Secrets of the Heart

1

When he was alive, Agnes told her uncle more than once that if he had been a different sort of man it would not have been the same story at all. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘the house was waiting for you.’ Together they laughed about it, conspirators who understood each other perfectly.

Sometimes Agnes was taken aback by the depth of her feeling for Flagge House, the beautiful, big-windowed manor set in a water-meadow that had been in the Campion family for four hundred years. It was home and that was sufficient reason to love it. Yet it was also the material of fantasy and dream, an idyll of pastoral life and of a history that was vanishing. To all these Agnes clung – probably, she told herself, as a compensation for her sad circumstances. And as she grew from an awkward adolescent into a woman whose looks and success excited comment, she remained bewitched by her vision of the house and its past. As such, she was doubly bound in its coils of obligation and feverish romanticism, a maiden marooned on a rock but happy to be so. Her passion had been long-lived, for Agnes, now thirty, had first stepped into its flagstoned hallway, over which the sun had spilled a golden halo, at the age of twelve and had been instantly captivated and the intensity of her feelings had not diminished one iota.

Yet… and yet, as with all great enduring loves, occasionally in her busier, professional moments, when Agnes was away from home and operating as the documentary producer, she grew impatient with its demands, even perhaps a little embarrassed by its hold on her spirit.

But not for long.

Separated by a ten-year gap, her uncle John and his younger brother, her father, had not got on. ‘Billy could never accept his bad luck at being the younger,’ John explained. ‘It made trouble between us and that’s why your parents went to live in Cape Town.’ However, when both her parents had been killed in the car crash on the dangerous Cape to Fishhoek road, John had immediately come to the rescue and brought Agnes back to Flagge House. ‘Children,’ he said staring at his niece through his glasses, ‘are far more important than feuds. Never forget it.’

He and Maud, his wife, were childless and, for a time, they were at a loss as to what to do with Agnes. Maud’s solution was to regard her with bewilderment, but John’s was kinder and cleverer. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I’ve got such stories to tell you.’

In 1589, the first Campion rode into Charlborough and surveyed the site.

He led her from room to room and positioned her in front of the Campion portraits. Fighters, failures, wise administrators, spendthrifts and, a special category, religious martyrs. Here was a Rupert, who had died of his wounds at Naseby, there a bridge-builder in India. ‘And this,’ he said, placing his hands on her shoulders and steering her close up to the portrait in the hall, ‘is the other Agnes Campion.’ A large-eyed woman, fair hair drawn back into a tight knot with ringlets, she was wearing pearl earrings into which the painter had incorporated highlights with oil-slick colours. She had died at the age of thirty-one in 1650, from one childbirth too many. ‘She can be your special companion,’ advised her uncle shrewdly. ‘And you have her look. We’ll make it our project to find out about her.’

What had they found in their shared search through the family archives? That the dead Agnes had been a legendary cook, almost modern in her use of fresh vegetables and herbs. In January, she served her household with ‘showlder of muttone and bagge pudding’. In December, ‘salte pigge with boyled carrottes’. They found the letter written by her widower with instructions for her tombstone to be inscribed with ‘From One Who Loved Her’. They found her will.

Agnes Campion. Her will. I give and bequeath to my husbande my inlayde cabnott, desiring him to accept it, should I dye being with childe…

They had never discovered if the ninth child, the one who killed her, had survived.

This is real history, her uncle taught Agnes, ushering her through the rooms where thrift and utility had reigned: rooms where fruit and vegetables were stored, herbs dried, meat salted, where the women laundered and sewed and kept an inventory of every scrap of clothing. ‘This history tells no lies. It is’, he said, ‘the small alleyways and courtyards, the mud paths beaten into iron by countless feet that make up the truth.’

A month or so before he died, her uncle went blind. ‘No matter,’ he said, in his gentle way. ‘It is to be expected.’

Her heart breaking for the second time in a year, Agnes sat by the bed in the blue room where the spiders made free in the cornice and the cracks ran in dark tributaries across the walls. It was shrouded by the drawn curtains, and borrowed heaters exuded uneven pockets of warmth. She held his hand. ‘Is there anything I can do to make it more bearable?’

His flesh felt lifeless. ‘There is one thing,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could bring up my Jane Austens and put them on the bedside table? I miss them.’

Trying hard not to distress him with her weeping, Agnes went downstairs into his study, searched for the books amongst the papers and unpaid bills and carried them upstairs. She guided her uncle’s fingers over the pile, which she had placed as close to him as possible. The encounter between his fragile fingers and the worn bindings was of old companions. ‘All my life,’ said John, ‘these have been my friends, and I don’t want to abandon them now.’ Exhausted by the effort, he lay back and was quiet.

Neither Maud, John’s wife of forty-five years, nor the nurse approved of this sentimentality. At regular intervals, they attempted to move the books out of the way of the medicines and necessary equipment. At one point Maud, threatened by what she saw as Agnes’s indulgence, snatched up Persuasion and threatened to throw it away. Agnes won and was rewarded by her uncle’s patient smile.

In the lucid moments that were left, John chose to say the things that Agnes already knew but wanted to hear again.

‘I’m glad the house will be yours, Agnes. It is right. No one better.’ The breath was measured between each word.

As the last surviving Campion, Agnes had known that she was to inherit Flagge House, since her uncle explained the position on her sixteenth birthday. It was a trick of fate and fertility that continually brought her up short.

There was another struggling pause. ‘I’m glad we’ve always agreed on what needs to be done. But you will have to find ways. I’ve told you, there is no money.’

Agnes’s mental image of the house grew hazy, and reassembled in sharper detail so that the defective roof and rotting windows were observable. For a second or two, she was shaken by doubt. Then she touched her uncle’s cheek with a finger, willing him into peace as he laboured on. ‘It won’t be easy, Agnes.’

Inheriting an historic, if smallish, manor house was tricky at any time, and a rather vexed subject in the world in which Agnes had chosen to make her career. But she had thrashed that one out with herself. She had been lucky and others were not and, if the golden apple had been tossed into her lap, it was best to make the most of it – precisely because others suffered and had no luck. Anyway, there were her feelings for the house and she loved her uncle. That was important. Why waste energy on unnecessary scruples?

She bent over to kiss him. ‘I promise to do my best.’

While John fought his last battle, she sat on through the bleak January afternoons and silently said goodbye to the security of their relationship. Resting on the sheets, John’s hands were almost as white as the cotton and, occasionally, they clenched in pain. She stroked them, anticipating the time when he would not be there. No longer would his place be laid at the table; his key would remain on its hook in the hall; his voice, having joined the voices of the dead that crowded the husk of the house, would not be heard.

What a stealthy thief Death was, and what a dark and private business dying was. She had encountered it and its effects in her work more than once. They were lucky in the West: the span between the green light and the red was usually reasonable and, very often, by the time the latter flickered, you were aching and ready to go. She glanced at her uncle. That was true in his case but it did not make the passage easier.

Agnes squeezed out a cloth in warm water, to which had been added a drop of lavender oil, and bathed her uncle’s face and wrists.

‘Uncle John…’ she whispered, but longed to say ‘Father’. ‘Thank you for everything. Thank you for looking after me all those years.’

He turned his head towards her. ‘You were my daughter,’ he said simply.

He shut his eyes and fell into one of his lightning dozes. Outside, in the dark winter world, the wind rattled frozen branches. It was grief-stricken weather: wild, moody and battering, which was only fitting. Slowly the sun abandoned the short day, leaving Flagge House and the water-meadow to the gloom. Complete and turned into itself, the house and the land settled for the night.

‘Are you frightened?’ she asked, when he woke with a start. She thought she saw that his features had sharpened.

He stirred and grimaced. ‘I lost God a long time ago.’

Agnes did not bother him any more but sat, quiet and watchful. Slowly, infinitesimally slowly, John Campion raised his hand and traced the shape of the books he could no longer read.

Are they there, Agnes?

When she woke the next morning, still exhausted from her late-night watch, Maud appeared in her bedroom and told Agnes abruptly that her uncle was dead.

The phone rang. ‘Julian,’ said the clever, faithful Angela, who was today dressed in purple Spandex, ‘it’s a Mrs Maud Campion. She says she lives near Lymouth and she met you at the Huntingdons’ cocktail party.’

Julian was in his office at the Portcullis Property headquarters in London which, as chief executive, he had occupied for the past seven years, worrying over the figures which, for the first time in those seven years, were behaving unpredictably. ‘Put her off.’

‘She’s been sitting on the phone for ages. And Kitty has also rung asking if you would call her back about arrangements for the weekend. She says…’ Angela’s pause was wicked ‘… she says that if you’re not home in good time tonight there will be trouble. She did not specify what.’

There were many strands to knit into a day, strategic, financial, Kitty, the staff, the figures, but early on Julian, who had been born with an unquenchable curiosity and a capacity for risk-taking that had both pushed him to the top of his profession and, from time to time, got him into trouble, decided never to pass by on the wrong side of the road. Also, and this was an intellectual discipline, he refused to downgrade his experiences, especially the bad ones. Each one was useful and added a layer, another facet, polished up the idea of what he wished to be.

Sometimes this philosophy was tested to its limits. There was only so much that could be crowded into a day. He sighed but said therefore, ‘Put her through and, Angela, could you ring Kitty and tell her I promise to be home on time?’

He turned his attention to the phone. ‘Mr Knox, we met briefly at Vita Huntingdon’s at the Conservative do, and since your work is well known in the area I thought I would get in touch. My husband died last week…’

The voice was both confident and strangely muffled, as if the speaker did not wish to be overheard. Julian searched his memory for a Mrs Maud Campion. The call did not surprise him for he was used to approaches such as he assumed this one to be. Profit was a great dismantler of barriers and, because he lived there and knew it, Portcullis had quite a few projects under way in the Lymouth area. ‘Is it to do with a property?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘I’d be delighted to discuss it and then I think it would be better if I put you through to the office that deals with the properties. I occupy a less important role. I merely run the company.’ He spoke with his customary lightness, laced with irony, which made the less confident take fright. The word ‘run’ resonated in his head. Phone hunched on his shoulder, he tapped another key on his laptop.

‘That’s quite all right, Mr Knox. I prefer to deal directly with the top.’

The tone was old-fashioned. Julian raised an eyebrow at the hovering Angela, who had embarked on the grim task of getting him to a meeting on time. ‘Perhaps you would like to tell me what you had in mind.’

Agnes felt in her dressing-gown pocket for her handkerchief which, not surprisingly, was damp, because she had done nothing but weep since John’s death – secret tears that convulsed her between making the arrangements and seeing people, and which left her exhausted.

It’s because I’m so tired, she told herself. Fatigue flays you open, and bullies you into thinking that you cannot survive such a loss. But I can. She thought of John’s key hanging on the hook and his empty place at the table. She remembered looking up at him as he had taken her round the house, and the manner in which he had placed his arm around her shoulders and told her that her bad times were over. She had found her refuge and a place in which to grow up.

It was dawn, the day after the funeral, and Agnes, run ragged by the demands of her aunt and the organization of the details, had abandoned her efforts to sleep. In the frozen moment before dawn, she had pulled herself out of bed and crossed over to the window. Her feet left smudges on the floor and the darkness was as thick as velvet.

Out there in the meadow, the river clattered icily over the stones.

During the past four years, she had grown used to sleepless nights – nuits blanches, as Pierre called them – and to rising in the morning with a body racked with tiredness and stretched nerves. Nothing helped. They came with the job and with love affairs and, now, with bereavement. She had given up fighting them, for, in a curious way, Agnes felt her experience of them made her truly alive.

The cold knifed into her flesh and hurt her bare feet, and she tucked her arms across her chest, a defensive posture that she noticed she had adopted lately. Correction: that she had taken to since Pierre.

Happiness and unhappiness were so close that they were joined at the hip, except that unhappiness was longer lasting. But she had no intention of letting it become a life habit. Occasionally, Agnes dreamed of warm kitchens where she did feel happy – which surprised her as her interest in cooking was minimal – but put it down to some residual message to do with contentment lurking deep in her psyche. Perhaps there was a programme to be made that investigated the meaning of the kitchen?

Above all, Agnes wanted to live as completely as she could manage, for the ambitions that drove her were deep-seated. She had been battered and hurt, and now she was grieving bitterly for the end of a loving era and worried by the prospect of the new, but she wanted to understand what she was and how best to be that person.

Outside, the waxing light threw a transparent wash over the meadow. My land. With a tremor of delight and dread she said it aloud: ‘My land.’

With a grand sweep that made the rings rattle, she pulled the curtain fully back and stared at the shapes massing across her vision: the land, the trees, the perimeter wall snaking its way towards the village.

Silence. Except for the sound of the river running over those stones as it had since human memory began.

Agnes shivered and hugged herself for warmth. Her land and house. Flagge House had acquired its name because of the river and wild irises for which the area was famous. No longer did they grow in their masses but, if the year was propitious, the irises ran up a display of colour that aped the white and smoky-yellow carpet of previous glories.

It was good soil, whose mixture of clay and chalk produced a mix of vegetation, and where the river had thrown an ox-bow and slowed its pace, it was carpeted with moss and lush grass.

In the past, figures had moved over this landscape, purposeful, occupied figures, who understood and lived by the land. Her Agnes, the dead Agnes of the portrait, would have been among them. Silk skirts swishing, lace pouting at her breast, earrings jangling.

Sleepless and wrung out, Agnes felt the weight of those past lives. Something had ended. Something was beginning.