

‘I’m not sure,’ he says. There’s a pause. ‘I’m thinking about it.’

I can hear them, breathing. Say something, one of you.

‘Inspector Adams?’

‘No,’ says Marcus quickly. ‘I’m considering doing something new.’

‘Oh?’

‘Grace sent me some tapes.’

‘Tapes?’

‘Like letters but recorded.’

‘She didn’t tell me,’ Ruth says quietly. ‘What does she say?’

‘All sorts of things.’

‘Does she… does she mention me?’

‘Sometimes. She talks about what she does each day, but also about the past. She’s lived an amazing life, hasn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth.

‘A whole century, from domestic service to a doctorate in archaeology. I’d like to write about her.’ A pause. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Why would I mind?’ says Ruth. ‘Of course I don’t. Why would I mind?’

‘I don’t know…’ I can hear Marcus shrug. ‘Just had a feeling you might.’

‘I’d like to read it,’ says Ruth firmly. ‘You should write it.’

‘It’ll be a change,’ says Marcus. ‘Something different.’

‘Not a mystery.’

Marcus laughs. ‘No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history.’

Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.

I am awake. Marcus is beside me in the chair, scribbling on a notepad. He looks up.

‘Hello there, Grace,’ he says, and he smiles. He puts his notepad aside. ‘I’m glad you’re awake. I wanted to thank you.’

Thank me? I raise my eyebrows.

‘For the tapes.’ He is holding my hand now. ‘The stories you sent. I’d forgotten how much I liked stories. Reading them, listening to them. Writing them. Since Rebecca… It was such a shock… I just couldn’t…’ He takes a deep breath, gives me a little smile. Begins again. ‘I’d forgotten how much I needed stories.’

Gladness-or is it hope?-hums warmly beneath my ribs. I want to encourage him. Make him understand that time is the master of perspective. A dispassionate master, breathtakingly efficient. I must make some attempt for he says softly, ‘Don’t speak.’ He lifts a hand, strokes my forehead gently with his thumb. ‘Just rest now, Grace.’

I close my eyes. How long do I lie like that? Do I sleep?

When I open my eyes again I say, ‘There is one more.’ My voice is hoarse from lack of use. ‘One more tape.’ I point to the chest of drawers and he goes to look.

He finds the cassette stacked by the photographs. ‘This one?’

I nod.

‘Where’s your cassette player?’ he says.

‘No,’ I say quickly. ‘Not now. For later.’

He is momentarily surprised.

‘For after,’ I say.

He doesn’t say, after what? He doesn’t need to. He tucks it in his shirt pocket and pats it. Smiles at me and comes to stroke my cheek.

‘Thank you, Grace,’ he says softly. ‘What am I going to do without you?’

‘You’re going to be all right,’ I say.

‘Do you promise?’

I don’t make promises, not any more. But I use all my energy to reach up and clutch his hand.

It is dusk: I can tell by the purple light. Ruth is at my bedroom door, a bag under her arm, eyes wide with concern. ‘I’m not too late, am I?’

Marcus gets up and takes her bag, gives her a hug. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not too late.’

We’re going to watch the film, Ursula’s film, all of us together. A family event. Ruth and Marcus have organised it and seeing them together, making plans, I’m not about to interfere.

Ruth comes to kiss me, arranges a chair so she can sit by my bed.

Another knock at the door. Ursula.

Another kiss on my cheek.

‘You made it.’ This is Marcus, pleased.

‘I wouldn’t miss it,’ says Ursula. ‘Thanks for asking me.’

She sits on my other side.

‘I’ll just drop the blinds,’ says Marcus. ‘Ready?’

The light dims. Marcus drags a chair to sit beside Ursula. Whispers something that makes her laugh. I am enveloped by a welcome sense of conclusion.

The music starts and the film begins. Ruth reaches over and squeezes my hand. We are watching a car, from a great distance, as it winds along a country road. A man and a woman side by side in the front seat, smoking. The woman wears sequins and a feather boa. They reach the Riverton driveway and the car winds its way to the top, and there it is. The house. Huge and cold. She has captured perfectly its bizarre and ruinous glory. A footman comes to greet them and we are in the servants’ hall. I can tell by the floor. The noises. Champagne flutes. Nervous excitement. Up the stairs. The door opens. Across the hall, out onto the terrace.

It is uncanny. The party scene. Hannah’s Chinese lanterns flickering in the dark. The jazz band, clarinet squealing. Happy people dancing the shimmy-shake…

There is a terrible bang and I am awake. It is the film, the gunshot. I have fallen asleep and missed the ultimate moment. Never mind. I know how this film ends: on the lake of Riverton Manor, witnessed by two beautiful sisters, Robbie Hunter, war veteran and poet, kills himself.

And I know, of course, that’s not what really happened.

THE END

Finally. After ninety-nine years my end has come for me. The secrets that have been restless in my head, growing louder and louder, pushing against my skull, anxious for release, are quiet now. The final thread that tethered me has released and the north wind blows me away. I am fading at last to nothing.

I can hear them still. Am vaguely aware that they are here. Ruth is holding my hand. Marcus is lying across the end of the bed. Warm upon my feet.

There is someone else in the window. She steps forward, finally, out of the shadow, and I am looking into the most beautiful face. It is Mother, and it is Hannah, and yet it is not.

She smiles. Holds out her hand. All mercy and forgiveness and peace.

I take it.

I am by the window. I see myself on the bed: old and frail and white. My fingers rubbing together, my lips moving but finding no words.

My chest rises and falls.

A rattle.

Release.

Ruth’s breath catches in her throat.

Marcus looks up.

But I am already gone.

I turn around and I don’t look back.

My end has come for me. And I do not mind at all.

THE TAPE

Testing. One. Two. Three. Tape for Marcus. Number four. This is the last tape I will make. I am almost at the end and there is no point going beyond.

Twenty-second of June, 1924. Summer solstice and the day of the Riverton midsummer’s night party.

Downstairs, the kitchen was abuzz. Mrs Townsend had the stove fire raging and was barking orders at three village women hired to help. She smoothed her apron over her generous middle and surveyed her minions as they basted hundreds of tiny quiche.

‘A party,’ she said, beaming at me as I hurried by. ‘And it’s about time.’ She swiped with her wrist at a strand of hair already escaped from her topknot. ‘Lord Frederick-rest that poor man’s soul-wasn’t one for parties, and he had his reasons. But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists.’

‘Is it true,’ said the skinniest of the village women, ‘Prince Edward is coming?’

‘Everyone that’s anyone will be here,’ said Mrs Townsend, plucking pointedly a hair off a quiche. ‘Those that live in this house are known to the very best.’

By ten o’clock Dudley had trimmed and pressed the lawn, and the decorators had arrived. Mr Hamilton positioned himself mid-terrace, arms swinging like an orchestra conductor.

‘No, no, Mr Brown,’ he said, waving to the left. ‘The dance floor needs to be assembled on the west side. There’s a cool fog blows up from the lake of an evening and no protection on the east.’ He stood back, watching, then huffed. ‘No, no, no. Not there. That’s for the ice sculpture. I made that quite clear to your other man.’

The other man, perched atop a stepladder stringing Chinese lanterns from the rose arbour to the house, was in no position to defend himself.

I spent the morning receiving those guests who’d be staying the weekend, couldn’t help catching their excitement. Jemima, on holiday from America, arrived early with her new husband and baby Gytha in tow. Life in the United States agreed with her: her skin was brown and her body plump. Lady Clementine and Fanny came together from London, the former glumly resigned to the prospect that an outdoor party in June would almost certainly bring on arthritis.

Emmeline arrived after luncheon with a large group of friends and caused quite a stir. They’d driven in convoy from London and tooted their horns all the way up the driveway before turning circles around Eros and Psyche. On one of the car bonnets was perched a woman dressed in bright pink chiffon. Her yellow scarf drifted behind her neck. Myra, en route to the kitchen with the luncheon trays, stood, horrified, when she realised it was Emmeline.

There was precious little time, however, to be wasted tut-tutting about the decline of the nation’s youth. The ice sculpture had come from Ipswich, the florists from Saffron, and Lady Clementine was insisting on high tea in the morning room, for old time’s sake.

Late afternoon the band arrived, and Myra showed them through the servants’ hall onto the terrace.

‘Negroes!’ said Mrs Townsend, eyes wide with fearful excitement. ‘At Riverton Manor. Lady Ashbury will be turning in her grave.’

‘Which Lady Ashbury?’ said Mr Hamilton, inspecting the hired wait staff.

‘All of them, I dare say,’ said Mrs Townsend, eyes wide.

Finally, afternoon tilted on its axis and began its slide toward evening. The air cooled and thickened, and the lanterns began to glow, green and red and yellow against the dusk.

I found Hannah at the burgundy-room window. She was kneeling on the lounge peering down toward the south lawn, watching the party preparations, or so I thought.

‘Time to get dressed, ma’am.’

She startled. Exhaled tensely. She’d been like that all day: jumpy as a kitten. Turning her hand first to this task, then to that, never leaving any more complete than she had found it.

‘Just a minute, Grace.’ She lingered a moment, the setting sun catching the side of her face, spilling red light across her cheek. ‘I don’t think I ever noticed what a pretty view it is,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think it’s pretty?’

‘I do, ma’am.’

‘I wonder that I never noticed before.’

In her room, I set her hair in curlers, an undertaking more easily said than done. She refused to stay still long enough for me to pin them tightly, and I wasted a good deal of time unwinding and starting again.

With the curlers in place, or good enough, I helped her dress. Silver silk, shoestring straps falling into a low-cut V at the back. It hugged her figure, terminating an inch below her pale knees.

While she pulled at the hem, straightening it, I fetched her shoes. The latest from Paris: a gift from Teddy. Silver satin with fine ribbon straps. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not those. I’ll wear the black.’

‘But ma’am, these are your favourites.’

‘The black are more comfortable,’ she said, leaning forward to pull her stockings on.

‘But with your dress, it’s a shame-’

‘I said black, for God’s sake; don’t make me say it again, Grace.’

I drew breath. Returned the silver and found the black.

Hannah apologised immediately. ‘I’m nervous. I shouldn’t take it out on you. I’m sorry.’

‘That’s all right, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Natural to be excited.’

I unrolled the curlers and her hair sat in blonde waves around her shoulders. I parted it on the side and brushed it across her forehead, catching the hair with a diamond clasp.

Hannah leaned forward to attach pearl drop earrings, winced then cursed as she caught her fingertip in the clip.

‘You’re rushing, ma’am,’ I said gently. ‘You must go carefully with those.’

She handed them to me. ‘I’m all thumbs today.’

I was draping ropes of pale pearls around her neck when the evening’s first car arrived, crunching the gravel on the driveway below. I straightened the pearls so they fell between her shoulderblades, rested in the small of her back.

‘There now,’ I said. ‘You’re ready.’

‘I hope so, Grace.’ She raised her eyebrows, scanned her reflection. ‘Hope there’s nothing I’ve overlooked.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so, ma’am.’

She used her fingertips to brush rapidly the edges of her brows, stroking them into line. She straightened one of her pearl strands, lowered it a little, raised it again, exhaled noisily.

Suddenly, the squeal of a clarinet.

Hannah gasped, clapped a hand to her chest. ‘My!’

‘Must be exciting, ma’am,’ I said cautiously. ‘All your plans finally coming to fruition.’

Her eyes met mine sharply. She seemed as if about to speak, yet she didn’t. She pressed her red-stained lips together. ‘I have something for you, Grace. A gift.’

I was perplexed. ‘It’s not my birthday, ma’am.’

She smiled, quickly pulled open the small drawer of her dressing table. She turned back to me, fingers closed. She held it by the chain high above my hand, let it collapse into my palm.

‘But, ma’am,’ I said. ‘It’s your locket.’

‘Was. Was my locket. Now it’s yours.’

I couldn’t return it fast enough. Unexpected gifts made me nervous. ‘Oh no, ma’am. No thank you.’

She pushed my hand away firmly. ‘I insist. To say thank you for all you’ve done for me.’

Did I detect the note of finality even then?

‘I only do my duty, ma’am,’ I said quickly.

‘Take the locket, Grace,’ she said. ‘Please.’

Before I could argue further, Teddy was at the door. Tall and slick in his black suit; comb marks channelling his oiled hair, nerves furrowing his broad brow.

I closed my hand around the locket.

‘Ready?’ he said to Hannah, fretting with his moustache ends. ‘That friend of Deborah’s is downstairs, Cecil what’s-his-name, the photographer. He wants to take family shots before too many guests arrive.’ He knocked the doorframe twice with his open palm and continued down the hall saying, ‘Where on earth is Emmeline?’

Hannah smoothed her dress over her waist. I noticed her hands were shaking. She smiled anxiously. ‘Wish me luck.’

‘Good luck, ma’am.’

She surprised me then, coming to me, kissing my cheek. ‘And good luck to you, Grace.’

She squeezed my hands and hurried after Teddy, leaving me holding the locket.

I watched for a while from the upstairs window. Gentlemen and ladies-in green, yellow, pink-arriving on the terrace, sweeping down the stone stairs onto the lawn. Jazz music floating on the air; Chinese lanterns flickering in the breeze; Mr Hamilton’s hired waiters balancing huge silver trays of sparkling champagne flutes on raised hands, weaving through the growing crowds; Emmeline, shimmering in pink, leading a laughing fellow to the dance floor to perform the shimmy-shake.

I turned the locket over and over in my hands, glanced at it every so often. Did I notice then the faint rattle from within? Or was I too preoccupied, wondering at Hannah’s nerves? I hadn’t seen her that way for a long time, not since the early days in London, after she saw the spiritualist.

‘There you are.’ Myra was at the door, cheeks flushed, out of breath. ‘One of Mrs Townsend’s women has collapsed with exhaustion and there’s no one to dust the strudels.’

It was midnight before I finally climbed the stairs to bed. The party was still raging on the terrace below, but Mrs Townsend had sent me away as soon as she could spare me. It seemed Hannah’s twitchiness was contagious, and a busy kitchen was no place for fumbling.

I climbed the stairs slowly, feet throbbing: years as a lady’s maid had caused them to soften. An evening in the kitchen was all it took to blister. Mrs Townsend had given me a little parcel of bicarbonate soda and I intended to soak them in a warm bath.

There was no escaping the music that night: it permeated the air, impregnating the stone walls of the house. It had grown more raucous as the evening wore on, matching the spirits of the party-goers. I could feel the frenzied drumbeat in my stomach even as I reached the attic. To this day, jazz turns my blood to ice.

At the top landing I considered going straight to set the bath running but decided to fetch my nightgown and toiletries first.

A pool of the day’s hot air hit my face when I opened my bedroom door. I pulled the electric switch and hobbled to the window, swinging the sash open.

I stood for a moment, savouring the burst of cool, breathing its faint aroma of cigarette smoke and perfume. I exhaled slowly. Time for a long, warm bath, then the sleep of the dead. I collected my soap from the dressing table beside me then limped toward the bed for my nightgown.

It was then I saw the letters. Two of them. Propped against my pillow.

One addressed to me; one with Emmeline’s name on front.

The handwriting was Hannah’s.

I had a presentiment then. A rare moment of unconscious clarity.

I knew instantly that the answer to her odd behaviour lay within.

I dropped my nightgown and picked up the envelope marked Grace. With trembling fingers I tore it open. I smoothed the sheet of paper. My eyes scanned and my heart sank.

It was written in shorthand.

I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the piece of paper, as if, through sheer force of will, its message would become clear.

Its indecipherability only made me more certain its contents were important.

I picked up the second envelope. Addressed to Emmeline. Fingered its rim.

I deliberated only a second. What choice did I have?

So help me God, I opened it.

I was running: sore feet forgotten, blood pulsing, heartbeat in my head, breath catching in time with the music, in time with the music, down the stairs, through the house, onto the terrace.

I stood, chest heaving, scanning for Teddy. But he was lost. Somewhere amid the jagged shadows and the blurred faces.

There was no time. I would have to go alone.

I plunged into the crowd, skimming faces-red lips, painted eyes, wide laughing mouths. I dodged cigarettes and champagnes, beneath the coloured lanterns, around the dripping ice sculpture toward the dance floor. Elbows, knees, shoes, wrists whirled by. Colour. Movement. Blood pulsing in my head. Breath catching in my throat.

Then, Emmeline. Atop the stone staircase. Cocktail in hand, head tipped back to laugh, strand of pearls draped from her neck to lasso that of a male companion. His coat draped about her shoulders.

Two would have more chance than one.

I stopped. Tried to catch my breath.

She righted herself, regarded me from beneath heavy lids. ‘Why, Grace,’ she said with careful annunciation, ‘is that the prettiest party dress you could find?’ She threw her head back with laughter as she slipped on the ‘p’ sounds.

‘I must speak with you, miss…’

Her companion whispered something; she smacked his nose playfully.

I tried to breathe. ‘… a matter of urgency…’

‘I’m intrigued.’

‘… please…’ I said. ‘… In private…’

She sighed dramatically, removed her pearls from the fellow’s neck, squeezed his cheeks and pouted. ‘Don’t go far now, Harry darling.’

She tripped on her heel, squealed, then giggled, stumbling the rest of the way down the stairs. ‘Tell me all about it, Gracie,’ she slurred as we reached the bottom.

‘It’s Hannah, miss… she’s going to do something… something dreadful, at the lake…’

‘No!’ said Emmeline, leaning so close I could smell respired gin. ‘She’s not going to take a midnight swim, is she? How s-s-scandalous!’

‘… I believe she’s going to take her life, miss, that is, I know it’s what she intends…’

Her smile slipped, eyes widened. ‘Huh?’

‘… I found a note, miss.’ I handed it to her.

She swallowed, swayed, her voice leapt an octave. ‘But… Have you… Teddy-?’

‘No time, miss.’

I took her wrist and dragged her into the Long Walk.

Hedges had grown to meet overhead and it was pitch black. We ran, stumbled, kept our hands to the side, brushing leaves to find the way. With each turn the party sounds grew more dreamlike. I remember thinking this was how Alice must’ve felt, falling down the rabbit hole.

We were in the Egeskov Garden when Emmeline’s heel snagged and she tumbled.

I almost tripped over her, stopped, tried to help her up.

She swept my hand aside, clambered to her feet and continued running.

There was a noise then in the garden and it seemed that one of the sculptures was moving. It giggled, groaned: not a sculpture at all but a pair of amorous escapees. They ignored us and we ignored them.

The second kissing gate was ajar and we hurried into the fountain clearing. The full moon was high and Icarus and his nymphs glowed ghostly in the white light. Without the hedges, the band’s music and the whooping of the party were loud again. Strangely nearer.

With aid of moonlight we went faster along the small path toward the lake. We reached the barricade, the sign forbidding entrance, and finally, the point where path met lake.

We both stopped in the shelter of the path’s nook, breathing heavily, and surveyed the scene before us. The lake glistened silently beneath the moon. The summer house, the rocky bank, were bathed in silvery light.

Emmeline inhaled sharply.

I followed her gaze.

On the pebbly bank were Hannah’s black shoes. The same I’d helped her into hours before.

Emmeline gasped, stumbled toward them. Beneath the moon she was very pale, her thin figure dwarfed by the large man’s jacket she wore.

A noise from the summer house. A door opening.

Emmeline and I both looked up.

A person. Hannah. Alive.

Emmeline gulped. ‘Hannah,’ she called, her voice a hoarse blend of alcohol and panic, echoing off the lake.

Hannah stopped stiff, hesitated; with a glance to the summer house she turned to face Emmeline. ‘What are you doing here?’ she called, voice tense.

‘Saving you?’ said Emmeline, beginning to laugh wildly. Relief, of course.

‘Go back,’ said Hannah quickly. ‘You must go back.’

‘And leave you here to drown yourself?’

‘I’m not going to drown myself,’ said Hannah. She glanced again at the summer house.

‘Then what are you doing? Airing your shoes?’ Emmeline held them aloft before dropping them again to her side. ‘I’ve seen your letter.’

‘I didn’t mean it. The letter was a… a joke.’ Hannah swallowed. ‘A game.’

‘A game?’

‘You weren’t meant to see it until later.’ Hannah’s voice grew surer. ‘I had an entertainment planned. For tomorrow. For fun.’

‘Like a treasure hunt?’

‘Sort of.’

My breath caught in my throat. The note was not in earnest. It was part of an elaborate game. And the one addressed to me? Had Hannah intended me to help? Did that explain her nervous behaviour? It wasn’t the party, but the game she wanted to go well?

‘That’s what I’m doing now,’ said Hannah. ‘Hiding clues.’

Emmeline stood, blinking. Her body jerked as she hiccoughed. ‘A game,’ she said slowly.

‘Yes.’

Emmeline started to laugh hoarsely, dropped the shoes onto the ground. ‘Why didn’t you say so? I adore games! How clever of you, darling.’

‘Go back to the party,’ said Hannah. ‘And don’t tell anyone you saw me.’

Emmeline twisted an imaginary button on her lips. She turned on her heel and tripped her way over the stones toward the path. She scowled at me as she got close to my hiding spot. Her makeup had smudged.

‘I’m sorry, miss,’ I whispered. ‘I thought it was real.’

‘You’re just lucky you didn’t ruin everything.’ She eased herself onto a large rock, settled the jacket around her. ‘As it is I’ve a swollen ankle and I’ll miss more of the party while I rest. I’d better not miss the fireworks.’

‘I’ll wait with you. Help you back.’

‘I should think so,’ said Emmeline.

We sat for a minute, the party music reeling on in the distance, interspersed occasionally with a whoop of excited revelry. Emmeline rubbed her ankle, pressed it onto the ground every so often, transferring her weight.

Early morning fog had started to gather in the fens, was shifting out toward the lake. There was another hot day coming, but the night was cool. The fog kept it so.

Emmeline shivered, held open one side of her companion’s coat, rifled through the large inside pocket. In the moonlight, something glistened, black and shiny. Strapped to the coat’s lining. I inhaled: it was a gun.

Emmeline sensed my reaction, turned to me, wide-eyed. ‘Don’t tell me: first hand gun you’ve ever seen. You are a babe in the wood, Grace.’ She pulled it from the coat, turned it over in her hands, held it out to me. ‘Here. Want to hold it?’

I shook my head as she laughed, wishing I had never found the letters. Wishing, for once, that Hannah hadn’t included me.

‘Probably best,’ Emmeline said, hiccoughing. ‘Guns and parties. Not a good mix.’

She slipped the gun back into her pocket, continued to fossick, locating finally a silver flask. She unscrewed the lid and tossed her head back, drank for a long time.

‘Darling Harry,’ she said, smacking her lips together. ‘Prepared for every event.’ She took another swig and tucked the flask back into the coat. ‘Come on then. I’ve had my pain relief.’

I helped her up, my head bent over as she leaned on my shoulders. ‘That should do it,’ she said. ‘If you’ll just…’

I waited. ‘Ma’am?’

She gasped and I lifted my head, followed her gaze back toward the lake. Hannah was at the summer house and she wasn’t alone. There was a man with her, cigarette on his bottom lip. Carrying a small suitcase.

Emmeline recognised him before I did.

‘Robbie,’ she said, forgetting her ankle. ‘My God. It’s Robbie.’

Emmeline limped clumsily onto the lake bank; I stayed behind in the shadows. ‘Robbie!’ she called, waving her hand. ‘Robbie, over here.’

Hannah and Robbie froze. Looked at one another.

‘What are you doing here?’ Emmeline said excitedly. ‘And why on earth have you come the back way?’

Robbie drew on his cigarette, fumbled with the filter as he exhaled.

‘Come on up to the party,’ Emmeline said. ‘I’ll find you a drink.’

Robbie glanced across the lake into the distance. I followed his gaze, noticed something metallic shining on the other side. A motorbike, I realised, nestled where the lake met the outer meadows.

‘I know what’s happening,’ Emmeline said suddenly. ‘You’ve been helping Hannah with her game.’

Hannah stepped forward into the moonlight. ‘Emme-’

‘Come on,’ said Emmeline quickly. ‘Let’s all go back to the house and find Robbie a room. Find some place for your suitcase.’

‘Robbie’s not going to the house,’ said Hannah.

‘Why, of course he is. He’s not going to stay down here all night, surely,’ said Emmeline with a silvery laugh. ‘It might be June but it’s rather cold, darlings.’

Hannah glanced at Robbie and something passed between them.

Emmeline saw it too. In that moment, as the moon shone pale on her face, I watched as excitement slid to confusion, and confusion arrived horribly at realisation. The months in London, Robbie’s early arrivals at number seventeen, the way she had been used.

‘There is no game, is there?’ she said softly.

‘No.’

‘The letter?’

‘A mistake,’ Hannah said.

‘Why’d you write it?’ said Emmeline.

‘I didn’t want you to wonder,’ said Hannah. ‘Where I’d gone.’ She glanced at Robbie. He nodded slightly. ‘Where we’d gone.’

Emmeline was silent.

‘Come on,’ said Robbie cagily, picking up the suitcase and starting for the lake. ‘It’s getting late.’

‘Please understand, Emme,’ said Hannah. ‘It’s like you said, each of us letting the other live the life they want.’ She hesitated: Robbie was motioning her to hurry. She started walking backwards. ‘I can’t explain now, there’s no time. I’ll write: tell you where we are. You can visit.’ She turned, and with one last glance at Emmeline, followed Robbie around the foggy edge of the lake.

Emmeline stayed where she was, hands dug into the coat’s pockets. She swayed, shuddered as a goose walked over her grave.

And then.

‘No.’ Emmeline’s voice was so quiet I could barely hear. ‘No.’ She yelled out, ‘Stop.’

Hannah turned, Robbie tugged her hand, tried to keep her with him. She said something, started back.

‘I won’t let you go,’ said Emmeline.

Hannah was close now. Her voice was low, firm. ‘You must.’

Emmeline’s hand moved in her coat pocket. She gulped. ‘I won’t.’

She withdrew her hand. A flash of metal. The gun.

Hannah gasped.

Robbie started running toward Hannah.

My pulse pumped against my skull.

‘I won’t let you take him,’ said Emmeline, hand wobbling.

Hannah’s chest moved up and down. Pale in the moonlight. ‘Don’t be stupid, put it away.’

‘I’m not stupid.’

‘Put it away.’

‘No.’

‘You don’t want to use it.’

‘I do.’

‘Which of us are you going to shoot?’ said Hannah.

Robbie was by Hannah now and Emmeline looked from one to the other, lips trembling.

‘You’re not going to shoot either,’ said Hannah. ‘Are you?’

Emmeline’s face contorted as she started to cry. ‘No.’

‘Then put the gun down.’

‘No.’

I gasped as Emmeline lifted a shaky hand, pointing the gun at her own head.

‘Emmeline!’ said Hannah.

Emmeline was sobbing now. Great hulking sobs.

‘Give it to me,’ said Hannah. ‘We’ll talk more. Sort it out.’

‘How?’ Emmeline’s voice was thick with tears. ‘Will you give him back to me? Or will you keep him the way you have all of them. Pa, David, Teddy.’

‘It’s not like that,’ said Hannah.

‘It’s my turn,’ said Emmeline.

Suddenly there was a huge bang. A firework exploded. Everyone jumped. A red glow sprayed across their faces. Millions of red specks spilled across the lake surface.

Robbie covered his face with his hands.

Hannah leapt forward, seized the gun from Emmeline’s slackened fingers. Hurried backwards.

Emmeline was running toward her then, face a mess of tears and lipstick. ‘Give it to me. Give it to me or I’ll scream. Don’t you leave. I’ll tell everyone. I’ll tell everyone you’ve gone and Teddy will find you and-’

Bang! A green firework exploded.

‘-Teddy won’t let you get away, he’ll make sure you stay, and you’ll never see Robbie again and-’

Bang! Silver.

Hannah scrambled onto a higher part of the lake bank. Emmeline followed, crying. Fireworks exploded.

Music from the party reverberated off the trees, the lake, the summer-house walls.

Robbie’s shoulders were hunched, hands over his ears. Eyes wide, face pale.

I didn’t hear him at first but I could see his lips. He was pointing at Emmeline, yelling something at Hannah.

Bang! Red.

Robbie flinched. Face contorted with panic. Continued to yell.

Hannah hesitated, looked at him uncertainly. She had heard what he was saying. Something in her bearing collapsed.

The fireworks stopped; burning embers rained from the sky.

And then I heard him too.

‘Shoot her!’ he was yelling. ‘Shoot her!’

My blood curdled.

Emmeline froze in her tracks, gulped. ‘Hannah?’ Voice like a frightened little girl. ‘Hannah?’

‘Shoot her,’ he said again. ‘She’ll ruin everything.’ He was running toward Hannah.

Hannah was staring. Uncomprehending.

‘Shoot her!’ He was frantic.

Her hands were shaking. ‘I can’t,’ she said finally.

‘Then give it to me.’ He was coming closer now, faster. ‘I will.’

And he would. I knew it. Desperation, determination were loud on his face.

Emmeline jolted. Realised. Started running toward Hannah.

‘I can’t,’ said Hannah.

Robbie grabbed for the gun; Hannah pulled her arm away, fell backwards, scrambled further onto the escarpment.

‘Do it!’ said Robbie. ‘Or I will.’

Hannah reached the highest point. Robbie and Emmeline were converging on her. There was nowhere further to run. She looked between them.

And time stood still.

Two points of a triangle, untethered by a third, had pulled further and further apart. The elastic, stretched taut, had reached its limit.

I held my breath, but the elastic did not break.

In that instant, it retracted.

Two points came crashing back together, a collision of loyalty and blood and ruin.

Hannah pointed the gun and she pulled the trigger.

The aftermath. For, oh, there is always an aftermath. People forget that. Blood, lots of it. Over their dresses, across their faces, in their hair.

The gun dropped. Hit the stones with a crack and lay immobile.

Hannah stood wavering on the escarpment.

Robbie’s body lay on the ground below. Where his head had been, a mess of bone and brain and blood.

I was frozen, my heart beating in my ears, skin hot and cold at the same time. Suddenly, a surge of vomit.

Emmeline stood frozen, eyes tightly closed. She wasn’t crying, not any more. She was making a horrible noise, one I’ve never forgotten. She was crawing as she inhaled. The air catching in her throat on every breath.

Moments passed, I don’t know how many, and a way off, behind me, I heard voices. Laughter.

‘It’s just down here a little further,’ came the voice on the breeze. ‘You wait until you see, Lord Gifford. The stairs aren’t finished-damn French and their shipping hold-ups-but the rest, I think you’ll agree, is pretty impressive.’

I wiped my mouth, ran from my hiding spot onto the lake edge.

‘Teddy’s coming,’ I said to no one in particular. I was in shock of course. We were all in shock. ‘Teddy’s coming.’

‘You’re too late,’ Hannah said, swiping frantically at her face, her neck, her hair. ‘You’re too late.’

‘Teddy’s coming, ma’am.’ I shivered.

Emmeline’s eyes snapped open. A flash of silver blue shadow in the moonlight. She shuddered, righted herself, indicated Hannah’s suitcase. ‘Take it to the house,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Go the long way.’

I hesitated.

‘Run.’

I nodded, took the bag and ran toward the woods. I couldn’t think clearly. I stopped when I was hidden and turned back. My teeth were chattering.

Teddy and Lord Gifford had reached path’s end and stepped out onto the lake bank.

‘Dear God,’ said Teddy, stopping abruptly. ‘What on earth-?’

‘Teddy darling,’ said Emmeline. ‘Thank God.’ She turned jerkily to face Teddy and her voice levelled. ‘Mr Hunter has shot himself.’

The Letter

Tonight I die and my life begins.

I tell you, and only you. You have been with me a long time on this adventure, and I want you to know that in the days that follow, when they are combing the lake for a body they will never find, I am safe.

We go to Germany first, from there I cannot say. Finally, I will see Nefertiti’s head mask!

I have given you a second note addressed to Emmeline. It is a suicide note for a suicide that will never take place. She must find it tomorrow. Not before. Look after her, Grace. She will be all right. She has so many friends.

There is one final favour I must ask of you. It is of the utmost importance. Whatever happens, keep Emmeline from the lake tonight. Robbie and I leave from there. I cannot risk her finding out. She won’t understand. Not yet.

I will contact her later. When it is safe.

And now to the last. Perhaps you’ve already discovered the locket I gave you is not empty? Concealed inside is a key, a secret key to a safe box in Drummonds on Charing Cross. The box is in your name, Grace, and everything inside it is for you. I know how you feel about gifts, but please, take it and don’t look back. Am I too presumptuous in saying it is your ticket to a new life?

Goodbye, Grace. I wish you a long life full with adventure and love. Wish me the same…

I know how well you are with secrets.