‘I told her what she needed to know without hurting her more than was necessary.’ Edward’s voice was low, furious.
‘Well, whatever it was you did write, it is little more than a pile of ash in her father’s fireplace now. She refused to accept it. She told me that she needed to see you herself to put things right. Who was I to refuse? You should be thanking me. It’s no secret that your family needs what Fanny offers.’ His lips curled in an unkind smile. ‘Those poor sisters of yours haven’t much hope otherwise.’
‘My sisters are none of your concern.’
‘I wish you’d tell that to Clare. She goes to such great lengths to make herself my concern. I’ve a good mind to give her what she needs. She’s going to spoil my painting with her damn longing otherwise. I’m more than happy to look after Lily, too, once you and Fanny repair your differences.’
The arbour was in the way so Lucy didn’t see the first punch thrown; she only saw Thurston staggering backwards onto the lawn, his hand on his jaw and a half-smile of surprise on his face. ‘Only trying to help, Radcliffe. Fanny might be a bore, but she’ll give you a home and allow you to paint. Never know – with time and a bit of luck, she might even learn to turn a blind eye.’
Lucy lay in bed afterwards ruminating. The fight between Edward and Thurston had not lasted long and when it was over they had gone their separate ways. Lucy had left the window and slid beneath the cool bedcovers. She’d always enjoyed being alone, but now, as she registered a gnawing sensation deep within her stomach, she realised that she felt lonely. More than lonely, she felt uncertain, which was infinitely worse.
The small bronze clock on Lucy’s bedside table said that it was five minutes after midnight, which meant that she had been lying in bed, waiting for sleep to claim her, for over an hour. The house was motionless; the woolly weather outside had calmed. A few night birds had emerged from their hiding spots to perch upon the branches of the moonlit chestnut tree. Lucy could hear them now, clearing their throats. Why, she wondered, did the minutes stretch and the hours become interminable when it was dark?
She sat up.
She was wide awake and there was no point in pretending otherwise.
Her mind was too busy to sleep. She wanted to understand what was going on. Edward had said that Fanny Brown would not be coming to Birchwood Manor, and yet here she was. Everyone else seemed to know enough to be behaving strangely; Thurston and Edward had even had a fight beneath Lucy’s window.
When she was a little girl and her racing thoughts had refused to let her sleep, it was always Edward to whom Lucy had gone. He would tell her a story and answer any question she had; he would calm her down and usually make her laugh. She always felt better when she left him than she had when she’d arrived.
Lucy decided to go and see if he was still awake. It was late, but Edward wouldn’t mind. He was a night owl, often working in his studio until long after midnight, the candles burning down towards the necks of the old green bottles that he collected.
She crept into the hallway but saw no light coming from beneath any of the bedroom doors.
Lucy stood very still, straining to hear.
As she listened, a faint noise came from downstairs. The soft, brief scrape of a chair leg moving against the wooden floor.
Lucy smiled to herself. Of course: he would be in the Mulberry Room with his paints and easel. She might have guessed. Edward always said that painting helped to clear his mind – that without it, his thoughts would drive him mad.
Lucy tiptoed down the stairs, past the platform that masked the secret chamber, all the way to the ground floor. As she had expected, a faint flicker of candlelight emanated from the room at the end of the hallway.
The door stood slightly ajar and Lucy hesitated when she reached it. Edward did not like to be disturbed when he was working, but surely tonight, after what had happened with Thurston, he would be just as glad for company as she. Carefully, Lucy prodded the door, just enough that she could poke her head in to see whether he was there.
She saw his painting first. Lily Millington’s face, stunning, regal, otherworldly, stared back at her, red hair flaming behind. Lily Millington, the Fairy Queen, was luminous.
Lucy noticed then the gem at the hollow of Lily’s neck: the same gem that she’d spied when she sneaked an illicit peek at Edward’s sketchbook, now depicted in colour. Bright iridescent blue. As soon as she saw the startling shade, she knew what it was, for Lucy had heard much about the Radcliffe Blue pendant, even though she’d never seen it in real life. And she wasn’t seeing it in ‘real life’ now, she reminded herself; only Edward’s imagined rendering of it: a talisman at his Fairy Queen’s throat.
There was a noise then from inside the room, and Lucy peeked around the edge of the door; she was about to call out to let Edward know that she was there, when she saw him on the settee and stopped. He was not alone. Edward was above Lily Millington, his damp hair hanging over his face while hers was spread glimmering on the velvet cushion; he wore nothing and neither did she; their skin was candlelit, smooth, and they gazed at one another, the two of them locked within a moment that belonged to them alone.
Lucy managed to withdraw from the room unseen. She fled back along the corridor and up the stairs to her bedroom, where she threw herself onto her bed. She wanted to disappear, to explode like a star into tiny, tiny pieces of dust that burned up and became nothing.
She didn’t understand what she was feeling, why she was hurting this way. Tears fell and she hugged her pillow to her chest.
She was embarrassed, she realised. Not for them, for they had been beautiful. No, Lucy was embarrassed for herself. She knew herself, suddenly, to be a child. An awkward clomping girl who was neither beautiful nor desirable, who was clever, certainly, but otherwise ordinary, who was, she saw clearly now, not the first and most special person to anyone.
The way that Edward had looked at Lily Millington, the way that they had looked at one another – he would never look at Lucy like that, and neither should he, neither would she want him to; and yet at the same time, as she pictured his expression, Lucy felt something inside her that had been carefully constructed and important crumble and fall away, because she understood that the time of being children together, brother and sister, was over, and that they were each standing on different sides of a river now.
Lucy was woken by a tremendous noise and her first thought was that the storm had returned to rage on for another day. When she cracked her eyes open, though, light spilled in and she saw that it was a bright and brilliant morning. She noticed, too, that she was curled up in a tangle of sheets at the foot of her bed.
The noise came again, and Lucy realised it was Thurston shooting at the birds. Events of the previous day came rushing back upon her.
Lucy had a headache. It happened sometimes when she hadn’t slept for long enough, and now she went downstairs to fetch a glass of water. She had hoped to find Emma in the kitchen and to sink down into the woven chair by the cooker, from which she would listen as the maid told mild stories of local happenings and tut-tutted good-naturedly about the louche behaviour of the others. But Emma wasn’t there; the kitchen was empty and showed no sign that anyone had been in it since Lucy and Lily Millington had made cheese sandwiches the night before.
The night before. Lucy shook her head in an attempt to rid herself of the confusion of what she had seen in Edward’s studio. It certainly provided an explanation as to the conversation she’d overheard between Edward and Thurston. So, too, Edward’s preference that Fanny Brown not come to Birchwood Manor for the summer. But what did it all mean? What was going to happen?