willing to do any work that’s going. After Operation Vestal I spent a lot of predawn time online, checking hostel prices and job ads in various languages and doing the maths. There are plenty of cities where you can get a crap flat for three hundred quid a month, or a hostel bed for a tenner a night; figure in your flight, and enough cash to feed you for a few weeks while you answer ads for bar staff or sandwich makers or tour guides, and you’re talking a brand-new life for the price of a secondhand car. I had two grand saved up: more than enough.
And Lexie knew all that better than I did; she had done it before. She wouldn’t have needed to find a lost Rembrandt in the back of her wardrobe. All she would have needed was the right little trinket-a good bit of jewelry, a rare piece of porcelain, I’ve heard of teddy bears going for hundreds-and the right buyer; and the willingness to sell bits of this house, out from under the others.
She had run off in Chad’s car, but I would have been willing to swear on just about anything that that was different. This had been her home.
“I’d get us all new bed frames,” I said. “The springs in mine stick into me straight through the mattress, like the princess and the pea, and I can hear every time Justin turns over,” and I flipped the music box open again, to end this conversation.
Abby sang along, softly, turning the clay pipe in her hands: “Greensleeves is all my joy, Greensleeves is my delight…” Rafe turned the clockwork mouse over and started examining the gears. Justin flicked one of the marbles expertly into another, which rolled across the floor and clicked neatly against Daniel’s mug; he glanced up from a tin soldier, smiling, his hair falling across his forehead. I watched them and ran my fingers over the old silk and hoped to God I had been telling the truth.
12
The next evening, after dinner, I went fishing in Uncle Simon’s epic masterpiece for information about a dead Glenskehy girl. It would have been a lot simpler to do this on my own, but that would have meant throwing a sickie from college, and I didn’t want to worry the others unless I really needed to; so Rafe and Daniel and I were sitting on the spare-room floor, with the Marches’ family tree spread out between us. Abby and Justin were downstairs, playing piquet.
The family tree was a huge sheet of thick, tattered paper covered with a wild variety of handwritings, from delicate, browning ink at the top-James March, born ca. 1598, m. Elizabeth Kempe 1619-to Uncle Simon’s spider scrawl at the bottom: Edward Thomas Hanrahan, born 1975, and last of all Daniel James March, born 1979. “This is the only thing in this room that’s intelligible,” Daniel said, picking a bit of cobweb off the corner, “presumably because Simon didn’t write it himself. The rest… we can try having a look, Lexie, if you’re really that interested, but as far as I can tell he wrote most of it when he was very, very drunk.”
“Hey,” I said, leaning over to point. “There’s your William. The black sheep.”
“William Edward March,” Daniel said, putting a finger gently on the name. “Born 1894, died 1983. Yes; that’s him. I wonder where he ended up.” William was one of only a handful that had made it past forty. Sam had been right, the Marches died young.
“Let’s see if we can find him in here,” I said, pulling a box towards me. “I’m getting curious about this guy. I want to know what the big scandal was.”
“Girls,” Rafe said loftily, “always sniffing for gossip,” but he reached for another box.
Daniel was right, most of the saga was almost illegible-Uncle Simon went in for lots of underlining and no space between lines, Victorian-style. I didn’t need to read it; I was only scanning for the tall curves of a capital W and M. I’m not sure what I was hoping we’d find. Nothing, maybe; or something that whacked the Rathowen story right out of court, proved that the girl had moved to London with her baby and set up a successful dressmaking business and lived happily ever after.
Downstairs I could hear Justin saying something and Abby laughing, faint and faraway. The three of us didn’t talk; the only sound was the soft, steady rustle of paper. The room was cool and dim, a blurred moon hanging outside the window, and the pages left a dry film of dust on my fingers.
“Oh, here we go,” Rafe said suddenly. “ ‘William March was the subject of much unjust and-sensational?- something, which finally cost him both his health and…’ Jesus, Daniel. Your uncle must have been trolleyed. Is this even in English?”
“Let me see,” Daniel said, leaning across to look. “ ‘Both his health and his rightful place in society,’ I think.” He took the sheaf of pages from Rafe and pushed his glasses up his nose. “ ‘The facts,’ ” he read slowly, running a finger under the line, “ ‘stripped of rumormongering, are as follows: from 1914 through 1915 William March served in the Great War, where he’-that has to be ‘acquitted’-‘himself well, later being awarded the Military Cross for his acts of bravery. This alone should-something-all low gossip. In 1915 William March was discharged, suffering from a shrapnel wound to the shoulder and from severe shell-shock-’ ”
“Post-traumatic stress,” Rafe said. He was leaning back against the wall, hands behind his head, to listen. “Poor bastard.”
“I can’t read this bit,” Daniel said. “Something about what he had seen-in battle, I assume; that word’s ‘cruel.’ Then it says: ‘He dissolved his engagement to Miss Alice West and took no part in the amusements of his set, preferring to spend his time among the common people of Glenskehy village, much to the anxiety of all parties. All concerned realized that this’-unnatural, I think-‘connection could not have a happy result.’ ”
“Snobs,” said Rafe.
“Look who’s talking,” I said, scooting across the floor to rest my chin on Daniel’s shoulder and try to make out the words. So far, no surprises, but I knew-could not have a happy result-this was it.
“ ‘About this time,’ ” Daniel read, tilting the page so I could see, “ ‘a young girl of the village found herself in an unfortunate situation, and named William March as the father of her unborn child. Whatever the truth may have been, the people of Glenskehy, who were then well trained in morals unlike these present times’ ”-“morals” was underlined twice-“ ‘were shocked at her loose conduct. It was the strong-belief?-of all the village that the girl should remove her shame from their midst by entering a Magdalen convent, and till this should come about they made her an outcast among themselves.’ ”
No happy ending, no little dress shop in London. Some girls never escaped the Magdalen laundries. They stayed slaves-for getting pregnant, getting raped, being orphaned, being too pretty-till they went to nameless graves.
Daniel kept reading, quiet and even. I could feel the vibration of his voice against my shoulder. “ ‘The girl, however, either despairing of her soul or unwilling to perform the prescribed penance, took her life. William March-whether because he had in fact been her partner in sin, or because he had already witnessed too much bloodshed-was greatly affected by this. His health failed him, and when he recovered he abandoned family, friends and home to begin anew elsewhere. Little is known of his later life. These events may be taken as a lesson in the dangers of lust, or of mixing outside the boundaries of one’s natural level in society, or of…’ ” Daniel broke off. “I can’t read the rest. That’s all there is about William, anyway; the next paragraph is about a racehorse.”
“Jesus,” I said softly. The room felt cold all of a sudden, cold and too airy, as if the window had slammed open behind us.
“They treated her like a leper till she cracked,” Rafe said. There was a taut little twist to one corner of his mouth. “And till William had a breakdown and left town. So it’s not just a recent development, then, Glenskehy being Lunatic Central.”
I felt a slight shudder run down Daniel’s back. “That’s a nasty little story,” he said. “It really is. Sometimes I wonder if the best thing would be for ‘no pasts’ to apply to the house, as well. Although…” He glanced around, at the room full of dusty battered things, the ragged-papered walls; the dark-spotted mirror, down the corridor, reflecting the three of us in blues and shadows through the open door. “I’m not sure,” he said, almost to himself, “that that’s an option.”
He tapped the edges of the pages straight and put them carefully back in their case, closed the lid. “I don’t know about you two,” he said, “but I think I’ve had enough for tonight. Let’s go back to the others.”
