Down the Garden Path (21 page)

Piling them onto my lap, I went through them for fifteen minutes. I found two belonging to Lily. I touched the pages lightly, trying to get the feel of this child who had been terrible at arithmetic but a good speller—or so her tutor father had thought. Remembering when I had done similar work, I decided that Lily must have been about eight at the time of both books. I thumbed past
Latin
by Hyacinth and
Literary Analysis
by Primrose and came to
Composition
by Violet. In the front pages was a loose piece of paper. On it was a drawing of a coffin with two beaming stick figures seated inside holding hands, with a fancy scripted legend below—
Violet Tramwell loves Arthur Wilkinson.
Okay, she’d had a crush on him as a child, and the woman she had become had left home and country, and changed her religion for a man her family considered beneath her. None of that made Violet an unlikely candidate for the role of my mother. She could have fallen prey to some passing philanderer while Arthur was getting established in America; or perhaps Arthur was my father, and ...

I chewed the end of the pencil. Part of me found it difficult to imagine Violet depositing darling Arthur’s baby on a doorstep, but she was obviously a very determined character—and if an untimely pregnancy had threatened her relationship with the man she loved, wasn’t it perfectly understandable that she would have chosen the lover over the baby?

No, it wasn’t—not when the baby was me. But then, my mother wasn’t some fanciful extension of me. Harry had tried to instill that realization in me often enough. The distant orchestra of clocks punctured the silence of the nursery, and I realized I would have to go down soon for lunch and face the sisters without revealing any knowledge of their guilty secret. “Guilty secret! Who are you to judge others?” Dad’s voice was so close, so clear, that I almost expected to turn around and find him behind me.

A lovely, peaceful feeling came over me as I remembered what else Dad was wont to say. “You don’t love people despite their faults but because of them.” In coming here I had committed myself to finding my mother, and I would just have to take her as I found her. Should, incredible as it seemed, her name be Mrs. Arthur Wilkinson, undertaker’s, wife, or even Hyacinth or Primrose Tramwell. Writing the word “Lily,” I underlined it and added
Her father never recovered from her death.

After staring at those few words for several minutes, I found I could write nothing else about Lily. Had the gallery contained portraits of the other sisters as adults I could have assumed that she had died in childhood—but until I knew the how and when of her demise I was stumped. Fear that the Tramwells would think it odd that someone in the throes of amnesia would show extreme curiosity about their past family history had prevented me from asking too many probing questions. But I would now have to take the plunge.

The nursery had grown stuffy. I opened the window, leaning out to look at the garden. How peacefully innocent it appeared, washed sparkling clean from yesterday’s rain. A blackbird zoomed down from one of the elms, settled on the edge of the sundial, then fluttered off. Was the cat out? My eyes searched the flower beds for a skulking black form and then I saw what had disturbed the bird. Bertie was crouched behind a wooden seat. That boy! Was he playing Robin Hood? On impulse I leaned out the window and called down, “The Sheriff has Big John and Friar Tuck!”

Bertie’s face inched over the top of the seat and he gaped. “Cripes, how did you know, miss?”

“I know everything. Why didn’t you ask your friend to play?”

“Fred?”

“Don’t you have another one?”

“You mean Ricky? Fred doesn’t like him anymore.”

“And if the Tramwell ladies catch you skulking around they may not like
you
anymore. Better scram.”

Leaving the window open so the nursery would catch a little sun, I went into the hallway, and on impulse decided to look in some of the rooms in the hopes of finding portraits of the four sisters as adults. Down the whole length of the hallway I tiptoed, opening one door after another into—nakedness. Not one was furnished. Yesterday, when I had opened the wrong doors looking for the bathroom, I had thought how sensible the sisters were to have cleared a few rooms to save on work for the servants. Now, a deep sense of foreboding moved within me.

At last; here was a room furnished and obviously occupied. It was crowded with black lacquered furniture decorated with Oriental panels which did not complement the hyacinth-patterned wallpaper. Next, a large linen cupboard. And then, a room with primroses on the paper, a dainty frilly room with a canopied four-poster bed and an ornate French armoire cutting one corner. Mm ... None of the previous, barren rooms had possessed floral wallpaper that I could remember. A creaking below the bannister rail brought me up short. I paused, listened, and went on past the bathroom. But yesterday, when I had opened those doors by mistake, surely I had seen a room with flowered paper.

Here it was. Empty of all furnishings, except for the faded mauve-blue curtains at the window; a blue that picked up the colour of the violets garlanding the walls. Not even a footstool. I bit down on a nail. Even if Violet had never come home for a holiday, I would have thought her old room would have been kept in readiness, just in case. The room next door did possess a footstool, pushed up against the far wall. Above it was a small plain brass cross. I was standing near the door, tracing the shape of one of the lilies on the paper, when a hand came down on my shoulder. A scream rose in my throat which I barely managed to swallow.

“After Lily’s death Father used to come here and pray.” Hyacinth spoke as though we had been in the middle of a conversation. Her black hooded eyes were on the cross.

Now I could ask the big question. So easy, but my voice crawled out in a whisper. “How did your sister die?”

I thought at first she would never answer. Then, leaving me standing in the doorway, she went and stood with her back to me in the middle of the room. “I suppose one could say Lily was a victim of the Tramwell family curse.”

“What?”

“Lily fell down the stairs, like our ancestress, Tessa.”

Instinctively I said, “Your poor mother. I can’t think of anything worse than—”

“She never gave way. Never cried. She had Father to tend, you see. His hair went white in a week. Outsiders thought they knew him, that he was mainly interested in his wines and in sporting his fancy waistcoats. But his children were everything to him. He was the perennial child himself. Father was the one who put the swing in the nursery. The house would ring with laughter. Lily had the most infectious laugh. Rather like yours. Sometimes even now, I can hear ... such a merry sound, and then the screams.... But enough of that.” Hyacinth turned and came back to me. “It was all a long time ago.”

Laughter, minutes before she fell? Then Lily had not been driven from the house by irate parents who had discovered that she was pregnant. Unless ... unless she was defiant, spirited, determined to brazen matters out—I shivered—and an infuriated someone had come up behind her and given her an angry shake or a shove.

“A terrible accident,” I said.

“Yes.” Was Hyacinth agreeing that it was terrible or that it was an accident?

Fergy says prying into people’s grief is like going through someone’s handbag, but I persisted. “Was Lily very young when it happened?”

“Naturally.” Wasn’t Hyacinth paying attention? Old people fell downstairs.

“How old was she?” I asked.

Hyacinth took my elbow and guided me from the room. “Come away. No point in focussing on the morbid. Chantal has lunch ready, and I thought that afterwards you might like to help me with some weeding in the garden. Nothing like fresh air for curing all manner of ills.”

Not only was she unwilling to discuss Lily further, but those last words were perhaps a hint that I was beginning to outstay my welcome. I was being hurried towards the stairs, Hyacinth explaining that since Butler and Chantal were both having this evening off we would have a substantial meal now and a cold one at dinnertime.

After lunch, which was a rather silent meal—Primrose appearing rather abstracted—I did go out and help Hyacinth weed the rose beds. The sun was warm on our backs as we knelt companionably, prodding our trowels into the damp earth. I thought of Mum. So long ago, those afternoons when I had sat beside her dropping stones in my small bucket as she worked. Often when I thought of her my sense of loss was a dull ache, but now it was raw and fresh as though dragged to the surface like the weeds in my hands.

The rest of the day passed and I found I was counting the minutes until I could get to Harry in the Ruins.
If
I could get to him. At six o’clock precisely Butler served us a ham salad and cheese and biscuits in the parlour, and announced that he and Chantal would be leaving in half an hour.

“Have a pleasant evening,” said the sisters.

“Thank you.  I h’always find my therapy sessions most rewarding, mesdames.” He swept a cracker crumb into his open palm and padded noiselessly from the room.

“So pleased he is getting this release.” Primrose poked at a lettuce leaf.

“But I thought ...” I could not help myself. “I thought you didn’t believe in psychotherapy.”

“The home-brewed kind we do,” replied Hyacinth. “Pass the mustard pickle, please, Tessa.”

Who could Butler be seeing? A sympathetic woman? The curtains had not been drawn, and in looking towards the windows I was overcome again by the feeling that someone was lurking in or near the grounds watching. Bertie? But I hadn’t experienced this prickly chill when I had caught him playing Robin Hood earlier in the morning. Chantal crossed the lawn, a scarf fluttering around her head. Off to some pub, I was sure: Perhaps the Traitor’s Head?

The meal over, we removed to the sitting room, and I had to fight to keep my jumping limbs still. The sisters picked up books to read, and suggested that I might find
The Dutiful Daughter
soothing. Burying my scorching face in it, I turned a page every now and then without reading a word. Hyacinth was sitting on the same couch as I, and Primrose on the one opposite. When I did lift my head briefly I noticed that although the silvery head was intently bent, one hand was lying across the open pages. Five minutes later I looked again, and the hand was in the same place.

This time Primrose caught my eyes on her and closed the book. “Dear me, I can’t settle,” she said. “I haven’t heard Minnie, and wonder if she got out when Butler and Chantal left. I’ll go and have a quick peek round for her.”

About ten minutes later she came back to inform us that she could not find Minnie anywhere in the house, and that Clyde had warned her that morning to keep a watch on the dog because several animals had been kidnapped in the village in the last week or so.

“Crime rampant in Flaxby Meade,” sniffed Hyacinth, but she looked rather anxious.

“My dear, if you and Tessa will look in the Ruins and around Abbots Walk, I will go down the other way and call for her.” Primrose ducked back out the door.

Half an hour of searching and cajoling brought no sign or sound of Minnie, and I began to fear that a ransom note might soon be winging its way to Cloisters. Leaving Hyacinth still circling the grounds I went back into the house. With all those rooms it would be easy for the dog to have burrowed away behind a piece of furniture and gone unobserved by a nervous Primrose. I searched the kitchen first, then the parlour and sitting room in hopes that Minnie had wandered into one of these friendly haunts the minute we all left the premises. Not a sign, so I started opening other doors into rooms that were almost as empty as the ones upstairs ...

I stood in the centre of the hall, the wind knocked out of me as though I had been hit with a mallet. Angus had been right when he had suggested that the sisters might be in financial trouble.
They must have been forced to sell their furniture in order to retrieve the funds they had gambled away!
Now I began to wonder if their choice of servants was as liberal as I had supposed. An ex-burglar and a gypsy would never be sponsored for membership in such groups as the Joyful Sounds.

Everything began suddenly to fall into place. Godfrey Grundy would know the Tramwells’ financial state, but his lips would be sealed for his own purposes; and I would bet his mother, when she came to Cloisters, would never be allowed to set foot beyond the sitting room. Maude Krumpet seemed to be only an occasional visitor, and Clyde Deasley ... how much did he know? Clyde Deasley, antique dealer! Wasn’t it likely he was the one who was buying up the furniture and other items of value? Or at least offering valuation estimates. That book Primrose had handed him yesterday,
Evelina,
volume I: Was that really a loan to a friend of Mr. Deasley’s, or was he taking it to show a client? This morning when I had been told to ask him to look at the silver teapot, had the spout needed repairing or was the pot off to the auction block? What sort of detective was I? A detective wearing rose-coloured glasses. I had liked the idea of the ancestral home having its ghosts, yes, but that one of them should be poverty ...

I was so rooted to the ground that when Primrose leaned over the bannister rail and let out a small cry of surprise, I couldn’t move. All I could do was stare blankly up at her.

“How you startled me, Tessa dear. I imagined you were still outside. When I couldn’t find Minnie down the lane I decided to look up on the third floor.”

Footsteps. Hyacinth entered the hall saying she hadn’t had any luck, and Primrose came down the last few stairs, hands twisting, eyes directed at the floor.

How could they bear it if Minnie was really gone? Hadn’t they lost enough already? They had been foolish and imprudent, but everyone needs a little fun in her life. I went to where they stood close together and put my arms around them. “Minnie will be back. She’s romped off with her boyfriend the way she’s done the last couple of nights.”

I made tea and, coming down the hall with the tray, I heard the phone. It was Maude, ringing to ask how I was doing. Kind of her, but I was glad when she rang off quickly, saying she was on her way out to spend the evening with Mrs. Grundy, who seemed to be on the brink of another of her turns. The slight tension in her voice was thus explained, but Maude wouldn’t buy my delayed recovery much longer.