The Treasures (The Sevenstones Trilogy #1)

Prologue

Emma Raven sat by the window, listening for the sound of the cab.

Her back ached, as it did when she sat for too long.

She hadn’t done her stretches that morning.

She must speak to the GP about her HRT. (She must try to get an appointment.) She had to mend her headphones before the Teams meeting.

She hated Teams. She must remember to buy the birthday present for Ted.

Call the locksmith about her own front door lock jamming (she’d been trapped in the house last week, and had had to climb out of the kitchen window).

Buy ham. Try probiotics! Go for a run. Book the tickets for that pottery course, and the silent disco, and then there were the summer holidays she’d done nothing about …

But, before that, sort out the recycling tonight, not tomorrow, as tomorrow she was off early.

Book the dog into the groomer’s, pay the house-clearance company, call the auction house about the new auction date, upload the missing information to GOV.UK, don’t forget car-insurance renewal.

Remember to breathe. Take a breathing workshop.

Be articulate and well informed about everything that is wrong with the world, but also full of joy.

The old house sat with Emma, quietly waiting.

It had been with her as she had boxed up beautiful old Puffin paperbacks, crying as she found old notes behind the ancient fridge – ples can I have some ise crem – peeling off old stickers from the windows, standing in shock at the bare, bare rooms in which only the faded outlines remained where family photographs and pictures had hung, the merest suggestion of the story of their years there.

But it knew. It understood it was time for a change. That the seasons had passed – spring, summer, autumn, winter – and now it was time for a new spring. To every thing there is a season – isn’t that what Dad used to say?

Spring was coming, the scent of narcissi and wet earth and something new wafting towards her as she pushed open the tight casement window, swollen with winter rain; then she shifted impatiently on the old stone windowsill that had served her as a seat all those years, from Sindys and stickers through to different Body Shop bottles and, behind the wooden panel below it that you could pull out, secret packets of cigarettes and her diary. She wondered if they were still there.

Impossible to think back over it all, the arc of time in the house.

It was too big. She kept recalling silly things.

The hooks Dad had put up by the fireplace for the Christmas stockings, hitting his finger and swearing so loudly about how stupid it was that Emma’d figured out there was no Father Christmas.

Funny, because he was such a gentle man, but it had been a terrible year, the worst one.

Or the time one of her siblings – she couldn’t even remember which now – tumbled into the stream and Uncle Guy toppled in trying to save them, and squashed a toad, and all the children cried about the squashed toad, gave it the first of many animal funerals.

The Royal Wedding street party that ended in disaster.

The Great Storm, when the others woke up and there were eight, ten fallen trees across the lane, so many that there was no school, and it was like Christmas in October.

Driving blindly back from the pub after too many vodka and tonics, sobbing, aged seventeen.

Carol singers at the door; the Summer Solstice out in the stones.

The long refectory kitchen table covered in pieces of material, Silver Jubilee Wedding mugs, geranium cuttings in jugs, seed packets, hammers, deely-bobber headbands, feathers, children’s drawings, empty cereal bowls.

All gone long ago: broken, sent to charity, sold, thrown away.

Emma dropped to her knees, groaning only mildly.

There must be an unopened packet in here; there’d been that duty-free one that Aunt D kept hidden for Christmases.

She pulled at the wooden board of the windowsill.

It came away with barely a grumble – she was always amazed at the ways the house shifted round throughout the year without ever cracking or crumbling – and, too late, she remembered that it was the wrong board, that the secret hiding place was under the other window.

But the board had come away. And there was something there. A small drawstring bag. Emma snatched it out, suddenly afraid, she didn’t know why.

Each little piece in the bag had been tightly bound up in cloth; she unwrapped them and laid them out on the floor, a mismatched Noah’s Ark.

Emma stared at the treasures before her, a strange collection of animals and stones and oddments.

A metal wizard, the paint worn off, a quartz elephant, a darling little china deer …

a raven with a chipped wing. Raven! She held them up in delight.

A carved wooden house, the chimneys snapped off.

A little blue-and-white china cat. A brooch: a severe-looking woman in profile.

And, finally, a small rose-gold necklace with a star-shaped gold pendant set with sapphires, and, on it, a tag: For Emma, from her father .

Why were they there? Why were they hidden away?

What was the point of storing them here?

There came the humming shrooooom sound of the electric car pulling into the driveway.

Emma wrapped up the pieces and put them back into the bag.

She placed them carefully at the top of her knapsack, aware as she did so that they were the key to Sevenstones, the key to the mystery of her parents, her family, and the happiness and sadness that was at the heart of the house.

Over a hundred years – and this was the first lie, the biggest of the lot – since her great-grandfather had bought it, a tumbledown stone shack in a field.

It was only ever meant to be a retreat, somewhere to paint.

The little trinkets clinked very slightly as she slung the bag over her shoulders.

Emma went down the curving slippery staircase where children’s feet had thudded and through the long sitting room with the great hearth, cleared of cinders for the first time in decades.

So strange to see it bare. It was all … very strange, that was all.

She felt the bag of treasures shift inside her knapsack again, as if their discovery had awakened them from a deep sleep and she remembered, as if climbing back through time, her mother telling her about them.

About why they were there, what they meant.

Emma hot and flushed after waking from a nightmare, to find her mother caught on the floor of Emma’s bedroom, holding these little things on her lap, tears running down her cheeks.

She stopped on the stairs, held by the memories.

What could they tell her now? The gold star necklace or the friendly china cat, the worn, battered wizard, the small piece of stone, the dogs, the raven?

She was carrying these tiny treasures away with her, and their secrets too, and she wished she could ask them to tell her everything.

She stood looking left, to the old part of the house, then right, to the new part, then slid the key on to the windowsill and walked down the path for the last time.

She touched the ancient standing stone, shut the gate and closed the door on their life.

It was time for a new family to call Sevenstones home.

But oh … the stories left behind! In each echoing, empty room, going back fifty years, even longer, to the beginning of it all. The beginning of their family.