Mr. Tipp sounded heroically excited at the prospect of embroiling himself in another period of treachery and intrigue in the shadowy history of Gossinger Hall. But there was not time for Mrs. Much to try to talk him out of playing Sherlock Holmes, because the door bounced open and Miss Sophie Doffit entered the kitchen to announce that Lady Gossinger had made herself ill following the funeral. The old lady did not add that her Ladyship had achieved this result by drinking the entire contents of a bottle of sherry. She demanded a pot of extremely strong coffee and bore it away with what Mrs. Much, in her nervy state, sized up as a strangely triumphant smile.
For Flora, the days after the funeral got all jumbled together like scarves thrown higgledy-piggledy in the drawers of a dressing table. There were only a few distinct moments: Being in the garden with Mr. Vivian Gossinger, and telling him it was difficult to believe that Grandpa was dead and feeling safe for the first time in days when he put an arm around her. Sir Henry asking if she’d like to get away for a while and live in Bethnal Green in a flat that had once belonged to her Ladyship’s parents.
And now Flora sat in the middle of a long carriage on an early morning train to King’s Cross. There were two men seated opposite her, separated from her by the laminated table. She saw that the one next to the aisle wore a clerical collar, but otherwise she hardly noticed them. Her two suitcases were in the overhead rack and
her face was pressed to the cool of the window. Flora had only been to London once before when she was a small child; come to think of it, she had never been anywhere much.
Her whole world had been Gossinger from when she was three years old and Grandpa had explained that he wasn’t the King of England, but only Sir Henry’s butler, and that no crowns went with
that
job. To the
chuff-a-chuff-chug
noises of the train, the memories returned in soft shining colors behind her closed lids: Watching while Grandpa went about his work. Telling him that she loved him more than gingerbread or playing dressing-up in the trunk room, and even more than rainy days.
Flora remembered the time when she had begged him to promise he would never die and leave her, the way her mother had done, or at least not until she was nine hundred and ninety years old. On that occasion she had hugged him passionately, and promised him that when he was too old to be a butler anymore they would go and live in a little house by the sea at Cleethorpes and then it would be her turn to read him bedtime stories.
Shifting her position slightly, Flora sensed rather than saw that one ... or perhaps both ... of the men opposite were watching her, but she didn’t wonder what was attracting their attention. Unlike the train, which was rushing past another station, her mind had traveled back again to the time when her world was real and safe. She had sometimes missed her mother, but had never felt too bad about not having a father. When she was still very young she had concluded that God had temporarily run out of these items at the time she was about to be born in the same way that the cake shop might be out of Bakewell tarts on a particularly busy day. What Flora got instead was Grandpa.
And she had never stopped feeling lucky. He was
sometimes a little stern and not much given to hugs or kisses, and a few times, such as when he sent her to bed early because she had said that Sir Henry had big ears, she had decided Grandpa loved everyone at Gossinger more than her, and the Queen more than anyone in the whole world. But even at that moment she had known in the kernel of her heart that Grandpa would have burnt at the stake, without a wince, if anything or anyone had threatened harm to his little girl.
Flora stared out the window at fields and trees and scatterings of houses speeding past as if fleeing an invading army. She felt terribly small and lost, in much the same way that a nun might have done at the time of the Reformation after being booted out of the convent by Henry VIII’s henchmen without so much as a spare set of undies and being told not to loiter.
I expect I look just as odd and out of touch with the world,
thought Flora,
as if I was wearing a rough woolen habit and one of those meek faces that comes from praying all day and half the night in a cell the size of a pantry.
Her glance passed over the heads of the two men sitting opposite her and focused on the women in the carriage, particularly the ones of about her own age. They all looked so ... Flora floundered for the word, so ...
alive.
Some were smartly dressed. Others looked as though they hadn’t had a bath or washed their hair in recent memory. But none of them looked as though they were going up to London for the first time in their lives. Studying a red-haired girl dressed like an Edwardian tramp with a silver stud in her nose and her eyelashes weighed down with mascara, Flora fingered the knot at the nape of her neck and felt a twinge of envy. She remembered the time when she bought a lipstick—Persuasion Pink was the color—and how Grandpa could not have looked any more disappointed if she’d told him she’d earned the money to buy it standing on street corners talking to strange men in fast cars. Grandpa hadn’t forbidden Flora to paint her face like a circus clown. He’d merely reminded her, without raising his voice, that what she wore and how she comported herself must always reflect for better or worse on Gossinger Hall. Flora had come close to saying something defiant on that occasion, but she had noticed that when her grandfather turned away his shoulders were a little stooped and his hair was closer to white than gray. It was the housekeeper at the time, a Mrs. Jolliffe, who’d spoken up in Flora’s defense.
“No harm in a bit of lipstick, Mr. Hutchins. Even the prettiest girls” (her tone made it plain Flora could not count herself in this fortunate category) “don’t like to go around with their faces bare as a baby’s bum. And Flora’s at that age. Wanting to make the most of herself. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen the way she colors up when Mr. Vivian Gossinger comes for a stay and so much as tells her good morning?”
“I never!” Flora had cried, being mightily tempted to hurl the hateful lipstick at Mrs. Jolliffe’s smiling face.
“Indeed not!” This time, Mr. Hutchins broke with precedent and raised his voice in addressing the housekeeper. “I take extreme offense at the suggestion that I have not brought up my granddaughter never to behave with any degree of familiarity toward members of the Family.”
“You can’t stop a girl from thinking, not when it comes to young men,” Mrs. Jolliffe had responded, completely unabashed. “Especially one the likes of Flora here, that’s been kept cooped up at Gossinger, never getting to mix and have fun with people her own age.”
At that point Flora had run out of the room wishing she were dead and Mr. Vivian Gossinger had never been born. She had never,
ever
thought anyone would guess her secret. Flinging herself down on her bed, she made up her mind that the next time he said good morning to her she would look as daft as she could; that
way he couldn’t possibly think Flora Hutchins had the brains to lie awake at night wondering what it would be like to step out into the soft green waking of very early morning and find him waiting for her by the weeping willow tree.
And I was standing under that tree,
thought Flora, once again staring out the train window,
after the police left on the day of the funeral and Vivian came out into the garden to tell me I wasn’t to worry about the future because he knew Sir Henry and her Ladyship would see I was all right. But I’m sure
—she pressed her nose against the pane of glass and closed her eyes—
that there was something else he wanted to say and didn’t, because he kept circling the weeping willow as if it were a maypole hung with ribbons just to tangle him up into knots.
Perhaps he was having trouble finding the right words to tell her how sorry he felt about Grandpa’s death, but Flora didn’t think it was that.
Then, Sir Henry came out to join them. And it was at that moment Flora spotted the woman in front of the Dower House Nursery Garden across the road.
There had been no mistaking her. She was the gypsy-looking person in the mustard-and-black plaid cloak who had been at Grandpa’s funeral. Who was she? And why the will-o’-the-wisp act? Those questions kept creeping back into Flora’s mind, along with the realization of how little Grandpa had ever told her about his life and attendant relationships outside of Gossinger Hall.
I
wish I’d asked him more
—
about my mother especially,
Flora thought,
but I always knew it made him unhappy to talk about her. As though there was ... more wrong than the sadness that she died young.
“Excuse me!” The voice came at Flora like a fist through a windowpane, shattering her thoughts like flying glass. The speaker was one of the men sitting across from her. The one by the window, not the one
with the clerical collar. “Forgive me for intruding when it’s clear you’re miles away, Miss Hutchins,” he said with a touch of primness. “But I didn’t want us to reach King’s Cross without reintroducing myself and telling you how exceedingly sorry I am about your grandfather’s unhappy end.”
Flora blinked. He was a youngish man with a head of beige woolly hair that looked unfortunately like a barrister’s wig, and he had a long nose and a mouth that seemed to flap when he talked. He was wearing a Burberry raincoat. Where had she seen him before?
He helped her out. “My name is Ferncliffe. On the day of your grandfather’s accident I brought a group of eleven-year-old boys from the New Church Preparatory School.”
“I remember,” said Flora.
“The boys were rather rowdy,” Mr. Ferncliffe felt called upon to admit, “wound up like a bunch of alarm clocks all going off at once. It quite put me off teaching; but my mother thinks I ought to stick it out as a character-building exercise.” He looked decidedly wistful, clearly hoping Flora would tell him that keeping himself cheerfully occupied as an early retiree was far more likely to make a man of him.
“I talked to you in the Great Hall, didn’t I?” she asked. “About being worried that I couldn’t find my grandfather; but I never dreamed, not for one single minute, that at the time he may already have been dead.” Flora bit her lip.
The sad tilt of her pale face smote the science teacher with such force that the pen in his shirt pocket almost jumped out. He was beset by an almost overpowering urge to rescue her from a life of loneliness and despair.
Only looming thoughts of his mother demanding to know what had made him late for his tea prevented Mr. Ferncliffe from reaching across the laminated table for Flora’s hand and imploring her to run off with him to somewhere unbearably romantic, such as the Isle of Skye, change their names to Jones, and hide out forevermore in a bed-and-breakfast. Mr. Ferncliffe, all five foot eleven of him, flamed with the intensity of his enthusiasm as he pictured the sweet, shy smile that would touch Flora’s lips when she discovered fate had supplied her with a Young Lochinvar when she most desperately needed one. She would be so intensely grateful, so heart-wrenchingly humble, that he would have his work cut out for him trying to persuade her of his relief at having escaped the clutches of innumerable ravishing beauties.
Sadly, common sense returned full force. Possibly it would be best to tread the path of true love slowly. Sighing heavily, Mr. Ferncliffe adjusted the buckle of his raincoat in a heroic attempt at pulling himself together, and was able to address the object of his present heart’s desire in a reasonably level voice.
“I expect you’re wondering, Miss Hutchins, what brought me back to Lincolnshire?”
Flora hadn’t been wondering anything of the sort. She had been thinking about those eleven-year-old boys and what a good thing it was that their school outing hadn’t been spoilt. Luckily they had just departed in the coach when Grandpa was found in the garderobe. Then her mind had flashed to Mr. Ferncliffe vainly trying to control his youthful charges that afternoon and, unkind as it sounds, she couldn’t help suspecting that at least one or two of the youngsters might have got a big buzz out of being at hand when a corpse was discovered in gloomy Gossinger Hall.
“I’m sorry,” Flora looked full at Mr. Ferncliffe, “what was it you were saying about coming back to Lincolnshire? Did it have something to do with Grandpa’s death?”
“You mean ... yes, I suppose there would have to be an inquest. One of the boys—Boris Smith is his
name—did come to me the other day wanting to know if the police would be around asking me and the lads from the day trip to give statements. Little ghoul! But if there is to be anything of that sort I don’t know about it. The headmaster doesn’t exactly make a habit of confiding in me.”
Mr. Ferncliffe realized he sounded peevish, which was not the image he wished to promote. He proceeded to sink deeper in the mire by adding that the HM was inclined to treat all his teachers like servants. Fortunately Flora didn’t seem to notice, and Mr. Ferncliffe finally got round to explaining that he had returned to the city of Lincoln because his mother (at least he didn’t slip up and call her “Mummy”) had been quite cross with him after his last visit.
“She was extremely upset that I didn’t go up Lucy Tower.”
“That’s at the castle, isn’t it?” Flora was trying very hard to sound interested and not wish that a suitcase would bounce off the luggage rack and come crashing down on Mr. Ferncliffe’s woolly head so she could sit in silence until she reached King’s Cross.
“My mother’s name is Lucy,” Mr. Ferncliffe said.
“Is it?”
“She is very attached to her name.”
“It
is
pretty.”
“So I suppose it’s understandable,” Mr. Ferncliffe conceded, “that she felt slighted that I didn’t go up that blasted tower and think about her every step of the way. I tried to explain that the boys were out of control and I might have been tempted to forget about the wonderful view and push one or two of them off the top.” He laughed rather shakily to prove he was only joking. “Mum—
Mother
wouldn’t get off the subject for
days. What did the trick was her reading about that bank robbery, the one that took place not far from Gossinger Hall.” Mr. Ferncliffe rested his elbows on the table and
steepled his fingers. “And I’ll admit it was somewhat interesting that it turned out the man who did the holdup was technically only taking out his own money.”