Free A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper Page A

stripped of its decorations, the Solar is impressive – the largest room in the castle, apart from the Great Hall. There are two big mullioned windows fitted with windowseats, an enormous fireplace and a dais for the four-poster bed. Most of the furniture is gone now, but the bed is still here because no one could work out how to take it apart and it’s too big to fit through any of the doors.
    I have propped the silver-framed photographs I found beside me, so I can look at them as I write. One is clearly of Toby and Veronica, their christening gowns trailing over the lap of someone wearing a long shiny skirt. (Isabella? My mother? Her face is blurred and shadowed.) Toby is gnawing at his fist and Veronica is either grinning or grimacing, it’s hard to tell. The only way I can distinguish them is that the little bit of hair Veronica has is scraped into a wisp and secured with an enormous bow. Along the bottom of the photograph, someone has written, The twins, 1919. (I can just hear Veronica exclaiming, ‘What if some poor future historian reads it and thinks we actually were twins? When in fact we were born six weeks apart? And are cousins, not siblings?’)
    The other photograph is of a vaguely Moorish mansion with a fountain in front. I’ve never seen it before. Is it somewhere Isabella lived? Her family home? Does Veronica know it’s here? Peering closer, I see that what I’d imagined was flowering vine creeping up the walls is in fact mould. Ugh. It’s underneath the glass, too – it may be too late to save the photograph, but I’ll take it back to our room anyway, along with the other one. I don’t think Veronica will mind, even if the house does turn out to be Isabella’s. I don’t think Veronica cares any more.
    Looking around at the blank walls and dusty flagstones of the Solar, remembering how it used to be, makes me wonder again at how little Isabella took with her. I was only eight when she left, but I recall sitting on her favourite rose-patterned rug afterwards and thinking that surely she could have rolled that up and strapped it to her suitcase. But she left in such a hurry. There’d been an argument between her and Uncle John, the sort involving shouting and smashed china (these had become depressingly ordinary). What was out of the ordinary this time was Isabella storming upstairs to toss some clothes into her little alligator suitcase. She’d caught sight of a ship making its slow way past the island.
    ‘Enough!’ she screamed, loud enough for the entire castle to hear. I remember standing in the bathroom in my striped pyjamas, shivering violently, while Veronica patted my shoulder, saying, ‘Never mind, Sophie, never mind.’ Toby, peering through a crack in the bathroom door, watched Isabella stalk out of her room in a swirl of calf-length mink, suitcase handle clenched in one hand. He was the last one of us to see her.
    We were all certain that she would come back, or at least send for her things once she was settled in her new place. But she never did. We waited and waited, and we never heard a thing. And after a while, Veronica stopped going up on the roof with the telescope to scan the sea for ships; the fox fur Henry had taken to play with lost its Isabella scent and then its glass eyes and chunks of its fur; Rebecca and the villagers moved most of the furniture from the Solar into the other rooms and threw dustsheets over the enormous bed. Isabella’s remaining possessions scattered throughout the castle, and beyond. We sold the most valuable of her trinkets to pay for a new water pump in the village. We used bits of her old woollen bathrobe to block a draughty gap in the bathroom wall. Her white crêpe de Chine skirt came in handy for bandages when Jimmy broke his wrist. Mind you, most of Isabella’s clothes got burnt up in the stove one night. We never did find out whether that was Uncle John or Rebecca.
    ‘I expect it’s just that she’s still settling in to the new place,’