Chapter 21
ALEX
It was a few hours later when Nick appeared to ask Alex if she wanted lunch. His eyes fell on the circlet she had placed beside her laptop on the desk, and he froze. Visibly froze. As if horrified or guilty.
Alex just waited, watching him. She wondered if he’d try to ignore it.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked eventually when he didn’t seem able to make a decision.
‘Oh,’ he said and then made an apologetic face. ‘Yes. Just that… Maeve gets these fancies into her head and makes…’ He nodded at the circle. ‘I’m sorry. She makes them all the time and hands them out to everyone as if they’re important. You don’t actually have to keep it.’
Alex put her hand out to touch it before he could try to take it away. ‘It’s fine. I like it. She’s a very sweet kid.’
That brought a smile to his lips. He really did dote on her. And Alex wasn’t lying. Maeve was sweet, if a little strange. And sad.
‘Her mother…’ she began and then stopped, feeling awkward. It really was none of her business and if he didn’t want to talk about it, she shouldn’t ask.
Nick’s smile fell a bit. He tried to hold onto it but didn’t quite manage to stop it from slipping. ‘She passed away two years ago.’
That was all he said, but it sounded so absolute that Alex didn’t have the first clue how to ask any kind of follow-up question.
‘I… I’m so sorry,’ she blurted out. ‘Maeve talked about her…’ Oh God, this was beyond awkward. What was she doing? She had no right to interrogate him about his dead wife, for goodness’ sake.
He nodded, looking just past her head, still not making eye contact. ‘Maeve has something of an overactive imagination. Lots of imaginary friends, that kind of thing. Grief, her counsellor says. And trauma. She sometimes pretends Sally’s still here. In the house.’
Alex racked her brains, trying to think of something…
anything… to say. Grief and trauma. She remembered that all too well.
She hadn’t been as little as Maeve when she’d lost a parent.
And she’d had Theo constantly at her side so there wasn’t a lot of space for the imaginary friends.
Still, there had been a few when she was here. She recalled that much.
It had to be lonely for Maeve. Wildewood Hall had been for her.
‘Imaginary friends like Daisy?’
A brief bitter smile flashed over his mouth for a moment. He had an expressive mouth, she thought, now she could see it. And a good smile, even when it was tinged with heartbreak. His eyes softened a little and flickered over her face for just a moment.
‘Yeah, Daisy.’ He raked his fingers through his shaggy overlong hair.
He may have shaved but he’d done nothing to trim his hair.
But it suited him. There was something about him.
Ragged and careworn, like the house. No, like the woods.
Wild and a bit rough around the edges, but all the more beautiful for that.
She caught her thoughts and steered them back to safer ground.
Nick, all his rough edges and his shaggy hair, were none of her business, she reminded herself firmly. This was a man who was clearly still in mourning. And dealing with a young child who was not handling grief either. Having Alex here wasn’t helping one bit.
‘Let me show you something,’ he said at last, with a heavy sigh, as if he’d been as caught in his own thoughts as she’d been.
He led her out into the hall, down towards the morning room, portraits all along the walls.
This was the most time she’d spent looking at them since her grandfather quizzed her, and she noticed the features echoed in her own and Theo’s, in Dad’s faces.
That haughty stare, those blue eyes, that smile…
She paused beneath a woman she didn’t recognise, head held high, hair perfectly piled on top of her head, a length of pearls wrapped tightly around her long slender throat. Speaking of haughty, Alex thought with a shudder.
‘Lady Eloise de Wilde,’ Nick said. ‘Your grandmother.’
No, that couldn’t be right. Gran had never looked like that.
True, she was young in the painting, no older than Alex was now, and Alex had only known her as an old woman.
But that woman, the one in the painting…
Alex didn’t know her at all. It wasn’t the laughing, patient Gran who had cared for her when she’d been here as a child while her grandfather had dragged Dad and Theo off to learn about being lord of the manor.
‘No, that’s not her. I met her when I was little. We used to visit.’
‘Oh…’ He sounded a bit bewildered, like he didn’t want to argue with her, but something was wrong.
‘What?’ she asked. Why was he going all cryptic on her again? ‘Just spit it out, Nick. I don’t have time for this.’
It wasn’t impatience. Not really. She was shaken and she didn’t like the feeling one little bit.
‘She died in 1967.’
Well, that was just stupid. Her dad would have only been ten.
Alex stared at the portrait for another long moment, studying it.
‘Okay, well it couldn’t have been her then.
My gran… Gran was here when I was little.
She looked after me while the men were off—’ She waved a hand dismissively.
‘Maybe she wasn’t my actual grandmother then. A housekeeper, or something?’
Oh God, had her grandfather had a live-in lover that he’d pawned her off on?
Gran had talked about him affectionately enough, as if he was a foolish but loveable man.
Alex had never seen it herself. Gran had been the one to tell her that he was doing his best, that he was trying to help. Even that he was trying to protect her.
Her grandfather, protecting her? She’d not questioned it, partly because she’d not believed her. But what had he been protecting her from?
Nick chewed on his lower lip drawing her attention back to him. That was far too distracting a thing for her to contemplate right now. Because if she started thinking about his lips…
Alex drew in a deep breath. ‘You wanted to show me this?’
Nick shook his head but didn’t say anything further to her. There had to be a logical reason for him to show her. And why she remembered a different gran, one that couldn’t be this woman. She’d work it out.
Another thing to research. There was every possibility that all this was some kind of new tactic to make her give up the house sale or… or… just to make her look like a fool. She didn’t know. It was unsettling and she really didn’t like it at all. But she followed him as he continued down the hall.
‘This one,’ said Nick, and stopped in front of a portrait of a young girl.
It had to be a couple of hundred years old.
She was golden-haired, with the de Wilde blue eyes, and she held a bunch of wildflowers in her small hands, not unlike the ones Maeve had woven into the circlet.
Behind her, the line of the woods outside the house rose like a dark threat.
‘Margaret de Wilde, youngest daughter of Hugh, the fifteenth Baron de Wilde. Died in 1806. She was seven. They called her Daisy.’
Alex frowned. Daisy…?
But before she could ask more questions, he turned around and waved his hand at another portrait.
This was more modern, the girl in it from perhaps the 1920s.
‘And this is Rosalind. You’ll hear about Rose as well.
And Dickie and Reg, Cecil, and maybe even Cornelius.
And others. Maeve sees their portraits around the house, and in the books, the old photos and… ’ He sighed again.
She didn’t press him in the brief pause. Her head was spinning. Those names.
‘I wanted to take her to a psychologist last year but Patricia says she’ll grow out of it eventually and to just let her have her childhood.
Not to stifle her imagination, you know?
But that’s one of the reasons I don’t really want her here in the house too much anymore.
She stays with Patricia during the week because of school anyway.
I thought she’d make friends in the village but…
’ Another sigh. His eyes glistened as he turned away and Alex felt the wave of pain coming off him as if it was a physical thing.
‘She just tells us she already has friends here and they’re more fun. ’
Alex reached out before she thought about what she was doing, her hand coming up to the centre of his back, right between his shoulder blades.
His body was warm but he was so tense, a coiled spring.
All she meant to do was offer him a little comfort, a bit of understanding.
But for a moment he froze, like an animal about to attack, or flee.
Then, slowly, he seemed to relax into her touch.
His scent wound itself around her again, as did the way she just needed to breathe him in. It was addictive. Intoxicating.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I didn’t mean to bring up the past.’
‘The past has a habit of throwing itself right in your face around here, Alex. I’m sure you already know it.’
He nodded to a final portrait, one half in shadows at the end of the hall. A man in a linen shirt. A modern painting in oils, beautiful and so very true to life. As if he might step out of the frame at any second. Her father. In his thirties. The same age he was when he died.
But he hadn’t looked like that when she last saw him.
‘I’ve never seen that before,’ she said, her throat so tight she had to force the words out.
‘Your grandfather commissioned it after he died. Your dad, I mean, after he…’ He trailed off awkwardly. ‘You know.’