The kitchen occupied the space at the head of the stairs between my bedroom and the storeroom. We were higher now than the ribbed roof of the printworks, which meant that the narrow windows on this floor hadn’t been bricked up. While I laid out the printed sheets on the wide table, Robert drifted along to the partially open door for my bedroom.
It amused me to watch the way he lingered on the threshold and used the lightest of pressure to ease the door ajar just enough to peer in at the clutter and books and general homeliness. He must have sensed the drift in my attention. He turned his head and I raised an eyebrow at him.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Did you imagine I’d be living up here in forlorn squalor while you revelled in the comfort of my uncle’s house?’
The attic room had changed a lot since he had last seen it. The mattress still lay on the floor beneath the front window, where he and my uncle had placed it, but I had added a rug and the small round table where my handbag rested at night. The thin partition wall was hung with pictures and there were a few pretty ornaments and vases on the mantelpiece. After a moment of thought, Robert drew something out of his pocket and stepped in to set it carefully beside the tallest vase.
‘What was that?’ I asked, as he rejoined me.
‘A tiny ceramic hedgehog that was once yours, but has lately come to me by way of a drawer in your advent calendar. I thought I should return it.’
For a moment I thought he was making the point that he didn’t want his own mantelpiece cluttering with idiotic trinkets. Then I grasped a small hint of a gentler truth. After all this talk about lasting monuments, he had thought I might appreciate the return of a few harmless tokens of my own. He knew that the little hedgehog, all of half an inch high, had been a childhood treasure.
Now, although he didn’t mean it to, the gift forever carried the memory of his presence here on this day too.
Robert was studying the printed sheets I had spread across the table. If I had ever wondered about his fitness to do this job, I only needed to observe his concentration now. It was some time before his eyes flicked up to catch me watching.
Oblivious to the way he had made my heart miss a beat, he said, ‘You are aware that there are other errors in this text beyond the misspelling of the name Ashbrook?’
He didn’t require an answer to that. Instead he returned his attention to the test print while I took up my teacup and retired to a place against the wall.
His finger lightly tapped a line of text. ‘There’s the epitaph on the family memorial.’
After moment he added, ‘Do you know, I’d love to understand how those few lines from a Victorian adventure story came to hold such special importance for this Walter fellow that his children should have very specifically chosen to adapt it for his memorial.’
‘Well,’ I said, straightening from my lean against the wall. ‘It’s simple enough to observe that the book has a good deal to say about Africa. Perhaps Walter liked it, or knew the author or something. It was published during Walter’s lifetime, wasn’t it?’
‘But after Harriet’s, I believe.’
‘And what does that mean?’
I saw his mouth give a little downturn at the corners. ‘Nothing, probably.’
‘So are you trying to tell me that the African connection means that I’m actually being called to restore Walter’s name? Perhaps I’m meant to prove that his memorial is dedicated to the herd of diminutive giraffes? Jacqueline will be delighted.’ My voice didn’t need to convey my disbelief.
After a pause he began very tentatively, ‘Lucy, don’t take this the wrong way, but Archie doesn’t have a grave, does he?’
I set my teacup down on the kitchen sideboard with very careful precision to show that I was prepared to accept the question. ‘No grave. He was lost with his ship. It went down with about half the crew so technically he’s buried at sea. His name will be listed on a war memorial at some point.’
‘More memorials?’ Robert had straightened from his bend over the papers. He reached out a hand to stem my instinctive protest before telling me, ‘No. I’m not trying to accuse you of creating this urgency for finding Harriet’s grave out of the loss of Archie. I’m trying to suggest that you might be interpreting the pressure you feel in a certain way because of your own history.’
‘Doesn’t that amount to the same thing?’
‘Not really.’
Robert’s reach across the table had just barely touched my sleeve. Now he let his hand fall. He stood there, very much focussed upon this methodical process of unpicking my thoughts. It was an odd experience, seeing him work with me like this. It showed how much he had kept away from me before.
His attention returned to the papers. He was marking up the few errors I had missed with a pencil. Because above it all, and regardless of how many complications I thought I was finding within the pages of Jacqueline’s book, it was undeniable that we were also swiftly approaching the deadline for publishing it. And I knew now just how much it mattered to Jacqueline that we helped her to achieve her goal.
I told him this. And then, as his hand marked a circle around another misspelled variant of Ashbrook, he remarked quite as if it didn’t matter, ‘Every turn of yours keeps bringing us back to the issue of Harriet’s loss, doesn’t it, even when these misspellings by your own hand clearly mention Ashbroke. If it were me, I might truly begin to think that my errors referred to an Ashbrook, not Harriet Clare.’
He added thoughtfully, ‘But you’ve had all these conversations with Jacqueline. You know how much your last visit to that house left you preoccupied with the issue of the child’s neglected name. And now it has spread to this building too, and the depth of your reaction frightens you, doesn’t it?’
His uncompromising question made me fold my arms. I told him, ‘Frightened seems a strong word to use.’
‘It seemed to be a strong feeling just now. So?’
After a moment when I still didn’t have an explanation, he said simply, ‘Listen, Lucy, I have to admit that I know what I saw in your eyes as I lifted you from your fall on the stairs at the Ashbrook house. It was there again today when you stepped into your office and I know that look. I’ve seen it before, and it is not one I would ever have expected to find in you.’
Now he had shocked me. He was speaking about the experiences of his fellows in the prison camp again, I knew he was. A chill ran over my skin like a breath of air.
I whispered, ‘The dead aren’t ghouls who can stalk us on a whim, I know that. If they were, I needn’t have worried so much about accepting the balance in my mind between living this life and remembering those who have left me. This isn’t about reaching out.’
I struggled to find a better explanation. I told him, ‘Perhaps this feeling I have is the effect of war and loss and being forced into a closer acquaintance with my own mortality or something like that, but my world is nothing like my mother’s or my grandmother’s. When they extend a hand to a wandering soul, they do it kindly and generously and in the fullness of their faith. But this isn’t a conversation. This feels invasive. The darkness is in my mind and it already knows my thoughts. It feels dangerous.’
I bit my lip defensively as if, despite my better words, I were summoning it after all.
But nothing danced about on the stairs outside my kitchen door.
After a moment while Robert’s gaze followed mine to the head of the stairs, he quoted softly, ‘Truly, the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life which can never die.’
I felt my muscles adjust into puzzlement. ‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing really. Another misquote from that African adventure, worthy of our friend Walter. It suggests that the ghosts of this world are all around us in the words and actions of those who have gone before. You don’t need to reach out. Because the air Harriet breathed is still here.’ He turned back to me and straightened.
‘And that, by the way,’ he added as I sharply stopped my intake of breath, ‘is meant as a word of comfort. There are things she will have left behind for us to find, even if she didn’t mean to.’
I let out my air with a faintly guilty smile and he reached out that hand again to lightly give a reassuring touch to my elbow.
The touch steadied against my arm when he stepped around the corner of the table to move nearer. He said seriously, ‘I know you aren’t about to take off on a madcap journey across one hundred and fifty miles and four changes of train into Norfolk without exhausting a few local possibilities first, so what are you going to do? Will you ask Jacqueline’s vicar to let you take a look at the parish registers?’
I shook my head. We already knew that Harriet wasn’t buried in either of the nearby churchyards. I admitted, ‘I thought I might begin with the newspaper. For the death notice.’ Then on an entirely different note, ‘Robert?’
His attention had strayed to the crease between his thumb and forefinger on his free hand where, in the moment before, his palm had run against a sharp edge of one of the sheets of paper. A thin line had been scored there. Now I was close enough to share his examination of the mark. He found the cut had barely broken the surface, dismissed it and then returned his attention to me. ‘Sorry? Yes, of course. I will have time to help you tomorrow, Lucy.’
His readiness made a mockery of the faint tension that remained in me. ‘Actually,’ I said, working hard to lift my gaze from his hand. ‘I wasn’t thinking about my uncle’s pressing deadlines, or his despair when we both abscond from yet another day of work on the Willerson archive. I was going to ask a question on a somewhat different but related theme about the rhubarb seeds.’
He repeated blankly, ‘The rhubarb seeds?’
‘In my advent calendar,’ I said. ‘I thought you wanted me to unpick the clues from Miss Prichard’s manuscript but she seems to have omitted rhubarb entirely. What are they for?’
I saw an eyebrow twitch. ‘Medicinally? Rhubarb is a mild purgative.’
Robert was teasing me. I remarked dryly, ‘In that case, your choice of ingredients for my advent calendar is a bit immediate, isn’t it? A plant that will rid the body of harmful things?’
That swept the humour clear from his face. He suddenly had his hands on both my arms.
‘The present worry was not,’ he said firmly, ‘foremost in my mind when I first set about leaving you little gifts in your advent calendar.’
He explained, ‘The rhubarb seeds belong to the original recipe. They bear no relation to Miss Prichard’s manuscript, or this work, or in fact any book. They relate to you. And it must be said that you’ve made everything simpler, because yesterday I was still struggling to source the last two ingredients. Then you freed me. I found a new recipe. And, since it uses all the same ingredients bar two, it’s a saving on many accounts because now I don’t have to source sloe berries or the everlasting flower Xeranthemum.’
‘Xeranthemum?’
His hands moved lightly on my sleeves as he met my slanting smile. ‘Your aunt has a sprig of it in her wreath, as I learned yesterday, and I was going to have to perform a minor act of vandalism to get at it. And,’ he added, ‘if you’re fishing for another hint, I have no idea about the plant’s medicinal properties.’
There was a thrilling little pause after that – the sort that made me suddenly very conscious that he was holding me very still before him. Nothing moved except my pulse. Then he bent his head and kissed me.
It was some time later that Robert spoke. His arms had enfolded me very tightly and when I caught the quieter murmur of his voice against my hair, it seemed to be a seamless continuation of the reference he had made to my aunt’s Christmas wreath.
He said, ‘You did understand me, didn’t you, when I said that it wasn’t all my own choice to give you room to come home properly? You did understand that I’m reasonably certain that your aunt has guessed what I think of you?’
I said, ‘I think you’ve just explained what she was trying to ask me about last night as I left her house. She seemed to be convinced that I would either be frightened away or work myself up into hurting you, if she said too much.’
I asked, ‘Are you trying to tell me that she told you to keep your distance?’
‘That isn’t what I’m trying to say. Although, I believe that your Aunt Mabel foresaw the impact you would have on me. And immediately decided that she had no wish to experiment upon your feelings by thrusting us together over her family dinner table.’
It was very quiet up here in my attic. I thought he had noticed my interest in that vacant stairwell. And in that faint line of a cut on his hand.
That same hand was holding me very close. Nothing was stalking him from the shadows here, and he wasn’t being my guardian either. He said almost fiercely, ‘I’m trying to say that we’re all so protective of each other’s welfare that we might forget to simply live. When you’re already pretty formidable, as I said, aren’t you?’
He stayed with me that night. After many hours of work to find the errors, and get fresh blocks made up after dinner, what remained of this time was ours.
I woke to the cold air of a bedroom on a wintery Monday morning to find him sleeping on his side beside me, his back turned to me and his hair ruffled again, this time by my pillow. The weak light of a damp dawn was drifting in through a chink in the curtains to cast a soft line across his cheek and onto me. I had overslept if daylight was beginning to show.
Very gently, I touched my lips to his shoulder. There was a confidence that came from this kind of proximity. It awoke a thrill in me when his eyelashes lifted and his thoughts turned immediately to me; a new sense of determination that grew from being able to recall precisely how this place had felt last night after the building had grown dark; when the only silence had been the one that had fallen peacefully between us, while the sounds of the floorboards had gone on whispering to the shifting air outside my window.