Free Fiercombe Manor by Kate Riordan Page B

rather than elegant, its newel post as tall as a man and the carved balusters deeply stained but unpolished.
    Mrs. Jelphs paused with her tray and nodded towards the wide turn in the staircase, above which hung a huge gilt-framed oil.
    â€œThat’s the third baronet,” she said. “He was said to be an alchemist, or at least that’s what was believed locally. The currentbaronet is not a direct descendant of his. That’s often the way with these families. It only takes a childless marriage, or a premature death”—she paused here, I assumed out of respect for my loss—“and the line dies out.”
    I hesitated at the foot of the stairs, peering up at the painting, while Mrs. Jelphs made off down another dim passage. Decades, probably centuries, of grime had turned the background of the portrait to mud, so that the long-dead baronet’s pale hands seemed to loom out of the folds of his dark cloak and the canvas itself, while his shadowy face floated grotesquely above the white froth of a lace ruff. There was something about the picture I didn’t like, some echo of the man in it that made my skin crawl, and I knew that I would always rush past it, never looking up to meet those hooded eyes. Turning away from it, I hurried to catch Mrs. Jelphs, her long, old-fashioned skirt whisking around the corner out of sight.
    The little room she had chosen for us was the room I came to feel most at ease in during that first summer at Fiercombe. The mullioned windows were wide for the room’s size, and some gardener, or perhaps Mrs. Jelphs herself, had made sure the ivy that grew on the walls outside was kept trained back, to allow in as much light as possible. Dust-pink tea roses and the odd stray festoon of honeysuckle peeped in regardless, and on clear days, such as that first afternoon, their shadows danced with the sunbeams on the pale, unpapered walls.
    Mrs. Jelphs gestured for me to sit down. She herself sat with her back to the window, the sunlight no doubt warm on her. Now that I could see her properly, I found I could recognise something of the girl in the photograph I had once seen.
    â€œThese are a few of the girls I grew up with,” my mother said that day in her bedroom. We were sitting on her and my father’sbed, the tin of old letters and photographs between us on the eiderdown. “Mary Woodward. Sarah . . . someone, I can’t think now. Rosie Hewer. And Edith Jelphs. We would have been fifteen, though perhaps Edith and Rosie were only fourteen. I was one of the older ones. That was the last summer I spent at home before I went up to London.”
    The picture had been taken by a travelling photographer, which explained why the girls’ expressions seemed shy or, in my mother’s case, guarded. Other than her, Edith Jelphs was the most composed of the five, her face quite closed. They were positioned to the left in the picture, the photographer apparently keen to capture Painswick’s famous churchyard in the background. Though slightly blurred, the dark, sculpted yew trees stood out in stark contrast to the girls’ pale dresses and pinafores.
    I looked as closely as I dared at the same woman, now some forty years older. Her skin had not sagged but thinned in the intervening years, its surface delicately creased like the tissue paper you’d find wrapped around an old wedding dress. Her eyes when she looked up to hand me my tea were still sharp, and of a blue so dark they would look black in artificial light.
    My mother had rarely talked at length about her childhood, or the people she had known. She would open up briefly, like the day she got out the tin, but then the shutters would come down and she wouldn’t be pressed.
    â€œEnough of that nonsense,” I remember her saying as she bustled over to the wardrobe to replace the tin. “There’s no point dwelling on what’s passed. Those days are long gone.”
    In the