Chapter 6
6
Not many moments later, Ruth climbed the spiral staircase, possibly hearing the banging of doors and stomping of feet and finally deciding to check on her charge. Olivia explained that she’d heard a voice, but Ruth assured the young girl that no one had entered or exited the tower through the main entrance, which only left the windows. Together, they checked the casement stays in the dressing room but they hadn’t been tampered with. Had one of the Fairchild boys scaled the outside wall and called in through her open window? Howard, in particular, had a reputation for pulling silly pranks. She didn’t know much about acoustics but thought it possible that a voice could be carried around the inside of the hexagonal structure, making it sound as though the speaker was next to her. After all, this was the basic principle of the whispering gallery in St Paul’s Cathedral. But Ruth had another theory.
‘Had you begun to drift off, miss?’ she asked.
It was only too obvious that she was implying the voice was in Olivia’s head. Perhaps it was. She understood that grief did funny things to you. Lady Fairchild, in her ongoing efforts to connect in some meaningful way, had passed over an article from one of her ladies’ journals about loss. It had, rather alarmingly, highlighted the possibility of psychosis in extreme cases. Was it possible that the imaginary voice had been a result of her distressed brain struggling to cope?
‘That must be it. I’m overtired and have allowed Louis’s words to upset me.’ She didn’t want Ruth to worry. She’d carried on conversations in her head since she was a small child, but this was the first time someone had spoken to her out loud. Or her troubled mind had made her think someone had.
She returned to her room and silently slipped back into bed, too bewildered to shed any more tears.
* * *
‘Louis thinks he might have upset you last night.’
Lady Fairchild had asked to see Olivia. The interview felt very formal, as the young girl sat on the sage-green sofa in the morning room, opposite Her Ladyship, who was fiddling about with some embroidery. Olivia was clutching a lace tablecloth and had a curtain ring on her finger because she’d been in the middle of her wedding to a returning general from the American Civil War when she’d been summoned, and she did so love to dress up.
The older woman’s face was pulled into a worried frown but Olivia remained intimidated by this relative stranger.
Lady Fairchild tried to defend her son. ‘He sometimes says things without thinking and has a habit of treating life in a very black and white manner, but you must pay no heed to my boys. They simply aren’t used to girls,’ she said.
Olivia nodded and forced out a smile. She looked down nervously at her clasped hands, longing for the arms of her mother or the wide lap of her father – always offered when they’d been worried about her. These kind people were doing their best, but no one had held her close in weeks. Even Ruth was not the sort to embrace another, nor would it have been appropriate for her to do so. Although Olivia suspected her maid was the reason she had been summoned. As someone now in the Fairchilds’ employ, she was expected to report back, and would have informed her mistress about the rumpus in the night.
‘Perhaps a little trip to the seaside will lift everyone’s spirits and help us to feel more like a family,’ Lady Fairchild suggested. ‘We can go by train, which will delight Benji. A change of scene will do us all good – or maybe it’s just me who needs a different outlook.’ She tossed her embroidery frame onto the small circular table by her chair – the first sign that her privileged life was perhaps not as enviable as Olivia had imagined.
‘Sir Hugo won’t come, of course, even though he visits Haven-on-Sea often enough without us. But I shall insist all the boys attend, and may even invite the Dunn lad, when he comes over later, to make it a merry little band.’
‘The Dunn lad?’ Olivia queried. The name meant nothing to her.
‘Clarence was into boxing at one time and Ernest Dunn was someone from the village he used to spar with in the holidays.’ Her Ladyship rolled her eyes. ‘Although my eldest son is more into horses and shooting now, and spends much of his spare time out in the stables, so I’m not sure why he perpetuates the friendship. After all, the boy’s father is only a postal worker and Ernest a mere junior clerk for a shipping company.’ Kind she may be, but she was also a snob.
‘We shall go the week after next,’ she concluded. ‘And then the sea air can blow all your silly nonsense away.’
* * *
That afternoon, the aforementioned Ernest walked up from the village and suggested tennis doubles. Olivia and Benji, however, were pointedly excluded from the game and so she retreated to the Japanese garden with a book, where part of her was hoping to bump into Tanner, and part of her simply found it a place to indulge in peaceful reflection. She idly ran her hands over the gigantic granite boulders, which she’d read represented the landscape and the seasons, and then sat beneath the honeysuckle. They’d had an earlier-flowering variety at Windy Acres, and it was one of her favourite flowers.
Disappointingly, however, there was no shirtless, sullen nineteen-year-old in the pond, clearing duckweed, so instead she enjoyed the sounds of the fountain splashing into the pool below as she read. Water did not unnerve her, despite her parents drowning. Man, not nature, was responsible for their untimely deaths.
After a while of losing herself in the trials of a tortured young artist in her romance novel, she felt chilly and decided to return to her room. That summer was proving a grand disappointment for many, but especially someone who enjoyed being outside so much. As she headed back towards the house, she heard boisterous shouts from the tennis courts and, not wanting to engage with anyone, she slipped behind the row of sheds that backed onto the enclosure. These outbuildings held everything from the wicker garden furniture and marquees for entertaining, to croquet sets, cricket bats and tennis racquets.
‘Is someone there?’ A small voice came from behind one of the wooden doors.
Olivia paused. ‘Benji?’
The padlock had been looped over the staple, but it hadn’t been locked, so she unhooked it and swung back the door to a pale and anxious nine-year-old.
‘What are you doing in the?—’
‘Howard sent me in to get more balls from a bucket at the back and then shut me in.’
He was close to tears and she could see he was trying to hide a dark patch at the front of his short trousers.
‘When was this?’ she asked.
‘Just after luncheon. They said I was too young to play but could help them set everything up.’
It was now approaching five o’clock. The poor lad had been in there for hours. Olivia was furious. What was Howard thinking?
She sent Benji to the house and then spun on her heel and marched back to the tennis courts. This may not be her family but she would not stand by and let Howard bully his little brother, particularly as she was now starting to wonder if the older Fairchild boy was behind the voice she’d heard in the tower. Being bereaved had its advantages; any outburst on her part could be attributed to her grief.
The four older lads were in the middle of a match, with Clarence berating Louis for missing a shot, when she swung open the high mesh gate.
‘Why did you lock Benji in the sheds?’ she shouted at Howard. ‘He’s been in there for hours.’ She strode over to him, absolutely incandescent and not caring that play had to stop for her. There was no way she was going to tell him that the child had wet himself.
‘Dash it. Totally forgot about him.’ He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and wandered over to her. ‘He was being a pain – asking to join in when we were all desperate to get on with the tennis. It’s a game for four and he’s just not big enough – he can hardly lift the racket. This is a sport for men.’
‘You’re not a man,’ she shot back. ‘You’re fourteen. And not a particularly nice fourteen-year-old, at that.’
He raised his hands to calm her and looked across the net to where Clarence and Ernest were exchanging amused glances – although whether this was because Benji had been forgotten or she was putting Howard in his place, she wasn’t sure.
‘There’s no need to get your petticoats in a twist. I forgot, all right? It was just a bit of fun and then I got distracted by the game. Look, he’ll never survive senior school if he can’t take a bit of gentle ribbing. I’ve had my fair share of teasing over my hair and got on with it.’
‘Just because it happened to you, doesn’t make it right. Have you not heard the expression “pick on someone your own size”? I’m nearly your size,’ she pointed out, and it was true, although she didn’t doubt he’d be shooting up to Clarence’s height in the next couple of years. ‘And you don’t want to pick a fight with me, because I’d win.’
She spun back to the gate and left him open-mouthed as Clarence irritably requested that they resume the game.
* * *
Lady Fairchild organised a picnic for the youngsters on the back lawns to round off the day. Cook had rustled up a delightful selection of cold meats, pickles and jellies, and had even baked a fresh cob loaf.
‘I’d forgotten Tanner worked here,’ Ernest said, gazing across at the two gardeners who were weeding the flower beds. ‘His mother lives in the village.’
‘Poor devil.’ Clarence rolled over onto his back and rested his head on his interlocking fingers. ‘Went all peculiar after that girl he was sweet on disappeared last spring.’
‘Women are so fickle,’ Louis said. ‘One of the many reasons I do not intend to marry.’
‘Lucky to have the choice. One of my many unwritten duties is to produce the next heir for the manor.’ Clarence sounded resentful.
‘Oh, come on, Fairchild. You can hardly moan when you get to inherit all this,’ Ernest pointed out, his hand sweeping across the view of the enormous house. ‘And procreation is hardly a chore. In fact, I’ve always found it rather fun.’
‘Young ears,’ Clarence chastised and nodded in the direction of Benji and Olivia, who were together at the far end of the blanket, keeping their heads low and remaining largely silent, not wanting to give the four older lads any excuse to mock them.
‘Odd girl, though.’ Ernest’s brow folded into a wrinkle. ‘I found out, after she went missing, that I was the last one to see her. She was heading towards the station. Didn’t they think she’d run off with a traveller?’
‘We all know there’s only one reason to run away and marry.’ Louis raised an eyebrow.
‘I should think it’s being able to go to bed when you like and not get told what to do by grown-ups any more,’ Benji mumbled, tossing pieces of sausage roll at an appreciative, and increasingly bold, blackbird.
Clarence scoffed. ‘I think you’ll find being married is ten times worse than living with your parents. Besides, of the four of us, I suspect only you will marry for love,’ he mused. ‘I shall marry for duty, Louis will be married to his job, and Howard will never settle down. He’s too restless.’
‘Howard’s got some catching up to do,’ Ernest pointed out. ‘He’s not even dipped his wick yet.’
‘What does dipped?—’
‘Ernest!’ Clarence interrupted Benji. ‘Can you please watch what you say in front of the children. There’s a chap.’
Resentful at being called a child again and, after a long and trying day, Olivia excused herself and returned to the tower, where her imaginary friends were infinitely more pleasant. The voice had not returned, although she thought she heard humming coming through the wall in the night, but rolled away and put the pillow over her head.
If Howard was up to his stupid nonsense again, she wasn’t interested.