Happily Ever After

Chapter 17

17

PEQUOD – MOBY DICK, HERMAN MELVILLE

I redoubled my searching efforts, mostly visibly and mostly to reassure Lady Tanith that I wasn’t just sitting in the library twiddling my thumbs and drinking tea. I cleared all the shelves I hadn’t made my way through already, piling books randomly around the floor in teetering heaps, moved all the furniture, rolled up the carpet and generally made the place look as though I were leaving no stone unturned.

There were no stones to turn. I pressed, pulled and twisted every jutting moulding and shelf edging, to reveal an enormous lack of secret passages, priest holes or hiding places of any description. Oswald’s giant expression now looked to be disappointment tinged with relief. Anything this well-hidden wasn’t meant to be found, surely. I knew Lady Tanith wanted to publish the diaries, together with reprints of Oswald’s novels and poems, ‘for the students of the future, who will, no doubt, regard him as the genius he was.’ But maybe the diaries were less of an insight into his working methods, and more of a record of his sexual exploits? Lady Tanith may have been his muse, but perhaps he had been less interested in listing the ways she inspired his creative juices and more in noting the various, and no doubt ambitious, ways she inspired all his other juices?

But my efforts reassured Lady Tanith to the extent that she allowed me to have a small gas-fired heater in the library. The room was so big that the heater didn’t do much more than take the edge off the cold, but by sitting almost right up against it to fill in the spreadsheet, I could at least keep my fingers mobile.

When Sunday rolled around, I put on some clean jeans and set out for Jay’s house on the green. The sun had cracked the clouds today, giving rise to a deceptively mild day as though summer were coming, rather than going. The grass was greener, the flowers were perky and scenting the air, and there were a few people moving about in the village. The carpenter whom I had come across around Templewood was painting a window frame and two ladies I recognised as part of Mrs Compton’s coven of cleaning helpers were sitting on a bench chatting. A man walking a dog raised a hand in greeting, and two small children, poking the ground with sticks, stopped their prodding for a moment to stare at me as I walked up to Jay’s front door and knocked. I didn’t examine the idea that everything looked better because I was going to be seeing Jay; it seemed superfluous.

‘He in’t in, miss,’ the larger of the children offered. ‘He had to go down to trains, yesterday.’

Oh bugger.

‘Aye. His mum were taken badly,’ the smaller child said. ‘But he left you a note.’

‘Shurrup, stupid, note might not be for ’er.’

‘’Tis so! Cos, cos he told me, right. He told me a lady were coming and to make sure she saw the note. So it’s you who’s stupid, Marcus Dalby!’

The two of them set to what looked to be a pleasurable and often repeated scrap, while I fished out the note from where it had been jammed under the doorknocker.

Andi,

So sorry to have to call off our lunch, but my mum has broken her arm in the middle of preparations for a London landscaping event, so I’m heading home to give Dad a hand for a few days, to make sure all the basics are covered. Hopefully we can reschedule once I’m back.

Take care, don’t work too hard and don’t eat anything that looks like paté, I haven’t seen Mr Compton around in a while and Mrs C has got a really effective mincer and one hell of a temper. Catch you later.

Jay x

Despite my disappointment, I found I was laughing. Jay had thought of me to the extent of leaving a note, which was good. I pushed it into my pocket and headed back, past the still-fighting boys, through the churchyard, past Oswald’s phallic memorial and into the gardens of Templewood Hall.

Hugo and his mother had gone out to lunch. I’d watched them drive away before I’d left, grateful that I didn’t have to explain where I was going to either of them. Not that Hugo would have minded, he seemed to quite like Jay whenever he spoke about him, but Lady Tanith seemed to think that I should be sealed into the library and not released until I’d found those bloody diaries.

The house was empty when I got back. It even felt empty. Mrs Compton also had Sundays off, ‘unless it’s an Oswald Day,’ Hugo had remarked, so there was no ghastly presence stalking the corridors with pithy, insulting one-liners to aim at my head. It was just me and The Master.

I made myself a sandwich, being careful to avoid anything that looked as though Mrs Compton had had a hand in its manufacture, and wondered how, when she could cook such wonderful meals on Oswald days, she managed to churn out such utter slop the rest of the month. Then I took my sandwich for a walk around the downstairs rooms for no other reason than I didn’t know what to do with myself.

The sun continued to shine, and the rooms continued in their peeling paint and emptiness. The Master strolled along slightly behind me, like a small, round chaperone, cocking his head when I opened each door as though querying why I could possibly want to go into the Morning Room or the Drawing Room when there were no comfortable fires to sit in front of. I tweaked a few cupboards in case Oswald’s diaries had migrated from the library, but found nothing more interesting than about forty thousand back copies of the Radio Times from the 1970s and loads of disused biros. Still eating, I trudged upstairs, with half a mind to get changed and go into the library to see if there was a Netflix account set up on the computer while nobody was around to see me watching it, but I only got as far as the top of the stairs when The Master took off. As though he’d been bitten by something, he leaped into the air and ran full pelt the length of the landing that ran away from my room and across the top of the house towards Lady Tanith’s wing, with a yowl that sounded like pain.

‘Master? Puss?’ I called, walking in the direction he’d gone, but cautiously. I didn’t know this part of the house, which was strictly Lady Tanith’s territory and, as she was terrifying enough in the public rooms, I had never wanted to encounter her one-to-one in her private suite. I had a vague fear that it might be full of bodies, or, even worse, living people kept chained up.

‘Puss? Are you all right?’ I stopped, but everything was quiet. Great. It would just be my luck for the cat to have some kind of fit and drop dead on my watch. A distant yowl set me off again, walking an interminable corridor, where the few windows gave a view over the high, far hills where the bracken was turning to flame and the sky met the land so sharply that it was almost audible. This side of the house looked out towards the moorland rather than the domesticated garden view of the wing that Hugo and I occupied; the panelling was older and covered with the drill holes of woodworm, the curtains more sun bleached and tattered. Lady Tanith was clearly dedicated to keeping everything here exactly as Oswald would have known it, to the extent of not so much as replacing a light bulb.

Another corner, a closer yowl and I was standing surrounded by doors, while the cat writhed on the carpet.

‘Are you all right? What’s the matter?’ I bent down towards The Master. He was trying to hook a paw under the nearest door, alternately pressing his nose to the gap and prodding a clawed foot into the space. ‘Is it a rat? Or a mouse? Oh, please not a rat…’ Hugo was terrified of rats. Not because of their essential rodenty nature, but because he was afraid one would get into his clothing collection and chew holes. It was one reason that he was happy to give The Master the run of the house – the other, of course, being that his mother wanted the cat to have the run of the house, and he was not going to stand up against her any time soon.

‘Is there something in there?’ I asked the cat.

In answer, he lay on his side and poked the paw further in.

I tried the door. It wasn’t locked, to my surprise, and opened onto a small and narrow staircase of the kind that servants used to access the attic rooms without being visible to the household in general. The Master shot up the stairs as though he were being summoned by magic and I, aware of some vague duty of care to the cat, followed him.

The attics were huge. A big, rambling space, split into smaller rooms littered with boxes, broken vases, big hats, old board games, almost anything one could shove up into an attic. Huge beams arched above my head and occasionally demarcated the floor into sections as I padded after the cat, who had vanished except for an occasionally sighted twitch of dark tail and a spooky screeching.

Gosh, the space was big. I looked around, trying to get my bearings. Tiny windows in the eaves gave me glimpses of bits of sky or treetops, none of which was much good for ascertaining my position, and the boarded floor, which was remarkably free from dust, gave no clues either. I had to look for landmarks among the junk as I went, and when I turned left at the same broken hat stand twice, I gave up and resigned myself to being lost.

‘Puss! Master, come on .’ I hoped the cat knew where he was. Presumably, he’d also know how to get out of here, if I could only find him. ‘Puss?’

A muffled miaow. I rounded another corner and saw a chocolate tail and paws squeezing their way through a narrow gap between two beams. Hoping for a shortcut, or at least, not a nest of rats, I followed him.

And stopped.

And stared.

And guessed what the noises in the ceiling had been.

In a secret corner, under a small window, stood a table. On that table, in a rather terrifying parody of a religious setting, there were some candles standing in front of some photographs, which were propped against the wall.

I went closer. One photograph was quite large, a black and white shot of what had evidently been a wedding, although the way the paper had been cut in half told me that the bride had been excised with a pair of scissors, leaving the groom alone and handsome in his morning suit, smiling at the camera. It was Oswald. Younger than his portrait and showing the immaculate bone structure that Hugo had inherited, he stood among similarly besuited guests, none of whom were visible as more than mannequins of elegance.

All the other pictures were of Oswald too: Oswald fishing, Oswald astride a large, bow-fronted horse, Oswald sitting on a fence with a small child. In pride of place, right in the centre of the table and resting on a pile of books which had Oswald’s name printed on the front in gold embossing and various pretentious titles, was a colour photograph of Oswald, looking rather ill-at-ease, standing next to a radiant, and much younger, Lady Tanith.

The footsteps I’d been hearing and putting down to ghosts, or the even more unbelievable concept of Mrs Compton cleaning, must be Lady Tanith’s visits to what I was trying not to think of as an altar to Oswald. Ghosts might have been preferable.

Oh boy. I turned sharply and began to tiptoe my way back, between the beams, down the attic and as far away from the shrine to Oswald Dawe as I could go. At some point in my retreat, The Master caught up with me, a deceased rodent of some variety in his jaws and a contented look on his little furry face, but I was too horrified even to be repulsed.

Lady Tanith was bonkers. Absolutely and totally quacking round the pond. I’d thought she’d limited herself to the enormous painting and some misty memories, but no, she’d gone full Misery . I’d half expected to find Oswald’s corpse in there, desiccated and withered on the table, covered in flowers.

The cat and I found, by some miracle, the tiny staircase down to the main house and I ran down almost without touching the treads, slamming the door shut behind me, as though the resultant draught could take the memory of what I’d seen from my mind. The pictures. The way she’d cut Caroline out of her own wedding photograph. The candles. The books.

I flew along the landing to my room, hurled myself onto the bed and pulled the pillow over my head. She’d set up a shrine to Oswald in the attic. There wasn’t enough urrrggghh in the world to cover how I felt about that. Lady Tanith must visit it regularly; there were no cobwebs anywhere on the table or pictures, and the noises above my head, although irregular, came pretty often.

From the other side of my room there was the sound of The Master eating his prey, with a disgusting amount of crunching. I groaned and pulled the pillow harder over my ears to try to block it out. To try to block out everything , the bone-chewing, the thought of that memorial table…

Then something odd happened. Which, given what had gone before, made it very odd indeed.

I began to feel sorry for Lady Tanith.

Oh, not hugely sorry, not yet. But the tiniest corner of pity crept into my heart when I thought of her, up there in the attic, alone at night, with Oswald’s pictures. And I thought how dreadful it was that they had had such a deep involvement that it had impacted her so hard when he died. She’d been cheated of her promised happy ending, left with nothing but the booby prize of Oswald’s son, when she’d been so desperately in love with his father, who had loved her, left her and never come back.

Obviously, she was still an absolute cow, and this kind of hero-worship was only one step from gibbering madness, but, even so. She must have suffered so much, waiting for her beloved to come back, and hearing of his death. No wonder she was desperate to find his diaries. She wanted to relive those happy times, when Oswald had been hers, even if only for short periods. Oswald himself must have suffered too, torn between his duty to his languishing wife and his love for the vibrant, energetic Lady Tanith. No wonder she had become his muse. No wonder he hadn’t known which way to turn.

I had to find those diaries. Not for me, well, maybe a little bit for me, so I wouldn’t get thrown out of Templewood with winter coming, but for Lady Tanith’s peace of mind. To reunite her, in however small a way, with Oswald. To let her read through his notes, hopefully some of his wonderful memories of his time with her, then she could publish and show the public – however many of them were interested – that their love had been true and inspirational to his work.

Just because I thought Oswald couldn’t write his way out of a deckchair, that didn’t mean everyone thought the same. After all, I didn’t think much of Tolstoy, but plenty of other people did. There were probably students of Oswald’s work out in the world, poring over his every word, analysing every grim, obviously rhymed line. Those diaries could be valuable to the world of literary research. I could be a hero!

I took the pillow off my head and got up. The Master ‘brrrrrpd’ at me questioningly, and then followed as I set out towards the library again, with a new resolution in my steps.

I bloody well would find those diaries, if I had to take the room apart to do so.