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Chapter One (#ulink_a0d30fe6-3c64-59da-b808-36c1d5e14287)
“We’ll take it,” I said, making Bella laugh as she looked up at the imposing house.
“You can’t just buy it! We haven’t even stepped inside yet.”
I pulled her close against my side. “I don’t need to. This is it. This is home.”
Biding Time, by Nathaniel Drury (1967)
Two long years away, and the first person I saw upon my return to Rosewood was the ghost. Even if I didn’t quite realise it at the time.
I’ll admit, I was preoccupied. I hadn’t planned on going home so soon, not until Nathaniel called and insisted, and the temptation was too great to resist. Oh, I’d assumed I’d go back eventually, for a visit, at least. But two years away didn’t seem like enough. Two Christmases, two birthdays, two anniversaries – Ellie couldn’t possibly have forgiven me so soon.
This was a mistake. Which is why I was loitering in the Rose Garden instead of going inside.
The walled Rose Garden is one of my favourite spots at Rosewood, especially at midsummer, when it’s overflowing with flowers. As children, Ellie and I would mix up buckets of perfume from the petals: pungent flower water we’d sell to charitable passers-by at the end of the driveway. This year, however, it seemed that someone else had got there first.
Almost all the yellow rose bushes had been decapitated, leaving only stalks, leaves and thorns. As I blinked at the empty spaces where the flowers should be, I thought for a moment that I saw someone standing across the flower bed – a girl, younger than me, with long dark hair and pale features. The summer sun shone through her skin, lighting her up from the inside, like a creature from one of my grandfather’s more fantastical stories, only existing between one second and the next. Because when I opened my eyes, I was alone again, standing outside the house that was supposed to be my home, wondering if I’d be welcomed or dismissed.
Wasn’t that Rosewood all over? A place out of time, more fiction than real it seemed sometimes. Like Nathaniel had pulled the house itself from the pages of one of his books, complete with secrets and mysteries – even the paranormal.
Before I could fully process what I’d seen, my grandmother’s voice echoed out from the terrace, imperious and impatient, just as I remembered. Isabelle Drury was the mistress of Rosewood, and she never forgot it, not for a moment. It was more than a home to her; it was her kingdom, and she ruled it – and us, her willing subjects.
“We’ll need more of the eucalyptus. You can go and tell her.”
There was no response, and I found myself waiting, breath stuck in my chest, all thoughts of the strange girl forgotten. I wanted to hear another familiar voice, there, in the buzzing summer air, with its insects and pollen and freshly cut grass, rather than over a too-clear phone line. I wanted to feel like I was really home again.
I hadn’t intended to come back to Rosewood so soon. But now that I was here, I couldn’t imagine how I’d stayed away so long.
“And don’t forget the etched vase,” my grandmother’s voice rang out again. I smoothed down my hopelessly creased pale linen skirt and stepped out of the Rose Garden. Time to face the music.
Isabelle had moved back inside, and whichever family member she’d been ordering about had obviously rushed off to fulfil her demands; haste was always a good idea when dealing with my grandmother’s requests. The terrace was deserted again.
“In and out,” I muttered to myself as I retrieved my suitcase. “Minimum casualties.” That was the plan. This was a tester weekend. If it wasn’t dreadful beyond all measure, maybe I could come back for Christmas. Start finding a place here again. Maybe even find forgiveness, eventually.
But first I had to make it through the weekend.
I climbed the few steps to the glass-panelled doors that led from the terrace into the house, pushing down the hope beating in my chest. It was all so familiar, as if at any moment Ellie, aged seven and a half, could come running out carrying dolls for a tea party, Isabelle following with the second-best china tea set. At least, until I passed through the empty drawing room and reached the cool shade of the hallway.
The tiled floor of the wide entrance hall was covered in buckets, vases, stands, and what appeared to be chicken wire. Bright yellow roses and dark green foliage were stuffed and stacked into any and all containers; loose leaves and petals littered the ground. And in the middle of it all sat Isabelle, head bent over a small crystal vase filled with two blooms and a few sprigs of lavender, sunlight from the windows either side of the front door shining silver on her hair.
I leant my overfilled suitcase against the wall, and asked, “Can I help?”
Isabelle jerked her head up to look at me, and she lost her grip on the vase in her hand. It tumbled to the floor, spilling water across the floor tiles and crushing one of the rose’s stems. I darted forward and righted the vase, miraculously still intact. For one, brief moment, I saw the depth of the shock she must be feeling flash across her face, before she recovered her composure.
She really hadn’t expected me to come. As much as I knew the lack of an invitation wasn’t a mistake, I realised a small part of me had been hoping against hope that it was. That I hadn’t been forgotten, cut out.
Except I had.
“Hi,” I said, trying to look less nervous than I felt.
“Kia, darling, really!” Isabelle smiled, but she still looked a little shaken. Older, too, I realised. Faded. Frail. “You should have told us you were coming. You can’t just show up, scare people half to death.”
I reached my arms around my grandmother’s body, feeling bones and skin. “I did tell you. Well, I told Nathaniel I’d be here, when he rang to invite me. I even gave him my train times when he called last week.”
He’d wanted to check I was still coming. I wasn’t sure that it was a good sign that Nathaniel was so desperate to have me there to witness whatever he had planned to add excitement to Isabelle’s party. It almost made me an accessory.
Not to mention the fact he hadn’t told anyone else he’d invited me. What did that say about the welcome I should expect?
Isabelle wriggled out of the embrace and, regaining her natural poise, set about choosing a new rose for her vase. “And isn’t it just like him not to mention it.”
“Perhaps he wanted it to be a surprise?” I suggested, feeling even more uneasy. I’d honestly assumed he’d have at least told them I was coming. I should have known better. This all had the stink of one of Nathaniel’s Plans – and they seldom ended well.
“I’m sorry, Isabelle. I really thought Nathaniel would have told you.” Isabelle sniffed, but looked faintly mollified, so I went on: “Where’s everyone else?”
Isabelle checked her watch and ticked them off on her fingers. “Your parents have taken Caroline to buy a dress for the party, as the one I picked for her was apparently unacceptable to her. Your grandfather has the DO NOT ENTER sign up on his door, so I choose to believe that he is writing. Therese is probably still wandering the woods aimlessly, and has forgotten she’s supposed to be collecting foliage for me. Edward’s here, though. He can help you with your bag.”
No mention of the two people I wanted to know about most, I noticed. Had it been Ellie Isabelle sent for vases? I wanted to ask a thousand questions. About how Ellie was, how she’d been, since I left. Whether she still hated me as much as I imagined she must. And, most urgently, what had Ellie told our grandmother about why I left? From Isabelle’s reaction, I suspected that she knew more of my secrets than I’d like. When I’d left, while Ellie and Greg were on their honeymoon, what happened had been a secret between the three of us. I couldn’t imagine that Ellie would want anyone else to know, any more than I did. But it was clear that Isabelle knew something.
God, what if everybody knew? My hands started to tremble at the very idea, a horrible sense of dread seeping through my veins. What if my secret was out, and I was walking into a house full of people who utterly – and rightly – despised me?
It was enough to send me running back to the train station, and the safety of my flat, hundreds of miles away in Scotland. But then, something curious about her list struck me.
“Edward?” I asked, trying to shift my focus away from my fear. I was pretty up to date on family members, despite my absence, and I was sure that there hadn’t been an Edward when I’d left.
“Yes.” Isabelle moved to the stairs and called, in as genteel a manner as possible, “Edward!”
I went and picked up my suitcase. If my grandmother had started hallucinating household help, I’d probably better get used to carrying things around myself.
To my relief, when I turned back a tall, slim stranger was leaning on the banister at the top of the stairs, looking utterly at home. “You hollered, Isabelle?” The man raised a sandy eyebrow. “I don’t suppose that you were just missing my company?”
“Always, dear,” Isabelle said, absently. “I thought that you might like to help Saskia with her bags, while I call Sally and Tony and inform them that their prodigal daughter has returned.”
“Might like to?” Edward asked, taking the stairs at a lazy jog, long legs making easy work of the wide steps.
“Would if I asked you to,” Isabelle clarified.
“Of course.” Edward hopped over the last few stairs and landed on one foot on the hall tiles. “And I assume that this is Saskia,” he said, turning on his heel to face me. He looked a little older than my twenty-six, with the start of tiny laugh lines around his eyes. He wasn’t smiling now, though, and he didn’t seem in any way pleased to meet me. In fact the coldness I felt from him suggested exactly the opposite.
“I’ve heard a lot about you from Ellie,” he said, which explained the chill. Even if she hadn’t spilled the whole story to this stranger, I was under no illusion that she’d have spoken about me in anything approaching glowing terms.
“Oh good. Listen, I’m fine carrying my own case, honestly.” I had four whole days stretching ahead to spend time with people who disapproved of me. I didn’t really feel up to starting off with someone I’d never even met before.
Edward took two long strides across the hallway and snatched up my bag. “Not a problem.” He gave me a short, tight smile, then swung round to face Isabelle, suitcase swaying in his hand. “Which room is she in?”
“My room,” I said, as if that should be obvious, at the same time as Isabelle said, “You’d better put her in the Yellow Room.”
“Right-ho.” Edward hefted the case up the first few stairs.
“Hang on. What’s wrong with my room?” It was, after all, my room. I snatched the case out of Edward’s hands.
“Caroline’s sleeping in it.” Isabelle looked vaguely regretful for a moment, but it didn’t last. “But really, Kia, it is a little girl’s room, and Caro’s too big for the box room, now. She’s almost ten. She needs her own space.”
Caroline – our last-minute-accident baby sister, and the shocking evidence that our parents were still having sex into my secondary-school years. How could she be ten already? How much had she changed in the last two years? How much had I missed?
“It’s my room,” I said again, even as my brain acknowledged the ridiculousness of this statement.
“Your room is the candy-stripe confection in the attic?” Edward reached out and retrieved the case from my hands again, his long slim fingers brushing against mine as he took the handle. I gritted my teeth against the slight shiver his touch gave me, even in the warm summer air.
“My grandfather helped me decorate that room.” One long summer when my parents were abroad and Ellie and I had stayed at Rosewood for six glorious weeks, instead of sweating it out in our semi in the suburbs of Manchester. It had taken an age, because Nathaniel had been working on Rebecca’s Daughters at the time and would regularly disappear into his study for hours in the middle of painting the walls.
Edward grinned. “Strange. Nathaniel never struck me as a candyfloss kind of guy.”
“Who are you, anyway?” It didn’t seem fair. I’d been home mere minutes, and I was already being mocked by strangers.
“I’m your grandfather’s assistant,” Edward said, making his way up the stairs, lugging the case alongside him.
I looked to Isabelle for confirmation. “I know,” she said. “We were surprised too. But he’s been here over a year, now.” And no one had mentioned him to me – not even Nathaniel. Which said more about how far I’d run away than the seven hours it had taken me to get back by train that day.
Edward reached the top of the stairs and paused, obviously waiting for me to follow. I looked at him with a new appreciation. The last assistant Nathaniel had hired, six months before I left for the wilds of Scotland, had lasted approximately a fortnight before falling down those very stairs in his hurry to get away from Rosewood. Granddad did not work well with assistants.
“Well, okay then.” Picking up my handbag, I turned back to Isabelle. “Do I really have to sleep in the Yellow Room?”
“It has a lovely view of the Rose Garden, darling.”
“But all the roses are in here!” I waved an arm at the overflowing buckets of blooms.
“Don’t be melodramatic, dear. There are plenty of roses left. We’re only using the yellow ones, anyway.” She plucked a few leaves from the bottom of a rose stem and added the flower to the bucket. “Besides, these are just for the house displays. The florist is doing the stands and centrepieces outside.”
That sounded like an awful lot of flowers. “But the Yellow Room’s all… yellow.” There was a muffled snort of laughter from the top of the stairs, and I mentally glared at Edward, wondering what it was about Rosewood that made me thirteen again. “Never mind. I’ll go get freshened up, and maybe by the time I get back my parents will have found their way home.”
“Perhaps. Kia…” Isabelle paused, as if trying to decide whether to speak again or not. Finally, she said, “Did your grandfather say particularly why he wanted you to come back?”
I blinked in surprise. “It’s a family occasion. I assume he wanted us all here.”
Isabelle gave a sharp nod, and turned back to her buckets of roses. “Of course.”
Confused, I turned to follow Edward. But I couldn’t help wondering what Isabelle thought Nathaniel was up to this time.
“There you go, then,” Edward said, placing my bags on the window-seat. “I’ll leave you to settle in.”
I nodded, gazing around at the sunshine walls and golden blankets, wondering how many guests had visited twice, after being put to stay in the Yellow Room.
Probably all of them – at least any that had been invited back. A weekend at Rosewood had been a highly sought-after ticket, back in the day. Well, according to Isabelle, anyway.
“Actually,” I said, trying to sound decisive, rather than just unsettled, “I think I might go and find Great-Aunt Therese. It must be almost time for her afternoon tea.” Never mind that I’d spent seven hours on various trains and really could do with a shower; first, I needed to feel home again. And after that very lacklustre welcome from Isabelle, I knew I wasn’t going to find that feeling in the Yellow Room. At least Great-Aunt Therese might be pleased to see me.
Assam tea and a Victoria Sandwich in Therese’s cottage garden were more familiar to me than even my attic bedroom. Nathaniel had moved his younger sister into the cottage on the edge of Rosewood’s gardens as soon as her husband died, the year I was born, when she was only forty-one. Almost every afternoon that I had spent at Rosewood since had always paused for tea with Therese at half past three, first with my mum and Ellie, and later just the two of us.
Edward shrugged indifferently. “I’ll come with you, then. May as well see if she’s finished collecting leaves for your grandmother. Pre-empt being sent.”
“If you’re Granddad’s assistant, why aren’t you assisting him rather than Grandma?” I asked, as we trotted out into the sunlight. It felt odd to be at Rosewood with a stranger – especially one who seemed far more at home than I did.
“He’s having one of his Great British Writer days. Doesn’t like anyone hovering, in case it disturbs his flow.” Which might explain why Edward had lasted longer than the other assistants. A keen sense of when to get lost.
“So you’re just making yourself useful until he needs you again?”
“Got to earn my keep somehow.” Edward gave me a quick smile as he turned off the drive and onto the long, rambling path that led, eventually, to Therese’s cottage.
He didn’t seem inclined to any further conversation, and I found my attention drawn instead to the familiar sights along the way – the huge magnolia that overhung the path, the strange fountain statue that Isabelle had found on holiday in France one year and had shipped back, the wild flower patch my mother planted which, over the course of a few summers, overtook almost a whole lawn.
As we reached the bend in the main path that led down to the abandoned ruin of the old stables and Therese’s tiny cottage, my great-aunt appeared in the distance. Therese was unmistakable with her 1950s silhouette of full skirt and tight cardigan even when, as now, her arms were full of eucalyptus leaves.
Edward squinted up into the sun, the light bleaching his sandy hair even paler. “This looks like another of those ‘earn my keep’ moments,” he said. “Isabelle will only send me back for them later, anyway.” He jogged away down the path to relieve Therese of her leafy burden. He had a point; Isabelle never came down to Therese’s cottage if she could send someone else. In fact, I didn’t think I’d ever seen her there. “I’ll take these up to the house for you, Mrs Williams,” I heard Edward say. “Save you the trouble, since I’m heading back anyway. Besides, you’ve got a visitor.”
Therese’s pale blue eyes widened and her red lips pursed as I came close, and I wondered what changes she saw in me. But then she smiled, and I was eighteen again, home from university as a surprise one weekend, folded into her expensively perfumed embrace and thoroughly kissed, leaving lipstick marks on my cheeks. Therese was an anachronism, a throwback to a decade she’d only just been born for, with her fifties costumes and curled and pinned hair. But she was a part of Rosewood for me, every bit as much as Isabelle’s cocktails before dinner and Nathaniel’s stories.
“It’s so good to have you home,” she said, leading me inside, and I blinked away unexpected tears as I realised just how much I had missed her. At least someone was pleased to see me.
Therese’s cottage was as I had left it, filled with knick-knacks and jugs full of sweet peas and dishes laden with glass bead necklaces. The only difference, as far as I could see, was the vast collection of clothes that hung from every hook and corner and ledge in the lounge. And the hallway. And running up the stairs. Dresses and skirts and blouses and coats and handbags, with gloves and scarves and tops and shoes spilling out from old steamer trunks, stacked carelessly against the walls.
Therese had always been a bit of a clothes horse, but this was taking things to extremes, even for her.
I peered into the lounge from the hallway, and saw that in amongst all the accessories, my favourite photo of her still sat on the mantelpiece. Therese, aged nineteen, pale and pouting in black-and-white with crisply waving hair surrounding challenging pale eyes. It must have been taken in the tail end of the sixties, I’d worked out once, but Therese looked like a screen siren from thirties Hollywood. It was one of a very few photos I’d seen of Therese out of her fifties costume, and even that was out of sync with the rest of the world – but fitted perfectly at Rosewood.
Rosewood existed in a bubble all of its own, out of time, because that was the way Nathaniel liked it. I wondered absently how Edward was coping with the lack of internet at Rosewood. Maybe I’d ask him later.
Picking up the picture frame, I studied the photo, finding familiar lines in the much younger face. She kept it up as a reminder, Therese always said. A reminder that she’d been beautiful once. Before life happened.
Turning to watch her potter around the tiny kitchen, filling the kettle and warming the pot, I knew that she was still beautiful. Why had she never remarried? “Once was enough,” she always said, but she’d only been forty-one when Great-Uncle George had died. Therese would have been quite a catch, with her perfectly pinned hair, slim waist, beautiful outfits, and her pale blue eyes. She and Isabelle together as young women must have been a formidable sight.
Great-Uncle George had always been a little bit of a mystery. He’d died before I was born, so all I really had to go on were occasional snatches of parental conversation, when the adults thought I wasn’t listening. I’d asked, once, but hadn’t really received any satisfactory answers.
As far as Ellie and I had been able to piece together, George had been some hotshot trader in the city when he met Therese and they’d fallen instantly in love. They’d married shortly after and gone to live in London, where he showered his new bride with lavish gifts of jewels and dresses. Isabelle, it seemed, was always a little sore on this point.
Still, and this was the part that didn’t make any sense, when George had suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of only forty-seven, creditors had swooped in and taken the house, the furniture, the cars, and most of the jewels. Therese had showed up at Rosewood with a suitcase of evening gowns, planning to stay only until she was back on her feet, and she had never left.
Isabelle mentioned that part often, pointedly, usually when Nathaniel and Therese had their heads together, laughing over some private, shared joke the way only siblings could. The way Ellie and I used to.
In fifteen years’ time, would I be back at Rosewood, begging asylum again? And if so, would Ellie resent my presence as obviously as Isabelle had always resented Therese’s? Probably.
“We’ll take tea in the garden,” Therese said decisively, smoothing a lace cloth over a plain silver tray, and laying out the china cups, sugar bowl, milk jug, and a plate of chocolate-covered ginger biscuits. “Will you bring the pot, Kia?”
Wrapping the handle of the delicate teapot with a clean tea towel, I did as I was told, and followed Therese out through the back door into her tiny, hedged garden.
Therese’s flower beds were tended and nurtured daily, and carefully trained to appear as a hodgepodge cottage garden. Lupins and delphiniums and foxgloves loomed over fuchsias and snapdragons; sweet peas clambered up canes set against the cottage wall, sending their familiar scent past me on the breeze.
In the middle was a small, circular patio, occupied by a wrought-iron bistro table and two chairs, glowing warm in the late afternoon sun.
