The Promise of Wonder (Hallewell Trilogy #1)

Chapter One Midsummer’s Day 1889

Chapter One

Midsummer’s Day

Theo Hallewell woke to the subterranean light before dawn, and to the knowledge that today was the day. A day so long planned for, imagined and reimagined, that it was both terrifying and elating.

The house was still asleep; no muffled sounds of the servants getting up, just a few faint creaks from the old beams. A blackbird sang outside, and a dog barked in the distance.

It would be hours before the guests went down for breakfast; hours before her mother would glide the length of the hall, asking after everyone’s sleep and managing to appear interested in the replies.

Theo opened the window to the damp scents of stone, lawn, and the manure around the roses. Ordinary enough, on any other day, but now laden with potential. Like the whole world was holding its breath.

She had no idea what to wear on such a day.

Only recently had it started to matter. Theo had become visible, somehow, and had begun to sense other people’s scrutiny.

She’d preferred the anonymity of before, since there was really only one person she wished would notice her.

Setting the small mirror from her dressing table on the windowsill, she brushed her hair out of its plait.

Long, straight sweeps of mouse brown. Her mother, Diana, couldn’t help making disappointed noises now and then, because it had been such a pretty colour when Theo was little. White-blonde, like her sister’s.

She would turn sixteen in a couple of months, and wondered what that might mean.

Her mother insisting she dress better, no doubt, refinement being the constant refrain.

At least the longer skirts, which snarled around her ankles and ended up filthy, also hid the boots with the sturdy soles that she wasn’t supposed to wear any more.

There would be no being out, no launch into society, no parties or balls – not that Theo wanted any of that.

But sixteen was surely a watershed. An acceptable age to court, and be courted.

She stopped brushing and stared into her own eyes, made greyer by the half-light.

Widening them, she found it odd that this face was hers.

Sometimes it felt like a mask; her body a machine she didn’t know quite how to operate, prone to doing unpredictable things.

She rose then, and moved silently past her sister’s empty bedroom to the stairs.

Across the lawn and out of the garden gate, past the copse of elms with its noisy colony of rooks.

Ahead of her, the ruins of Hallewell Castle sat up on their grassy mound, silhouetted against a sky now the colour of a starling’s egg.

As she climbed, a shaft of coral light caught a single broken tooth of battlement, creeping lower as the sun rose.

‘“The splendour falls on castle walls”,’ Theo recited, walking a slow circuit of the outer rampart. ‘“And snowy summits old in story.”’

She visited a few familiar places: the musket-ball holes that pocked the southern buttresses like acne; the murky guard room, all green and streaked with pigeon mess.

The ruins were mostly Norman, but they sat upon much older things: an Anglo-Saxon stronghold, of which only the skeleton of a ninth-century chapel remained.

Before that, the Romans had built a shrine at the spring below – the Holy Well that had given the ruins, the village and Theo’s family their name.

The castle had been built and rebuilt many times before being blown to pieces by Cromwell’s Roundheads in 1646.

From the south-western side of the hill, Theo looked down at the only home she’d ever known.

Hallewell House, built after the Civil War when the family had grovelled enough – and been penalised sufficiently – to be allowed to return.

No more Lord or Lady Hallewells after that; just Mr and Mrs. They’d once owned vast swathes of Cranborne Chase, on the border between Wiltshire and Dorset; now the estate had shrunk to about forty acres of paddocks and gardens, the castle and the spring.

The house itself was a low, sprawling, many-gabled thing, some parts built of stone and others of half-timbered brick and render, all beneath an undulating roof.

Like the castle, it had been added to and reconfigured many times.

A Georgian forebear had added a boxy, double-storey entrance hall with big sash windows that looked wholly out of place.

The roofs of Hallewell village were dotted down the hill to the south.

Theo’s gaze settled on the thatched oblong of St Agnes’s Caring and Preventative Cottage Home for Friendless Girls, and she wondered if Missy was awake yet.

The matron ran a tight ship, but it was still so early that a skein of mist hung above the spring, and the chattering swallows seemed far too loud, skimming across the sky.

Theo watched the spreading light paint everything with molten gold.

She couldn’t see Toby’s house; it was hidden by trees. But she knew he’d be up.

‘Auspicious,’ she whispered. That was the word.

She turned east to her favourite view of all: an old drovers’ route, away in the distance; a nameless green lane, sunken between high hedges, that crested the hill and then vanished.

It reminded her of more lines by Tennyson: And thro’ the field the road runs by / To many tower’d Camelot, and always gave her a powerful yearning to follow wherever it led.

To see things she’d never seen. To be awestruck.

She tried to ignore the thought that she probably never would.

Society and responsibility, and being sixteen. And a girl.

There was a soft thump from below. Theo looked down and saw Kitty Shoat, one of the upstairs maids, yawning like a cat as she headed for the outhouse.

The spell broke, and with a short sigh Theo made her way back.

She needed to be washed and properly dressed in time to have breakfast with the guests.

But the day was auspicious. Night would come, and her plan would work; Toby would see her, and everything would change.

In fact, Toby Meriwether had overslept. He surfaced with a start, got up too quickly, then had to wait, holding the bedpost, for the room to stop spinning.

He was trying to cultivate the habit of rising at five in order to have at least two hours to study before Kit, asleep in the next bed, woke up and made it impossible.

Their father taught at the national school in the next village – which Toby and Kit had attended – and he’d arranged for Toby to use an empty attic room there, during school hours.

But Toby’s conscience wouldn’t let him stay there all day.

His mother had enough to do, and tired easily, and Kit was adept at sneaking away and getting into trouble.

Once, Toby had spent five hours there, wrangling with a piece of algebraic logic that stubbornly refused to make sense.

History, Ethics, Latin – these were all merely a question of quantity and retention.

Algebra and Logic, however, were like tackling a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

When he’d got home, Kit was up on the church roof again, throwing clods of moss at passers-by and hooting with laughter.

It had taken Toby’s direst warnings to persuade him to come down before the verger sent for Constable Pryce, who’d been very hard on Kit ever since the incident with the horse manure.

The boys’ mother, Mona, was kind and quiet, head and shoulders shorter than her sons, with fair hair and tiny hands.

It seemed improbable that two such tall, dark-haired lads could have sprung from her.

She loved them equally, it went without saying; and though she never lost patience with Kit, Toby knew that she worried.

He worried too. He worried what would happen when he went up to university, because however much they loved him, Kit was a handful.

Mona couldn’t watch him all the time, let alone keep him occupied.

Kit had finished school three years ago, at fourteen, having got no further than Standard III.

The headmaster had kept him on as long as possible – a gangling teenager surrounded by eight- and nine-year-olds, far too big and noisy as his frustration grew.

Toby had been through all seven Standards by the time he turned twelve.

At that point, the vicar had taken over his tuition in private and plundered various philanthropic bodies to fund his university entrance, since the fees for the first year alone would have outstripped his father’s annual salary of a hundred and twenty pounds.

But once he was away at Bishop Hatfield’s Hall – if he passed the matriculation examination well enough to win the scholarship he needed – what then?

Durham wasn’t local; he could hardly nip home three hundred miles because Kit was in a fix.

And in any case, the university was strict about away days. Once you were up, you were up.

Toby peeped out around the thick blanket at the window.

The sky was an immaculate blue. He squinted at his watch, dismayed to find it gone seven already.

Most days, panic roused him much earlier – the possibility of not having enough time to study, of not winning the scholarship, not being able to take up his place. Dreadful thoughts.

He dressed hurriedly, out on the landing, put off his wash and shave until later, and went down to where his parents were already at the breakfast table. Bread, jam and cocoa; a boiled egg each for Toby and his father, David.

‘Stayabed,’ Mona said, running a hand through Toby’s scruffy hair as he bent to kiss her cheek. ‘Thought you’d have been up with the lark again.’

‘I wish you’d woken me.’

‘You know I can’t, without waking your brother. You’ll have to tie a string to your big toe and leave the end outside the door so I can tweak it.’

‘I’d only yell, and that’d be that.’