The House On Rookery Lane

The conclusion of our mysterious serial

My fears over my former governess’s “accident” refused to leave me. When I returned to Rookwood, therefore, I went straight to Penny’s bedroom, which had yet to be cleared since her sudden death. If anything could provide me with a clue to the truth, it would be her diary.

With a growing sense of urgency, I searched the wardrobe as directed by Hunter, fingers lingering over the dresses hanging there. I’d just unearthed the shoebox when behind me, Millie spoke and made me jump almost out of my skin. Her smile was ghoulish when she saw my expression.

“Did I scare you?” Fingers clutching my chest, I nodded. “It’s this house,” Millie murmured darkly. “It plays tricks on you.” She peered past me into the wardrobe. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for an old favourite book of mine that Penny used to have.”

The lie came readily to my tongue, and I wondered why.

But Millie’s mind had already wandered, back to her reason for being here. “I think you should go downstairs,” she said fretfully. “Hunter is…” She paused. “Hunter’s what?” I demanded. Millie bit her lip. “Being imprudent,” she murmured.

Ihurried downstairs in search of Hunter but hearing raised voices, instinctively slowed my steps.

“I don’t understand you, Mother,” Hunter was shouting. “I’ve never understood you where this is concerned!”

“You’re a gifted young man with good standing in society,” Elizabeth retorted just as hotly. “You could have anything you want in life, and you’re settling for…”

Being lord and LADY of the MANOR was always your DREAM, not mine

“What? Happiness, laughter, the woman I love? And don’t repeat your accusations of her pursuing me. I chased her! I wouldn’t let her make us victims of a stupid, out-dated class prejudice. I love her and I’d do anything to be with her, move mountains if I could…”

There was a pause and it was then I realised I’d been holding my breath.

“Heavens,” I heard Elizabeth say. “And I thought Millie was the dramatic one in this house.” Hunter sounded detached now. “Understand that I’m going to marry Reena, Mother, with or without your blessing. If it’s without, I’ll take her away with me, start somewhere new.” “But you can’t leave Rookwood!” “Being lord and lady of the manor was always your dream, not mine.”

At the sound of a strangled moan, I couldn’t listen anymore. I burst into the drawing-room. “Hunter, please! Enough.” He’d turned at my entrance and now came forward to enfold me in his arms. I steeled myself to look at Elizabeth. But the eyes that met mine were surprisingly devoid of the enmity I’d expected.

“I’m sorry to spring this on you at such a time as this,” I said. “We should have waited.”

There was a flicker, unrecognisable, in her gaze before she turned to stare out the window at the terraced, formal landscape beyond. “No matter.” “I’m going to take Reena out to dinner,” Hunter announced into the charged silence. Elizabeth gave a short nod. “As you wish. I’ll tell Cook that there will be two less at the table.”

Feeling distinctly uncomfortable, I allowed Hunter to usher me outside. He immediately drew me into his arms.

“I had to tell her,” he said contritely.

“She was making all these plans for my future and she needed to know how things stand. Forgive me?”

I looked deep into those sherry-brown eyes and immediately felt my heart melt. “Forgiven,” I whispered. His kiss held a touch of relief. “Do you think your mother will forgive us, too?” I wondered. “Of course,” he said. “Eventually.” I didn’t reply. I wasn’t quite so sure. Then my heart skipped a beat for an entirely different reason. In all the emotion of the recent scene, I’d almost forgotten the diary! I raced back up to Penny’s room, relieved to find it still in the shoebox, and carried it away to the attic for study.

My feelings of triumph did not last, however, for the diary fell open at a section where some pages had quite clearly been torn out.

Rookwood was in darkness when we returned to it after a prolonged dinner, Hunter having needed time away from its charged atmosphere. I didn’t want to burden him further with my suspicions over Penny, so had remained silent on that score. I was beginning to doubt myself, anyway. What did I have but a summons, a damaged diary and an instinct that something simply wasn’t right? And hadn’t this house always had a similar dramatic effect on me?

There was also that burning question – why on earth would anyone want to be rid of sweet, harmless Miss Peniston?

I readied myself for bed but sleep seemed determined to elude me, so I flicked through Penny’s diary, smiling as I heard her voice, saw her once again through her words. Most entries

were the kind all journal writers keep; the minutiae of a quiet country life with its individual triumphs and stumbles.

I featured quite a lot, always in a positive way and often coupled with Hunter, but it was as these entries progressed that I noticed a deepening concern, an unhappiness with something Penny felt we ought to know.

Her references to this were frustratingly oblique – lines like “How would Hunter feel if he knew?” and “Dear Reena; would it affect her decision? I worry about them.”

What was it that was bothering her so much that she needed to confide it to her diary? Something that would impact upon myself and Hunter, I thought with a shiver.

Then I reached the section where the pages had been forcibly removed, and remembered a crackling fire…

A sudden sound on the staircase outside startled me from my reverie. Looking up, I realised how late it was and at once, childhood terrors came crashing in to scramble my senses. It took several breaths and a stern reminder that I was a woman grown to calm my nerves.

Slipping out of bed, I crept on tiptoe to ease open my door and peer cautiously around it. A flicker of candlelight on the gallery drew me down the staircase, and then I saw her. The white lady. Only it wasn’t a wandering spirit, and as my heartbeat slowly returned to normal, I remembered Edith Raike’s comment about fading minds and felt only pity for the strangely forlorn figure pacing the floor.

Instinctively, I moved toward her, only to be halted by Elizabeth emerging from the shadows and silently shaking her head. I waited then followed as she went to her sister and, easing an arm around her shoulders, coaxed Millie back to her bedroom. Millie appeared to be sleepwalking, though her long hair hanging loose and her diaphanous nightgown seemed specially picked to play the part of the phantom legend of which she was so fond.

I helped Elizabeth tuck her in bed and watched her settle to sleep, then looked up to find Elizabeth’s eyes on me.

“Come,” she said quietly. “You and I should talk.”

She took me to her bedroom and onto the balcony overlooking the rear gardens. I stood staring out upon the moonlit lawns, a feeling of unreality wrapping round me like a mantle.

“I knew this day would come,” Elizabeth finally murmured, “though I did everything I could to avoid it. But there was something about those eyes of yours, that engaging frank manner that seemed to have an irresistible effect upon my son. Then of course there was that ridiculously romantic name.”

She turned to look at me, a hard gleam in her gaze.

“I had nothing against you personally, you understand. But a child from your station in life has no place with a Wraxham of Rookwood, no family or funds to strengthen Hunter’s future, to propel him to the position in society he deserves. I knew that if I let him, my soft-hearted boy would appoint himself your saviour and then you’d be the ruin of him.”

There was a constriction in my throat, but this time it was anger.

“You don’t know your son,” I said, proud to hear the strength and evenness of my voice. “You never really have.”

“No.” Her laugh cracked in the middle. “I discovered that earlier when he leapt so passionately to your defence. Penny warned me that he would, you know. She said there was only one thing – one soul – he’d ever really cared about. She was right, as she always was. She knew things…”

“I never forced him,” I felt compelled to tell her. “I went away, I started to make another life for myself.”

“And still he came after you.” She gave an inelegant snort. “Oh, the things we do for love…”

My fingers curled around the parapet.

“What happened to Penny’s diary?” I said. “Did Millie tear out some pages to conceal an uncomfortable truth? Or was that what you were burning in the garden earlier?”

Elizabeth’s smile, caught in a shaft of moonlight, had an edge to it.

“I always said you were too astute for your own good, my dear.”

I kept my temper firmly in check, my fingers rooted. I wanted the truth.

“No more games, Elizabeth,” I demanded. “Penny knew something, didn’t she? Something that she felt Hunter and I should know, too.” “No.” “She sent for me,” I persisted, “she was about to reveal this secret and so you got rid of her, didn’t you?” “I didn’t have to!” The explosion stunned me into silence and for juts a moment, it broke Elizabeth’s unending poise. Then she was her elegant self again and explaining quite calmly.

“I didn’t have to do anything in the end, thank God. Penny had a bad fall from that ridiculous contraption she loved to ride around on. I chose to see it as divine intervention.

“I never guessed how far it had already gone with you and Hunter. She kept that from me.” “What did she know?” I demanded. “That Hunter might not be legitimate, damn you!”

I gasped as realisation hit me. Of course. Rooks and cuckoos …

Elizabeth turned her back on the shock in my face.

“You don’t need to know the details. Suffice to say that it was wartime, and such days of desperation do strange

I stared over MOONLIT lawns, and a feeling of UNREALITY wrapped me

things to the most loyal of hearts. I could not have borne such a thing to come to light. It would ruin this family, Millie’s tenuous grasp on reality, Hunter’s future. It could have destroyed his right to inherit Rookwood.

“I would have done whatever it took to protect him from that, even silence Penny. But I never realised how much I would miss her, so much so that I couldn’t bear to burn all her last words… just the incriminating ones.”

She sighed. “Now it appears my efforts have been for nothing.”

“No,” I said emphatically. “Hunter adored his father – and he respected him. What good would it do to discover that he might not have been his son, after all?” Elizabeth stepped up to the parapet. “I have always loved this place,” she murmured. “I have nurtured it, kept it safe, believing it and its precious history would be part of the Wraxhams’ future as well as their past and present.”

“Hunter is still your wonderful, talented son,” I pointed out. “And you will always have a part in his life, whatever that might turn out to be. I know he wouldn’t really be happy if you didn’t.”

“And what of you?” She asked, her voice tight. I took a steadying breath. Elizabeth had always been my staunchest enemy, yet it seemed we had some things in common that should have made us friends. And I admired the strength it took to admit to such a secret, and the devotion to a child who had driven her to contemplate the unforgiveable in his defence.

“I will do whatever I can,” I promised, “to live up to his love.”

“Yes,” she said and there was a glimmer of affinity in her expression. “I believe that you will…”

How different everything looks and feels by daylight. The next morning, when I woke, it was like emerging from a nightmare into the safe, bright light of dawn, where spirits and dark shadows didn’t exist.

Even the house seemed altered. Now, looking at the aged Rookwood through the eyes of Elizabeth and my own wider adult gaze, it was all at once a more welcoming place, with echoes of former residents adding a richness and depth of warmth to its walls. What would be the outcome of this strange sequence of events? What future for this house as a part of the Wraxham inheritance? All I knew for sure was that I finally felt something more than just that outsider looking in.

Armed with two freshly-picked posies, I walked with Hunter after breakfast to the grove, where we’d chosen a place near his father’s grave that Hunter thought Penny would have liked to be laid to rest. It was a huge relief to know no human hand had taken her from us, though I would always begrudge the years together that we’d lost.

I watched Hunter place some flowers against his father’s headstone and in that moment, I knew that whatever the future held for us, last night’s confession was one that only Elizabeth had the right to reveal.

“There’s something different about you this morning,” Hunter observed as he crossed back to stand beside me. “Did anything happen last night?”

I told him of my brush with ghostly legend. Hunter frowned.

“Millie’s mind has been deteriorating,” he admitted. “But Mother wouldn’t hear of her going anywhere ‘more comfortable’, as Doctor Raike has put it. She truly believes her home and life is here, at Rookwood with her family.”

I pictured that fragile creature gliding along the gallery.

“Poor thing. She’s been haunted by the legends of this house for years.”

“As I’ve been haunted by you,” Hunter murmured, taking me into his arms. “I love you so much, Reena.”

“I know,” I whispered. “I heard you yesterday.”

“I meant every word,” Hunter vowed, tucking a wayward curl behind my ear. “Don’t worry about Mother, or anything else. I know you were unhappy growing up in this house, and I mean to make that up to you.

“But if you can’t reconcile yourself with living here, I’ll take you away. This place and our family connection to it just aren’t important. All that matters is that we’re together, and we’re happy.”

I looked back down the hill to where Rookwood stood in all its crimson, gabled glory.

“Well, we’ll see,” I said softly. “You know, I think this place might start to grow on me, over time.”

His smile was all the reward I needed. Together, we turned so I could position my posy on the spot where Penny would have her forever-bed.

Hunter glanced sideways at me.

“There’s something DIFFERENT about YOU this morning,” he OBSERVED

“You’re satisfied that what happened to Penny was an accident?” he asked. I nodded. “And her diary held no clues to what it was she wanted to talk to you about?”

“No,” I said, perfectly truthfully. Then I smiled and took his hand. “Perhaps it was what you suggested – she wanted to help me lay the past to rest.”

And in bringing me back here to the house on Rookery Lane, that’s exactly what she had done…