Chapter 27
27
Despite having conducted the same investigations all those years ago, Olivia spent that afternoon examining the physical structure of the tower. Was it possible for someone to access it at night? Her childish, thirteen-year-old mind had allowed her to accept that a voice floating through a brick wall was either a spirit or the subconscious invention of another imaginary friend, but her much better informed twenty-year-old self was more sceptical and wanted to rule out the practical before she embraced the fantastical.
Everyone was surprised to see her around the house and grounds, after having shut herself way for so many months, but no one commented as she carried out her investigations. She visited the head gardener’s cottage and asked him to put ladders up to the east tower windows and check for signs of tampering. She also took the opportunity to quiz him about Tanner and he confirmed Lady Fairchild’s version of events. The lad – a very promising individual, despite the melancholy – had been sent to work elsewhere and, to his knowledge, had never returned to Norfolk. The mother had followed a few weeks afterwards and all contact with them had been lost. He had no idea if Tanner had even survived the war… which hadn’t even occurred to Olivia. Perhaps she would ask Sir Hugo to speak with his cousin – although this might lead to questions she didn’t want to answer.
Satisfied no one had set up pipes or been opening windows from the outside, she needed to rule out the voice being in her head. Had the cruel death of the man she loved driven her to grief-induced auditory hallucinations? She found a book on clinical psychiatry in the great library that suggested ‘affections of the temporal lobes’ might be to blame. But most of the case study patients reported snippets of speech, the calling of a name, or indistinct mutterings – not complete and reasoned conversations. And when the voices were more reasoned, doctors theorised these were merely echoes of the patient’s thoughts. Olivia, however, knew she could not have come up with the alternative scenario regarding the Titanic .
She returned to the tower that night, checked it for signs of an intruder, secured the windows and locked the main door. Leaving her lamp on, she started to read an adventure novel to while away the time – the first book she’d picked up in months. Thoughts of Howard, as ever, swept over her with the dark cloak of evening. Every so often, she whispered Seth’s name but got no reply.
It was almost ten o’clock when a call of, ‘Olivia?’ made her jump.
‘I’m here.’ She shuffled closer to the bricks and his voice was only inches from her face.
‘So, our conversation last night was interesting,’ he said. ‘Half-thought I’d dreamed it all, but I asked the other staff a few questions about Olivia Davenport. She’s not been to Merriford since I’ve been back but the Davenport family stayed here for a week the summer of 1912, after their horrible experience, and apparently they have visited from time to time throughout the war.’
Was there really an Olivia out there who still had both parents? A girl cherished and nurtured, who did not know the pain of losing people she loved? Even the death of the three Fairchild boys would not affect this young woman in quite the same way, for she would never have become as close to them in a world where she was only an occasional visitor to Merriford Manor.
‘And I’m supposing I’d better be calling you “miss” from now on – on account of you being a lady.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ she stressed. ‘It never mattered before and it shouldn’t matter now. We’re friends and equals, Seth. In this tower we are, at any rate.’ It would feel awkward if he started addressing her as such and put a distance between them that she didn’t want. ‘Tell me more about the Davenports…’ she said.
Even if this was all fantasy, she couldn’t help but indulge herself. Was it wrong of her to escape, even if only for a moment? She closed her eyes – a picture forming in her mind’s eye of them sitting on fancy wicker chairs in the formal gardens at the back of the manor, her mother’s leg perhaps resting on a footstool, enjoying afternoon tea on the terrace with the Fairchilds. All of that had been taken away from her and it still hurt.
‘I know very little about them. Their lives, and the lives of the Fairchilds, are far removed from mine. Most of what I picked up was through servant gossip, or what I saw as I went about my duties. I know that the newspaper coverage of the Carpathia rescue helped sales of Jasper Davenport’s later books and I gather he’s done well in recent years, but I don’t read novels.’ He laughed. ‘I don’t have the time. If I read at all, it’s the Gardener’s Chronicle , as I’m always keen to learn about new plants and hybrids, and the latest fertiliser mixes. I might not sound particularly educated to you but I’ve even had a piece published on lady’s slipper orchids. Sir Hugo’s late father?—’
‘Has a collection in the conservatory. I know.’
‘Ah, there I must correct you. It’s in this tower and the reason I sleep here. Some are extremely valuable, and determined collectors will stop at nothing to get their hands on them.’
Olivia remembered that the orchids had been moved when she’d been given the tower. Her subconscious might create a world where her parents had survived and her father had gone on to have success with his writing, but she had forgotten this detail, and wouldn’t have conjured up the name of an orchid, or a gardening publication, because she had a limited horticultural knowledge. It made her think.
‘Tell me something I couldn’t possibly know – something about the orchids – that I can check on, so that I can rule out you being a figment of my imagination.’
There was a considered pause. ‘Well, now, I can tell you that they have three petals and the biggest is called the labellum – see, I know some fancy words.’ He chuckled. ‘And this big old petal should be at the top but as the bud grows in the plant, the whole thing spins about so by the time it’s in flower, it’s standing on its head.’
Olivia couldn’t have fabricated such a thing, she acknowledged to herself.
‘So, if you really are Seth Tanner, and I really am Olivia Davenport, how does this make sense? You aren’t here with me, but you are. There appear to be two different realities, as ridiculous as it sounds, and we overlap somehow.’
She expected him to laugh but he didn’t.
‘We don’t understand how a woman can give birth to two identical babies, but it happens – two things created by God that are the same in every way. Only He understands how and why.’
‘He didn’t mention anything about creating two worlds in the Bible,’ she huffed.
‘Perhaps He did that on the eighth day,’ Seth joked. ‘It probably dint take long because He knew what He was doing – having made one a few days before.’
‘I beg to differ. He did a rotten job the first time around. He should have put a nicer species in charge – sheep, for example. I suspect they wouldn’t have instigated a war over the assassination of an Austro-Hungarian archduke.’
‘No,’ Seth agreed, and they were both silent for a while. The war was still so raw that it couldn’t be mentioned without a period of reverence and, for Olivia, the wretched heartbreak of losing Howard twisted her insides into tight, constrictive knots, so that she still could not bring herself to mention him by name.
They considered the possibility of overlapping worlds for a long time, comparing what was going on in each of their lives and, if her abstract theory was to be believed, their worlds. All major events in history they agreed on: from the existence of ancient civilisations and the chronological order of the monarchs of England, to the major battles in the war and the current prime minister. But smaller details after April 1912 were subtly different. What had happened to make them diverge? And was it linked to the lode?
It was bittersweet for her to hear that Jasper Davenport was as famous as Joseph Conrad, but that Margaret Brown, an outspoken survivor of the Titanic , had been killed in an automobile accident just outside New York City recently. The war had followed a similar path and the armistice had been signed on the same day. But when she talked of Lord Kitchener’s death aboard the HMS Hampshire , he insisted the man was still alive. Things closer to home were at odds too. Miriam Peterson, a lady from the village, had lost her son in Africa, but Seth said he was now the Merriford Lode police constable.
Olivia tugged a blanket around her shoulders and wondered at the things she was being asked to believe. Was it the chill of the night air or the chill of her circumstances that was creeping across her skin?
‘The tiniest pebble dropped into the middle of a big lake makes surprisingly large ripples,’ Seth said. ‘If just one man of fighting age died aboard your ill-fated Titanic but didn’t die here, then a subtly different battalion would have been formed when the war broke out. Different men would have stood in different places when the shells dropped and changed everything – who survived and who died. And for each of those men, this affected who they married and what children they had. Some people born here will never exist for you, and the other way about.’
The implications were immense. It made her realise that every single event in life had the potential to lead to a million different outcomes. Over time, their worlds would diverge at an increasing rate. Eventually, there would be different political leaders, different heroes, different villains. Two totally separate histories would play out.
The conversation moved on to talk about themselves, even though they both avoided mentioning the Fairchild boys. She admitted that, at twenty-one, she would inherit a large house and a considerable sum of money, and he countered that his only prospects would be what he could achieve by hard work and determination. There was no judgement on either side.
She also learned that a hard-working but unhappy Seth Tanner had signed up in the August of 1914, looking for something to give his life meaning, which explained why the voice had disappeared for fifteen-year-old Olivia. He’d spent the duration of the war trying to stay alive, writing letters to his anxious mother, dreaming of his future, and doing his best to keep his feet clean and dry. Much of this time, he swung from either being bored out of his mind, or in a stomach-churning state of anticipation, awaiting orders for the next push. Like Clarence and Howard, he would not be drawn on details of the fighting, but instead focused on those moments of stillness or beauty that touched him in all the chaos and misery. Moments of joy, he reiterated, that a bossy Princess Cordelia had ordered him to hold on to.
In return, she told him of her work with the wounded men once the manor had been requisitioned as a convalescent hospital – which had also happened in his world. She even mentioned the publication of her short stories and articles in the ladies’ journals. Impressed, he questioned her further on her writing and she was forced to admit it had fallen by the wayside, so he encouraged her to pick up her pen again.
They were still talking when the birds began their tweeting in earnest and the colours started to saturate her room.
‘I’m increasingly convinced that our strange situation is all connected to the lode,’ he said. ‘I read something in the newspapers just before the war about the Cleveland ironstone mines, up in Yorkshire, and how a lot of them miners thought the pits were haunted. They’d been hearing voices for a couple of years – which makes sense with our thinking this all happened the year the ship sank. And then one poor man claimed he’d been talking to himself in the mine – except it was a version of himself that had just become a father to a baby boy?—’
‘Let me guess, and his wife had just had a little girl?’
‘Exactly that. Those ripples that we talked about. We know that an iron seam runs under this tower, so I’m now wondering if whatever caused the world to split had travelled along them metal deposits, and they’re the fragile link between the two. I’m not much of a scientist, but I know that we use copper wire for electricity because it’s a good conductor. What if the metal in the earth was conducting… something? Electricity? Heat? Rays of a nature I couldn’t hope to understand?’
‘I’m not much of a scientist either, but it’s a good theory,’ she acknowledged. ‘The metal conducts our voices like a telegraph wire, but can’t conceivably conduct our bodies?’
It occurred to Olivia that without the physical barrier of bricks between them, they might be able to sense each other, or somehow see something , even if it was just a shadow or a ghostly form. They both crept outside in the half-light of morning and followed the assumed line of the lode from the tower and across the back lawns, but were to be sorely disappointed. She thought perhaps she heard a faint something, but in the gardens, they had no sure way of knowing exactly where the seam ran. Nor could they pinpoint where each other was standing, since all contact was lost as soon as she stepped from her room.
‘How will you get through the day with so little sleep?’ she asked, as they returned to their beds, and aware he had a whole day’s work ahead of him.
‘Had it worse,’ he reminded her. Of course, she remembered with a stab of guilt, he’d been to war. ‘But let’s talk again tonight. Maybe not for so long, though,’ he joked.
‘Until tonight, then.’
‘Until tonight.’
She settled down under her covers feeling guilty that she could sleep in, but Seth had to work a long day. As she closed her eyes, she thought she heard the door to the tower but couldn’t be certain. And then a further, swelling wave of guilt swept over her as it struck her she’d hardly thought of Howard since Seth had whispered her name through the bricks all those hours earlier.
* * *
‘I have arranged for you to see a top London doctor,’ Sir Hugo said to Olivia. ‘Old university chum of mine. He knew your father too. Thoroughly decent bloke. Lady Fairchild is concerned about you and he’s done some ground-breaking work with all these poor fellows suffering from war neurosis. Thinks hearing voices and the like is just the old brain trying to make sense of things. We know you’ve rather been through the mill.’
She’d been called to the morning room but felt somewhat ambushed to find Sir Hugo present, especially as she was running on so little sleep.
‘I perfectly understood the need to isolate yourself over the winter,’ Cynthia said, leaning forward to put her hand on Olivia’s knee. ‘And am delighted that you seem a bit livelier, but these odd questions about Tanner, and your request for Rowe to examine the tower are giving us cause for concern. Then, this morning, Benjamin tells me he heard you talking to yourself in the night.’
She’d been right; someone had been in the tower the previous evening. Benji was spying on her and reporting back to his mother. But if he’d stood at the bottom of the staircase, only her voice would had travelled out, because Seth wasn’t technically in the adjoining room. He wouldn’t have been heard in the same way.
‘You’re so far from the people who care most about you out there – the people who want to look after you. I talk to my boys, and it is a comfort, my dear, but they never answer back. I don’t have conversations with them. I’d hoped all that imaginary nonsense was behind you.’
But it wasn’t her imagination. The things that Seth was saying to her through the wall were too detailed for her to have fabricated. She knew nothing about varieties of orchid or their petals – and the lady’s slipper did exist; she’d looked it up. Rowe had also confirmed that William was Tanner’s middle name. There was no way Olivia could have known any of this information.
‘If I’ve been heard talking aloud, then it will be me running through story ideas.’ This was untrue; she had absolutely no desire to write again but she didn’t want them worrying about her. ‘Returning to the tower is helping me to deal with the grief. I realise that I’ve been cooped up for far too long and will address that immediately.’ She glanced over to one of the tall windows. ‘As the weather looks so promising, perhaps I shall bicycle into the village this very afternoon.’
Cynthia’s face registered her shock before she rearranged her features to express delight, but the truth, which even surprised Olivia, was that she did feel better. She had something to distract her from the pain of it all now. She wanted to know more about Seth Tanner and she intended to start by asking questions in Merriford Lode.