Two months later
Nothing shone as brightly as a sun-soaked Cornish day. The sea dazzled and the sky shone. Gulls swooped. Sands were golden and the waves eased happily on to shore.
Rachel took delivery of the first lorry-load of exhibits. As the paintings were unloaded, carefully parcelled and bound, she felt a homecoming more profound than a hundred return trips to America. It was the perfect solution. She had spoken to Paul last week and given him the promotion: he’d earned it. He would take over the New York space, she told him, while she set up a new gallery here. It meant she was able to expand at the same time as staying in England. She didn’t know yet what the future held, but there was too much possibility here to turn her back on.
The orangery at Winterbourne was the ideal platform, light, bright, and with the incredible panorama of the Atlantic to offset the works. She was excited about the new direction, had already been in talks with upcoming artists and the draw of the house itself was enough to attract the more exciting names. Rachel hoped it would also be enough to entice visitors. Winterbourne had for a long time been a closed fortress, but now, at least in part, it would be open to the public. The chance to visit her gallery would be a chance to visit the grandest, and most elusive, house in the country. What’s more, if she could make money from it, she could set about repairing those parts of the estate in need of improvement. Both her passions rolled into one.
Rachel waved the delivery guys off and set about unwrapping the frames. Immediately their colours and vibrancy filled the space. She had spent all week clearing and cleaning the orangery, and was gratified at the beautiful structure hidden beneath decades of dust and neglect. It felt good to breathe life back into Winterbourne, to polish it and feel proud of it, and to set it working again.
Already she was imagining how she would arrange the prints, and what visitors and reporters would say when Saturday’s private viewing arrived. For Rachel’s own part, this fresh start signified more than success and more than money. It signified change. From now, she would do things differently. She was no longer working at the expense of her personal life, cancelling one out in favour of the other, and wondered why for so many years she had thought it necessary. Women had both the world over, not because it was easy but because it was what they did – because women were the strongest creatures alive. Rachel had come to Winterbourne to find her past, but in the end it had shown her that and more. It had shown her that she belonged to a triumphant, irrepressible sisterhood. And she could have it all.
At last, here at Winterbourne, she could be happy.
There was nothing like a brush with death to make life seem all the sweeter. Afterwards they’d told her that she’d come back from the brink, and it was a miracle she had survived her ordeal at all. When they had found her she’d been drowned, carrying only the faintest pulse that might so easily have been missed had one man not insisted on striving on: just one more breath, one more resuscitation; Rachel had to come back, she wasn’t leaving them yet… On an unconscious level she must have known that herself. She tried to remember what happened that night but events sprang up in puzzling order. Aaron and the water, the pain in her head, the fear, the pull of the mirror – and then the beach, cool and smooth on her back. And Jack.
Saved.
Her recovery, the hospital said, had been astonishing. Rachel recalled the ride in the ambulance, wrapped in a coarse blanket, and the sensation of her cold, sodden hair trickling down her back. In the ward she was treated for her head injury, shock and hypothermia. She must have fallen asleep because when she next woke she was somewhere else, cosseted in a plump, sweet-smelling bed, with a mug of hot tea at her side and the smell of burned toast seeping up from downstairs. She’d inched a hand out from under the duvet and a warm tongue licked it. Dogs. Blankets. Farmhouse.
Jack.
Rachel had turned to the man next to her and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if they had been together and married for fifty years, knowing every inch and part of the other, he leaned in and kissed her. He tasted of open air and wild oceans. Jack. She could never find the words to thank him for saving her life. It sounded so dramatic, so unreal, but there it was, what happened.
You’re lucky, she’d been told repeatedly over the past two months. It was odd to hear it after so long being affiliated with misfortune. But it was true. She was lucky that Jack had been in the Landogger Inn that night when a local had come in, saying he’d seen a pair of figures staggering down the bluff towards the sea. She was lucky that Jack had thought it unusual enough to investigate, and she was lucky that he cared enough about her, even in spite of their argument, to follow his instincts.
‘I knew it was you,’ he’d said to her in the ambulance, tightly holding her hand. ‘Whatever had been said between us, you weren’t getting rid of me. I’d have followed you across the ocean if I’d had to. I care about you so much, Rachel.’
She was lucky that Jack was a strong swimmer. By the time he’d reached the beach, she and Aaron had been far out on the waves, and he’d had to dive in without a second thought. She was lucky that the tides were on their side – as Aaron had been making his confession the boat had already been drifting closer to shore. She was lucky that by the time she went under, Jack was mere seconds away.
Rachel left the orangery and stepped out into the sunshine. She looked towards the sea and it was hard to believe, so kindly it appeared now, that it had once held such menace. She didn’t know what would happen to Aaron. She’d been told, after Jack’s rescue, that he’d had no choice but to come ashore. The police had caught him, and he’d since been repatriated to America where the courts would serve his sentence.
She had been trying to avoid hearing about his plight. It upset her too much, it still astounded her, and she tried to rationalise it by remembering how desperate he’d been, and how in a moment of savagery had sought the only exit he could fathom.
But still his betrayal had the power to wind her.
How long had Aaron been machinating to get his hands on the Winterbourne fortune? Had it been from the instant she’d told him, in his penthouse on Central Park? Had it been afterwards, when he’d tried to sell through Wanda Pearlman? Had it been when he’d said he’d had feelings for her, and she’d believed him, and had that all been a lie? The last she’d heard the case had had a brief moment on US news, reports of an attempted murder on a random English coastline by one of the country’s leading entrepreneurs. Rachel had shut herself away from the noise, taking solace in Jack’s embrace. Aaron had been fearful, above all, of negative publicity surrounding his bankruptcy. What he’d wound up with was looking a great deal worse.
Jack.
She had only to think of him and their future together to feel brighter.
He’d be here any minute to help unpack, for she wasn’t just taking delivery of the gallery but also her own possessions. Admittedly she hadn’t much to bring over from New York, and she planned to hang on to the apartment as a toehold in the city: as much as she loved Cornwall, part of her would always belong to Manhattan.
Remembering something, she went inside the house.
Winterbourne felt lighter now. Even Jack agreed, in spite of his rather sceptical expression when she’d told him what she’d been doing on the boat with Aaron, and her belief that the mirror was in some way haunted. In the light of day, and with distance now from her discovery at the library, yes, it did seem, at times, unlikely. Yet something had held her in its grip that night, and had seemed to hold Winterbourne long before, and now the mirror had gone there was a change. The rooms seemed sunnier. Shadows crept more quickly back to their corners.
‘It was a witch, then?’ Jack had raised his eyebrow during one of the long afternoons they had shared since, strolling the beach. They’d made a habit of it: going for romantic dinners or picnics on the moors, paddling in the shallows, eating fish and chips on the rocks, cooking together and sleeping together and somewhere in between they’d fallen in love, unable to spend more than an hour apart. The kind of serenity she’d thought she’d never find again. ‘And you think the de Greys killed her…’
‘More or less, yes,’ Rachel had said. ‘But it was more than that. This man – Ivan – showed her happiness, what she thought was love, and then he set about murdering her. She went straight from bliss to her grave. It’s awful, don’t you think?’
‘And she’s been at Winterbourne ever since.’
‘I know you think it’s crazy,’ she’d teased, with a smile. ‘And maybe it is. But Ivan built Winterbourne right on her land, right where it happened. Now I’m not saying she’s been a ghost all this time, maybe she’s just been a bad energy. And the women that suffered here did so because they claimed the contentment that Mary was denied. Or, at least, they tried to. Mary couldn’t accept that. Winterbourne is hers.’
‘But it isn’t, presumably, any more, since you’re here.’
Rachel had turned to him, confident. ‘It’s a different place now,’ she’d said, knowing it was true. ‘Trust me. I gave the mirror back to her. It’s over.’
She walked now to Jonathan de Grey’s study, keen to find what she was looking for. She saw it straight away, on his desk, bathed in the calm sunlight that streamed in through the window. It was a black and white photograph of the captain and his governess, Alice Miller, outside Winterbourne, their hands on the shoulders of two children. When Rachel had first found the image, buried in the very bottom of his desk where it might never again have seen the light of day, she’d assumed it to be the captain and his wife. But written on the reverse, in pencil, were the words:
Alice, my darling, and I.
Rachel crossed the picture with her fingertips. She’d had it framed, so precious she understood it to be, and would hang it at the entrance to the orangery. It would be the first thing her visitors saw: Rachel’s grandparents, together.
My darling… His choice of words had surprised her. But then, attached to the back of the photograph, she had found a folded note, written by the man himself.
She read it again now.
Dearest Alice,
You will never read this letter. You will never see it. And yet I cannot desist from writing to you. How can I make things right between us? How can I make it up to you? I cannot. If I could do it all again, I would, and do it differently.
But I did not know, my darling. I did not know until it was too late.
I thought it was for the best. You would be safe there, away from me and away from this place that had caused you so much damage. I wanted you to be well, and once you were well you could go anywhere you liked, you could be free. But I could not ignore my heart. My heart woke me in the night, it followed me around in the day; it knocked and tapped at my window, demanding to be heard. I realised what I had been hiding from, and it was simply this: that I loved you. After everything, and against the odds, I loved you. It seemed tremendously easy when I faced it. I should have seen it sooner, when you first arrived and I thought that yours were the kindest eyes I had ever seen; or when the children took to you so naturally, and you to them; or when I learned you had dined with my doctor and it caused me such pain. Alice, I couldn’t bear to think of you with another man, and to my shame I tried to warn you away from him so I would not have to again.
It wounds me more than is possible to express that I realised all this too late. That I did not make it in time. And the worst wounding of all comes from the fact that you must have believed I turned my back on our baby.
That summer, Constance showed me your letters. She wept as she admitted her deceit, promising that she regretted concealing the letters from me and she only had because she’d been afraid – afraid, in part, of you, and what had become of you at St Josephine’s, and afraid of what the letters contained. Some of them, she had opened herself. To say I was angry with her is to do anger a disservice. But after the fire had calmed, I was seized by a terrible sadness.
There were months and months of letters… With each one, my heart dropped.
Nobody told me, Alice. I hope, wherever you are, that you believe it. If I had known, I would have run faster than the wind to your side. I telephoned the hospital and demanded that I should speak with you. Our baby, at that time, would have been a little over two months old. But the nurse told me the news that you had died. In childbirth? I asked, numb to my soul. No, the woman said – and these words will stay with me until my dying day, as terrible for their tragedy as they are for their truth. No, she said, Alice died of a broken heart.
Frequently I have imagined that I know how that feels. I have gone to bed at night with an ache in my chest so physical, so real, that I do not expect to wake.
But wake I do. Life goes on, just without as much colour as before.
You changed my life, Alice Miller, from the day you came to Winterbourne. Your spirit and your laughter brought us joy, and I think of the joy we might have known together were circumstances on our side. I lied when I told you I had seen Laura in your eyes, and that was why we made love. I saw you, and only you. But even then I feared you would be drawn to the dark, as she was. I saw the marks on your body, marks that covered you, according to St Josephine’s, by the time of your death. I tried to protect you by denying my love. I yearn to have admitted it sooner.
So little I can do for you now, my darling, but I can do one thing. I vow to keep watch over your daughter, our daughter, and provide for her as best as I can. I vow to love her, if only from afar. I vow to spare her Winterbourne and its heartache. If she wishes to find it when she’s grown, so be it and I wish her luck. Know that she is well and happy where she is, a long way from here, with a safe and loving family.
Trust me to protect her until my dying day, my darling Alice. And then, only then, if there is indeed a God, I hope to be reunited with you.
Yours, always,
Jonathan
As before, the letter made her cry. Rachel folded it and held it against her heart, feeling that organ beating steadily through the paper. Her mother, the child Jonathan wrote about, had discovered Winterbourne when she was grown, and it had cost her her life. Now, with Rachel, things began again. Things were different. She could change her family’s fate and break the spell at Winterbourne. She already had.
I’ll do it for you, she thought, and she thought about Alice, and Jonathan, and most of all her mother, driving through the rain with a baby on the back seat.
‘Hello?’
She heard his voice in the hall, just as she’d heard him the first time he’d come up to Winterbourne and frightened the life out of her. Rachel felt a rush of happiness and went to meet him, glad that of anyone to draw her from her grandparents’ tragic love, it should be him, Jack Wyatt, with whom the dice would be cast anew. Their love would prevail. Their love had come through the storm and out the other side.
He kissed her deeply. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked. ‘The place looks good.’
‘We’ll be ready for Saturday.’ She smiled. ‘You’ll be here, won’t you?’
‘I wouldn’t miss it.’
They kissed again, and as Rachel felt his arms around her she realised she had loved Jack from the instant she’d met him, from the moment he’d challenged her, from the sheer and special difference of their worlds, from the morning she’d climbed into his Land Rover and seen all those dog blankets strewn across the back seat.
Jack accepted her past and the complications of her future. Rachel had told him of her plans to trace her biological father. This man was the last piece and he was out there somewhere, the man who had known Sarah Thripps and the last vessel that carried Rachel’s blood. Even if he were dead, even if he were a disappointment, she could handle it. At first Jack had worried such a journey would cause her pain. But when she explained, he understood. ‘I’m with you all the way,’ he’d said.
And supposing her father wasn’t either of those things? Supposing he was alive, and well, and had been looking for her too? Stranger things had happened.
‘Come with me,’ said Rachel. She took Jack’s hand and they went outside into the welcome sunshine, walking across the gravel towards the orangery.
‘Look at this place!’ he exclaimed.
‘Impressive, isn’t it? It’s just missing one last thing…’
Rachel lifted the framed image of Alice and Jonathan and rested it on the hook on the wall. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, standing back. And at that moment, with the house serenely behind her and the warmth of summer bathing her skin, she felt that all was, at last, right and well in this little corner of the world.
‘It’s perfect,’ said Jack.
She squeezed his hand.
‘That’s what I thought.’