And I thought of my mother, who was like sunlight on the surface of my memories, bright and warm but shifting. I remembered being with her one day at the edge of the river that ran behind our house in London. I had dropped a scrap of ribbon I’d been treasuring and was forced to watch, helpless, as the current took it away. I had cried, but my mother had explained to me that it was the nature of the river. The river, she said, is the greatest collector of them all; ancient and indiscriminate, carrying its load on a one-way journey towards the depthless sea. The river owes you no kindness, little Bird, she said, so you must be careful.
I realised that I could hear the river in that pitch-black hole, that I could feel its currents lulling me to sleep …
And then I heard something else, a set of footprints heavy on the floorboards above, and a muffled voice: ‘I have the tickets.’ It was Martin, right above the trapdoor. ‘Where have you got to? We just need the Blue and then we can get out of here.’
And then there came another noise, a door slamming downstairs, and I knew that someone else was in the house.
Martin ran towards the interruption.
Raised voices, a scream.
And then a gunshot.
Moments later, more shouting – Edward calling out.
I felt about for a latch to release the trapdoor, but no matter where my fingers traced, I could not find one. I could not sit up; I could not turn around. I began to grow frightened, and the more I panicked, the shorter my breaths became, the harder they stuck against the back of my throat. I tried to answer, but my voice was little more than a whisper.
It was hot, so hot.
Edward called out again; he called for me, his voice sharpened with fear. He called for Lucy. He sounded a long way away.
Rapid footprints overhead, lighter than Martin’s, coming from the hallway upstairs, and then a tremendous thump that made the floorboards rattle.
Mayhem, but not for me.
I was a boat on a gentle tide, the river shifting softly beneath me, and as I closed my eyes another memory came. I was a baby, not yet a year old, lying in a crib in an upstairs room of the little house by the river in Fulham. A warm breeze wafted through the window and brought with it the sounds of morning birds and the secretive smells of lilac and mud. Light was turning circles on the ceiling, in step with the shadows, and I was watching them dance. I reached up to clutch at them, but they slipped through my fingers every time …
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Spring, 1882
‘A nice old place. Been a bit neglected inside, but good bones. Let me just get the door open and you can see for yourself what I mean.’
Lucy did not do herself or Edward’s lawyer the discourtesy of pretending that she had never been inside Birchwood Manor; neither did she volunteer the fact. She said nothing and waited instead for the man to jiggle the key in the lock.
It was a morning in early spring and the air was crisp. Someone had been maintaining the garden – not perfectly, but with sufficient care to stop the tendrils overgrowing the paths. The honeysuckle had a promising layer of buds, and the first jasmine flowers along the wall and around the kitchen window were starting to open. They were late. The laneways of London were already perfumed, but then, as Edward used to say, the city plants were always more precocious than their country cousins.
‘There she goes,’ said Mr Matthews of Holbert, Matthews & Sons as the lock gave way with a deep, gratifying clunk. ‘That’s got it now.’
The door swung open and Lucy felt a roiling sensation deep within the pit of her stomach.
After twenty years of absence, of wondering, of trying not to wonder, the moment was finally upon her.
She had received the letter five months before, only days after news of Edward’s death in Portugal had finally reached them. She had spent the morning at the museum in Bloomsbury, where she had volunteered to help catalogue the donated collections, and had been home only long enough to sit down to a pot of tea when her maid, Jane, brought in the afternoon post. The letter, written on gold-embossed letterhead, had begun by expressing the writer’s deepest sympathies for her loss before moving on to notify her in the second paragraph that she had been named as a beneficiary in the last will and testament of her brother, Edward Julius Radcliffe. In closing, the letter’s writer had invited ‘Miss Radcliffe’ to make an appointment at their offices to discuss the matter further.
Lucy had read the letter again, and again tripped over the words, ‘your brother, Edward Julius Radcliffe’. Your brother. She wondered whether there were many beneficiaries who needed reminding of their relationship to the deceased.
Lucy had not needed a reminder. While it had been many years since she had seen Edward, and then only a very brief and unsatisfactory meeting in a dingy building in Paris, reminders of him were everywhere. His paintings covered almost every wall of the house; Mother insisted that none should be removed, holding out hope to the last that he would return and take up where he’d left off – that perhaps it was not too late for him to ‘make a name for himself’ as Thurston Holmes and Felix Bernard had done. And so the beautiful faces of Adele and Fanny and Lily Millington stared down at Lucy – in repose, in consideration, in character – watching her every move as she tried to get on. Those eyes that followed a person. Lucy was always careful not to meet them.
When she received the letter from Messrs Holbert and Matthews, Lucy had written back by return post to make an appointment to meet at noon that Friday; and, as the first flurry of December snow fell lightly outside the window, she found herself sitting on one side of a large sombre desk in the Mayfair office of Mr Matthews Sr, listening as the old lawyer told her that Birchwood Manor – ‘a farmhouse in a little village near Lechlade-on-Thames’ – was now hers.
When the meeting was at a close, he sent her home to Hampstead with a direction that she must let them know when she wished to visit the house so that he could arrange for his son to accompany her to Berkshire. Lucy, with no intention then of visiting Berkshire, had told him that it was far too much to ask. But it was ‘all part of the service, Miss Radcliffe,’ Mr Matthews had said, indicating a large wooden panel on the wall behind him on which in gold cursive lettering was painted:
HOLBERT, MATTHEWS & SONS
Carrying out the wishes of our
clients in death as indeed in life.
Lucy had left the office, her thoughts in an uncharacteristic swirl.
Birchwood Manor.
What a generous gift; what a double-edged sword.
In the days and weeks that followed, when the nights were at their blackest, Lucy had wondered whether Edward had left her the house because on some level, due perhaps to the deep connection they’d once shared, he had guessed. But no, Lucy was too rational to let such an illogical idea take root. For one thing, there was nothing certain to guess; even Lucy did not know for sure. For another, Edward’s thinking had been clear: he had specified within a handwritten letter attached to his will that the house should be used by Lucy to build a school offering education to girls as bright as she had been. Girls who quested for the type of knowledge that was otherwise denied them.
And just as Edward had possessed a gift in life that enabled him to win people over to his way of thinking, in death, too, his words had influence. For although, in the offices of Holbert, Matthews & Sons, Lucy had promised herself that she would sell the house, that she would never again willingly set foot within its walls, almost immediately upon leaving, Edward’s vision seeped into her thoughts and began weakening her better judgement.
Lucy had walked north through Regent’s Park and her gaze had alit upon one little girl after another, each obedient beside her nanny and longing, surely, to do more, to see more, to know more than she was currently permitted. Lucy had a vision of herself shepherding a clutch of pink-cheeked girls with questing spirits and excited voices, girls who did not fit within the moulds that had been ascribed to them; who longed to learn and improve and grow. Over the coming weeks, she thought of little else: she became obsessed with the idea that everything in her life had led her to this point; that there was nothing more ‘right’ than that she should open a school in the twin-gabled house on the bend of the river.