Chapter Seventeen

Present Day

Cassie sat up in the attics for ages, going through the old papers and letters and documents that were the detritus of Hartsford family life.

Much of it was deadly dull. There were shopping lists, invoices, menu plans – lists not unlike the ones Delilah’s grandmother had squirreled away.

She decided she would do a little board about Delilah’s grandmother and was hopeful that she would come across some photographs of her. The owners of Hartsford Hall had a long history of capturing everything on camera. There were, she knew, hundreds of photographs much older than the era she was currently interested in, of servants arranged outside the building and footmen standing to attention whilst her Edwardian and Victorian relatives sat stiffly in the carriages, bundled up against the wind as they took the air around the carriage drive.

Cassie knew it was only a matter of time before she found Granny Delilah and that thought renewed her vigour in poking around the paperwork. The written papers were starting to run into one another and she was finding it difficult to maintain her concentration. She’d found nothing about Robert Edwards and nothing about Astrophel, which was irritating her as well.

Cassie sat back in the chair and stretched. She looked at the piles of things around her and she was surprised to see how much she’d actually done. She’d even made notes on the A4 pad Elodie had left on the desk. The next step, she guessed, was putting it all into Elodie’s database. She was a bit nervous about that – she hoped she wouldn’t mess it up.

Sighing, she leaned down again and dragged a battered old vanity case towards her. This had to have something interesting in it, unless it had just been used as a convenient receptacle for receipts and old birthday cards of course. Who knew where the Hartsford inhabitants would have stashed stuff?

Vanity Case, she wrote on the pad and underlined it.

She opened the lid and stared into it. ‘My word!’ It looked, at first, as if the case was full of instruments of torture – then she realised it was a pile of hair curlers from the 1940s. They looked like thumb screws. ‘Bloody hell. And a lot of serious ouch.’ She picked one of the curlers up and turned it around in her fingers. It had a couple of long, reddish-coloured hairs stuck in the metal. ‘Definitely ouch.’ She touched the roots of her own dark hair, imagining that swift stab of pain when you accidentally pull a hair out with a hair grip or a bobble. She sympathised with this red-headed girl – big time. But hold on. Red-headed? Her heart beat a little faster.

She put the curler down and moved the rest of them around until she found the papers that had been stuffed in the box along with the curlers.

Lady Estella Aldrich is invited to a Hunt Ball … she began to read on the first one, a small, stiff card. She was right. Stella! The girl in the awesome photograph. The one with the long red hair – or at least that was the colour it was painted on the picture. Looking at those hairs in the curler, Stella had indeed been a natural redhead.

‘Well I never.’ Cassie’s spirits rose. At least she’d made that little discovery. ‘Come on Stella. I’ve got you now. What else were you up to in your social life?’

She delved deeper and pulled out hairdressers’ bills, scrappy notes about buying tack for horses, invoices from local shops – written very politely and reminding Lady Estella Aldrich she still owed the retailer a couple of pounds for her latest purchases. Cassie giggled. She liked the sound of Stella. She clearly didn’t give a damn. Maybe next week – ask Daddy, if he’s not grumpy, she had scrawled on one receipt from a rather exclusive dress shop with a London address. In Cassie’s head, it was the gown she was wearing in the photograph. Cassie’s own father had never really been around in a grounded, physical sense. He’d been so busy with scholarly works and race horses and losing money to strange investments, that he was usually there in body, but very rarely in spirit. And her mother … well, forget her. That was another issue she had to deal with, but at least sifting through these things was taking her mind off that letter a little.

In amongst Stella’s treasures, there were also stubs of cinema tickets and London theatre programmes, and, bizarrely, a couple of labels from champagne bottles, clearly saved from special occasions. Cassie shivered. The atmosphere in that wine cellar had been alive – and hadn’t one of the bottles been unlabelled? So far Stella’s life was rather superficial and shallow, but it was quite exciting to visualise it, and imagine that she herself had popped the bottles back on that shelf for some reason.

‘Stella, sweetie,’ Cassie addressed the vanity case, ‘you simply have to be the sort of girl who would enjoy a weekend party. I bet you went in that pool at any rate.’ She imagined her jumping off the diving board and maybe doing an elegant swallow dive into the water – quite a contrast to Robert’s dive-bombing. She didn’t know if the pool would have been deep enough to factor in an elegant swallow dive, but she liked the image. She wondered if Stella would have swum with her long red hair streaming out behind her Ophelia-wise, or whether she would have had it tucked into a neat little swimming cap – maybe one with pink rubber flowers all over it.

Cassie pulled out a small, bound notebook which had blue, splodgy ink on the front. ‘List of my jolly good chums. Happy days!’ it declared. Cassie hoped it would let her into more of Stella’s life, but when she opened it, she was disappointed to find there was nothing of any substance.

As the cover had promised, there were lists: names and dates, rooms her chums were assigned to, which Cassie recognised as Hartsford Hall rooms, and various streams of consciousness and nonsense where Stella had randomly jotted things down for other reasons, as if they’d just occurred to her at that particular moment in time. On one page, she’d apparently decided to make a list of perfumes and lipstick colours, underlining the ones she possibly felt needed replacing or maybe the ones she was going to wear to a particular party. Tabu. Je Reviens. Blue Grass. Joy. Wild Peach. Rose Pink. Scarlet.

Cassie thought of her list of foodstuffs for the Country House Party Weekend. Clearly, some things were genetic. Cassie had even made a list of particular dresses she fancied wearing, along with the websites she could obtain them from. More than half a century separated Stella and Cassie Aldrich, but they were dreadfully similar in some respects.

Clipped onto another page, hidden amongst the careful plans, was a loose sheet of different paper. On it was a terrible rhyming couplet, carefully printed out in block capitals. ‘Twas in the month of June and she danced naked ‘neath the moon. My love was gone too soon, and led me to my roon.

‘Yeuch,’ Cassie muttered. ‘I guess that was meant to be “ruin”.’ Stella had evidently felt the same in the “yeuch” stakes. She had scrawled Rubbish! Not amused. See me. You’re in big trouble – this is simply not worthy of the great “Jack Shelley”. Her writing was a little wonky and Cassie wondered if it had been champagne-fuelled.

Who was in trouble and why was a mystery. But she smiled anyway. She flipped back to the lists of names and scanned them. Some of them were only initials – people who were probably regulars on her party circuit: R, V, A, Rosie J, Oscar, M and L, Helen W, Stephen ran one list. It was entitled My Birthday! Hurrah!

The next list was shorter. Next to it, she had written Only Vronnie, Rosie, Mary, Lois, Helen and me. Poor boys! I am lost. So very lost.

The boys had disappeared – perhaps they’d joined up or been called up, but for whatever reason, they weren’t on any subsequent pages.

This was so frustrating. It had all clearly meant something to Stella, but her shorthand had never been designed to be deciphered by anyone else. Cassie closed the book and sighed. She didn’t think she was going to get much more done, and the light outside the attic window and the rumble in her tummy told her it was dinner time at the very least. There didn’t seem to be any noises from the rest of the wing, so she assumed Alex and Elodie were still out and she hoped everything was okay.

And she still hadn’t located their resident war poet – or Mr Grammatically Incorrect either – Astrophel. Because surely Robert Edwards couldn’t be the one responsible for that appalling rhyming couplet? The thought made her smile and, unbidden, a young man’s smiling face came into her head, gazing at her as she stood by the river under an archway of trees. But it was moonlight and starlight, and she didn’t know where it had come from. The image faded almost as quickly as it had come.

Resolutely, Cassie scooped up the vanity case and its associated contents and fastened the catches on it. The case was coming back to her cottage and she was going to reunite Stella with it.

Aidan, as good as his word, chased Petra and Iain out of the office as soon as Petra had a quote for him. Then he made a few phone calls and rattled off some emails, and called in he didn’t know how many favours. But by the end of that day, he had, in transit, enough supplies to make a start at Hartsford Hall a week on Monday if required.

He picked up his phone, intending to send Cassie a quick text, just to let her know when they could start work if Alex was happy with the price. But instead of opening the ‘message’ icon, almost unconsciously, he clicked on the ‘call’ icon.

Before he could register it, the telephone was ringing and it took only a moment before she answered.

‘Hello?’

‘Cassie?’

There was a beat. ‘Aidan?’ Then there was another, warm little, ‘Hello!’

Aidan smiled into the receiver, the expression coming out in the tone of his voice. ‘The very same.’

‘Did you get a quote for me already?’

‘Yes. I came straight back to the office and got it all sorted. Plans and everything.’ He gave her the quote, crossing his fingers and knocking even more off the price Petra had given him. ‘We can start the week after next, on the Tuesday if you’re happy with it. Can we arrange the deliveries for a week on Monday? My site manager will liaise with you for all that.’

‘Oh. Yes, of course. It’s less than Alex told me I had in my budget, so I’d say we’re good to go.’

Aidan smiled again and said something he really hadn’t been intending saying at all. ‘Excellent. I’ll confirm that for a week on Monday, then I can get involved a little further down the line.’

‘Okay.’ There was an answering smile in Cassie’s voice and it felt good. Maybe her involvement with that Tom guy wasn’t serious? One could hope.

‘So, have you been back into the secret room?’ Aidan was reluctant to end the conversation.

‘Yes. I went in and put it all back together, although I think I damaged the floor a bit. And I definitely damaged the chair. Never mind.’

‘Never mind,’ Aidan echoed. ‘Can it be fixed?’

‘I doubt it. I found a letter in the chair cushion though. So it wasn’t all bad.’

‘A letter?’ Aidan leaned forward, his elbows on the desk. This was just the sort of thing he liked to hear about. ‘Who from?’

‘I don’t know.’ Aidan imagined her shrugging. ‘Someone who’d swallowed a punctuation guide I think.’

He laughed. ‘How come?’

‘His name.’ She sighed. ‘It’s a silly one. Something about apostrophes, the idiot.’

‘And what exactly is he called, this idiot man?’

‘Apostro … Apostro … Hang on.’ He could hear her rustling papers around. He wondered if she was in an office or at home. He looked at the clock. It was almost seven in the evening. Probably home then. He was the only one daft enough to be in his office at this time.

‘Ah. Here we are. Astrophel. Similar to Apostrophe. Not quite.’

‘Astrophel? That is a strange one. Why couldn’t he have been an Archie or a Stephen?’

‘I found a Stephen. Stella had a notebook with her friends’ names in. I think all her male friends went off to the war, though.’

‘Well, let’s hope you’re doing them all justice by bringing the Spa back to life again.’

‘Indeed. Is there anything I need to know for Monday week then?’

‘Nope. The site manager will come about nine o’clock and she’ll bring the plans with her. Then you can see what we’ve come up with for you.’

‘All right. And you? Will I see you too? Soon?’

‘You will.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re very welcome.’

‘Bye then.’

‘Bye. I’m looking forward to it.’

There was another smile. From both of them, it seemed.

July 1941

And then it happened.

It was dark. That was all Rob knew. It was dark and cold and he felt a curious mixture of cold and heat. He was shivering, but his skin was burning.

He could remember the noise and he could remember the screaming. The fireball that engulfed the plane and the seemingly endless plummet to the ground.

Then people. People near him, foreign voices everywhere. Then blessed darkness and blessed sleep and unbearable pain swamping him, and Stella’s face imprinted on the back of his eyelids as he slipped away into oblivion …

Stella read the letter seventeen-year old Jack had sent her. She had to read it three times, just to make sure.

Missing in Action. Over France.

The words didn’t change, however many times she read them.

They didn’t change when Leo read them either.

And they didn’t change when her brother gathered her up in his arms and she cried into his shoulder until she no longer had any tears left.