Chapter 2
THE PRESENT – LATE FEbrUARY
After the cocooned warmth of the car, the wind cut like a knife.
It tugged the car door from her hand and slammed it shut, and Jenna felt the cold air rush in and fill her lungs, the bite of it, and with it a sensation of familiarity.
Five hundred years had passed but it took her straight back to the winter nights on the priory’s dormitory stairs, with the stars hard and bright in a black sky above, the milk frozen in the pail in the cowshed, and the burn and itch of chilblains when she reached the warming room.
This was a mistake. I should not have come back here.
Jenna blinked to dispel the images, focusing on the present, as she had been taught to do: on the pale glow of light from the nearby ticket machine, the whine of an aeroplane engine overhead, and the shape of her phone in the back pocket of her jeans.
They were so small, these telling details of modern life, but they were all around her all the time and they helped to anchor her.
She had not expected the rush of memories to be so strong or so immediate.
Now she wondered why she had not anticipated these feelings.
Winterhill, nestling in a hollow of the Berkshire Downs to the north of the M4, was an atmospheric little town and the film set for many a historical drama.
Most people found it utterly charming, especially those who were searching for a chocolate box representation of ‘olde’ England.
For her, though, it was a lived memory, somewhere she had known a very long time ago.
She might be only thirty years old but sometimes she felt as though she was about five hundred years old, carrying with her the weight of a past life she did her best to ignore.
As a small child, she had chattered unselfconsciously about all sorts of things that she remembered from the past; everyone had commented on her vivid imagination until they started to find it – and her – sinister.
‘It’s not normal,’ her Aunt Jane had told her mother bluntly, over Jenna’s head, when she was about five years old.
‘All these stories she tells about nuns and abbeys falling down and King Henry VIII. People will think she’s got mental health issues.
A lot of young children suffer from anxiety and other disorders these days. Maybe you should talk to the doctor.’
‘I have to get an appointment for Bree’s earache first.’ Jenna’s mother had been juggling baby Molly under her arm whilst trying to feed a grizzling two-year-old Bree with her other hand.
Her gaze, warm but slightly distracted, rested on her eldest daughter for a moment.
‘Jenna is all right,’ she said. ‘She just lives in her head a lot of the time.’
However, once her schoolmates had started to call her creepy and a freak, Jenna had quickly learned to keep quiet, and as an adult she had become adept at closing down the flashbacks, memories, visions, whatever they were, of events that she was certain had happened to her in a past life.
She never spoke of them, except to her sisters and to her therapist. Most people, she had discovered, were either unhealthily fascinated or completely contemptuous about anyone who claimed to have experienced reincarnation, but Jenna knew it was real. She was the proof.
Her middle sister, Bree, agreed with her.
Bree was an artist whose paintings were inspired by her own past life experiences.
She cheerfully exploited her self-proclaimed ‘spookiness’ for marketing purposes and was wildly popular and successful.
Bree claimed to remember more than one previous life but Jenna suspected that she had invented most of the stories she told.
Perhaps she had even started to believe they were true.
All three of the sisters had their own issues.
Reincarnation did tend to mess with your head.
Jenna wound her multicoloured scarf about her neck, pulled on her bobble hat and gloves, and set off across the car park to the ticket machine.
Frosty pebbles crunched under her boots.
Some cars, early arrivals like she was, had smashed the delicate ice patterns on the puddles, leaving muddy water and jagged edges.
The information hut was shuttered and dark, unmanned at this time of year when visitors were sparse, but a brown sign directed her across the road: Winterhill Hall and Priory Ruins.
‘It’s a funny place to go to celebrate your birthday, especially on your own.
’ Her friend Ashley had been too surprised to be tactful when Jenna had mentioned where she was spending the day.
‘I mean, it’s only down the road. You could go any time.
And you must have visited Winterhill Hall a million times anyway, since you grew up in the town. ’
A million was perhaps an exaggeration, Jenna thought now, but she knew the Hall better than Ashley could ever guess.
‘I was feeling a bit nostalgic,’ she had told her friend. It was a half-truth; the real truth was that something was calling her back home and she needed to discover what it was.
But the explanation had struck a chord with Ashley. ‘It’s turning thirty that does it,’ she had said sagely. ‘Trust me, I know. I felt as though my best days were behind me. You’re trying to recapture the past.’
Jenna had found that very funny. ‘We’ll have a proper celebration next weekend when we all go up to London and have lunch and champagne at the top of the Shard,’ she had promised. ‘Thanks for arranging that, Ash.’
She smiled now, remembering the conversation.
Ashley was a great friend, even if there was one very big, fundamental thing about herself that Jenna had never confided in her, or indeed any of the rest of her friendship group.
Perhaps that was why she always felt slightly apart from other people.
She noticed it most in intimate relationships where she always felt as though she kept a part of herself back.
Lately she’d given up trying to meet anyone. It just never felt quite right…
She passed the entrance to a couple of big houses that were set back from the road, gated and closed in with laurel hedges.
She and Molly and Bree had grown up on the poor side of village, if the chichi Winterhill could be said to have a poor side.
There was a small estate of former council houses tucked away behind the Instagram-perfect thatched cottages and ancient market square.
Their father, a mechanic, had originally had a small but profitable yard down the end of a cul-de-sac, where he had fixed people’s cars for less than the going rate and, Jenna suspected, had probably done more than a few dodgy deals on the side, no questions asked.
He had progressed to owning a multi-franchise car and van dealership group.
Not bad, he had boasted, for a boy who left school with only two O levels.
Her parents had retired to Spain two years ago, leaving their ‘cuckoo daughters’, as Bree called the three of them, in England.
‘Let’s face it,’ Bree had said once to Jenna, ‘we are cuckoos. We have nothing in common with our parents. Well, you and I don’t. It’s no wonder they’re baffled by us. We are linked spirits who were placed in their nest for this particular life, that’s all.’
‘If you say so,’ Jenna had said. Bree had very advanced theories about reincarnation which Jenna had always felt completely unable to understand, possibly because Bree made them up as she went along.
Jenna found it complex enough navigating her current life whilst carrying the shadow of the Tudor one, and now that she was back in Winterhill, that history was catching at her heels.
She shivered now, zipping her fleece jacket up to the neck as she took the zebra crossing over the main road.
A couple of cars passed behind her, tyres swishing softly, then silence fell again, a twenty-first-century silence with the background of music playing very distantly, along with the high-pitched buzzing of a chainsaw.
The signpost directed her down a narrow path lined with cypresses.
There was a graveyard feel to the setting; the harsh cawing of rooks in the bare branches of the taller trees that lined the track, the dark corridor of the evergreens leaning in to give the impression of a coffin path.
Yet Jenna knew this was a modern route built to link the car park with the priory grounds and keep the traffic out of Winterhill’s narrow village streets.
Before the dissolution of the monasteries, the priory had been in the heart of the town, the great oaken door in its protective wall opening straight out on to the loud chaos of the cobbled marketplace.
The wall was gone now and all the priory lands that lay behind it had been turned into a park bounded by the River Lynch to the east with the wooded slope of the hillside beyond.
Winterhill Hall, the beautiful Tudor house that had risen from the destruction of the priory, was tucked away on the edge of the parkland, its roof and chimneys just visible.
Jenna stared at the house, the enduring monument to one man’s ambition and success.
Sir William Sharington.
The memory of Sir William was a curious one, at the same time very intimate and yet so distant to Jenna that it felt like a fantasy, something she had conjured up in her imagination rather than a real experience.
Did it even count as real if it had not happened to her, to Jenna Bergin, thirty years old today, born in England in the 1990s, but to another version of her, to Marris North, centuries before?
She realised that she had stopped walking whilst she thought about it, going over the old discussions she had had with Bree.