After a long time, life at The Sanctuary settled down and grew peaceful again. The gardens were closed for a year, and when they reopened the following spring the mausoleum had been torn down and the mound flattened and grassed over, so that there was nothing to be peered at by ghoulish sightseers.
There was a noticeable increase in visitors, and occasionally still another journalist. No questions were answered by the gardeners, or Ruth in the tea-room. They had learned to say, ‘I didn’t work here last year.’
‘I wish that were true, Will,’ Ruth said, more than once. ‘I torture myself thinking there must have been some way I could have known.’
Papers at Bramble Bank had told them who Jo was. Publicity had brought an aunt and cousin, a few friends, a man who had been staying with Priscilla Smythe. Most of the mysteries had been gradually cleared up, except for the great central mystery of how they could all have been so totally deceived by Marigold’s performance as Jo.
‘We wanted to be, I suppose,’ Ruth said. ‘She was so blooming useful. Right from the beginning, when she turned up to help me in the tea-room, she seemed like just what we needed.’
‘And there are women like that. Over-made-up and theatrical, cheerful, pushy. I rather liked her,’ Tessa said sadly.
‘I liked her very much.’ William thought about the strange scene in the underground kitchen, where Jo, as he realized now, was being Marigold, and giving him her real self.
They had all liked her. Jill did say, ‘I always found her a bit over-powering,’ but it was only Harriet who boasted, ‘I knew all along there was something bogus about her,’ and nobody believed that.
One evening in June, William and Frank Pargeter’s friend Roger, who had looked for the nightingales last year in vain, made a twilight pilgrimage to the thicket at the top of the hill. There was some general bird movement and warbler song, and what seemed like nesting activity. They waited quietly. Roger never said much anyway.
After a while, they heard it, over-riding the other birds. The loud clear, clicking call, and then the bubbling trill.
The nightingales had come back again.
Roger muttered, looking at William with his crooked smile, ‘Frank’s epitaph. He saved the birds.’
‘He also saved my grandson.’
Frank had lived for two days after the operation on the stomach wound. Whispering, his wife interpreting, he had managed to tell them what had happened at the tomb.
Now the family did not talk about that any more, nor about the things that had happened while Jo was at The Sanctuary. After Frank died, clutching Faye’s hand, they had talked and talked endlessly, reasoning, remembering, until everything had been explained.
Troutie’s death. Poor Charlotte. Perhaps the hare in the hidden garden. Probably Bastet. The keepsake of Sylvia’s lover and the destruction in the library.
When the rooms where John and Polly Dix had once lived were being looked at for conversion into a separate flat, they remembered that there was a crawl space under the central roof to the attics of the other turret wing. On the floor, where a trapdoor had been cut in the boards, Dorothy found transparent, long-dead lily petals and a few curled dry leaves.
The shock of discovering that Jo was responsible for psychic phenomena had been quickly overtaken by relief that they had not been genuine mysteries.
‘And perhaps I never did smell those lilies in the first place,’ Dorothy said.
‘You did. And my mother did shout up the stairs.’
‘She could have imagined that Geraldine had come back to haunt her. Anyway, nothing like that can ever happen again. I remember telling Ralph Stern two years ago, “No supernatural phenomena here,” rather pompously, but he was so full of himself. The Sanctuary is safe, Will.’
‘All’s well.’
The nightmare was over. The house was theirs again. The garden entranced itself in luminous bloom and beauty, and shed its untroubled peace once more on the gentle visitors who came to wander and enjoy.
They held the Festival of the Lake again, because life goes on, and tradition heals its own wounds. Tessa and Rob and Chris did not come, but when the summer was almost over, they had a last family weekend, before the children went back to school.
In the kitchen before dinner, Jill and Tessa were feeding children and cooking, and William was making drinks in the butler’s pantry.
He put a glass on the table for Dottie, who was playing cards with Rob and Annabel.
‘What’s the matter, Wum?’ Rob’s eyes followed William’s towards the door of the back pantry where cakes were prepared for the tea-room. The door had been closed. It was opening very slowly. Then it stopped, not far enough to see into the pantry. They would normally have looked away and started to talk again, because not all the doors shut properly or hung level in this old house.
But they were all still, staring in silence. The sound was quite faint, but clear, like the light jingle of a woman’s bracelets as she moved her arm.