‘And perhaps you should have it blessed. A local priest will probably do it. Perhaps you could find out when it was consecrated. Not as old as the house, I would imagine, from the stonework.’
‘Can’t you do it?’
He smiles.
‘Not exactly my tradition, lovely.’
When they’re approaching the summit of the hill, he turns to take in the vast view, the setting sun spreading a deep watercolour wash over pastel fields and smoky woodland.
‘What’s that village over to the left?’
‘That’s Winchcombe,’ she says. ‘I never know whether it’s a village or a town.’
‘Ah, yes, so it is.’ He knows it well enough, drove close to its perimeter to get here today. ‘A large village these days with the heart of a town.’
A town in the old sense, a sturdy, working town, untypical of the modern Cotswolds. It has a strange history of growing tobacco.
‘All very old round here,’ she says. ‘And nothing barbarically new to spoil it. Not for miles and miles.’
‘Only the barbarically old. If barbaric is the word.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Belas Knap. If this little hill isn’t known as the Knap, it probably suggests the name of the house links with the Neolithic longbarrow.’
‘I suppose. It’s somewhere over there.’ She points vaguely at a wood behind the hill. ‘Only been once. A longer walk than I imagined. It’s just like an odd little hill. As if it’s erupted from the corner of the field. Or it’s landed from somewhere. Doesn’t look five thousand years old with all that new stonework.’
‘Probably a matter of health and safety.’
‘There used to be dead people in there. I think they took away dozens of skeletons. I’m quite glad you can’t see it from here.’
‘I should take a look.’
‘You wouldn’t get there before dark. It’s quite steep and treacherous. The ground.’
Fingers moving inside her cloak, holding it closed at the front.
‘Perhaps not, then,’ he says. ‘Perhaps when I return.’
‘I hope you’re going to.’
‘You know me, lovely. Be with you, I will, at the merest beckoning of a finger. Now we’re in touch again. Now I know where you are.’
She smiles. A hand emerges from the cloak and she squeezes his arm affectionately as he raises it to point to something two or three miles away which lies like a chunky copper bangle in an open jewel case of green baize.
‘Sudeley Castle?’
‘Yessss.’ Her hair’s thrown back, and he sees her face is shiny with… pride? For someone else’s luxuriously appointed castle? ‘You know it, Cindy?’
‘I know a little of its history.’ He’s done some reading. ‘And its ghosts, of course.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Is there more than one?’
Back inside the house, she shows him a leaflet for Sudeley, displaying an aerial view of the castle with its velvety gardens.
Walk in the footsteps of Kings and Queens
, it says on the front.
There’s a cut-out figure over the castle: a tall, slender woman, from a painting, her waist forming the point of a V, in a sumptuous red dress. She has delicate, composed features and her multi-ringed fingers are spread over her abdomen. Red stones in the rings, the necklace and the choker.
He rather likes her. She has, for the period, an unusually kind, intelligent face. The sixth wife of Henry VIII, herself four times married. One of the survivors.
Trinity, of course, played her in the British feature film
The King’s Evening
. Not a very good film, he recalls, and Katherine
Parr does not appear until the last quarter; there’s much more about the flighty Catherine Howard – wife five, beheaded for adultery. Adultery is always more cinematic. As is beheading, of course.
‘You felt close to Katherine Parr?’
‘More than any woman I ever played.’
‘And that’s why you wanted to live here?’
‘She’s the only Queen of England to be buried at a private house, rather than some cathedral. Did you know that?’
‘I
didn’t
know that.’ Through the old, sour-milk panes of a mullioned window, he watches a hill beyond Sudeley Castle catching fire in the last rays of the sun. ‘Didn’t survive Henry for long, mind, poor dab.’
Falling rapidly into the arms of Thomas Seymour, brother of Jane, wife three, and then…
‘What complicated times those must have been, Trinity.’
‘And so close,’ she says. ‘When you’re here.’
She’s standing near enough for him to sense the tremor under the cloak. It’s cold in here, colder than outside, though there are signs of a recent fire in the vast ingle. The room, unfurnished except for a window seat with a cushion, has uneven oak panelling on two walls and another is a dense wooden screen. The room’s been cleaned out and stripped back quite recently. She insists everything will be finished in time for the summer, but the smog of dark history is not so easily dispelled.
Outside there are ladders and scaffolding. It’s Saturday tomorrow but the renovation work will apparently be continuing. No expense spared to make the place habitable… and more, much more.
She’s told him she didn’t want a house someone else had restored. She wanted somewhere neglected, unwanted, misused. Well, he supposes a gastropub qualifies as misuse. Nothing left of that now. He suspects it had all gone before the builders and carpenters moved in. Starting their operations here, at the core of the house, and working outwards, drawing in the newer sections,
opening up the stairs, rediscovering bedrooms – of which there might be as many as twenty. Like most houses with land, it’s been added to over the years, and not always sympathetically.
‘Trinity, was this house – when it was much smaller –
connected
with Sudeley? One of the castle farms, perhaps?’
‘I certainly
feel
it was,’ she says protectively. And then opens her arms. ‘I can’t wait. Can’t wait to fill it with people. Harry isn’t sure it’s going to work, but… I just think it will.’ Her arms drop. ‘Cindy, love, you’ve been awfully quiet. Is there something you’re not telling me?’
He doesn’t react quickly enough and knows she’s seen his expression. Feels terrible, he does, knowing how much this place means to her. But there are better houses than this, if you have the money, which surely they do.
But they’ve bought it now, see, that’s the problem. No going back. Seems she tried to find him months ago, when he’d changed his mobile phone number, and his email address to something confusing. Eventually, she employed an inquiry agent to track him to West Wales.
He only wishes he felt more worthy of her faith in his instincts.
‘I won’t lie to you, lovely,’ he says. ‘I suspect that it’s had its moments, this house.’
And he thinks she feels that, too, but doesn’t want to tell him something, in the hope that she’s wrong.
‘Is that so unusual, a place this old?’
He forces a shrug.
‘Just me, it is, probably.’
They’ve known one another for quite some years now, since the night she was the star guest on the BBC’s
National Lottery Live
, which he was presenting at the time. The night she activated the big-money balls in the machine. Before her marriage, this was. They had dinner afterwards and began a period of exchanging confidences, when he learned about her yearning for the English countryside and a gentler, more gracious way of
life, while at the same time recognizing the irony in her situation: that to attain her pastoral dreamworld she must struggle on for a while through the brash and frenzied carnival of popular culture.
And then she married Harry Ansell.
‘You’re not staying here alone?’
‘No, no. I’m going back to Cheltenham. I wouldn’t
mind
staying here, we have one bedroom more or less finished, but I promised Harry I wouldn’t. He’s in America till the middle of next week.’
‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘Don’t be alone here, yet. Not being funny, see, but…’
She looks at him with dismay. The mullioned window is becoming rosy with evening. A hostile dampness will soon be forming in the gloom of the passages between rooms, like the furring of old arteries.
‘It’s a lonely place,’ he says lamely. ‘Well, that is… there are few places it’s safe for a woman to be alone nowadays. Especially a… someone like yourself.’
‘Oh, I’m not worried about
that
.’ A small, amused light in her eyes. ‘We have a security firm patrolling at night. And Katherine is…’
He looks sharply at her. Katherine Parr again.
‘I don’t know quite why I’m asking this, Trinity, but… has the late queen been seen… here?’
‘Well… maybe.’
‘By whom?’
‘Different people, over the years. I’m not sure.’
‘Including you?’
‘Not clearly. I sometimes think I see her watching me from a doorway. Very pale. And lights. And a smell of something sweet… perfume. I don’t know.’
‘What kind of perfume? Roses? Herbs?’
He doesn’t know much about sixteenth-century scents but suspects we would not necessarily recognize them as such. Less
a precursor of Chanel No 5 than a way of masking the pervading body odours caused by extremely infrequent bathing.
‘A sweet smell, anyway,’ she says. ‘Quite strong. Pungent.’
‘And why did you think it was Katherine Parr?’
How likely was it, after all, was it that Katherine would have placed one dainty shoe on the pitted track to Knap Hall, a farmhouse full of rushes and rats?
‘Little lights,’ she says. ‘There was a pattern of tiny red lights, like a constellation, in the… figure. I thought of rubies. Katherine wore a lot of rubies.’
‘But why would she come here?’
‘To get away from Thomas Seymour?’
Thomas Seymour of Sudeley – it was his castle, but after their rapid marriage she seems to have given him much of the money left to her by the King to make it splendid. Seymour is remembered not fondly by history, mainly because of his alleged attempts to have sex with the King’s daughter Elizabeth – the future Elizabeth I – when she was not much more than a child. Katherine seemed to have been in love with him since long before Henry sent for her to be his queen. But to Seymour, she might still have been second best. Not so long after Katherine’s death, Seymour was executed for treason.
‘The Bishop who eventually gave him the last rites,’ Trinity says, ‘or whatever you did before an execution, said he was “wicked, covetous, ambitious” and… something else bad. On her deathbed – probably delirious – Katherine’s said to have bemoaned his treachery – his attentions to Elizabeth.’
‘And you think perhaps she came up here to get away sometimes from him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Or meet a secret lover, maybe?’
‘I never thought of that. There’s also supposed to be a good-looking young man seen here. Fair-haired, wearing leather.’
‘Who told you that?’
Trinity looks a little vague.
‘Do you feel she’s happy… Katherine, if… when she’s here?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Although they’re inside, she draws up the capacious hood of her winter cloak, half turning so he can’t see the expression on her face, muffling her response. Keeping something to herself.
‘She died in childbirth?’
‘After childbirth,’ she says. ‘Complications.’
‘Not uncommon in those days.’
Something not terribly healthy here. If the only reasons for Katherine to be at Knap Hall lie in the emotional needs of a woman who once played her in a film which was not really about her…
‘Trinity, would you do something for me? Would you have time to keep a little diary? Recording anything that happens, as soon after the event as you can. Would you do that?’
‘OK.’ She nods. ‘I can try. Have to be done under cover. Harry wouldn’t exactly approve. He’s… not a believer.’
‘Presumably he doesn’t know I’m here.’
She laughs.
‘He doesn’t even know I know you. Poor Cindy. But I wouldn’t want to talk to anyone else about all this. In my situation there are so few people you can ever really trust. Not even a vicar or anyone who might just want to… you know… get rid of her?’
Oh dear. She’s being selective here. Something bad she wants removed, but something she perceives as good. A question of babies and bathwater. Not really how it works.
‘Let’s make it a
secret
diary, then,’ he says.
‘The Secret Diary of Trinity Ansell, aged thirty-four and a half.’
They both laugh.
Another woman he could have loved, if he was normal.
At the door of his car, parked on the rubble forecourt, he turns back and sees her standing outside the broken porch in the last
light. A chill on the purpling air, and her face is shaded by the hood. She looks more ghostly than ever, more ephemeral, more… temporary.
Essentially she hasn’t changed. Just because people have become rapidly rich doesn’t mean they become bad or selfish, self-indulgent, haughty, morally lax or corrupt. And if Katherine Parr looked this good then Henry VIII was a luckier man than he deserved to be.
What he’s decided is that he’ll drive out of the gate, park up the lane and then find his way to the top of the hill again, alone, absorbing what he can, feeling the landscape so that it can be journeyed back to, in his meditation. He notes all the outbuildings he hasn’t even entered, particularly the long stable block with its wide arched doorways and a belltower that’s probably older than the one on the chapel at the rear.
How to help a woman who – dear God – wants to be haunted?
But selectively.
He watches Trinity standing by the Elizabethan porch and thinks she would actually have been quite at home in Tudor times, might even have caught the King’s eye. She has a feel for history, and not in an academic way, and she senses the liminal nature of this landscape. The popular media will occasionally notice, with scornful amusement, her openness to clairvoyants, tarot-readers and… well… people like him.
As Trinity waves, he feels an entirely unexpected sting of tears, giving way to the dampening dread he so hoped he would not experience here. She wants somewhere to love and hopes she’s found it. But he doesn’t think this house, haunted or not, will love her back.
PART TWO