Chapter Four #3
‘Mrs Allen,’ I try again, ‘if you don’t mind my saying, I’ve had the sense that you don’t particularly want me here. If it’s not about Lady Lascy’s health, then have I done something to offend you?’
She seems surprised by this, although it’s unclear whether it’s because of what I’ve said, or the fact that I’ve said it. Her chin twitches. ‘No,’ she says at last. Pauses to think. ‘If you must know, I don’t like to see someone new getting sucked in.’
It’s not the answer I was expecting. ‘Sucked in?’
‘To Harfold, I mean. Especially someone so young – and live-in, as well.’ She shakes her head. ‘It’s not a happy place, this.’
That makes a kind of sense. The tragic history of the Lascy family must weigh heavy on everyone who knew them, not just Arabella. ‘Well, thank you for your concern,’ I say, ‘but I think I’ll be all right.’
Mrs Allen gives a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘Of course.’
I can tell this isn’t the end of it. And the blaze of my curiosity has only been fanned brighter after meeting my strange employer.
Now that I can put a face to the name, I no longer get those goosebumps when I sense Arabella’s gaze through the blank windows of Harfold Manor.
Sometimes I stare back, seeking her out.
I find myself charmed now by her awkward interest in me.
The tentative wave she’ll give out of the window if I spot her, the way she will call down from time to time with a question about my work.
Do you have enough compost to be getting on with?
When do you think those dahlias will go over?
Does that type of spade have a special name?
It’s clear she has no real care for the answers – these questions are just an excuse to start a conversation.
Eager to impress with a story about the expense of such-and-such statue, the history behind a remarkable architectural feature.
It’s all strangely endearing. And it’s not like I have a whole queue of other people waiting to speak to me.
A couple of weeks after our first meeting, Arabella remembers her invitation to show me the Lascy family genealogy.
‘Nora found this at last. I don’t know what she had done with it,’ she says, dangling a key from her little finger.
She’s standing in the front doorway, having just waved me over from across the lawn.
I wonder if Mrs Allen had lost the key in the chaos of the house, or whether she was intentionally withholding it in an attempt to keep me out of things.
Either way, she isn’t around now to observe us: she and Tom will be down at the Sunday church service.
Of course, I’m also on a half-day, but I don’t have plans for my free afternoon, so I think may as well and knock my muddy boots on the doorstep, before following Arabella into the entry hall.
‘We’re this way.’ Arabella leads me up the main staircase.
Her dress today is a bright yellow velvet, over which she’s layered several shawls with various beads, frills and fringes.
The result is a strange, top-heavy silhouette.
No shoes or stockings on her feet. As I follow, I have to tread carefully around the teetering stacks of newspapers that appear to live permanently on the steps.
Some seem fresh; others are faded, caked in cobwebs and dry mouse shit.
At the top, we reach a wooden walk that encircles the entire upper half of the open hall.
Arabella taps a framed water-colour painting of the Dover cliffs as we pass it, the shading done in pretty pinks and blues.
‘My brother’s work – Harry.’ There are entryways leading off the left- and right-hand sides of the walkway, further corridors branching away.
Arabella turns left. ‘We don’t use this wing any more,’ she tells me.
The passageway we enter is curiously empty of clutter.
More dust and cobwebs. Very dark – at the far end, the lone window is shuttered, so only thin bars of light creep through.
‘You’ll have to forgive the mess,’ Arabella remarks.
I can’t tell if this is meant as a joke, or if the irony has passed her by entirely. ‘I never come this way these days.’
‘Why’s that, then?’
Halting in front of one of the doors, Arabella struggles in the half-light to slip the key into the lock.
‘It’s just so expensive to keep up, and too much work for poor Nora.
She used to have three maids under her before the war, did you know?
It seems frivolous when it’s only me – and Morry on the odd occasion.
Ah, here we are.’ The crunch of protesting metal.
This room is as plain as the corridor: just a bed and some bulky item of furniture, shrouded under white fabric. Bare boards on the floor. It’s as if we’ve stepped into a completely different house. There’s only one wall hanging – the promised family tree.
Arabella wrests open the shutters, letting in a slap of daylight.
Her face is touched suddenly with gold. She’s quite handsome from certain angles.
‘This was my parents’ room,’ she says. ‘Mummy used to let us up into bed with her on a Sunday morning – all five of us children – and we’d loot her breakfast tray like a family of brigands.
She always stayed in bed late on a Sunday.
’ A fondness in her voice, as if she can still see them all tucked up together.
‘It must’ve been nice having so many siblings. I always wanted a brother. Someone to run around and play boys’ games with.’ I’m not sure why I say this.
Arabella looks over at me, lifting her eyebrows. ‘I don’t imagine that stopped you.’ The tease in her voice is a surprise. It doesn’t have any malice to it, though: it’s familiar, almost intimate.
I find myself smiling. ‘No.’
‘My brothers were wonderful. Charlie, in particular. I wish you could have met him. We were the best of friends, Charlie and I.’ She crosses to where the genealogy hangs, now illuminated enough to be read.
‘I wouldn’t have liked a sister, I don’t think; I enjoyed the attention of being the only girl.
Mummy’s little pet.’ She taps one finger delicately on the picture frame. ‘Here, come and look.’
I move to stand beside her. The writing isn’t particularly large, so I have to get close, our shoulders a breath away from brushing.
‘Don’t be shy,’ says Arabella. ‘Lean in, do.’
As she promised, the genealogy begins with the Normans – Robert Lascy, born approximately 1042 in Poitiers.
A decorative title reads: The pedigree of the Lascy family of Harfold, 1774.
And indeed, stylistic differences appear from around the late 1700s as later hands have extended it.
Subtle variations in tone where names have been added over time – I imagine done by the hired help, rather than the ladyships recorded here.
The overall design is simple, not much in the way of illustration save for one of Harfold’s omnipresent hares tucked into a corner – a striking contrast to Arabella’s own lavish needlework.
Still, the deep green cloth it’s made from must have been expensive back then.
The lines of connection are picked out in gold thread, names embroidered in white.
The flow of blood across all these centuries, all these dead ancestors.
Twenty-nine generations. What a weight to have over you.
The final one standing of an age-old breed, like the last great bustard of Salisbury Plain.
Arabella points out a handful of the various characters – this one was accused of witchcraft; this one lost his eye in a duel. James, second Viscount Lascy (born 1668 in Canterbury), the man responsible for building Harfold.
‘Have you heard the story?’ Arabella asks.
‘James was riding through the countryside by the light of a full moon when a hare came into his path. He only managed to draw his horse to a halt at the last moment. He expected the small creature to flee in fear, but instead it stood up on its hindlegs and started to dance, circling around him, faster and faster, thumping its feet to a mystical rhythm.’ As she describes it, a dreamy delight spreads across her face.
‘When James stopped at a local village and shared his tale, he learned that the creature he had encountered was no ordinary hare, but an ancient pagan god of the land. There had been stories of it appearing as far back as the time of the Plantagenets. In showing itself to James, it had honoured him with a blessing of good fortune. He returned to that same spot the following day, and there he placed the first stone in the construction of Harfold Manor.’
I understand now the reason for all the hare iconography about the place. Reacher hadn’t made the connection quite so clear in his version of the tale.
Arabella traces a finger from James through the generations until she reaches the bottom of the genealogy, where her own name is stitched.
‘And that blessing is meant to have travelled from one owner of Harfold to the next, all the way down to me.’ Next to her name, a row of brothers, their lifespans cut short in thread.
‘I had to do these dates myself,’ she says, indicating her parents and the boys.
Was that with the same needles and thread she used to do my portrait?
The thought puts a cold feeling in my bones.
The open space where Arabella’s own date of death will be entered – as if the family tree is holding its breath for it.
‘There’s Maurice,’ Arabella adds. The only child of her mother’s sister.
‘And nobody after us – not unless Morry has an extremely drastic change of heart.’ Not turning her head, she slides her eyes sideways to glance at me.
‘I assume you’d guessed that about him?’
I’m smiling again. ‘What about you, though?’
Arabella chuckles. ‘Am I a homosexual?’
‘Oh, I didn’t mean—’ I start to correct myself in a panicked rush, before realizing she’s teasing me once more, and laugh as well. A lightness in my chest at this moment of connection. ‘Children, Arabella! You don’t think you’ll have any?’
‘Look, there isn’t much space down here,’ says Arabella, indicating the blank area at the base of the genealogy. ‘It’s as though they knew it would end with me. No … it is too late for children.’
‘You think so?’ Arabella’s birth date is listed as 1887, which makes her only thirty-eight years old.
‘I haven’t the time for it,’ she says.
It strikes me as a strange statement from a woman who doesn’t actually appear to do anything.
No work. No travels. No social engagements, apart from Reacher and myself.
I’d think Arabella had all the time in the world to fill.
Instead, her life is vast and empty – at least it seems that way, looking in from the outside.
A yawning loneliness as her family tree has been whittled down and down.
Perhaps this is why she feels the need to cover every surface with needlepoint decoration: to fill the gap.
And maybe that’s what the picture of me was really about, and the invitations into her home.
She is trying to make friends. I see my own solitude of the past years mirrored back to me, and my heart goes out to her.
It may be that we each have something we can offer to the other.