“MERYL! MERYL! MERYL?”
Silence.
I was just about to shout again when a beady little eye appeared at the keyhole. “Miranda, is that you?”
A man’s voice. And then a face at the window, gnomic and worried.
“Can you see the fire? Has it stopped?” My voice was desperate, and it frightened me when he didn’t answer. The key turned in the lock, and there he was—drenched, his wet clothes emphasizing his small frame.
He registered the surprise on my face. “I trained as a jockey once.” He shook his head. “You should never have come here.”
I pushed past him. “Why does everyone keep saying that?”
I started to run, and Tom followed. I kept running, afraid he might change his mind and force me back into the shell house. Deep under the cover of the greenery again, I couldn’t see what was happening on the mainland, and I had no strategy other than getting back there as soon as I could.
“Slow down!” Tom called. “You’ll fall.”
“The fire! I need to get back to the children.”
“Leonard is there.” It wasn’t enough to slow me down. I knew Leonard was capable, but I needed to see them for myself. Touch them. To convince myself that human life wasn’t dispensable. Which made me think of my mother. And what I was beginning to suspect was the truth behind her departure from Barnsley.
“Why do Max and Elizabeth never talk about Tessa?” Silence again. This was off script, and without Elizabeth he was uncertain. “Tom?”
“Tessa?” It wasn’t the question he’d been expecting.
“Tessa. My mother.” The truth came easily. It felt good. I felt something in me unfold, loosen.
Tom was quiet for a moment. “Elizabeth said it was so, and I didn’t believe her.”
“Why do they hate her?”
“For god’s sake, woman, I’m thinking.”
“I don’t know what happened between them.”
“How could you not?”
“I was still very young when she died.” I had already started puffing. Tom chased after, sounding even worse. “Was it something to do with the book? The House of Brides?” My voice wavered.
“Did your father never say anything?”
“No,” I said, firmly. “I don’t think so.” Less firm. I thought about Fleur. My dad had always deeply appreciated her creative achievements. He took visitors on tours of our garden, and pulled the car over so she could admire gardens whenever she asked. He adored her, and he respected her work.
He loved my mother, but the battered copy of The House of Brides had been hidden away in my room since I was old enough to read. He had never once come looking for it. “It’s not something we talked about.”
With every breath, the cold air rushed in, and I was struggling to stay calm. In, out. In, out. Panic loomed. It was even harder going down the hill than coming up; every time I placed my foot in the mud, it ended up much farther down the hill than I’d intended, so that I was half sliding and half lurching towards the bottom. Tree roots lay just below the sludge and threatened to trip me at every moment.
“I hate to think of people laughing at Elizabeth behind her back,” Tom said.
“Why didn’t she do something? If that’s what she thought?”
“Your mother was very clever. She took all the notebooks, all Elizabeth’s notes, with her when she left.”
“Max would have known, if Elizabeth was telling the truth. Max would have said something.” There was a fire burning across the sea, but as the minutes passed, I felt less certain I would be able to do anything to help. The clock was ticking. I was no closer to the children. I was no closer to finding Daphne.
“No. He didn’t believe Elizabeth. She had a history of hysterics,” he puffed. “Plus, she liked a drink, even then. Didn’t we all! Max thought it was another of Elizabeth’s delusions. He didn’t know she was out here writing, day and night. The house and its history were her obsessions. Max thought she was just jealous.”
Max knew Elizabeth better than any of us, and he didn’t believe her. It had to be nonsense. My disbelief turned to anger. I turned to look at Tom and hit a tree root. My knees hit the ground first, and I wasn’t quick enough to use my hands to break my fall. The pain barely registered.
“My mother wouldn’t do that!” I knew she wouldn’t. The mud was spectacular; it covered the lower half of my body almost instantly. Getting up seemed impossible. Everything seemed impossible. Realization was crushing down on me.
Tom reached out a hand. Up close I could see the open pores on his nose, the sweat forming in his moustache. He smelled like Elizabeth. I wrenched my arm out of the bog and let him help me up. “It was a terrible time,” he said. “The countryside was in turmoil. She had failed, spectacularly, and lost a lot of money. Caused a lot of problems for Barnsley, and other farmers in the area.”
I couldn’t see how my mother, with her long silk separates and oversize spectacles, could cause problems for farmers. We started to hobble down the hill, moving more slowly, more carefully now.
Tom sensed my confusion. “Do you not know anything about those times?” he asked. “Your mother poured a lot of money into a rare breed of sheep. She had fancies of becoming a shepherdess. Can you not see where I’m going with this?”
“No.” Once again my spectacular lack of interest in current affairs was evident.
“There was a virus. It was years before the foot-and-mouth outbreak, but it was almost as bad. Not only was the flock she brought in from Yorkshire completely infected, but it got into the existing Barnsley flock as well. Shut the farm down for months. The lot of them had to be burned. And those in the surrounding farms. She wasn’t a popular lady around here. Elizabeth and Max were heartbroken. She hadn’t consulted them at all. Some bloke from Yorkshire had talked her into it.”
This flight of fancy, this disregard for other people’s feelings, sounded more like the mother I remembered. If I didn’t want to go to swimming lessons as a child, then—poof—they were cancelled. School—optional. On a sunny day, we went to the beach or the park, whatever other commitments we might have had scheduled. From a child’s perspective, it was delightful; but now, from an adult’s, I could see how little respect she had for other people and their emotions and how quickly it could become tiresome. “So she ran away to Australia,” I guessed.
Tom’s face was sad. “And she took my Elizabeth’s book with her.”