Chapter 33
CERENSTHORPE ABBEY – PRESENT DAY
Edith clung to Gulliver’s arm and Tabitha hovered behind her as the tall man in a protective suit, similar to those usually worn at crime scenes, beamed at them from the interior of the room.
‘This is remarkable,’ said Mark Llewellyn, his Welsh vowels even more pronounced than usual due to his excitement.
‘We’ve had some unexpected discoveries at Marquess House, but this,’ he pointed to the glass case, ‘is astonishing. What’s even better is all the paperwork your great-grandfather filed with it, Mrs Swanne.
The name of his contact at the British Museum, the tests they performed and the authentication – we’re rarely this lucky. ’
‘Is it safe to move it?’ asked Edith.
‘Not yet,’ said Mark. ‘It’s been inside the room and its case for decades. We’ll need to ensure there’s no damp anywhere before we expose it, but it won’t be long. You must be desperate to examine it.’
The click of heels on the wooden floor caused them all to turn.
Lucia walked towards them; her long blonde highlighted hair fell to her waist in perfect soft waves and curls.
She wore a figure-hugging dress of fuchsia pink and knee-high patent boots with spiky heels.
Her blue eyes were hooded and watchful and her pink painted lips curled with disdain.
‘I told you to wait for me,’ she said coldly to Gulliver, ignoring Edith and Tabitha. Despite the Italian heritage she spoke about endlessly, she had no trace of it in her vowels.
‘You’re an hour late,’ said Gulliver.
‘And?’
‘The world doesn’t revolve around you.’
Edith cleared her throat.
‘Are you all right, Edith?’ Lucia asked, her tone patronising.
‘Perfectly, thank you,’ replied Edith, crisply. ‘The house remains mine, Lucia, therefore, we work to my timetable.’
Lucia narrowed her eyes and she took a step back, glaring first at Edith, then Gulliver. To Tabitha’s surprise, Gulliver ignored Lucia, instead of responding with one of his usual placatory comments or gestures.
Maybe he has fallen out of love with her, after all, Tabitha thought, turning to Mark, who was staring at Lucia in surprise.
‘Perhaps you could show us whatever you’ve found that won’t be damaged by its removal,’ Tabitha suggested, trying to ease the tension.
‘Of course,’ he replied and disappeared back inside the room.
After their discovery, Tabitha and Gulliver had pushed the door back in place and run upstairs to Edith like two excited children. The revelation of the Chaucer manuscript had roused her from the lethargy that had enveloped her since her gastric bug.
‘We need experts,’ she had said. ‘The British Museum, perhaps? It was where Wilbur took it initially.’
Tabitha had suggested Marquess House, the huge research centre based in the manor of the same name, on the edge of the village where her parents had their hotel.
‘I could call my friend, Briony,’ she had continued. ‘Her brother, Mark, is in charge of The Dairy, part of the research centre at Marquess House. It specialises in authenticating documents and storing them. Mark’s a renowned expert in his field,’ she had explained.
‘Their reputation is exemplary,’ said Gulliver. ‘Do you think they’ll help?’
‘I think so,’ she had replied and immediately rung Briony Mackensie to check she had the most up-to-date number for Briony’s brother, Mark Llewellyn.
As soon as Tabitha had explained the situation, Mark and his wife, Stephanie, had gathered a small team and headed straight to Cerensthorpe Abbey, where Edith had insisted they all stay.
‘I will have to ask you to wear gloves,’ said Mark as he reappeared carrying a cardboard box.
‘This is the original authentication paperwork, but there’s an anomaly.
This document states there are twenty-five tales rather than the usual twenty-four in every other version of The Canterbury Tales.
At first, they wondered if the entire thing was a fake, but apparently not.
The extra story, The Mother’s Tale, has been loosely translated from Old English and transcribed.
With luck, the original is inside the glass box with the Chaucer. ’
‘Grandfather mentions the extra tale in his diary,’ Edith said. ‘Gull, have you given Mark a copy?’
‘Tabitha gave me the transcript she’s been working on. It’s very interesting,’ said Mark. ‘There is a suggestion it might be Tudor. Incidentally, did you ever discover what happened to the child?’
Tabitha looked up in surprise as Edith shook her head.
‘Until Tabitha typed it out for me, I had no idea about the little girl, Eglantine. It’s strange to think there might be more Swanne offspring out in the world. Sadly, no one has ever presented themselves here, which makes me wonder if the poor thing died.’
Tabitha could not help but glance at Lucia, who was glaring at Edith with a look of intense hatred. A moment later, her expression became neutral and Tabitha wondered if she had imagined it.
‘Perhaps you could hire a genealogist,’ Mark suggested.
‘Let’s solve this mystery first,’ said Gulliver. ‘Are there any documents giving more information about the extra tale?’
‘No and the copy here is a typed transcript from the early 1900s. Unfortunately, some of the ink is blurred. We could take it back to Marquess House and scan it, then we’ll be able to clean it up.’
‘Is it readable?’ asked Edith.
‘What do you think, Tabs?’ said Mark, showing her the top page.
Tabitha studied it; the majority of the closely typed page was legible.
‘Would photocopying damage it?’ she asked.
‘Not these pages, no; they’re standard paper from the era. It’s a bit thin but sturdy enough. Depending on the copier, it might be possible to clean the pages up a little, to make them easier to read. Although, I’d prefer to do it myself.’
He gave Tabitha an apologetic grimace.
‘Take him to your office, Tabitha, dear,’ said Edith, her voice bubbling with excitement.
Mark, still wearing his protective white suit, followed Tabitha out of the library.
‘This is a lovely house,’ said Mark as they wandered through the winding corridors.
‘Not as grand as Marquess House,’ she said.
‘It takes a lot to outshine Marquess House,’ he agreed, ‘but this is stunning. I saw the ruins in the garden; are they the original abbey church?’
‘Yes, it fell into disuse after the property changed from a religious house to a secular college under the ownership of Elizabeth Boleyn,’ she explained. ‘The house was passed to Mary Boleyn, then her daughter, Maud, who is Gulliver and Edith’s ancestor.’
‘The Swannes have a direct connection to the Boleyns?’ he asked, stopping dead.
‘Yes, why?’ replied Tabitha, bemused.
‘That explains a great deal.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Before you arrived this morning, Stephanie and I had a quick look through the authentication documents. I wanted to ensure there were no nasty surprises for Edith, she’s such a lovely lady, and Steph read some of The Mother’s Tale.’
‘And?’
‘After a few pages, she asked if there were any family links to the Boleyns with the Swannes as she thought there was a connection to the text.’
‘In what way?’
‘Steph has hypothesised that the “mother” in the tale might be Elizabeth Boleyn, mother of Mary, Anne and George, wife of Thomas, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk.’
‘No,’ said Tabitha, astonished.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘and if she was the owner of Cerensthorpe Abbey, it would make sense that she might leave it here rather than at the Boleyn residence of Hever Castle.’
‘But why would she have placed a story in an ancient copy of Chaucer?’ asked Tabitha.
‘I’m hoping these pages will explain,’ he said.
‘If that’s the case, why didn’t Wilbur Swanne or his contact at the British Museum do more research?’
‘Who knows? But back in the 1900s when Wilbur shut the manuscript away, there was far less interest in the female side of history,’ he said.
‘True,’ murmured Tabitha, but she also wondered if Wilbur’s grief was what had driven him to hide the documents. They were intrinsically linked to the tale of his life with Helena. Was locking everything out of sight his way of surviving the pain?
They reached her office and Mark nodded approvingly at the state-of-art photocopier.
‘There’s a setting which will help clean up the pages,’ he said. ‘It might take a while, as I’ll be doing each page individually.’
Tabitha cleared the old refectory table which stood in one corner of the room, ready to compile the pages, then joined Mark by the photocopier.
‘Was there something specific that made your wife think The Mother’s Tale was written by Elizabeth Boleyn?’ asked Tabitha.
‘It’s the opening page,’ he said. ‘Listen to this, “I have lived without them for two years – my daughter, my son. My other daughter, for her own safety, lives away from our family with its tainted lineage and its cursed name. He did this to me as an act of revenge. He destroyed us all, one by one by one, in a myriad of devious and wicked ways. None challenge him. None know the truth, but one day my tale will be told. I shall reveal his villainy, his cruelty and the evil blackness of his sorcerer’s heart…”. ’
‘There are no names,’ she said. ‘It could be anyone, it might not even be Tudor.’
‘True, but there’s a line further on about “killing them both”; we work a lot with documents from the Tudor era, and all these comments made me think of Anne and George Boleyn being executed and Mary Boleyn banished from court.
When you said there was a connection to the extended Boleyn family earlier, it felt even more viable.
There’s a poem too, it begins “One for sorrow, Two for joy—”’
‘One of the clues we solved involved a hawking whistle engraved with the words, “Two for joy”,’ interrupted Tabitha.
‘Do you know who it belonged to?’ asked Mark in excitement.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘It was on a taxidermy magpie which is mentioned in Wilbur’s diary.’
‘Gross,’ said Mark.
‘Horrific,’ agreed Tabitha ‘but if the words were written on one of the pages of the tale and you’re right about the author, could the whistle have belonged to Elizabeth Boleyn?’
‘I’d say it was possible,’ said Mark, pressing the start button on the photocopier. ‘We’ll have to read it and see if the author mentions it in the tale.’
‘Could you do ten copies of the document, please?’ Tabitha asked.
‘I planned to do at least that many, then ask Edith’s permission to read it and to send one to Perdita,’ he said.
Perdita Mackensie, Briony’s sister-in-law through their husbands, was a respected historian, as well as the one of the joint owners of Marquess House along with her sister, Piper.
‘Edith was most excited about the Chaucer; do you think the other tale could be as valuable?’ said Tabitha.
‘Yes, and if we can date and authenticate the paper it’s written on, it’ll help.
If it turns out to be a version of Elizabeth Boleyn’s life, it could change all we know about the Boleyn story.
It would be priceless because there is hardly any information directly about Elizabeth remaining in the archives.
She appears in other people’s lives but her voice has been lost.’
For reasons she could not explain, Tabitha felt a shiver of fear run down her spine.