I needed to sleep. It was all too much for me. Or perhaps I was coming down with what Robbie had. Either way, when Mrs. Mins stuck her head around the door and told me that Robbie, dosed up on paracetamol and antibiotics, was sleeping soundly and that the girls had gone to bed easily as well, I was too tired to argue. Too exhausted to care. Tucking the ring box into my pyjama pocket and the notebook under my pillow, I switched out the light.
And lay there. For hours. And hours. Eventually I relented and took the notebook out from its hiding place. Daphne’s voice carried me back in time immediately.
You couldn’t blame her, though, could you? I know what my Max is like, and going by what he has told me, his father was one hundred times worse. I mean, I get upset if my Max asks me to put another log on the fire. There’s just something about his tone, sometimes. You know what I’m talking about. The old Summer charm—when it’s on, it’s very, very good, and when it’s not, it’s lethal. Literally.
Anyway. Meryl was furious about what happened that day, but she didn’t blame Maximilian, like a normal person would. No, she blamed Beatrice. There were two reasons for this: one, because Beatrice had made a fool out of her beloved Maximilian, betraying him and not appreciating him or their precious children; and two, because she hadn’t jumped on Peregrine’s boat and sailed off into the distance. That would have solved all Meryl’s problems, in her opinion.
You’ve probably worked out by now that this is where it gets murky, where there’s a chasm between what Meryl told my Max about the night Beatrice died, and what my Max thinks really did happen.
My Max and Meryl slept together for years—he told me that the very first night we met. And he’s regretted telling me ever since, I think.
That was all ahead of him, though, when he was growing up. All he knew was that Meryl loved him, and as he grew into a teenager, that love seemed to change into something more sensual. You have to remember that even though we think she is old now, she was only twelve years older than Max. So when he was seventeen, which was the year it first happened, she was twenty-nine, and she looked amazing.
Seventeen!
I might not have been 100 percent accurate about the ages, but I was right about the no scruples part. I don’t care how amazing Mrs. Mins looked—Max wasn’t even an adult!
Can I just reiterate that? Amazing. My Max has shown me photos—well, okay, I found them in his sock drawer—and she was banging. Banging. They’re still in there, if you can come up with a legitimate excuse to have a poke around in his sock drawer.
It went on for some time. Max would come home from boarding school and creep down the corridor to her room. In those days, the rooms we live in now were the servants’ quarters, and Meryl lived there, in the end room with the tiny bathroom.
My room. I looked around me nervously, suddenly feeling Mrs. Mins’s presence strongly. Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself, and kept reading.
My Max was over in the east wing, a couple of doors down from Beatrice’s old bedroom. Maximilian had taken over the library downstairs as his bedroom, saying he couldn’t handle the stairs, but my Max knew it was because he couldn’t bear to be close to where it had all happened. Anyway, it went on for years, the pair of them sneaking around, Meryl never letting on about her feelings for Maximilian. She only told him about that first fateful summer years later.
The relationship between Max and Meryl went on all through my Max’s university years and right up until Maximilian died, which was when it came to a head. My Max had feelings for Meryl. He says now it wasn’t love, but I think he is trying to spare my feelings, and also himself from ridicule. There hadn’t been anyone else before me, only Meryl, and when we met he was in his early thirties. Something was holding him back from finding a proper girlfriend, and that something was Meryl, no matter what he says. In fact, one of my conditions on coming down to Barnsley was that Meryl had to go. She had missed out on university to stay and wait for Max, and by the time she worked out that Max wouldn’t marry her, it was too late. Max found her a job at a small family-run hotel in Capri, owned by a friend of his father’s. She became quite senior, well respected within the industry. After a couple of disastrous seasons and problems with staff, Max convinced me to travel to Capri with him and bring Meryl back to help out. I wonder now if that had been his plan all along.
Anyway, this is getting ahead of things, and I want to go back to what happened that summer, the summer they lost Beatrice.
Maximilian was right; that night after the scene at the cove, Beatrice came down to dinner as usual. And as usual she had taken the edge off her misery with a number of pre-dinner gins. Everyone was there, all their close friends gathered together for the last night of the festival. Beatrice sloshed her way through dinner, constantly lifting her glass for refills of wine, barely touching any of the food on her plate, and chain-smoking. (That’s where you get it from obviously, Elizabeth.)
Meryl, coming in with the children to say good night, only saw part of the display, but she said Beatrice was slurring her words and holding her head up with one hand, her elbow resting on the table, sprinkling ash everywhere as she gesticulated wildly. The guests that night were a combination of stragglers from the summer parties and new arrivals for the festival. There was one noticeably empty chair, which Beatrice still seemed to be directing all her attention towards: Peregrine’s.
Meryl came across Beatrice again, staggering along the upstairs corridor, not long after the children were in bed. She helped her along, and saw her to her room. She said she didn’t enter the room at that point—that even though Beatrice was drunk, she didn’t feel it was appropriate. This might be true. Maybe.
I’m sorry, I know this is your mother, and this will be hard for you to read, but a lot of it is in that bloody book anyway. As much as you and Max hate it, I’m sure you must have read it. Max says Tessa’s problem was that she didn’t care about anyone else when she wrote that book. That she’s a narcissist. But he’s just as tied up with the mythology of Barnsley and the House of Brides as she was.
I mean, I think I have Tessa to thank for my marriage. I’m sure that bloody book was the reason he couldn’t bring himself to marry Meryl. A member of staff. Not exactly House of Brides material.
Anyway.
Sometime later, maybe an hour or two, Meryl came up to the east wing to check on the children. She heard shouts coming from the main bedroom, but thought nothing of it, especially after the events of the afternoon.
It was only when she got to my Max’s room, and his bed was empty, that she started to worry.
Racing back along the hallway, she smelled the smoke for the first time. The old walls in that part of the house are solid and three feet thick in some parts, the doors made from the heaviest of oak and almost as impenetrable, so the smoke was mostly contained until Meryl got back to the door. Not bothering to knock this time, she pushed the door open. The smoke was so thick, it was difficult to see, and there was no sign of anyone at first.
The flames had already taken over the thick drapes, and as she walked in, the pelmet crashed to the ground and the fire leapt across the carpet.
They were in the bathroom—Beatrice lying on the bath mat, the water from the bath overflowing around her, and little Max crying over the top of her motionless body. Meryl grabbed Max but left Beatrice behind. She said she couldn’t shift her, but did she even try?
Back then, Meryl was hailed as a hero. She rescued Max, and she raised the alarm about the fire, saving Barnsley House from being completely engulfed by the flames. Maximilian was distraught, and he desperately missed his wife. If Meryl thought the death of Beatrice would create an opening, she was wrong. It just made her workload heavier, for the full-time nanny quit in disgust at the scandal, leaving Meryl with full care of the children. Maximilian would disappear for months on end, escaping the bad memories of Barnsley in favour of overseas holidays and friends’ houses.
I suppose you know your father was never around—you don’t need me to tell you that. You also know that he died when Max was twenty, after the affair between Meryl and my Max began. Gossip started in the village soon enough. You know what it’s like. But I’m not sure if it ever reached your father’s ears. In any case, he never said anything to Max.
Max—a young adult now—and Meryl were cooped up in that house together. And then Meryl’s younger brother Leonard, who had been out at sea with his father, suffered a nasty accident on a trawler. A hook caught him in the face and sent him flying across the deck, breaking his legs in the process. Coming home to recuperate, he was a further burden on his mother.
Leonard came to live at Barnsley, and his presence took the pressure off the others for a bit. You were away at school and university during these years, but between the three of them they kept Barnsley just in the black, and stopped it going the way of many other country houses at the time. Unusually for someone so young, Leonard had a strong agricultural instinct, and before long he was advising my Max on most of the farm matters, as well as running maintenance around the place. There’s no problem with Leonard, never has been. In fact, it was something he said, after Agatha’s accident, that got me wondering. That made me realize that my Max and Meryl were sleeping together again.
Max won’t listen to me. Every time I bring something up about Meryl, he thinks it’s the jealousy talking, or that I’m trying to blame her for the accident. I know the accident was my fault. But I don’t think she’ll wait around forever. She made her move after the accident, and it worked for her. She won’t let him go again. She’s dangerous, and I need your help.
That was where it ended. I flicked furiously through the rest of the pages, my eyes racing across every line in case some code was embedded, some clue hidden, but there was nothing. Nothing but fear and desperation. The same fear and desperation I was starting to feel.