nothing wrong and it was clear that Peter needed her so much for his work.
Anne could tell that Greta had changed her accent, and she felt that the girl was watching her in order to imitate her. It sometimes almost seemed as if Greta was trying to become her.
“She’s not one of us,” she had once caught herself saying to her husband in an unguarded moment, but she had accepted his retaliatory accusation of snobbery as just. Forgiveness was part of the code of manners by which Lady Anne lived her life, and she had forced herself to accept Peter’s explanation for why Greta had tried on the dresses. She had money and Greta didn’t, and if she’d been nicer to her, then perhaps Greta would have felt able to ask to borrow a dress or two.
Thomas, of course, didn’t see it that way. It was ironic, given all the efforts that Greta had made to get on with him. All those books she’d read about Suffolk. Lady Anne didn’t know how she’d found time. It was as if something more had happened in her bedroom when Thomas found Greta trying on her clothes, but there was no point in asking her son. He’d found it difficult enough to tell her about the dresses.
“Let’s not talk about Greta or your father, Tom. I know things aren’t easy at the moment with what’s happened with Barton, but you shouldn’t try to make them worse. You’re not the only one who misses Barton. Jane loved him and so did I. What we both need is a change of scenery. London’ll be good for us.”
There was a note of appeal in his mother’s voice that Thomas could not resist. He loved his mother and could not bear to make her anxious or distressed. That would lead to one of the terrible migraines that hurt her so badly. The long afternoons when his mother lay on her bed with her face covered by a flannel sighing with the pain were the worst days of his childhood. Afterward she would be weak for days, sitting in the rocking chair by the kitchen door in her dressing gown, drinking the cups of peppermint tea that Aunt Jane made for her in a special teapot.
“Yes, Mum. I’m being silly. I’d love to go with you. I’ll go and get packed.”
“Jane’s washed your shirts. They’re in the laundry room. And you’ll need to take your blazer for the theater.”
“The theater? What are we going to see?”
“Macbeth. At the Globe. I’ve got tickets for Thursday night. Just you and me.”
“Macbeth! Oh, Mummy, I love you! It’s the one I’ve always wanted to see.” Thomas ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and hurried to his room to get ready.
Lady Anne smiled. What a strange boy he was! It was the first time in two weeks that she’d heard real happiness in his voice, and what was it that had caused this change? A tale of ghosts and bloody murder, treachery and treason.
They drove with the top of the Aston Martin down. It was a beautiful car that Lady Anne had had since she was in her twenties. The garage in Flyte that had looked after her father’s Rolls-Royce had done the same for the bright red sports car that he had given her for her twenty-first birthday. Driving it made her feel young again. The world that flew by in a blur of fields and haystacks seemed full of possibility. She was a fool to have shut herself and Thomas up in the house for so long.
Thomas also felt exhilarated. He loved to watch his mother drive. Her beautiful hands laced themselves around the spokes of the steering wheel, which was small like in a racing car, as she sat back in her tan leather seat and allowed the wind to blow her brown hair over her shoulders. She was wearing a white summer dress with an open neck, and Thomas could see her favorite gold locket glinting in the sun where it lay heart-shaped on her breastbone. His father had given it to his mother on their wedding day, with a picture of them both shut inside.
On her finger Lady Anne wore a blue, square-cut sapphire ring. The stone had been brought back from India by Thomas’s great-grandfather just before the First World War. There was a family rumor passed down through the generations that old Sir Stephen Sackville had stolen it from its native owner, who had then cursed him and his descendants, but no one believed the story. The jewel seemed so pure and magical, and the portrait of Sir Stephen hanging in the drawing room at the House of the Four Winds was of a kindly old man, saddened by the early death of his daughter, Lady Anne’s mother, in a riding accident. She had only been forty when she died, the same age that Thomas’s mother was now, and Thomas had often come into his mother’s bedroom to find her sitting at her dressing table gazing up at the portrait of her mother hanging on the wall above the fireplace.
“I’m wearing the ring for you,” said Lady Anne, sensing her son’s attention to the sapphire. “I know it’s your favorite.”
“Grandmother’s wearing it in the portrait, isn’t she?” asked Thomas, who loved family history. “I was looking at it yesterday.”
“Yes, she always wore it. Her father gave it to her when she was twenty-one. There’s that old story I told you about it. About where it came from in India. I’ve got a letter about it somewhere. I’ll have to dig it out. The sapphire’s so very beautiful. Wearing it makes me feel close to her. It’s silly, I know.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You’re right. It’s not.” Lady Anne smiled at the certainty in her son’s voice.
“I do so wonder what she was like, Tom,” she went on after a pause. “My father used to say that she was a daredevil. Always getting into scrapes and running up huge debts that old Sir Stephen had to pay off. But everyone forgave her because she was so pretty and full of life. Then suddenly she was dead. Killed by a horse, of all things.”
“How old were you, Mum?”
“When it happened? Five. I’d just turned five.”
“It must’ve been awful. Really awful.” Thomas suddenly wished that he’d not brought up the subject of his grandmother.
“I don’t know, to be honest,” said Lady Anne. “I mean, yes, it must have completely traumatized me, which is why I can’t remember anything about it except one image, which may have nothing to do with her death except that I feel sure it does. It’s seeing my father sitting on the front stairs. I can’t remember if he was crying or not, but I know that he never sat anywhere except on a chair and there he was sitting on the stairs.”
“The front stairs?”
“Yes. And for many years I couldn’t remember anything about my mother at all. I would look at the old photograph albums, but they didn’t mean anything, and curiously it was that painting that you like that gave me the strongest sense of her. It used to hang in the hall, and I’d gaze at it for hours until one day a memory came back to me.
“I was in a park on a swing. It must’ve been like a children’s playground, and I’ve never been able to work out where it is, although I can see a grove of big green Christmas trees nearby. Anyway, there’s someone pushing the swing, and I go up, up, up in the air so high that my little patent leather black shoes are right above my head.”
“But where’s your mother?” asked Thomas.
“She’s pushing the swing. I can’t see her but I know she is. And that’s why I’m so happy. Going so high but feeling so safe because she’s pushing me. That’s my memory of her.”
Lady Anne stopped talking and wiped a tear from her eye. Unlike many boys his age, Thomas was not repelled by emotion. He had the quality of empathy, and so he leaned across the hand brake and kissed his mother on her wet cheek.
“Thank you, Tom. You’re a good boy.”
This did upset Thomas, who didn’t feel he was a boy at all. He moved uncomfortably in his seat, but Lady Anne didn’t seem to notice. She was still thinking of her mother.
“So anyway, after my father died and I moved into the big room with Peter, I took the portrait up there with me and hung it over the fireplace.”
“Was the safe already there?” asked Thomas irrelevantly.
“No, that was your father’s idea. He wanted me to put all the jewelry in a bank vault because it was much too valuable to be left lying around. You know what he’s like. Practical, unlike me.”
“Yes.” Thomas responded with feeling. Practicality had always been his father’s code word for what he felt was missing in his son.
“But I wouldn’t have it. What’s the point in having beautiful things if they’re shut away where no one can ever see them? And so we compromised. Your father installed his big, ugly safe, and I hung your grandmother’s portrait over it.”
“Looking after her jewels,” said Thomas.
