Before the Ruins Read online

  It is the dead of winter, and the dead of night, and there are tracks, human footprints, in the snow, beginning in the courtyard, at the door to the library. At first, they follow the path toward the outbuildings and then past the stables, moving in the direction of the road, but at the foot of the drive they falter and then halt, perhaps contemplating the drifts of snow ahead, the likelihood of any vehicle at all being able to reach the manor, no matter what plans have been made, no matter how vital the mission.

  After that, the footsteps double back, briefly disappear into the tack room adjoining the stables, and then reemerge, this time leading down through the drifts to circle the lake, tracking across the film of snow that has blown over the floor of the little temple, until at its center they turn and, very distinctly, the toes point out over the lake, as though their maker paused here to contemplate the frozen reeds and thickening film of ice.

  When they leave the temple, something new starts to happen. The drifts on the lawn are, in places, knee deep and as the tracks return in the direction of the house, they begin to wander. Here and there, the snow is greatly disturbed and, once back within the walls of the kitchen garden, the tracks become smears. Finally, by the stone bench in the rose garden, they stop.

  The scene is one I have visited in my dreams, both sleeping and waking.

  A man, a Mr. James Mortimer, is slumped on the bench, his panting exhalations creating small puffs of smoke in the freezing air. He is dying, and James Mortimer is not his real name. It is the name he assumed when he befriended Lord Denford’s son at the races, when he offered him good tips that led to fair-to-middling wins, when he coaxed and flattered and listened his way into Clive Denford’s trust. It is a name that leads nowhere.

  In his lap lies a small tin, its two halves prized apart. Later they will test the tin for poison but find instead gelignite. Mortimer took it for his heart. He is looking down sadly into the empty case, panting as he dies.

  “It would have been all right, I suppose, if it wasn’t for the snow.”

  Mortimer doesn’t look up. You would think that it would be better to die looking up at the sky than down at your knees.

  “There was an accomplice, wasn’t there? They were supposed to come and spirit you away. Except it started snowing and it didn’t stop.”

  A bubble forms on his lips and bursts. Behind us the house is quiet. There are seventeen souls inside: the four family members, six servants (the four who sleep in and two who have accompanied their employers), and the seven weekend guests, the men there to shoot, the women to gossip and play cards. There are four more hours until the stable boy and scullery maids get up, seven more till Sir Thomas Denford and his weekend guests have their tea taken up, and Lady Mary Ashton realizes her diamond necklace, her famous diamond necklace, is missing, its velvet-lined case empty and the door to her room—which she swears she locked from the inside—open, the key missing.

  “Where’s the necklace?” I ask. “Where did you put it? We looked everywhere. Em always said it was in the lake.”

  I sit down and reach over to tilt Mortimer’s chin up so that he gets a view of the night sky. There’s no moon, but the night is aflame in blue and white.

  He’s not going to speak to me. He never speaks to me, not even to tell me his real name.

  Mortimer has stopped panting now. He seems to have given up exhaling. Instead he takes a series of tiny in-breaths while his eyes scan the heavens left to right as though reading a book. I try one last time:

  “Where is it, James? Where’s the necklace?”

  But it’s useless. He’s leaving, taking his secrets with him.

  What we know about him—the racing tips, the paternal interest he showed in a somewhat lost young man, the promise of a lucrative business proposition—is all we’ll ever know. Eight years later, Clive drowned in the shallows of a Normandy beach during the D-Day landings. Four years after that, his father, Lord Denford, sold up and moved to a house in the village of Ramsbury. When he died, a former domestic told the papers he kept a picture of Hitler and a revolver in the top drawer of his bedside table.

  James Mortimer expires, becomes extinct. The papers have a field day. Half a million replicas in glass are made and sold in Woolworth’s. When the police fail to find the diamonds, Mary Ashton’s family hires a private detective. The search goes on for months. For years the theories multiply—an insurance swindle, an inside job. People claim to know who Mortimer was, or that they’ve seen the diamonds in Rio de Janeiro, or Sydney, around the neck of a gangster’s moll in Chicago. None of it comes to anything. The story fades, is revived first on the occasion of Mary Ashton’s scandalous divorce and then upon her death. It lingers in the minds of locals like Mrs. East, enters the annals of local history, becomes an anecdote here, a footnote there.

  It was enough for us. More than enough. We spent the summer playing a game in which we searched for the diamonds. The game was a ritual, the ritual a spell. As though from above, with an all-seeing eye, I see the five of us, each of us a finger of a single hand, probing the manor’s nooks and crannies.

  I used to try to hear the diamonds. When we played the game, I used to listen for them, very hard, making myself quiet, as though they would speak to me and tell me where they were.

  Perhaps a month before the end? An August rain falls from a cloudless sky and dries instantly. I am barefoot by the stables. I have been balancing on a rotting rain barrel searching the guttering. My hands are green with slime. David is walking toward me. He has been wading in the fountain. Wet footprints trail behind him. His T-shirt and shorts are soaked through. He is wearing an expression of mild surprise. It is an emptying thing to play the game. The hours slip by. The past and future retreat to dark corners far away. Something inside, in the heart, is being worked upon. There is an unlocking feeling, an unlocking feeling in the chest.

  So David wears a surprised smile, a dazed look. His expression is reflected on my face. Our smiles touch first. I turn and go back toward the stables, toward the open door to the room full of birds’ nests, spiderwebs, and old bits of tack. David follows me. His footprints shrink and disappear.

  In the stables it’s cooler. I have pretended for a long time that I am not frightened of anything, that there is nothing left that can frighten me. I have removed myself to a safe place, so it is so. My self comes back to my body, unsteady, circling. David shivers and I shiver.

  I put out my hand and put it over his heart. After a moment, he does the same. The pads of his fingers pressing gently against my chest through the cotton of my shirt.

  This is the other game, and I do not know how to separate them.

  CHAPTER 9

  ENCHANTED PALACE I

  Fridays and Saturdays, I worked for Darren in the office, matching purchase orders with invoices and delivery notes, then stapling them together. I slid the drawers out of the big metal filing cabinets and rifled through pink carbon copies for serial numbers matching the ones on a list Jules had given me. When that was done, I fired up the computer and played about with the payroll program with the manual open on my lap until Marcus came to pick me up.

  Em finished at the tearooms at three. She came out in her black and whites with the little cap still on and got changed in the back of the van as we took the road out to the manor.

  “Tips any good?”

  “Busload of Americans!” She was unpinning her cap, her hair—mouse brown and poker straight—falling over her face.

  “Did you get us anything?”

  “Might have a few scones about my person, my love.” She smoothed down her hair and began unbuttoning the white frilly blouse they made her wear. Marcus kept his eyes glued to the road. In stillness, she could sometimes take on the look of a lady from an old painting, keen-eyed and white-throated, with a smile that guarded secrets. But Em was not often still, and when she spoke it was broad Wiltshire. The tights and skirt came off. The maid disappeared. She had on a cream satin padded bra we’d nicked from Dorothy P
erkins and a pair of yellow Snoopy underpants, then a T-shirt and shorts.

  “Where’s Peter?”

  “At a wedding I’m guessing.” Peter picked up tidy sums playing the “Wedding March” and “Jerusalem” for couples getting hitched. “Least no one was answering when I called.”

  But I was wrong, because when we got to the manor, Peter was already there, quite at home, sitting on a blanket I recognized from the vicarage conservatory, David beside him in the sunshine.

  * * *

  He told the others what he had told me. The school trip to Italy at Easter, the theft of the coat and cards. Same details, same confidential tone. I tried to look like it was news.

  “How did you get back into England?” Em asked. “Didn’t they have your name on a list at the airports?”

  “I hitched lifts with lorry drivers. I came across on a ferry from Calais to Dover with Bob from Barnes and a load of Parma ham. At customs, they barely even looked at my passport.”

  “This teacher, what’s he like?” Peter was scratching his shin where an ant had bitten him. My eyes wandered to his bike. It was on the grass, back wheel spinning slowly in the breeze.

  “Badger? All right, I suppose.” David swallowed. “A bit funny maybe, even for a teacher, but easy enough if you stayed on his good side.” David had been at boarding school on a scholarship, but because of the business in Italy, he’d missed his exams.

  “You could get a caution,” Marcus said. Sentencing was a matter of interest among his friends. What you got for doing what.

  “Don’t know if they have cautions in Italy.”

  “Or maybe you can get the charges dropped, get him to say he’d given you the card, or it was all a mistake.”

  David looked a bit queasy at that.

  “Not impossible,” he said. “But I think everyone should cool off a bit first. Then I was thinking I might write him a letter.” He was still looking for the right move, or perhaps for the problem to just go away. David didn’t believe rules applied to him. “Maybe,” he said, glancing at Peter, “you can help.”

  “Won’t your parents be going mad with worry?” Em asked.

  “I sent them a postcard.” Later, he would describe them as “Nice people, you know. Nice, very law-abiding.” He gave a suffocated laugh. “Dad’s desperate for me to get an apprenticeship. Mum writes down everything she spends and eats in a little book. On Sunday mornings they test the smoke alarm.”

  David got up and we followed him into the house. The kitchen was cold enough to bring out goose bumps. There was a table, chairs, and a deep enamel trough. He’d found the mains and turned the water back on.

  While the tap ran, we got some cups together. David handed me water in a tea-stained mug and our fingers touched.

  We went out again, this time into the courtyard, and from there into the rose garden. David’s head was inclined attentively to Peter who was talking about a book he was going to lend him. Marcus slipped his arm around my shoulders. Em skipped ahead. We had come to stand in front of the stone bench where, all those years ago, mysterious Mr. Mortimer had been found dead. I cleared my throat.

  “So, Mrs. East says…”

  * * *

  In the beginning, it gave us a reason to look around as much as we liked. We talked about hiding places, the places where, had we been Mortimer, we would have chosen to secrete the necklace. We had to remember it was freezing, and the middle of the night, and that we had a heart condition, that we were panicking!

  The diamonds were not under the old terra-cotta flowerpots.

  Nor did we find them in the shallows of the lake, the wet mud squidging between our toes.

  Not among the spiders in the cellar or with their cousins in the attics.

  Or among the rotting tack in the stables.

  Or in the greenhouses, as we tiptoed among the broken glass and the empty snail shells that littered the floor like spent bullet casings.

  Still, I felt a singing feeling in my blood, as though Mary Ashton’s discovery of her loss, the following uproar in the manor, the arrival of the police, were not events long past, but just about to happen.

  “Diamonds,” Em sang. “Oh diamonds, where are you!”

  And David smiled at everyone with his eyes, and it was like a lamp shining. It made you want to get closer, because David thought he was special, and within the ring of light he cast, you were special too.

  Still, I kept a careful distance. For Peter’s sake, for Marcus’s.

  Later, parked up in the lanes, Marcus leaned forward to tune the van’s radio.

  “It’s nice for Peter, you know, to have someone, a friend, isn’t it? Peter’s important to you, kind of like a brother.” His eyes flicked from the dial to my face, looking for confirmation of something. Later, when I kissed him, I tried to give him the answer he was looking for.

  * * *

  Peter photocopied pages from the books in the library. A photograph of Mary Ashton as a debutante, flanked by a Mitford and an Astor, the diamonds slung around her neck, remarkable only from the other baubles on view by the single teardrop diamond, glistening like a fat tear in the suprasternal notch. There were a few black and whites of Lord Denford himself, and one of young Denford in uniform—his pose heroic but his eyes terrified as though he was facing down, not the lens of the camera but the barrel of a gun. Perhaps most exciting of all, was the picture of James Mortimer, an artist’s sketch of the dead man’s face printed in newspapers across the country in the hope that someone would come forward to identify him.

  I kept a folded copy of it in the back pocket of my jeans. Over time, the image became less and less like something human, and more and more like a fortress, a silent fortress, built to guard a secret. I liked to take it out and look at it when no one was watching, the face of the dead man, a blind seer, a map to nowhere on earth. Some things touch something inside you, and you don’t know why. Then you get a feeling, not a usual feeling, but something special, like there were two of you, the everyday one and another. The other was often absent, not there, or asleep, a Merlin buried deep under his mound, and the special feeling was an awakening, an eye inside sliding open.

  I’ve read about people feeling such things when they are in love, an awakening, a coming alive, but I was not in love, not yet anyway.

  * * *

  In the rose garden, David emptying cans of beans into a saucepan. The sun was already gone, but in the west the clouds were raging crimson and pink and orange. Swallows dropped from the manor’s eaves, to bob over the lawns.

  A fortnight in and we had the place kitted out: a camping stove, a set of pans, torches, blankets and sleeping bags, cans of food, cereal, coffee, long-life milk. The camping gear was ancient, had belonged to Peter’s parents.

  “Have you mentioned us being here to Uncle Darren?”

  Marcus shook his head.

  “He wouldn’t mind though, would he? It being us?” I had my head on his knee. I looked up, as sweet-faced as I could manage. In the corner of my eye I checked to see if David was watching. I avoided looking at him directly, but Peter made up for it. Marcus looked at me, and Peter looked at David, and David and I did not look at one another, and Em looked at all of us, pencil in hand, sketchbook on her lap.

  “Wouldn’t have thought so. But he’d want to be asked.”

  “But then he might say no. I don’t think you should say anything, Marc.”

  I think we all shared Peter’s alarm. Darren saying no. Or perhaps even worse, him saying yes, and it not being secret anymore. I liked Darren. In the pub, he drank pints of orange juice and lemonade, never a sip of beer, but he had a drinker’s complexion. Even his hands were red, as though he had more blood than the rest of us. There were rumors of him putting a Paddy in the hospital for smashing up one of his diggers.

  When Marcus was tiny, his dad had run off to Spain and not come back. There was a black mark next to his name that was never quite explained. It had been Darren trying to squash himself onto one of
the school’s plastic chairs come nativity. Darren standing at the side of the pitch cheering encouragement and shouting at the ref. And when we were twelve and they’d started a trampolining club, Darren drove the minibus, turning out every week for a term to give a handful of us a lift there and back, playing what he called proper music and asking about school. Darren had left at fourteen, kicked out for punching out a teacher who’d tried to cane him. How we’d loved to hear that one! When I got something right in the office, he’d say, “Good girl,” and I’d feel a sort of doggy joy.

  Still, I don’t think any of us fancied the idea of Darren dropping in to enlighten us about the Yardbirds or the Moody Blues in the rose garden, to tell us at length about the problems involved with modernizing old plumbing.

  So we left it at that. I laid my cheek back on Marcus’s thigh. He held the end of my plait between his fingers. Once, before we were going out, I’d had him brush my hair. His mum was out and we were up in his bedroom. The curl made it knotty. I’d shown him how you had to start at the bottom. He went so slowly, like I was made of something much more fragile than I was. By the time he finished his breath was all funny.

  Em took up a spoon and began stirring the beans. For a second, I thought I saw a flicker of irritation cross her face, but then she said, “Happy memories,” in a passable imitation of the vicar. “Did I ever tell you about our honeymoon, Patricia’s and mine, hunting for fossils on the west coast of Wales?”

  * * *

  The game was Em’s idea too. She found the diamonds in a charity shop. When the old died, their families emptied their wardrobes and dressing tables and took the contents to Sue Ryder or Prospect. In and among the usual rubbish, there were musty morning suits, monogrammed golf clubs, cashmere twin sets, satin purses embroidered with seed pearls, clip-on earrings like great dazzling barnacles in trays of costume jewelry.