SURE ENOUGH, IT’S DEEP SNOW by the time she gets to the Dales. Not the picturesque kind of snow – not soft flakes landing on the tongue like peppermint feathers – this is great gobbets of white hurtling towards the windscreen. Lily speeds up the wipers to double-time but it’s still like driving into a vortex. She can’t see where she’s going. And that doesn’t just apply to the snowstorm.
The light’s fading already. Half past two, and the sky is the cold dark blue of flames tickling a Christmas pudding. The Yorkshire lanes don’t help – artery-narrow, hedgerows encroaching on the road like bad cholesterol. And then there are the trees, whispering and shushing above her, heads together, plotting.
Last time Lily was on this road, she was going the other way. Aged twelve, driven from Endgame House for what she thought was the last time. If Lily believed in ghosts it’d be different, she’d have stalked its halls forever trying to find her mother’s spectre. But she doesn’t believe in ghosts, or much else.
As she drives round a corner, a deer rushes out. Slamming on the brakes, time treacles as she tries to stop the car from spinning into the bank. Greenery whirls around her. She hears a screech but can’t tell if it’s from her, the wheels, or the deer. If this is it, the end, maybe it’d be easier to lift her hands from the wheel and close her eyes.
No.
She grips the wheel and steers away from the open arms of a tree. She has responsibilities now, and part of that involves returning to Endgame House.
When the car steams to a stop, there’s no sign of the deer. Please don’t be dead, she says in her head as she climbs out. Heart pounding, she bends to check under the chassis. Nothing. And no heart-wrenching remnants on the wheels. She breathes out and, at the same time, hears a harrumph, an exhale from the bushes. A deer is among the trees to the side of the car. Her fawn stands next to her, its ears cupped.
The deer stares at Lily, and she gazes back. Snow settles on both of their heads. The deer blinks, then walks away, her fawn following. Their breath condenses into ghosts. She watches till both animals disappear, safe, into the trees.
As Lily gets back into the car, she spots the snowflakes on her sleeves. Cog-like, silver in the half-light, they turn the black arms of her coat into steampunk chain mail. She has an image of making a corset-dress of armoured snowflakes for her first collection, of standing on a runway with an army of models wearing Lily Armitage couture.
Then, like a chamois on a windscreen, she swipes the thought away. She’s learned to not stick her neck out, in business or otherwise. She’ll keep to the historical replicas she’s known for. Don’t stand out. Don’t speak up. Stay in the shadows, and then you can’t be seen.
Driving away, the car coughs and sputters like it’s got something in its throat. She pats the steering wheel. ‘We can do this,’ she says. She hopes the car is more convinced than she is. ‘Not far now.’ And it shouldn’t be. The villages, with their single, clinged-to pubs, are getting further apart. Why are country houses plonked in the middle of nowhere? Probably because the resident lords owned the whole area and wanted to avoid the plebs. She imagines the one-time owners of Endgame House standing by the front door, looking out over their land from the top of the hill, tenant farmers far off below – worker bees kept at a distance so the queen needn’t be bothered by their buzzing.
Lily prefers London, or any of the other cities she’s lived in. There’s always something to listen to, even if it’s the sirens that sound as regularly as the chapel bell at Endgame House. And you’re never cut off from people, at least not in the same way. She can choose to isolate herself in the city, hunker down with a sewing pattern, not see anyone for days. Here, snow doesn’t give you a choice but to stay put. She used to love the snow days at Endgame House, running around the maze, even more difficult to navigate in a whiteout, hearing the silence a snowstorm brings. Now the thought of being shut in with her family makes her throat constrict.
Which is why, when Aunt Liliana had first sent the invitation to Endgame House, Lily had turned it down. She had no interest in playing one last Christmas Game to see who would win the title deeds.
But then, a month ago, Liliana had died and, two days later, her letter arrived. Everything changed. Feelings she thought she’d stuffed down deep enough to never resurface had emerged, like last year’s gnarled and forgotten orange from the bottom of a stocking. Coming back to where it all started would only make it worse.
Even the satnav doesn’t want to direct her to the house. With hardly any signal here, it keeps glitching, refusing to refresh while she continues to drive. As a result, she only sees the burgundy sign for ENDGAME HOUSE HOTEL as she drives past. Her heart beats faster. This is the first time she’ll have seen it as a hotel. When she lived at Endgame House, it was a conference centre, run by Uncle Edward, with help from Aunt Liliana and Mum. Edward had long had a dream of turning it into a fancy hotel, but his dream had only recently come to pass when he died. Moral of the story – don’t have dreams, and never let them come true.
It’s another five minutes before she finds a place to turn round, and every one of those minutes involves wondering whether she should go back to London. And now’s the time to make the decision. She’s at the gates to Endgame that bar the road into the estate. As the gates part, the family crest sculptured in bronze splits down the middle. You don’t have to stay, she tells herself as she drives through. You can leave at any time. In the rear-view mirror, the gates clamp closed behind her.
The car groans and digs deep, as does she, as they start up the hill. She’d forgotten how steep it was, but then she’d never had to drive up it in a fifteen-year-old Mini whose suspension had got lower with every one of those years.
The forest that encircles the estate presses in, as if trying to stare through the car windows. She used to play among the trees with Tom and Ronnie, two of her cousins. Playful images of wading in the stream disappear as the muddy incline relents its gradient and is clothed in gravel. The forest stands back, as if afraid to go any further.
She drives onto the circular gravel driveway. Every sound of the stones moving under the tyres brings up a new memory – bringing a huge Christmas tree home on the roof of her mum’s car; her cousins arriving for a summer of fun; the silent ambulance taking her mum’s body away.
The car gives a throaty sigh of relief as she pulls up. Lily, though, holds her breath. Her shoulders lift as if they could hide behind her ears. Her hands form fists. She can’t bring herself to look at the house, not yet, but she feels its presence all the same. Endgame House looms just out of her peripheral vision, as it has every day since she left all those years ago.
It takes every bit of strength she has not to turn the car round. Instead, Lily takes her aunt’s letter from her pocket and reads through it again.
She then closes her eyes and conjures the last time she saw Liliana. It was a few weeks before she died. They were in the Orchard Tea Rooms, walking distance from the house Liliana had lived in ever since moving from Endgame when Lily’s mum died. She had accepted a fellowship at her alma mater, Clare College, adopted Lily, and taken her, with Sara and Gray, Liliana’s biological children, to live in Grantchester. They were having lunch to celebrate Aunt Liliana’s retirement from her position as Chair of English at Cambridge. At least that’s why Lily had thought they were there.
Liliana had piled a scone with so much butter, jam, cream and fruit that it was a patisserie Buckaroo, toppling before she got it to her mouth. She laughed so much she spilled cider on her tweed skirt. She brushed it off and said, loudly, ‘That’s why you should make corsets out of tweed, darling, it resists the most pernicious of stains.’
‘There aren’t many historical frocks made of tweed, Aunt Lil.’
‘You should be moving on from all that, Lily,’ her aunt said. ‘Rehashing the work of others is hardly artistic. It’s not like you’re putting a new spin on things. Don’t you think it’s time you did something with your life?’
‘I’m fine as I am,’ Lily said. Her lips knitted together.
‘No one says they’re “fine” and means it. “Fine” means anything but.’ Aunt Liliana then sighed and grabbed Lily’s hand. Her face suddenly serious, she whispered, ‘You will come this Christmas, won’t you?’
‘I can’t,’ Lily replied. ‘You know that.’
Liliana fixed her eyes on Lily’s and said, ‘If not for me, then for your mother.’
She was invoking Mum, blackmailing Lily into attending. Anger unspooled in Lily. She whipped back her hand. She wanted to shout, say exactly what she thought. Instead, she gripped the table and looked down at the placemat. ‘That’s not fair, Liliana,’ Lily said, quietly. ‘It’s only a game.’
‘This isn’t entertainment, Lily, it’s life or death.’
‘I thought it was about inheriting the house.’
‘On the surface level, it is. But it’s more than that.’
‘Then tell me,’ Lily said, leaning forward. ‘Let me in, for once.’
Aunt Liliana laughed. There was a splinter of ice running through it. ‘Says you, the snow queen herself. You have your locked doors, Lily, and I have mine. And I shall open mine, in my own way. At Christmas.’ Aunt Liliana looked around the tearoom. Bunting fluttered from wooden beams as the door opened, letting in the autumn wind. ‘Winter is on its way. It’s time both you and I faced up to things. Time you stepped out of your locked room and found your way home.’
‘I don’t have anything to face,’ Lily said, quietly. ‘And I don’t have a home.’
‘Everyone has a home,’ Aunt Liliana replied. ‘It doesn’t have to be a place; home could be a person. Or a cat.’ Aunt Liliana stroked her leg as if her cat, Winston (‘after Smith, not Churchill’), was hunkered down on her lap. ‘Sometimes it takes a very long time to find our home.’ She looked out of the window, a flash of pain on her face. Then turned back to Lily. Her eyes were the same dark blue, shot through with skeins of green, as Lily’s. Liliana, though, had a corona of amber around her pupil, which now seemed to blaze: a lump of coal encroached by fire. They always did that when she was about to say something cruel and/or insightful. ‘But if you don’t have a home, why are you drawing the maze on your placemat?’
Lily looked down. Her right forefinger was tracing the way through Endgame House’s famous hedged labyrinth.
‘You got stuck in that maze when you found your mum dead at the centre,’ Liliana said. ‘If you don’t enter it again, you’ll never get out.’
Anger ran through Lily. She closed her eyes, and imagined that rage as thread, wrapped round a bobbin, and fed through a needle. She would use it later. For now, she took two ten pound notes from her wallet, let them float like autumn leaves onto the table, and left.
Liliana had phoned many times in the days that followed, but Lily hadn’t answered, or replied to her messages. She hadn’t known what to say. So she didn’t. She kept silent.
And then it was too late.
After she’d first read the letter, she sat with it on her lap for what must have been an hour. Her heart hurt and she kept whispering, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ over and over.
Lily now folds the letter and places it carefully back in its envelope, trying to tuck the memory away with it. She takes a deep breath and taps the steering wheel – the car’s done its job. Now she has to do hers.
Out of the safety of her little car, she walks across the gravel, head down so she can’t see the house. She concentrates instead on the way the snow battles with the stones – the early skirmishers fall and melt, but the next phalanx of snowflakes settles, and the next. Row after row of snow soldiers stand on each other’s white shoulders until all is conquered.
At the centre of the drive, she stops at the sundial and swipes the snow from its top. The message on its cracked face reads: THERE IS NOT TIME ENOUGH. Cheery. Especially in bleak midwinter, when the day scarpers before it’s started. Mum taught her to tell the time in this very spot. Lily traces her fingers over the raised numerals, her touch covering that of her mum’s from years ago.
The low sun leaves a long shadow, telling her it’s just gone three. The letter told her to arrive at teatime – 3.30 p.m. Teatime here, in the gorgeous north, the wilds of Yorkshire, means dinnertime in the south. Only at a posh place like Endgame House would teatime mean anything other than supper.
She can’t put it off any longer. She’ll have to look at the house eventually, it might as well be now. Lily takes a deep breath. Raises her head.
Endgame House is even darker than she remembers. A hulking, seventeenth-century grey manor house made from marble and limestone that once, she was many times told as a child, seemed to glow at dawn and dusk. Now it absorbs all the light around it and keeps its secrets close. Curtains are drawn on the many windows. Ready or not, here she comes.