Chapter 10
THE PRESENT
‘Have you met Molly’s new man yet?’ Jenna asked Bree as they sat in the chancel of Uffington Church sharing an afternoon tea of scones, cream and jam.
They’d met up to discuss what Bree called the logistics for their trip to Winterhill to retrieve Queen Anna’s box, which was planned for the following Thursday night.
The mere thought of it was making Jenna feel sick with nerves.
The low hum of conversation in the church and the clink of china had successfully muffled their discussion.
The ancient space, with its sheaves of flowers, its smell of dust mingling with polish, its air of timeless peace, was calming but also made her focus on why this expedition was so important to her.
This was a place where the past felt close and time simultaneously overlapped and seemed to stretch forever.
The solemn monuments from the sixteenth century commemorated men and women who had lived long ago but whose presence was still about them.
It was the same for her with Marris, and Will and Anna.
Retrieving the box, lodging it somewhere safe for eternity, was her way of paying her debt to the past.
Bree shook her head. Unsurprisingly, her mouth was full of scone. ‘I didn’t know there was anyone new,’ she said, when she had swallowed. ‘But then, why would I? Molly tells me nothing and I prefer it that way.’
Jenna sighed. She had already decided not to mention to Bree her suspicions about the pearl bracelet Molly had been wearing. One problem at a time, she reminded herself.
Bree’s eyes twinkled. ‘Not that you’ve told me much about your new guy, other than that you’re meeting up with him later,’ she pointed out. ‘I had to google him myself.’
‘Bree!’ Jenna was horrified. ‘You did not! That’s so intrusive.’
Bree gave a half-shrug. ‘I wanted to make sure he was good enough for you.’
‘No,’ Jenna corrected, ‘you were just being nosy.’
Bree didn’t deny it. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Luckily, he is. Good enough, I mean. He sounds pretty awesome. He made a fortune straight out of college with a fintech company and then became an angel investor. That must make him a good guy.’
‘He calls himself an accountant,’ Jenna said, her lips twitching slightly as she realised the scale of Owen’s understatement.
‘Well, that proves it.’ Bree finished the scone and sat back with a satisfied sigh. ‘He’s either very modest or he’s sick of women hitting on him for his looks and his money. Or both.’ Her smile faded. ‘Jen, do you think Owen could be—’
‘No.’ Jenna cut her off. ‘I don’t think he’s Will.’ She hesitated, remembering how intimate her connection to Owen had felt when they had been in the Long Gallery at Winterhill. It was disingenuous to say that she didn’t feel close to him.
‘Even if he is,’ she said slowly, ‘he doesn’t remember anything about the past, which amounts to the same thing. I could never tell Owen the truth because it wouldn’t make any sense to him.’
She didn’t want Will and Owen to be one and the same, she realised.
If they were, she would feel even worse about holding a part of herself back from Owen.
As it was, she could simply tell herself that dreams of a love that lasted through time were nonsense.
Bree, she was sure, would be the first to tell her to forget love and just have a good time. But then Bree surprised her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, taking Jenna’s hand.
‘It’s so hard sometimes.’ She didn’t say ‘I know how you feel’ but the words hung in the air between them.
And she did know, Jenna thought. Often when people said that, they didn’t have a clue, but Bree did.
She knew what it was like to carry the memories of a previous existence and have them spill over into the present.
Perhaps she even knew what it was like to meet someone and be convinced she had known them – loved them – before.
Maybe this was why they were so close, even though they were so different.
They understood each other. It could have been the same with Molly, she thought sadly, if Molly had not chosen to deny the past.
Except that Molly wasn’t denying the past now, was she, flaunting Marris’s pearls on her arm…
Bree wandered off to sketch some architectural details and study a few tombstones.
Jenna finished her tea, packed up the tray and returned it to the church kitchen.
There was a tomb of a crusader on the north wall by the loos.
She smiled a little; ancient and modern side by side.
Further along the wall of the nave was a modest stone inscription:
Near this place lyeth the body of Richard Swan, yeoman, of Swan Court Woolstone in the county of Berkshire, who departed this life in the year 1609 in his sixty-ninth year…
Jenna gave a little shiver. She had not known that Anna’s son had been buried at Uffington, rather than the smaller church in Woolstone village, but then she had never gone looking for him.
Until the excavation at Winterhill threatened all the secrets, she had taken the view that the past was better left undisturbed.
It was a modest sort of monument, appropriate for a man described as a yeoman who had farmed his own land.
Richard had lived to a good age for his era, and had died presumably knowing that the future of his family was secure and prosperous at Swan Court.
Within a century his descendants would have grown important enough in the area to inter-marry with the Sharington family…
She reached out a hand and touched the cool stone of plaque. Above the inscription was a carved swan. Below it a line in Latin:
Scio quis sim.
‘I know who I am…’ Bree translated, popping up beside her, folding her sketch pad away in her bag. She looked at Jenna, her eyes very bright. ‘Do you think Richard did know? That he was the King’s son, I mean?’
‘Yes.’ Jenna pointed to the stained-glass window above the plaque. ‘The clues are all here, aren’t they?’ The tiny highly coloured panes of ancient glass showed a starburst wheel design, the emblem of the Duchy of Cleves, alongside two entwined swans and a third device, the golden lion of England.
‘Wow.’ Bree pursed her lips. ‘Hiding in plain sight. Yet the fact that he died of old age suggests he kept the secret to himself.’
‘Which would have been very wise,’ Jenna observed, ‘given the disputes over succession after the death of Henry VIII.’
‘I wonder why we never looked him up before,’ Bree said thoughtfully. ‘Too much going on in our modern-day lives, I suppose.’
‘In my case it was a question of letting sleeping dogs lie,’ Jenna said, patting the head of a carved stone dog that was asleep on a nearby tomb, ‘but now I know that Richard Swan was able to keep quiet about his birthright, I’m all the more determined to preserve the secret.’
Bree nodded. ‘I’m heading off now,’ she said. She gave Jenna hug. ‘See you on Thursday. Stay strong.’ She walked off down the nave, her heels clicking on the tiles, turning the heads of everyone she passed in the effortless way she had.
Ten minutes later, Jenna climbed out of the car at White Horse Hill.
She and Owen had arranged to meet for a walk and dinner at the pub afterwards.
It was, she thought, a suitably low-key first proper date.
He’d texted her after they’d met at the manor, and he’d called into the bookshop one day during the week, earning her everlasting gratitude by bringing a coffee and pastry for her when she was doing her least favourite job, an inventory check.
She was also well aware that she was getting involved with Owen against all common sense, but she wanted to, and for once she was letting her heart rule her head.
She was ten minutes early and Owen hadn’t arrived yet.
There were very few other cars in the car park.
There was no wind and no sound except for the occasional car passing on the road, invisible from above.
Dusk was falling. The Iron Age fort that loomed high above the village often felt like a lonely place but Jenna loved it, and now she felt a rush of exhilaration to be out in the fresh air.
Mist clung to the slopes of the hill and obscured the iconic figure of the horse, swirled about the mound known as Dragon Hill and slid down the valley into the manger below.
The trees, wreathed in a chilly silver vapour, were still and dark.
White Horse Hill always gave Jenna a sense of peace.
Up here with nothing but the view, it seemed entirely possible to imagine that there could be life after life after life – the horse, after all, had seen 3,000 years come and go, the moon rise and the sun set.
It reminded her how insignificant they all were beneath the stars and Jenna rather liked that.
She was sitting in the picnic area, tying the laces of her hiking boots, when a spaniel shot over the grass from the direction of the viewpoint behind her, then sat and greeted her, head on one side, like a long-lost friend, its deep brown eyes warm and bright, its tongue lolling.
‘You’re very cute,’ Jenna said, smiling. ‘What’s your name and where did you come from?’
‘This is Titus, and he’s with me.’ Owen, wrapped up in a bulky padded jacket and hiking boots, appeared at the field gate.
‘Sorry if we’re a bit late. We walked up from Woolstone.
’ He held out a hand to help pull her to her feet and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
His lips were warm against her cold skin and he smelled of fresh air. Jenna felt a little light-headed.
‘We’d better get going before we freeze,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t realised it was still so cold.’
‘Shall we go up to the fort and across to the White Horse?’ Owen opened the field gate and Titus galloped off across the grass, looking back at them as if in reproach that they were keeping him waiting.