The Forgotten Sister Page 30

  ‘I can’t promise to stop doing that,’ Lizzie said, ‘but I reckon you understand me pretty well too, psychic gift or no psychic gift. Just don’t expect me to read the memory of stone if we visit any historical houses together,’ she added. ‘I’m done with all that. You can buy a guide book like everyone else.’

  Chapter 27

  Lizzie: Present Day

  It was a beautiful autumn day in the Cotswolds. The sky was the pale translucent blue of a winter sea at dawn and the sun hung low over the horizon. The fallen beech leaves crunched beneath their feet as Lizzie and Arthur walked along the footpath to the Citrine Pool. There was the slightest hint of frost in the air.

  ‘I expected the water to have a yellow tinge to it with a name like that,’ Arthur said as they stood on the edge of the pool, ‘but it’s dark.’

  ‘According to legend,’ Lizzie said, ‘the waters turned black when they trapped Amy Robsart’s wandering spirit and confined it to the pool. Before that it had been a greenish-yellow colour because of the rare quartz in the rock.’

  ‘I expect there’s a biological explanation for the change in water colouration,’ Arthur said, ‘but it’s a good story.’ He looked at her. ‘So this was where it happened. This was where the priests of Oxford locked Amy up for perpetuity.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lizzie shivered as a breath of air blew little eddies across the pond. ‘This is where they captured her and tried to bind her soul, and once she was trapped, the pattern kept on repeating.’ She touched Arthur’s arm gently. ‘The pattern is broken now, but to finish this we need to set Amy’s spirit free. So many wrongs have been done to her in life and the afterlife. We’re closing the circle, showing her that it is over.’

  Arthur looked around. The willows bent low over the edge of the pool and trailed their bare branches in the water. ‘It’s probably just my imagination,’ he said, ‘but I don’t like it here. There’s a bad feeling in the air.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lizzie said. She’d felt it from the moment she had seen the dark water glittering in the low sun.

  ‘I almost expect to see a flash of lightning and an apparition from a horror film,’ Arthur said. He dug his hands deep into the pockets of his coat and hunched his shoulders. ‘Poor Amy,’ he said. ‘What a horrible fate.’

  Lizzie put down the cardboard box she had been carrying and lifted the lid. Inside was a wreath of leaves and flowers that she had created that morning with Avery’s help.

  ‘It’s Quercus robur,’ she said, in answer to Arthur’s quizzical look, ‘the English oak. It’s strong and beautiful.’ She touched the petals of the pink flowers she had laid on top of the entwined oak stems and dark green leaves. ‘These are carnations,’ she said. ‘They’re the descendants of the pinks and clove gillyflowers that people grew in Tudor times. They were a symbol of undying love.’

  ‘I recognise them from Amy Robsart’s wedding portrait,’ Arthur said. ‘She was wearing a brooch with oak leaves and gillyflowers.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lizzie said. ‘It’s a symbol from a time when Amy had both great love and great hope in her life,’ she said. ‘I wanted her to know that she is not forgotten and that hope can rise again.’

  Lizzie held the wreath in her hand for a moment and then she took a step back and threw it overarm into the deep water. She heard the splash and saw the ripples spread and then fade.

  ‘Nice throw,’ Arthur said.

  ‘I was in the school netball team,’ Lizzie said. She put her hand in his and they stood side by side.

  She watched the garland settle on the water. She felt the spiral of love and grief rise up from the waters then, felt it flare into life and die down, until it was washed away and a shaft of sunlight cut through the overhanging willows and danced across the surface of the pond, reflecting shades of green and gold and citrine onto the oaken and gillyflower wreath.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that the best way to break the destructive patterns of the past, of any past, is to write a different future. We can do that now.’

  Epilogue

  Amy Robsart, The Citrine Pool

  From the other side of the pool I watch them, Elizabeth and Arthur, joined now through time and destiny. This is a different Elizabeth from the one I had known. She is as brave as the first Elizabeth, but she is kinder and more generous. She has changed, and in doing so she has altered the course of fate and the futures of those who are to come.

  Elizabeth, my enemy, you were the only one who could help me. You saw that the truth needed to be told. You broke the pattern.

  Yet in the end it is your kindness that heals me. Kindness cannot alter the past but it can change the future. It can bring peace.

  I watch with them as the sun falls brilliant and bright on the oak and gillyflower wreath and the waters of the pool dazzle in shades of green and gold. I feel my spirit expand as it touches freedom.

  They turn to leave. His arm is about her, her head against his shoulder. They love. They will always love. This, I know.

  My time is done now. I can leave too, slip away and be gone, with love and hope in my heart. I am no longer trapped. I can go where I will and be free. It is a beautiful day.

  Acknowledgements

  The mystery of the death of Amy Robsart is one of the most enduring puzzles in English history. Amy, whose husband Robert Dudley was a childhood friend and favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, died at Cumnor Manor in Oxfordshire on 8th September 1560. The subsequent scandal forever destroyed Robert Dudley’s chances of marrying the Queen.

  Amy has fascinated me for years, perhaps because, like the other historical women who have inspired my books, her story so often gets lost in a bigger one, in this case the relationship between Elizabeth and Dudley. Last year on a particularly wet and windy autumn afternoon, I made the trip to Cumnor to the site of the lost manor house, and from there to Oxford, to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin where Amy had been buried. Her tomb has also been lost.

  This book is a very personal one for me, springing as it does from a love of Tudor history engendered in me by my beloved grandmother and I am as always immensely grateful to my family for their enduring love and support for my writing. For this book I am particularly indebted to my wonderful editor Emily Kitchin, whose ideas and suggestions inspired me to bring out the best in this story, and to Jon Appleton for his insightful copy-editing. A huge thank you too, to the teams at HQ in the UK and Graydon House in the US for all that they do to bring my stories to readers.

  As always, I am most grateful to my readers. Thank you!

  Read on for an extract from

  Nicola Cornick’s stunning historical

  mystery, The Woman in the Golden Dress

  Prologue

  Eustace

  April 1765

  I know what they will say of me when I am dead. I will be cast as a madman and a fool. They will blame the divorce, so scandalous for a peer of the realm, and claim that it drove me to misery and delusion, that it turned my mind. They will rake up all the old gossip and call my wife a whore.

  It pleases me that society will slander Isabella over again. I will gladly tolerate being painted a cuckold and a weakling if it hurts her. I wish I could hurt her more but she is beyond my reach now, more is the pity.

  There are those who call me a wicked man. They are wrong. True evil requires intent and I never had the will or the cunning to be truly wicked. Only once was I tempted to commit murder and even then it was not my fault, for I swear I was possessed. It was the golden gown that moved me to evil and the gown that led to that most terrible mistake.

  I remember the horror of it to this day. I still see the scene so clear before my eyes. She was walking ahead of me, through the dappled moonlight, and I recognised the gown and hastened my step. I swear I had no fixed intention, no thought of murder, not at that moment. I wanted to talk, to reason with her. Then, on the path by the mill, she seemed to stumble and fall and all of a sudden I was seized by the thought that this was my chance to be rid of
the threat for ever. I could not bring myself to touch her directly so I nudged her body with my boot and she rolled gently, so gently, over the edge and into the pool.

  I see it all again: the silver moon swimming beneath the water and the golden gown billowing out about her like a shroud slowly unfurling. I needed to claim that gown but my fear made me clumsy and I ripped it from her body when it would not yield to my hands. And then…

  I break out into a cold sweat whenever I remember. Everything is so vivid. The sweet scent of lime blossom mingled with the stink of dank weed from the millpond, the endless roar of the water over the sluice like the rush to bedlam.

  And then… The body rolled over in the water and I saw her properly for the first time in the moon’s reflected glow. It was not the face of my nemesis. I stood there with the gown dripping in my hands and then I was sick; sick with revulsion, sick with fear, sick with disappointment.

  Binks came upon me as I knelt there, retching up my guts.

  ‘I will attend to this, Lord Gerard,’ he said, as though he were my butler tidying away a glass of spilt wine. ‘You should have left it with me, as we agreed.’

  Binks was a damned impertinent fellow but a useful one and I was not going to argue with him. I took my carriage back to Lydiard House and I sat here in my study and drank more than I had ever taken before. I was out cold for three days.

  When I came to my senses the first thing I saw was the golden gown draped across the end of my bed like a reproachful ghost. I wanted to be rid of it, to burn it, rip it to shreds or give it to the first beggar woman I saw but at the same time I was too afraid; afraid that somehow, some day, it would return to haunt me. My only safety lay in keeping it close to me. Wherever I went the gown came with me, wrapped up tightly, hidden away to contain its poison, but with me all the same. And that is how it haunted me for ever after. That is how it has possessed me, in mind and body.

  I have no notion what happened after I left Binks to do the work that I dared not do. I heard reports of the tragedy of course, for the servants were full of the story and it was in all the local newspapers. It was a famous scandal that respected Swindon banker and businessman Samuel Lawrence had drowned his wife in the millpond and then apparently taken his own life, following her down into those dark waters.

  In time I almost came to believe those stories myself.

  Except that for as long as the gown is with me, I will remember the truth. I will remember Binks, who disappeared like a will-o’-the-wisp once the deed was done, and I will remember Binks’s men, the Moonrakers, hard men, smugglers, criminals. I have lived in fear of them these past twenty years for I know they hate me for killing one of their own. My life is so much more precious, infinitely more important than theirs, and yet I live in fear of a gang of felons.

  From the drawing room window I can see the lake here at Lydiard Park glittering in the morning sun. On the days when I am too drink-sodden and addled to walk, the steward places me here, telling me that it will raise my spirits to see the world outside. Little does he know that nothing could cause me more pain than to look upon the shining water. Or perhaps he does know it, and places me here to torment me. Perhaps he hates me too.

  The Moonrakers will come for me soon. This morning I received a token from their leader. It was such a beautiful gift, an inlaid box. I unwrapped it with greedy excitement until I saw the tiepin inside with the design of a hanged man, the word ‘remember’, and the initials C. L. Then I dropped it and it went skittering away across the floor propelled by my revulsion.

  She need have no fear. I shall never forget that day. The gown will remind me. It will possess me to my last breath.

  The sun swims under the rippling water and the day turns dark. The Moonrakers are ready. Ready to fish for their fortunes again, ready for time to repeat itself, ready for the secrets to be told.

  Chapter 1

  Fenella

  2004

  She could never forget the day she stole the gown.

  Twenty-three of them visited Lydiard Park that day. It should have been twenty-five but Emily Dunn had chickenpox and Lauren Featherstone’s parents had taken her on holiday to Greece despite the fact that it was still term time, and Mrs Holmes, the headmistress, disapproved. Mr Featherstone paid the fees, though, so Mrs Holmes kept quiet.

  There were three teachers as well, not that many to keep them all under control. Two of them looked harassed – Miss Littlejohn always looked harassed, and Mr Cash didn’t really like children much – they all knew it even though he never said so – but Miss French was all relaxed and smiley. Miss French was cool, more like a big sister than a teacher.

  ‘Just one more room to visit, girls,’ she coaxed, when they all started to drag their heels due to heat and tiredness and endless stately home corridors, ‘and then we can go to the tearoom and the shop.’

  Fen didn’t have any money to spend in the shop because her grandmother had forgotten again. She wasn’t sure if anyone remembered to pay her school fees either but until someone said something she was stuck at St Hilda’s and that was fine. She’d been to worse schools, plenty of them, some of them boarding, some not. She made friends quickly and easily because she’d learned how. It was either that or forever be the loner, the outsider, the one who came and went without leaving a trace.

  ‘Fen,’ Jessie, her best friend, all brown curls and bossiness, was pulling on her sleeve. ‘Come on.’

  But Fen lingered in the state bedroom as the gaggle of schoolgirls in their red and white summer dresses and red blazers went chattering through the doorway into the drawing room. As soon as they were gone the silence swept back in like a tide, cutting her off. It was odd, as though a thick door had slammed somewhere separating her from the rest of the world. She could hear her own breathing, feel the sun on her face as it fell through the high windows to speckle the wooden floor.

  It wasn’t a room that appealed to her at all. Her bedroom in her grandmother Sarah’s house in West Swindon was quite small, painted pale green and had an accumulation of vintage bits of china and glass and other small pieces that Sarah had encouraged her to buy on their trips to the flea markets and car boot sales. This huge space with its flock wallpaper, soaring white pillars and four poster bed with its embroidered hangings seemed completely lifeless. It was no one’s room, merely a museum. The whole place felt empty to her and a bit creepy; the other rooms held waxwork figures in period dress that had made her shudder. The other girls had giggled over them but Fen had imagined them as zombies or automatons come to life, stalking the corridors of the old house.

  There was a door in the corner and beyond it a room that looked to be full of light. It beckoned to her. Fen peeped inside. It was small, oval-shaped, painted in blue and white like the Wedgwood vases that her grandmother collected. What caught her eye, though, was the stained glass window with its tiny little painted panels depicting colourful pictures of fruit, flowers, animals – was that an elephant? – something that looked half-man half-goat, a ship to sail away in, a mermaid… The window enchanted her.

  She stretched out a hand towards the light, wanting to touch those bright panes and experience that vivid world but before her fingers touched the glass there was the sound of running footsteps behind her.

  ‘Fen! Fenella! Where are you?’

  It was Jessie’s voice, anxious and breathless now. Fen dropped her hand and turned quickly, hurrying back through the door of the closet into the bedroom beyond. Jessie was not there. Everything looked the same, as empty and lifeless as before. And yet on second glance it did not. It took Fen a moment to realise what was different. The shutters at the windows were now closed and the lamps were lit; they smelled unpleasantly of oil and heat. Perhaps one of the curators had come in whilst she was in the blue closet and had decided to block out the bright sun in case it damaged the furnishings.

  That was not the only difference though. The bed was rumpled, covers thrown back, and the wardrobe door was half-open, revealing shel
ves of clothes within that looked as though they had been tossed aside by an impatient hand. All of a sudden the place looked lived in rather than frozen in time. It was an unsettling feeling; instead of making the house seem more real, it gave Fen the creeps. Looking straight ahead, she was aware that her heart was suddenly beating hard but was not quite sure why. She walked quickly through into the drawing room to find the rest of the pupils.

  In the drawing room the differences were even more marked. There was a fire burning fiercely in the grate even though here the shutters were thrown back and the room was in full sunlight. It was so hot and airless that Fen felt the sweat spring on the back of her neck and trickle uncomfortably beneath her collar. The whole house was as quiet as a sepulchre. It was uncanny.

  Over the high back of one chair, shimmering in the light with a soft, golden glow, was the most beautiful dress Fen had ever seen. She stared at it. It felt almost impossible to tear her gaze away. She did not even realise that she had started to move towards it; her hand was on the material and it felt as soft as clouds, lighter than air, a trail of silver and gold spangled with stars.

  ‘Pound? Where the hell are you, man?’

  Fen had not seen the figure sitting before the window, almost hidden by the high curved back of a wing chair. She jumped at the crack of his voice and spun around. He was fair, florid, dressed in a wig and poorly fitting jacket with some sort of scarf wound carelessly about his neck and a waistcoat flapping open. He looked bad-tempered and drunk. Fen was only thirteen but she knew an alcoholic when she saw one. She could smell the fumes on him from where she was standing. Nevertheless she opened her mouth to apologise. He was probably a re-enactor of some sort, or a room steward, although really it didn’t seem appropriate to have drunks in costume wandering about the place.