Fiercombe Manor (22 page)

Over an early lunch, Mrs. Jelphs asked me what I planned to do with my afternoon, but I was deliberately vague. Something held me back from telling her I had decided to walk up to the village of Stanwick to pay a visit to Mr. Morton. She was going out again herself anyway, to visit a friend in Painswick. Ruck would drop her off in the carriage before calling in on his sister's family a few villages away.

Once they had gone, I set off up the hill. Instead of taking the gentler, winding path Ruck had brought me down, I decided to go up the main lane to the village, which was more direct. It was also much steeper, and I had underestimated it. I had always been slight and light on my feet, but my every movement felt ungainly now, and after five minutes of walking I was sweating, a runnel of salt water inching down my spine. I wondered if the thin, pale cotton of my blouse would turn transparent. I kept going and tried not to think about having to turn up at Mr. Morton's door in the state I imagined I was in.

The lane ended quite abruptly, around a turn in the road, and I found myself suddenly on level ground again. I caught my breath and took my first proper look at the village green. Ruck and I had bypassed it on the day of my arrival from the railway station. The
green sloped upwards from the road, with a row of cottages behind it. Set farther back was the church; I could see the tower, its clock with golden hands and, set below it, a gorgeously painted sundial of a type I know now is peculiar to this part of the world.

The only splash of bright, artificial colour amongst the greens of the trees and bushes and the ochre of the stone was the pillar-box, an ornate
VR
raised in the ironwork and the adjoining telephone box. The place was deserted, and I wondered if I'd made a mistake paying a surprise visit on a Sunday.

I'd entirely given up with my own watch, but the church clock told me it was almost three. Lunch should be finished, I reasoned, and any service at the church had been over for hours. I found Mr. Morton's cottage easily. Nan had told me, after some casual questioning, that it was just past the post office but before the pub, with wisteria around the door. She had understated this last detail. The wisteria hung in heavy hanks, covering much of the front facade with its decadent mauve-blue foliage.

The front door stood open, a dull brass umbrella stand against it, though there was no wind to slam it shut. Against the bright sunlight it looked dark within. I thought about knocking but called out instead, my voice loud in the apparently deserted village. After a pause with no reply, I tried again.

“Hello? Mr. Morton, are you there?”

I heard a door open and shut, and then a figure came into view. He was probably a little overweight, his well-pressed shirt stretching over a paunch, but at his substantial height he carried it well. Despite the heat of the day, he was wearing tweed trousers and seemed quite comfortable. His clothes mirrored the colours of the countryside around him, a sort of unconscious camouflage. Like the scarlet pillar-box on the green, only his florid cheeks clashed.

I liked him immediately. I knew instinctively he would be like the sort of uncle I had read about in the books I had loved as a child: fearfully clever, yet patient and protective.

“Oh, hello! It's Mr. Morton, isn't it? I hope you don't mind me turning up unannounced.”

“Why would I?” he said in mock surprise. “It's not often an old duffer like me gets any visitors. And do call me Hugh. Please, come in.”

He stood back to let me pass, his large frame only slightly bent by age. I stepped into the dark coolness of the hall. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that, just as Nan had said, there were books everywhere, piled up on a wooden pew and along shelves that had been sandwiched between the tops of doors and the ceiling.

He ushered me into a large, beamed sitting room and gestured towards the most comfortable-looking chair. There were yet more books in there, lining shelves that flanked the enormous fireplace, the kind big enough to climb into and sit off to the side to poke at the embers without being scorched. The furniture was a hotchpotch of periods, colours, fabrics, and materials—angular, simply varnished new furniture alongside good antique pieces. Some of them were dark and rustic, rough-hewn, while others were much more delicate, French-polished and inlaid.

My mother would have said the place lacked a woman's touch, which meant, I suppose, that everything had been chosen and saved for its function, rather than its ability to chime and harmonise with anything else. But I liked it as much as I liked its owner, and almost as soon as I sank down into the faded moss-green plush of the armchair he'd pointed me to, I felt sleepy and content. Although I hadn't been aware of it, I didn't feel that way very much at the bottom of the valley. There I was taut, strung too tight and on
guard for much of the time, never quite able to shake off the sense that I was being watched.

Not until I had drunk half the glass of cool water Mr. Morton brought me did I remember he didn't know who I was or what I might want.

“You must think I'm very rude,” I said, smiling, and suspecting that he didn't think that at all. “My name's Alice.”

I was so becalmed in that sunlit room, feeling the chilled water slide down through me, cooling my insides, that I began absentmindedly stroking the mound of my stomach. The baby had been moving, not kicking but churning, as I had laboured up the hill. Now he was still, as soothed as I.

Mr. Morton's eyes glanced over at my hand and then away, embarrassed.

“I think the baby is as glad that I'm sitting down as I am,” I said, hoping to put him at ease.

His eyes twinkled. “Does he or she have a name yet?”

“No, not yet. Though I'm sure it's a boy, so that narrows it down.”

Mr. Morton was the first person I'd admitted my conviction to, and as I did, I felt something approaching possessiveness for the tiny being inside me. He was beginning to become a person to me, I realised with a sinking heart.

“It certainly will narrow it down,” he said. “By about half, I would say. So, what brings you and Master Someone to see me then? It must have been quite a walk up from Fiercombe in this heat.”

So he did know who I was. He must have registered my sharp look, because he chuckled to himself.

“Little escapes us here in the village, even me. We so rarely have anyone new arrive, beyond the day-trippers who come to see the bluebells and the odd American hoping to poke around inside
the manor. We never have the pleasure of any new blood. Certainly no one who stays longer than an afternoon.”

He went out to refill my glass and brought back a plate of shortbread biscuits with it.

“You'll have heard about me from Nan, no doubt. Her mother is the saving of me on a weekly basis. Without her I would probably starve to death, and then have to be buried in a dirty shirt.”

I laughed. “Yes, it was Nan.”

“And how are you getting along with Mrs. Jelphs?”

“She's very kind, and I'm very grateful to her—I just wish she didn't worry about me quite so much. I don't know what sort of trouble she thinks I can possibly get myself into here, but sometimes I catch myself creeping about so I don't make her anxious—and even as a pathetic act of rebellion. I suppose that's one reason why I wanted to come up to the village and see you.”

“I think I can guess the other reason.” He smiled. “I'm no longer a betting man, but if you've come to me, then it's because you'd like to know a bit more about these parts. And Mrs. Jelphs is not one for gossip, regardless of the fact that all the interesting gossip is ancient history by now.”

“She talked to me a little, when I first arrived—about how it was when she first came to be lady's maid in the valley. But since then . . . it's as though she feels she's said too much and is making up for it. To be honest, I can't tell what she's thinking most of the time. Sometimes she watches me like a hawk; sometimes she'll close off, and I might as well be thin air. I feel like I put my foot in it either way—going for walks too late in the evening one minute, and then asking too many questions the next.”

He smiled again. “Our paths rarely cross, but from what I remember she had a similar effect on me. You mustn't take it personally. You're too young to know yet—so much is in front of you—but
there comes a point when you know you've had your best times. It sounds terribly depressing, doesn't it?”

“It does a bit, yes,” I said. I thought of James and the only full day we had ever spent together. We had gone to Kensington Gardens, and later I had conceived the child I now carried.

“What I mean is that I am an old man now, and quite content with my lot,” continued Mr. Morton. “I've had more than my fair share of excitement, and now I'm quite happy to read my books and sit here thinking about what I've done—and with whom”—he twinkled once again—“and indulge in a bit of harmless gossip at the post office of a morning. Now Mrs. Jelphs is a different kettle of fish altogether. She'd lived her life—or at least she felt she'd lived her life, the best of it—by the time she was what, twenty-two, twenty-three?”

“But that's such a waste.”

“Yes, of course, and you and I wouldn't have let that happen to us. But Mrs. Jelphs is one of those old-fashioned types you used to see in service. They're not even a dying breed now; they're a virtually extinct one. Those who lived for and through the people they served. When that's gone—the house sold, the fortune lost, the line died out—they haven't anything left. The Fiercombe estate, what's left of it, is the love of Edith Jelphs's life.”

We sat quietly for a time, and the mechanism of a grandfather clock in the corner of the room shunted and clunked into life, chiming once for the half hour. Distantly I registered that Mr. Morton was able to keep time up here in the village.

“The little bit Mrs. Jelphs did tell me about the past was fascinating,” I said. “Despite not wanting to talk about her, she obviously adored Elizabeth Stanton.”

“By all accounts everyone loved Elizabeth Stanton. She was one of nature's true charmers. It wasn't affected, though, and it wasn't
reserved for the sophisticated types who came down from London sometimes, either. You know how in old photographs everyone looks as though they've just been given some dreadful news?”

I nodded, and took one of the biscuits.

“It was the exposure time, of course. No one could hold a smile for long—a real smile, that is, not some rictus grin—and so people ended up looking much too serious. Now, things had improved somewhat by the 1880s and '90s, but I've seen photographs—just a few, mind—of Elizabeth Stanton, and in almost every one she was blurred because she couldn't seem to help moving, even after a short time. You would think she hadn't wanted to be photographed at all.

“There was one portrait of her, apparently taken at some expense by a well-regarded photographer, in which you can see her features properly. It was a very good photograph technically, the image pin-sharp, but artistically it was declared a failure. Her husband, Edward Stanton, who paid for it, is supposed to have exclaimed, ‘There is nothing of her in it, and so I will not hang it.' Too serious and sombre for his liking, you see. I saw it once, tucked away in a minor bedroom, still unframed. I thought it extremely beautiful: not so much sombre as wistful. I've not seen it since. Perhaps it was lost, or perhaps Mrs. Jelphs has squirreled it away somewhere.”

He stood and walked over to a cabinet with glass-fronted doors. From the pocket of his tweed trousers he plucked a tiny key and turned it in the lock.

“I don't know why I keep it locked. Not too many antiquarian book thieves around these parts, but I keep my most precious volumes in here—in both sentimental and monetary terms. Ah! Here it is.”

The book was bound in dark green leather, its gold embossed title rather unprepossessing:
The Aristocratic Families of Gloucestershire
.

“I don't suppose this is the book that has the photograph of Stanton House in it?” I asked.

“Yes, that's right. How did you know?”

“Mrs. Jelphs mentioned it in a more unguarded moment. She said it would be out of print now.”

“And so it probably is.”

He lowered himself carefully into the armchair opposite mine, tucking his long legs underneath. Eventually he found the right page.

“And here is the very picture, though it's not particularly good quality. It was taken in the midst of winter, when the sun only gets a glimpse over the escarpment for a couple of hours during the shortest days.”

It occurred to me that it soon would be the longest day: the summer solstice. Midsummer's Eve. I'd always liked the sound of it—an enchanted evening, when anything might happen.

Mr. Morton had been holding the book out towards me, his thumb keeping the place. I apologised for daydreaming and took it carefully from him.

The photograph was not so poor that you couldn't say with certainty that Stanton House was a forbidding-looking place. Though the image was black and white, you knew that the stones of its walls were grey, a light-leaching grey like a rain-filled sky. It was large and sprawling, not the square, symmetrical design I'd imagined but a High Victorian house with deep bay windows on the ground floor and Gothic Revival flourishes about the roofs and chimneys. Of course it had never got old enough for its lines to soften and smudge, but I had the feeling that, had it been allowed to stand, it would look the same today: impervious to both weather and time.

“Bit of a monstrosity, isn't it?” said Mr. Morton.

I nodded. “Mrs. Jelphs said that the locals hated it from the beginning.”

“Yes, and who could blame them? The old manor, built by their forebears, was allowed to go to seed, while Edward Stanton brought in stone from miles away, and brought in much of the labour to build it too. It was viewed as a dreadful snub, a real insult.