CHAPTER TWO

Grandpa’s disaster had come from a blue sky, as disaster often does. The telegram he sent Vita’s mother had been short: YOUR MUM DIED LAST NIGHT.

Vita had sat on the doormat, unable to move. Her mother, white-faced, carried her into bed, where together they drank blackcurrant cordial and told each other stories of Grandma, who had travelled the world with Grandpa and had a guttural laugh like a sailor’s. The stories helped them both a little, as stories often do.

But that had not been the end of it. More letters followed. The first were dark, and short. Hudson Castle, Grandpa wrote, felt full of ghosts.

Hudson Castle was very small, judging by castle standards. It had been uprooted from its hilltop in France and shipped, stone by stone, across the ocean to America by Vita’s great-great-great-grandfather. The castle had been thought, in its day, both very grand and mildly insane. Now it was run-down, crumbling, beautiful, and inhabited only by Grandpa, entirely alone.

But then hope had crept in. A man, Grandpa wrote, had offered to rent Hudson Castle. He had offered to transform it into a school. Grandpa would stay on as a governor; it would give him new purpose, something to do. No paperwork had been signed, but the man was eager to begin renovations. The man’s name was Sorrotore, a New York millionaire.

He enclosed a press cutting, showing a man standing outside a vast New York building, smiling at the camera with Hollywood teeth. ‘Victor Sorrotore outside his home in the Dakota,’ read the caption.

‘Victor Sorrotore,’ whispered Vita, and she memorised his face, just in case.

Within a week, Sorrotore struck. Grandfather returned from an afternoon walk to find his way back home barred. A strange man with two guard dogs came out of the caretaker’s cottage and pointed a rifle at him. ‘Hudson Castle belongs to Mr Sorrotore,’ the guard had said. ‘Scram!’

Grandpa had never in his adult life been told to scram. He had tried to push past the guard, and one of the dogs had bitten his ankle; not a snap but a true bite, which drew blood. The gun was levelled at his chest. Bewildered, he took the train to New York, rented the tiny apartment on Seventh Avenue, and found Sorrotore’s lawyer.

The lawyer expressed surprise as only lawyers can, his eyebrows riding so high up his face they nearly reached the back of his neck. Grandpa knew very well, the lawyer said, that he had sold the castle to Sorrotore. The money was there, in Grandpa’s account. A very small sum – only $200 – but it was understood that Hudson Castle had become a burden, one Grandpa was glad to be rid of. Grandpa checked his account; it was true.

Grandpa tried to hire a lawyer of his own, to demand that Sorrotore produce the title deeds, but he could find none who would take the case without more money than he had. ‘Justice,’ he wrote in his final letter, ‘seems to be only for those who can afford it.’ He would try, now, to forget the house in which he had been born. He would try, he wrote, to forget his life there with Lizzy: it was safer that way.

Upon receipt of this last letter, Vita’s heart had swooped into her throat. Hudson Castle was Grandpa’s home. It was where he could live alongside all his memories of Grandma Lizzy. ‘No,’ she whispered.

She had seen her mother’s face, and it had given her hope. Her mother was soft-bodied, sweet-voiced, and iron-willed. The two shared the same brown eyes, and the same stubborn jawline.

The next day, her mother returned from town with two tickets in hand. ‘We’re bringing him back here, whether he likes it or not. The ship sails from Liverpool,’ she had said. ‘We leave tonight.’

Vita saw that her mother’s engagement and wedding rings had gone from her left hand. She didn’t ask more, only went to her bedroom to pack, her boots smacking on the floor like a soldier’s on the way to battle.

It was Grandpa who taught Vita to throw.

Vita’s grandfather’s name was Jack Welles. Or, technically – because he had come from the kind of family that believed in long names, long cars, and long dinners – his name was William Jonathan Theodore Maximilian Welles. The family fortune had long since disappeared, but the habit of extravagant naming remained. His father was American, his mother and his schooling were English. Jack was a jeweller by trade, tall enough for doorways to pose a hazard, and thin enough to fit his legs through a letterbox.

When Vita was five, two things happened: her father was killed in the Great War, and she contracted polio. Her mother fought against the disease with wild, unsleeping passion. For long dark months Vita lay in a hospital bed, lifted out for baths in almond meal and oxidised water. She was given chloride of gold to drink, and wine of pepsin. She began to look far older than she was.

And then one day her grandparents arrived from America. Grandpa sat by her bed, gave her a ping-pong ball, and told her to call him when she could hit the head surgeon with it. Then he drew, with the steady hand of a jeweller, a very small bullseye on the far hospital wall.

She missed, and missed, until she did not.

Grandpa coached her like an athlete. He was a crack shot himself, and Vita spent hours throwing. She threw pebbles, marbles, darts, paper aeroplanes. When she came home from hospital, aged seven, she could send steak knives in elegant loops to land upright in a pat of butter across the room.

Vita grew, and her bones grew stronger, and eventually her leg brace was put away. Her left calf was thinner than her right, and her left foot curved in on itself, and her shoes were made, gratis, by a cobbler in the softest leather he could find. Her mother top-stitched them with red silk, and embroidered birds on them. She could run, though it made the muscles pull and burn, and although Vita willingly complained of cuts, and demanded bandages where there was very little blood, she never breathed a word about that particular pain.

She grew up small, and still, and watchful. She had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real. All of them were worth seeing. Her hair was the reddish-brown of a freshly washed fox.

Vita’s mother Julia only once raised the question of Vita’s constant target practice.

‘She won’t have it easy,’ said Grandpa. ‘And she looks so breakable. She might as well know how to throw a rock or two.’

By the time Vita was eight, she could hit an apple in the highest branches of a tree from fifty paces. She could skim a stone and make it bounce twenty-three times. ‘Back home, your Grandpa’s the best shot in town,’ said Grandma Lizzy. She was a tall woman, with a stern nose and richly kind eyes. ‘But I think you’re better.’

Grandpa watched Vita bowl overarm at the sea. ‘Now learn about velocity: learn how the air makes things twist. Look it up! Learn it! Learn as much as you can, for learning is the very opposite of death! Wonderful!’ Grandpa was the only person Vita knew who seemed to spark electricity when he talked, as if he struck against the world like flint against steel.

Eventually, Grandpa and Grandma went back to America, back to Hudson Castle. It was shortly after this that everything changed, and led Vita here, to her tiny room in the attic, looking out as the sun set over New York City.