“I think your mum is down at the cottage with Therese. She stayed there last night. Therese was…hysterical.”
I tried to picture it, but couldn’t. Therese was poised, funny, had a great line in biting commentary, tea and biscuits and perfect clothing. But in the twenty-six years I’d known her, I’d never seen her hysterical. But then, I’d never seen my grandmother in a mismatched outfit before, either. “Worse than Isabelle?”
“Different. More distraught than angry.” I could understand that; her brother had just died, after all. Except, surely Isabelle should be the same. Her husband was dead. And, if I was right, her last moments with him were spent in anger. Her last words were that she hated him.
Maybe that was why she was losing it, why she was focusing on getting into the study. Denial. Or delusion; a desperate wish to rewrite the ending, before it was too late.
I could understand that, too. I wanted the same.
Edward was still talking, and I made an effort to tune back in. “And Caro’s probably hiding out in the attic; she says it’s quieter up there.”
The mention of the attic should have been awkward. On any other day I’d have been thrown back into memories of our evening together, of his hands on my skin, of kissing him. But there were bigger things to think about today.
“How are Mum and Caro taking it?” It seemed absurd that it was only a day since Nathaniel died, that people were still only just reacting, that no one had thought anything through yet. Perhaps it was the distance I’d travelled that made it seem like so much longer.
“Badly,” Edward said. “Just like everyone else. Your mum… I think she’d love to just fall apart, but with everyone else acting so crazy, she’s having to hold things together. Her and Ellie, who looks absolutely drained.”
Poor Mum. Normally she got to be the flighty, dramatic, emotional one. But not today. And Ellie…she’d looked so pale, so exhausted. Like she always did after a long journey, as a child, when she suffered from travel sickness. All she probably wanted to do was lie down in a dark room and wait for everything to pass. But that wasn’t an option for either of us. Not when everything at Rosewood felt so wrong.
We sat in silence for a while, sipping our coffee, and instinctively, I rested my head against his knee. After a few moments he reached up a hand to stroke my hair.
Something inside me that had been curled tight since he called finally started to relax, just a touch. I wanted to stay there in the quiet with Edward for the rest of the day. Maybe longer. As long as it took to stop feeling so broken without Nathaniel there to mend me.
But eventually, I needed to start figuring things out. “Why is she so furious with you? Isabelle, I mean. Is it the memoirs?”
I could almost feel him sigh behind me, as if all the air had been flung out of his body. “Amongst other things. But yes, mostly that.”
“What happened?” Edward pulled his hand away from my head and, twisting on my step, I watched him put his elbows on the step behind him and lean back. His empty coffee cup was safely stored two steps further up.
“It only started this morning,” he said, staring straight ahead again. “Yesterday… When I…” He stopped, and took a breath. “I was the one who found him, you see, in his study. Which was… Well, I wouldn’t have wanted any of your family to have to do that, so I suppose it was for the best. Somehow.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching up to touch his knee. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask how Edward was in all this. After all, he’d probably spent more time with Nathaniel than the rest of us combined over the last year.
“He hadn’t come down, you see. To say goodbye to you, I mean. I checked his room and he wasn’t there, so I figured he was working. I left him to it until dinner time, but when I let myself in…”
“He hadn’t been down at all?” Edward shook his head, and my head buzzed with the confirmation of what I’d already suspected. I’d been the last person to see him, even if he hadn’t seen me. And I was probably the only person who knew about the row between him and Isabelle, that last night.
God, if I felt this dreadful from having hidden from him, wasted my last chance to spend time with him, how bad must Isabelle feel? No wonder she was losing it.
“He was lying there, collapsed over his desk. He still…he was still wearing his white jacket from the party.” Edward swallowed so hard I could see his Adam’s apple bob. “Anyway, what with the doctor coming and having to tell everybody… Isabelle was just very quiet, even when they took him…when they took the body away. We fed her some brandy and put her to bed, then I called you…”
“Why did you call?” I asked, thinking aloud. “I mean, why not my parents, or something?”
“Therese asked me to,” Edward said with a shrug. “Before she suddenly lost it and insisted on leaving Rosewood. Your mum went to look after her.”
“And everyone else had somebody else to look after too,” I finished. Of course they did. Greg would have been taking care of Ellie, just the way he was supposed to. Mum and Dad had each other, and Caro. Even Isabelle had Therese…except, Therese hadn’t been here, had she? She’d gone back to the cottage, taking Mum with her, leaving Ellie and Greg to deal with Isabelle and Dad to look after Caro. Why would Therese insist on leaving when things were so crazy? Surely she’d want to be with the family?
I’d only been back at Rosewood an hour, and already everything felt wrong. And it wasn’t just the lack of Nathaniel’s booming voice in the hallways.
“Anyway, so I called you, and then we all sat up drinking whisky until far too late, and I slept very badly and when I woke up this morning and it still didn’t seem real, Isabelle was clawing at the locked study door and demanding I give her the key.”
“Which you didn’t,” I guessed, and Edward nodded. “Why not?” Surely it wasn’t too much for her to ask – to see where her husband had spent his last moments. The room where he spent most of his time, in fact. The study, more than anywhere else at Rosewood, simply was Nathaniel. Of course Isabelle would want to go there.
Edward sighed heavily, something I suspected might become a bit of a theme. “Because he made me promise I wouldn’t.”
Under the circumstances, ‘he’ could only mean Nathaniel. And unless Nathaniel was issuing orders from beyond the grave… “He knew he was going to die?” My voice came out shaky and small, and Edward reached out again to touch my hair.
“He suspected, I think. It wasn’t…there wasn’t any diagnosis, no warnings from doctors, as far as I’m aware. I think he just knew he might not make it to the end of this project. So, one night, a few months before the Golden Wedding, he got me buzzed on his best scotch and made me promise that, if he died before the memoirs were published, I’d lock his study door and keep it that way until his lawyer told us to open it.” He pulled a face. “His lawyer, apparently, has more specific instructions and, more importantly, doesn’t have to deal with your grandmother right now.”
“What did he think she was going to do? And why?” Because, while Isabelle wasn’t always the sanest of people, I hadn’t really pegged her as the ‘burn down my dead husband’s office’ type or anything. But then I remembered her screaming at him in the hallway the night he died, howling about him telling secrets he’d promised to keep… Maybe she would. Maybe she’d destroy everything to stop the memoirs being published. Nathaniel obviously thought it was a possibility.
“Who knows? Nathaniel certainly wouldn’t say.” Edward looked down at the rapidly cooling coffee in my cup. “Are you going to drink that?” I handed it up to him and he swallowed it down, before putting my cup to join his on the higher step. “I imagine that there’s something in there – no idea what, mind – that Isabelle wouldn’t want included in the memoirs, and he didn’t want her finding and destroying it.” I didn’t have to imagine. I knew it, deep in my bones. Somewhere in Nathaniel’s study was a secret that Isabelle didn’t want getting out.
“But what does it matter now? He’s dead, aft
er all.” I swallowed the sudden lump in my throat. I hadn’t said it out loud before, I realised. “There won’t be any memoirs.”
“No,” Edward said, too slowly. “Perhaps not.”
With a sudden movement, he was on his feet, empty coffee cups in hand. “Come on,” he said, pulling me up. “It must be nearly time for breakfast. Let’s go find your mum and Therese.”
The path down to Therese’s cottage was littered with reminders of the party that had just been. While the obvious detritus – bottles, plates and so on – had been cleared away by the team Isabelle hired, there were still plenty of things that the family obviously hadn’t got around to before…just, before. Looking at the flowers, tables, and chairs, it felt like time had stopped. That the timeless bubble of Rosewood had frozen, even in the early morning sun, pausing everything around us while we caught up with the idea that Nathaniel was gone. That the heart of the house had stopped beating.
Would we ever come to terms with that? I wasn’t sure.
We crossed from the main path to the gravel entrance to Therese’s front garden, roses around the cottage door blooming pink and warm and welcoming.
“She’ll be glad to see you,” Edward murmured as I knocked on the wooden front door, and I assumed he meant Therese. Until my mother answered the door.
“Oh, thank God you’re here,” she said, ushering us both into the cottage. Another welcome home I’d missed the first time, but I knew better this time. Mum, like everyone else, wanted me here to do a job. A job I wasn’t sure I’d ever signed up for. “I’ll leave you to it, and go make sure everything’s ready for breakfast.”
“I definitely smelled bacon,” Edward said helpfully. “Which I took as a good sign.”
“Great.” Mum yanked her cardigan from the rack and shoved her arms into it. “You can come and help me set the table.”