When Atticus and Lucie Fox stepped down onto the platform at Bardon Mill railway station, they stepped down into a bustle of industry and a mass of people going about their daily business just as they would be in Harrogate. They were, perhaps, a degree less fashionable and a little less affluent than their counterparts to the south, but what they lacked in sophistication was more than compensated for in the warmth of their faces, in the cordiality of their smiles and in the richness of the South Tyne Valley.
A tall, strikingly handsome man in the uniform of a footman complete with felted top hat and, despite the heat of the day, a great, black cape-coat stood waiting for them on the platform. He lifted his hat and looked enquiringly in their direction. Atticus smiled in response and took out one of their thick, embossed calling cards. He said, “Mr and Mrs Atticus Fox of Harrogate,” and the footman bowed smartly, clicked his heels and took the card respectfully between his white-gloved fingers.
The required protocols satisfied, he cleared his throat and read: “‘A. & L. Fox, Commissioned Investigators,’” then twisted the card slightly to read the smaller, italicised script underneath: “Quo Fata Vocant.”
Looking up, he grinned as he translated easily: “Whither the Fates call.”
Atticus was both taken with the footman’s reading of the Latin in his broad, lilting Northumbrian accent and taken aback by the ease of his translation.
“You speak Latin very well,” he said.
The footman laughed genially. He had very white, very even teeth.
“Aye, well I really don’t, sir, begging your pardon. My father didn’t think it worth the penny a term it cost to learn Latin and Greek at the Bobby Shaftoe. That’s the school in the next village, Hayden Bridge, where I did my letters. No, sir, I’ve served a time in the Northumbrian county regiment; the Fifth Regiment of Foot, and by coincidence Quo Fata Vocant was our regimental motto.”
He laughed again and, servant though he was, they both warmed to him.
“Welcome to Hexhamshire, Mr and Mrs Fox. My name is James and I’ve been sent doon by the colonel, Sir Hugh Lowther, to fetch you to Shields Tower. Follow me, if you please.”
He bowed again and led them across the railway tracks to a large square of open ground adjacent to the Station Master’s house. There, a glossy black carriage stood aloof from the carts and wagons of miscellaneous freight that filled the yard. It was harnessed to a team of four perfectly-matched bay horses with their sleek coats curried to perfection. The coachman, dressed identically to their escort, stood in his seat and raised his top hat as they approached, and several onlookers turned to see who the important personages might be.
“This is taken from Sir Hugh Lowther’s coat-of-arms, I presume?” Atticus asked, nodding at a beautifully detailed crest set against the paintwork of the carriage door.
“It’s the Lowther family crest, yes, sir,” replied James, touching the brim of his hat. He pulled the front of his cape-coat to one side and bared an identical device embroidered onto the breast of his jacket. It was a white dragon.
“The colonel uses it for his household livery too.”
“Dragon, passant, argent,” murmured Atticus.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“White dragon, passant – it’s the heraldry of the crest. Do you see that the dragon is walking to the left with its right forepaw raised? One cannot live in Harrogate and not be fascinated by the subject of heraldry.”
Lucie coughed suddenly.
“The motto is interesting too,” Atticus continued: “Magistratus indicat virum – The office shows the man.”
He grunted thoughtfully.
“I’m not sure I wholly agree with the words, though.”
“No, sir,” said the footman.
After a moment Atticus said, “James, we have come all the way up from Yorkshire today. We’ve been sitting for hours and hours in all manner of cramped railway carriages, so while we recover ourselves,” he glanced back at the still-stationary train, “and whilst we wait for the porter to fetch us our trunks and our bicycles, pray, what can you tell us about Sir Hugh Lowther?”
The shadow of what might have been panic jolted the laughter from the footman’s face. He hesitated.
“I’m not at all sure it would be my place to make comment about the colonel, begging your pardon, Mr Fox.”
“Oh, come now, James,” Lucie purred. “My husband isn’t asking for your opinion of Colonel Lowther, only for a little bit about him as a gentleman. It would be a great help to us.”
James looked at her dubiously, but his resolve had clearly broken.
“Aye, well… I suppose as you’ve asked me directly, and as my orders are to render you every assistance, I could try.”
He stood straight and tall, almost as if he might have been back on the regimental parade ground at Spital Tongues.
“Well, first off I should say that Sir Hugh Lowther is a soldier in every proper sense of the word – a very fine and valiant, first-line soldier and the colonel of the ‘Fighting Fifth.’ That is the Fifth Regiment of Foot, ma’am, or the Northumberland Fusiliers, as they’re called these days. He has fought with the greatest honour all around the Empire, just like his father and his grandfather before him, and I can truly say that he’s the bravest man I have ever known.
“I served with him in the Fighting Fifth, myself. That was back in the fifties, during the Indian Rebellion.”
He paused, a smile lingering again on his lips, lost suddenly in his own recollections.
“I could tell you a tale or two about that.
“Sir Hugh is all but retired from the army now though. He has been since his father, Sir Douglas Lowther, fell ill a twelvemonth or so ago. Sir Hugh is his only son, you understand, and he had to take over the estate. He also has interests in a number of coal mines and iron works across Northumberland and he owns one of the big tanneries in Hexham. As you might imagine, he is a rich man, a very wealthy man indeed.”
“Shields Tower is a large estate then?” Atticus asked.
“Aye, sir, it’s a very large estate; several thousand acres in total, mainly tenanted out except for the home farm which is called Shields Tower Farm. Sir Hugh isn’t especially interested in the management of the estate and he leaves the running of it pretty well entirely to a land steward, a grand gentleman by the name of John Lawson. Besides, with all his other interests, he’s kept very busy. I declare we see less of him now than we did when he was away fighting with the regiment.”
“Does he have any family?” asked Lucie. “A wife or children?”
“Oh aye, Mrs Fox, aye he does. He has a son; Master Arthur, or Master Artie as we all generally call him, a tall, strapping, young gentleman of twenty-one, and a very beautiful daughter; Miss Jennifer, who is Master Artie’s younger half-sister.”
“Half-sister; so Sir Hugh has been married more than once?”
James nodded.
“Yes, ma’am, he’s been married twice now. Lady Igraine, the first Lady Lowther, vanished one day from the Great Whin Sill, a huge ridge that stretches across the county as far as the coast at Bamburgh. It was around a year after Master Artie was born. She was presumed to have got lost and perished on the moors, though they never found her body.”
In spite of the heat of the day, he shivered under his heavy cape-coat.
“It can be awful bleak up there. There are supposed to be wolves on the fells… and worse.”
His gaze drifted past them, towards the steep hillside beyond the village and he shivered again.
Atticus and Lucie glanced at each other and waited in respectful silence until James’ss thoughts returned once more to the here and now.
“Sir Hugh married a young widow soon afterwards. Lady Victoria Lowther died in childbirth whilst bearing Miss Jennifer.”
“Oh poor Sir Hugh; how very unfortunate he’s been,” Lucie exclaimed. “Losing not just one, but two wives. I’m very sorry for him. But Lady Igraine, what a beautiful, romantic name that is.”
“Aye it is, ma’am, it’s a very beautiful and romantic name for a very beautiful and romantic lady. We all utterly adored her. I had the honour to serve as her footman in my younger days. She was vivacious and charming and full of passion, with never a day of sadness or a day of sickness in all of her tragically short life.”
“It’s a very unusual name too.” Atticus tapped his fingertips thoughtfully on his chin. “Arthurian, unless I’m very much mistaken.”
“You’re quite right, Mr Fox, it is. You see, there are many old legends about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table hereabouts. Sewingshields Castle, up on the moors not far from here, was the site of one of King Arthur’s castles and his final resting place. Many people locally are named for characters from the Arthurian tales and Igraine was the name of King Arthur’s mammy.”
“That’s it,” Atticus exclaimed. “Igraine was the wife of King Uther Pendragon, King Arthur’s father.”
“Which is why Lady Igraine Lowther named her son Arthur I presume?” Lucie added.
“Exactly, Mrs Fox. She insisted on it by all accounts, even though Sir Hugh wanted to call him Douglas after his own father and the colonel usually gets his way. But Arthur did seem so natural and fitting.”
“Didn’t Sir Hugh’s father mind?”
“Not at all, Mr Fox. Sir Douglas adored Lady Igraine and with him she could do no wrong. He thought her the most beautiful woman in Christendom.”
He chuckled.
“He always used to say that she was lovely enough to eat.”
His grin froze.
“Aye, he was right too. Lady Igraine was born here, in Bardon Mill village, but she left to become a singer and a dancer in Newcastle. That’s where Sir Hugh first met her – in the Theatre Royal there. She was very beautiful, with long, dark auburn hair and a kind of wildness, a bit o’ mischief in her eyes that meant he fell instantly in love with her. We all did in fact, meaning no disrespect to the colonel.”
“There must have been some who considered it a rather unsuitable marriage though,” Lucie ventured. “That he married beneath himself perhaps?”
“Aye, and that’s right enough; a canny few did but the colonel would hear nothing of it. He said he was fated to be with her and married her anyway, in the great Abbey at Hexham.”
He nodded past them. “And at last, here are your trunks and bicycles.”
James chuckled as he glanced significantly once more at the slope leading up to the village of Bardon Mill and the much steeper hills beyond.
“If I might be so bold, Mr and Mrs Fox, the lanes of Tynedale will require some rather strenuous pedalling.”
The carriage swayed slightly on its big, iron leaf springs as the trunks were loaded and the heavy bicycles were passed up to the roof, and it rocked again as James clambered up to join his companion up front.
“All set, Mr Grey,” he said, and the coachman duly urged the team into a brisk trot. They glided through the open gates of the station yard towards the village itself. Dozens of children seemed to have appeared from nowhere along the road and they stood shyly in front of the low, heather-thatched cottages that flanked it to watch as the elegant coach-and-four swept past. Lucie, feeling rather grand, smiled and waved to them through the windows and almost immediately, the whole village seemed to be waving back.
The four bays leaned into their harnesses as the lane steepened and they soon left the long ribbon of houses and the village pottery works with its tall, square chimneys far below. Green hedgerows became dry stone walls and lush meadows, bleak grassy moorland and scrubby trees hunched permanently from the wind.
Lucie was utterly entranced.
“Atticus, isn’t this the most romantic place you’ve ever seen? You can almost imagine King Arthur and his gallant knights galloping across the fells.”
Atticus grunted.
“Oh, and is that the castle James mentioned, Sewingshields Castle, over there?” She pressed a finger against the glass of the carriage window. Atticus leaned across her and looked. A cluster of low, stone ruins were pressed into the grass of the moors just below them.
Then a tiny hatch slid open in the roof above and they looked up to see James’ss earnest face framed in the square.
“I beg your pardon, Mr and Mrs Fox, but to your left you can see the remains of the old Roman fortress of Chesterholm. There were a canny few Roman forts built around here with it being so close to Hadrian’s Wall an’ all. There’s another up on the Wall itself, called Housesteads. It’s much more complete.” He sounded like a sixpenny tour guide.
“Thank you, James.” In spite of her words, disappointment dampened Lucie’s tone. After a moment she admitted: “We thought it might have been Sewingshields Castle.”
“No, ma’am,” the footman explained patiently, “Sewingshields is up on the high moors beyond the Wall. If you ever wanted to go there, it’s out to the north-east of Shields Tower and a little way east of the Broomlee Lough, which is one of the small lakes there are around here.”
Lucie smiled, thanked him and settled back into the plump, buttoned-leather of the seat.