Turning left at a crooked signpost, we follow a small trail into the woods, dirt tracks criss-crossing each other until the way back is impossible to discern.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ I ask nervously, swiping a low-hanging branch from my face. The last time I entered this forest my mind never made it back.
‘We’re following these,’ she says, tugging at a fragment of yellow material nailed to a tree. It’s similar to the red one I found when I stumbled upon Blackheath this morning, the memory only serving to unsettle me further.
‘They’re markers,’ she says. ‘The groundskeepers use them to navigate in the woods. Don’t worry, I’ll not lead you too far astray.’
The words are barely out of her mouth when we enter a small clearing with a stone well at its centre. The wooden shelter has collapsed, the iron wheel that once raised the bucket now left to rust in the mud, almost buried by fallen leaves. Evelyn claps in delight, laying an affectionate hand on the mossy stone. She’s clearly hoping I haven’t noticed the slip of paper tucked between the cracks, or the way her fingers are now covering it. Friendship compels me to play along and I hastily avert my attention when she looks back towards me. She must have some suitor in the house and I’m ashamed to say I’m jealous of this secret correspondence and the person on the other side of it.
‘This is it,’ she says with a theatrical sweep of her arm. ‘Madeline will be passing through this clearing on her way back to the house. Shouldn’t be too long now. She’s due back at the house by three to help finish setting up the ballroom.’
‘Where are we?’ I ask, looking around.
‘It’s a wishing well,’ she says, leaning over the edge to peer into the blackness. ‘Michael and I used to come here when we children. We’d make our wishes with pebbles.’
‘And what sorts of things did young Evelyn Hardcastle wish for?’ I ask.
She wrinkles her brow, the question flummoxing her.
‘You know, for the life of me, I can’t remember,’ she says. ‘What does a child who has everything want?’
More, just like everybody else.
‘I doubt I could have told you even when I did have my memories,’ I say, smiling.
Dusting the grime from her hands, Evelyn looks at me quizzically. I can see the curiosity burning inside her, the joy at encountering something unknown and unexpected in a place where everything is familiar. I’m out here because I fascinate her, I realise with a flash of disappointment.
‘Have you thought about what you’ll do if your memories don’t return?’ she asks, softening the question with the gentleness of her tone.
Now it’s my turn to be flummoxed.
Since my initial confusion passed, I’ve tried not to dwell upon my condition. If anything, the loss of my memories has proven a frustration rather than a tragedy, my inability to recall Anna being one of the few moments when it’s seemed anything more than an inconvenience. Thus far in the excavation of Sebastian Bell I’ve unearthed two friends, an annotated Bible and a locked trunk. Precious little return for forty years on this earth. I don’t have a wife weeping for our lost time together, or a child worrying that the father she loved might not return. At this distance, Sebastian Bell’s life seems an easy one to lose and a difficult one to mourn.
A branch snaps somewhere in the forest.
‘Footman,’ says Evelyn, my blood immediately running cold as I recall the Plague Doctor’s warning.
‘What did you say?’ I ask, frantically searching the forest.
‘That noise, it’s a footman,’ she says. ‘They’re collecting wood. Shameful, isn’t it? We don’t have enough servants to stock all the fireplaces, so our guests are having to send their own footmen to do it.’
‘They? How many are there?’
‘One for every family visiting, and there’s more coming,’ she says. ‘I’d say there’s already seven or eight in the house.’
‘Eight?’ I say in a strangled voice.
‘My dear Sebastian, are you quite all right?’ says Evelyn, catching my alarm.
Under different circumstances I would welcome this concern, this affection, but here and now her scrutiny only embarrasses me. How can I explain that a strange chap in a plague doctor costume warned me to keep an eye out for a footman – a name which means nothing to me, and yet fills me with a crippling fear every time I hear it?
‘I’m sorry, Evie,’ I say, shaking my head ruefully. ‘There’s more I need to tell you, but not here, and not quite yet.’
Unable to hold her questioning stare, I look around the clearing for a distraction. Three trails intersect before striking off into the forest, one of them cutting a straight path through the trees towards water.
‘Is that—’
‘A lake,’ says Evelyn, looking past me. ‘The lake, I suppose you’d say. That’s where my brother was murdered by Charlie Carver.’
A shiver of silence divides us.
‘I’m sorry, Evie,’ I say at last, embarrassed by the poverty of the sentiment.
‘You’ll think me awful, but it happened so long ago it barely seems real,’ she says. ‘I can’t even remember Thomas’s face.’
‘Michael shared a similar sentiment,’ I say.
‘That’s not surprising, he was five years younger than me when it happened.’ She’s hugging herself, her tone distant. ‘I was supposed to be looking after Thomas that morning, but I wanted to go riding and he was always pestering me, so I arranged a treasure hunt for the children and left him behind. If I hadn’t been so selfish, he’d never have been at the lake in the first place, and Carver wouldn’t have got his filthy hands on him. You can’t imagine what that thought does to a child. I didn’t sleep, barely ate. I couldn’t feel anything that wasn’t anger or guilt. I was monstrous to anybody who tried to console me.’
‘What changed?’
‘Michael’ – she smiles wistfully – ‘I was vile to him, positively horrid, but he stayed by my side, no matter what I said. He saw I was sad and he wanted to make me feel better. I don’t even think he knew what was happening, not really. He was just being nice, but he kept me from drifting away completely.’