Chapter Twenty Eight The Island Folly
Julian, the photographer wanted the island.
Of course he did. Every photographer who had ever set foot on the Hartington estate wanted the island.
The temple folly, framed by the lake, the winter light doing something dramatic with the stone, making it look like gold; it was the shot.
The one that would end up above the mantelpiece in Chelsea, on the Christmas card, in the glossy pages of whatever society magazine Elizabeth had quietly tipped off about the wedding.
'Just a few frames,' he said with the mildly obsessed intensity of a man who believed that photography was not merely a profession but a calling. 'The light won't last. Twenty minutes, tops. The folly is perfect; it has been dressed beautifully.'
He was right about that. Seb, in a stroke of genius or insanity, had hung a chandelier inside the folly.
A proper one, not some garden-party lantern, but a serious piece of crystal and ironwork, suspended from a bracket bolted into the domed ceiling.
It was lit with real candles, dozens of them, their flames dancing behind faceted crystal, throwing splintered light across the snow dusted old stone columns.
In the grey of a December afternoon, with the mist sitting low on the lake and the skeletal trees framing the temple like an engraving, it looked extraordinary.
???
Getting to the island required a rowing boat and any boat in this family meant Maurice.
He had driven from the south of France in a battered Citroen, arriving at dawn with the expression of a man who had been summoned to his own execution and was determined to face it with dignity.
He had not been told why he was needed. He had not asked.
He had simply appeared, as Maurice always appeared, because the family required it and Maurice, for reasons that possibly even Maurice no longer understood, always came when the family called.
He was now sitting in the rowing boat at the lake's edge, wrapped in what appeared to be every item of clothing he owned.
A heavy fisherman's coat over a wool jumper over what James later confirmed was a wetsuit.
A scarf wound so many times around his neck that his head appeared to emerge from it like a turtle from its shell.
Fingerless gloves, a woollen hat pulled low over his ears and, inevitably, a cigarette, the smoke rising in a thin vertical line in the still December air.
He looked like a man who had been asked to row across the Styx and was doing it under protest.
'Maurice!' James called out, bounding down the lawn with the energy of a man who had just married the love of his life and found the whole world delightful. 'You came!'
'I came.' Maurice's tone suggested this was not a cause for celebration.
'You look warm.'
'I am not warm. I am in England. In December. By a lake.' He said the word lake the way another man might say open sewer.
'It's a Capability Brown lake. Very prestigious.'
'It is a pond. A cold pond. I have rowed on the Mediterranean. I have sailed in the Aegean. Now I row on a pond in the English countryside because the family asks and Maurice comes. This is my life. I have accepted it.'
Anastasia appeared at the top of the lawn and for a moment the entire scene; the lake, the island, the grumpy Frenchman in the boat: it all fell away, because she was a vision.
The dress caught the thin winter light. The veil, which she'd kept for the photos, moved in the faint breeze off the water.
Even Maurice looked up and, for a fraction of a second, something shifted in his expression.
Not a smile. Maurice did not smile. But a softening.
An acknowledgement that some things, even cold English ponds, were worth enduring.
'Madame,' he said, and rose slightly in the boat, which was as close to a bow as Maurice had ever come for anyone.
He rowed them across in silence, the oars dipping and pulling with the unhurried rhythm of a man who had been rowing boats his entire life.
The water was dark and still, reflecting the grey sky.
The island was perhaps a hundred metres from shore; close enough to see the guests milling on the lawn, far enough to feel like a different world.
The folly emerged from the mist as they approached.
Six stone columns supporting a shallow dome, open on all sides, the chandelier hanging at its centre like a jewel in a crown.
The candles were lit and the effect, in the gathering dusk, was genuinely magical.
Warm light spilling out between cold columns, reflected in the black water.
The kind of image that made photographers weep and Instagram collapse.
Julian was already on the island, having crossed in a separate boat with his assistant. He was practically vibrating with excitement.
'This is extraordinary. This. Is. Extraordinary. The light, the chandelier, the mist; this is a Tatler cover. Right. Groom by the left column. Bride in the centre. Let's start outside and work our way in.'
He worked quickly, efficiently, firing instructions and compliments in equal measure. James and Anastasia on the steps. James and Anastasia by the water's edge. James and Anastasia framed between columns, the chandelier glowing behind them.
'Now inside,' Julian said. 'Under the chandelier. That's the one. That's the money shot.'
They stepped into the folly. The candles threw sparkling light across the domed ceiling, the crystal drops catching and refracting it into tiny rainbows that danced across the stone floor.
It was warmer inside, the candles and the sheltered space created a pocket of heat that was welcome after ten minutes in the December air.
'James, stand just here,' Julian directed, positioning him directly beneath the chandelier. 'Look up at it, gorgeous. Now Anastasia, come in from the right. Take his hand. Look at each other. Forget I'm here.'
James looked up at the chandelier as instructed, his face lit from above, the crystal drops hanging a few feet over his head.
He looked, in that moment, completely happy. Open. Unguarded. A man standing in a circle of golden light with the woman he loved, on the best day of his life.
Anastasia stepped toward him and then everything happened at once.
A metallic click, small and precise, from somewhere inside the bracket housing.
The chandelier shivered. The crystal drops began to move, catching different facets of light in a slow rotation that didn't match the stillness of the air inside the folly.
Something was transmitting movement through the chain.
The bracket was shifting. Imperceptibly, but it was shifting.
Julian was still adjusting his lens. James was still looking up, still smiling, still standing in the exact centre of the kill zone with his face turned toward the thing that was about to fall on him.
Anastasia didn't think. She lunged. She grabbed James by the lapels of his morning coat with both hands and hauled him sideways with a strength that surprised them both, pulling him off his feet, sending them stumbling together across the stone floor and out between the columns on the far side.
James hit the ground with Anastasia on top of him, her veil tangled around them both, his elbow cracking against the stone step in a way that would produce a spectacular bruise by morning.
'What the…'
The sound came a half-second later.
It was a sharp, percussive snap from the dome, like a gunshot, followed by a grinding, tearing, rending noise as the bracket pulled free from the ceiling, bringing with it a chunk of stone the size of a paving slab and the chandelier itself, all iron, crystal and still-burning candles, falling in what felt like slow motion, hitting the floor of the folly exactly where James had been standing.
The impact was enormous. Crystal exploded across the stone in a spray of glittering fragments.
The iron frame buckled, driving itself into the flagstone floor with a sound like a car hitting a wall.
Candles scattered, their flames extinguished by the violence of the fall, hot wax spraying in an arc across the temple.
A chunk of the dome's interior plaster followed, crumbling down in a shower of dust and small stones that pattered across the wreckage like applause.
Then silence.
The kind of silence that follows a disaster. The kind where your ears are ringing and your brain hasn't quite caught up with what your eyes are seeing and the world seems to pause, just for a moment, to acknowledge that something very bad nearly happened.
Julian was pressed against a column, his camera clutched to his chest, his mouth open. His assistant had dropped the reflector and was staring at the pile of rubble and crystal that now occupied the centre of the folly.
Maurice, still in the rowing boat, had half-risen from his seat. His cigarette had fallen into the water. He was looking at the folly with an expression I had never seen on his face before and never saw again: genuine alarm.
James lay on his back on the stone steps, Anastasia still across his chest, both of them covered in a fine white dust that made them look like figures in a snow globe. He was breathing hard. His eyes were wide.
He turned his head and looked at the wreckage inside the folly. At the crater in the flagstone floor. At the twisted iron frame, still rocking slightly. At the slab of stone from the ceiling, easily a hundred kilos, sitting amid the shattered crystal like a headstone.
He looked at the spot where he had been standing three seconds earlier.
'Christ,' he said quietly.
He was shaking, a fine tremor in his hands that he couldn't stop and wouldn't be able to stop for about half an hour. His jaw was clenched. His eyes kept going back to the folly, to the hole in the dome where the bracket had been, to the rubble and glass glinting in the fading light.
Anastasia held his hand in the boat on the way back. She held it tightly and didn't let go, she didn't say anything, because there was nothing to say that could compete with what they had both just seen.
Maurice rowed in silence. Faster than before. His face had closed down completely, a mask of professional blankness, but his knuckles were white on the oars.
The mist had thickened while they were on the island.
From the lawn, the folly was a grey shape in the murk and the crash, which had seemed to shake the world when you were standing next to it, had evidently not carried.
Guests were still milling around the marquee entrance with champagne, laughing, oblivious.
Nobody was running. Nobody was pointing.
As far as the wedding was concerned, nothing had happened.
Which, James decided, was exactly how it was going to stay.
When they reached the shore, James stepped out of the boat on unsteady legs. I was there. I took his arm.
'I'm fine,' he said, which was obviously untrue. 'The chandelier fell.'
'I saw.'
'If she hadn't...' He stopped. Swallowed. 'She pulled me out. I didn't even see it. I was just standing there looking up at the bloody thing like an idiot and she just grabbed me.'
He looked at Anastasia, who was being helped out of the boat by Maurice.
'How did you know?' he asked her.
She looked at him for a moment and made a decision; one of those tiny, invisible choices that would define their marriage. Tell him everything? Tell him about the click of a device that made this happen?
'It just started moving,' she said simply. 'Old building, heavy chandelier. These things happen.'
He stared at her for a long moment. Then the tension in his jaw softened, just slightly, and he pulled her into a hug so tight that I worried about the structural integrity of her dress.
Gerald appeared shortly after, examined the situation with a military eye and pronounced: 'Bit of structural failure. Bound to happen eventually. Place is falling apart. Anyone hurt? No? Good. Probably time for champagne, I'd say. Champagne fixes most things.'
For once, I agreed with Gerald.
James stood very still for a moment, looking back across the lake toward the island. The mist had swallowed the folly completely now. You couldn't see the damage. You couldn't see anything at all.
Then he straightened his morning coat, brushed the stone dust from his sleeves, ran a hand through his hair and became, through what I can only describe as an act of sheer will, the groom again.
'Right,' he said, to no one in particular. 'I believe there's a party to be had.'
He offered Anastasia his arm. She took it.
They walked up the lawn together and by the time they reached the terrace, James was smiling and greeting guests and asking whether anyone had tried the oysters yet.
You would never have known, not in a thousand years, that three minutes earlier he had been lying on his back on a stone floor, shaking, staring at the place where he'd almost died.
Anastasia, I noticed, kept his hand the entire way. And her eyes, as they moved through the crowd, were not the eyes of a bride enjoying her reception. They were scanning. Watching. Cataloguing every face, every movement, every person who came too close.