Two children were travelling, separately from different directions, to Iyot House, Iyot Lock, one hot afternoon in late June.
‘Where am I to put them?’ Mrs Mullen had asked, to whom children were anathema. ‘Where will they sleep?’
Kestrel, the aunt, knew better than to make any suggestion, the housekeeper being certain to object and overrule.
‘I wonder where seems best to you?’ Images of the bedrooms flicked in a slide show through Aunt Kestrel’s mind, each one seeming less suitable than the last – too dark, too large, too full of precious small objects. She had no experience of young children, though she was perfectly well disposed to the thought of having her great nephew and niece to stay, and had a vague idea that they were easily frightened of the dark or broke things. And were they to sleep in adjacent rooms or with a communicating door ? On separate floors ?
‘The attics would suit best, in my view,’ Mrs Mullen said.
Shadowy images chased across Kestrel’s mind, troubling her enough to make her get up from her writing desk. ‘I think we had better look. I can’t remember when I was last up there.’
She went through the house, three flights of wide stairs, one of steep and narrow. Mrs Mullen did not trouble to follow, knowing it would all be decided satisfactorily.
The summer wind beat at the small latched windows but daylight changed its nature, making it seem a soft wind, and benign. The floorboards were dusty. Kestrel opened a cupboard set deep into the wall. The shelves were lined with newspaper and smelled of nothing worse than mothballs and old fluff. One of the rooms was completely empty, the second contained only a cracked leather trunk, but the two rooms next to one another, in the middle of the row, had furniture – an iron bed in each, a chest of drawers, a mirror. One had a wicker chair, one a musty velvet stool. And cupboards, more cupboards. She had lived here for over forty years and remembered a time when the attic rooms had been for maids. Now, there was Mrs Mullen, who had the basement, and a woman who came on a bicycle from a village on the other side of the fen.
The rooms could be made right, she thought, though vague as to exactly what children might need to make them so. Curtains? Rugs? Toys?
Well, linen at least.
‘The attics,’ she said, coming down from them, ‘will do nicely.’
Kestrel Dickinson had been an only child for fourteen years before two sisters were born, Dora first and then Violet. Dora was plain and brown-eyed with brown straight hair and placid under the spotlight of everyone’s attention. Their mother tried to conceal her disappointment, firstly that Dora was not a boy and secondly that she was not beautiful, though her love for both girls was never in doubt. Violet was born two years and two days after Dora and grew into a pert and extremely pretty child, with blonde bubble curls and intensely blue eyes, and was adored. She smiled, lisped, talked early, looked beautiful in frills, never got her clothes dirty, and laughed with delight at everyone who looked in her direction.
From the first Dora hated her and Violet learned quickly to meet like with like. As they grew into children and then young women, they quarrelled and despised one another. From the beginning the root of it all was Dora’s jealousy, but Violet, who had had her head turned early, quickly turned proud, self-absorbed and boastful. In her turn, Dora behaved with pettiness and spite. Their feud became life-long. Violet married when she was eighteen, and again, at twenty-five and thirty-three. After that she had a succession of lovers but did not bother to marry them. When she was forty-two, she had her first and only child, Leonora, by a rich man called Philip van Vorst, before she embarked on eight years of restless travel, from Kenya to Paris, Peking to Los Angeles, Las Vegas to Hong Kong. Her daughter travelled with her, growing quickly used both to their nomadic life, a succession of substitute fathers, hotels, money and, like her mother, being pretty, spoilt, admired and both lonely and dissatisfied.
Violet rarely returned home, but whenever she did, she and Dora picked up their animosity where it had been left, always finding fresh things about which to quarrel. Violet’s frivolous, amoral, butterfly nature infuriated her sister. She knew she behaved better, led a more wholesome life, but never managed to feel that these counted for anything when her sister arrived home showering presents out of her suitcases. The adoration she had always received shone out again from parents, servants, friends, everything that had been complained of was set aside. Dora, plain and brown, simmered in corners and, long into adult life, plotted obscure revenge. Violet had had three husbands, innumerable lovers – usually handsome, always rich – and a daughter with enviable looks. Dora had had one rather anonymous suitor who had never confessed any feelings for her and who had eventually faded from her life over a period of several months, while she remained waiting in hope.
By this time, Kestrel was long married and living at Iyot House, though she did not have children of her own and had detached herself from her feuding sisters, but had never stopped feeling guilt that she had not somehow succeeded in uniting them.
And then, in the flurry of less than three months, Dora had met and married George Cayley, a local widower almost thirty years her senior. A year later she had produced her small, frail son, Edward. Two years later both she and George were dead.
Kestrel inherited Iyot House from her own husband after a short marriage. At first she had disliked it and the expanse of dun-coloured fens, their watery aspect and huge oppressive skies, the isolation and lack of friends, the oddness of the villagers. In time, though, she grew used to it and found some sort of spirit half-hidden there. She had people to stay in the spring and summer and for the rest of the year was happy with her own company and her painstaking work as a botanical illustrator.
From Violet there came the occasional, erratic postcard which rarely mentioned her daughter Leonora but she heard nothing of her orphaned nephew until a letter had come asking if he might spend the summer at Iyot House. In some desperation she wrote to Violet.
‘They are cousins after all and he will need a companion.’
It was settled.