The Pride of the Peacock (Casablanca Classics) - Softcover

Holt, Victoria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1402277466 ISBN 13: 9781402277467

Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2014

Synopsis

A young woman uncovers her family's dark secrets in this mystery and her connection to a famously cursed gemstone in this Victorian gothic thriller from an internationally bestselling author

To secure her inheritance, Jessica Clavering agrees to a marriage of convenience, but will her handsome new husband's desire for her ever surpass his obsession with a famously cursed opal?

Raised in the shadow of her family's financial ruin, Jessica has never felt as though she fit in. When her only friend, an elderly neighbor, offers her the chance at a new life, she's eager to take it. His only condition: she must marry her son, Joss.

The newlyweds inherit a fabled opal mine in Australia. It's only once they arrive on the faraway continent that Jessica starts to uncover her family's dark past and her connection to the Green Flash, an exquisite and spellbinding opal. The stone arouses a dangerous desire in anyone who sees it―even her husband.

Blending historical romance with elements of the paranormal, The Pride of the Peacock is an exhilarating tale from the Queen of Gothic Romance. Fans of Susanna Kearsley, Daphne Du Maurier, and Kate Morton will be spellbound by classic story of an overseas voyage, a cursed opal, and forbidden desire.

Other Titles from Victoria Holt

The India Fan: Drusilla's glamorous neighbors gift her a priceless family heirloom―a beautiful fans with a terrible curse

The Shivering Sands: Caroline Verlaine's sister has gone missing and no one can tell her why. The only option is to go where Roma was last seen―an estate with a deadly history.

The Time of the Hunter's Moon: According to legend, a girl will see her future husband at the time of the hunter's moon. But when the handsome stranger revealed to Cordelia Grant disappears after an all-too-brief encounter, she has to wonder: Was he merely an apparition...or something more?

What readers are saying about The Pride of the Peacock

"The heroine is adventurous, the hero is brooding, and the twists and turns of the story are unexpected, culminating in a surprise but satisfying ending."

"It's suspenseful, full of relationship tales, uplifting, and I had a hard time putting it down!"

"I couldn't put it down. The twist at the end is surprising and reminiscent of Agatha Christie's style. Definitely a classic."

"One of Holt's best books."

"I loved this book. I have read it over and over again―along with every novel ever written by Victoria Holt!"

What reviewers are saying about The Pride of the Peacock

"The mysteries drew me in and kept me guessing right up to the end..."―The Good, the Bad, and the Unread

"This is just story telling at its finest."―Romancing the Book

What everyone is saying about the Queen of Gothic Romance Victoria Holt

"Victoria Holt's writing is captivating"―Bookfoolery

"She spins history with romance and intrigue and always leaves me wanting more."

"Holt's stories are spell binding....page turners."

"I love her books! I have read all of them again and again. She is a wonderful storyteller."

"One of the supreme writers of gothic romance, a compelling storyteller whose gripping novels have thrilled millions."―RT Book Reviews

About this title

About the Author

Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert, better known to readers as Victoria Holt, Philippa Carr, and Jean Plaidy, was one of the world's most beloved and enduring authors. Her career spanned five decades and she continued to write historical fiction and romantic suspense until her death in 1993.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Dower House

I was quite young when I realized that there was something mysterious about me, and a sense of not belonging came to me and stayed with me. I was different from everyone else at the Dower House.

It became a habit of mine to go down to the stream which ran between the Dower House and Oakland Hall, and gaze into its clear waters as though I hoped to find the answer there. That I chose that particular spot was somehow significant. Maddy, who was a general servant and a sort of nurse to me, found me there once and I shall never forget the look of horror in her eyes.

"Now why do you want to come here, Miss Jessica?" she demanded. "If Miss Miriam knew, she'd forbid it."

Mystery again! What was wrong with the pleasant stream and pretty bridge which crossed it? It was especially attractive to me because on the other side of it loomed the magnificent gray walls of Oakland Hall.

"I like it here," I retorted stubbornly; and as forbidden fruit could never have tasted sweeter to anyone than it did to me, having discovered that there was some reason why I should not go to the stream, I went there all the more.

"It's not right for you to go there so much," insisted Maddy.

I wanted to know why. This was characteristic of me and resulted in Maddy's calling me "Miss Why, Where, and What."

"It's morbid, that's what it is," she declared. "I've heard Mr. Xavier and Miss Miriam say so. Morbid!"

"Why?"

"There we go!" said Maddy. "It is. That's why, and don't keep going there."

"Is it haunted?" I asked.

"It might well be that."

So thereafter I went often to the stream and sat on its banks and thought of its rising in the hills and meandering through the country, widening as it went into Old Father Thames and, with that mighty companion, finally flowing into the sea.

What danger could there be? I asked myself. Shallow except when there were heavy rains, it was pellucid, and looking down, I could see the pebbles on its brownish bed. A weeping willow drooped on the opposite bank. Weeping for something? I pondered. Something morbid?

So in those early days I would come to the stream and dream mainly about myself, and always the theme of my wonderings was: You don't really belong to the Dower House.

Not that the thought disturbed me. I was different and wanted to be. My name for one thing was different. It was in fact Opal―Opal Jessica―and I often wondered how my mother had come to give me such a frivolous name, because she was a far from frivolous woman. As for my poor, sad father, he would surely have had no say in the matter; a cloud hung over him as sometimes I fancied it hung over me.

I was never called Opal, so when I talked to myself I sometimes used it, and I talked to myself a good deal. This was no doubt due to the fact that I was so much alone; and thus I became conscious of the mystery about me which was like a mist through which I could not see. Maddy occasionally shone a little light through that mist, but it was only the faintest glimmer and often had the effect of making everything more obscure.

In the first place I had this name which nobody used. Why give it to me if they didn't intend to use it? My mother seemed very old; she must have been in her forties when I was born, and my sister Miriam was fifteen years older than I and my brother Xavier nearly twenty; they never seemed like brother and sister to me. Miriam served as my governess, for we were too poor to engage one. In fact our poverty was the remorseless theme of our household. I had heard countless times of what we had had in the past and now had no longer, for we had come sliding down in the world from the utmost luxury to what my mother called penury.

My poor father used to cringe when she talked of "Better Days," that time when they had been surrounded by myriads of servants and there had been brilliant balls and elegant banquets. But there was always enough to eat at the Dower House, and we had poor Jarman to do the garden and Mrs. Cobb to cook and Maddy as maid of all work, so we weren't exactly penniless. As my mother always exaggerated about our poverty, it occurred to me that she did the same about past riches, and I doubted that the balls and banquets had been as grand as she implied.

I was about ten years old when I made a portentous discovery. There was a house party at Oakland Hall, and the grounds on the other side of the stream were noisy with the hearty voices of people. From my window I had seen them riding out to hounds.

I wished they would invite me to call, for I longed to see the inside of the big house. True, I could catch glimpses of it from my side of the stream in winter when the denuded oaks no longer shielded it, but I could see no more than its distant gray stone walls, and they fascinated me. There was a winding drive of about half a mile, so it was impossible to see the house from the road either, but I had promised myself that one day I would cross the stream and, with great daring, approach.

I was in the schoolroom with Miriam, who was not the most inspiring of teachers and was frequently impatient with me. She was a tall, pale woman, and as I was ten years old she must have been twenty-five. She was discontented―they all were because they could never forget those Better Days―and sometimes she looked at me with cold dislike. I could never think of her as my sister.

On this day when the hunting party―guests from Oakland Hall―came riding past I got up and ran to the window.

"Jessica," cried Miriam, "what are you doing?"

"I only wanted to see the riders," I replied.

She gripped my arm, none too gently, and dragged me from the window. "They might see you," she hissed, as though that would be the depth of degradation.

"What if they did?" I demanded. "They did see me yesterday. Some of them waved and others said hello."

"Don't dare to speak to them again," she said fiercely.

"Why not?"

"Because Mama would be angry."

"You talk about them as though they're savages. I can't see what harm there is in saying hello to them."

"You don't understand, Jessica."

"How can I, when nobody tells me?"

She hesitated for a moment and then, as though she was considering that a little indiscretion was creditable if it saved me from the mortal sin of being friendly towards the guests from Oakland Hall, she said: "Once Oakland Hall was ours. That can never be forgotten."

"Why isn't it ours now?"

"Because they took it from us."

"Took it from us? How?" I immediately visualized a siege, Mama militant and dominating, commanding the family to pour down boiling oil from the battlements upon the wicked enemy who were coming to take our castle, Miriam and Xavier obeying without question and my father trying to understand the other side of the case.

"They bought Oakland Hall."

"Why did we sell it then?"

Her mouth hardened. "Because we could no longer afford to live there."

"Oh," I said, "penury. So it was there that we had our better days."

"You never had them. It all happened before you were born. I lived my childhood at Oakland Hall. I know what it means to come down in the world."

"As I've never had Better Days, I don't. But why did we become so poor?"

She would not answer that. All she said was: "So we had to sell to those...barbarians. We did, however, keep the Dower House. It was all that was left to us. So now you see why we do not want you so much as to notice those people who have taken our house."

"Are they really barbarians...savages?"

"Not much better."

"They look like ordinary people."

"Oh, Jessica, you are such a child! You don't understand these things and therefore you would be wise to leave them to your elders, but now at least you know that we once lived in Oakland Hall and perhaps you will understand why we do not want you to go about staring like a peasant at the people you see coming from there. Now, it's time for our algebra lessons, and if you are going to have the slightest education you must pay more attention to your books."

But how could one be interested in x plus y squared after such a discovery, and now I was desperately anxious to know something of the barbarians who had taken our house.

That was the beginning of discovery, and in my energetic―and as I thought, subtle―way, I began to probe.

It seemed to me that I might have more success with the servants than the family so I tried Poor Jarman, who came for long days in the summer and short ones in the winter and kept the Dower House garden in good order under Mama's supervision. Poor Jarman! He was kept poor, he told me, by Nature, who presented his wife with a new baby every year.

"It's Nature what keeps me poor," was a favorite saying of his, which I thought very unfair to Nature. "Nature is the great provider," I used to write out in best copperplate under Miriam's guidance. She had evidently been too beneficent to Poor Jarman. It had made him very humble and he touched his forelock to almost everyone except me with great reverence. To me it would be: "Keep off those dratted flowerbeds, Miss Jessica. If the mistress sees them trod down she'll blame me."

I followed him round for a week hoping to prize information from him. I collected flowerpots, stacked them in the greenhouse, watched him prune and weed. He said: "You're getting interested in orty-culture all of a sudden, Miss Jessica."

I smiled artfully, not telling him that it was the past I was probing.

"You used to work at Oakland Hall," I said.

"Aye. Them was the days."

"Better days, of course," I commented.

"Them lawns!" he said ecstatically. "All that grass. Best turf in the country. Just look at this St.-John's-wort. You only have to turn your back and it's all over the place. It grows while you're watching it."

"Nature's bounty," I said. "She's as generous with St.-John's-wort as she is with you."

He looked at me suspiciously, wondering what I was talking about.

"Why did you leave Oakland Hall?" I wanted to know.

"I came here with your mother. It seemed the faithful sort of thing like." He was looking back to the old days before Nature's bounty had made him Poor Jarman. He leaned on his spade and his eyes were dreamy. "Them was good days. Funny thing. Never thought they'd end. Then suddenly..."

"Yes," I prompted, "suddenly?"

"Mistress sent for me. ‘Jarman,' she said, ‘we've sold the Hall. We're going to the Dower House.' You could have knocked me down with a dove's feather, though some had said they'd seen it coming. I was took back though. She said: ‘If you come with us you could have the cottage on the bit of land we're keeping. You could then marry.' That was the beginning. Before the year was out I was a father."

"You said there was talk..."

"Yes, talk. Them that knew it all was coming after it had happened...they was talking. Gambling was in the family. Old Mr. Clavering had been very fond of it, and they said he'd lost quite a tidy sum. There was mortgages for this and that―and that's not good for a house, and what's not good for a house ain't good for them that works there."

"So they sensed the gathering storm."

"Well, we all knew there was money trouble, 'cos sometimes wages wasn't paid for two months. There's some families as makes a habit of this, but Claverings wasn't never that sort. Then this man came. He took the Hall. Miner he'd been. Made a fortune out of something. Came from abroad."

"Why didn't you stay and work for him?"

"I'd always been with gentry, Miss. Besides, there was this cottage."

He had eleven children so it must have been about twelve years ago. One could calculate the years by Jarman's children, and people were never quite sure which was which so that it was like trying to remember which year something had happened.

"It all took place before I was born," I went on, keeping his thoughts flowing in the right direction.

"Yes. 'Tis so. Must have been two years before that."

So it was twelve years ago―a lifetime―mine anyway.

All I had learned from Jarman was that my father's gambling had been responsible. No wonder Mama treated him with contempt. Now I understood the meaning behind her bitter remarks. Poor Father, he stayed in his room and spent a lot of time playing patience―a solitary game in which he could not lose to an opponent who would have to be paid, yet at the same time preserving contact with the cards he still loved, although they had apparently been the cause of his family's expulsion from the world of opulence.

Mrs. Cobb could tell me little. Like my family she had been accustomed to Better Days. She had come to us when we went to the Dower House and was never tired of telling any who would listen that she had been used to parlormaids, kitchenmaids, a butler, and two footmen.

It was, therefore, something of a come-down to work in a household like ours; but at least the family, like herself, had known Better Days, and it was not like working for people who had "never been used to nothing."

My father, of course, playing his patience, reading, going for solitary walks, with the heavy weight of guilt on his shoulders, was definitely not the one to approach. He seemed scarcely aware of me in any case. When he did notice me, something of the same expression came into his face as that which I saw when my mother was reminding him that it was his weakness which had brought the family low. To me he was a sort of non-person, which was an odd way to feel about one's own father, but as he expressed no interest in me, I found it hard to feel anything for him―except pity when they reminded him, which they contrived to do on every occasion.

As for Mama, she was even more unapproachable. When I was very young and we sang in church:

"Can a mother's tender care

Cease towards the child she bear?"

I had thought of a little female bear cub beloved by its mother bear, but when I had mentioned this to Miriam she had been very shocked and explained the real meaning. I then commented that my mother's tender care towards me had never really ceased because it had never existed. At this Miriam had grown very pink and told me that I was a most ungrateful child and should be thankful for the good home I had. I wondered then why for me it was a "good home," though clearly despised by the others, but I put this down to the fact that they had seen those Better Days which I had missed.

My brother Xavier was a remote and romantic figure of whom I saw very little. He looked after the land we had been able to salvage from the Oakland estate and this contained one farm and several acres of pasture land. When I did see him he was kind to me in a vague sort of way, as though he recognized my right to be in the house but wasn't quite sure how I'd got there and was too polite to ask. I had heard that he was in love with Lady Clara Donningham who lived some twenty miles away, but because he couldn't offer her the luxury to which she was accustomed, he wouldn't ask her to marry him. She apparently was very rich and we were living in what I had heard Mama so often call penury. The fact was that he and Lady Clara remained apart although, according to Mrs. Cobb who had a link through the cook at the Manor, which was Lady Clara's home, her ladyship would not have said no if Mr. Xavier had asked her. But as Xavier was too proud, and convention forbade Lady Clara to ask him, they remained apart. This gave Xavier a very romantic aura in my eyes. He was a chivalrous knight who went through life nursing a secret passion because decorum forbade him to speak. He certainly would tell me nothing.

Miriam might be lured into betraying something, but she was not one for confidences. There was an "understanding" between her and the Rev. Jasper Crey's curate, but they couldn't marry until the curate became a vicar, and in view of his retiring nature that seemed unlikely for years to come.

Maddy told me that if we'd still been at Oakland Hall there would have been coming-out dances, people would have been visiting and it wouldn't have been a curate for Miss Miriam. Oh dear no. There would have been Squire This or Sir That―and maybe a lord. They had been the grand days.

So it all came back to the same thing; and as Mrs. Cobb could never be kept from telling of her own Better Days, I couldn't hope to get her interested in those of my family.

As I might have known, Maddy was the only one who could really help. She had actually lived at Oakland Hall. Another point in her favor was that she loved to talk and as long as I could be sworn to secrecy―and I readily promised that―she would at times let out little scraps of information.

Maddy was thirty-five―five years older than Xavier―and she had come to Oakland Hall when she was only eleven years old to work in the nursery.

"It was all very grand then. Lovely nurseries they was."

"Xavier must have been a good baby," I commented.

"He was. He wasn't the one to get up to mischief."

"Who then? Miriam?"

"No, not her either."

"Well, why did you say one of them was?"

"I said no such thing. You're like one of them magistrates, you are. What's this? What's that?" She was huffy now, shutting her lips tightly together as though to punish me for asking a question which had disturbed her. It was only later that I realized why it had.

Once I said to Miriam: "Fancy, you were born in Oakland Hall and I was born in the Dower House."

Miriam hesitated and said: "No, you weren't born in the Dower House. Actually...it was abroad."

"How interesting! Where?"

Miriam looked embarrassed as though wondering how I could have lured her into this further indiscretion.

"Mama was traveling in Italy when you were born."

My eyes widened with excitement. Venice, I thought. Gondolas. Pisa with its leaning tower. Florence, where Beatrice and Dante had met and loved so chastely―or so Miriam had said.

"Where?" I demanded.

"It was...in Rome."

I was ecstatic. "Julius Caesar," I said. "‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.' But why?"

Miriam looked exasperated. "Because you happened to appear when they were there."

"Father was with her then?" I cried. "Wasn't it costly? Penury and all that?"

She looked pained in the special way Miriam could. She said primly: "Suffice it that they were there."

"It's as though they didn't know I was about to be born. I mean they wouldn't have gone there, would they, if..."

"These things happen sometimes. Now we have chattered enough."

She could be very severe, my sister Miriam. Sometimes I was sorry for the curate, or should be if she ever married him―and for the sad children they would have.

So there was more to brood on. What strange things seemed to happen to me! Perhaps it was because they were in Rome that they had called me Opal. I had tried to discover information about opals. After looking up the dictionary I had mixed feelings about my name. It was not very flattering to be called after "a mineral consisting chiefly of hydrous silica," whatever that was, but it did not sound in the least romantic. I discovered however that it had varying hues of red, green, and blue...in fact all the colors of the spectrum and was of a changing iridescence, and that sounded better. How difficult it was though to imagine Mama, in a moment of frivolity inspired by the Italian skies, naming her child Opal, even though the more serviceable Jessica had been added and used.

Soon after that occasion when I had seen the guests riding out from Oakland, I heard the owner had gone away for a while. Only the servants remained, and there were no longer sounds of revelry across the stream, for visitors never came―only those, of course, connected with servants and they were quite different.

Life went on for a while in the old way―my father solitary with his patience and his walks and the ability to shut himself away from his complaining family; my mother dominating the household, busying herself with Church matters, looking after the poor, of which community she was constantly reminding us we had become a part. However, we were at least still sufficiently of the gentry to dispense benefits rather than receive them; Xavier went his quiet way dreaming no doubt of the unattainable Lady Clara (my sympathy was tinged with impatience because had I been Lady Clara, I should have said it was all nonsense to make a barrier of her money, and if I were Xavier, I should have said the same); and Miriam and her curate too. Of course she might be like Poor Jarman and bring a lot of children into the world. Curates did seem to breed rather freely, and the poorer they were the more fecund they seemed to be.

So as the years began to pass the mystery remained, but my curiosity did not diminish. I became more and more certain that there was a reason why the family gave me the impression that I was an intruder.

***

Prayers were said each morning at the start of the day and every member of the household had to be present for them―even my father was expected to attend. These were said in the drawing room, "since," my mother often commented coldly, "we have no chapel now!" And she would throw a venomous glance towards my father and then turn to Oakland Hall, where for so many years she had knelt in what was meant to be humility. Poor Jarman, Mrs. Cobb, and Maddy would be present. "All the staff," my mother would say bitterly. "At Oakland there were so many that one did not know all their names, only those of the ones in higher positions."

It was a solemn ceremony conducted by my mother when she exhorted us all to be humble, grateful, and conduct ourselves with virtue in the station into which God had called us―which always seemed incongruous to me, since she was far from contented with hers. She was inclined to be a little hectoring towards God, I thought. It was: "Look down on this..." and "Don't do that..." as though she were talking to one of the superior servants she must have had at Oakland Hall.

I always found morning prayers irksome, but I did enjoy the church services, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. The church was a fine one and the stained glass windows, with their beautiful colors, a joy to study. Opal colors, I called them with satisfaction. I loved the singing of the choir and most of all I liked to sing myself. I always thought of the times of the year through hymns. "Christian dost thou see them," used to thrill me; and I would look over my shoulder almost expecting to see the troops of Midian prowling around. Harvest time was lovely. "We plow the fields and scatter..." and "Hark the Herald Angels" at Christmas; but best of all I loved Easter, "Hallelujah. Christ the Lord is risen today." Easter was a lovely time, when the flowers were all delicate colors―whites and yellows, and the spring had come and the summer was on the way. Miriam used to go and decorate the church. I wondered whether the curate helped her and whether they sadly talked of their inability to marry because they were so poor. I always wanted to point out that the people in the cottages had far less and yet seemed happy enough. But at least the church was beautiful, and particularly at Easter time.

We still had the Clavering pew in the church. This consisted of the two front rows with a little door, which had a lock and key, and when we walked in behind my father and mother, I believe she felt that the good old days were back. Perhaps that was the reason why she enjoyed going to church.

After luncheon on Easter Sunday we always went to the churchyard, taking flowers, and these we put on the graves of the more recently family dead. Here again, prestige was restored, for the Clavering section was in the most favorable position and the headstones were the most elaborate in the churchyard. I know my mother was constantly irritated by the fact that when she died her memorial would be far less splendid than it would have been if the money to provide a worthy one had not been gambled away.

I was sixteen years old on that particular Easter Sunday. Growing up, I thought, and I should soon no longer be a child. I wondered what the future held for me. I didn't fancy growing old in the Dower House like Miriam, who was now thirty-one years of age and as far from marriage with her curate as ever.

The service was beautiful and the theme interesting. "Be content and thankful with what the Lord has given you." A very good homily for the Claverings, I thought, and I wondered whether the Rev. Jasper Crey had had them in mind when delivering it. Was he reminding them that the Dower House was a comfortable residence and quite grand by standards other than those of Oakland Hall; Miriam and her curate should be thankful and marry; Xavier and Lady Clara should do the same; my father should be allowed to forget that he had brought us to our present state; and my mother should rejoice in what she had? As for myself I was happy enough and if only I could find the answers to certain questions which plagued me I should be quite content. Perhaps somewhere inside me I yearned to be loved, for I had never really enjoyed that blessing. I wanted someone's eyes to light up when I came by. I wanted someone to be a little anxious if I was late coming home―not because unpunctuality was undesirable and ill-mannered but because they were fearful that some ill fortune had come to me.

"Oh God," I prayed, "let someone love me."

Then I laughed at myself, because I was telling Him what to do just as my mother did.

When the time came to visit the graves I took a basket of daffodils and walked with Miriam and Mama from the Dower House to the church. There was a pump in the Clavering section from which we filled the jars which were kept there, and then put the flowers on the graves. There was Grandfather, who had begun to fritter away the family fortunes, and there was Grandmother and the Greats, and my father's brother and sister. We could not, of course, deck out the graves of all the dead. I liked to wander round and look at the shrubs and open books in stone and read the engraved words. There were memorials to John Clavering, who had died at the battle of Preston for his King in 1648. James who had died at Malplaquet. There was another for Harold, who had been killed at Trafalgar. We were a fighting family.

"Do come away, Jessica," said Mama. "I do declare you have a morbid streak."

Called from the guns of Trafalgar, I walked solemnly back to the Dower House, and it was later that afternoon when I wandered out through the gardens to the edge of the stream. I was still thinking of long dead Claverings who had died so valiantly for their country and how John had fought the Roundheads in an unsuccessful attempt to keep his King on the throne, a struggle which had cost the King not only his throne but his head, and James fighting with Marlborough and Harold with Nelson. We Claverings had taken our part in the making of history, I told myself proudly.

Following the stream I came to the end of the Dower House gardens. There was a stretch of meadow―about an acre in which the grass grew long and unkempt. By the hedge grew archangel or white dead-nettle with its flowers just coming out. They would be there until December, and later the bees would be so busy on them that it wouldn't be possible to get near them. Very few people ever came here and it was called the Waste Land.

As I walked across it I noticed a bunch of dog violets tied up with white cotton, which was wound around their stems. I stooped to pick them up, and as I divided the grass I saw that the spot on which they had been lying was slightly raised. It was a plot of about six feet long.

Like a grave, I thought.

How could it be a grave? Because I had been to the churchyard that afternoon with Easter flowers, my mind was on graves. I knelt down and pushed aside the grass. I felt round the earth. Yes, it was a mound. It must be a grave, and today someone had put a bunch of violets on it.

Who could possibly be buried on the Waste Land? I went and sat thoughtfully by the stream and asked myself what it meant.

The first person I encountered when I went back to the house was Maddy, who, now that I no longer needed a nurse, had become maid of all work. She was at the linen cupboard sorting out sheets.

"Maddy," I said, "I saw a grave today."

"It's Easter Sunday so I reckon you did," she retorted.

"Oh, not in the graveyard. In the Waste Land. I'm sure it was a grave."

She turned away, but not before I had seen that her expression was one of shocked horror. She knew there was a grave in the Waste Land.

"Whose was it?" I insisted.

"Now why ask me?"

"Because you know."

"Miss Jessica, it's time you stopped putting people in the witness box. You're too inquisitive by half."

"It's only a natural thirst for knowledge."

"It's what I call having your nose into everything. There's a word for that. Plain nosiness."

"I don't see why I shouldn't know who's buried in the Waste Land."

"Buried in the Waste Land," she mimicked; but she had betrayed herself. She was uneasy.

"There was a little bunch of violets there―as though someone had remembered it was Easter Sunday."

"Oh," she said blankly.

"I thought someone might have buried a pet dog there."

"That's as like as not," she said with some relief.

"But it was too big for a dog's grave. No, I think it was some person there...someone buried long ago but still remembered. They must have been remembered, mustn't they, for someone to lay flowers there so carefully."

"Miss Jessica, will you get from under my feet."

She was bustling away with a pile of linen sheets, but her heightened color betrayed her. She knew who was buried in the Waste Land, but, alas, she wasn't telling.

For several days I worried her but could get nothing out of her.

"Oh give over, do," she cried at length in exasperation. "One of these days you might find out something you'd rather not know."

That cryptic remark lingered in my mind and did nothing to curb my curiosity. All that year I brooded on the matter of the secret grave.

***

When there was activity across the stream at Oakland Hall, I ceased to think about the grave. I was aware that something was happening because suddenly tradesmen called constantly at the house, and from my seat by the stream I could hear the servants shouting to each other. There were regular thwacks as carpets were brought out of the house and beaten. The shrill feminine tones mingled with those of the dignified butler. I had seen him several times, and he always behaved as though he were the owner of Oakland Hall. I was sure he was not haunted by the specter of Better Days.

Then the day came when I saw a carriage arriving and I slipped out of the Dower House to see it turn into Oakland's drive. Then I hurried back, darted across the stream, crept close to the house, and hidden by bushes I was just in time to see a man lifted from the carriage and placed into a wheelchair. He had a very red face, and he shouted in a loud voice to the people around him in a manner to which I was sure the rafters of Oakland Hall had been unaccustomed during the Better Days.

"Get me in," he shouted. "Come on, Wilmot. Come out and help Banker."

I wished that I could see better, but I had to be careful. I wondered what the red-faced man would say if he saw me. He was clearly a very forceful personality and it was, I felt, very necessary indeed for me to remain hidden.

"Get me up the steps," he said. "Then I can manage. Show 'em, Banker."

The little procession went into the house at last, and as I made my cautious way to the bridge I had a fancy that I was being followed, perhaps because I felt so guilty to be on the wrong side of the stream. I did not look round but ran as fast as I could, and it was only when I had sped across the bridge

Edition details

• Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1402277466
• ISBN 13: 9781402277467
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320