Chapter 30 Bedtime Reading
Bedtime Reading
It turned out to be quite a cheerful gathering at dinner, apart from Opal and Verity, who were rather quiet and with little appetite.
Cariad was in high spirits because she’d managed to persuade both Nerys and Bronwen that she should have the kitten.
‘It’s like having a special extra Christmas present!’ she said, and she didn’t even make a token protest when it was time for bed a little later.
Evie, too, had lost her air of abstraction and was back to her old decisive self. She finally opened up a little bit about the contents of the Memory Box, which were, she said, surprisingly illuminating about Arwen Madoc’s stay at Triskelion.
‘Luckily Milly Vane kept every letter Arwen wrote her during her visit,’ she said, and I saw Nerys exchange an uneasy look with Timon. Once again, I had the suspicion that there was some kind of family secret she was afraid Evie might ferret out.
‘No diary?’ I asked.
‘No, not as such,’ Evie replied ambiguously. ‘But the letters are very illuminating, since they confirm one or two suspicions I’d had – the first being that Arwen had helped her father with his paintings from quite a young age, after he developed a tremor in his hands.’
Some of the tension seemed to leave Nerys and she said, with interest, ‘Really?’
‘I remember you said you suspected that, ages ago,’ I said. ‘Did you make any more interesting discoveries?’
Evie smiled, showing a lot of teeth. ‘I’m not ready to disclose what I’ve learned from the contents of the box just yet.
In fact, I copied the letters and emailed them to Liv for her to transcribe into a Word document.
That will make them easier to work on, but there are other documents I’m still typing up myself. ’
‘What kind of documents?’ I asked, but Evie just tapped the side of her nose infuriatingly and said I’d have to wait a little longer, while she got both her notes and her thoughts in order.
‘However, there’s something you could help me with, Nerys.’
‘Oh?’ said Nerys, looking tense and wary again.
‘I’d like your permission to search the attic tomorrow.’
‘Search the attic?’ Nerys repeated blankly.
‘Yes, the one above our bedrooms, which Tudor says is just used for storing junk and suitcases – the usual kind of thing.’
‘That’s true,’ agreed Timon. ‘It’s just a lumber room, really, with all the broken or unwanted furnishings of the past decades in it.’
‘I’ve only ever gone up there to help you fetch down the Christmas decorations, or to get my suitcases, Timon,’ agreed Rhys.
‘What do you think you might find up there?’ asked Nerys, still looking edgy.
‘The answer to something that puzzled me. I was sure Arwen must have created a lot more work than was extant in the trunks of her belongings that came to me through my mother, or the three paintings of hers I have so far tracked down, and her letters to Milly Vane confirm this. But it seems that when she made up her mind to run away from Triskelion, she hid what she couldn’t carry away with her in the attic. ’
Nerys seemed to relax again and looked interested. ‘If she did, then I don’t think anyone can have discovered them since. And of course, I’m happy for you to search the attic, but it will be very dusty, and I expect some things will have to be moved out of the way.’
The others had all been listening with interest.
‘A treasure hunt!’ said Noel.
‘It’s quite exciting. We could all go and have a look now?’ suggested Timon.
‘There isn’t much light up there, I’m afraid,’ Nerys said. ‘And things are fairly jammed in so there’s not much room to manoeuvre.’
‘Tomorrow will do admirably and I’ll just need two helpers,’ Evie said firmly. ‘Rhys, for some muscle power, if you don’t mind.’
‘I’ll be delighted,’ Rhys said, grinning.
‘And Ginny, who is small and slight enough to squeeze into small spaces.’
‘You couldn’t keep me away!’ I told her. ‘After all, Arwen was my great-grandmother, so I feel I should be in on any discoveries!’
‘The rest of us will just have to contain our curiosity until you’ve searched,’ said Timon. ‘But I’m not sure how you will keep Cariad from joining you, if she finds out what you are up to!’
‘That’s OK, Mel’s nanny is picking her up early tomorrow and taking the girls out for the day.
The zoo again, I think, and then a film in the afternoon in Llandudno Junction,’ said Nerys.
‘Since Rhys’s old nanny retired from looking after Cariad, the Prynnes’ nanny looks after the girls a lot during the holidays, and there’s more for them to do at the castle than here, too. ’
‘It sounds a very sensible arrangement,’ Evie said. ‘I was lucky because I hired a nanny for Ginny and she turned into an excellent housekeeper and PA.’
‘I think Liv is a one-off,’ I said, but my thoughts were already turning to tomorrow’s search, and I felt a tingle of excitement in my stomach. Who doesn’t love a treasure hunt?
*
Evie paid me one of her late-night visits and when I complained that she hadn’t divulged any more details of what she’d found in the Memory Box to me than to anyone else, she said to my surprise that she’d come to the conclusion that I ought to at least read Arwen’s letters.
‘So I’ll ping them over when I get back to my room. There are a few hand-delivered notes to Milly that she sent when her friend was staying in Seren Bach as well, but Liv hasn’t quite finished those and is sending them over some time tomorrow morning so you can have them then.’
‘Well … thank you, and I can’t wait!’ I said, surprised but pleased.
‘I’m only letting you read them on the strict understanding that you don’t share them with anyone at present,’ she said warningly. ‘There are some … troubling elements, and at some point we will need to have a family discussion about what I’ve discovered.’
I looked nervously at her. ‘I assume you’ve found something a bit nasty in the Caradoc family woodshed?’
‘Let’s just say for the moment that Cosmo Caradoc doesn’t come out of it smelling of roses. But the real dynamite from the family viewpoint comes in a sort of journal that Milly kept for a few months.’
‘You didn’t mention a journal!’
‘I didn’t find it at once. Milly wrote it in fine pencil on the back of the drawings in one of her sketchbooks. Her handwriting is so spiky, it looks like lines on a seismic graph and I’m having to transcribe those myself, which is slow work. Noel lent me a magnifying glass.’
‘So what does she say?’ I demanded eagerly.
‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ Evie said in her usual maddening way.
‘I hope it’s nothing too awful, Ma. I’ve got sort of fond of the family.’
‘One in particular? You and Rhys—’
‘Are just friends, as I told you. That’s all I want,’ I said firmly.
‘From the way he looks at you sometimes, I’m sure he’d like to be a lot more than just friends, and I’d say he’s serious.’
‘He … looks at me?’
‘You both look at each other, when you think the other one won’t notice,’ she said, grinning. ‘You can’t deny you’re very attracted to him.’
I sighed. ‘No, but … I mean, I don’t think he is serious, and I don’t want an affair. It’s better to just be friends.’
‘I don’t know why you think he isn’t serious, Ginny.’
So I finally confessed to her about our first meeting, when we’d seemed to click, except that he’d never rung me afterwards. Then I went on to tell her the explanation he’d given me for that, on the night of the Winter Solstice.
‘That seems reasonable enough,’ she said. ‘But it obviously didn’t work out and they divorced soon after Cariad was born, didn’t they?’
‘Yes, but according to Verity, his wife was the most fascinating woman on earth and she was certainly beautiful – not an easy act to follow.’
‘Also, capricious and unfaithful, from what I’ve heard,’ Evie said.
‘From who?’ I demanded.
‘Oh, just gleaned from various things people have let drop. Nerys and Noel, for a start. I think I’d take anything Verity told you with more than a pinch of salt,’ she added.
‘I’ve been coming to that conclusion myself,’ I admitted. ‘I thought she was just a sweet person with a propensity for saying the wrong thing, but now—’
‘Oh, I’ve had her down as the Iago of the piece ever since I met her,’ Evie said.
‘Iago?’
‘From Othello. Iago seemed to be Othello’s friend, but all the time he was spinning lies and planting barbs in people’s minds, till at last Othello killed Desdemona.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said, trying to envisage Verity in the role. ‘It’s true she more than hinted that Rhys had had loads of affairs, even before the divorce from Annie, some of them with guests at the retreats, and that he even made a pass at her.’
‘Wishful thinking. And although I don’t expect he’s lived like a monk since his divorce, I can’t see him having affairs in the family home, with his daughter around, can you?’
‘No, that’s true,’ I admitted.
‘I think taking the lodge for a while is a great idea, Ginny, because it will give you and Rhys time to work things out – a halfway house, as it were. After all, if you want Rhys, you’re going to have to take on his family and move into Triskelion too.
That’s a big step, from near-recluse to part of a big multi-generational family, not to mention the frequent influx of guests. ’
‘I think you’re moving ahead too fast,’ I protested. ‘I hadn’t even thought … and anyway,’ I added, ‘I still feel that in some ways Annie is between us, an invisible ghost. He still doesn’t know yet that I was there at the accident scene when she died!’
‘Then it’s more than time you told him.’
‘I’ve come to that conclusion too, but the longer I’ve left it, the harder it seems to be.’
‘Do it tomorrow, after we’ve searched the attic,’ she ordered, getting up. ‘Right, now I’m off – and I’ll send you that bedtime reading in a minute!’
And with that she wrapped her velvet robe around herself and flitted off back to her room.
I opened my laptop and waited, and it was only a few moments later that a document called ‘Arwen’s letters to Milly’ popped into my inbox …
*
I read the letters with my laptop on my knees, propped up in bed, and once I’d started them, I couldn’t stop until I’d got to the last one.
After that I lay sleepless for hours, thinking about what I had read and feeling alternately sadness, indignation, anger and anxiety for Arwen.
I wanted to do something really nasty to the vile and smugly self-satisfied Cosmo Caradoc for the way he treated her.
Then there was his making her copy his style of painting, too, which she was clearly reluctant to do.
I admired her very much. She had been only eighteen and without much experience of the world, so young to be thrust into such a difficult situation, and I was glad that I knew she’d successfully escaped with her friend Milly.
Even that began to nag at my mind, for hadn’t someone said that she had run away on the very night that Cosmo had had his accident, but that it hadn’t been noticed till later? What if she’d had something to do with it?
I finally dropped off in the early hours and woke much later than usual, so that when I tapped on Evie’s door to tell her about my forebodings, she’d already gone down to breakfast.
I found her at the side table, loading her plate with cold ham, cheese and rolls.
Picking up a porridge bowl, I whispered urgently, ‘Ma, I’ve been wondering all night – the evening when Arwen ran off and Cosmo—’
‘Shush!’ she said, frowning and looking past me.
Turning, I saw Verity right behind me, smiling sweetly at us, her head tilted coyly to one side.
‘You look like a pair of conspirators! Exchanging secrets?’
‘Girlish confidences,’ Evie said, returning the smile with utmost blandness.
I took my porridge back to the table and Verity, one small roll on her plate, followed me.
‘You look absolutely awful, Ginny,’ she told me. ‘Didn’t you sleep or are you going down with this horrible flu too?’
‘Of course not. I just had a bad night, I’ve no idea why,’ I lied.
Rhys looked at me with concern. ‘You do look tired – but not awful!’
‘Did you have bad dreams?’ asked Cariad. ‘I do, sometimes.’
‘Something like that,’ I agreed.
Cariad, having learned of the treasure hunt, was reluctant to go off for the day, but in the end she left with Mel and the nanny right after breakfast.
I think I was just as excited. I was glad when Evie suggested we go and search the attic as soon as we’d finished eating because, what with questions about those letters swirling round my brain and a generally unsettled feeling, as if my fur was all on end, I couldn’t have done any work anyway.
*
The stair to the attic over the guest wing was right at the end of the passage, with a door at the top of the stairs, which opened to reveal a dark and cavernous space.
Rhys, going first, switched on the lights: two dim bulbs, which did little to reveal the gloomier corners of the very crowded space.
Evie produced three torches from her pocket and handed them out. ‘Tudor found them for me.’
‘This attic is the same size as the one over the family wing, but since that was already converted into servants’ rooms in the past, it’s been turned into extra guest accommodation,’ Rhys said.
‘Nerys has plans for this one, too, but it will need a lot more work – partition walls and plumbing and so on.’
‘The clutter of centuries seems to be up here,’ said Evie, ‘and only this bit near the top of the stairs is dust free.’
‘We only come up here to get luggage, or the Christmas decorations,’ explained Rhys, ‘and those are kept handy near the door. Other things get pushed into it occasionally, but no one has ever tried to sort it out. I think it will take ages when they go ahead with the conversion!’
There were passages between the stacked boxes, trunks, broken chairs, an old dressmaker’s dummy and all the other miscellanea you could possibly imagine would accumulate up there, and we sidled along the cleared aisles shining our torches into the darker corners.
There was no obvious bundle of paintings or sketchbooks or a folio, just a few prints in saccharine Victorian style and some sporting engravings.
At the back was some heavier old furniture, including a large and very dark wood wardrobe.
Evie, turning from a cupboard that only contained a flowered chamber pot, tried the handle, but although the key was in the lock, it took Rhys some brute force to wrench the door open with a very eerie creak.
Evie, ducking under his arm and shining her torch into the depths, exclaimed with satisfaction, ‘Eureka!’
Then, stepping in, as if she was about to pay a visit to Narnia, she began to rummage about, passing things back to us with admonitions to take care.