The Key to Flambards Read online

  Grace hadn’t taken a great deal of notice of all that family stuff; it had been too long ago to mean much, and she’d been too young to find it interesting. Coming to Flambards, though, and standing in the stable yard where Christina and then Granny Izz had learned to ride, had brought it into focus. And there was the inside of the house still to see. One of those windows high in the ivy must have been the one Christina looked out of when she woke up after spending her very first night here.

  Great-great-grandmother – that was too many greats to get hold of. Just Christina was enough. That way Christina stayed forever young, not getting old, old, older, like Granny Izz. Christina was that much further in the past, out of reach, whereas Grace remembered Granny Izz as a frail old lady, slowly getting smaller, a grey wisp of her earlier self.

  A reply pinged back on her phone: Cruise on the Seine then ice cream and film. More soon. M-Lx

  Grace sighed, her thoughts still half with Christina and now pulled in two directions. Had Christina been parted from a best friend she’d left behind in London? If so, she’d have had to write letters and go down to the village to post them, and wait days for a postman to bring the reply. At least Grace could message Marie-Louise and expect an answer within minutes. Even if it made her think she’d rather be eating ice cream by the river Seine.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Line of Russells

  Looking around the dining room, Grace could see only one person who might be under twenty-five: a dark pretty girl in an apron who was speeding in and out through the door to the kitchen. Wasn’t there anyone her own age here? Hadn’t Mum said that there would be? An older woman in an apron glanced through the doorway a couple of times, assessing the buffet table; she smiled at Roger but darted back out of sight before he could call her over.

  ‘That’s Pam, our cook,’ Roger told Grace and her mother. ‘We’ll go and say hello properly after lunch.’

  While he and Mum talked about the forthcoming courses, Grace gave her attention to the food. At least that was good, and there was lots of it – salads and dips, quiches and cold meat, with bread warm from the oven, laid out on a long table for everyone to help themselves. The three of them sat at a table in one corner, from where she saw people filtering in, in twos and threes, through doors open to the terrace and the cedar-tree lawn. Most were grandparent sort of age, with only a few younger ones, and even they must have been as old as Mum. A man with a ponytail came over and introduced himself as Frank, the tutor for this week’s course, before taking a seat with his group.

  ‘Thanks, Irina,’ Roger said, as the dark girl put down a jug of water on their table. Irina’s smile took in Grace and her mother before she whirled away. Grace glimpsed slim legs in cut-off jeans and the fine bones of tanned feet in ballet pumps.

  Before It, she’d never thought much about feet, but now she gave them close attention, reluctant but fascinated, whenever they were on display. Tanned feet, strong feet, painted toenails in sandals, the graceful turn of an ankle: she’d never realized before that feet could be so beautiful, so expressive. She had to push away the feeling that all these feet and ankles were there to taunt her, which was just ridiculous. What did she expect – everyone to go around in Ugg boots, out of sympathy, in the middle of summer?

  Roger turned to her. ‘Irina’s from Leipzig, on a gap year from uni – she helps out in the office as well as in the kitchen. It’ll be a younger group at the weekend. Contemporary dance. And you’ll probably meet Jamie this afternoon – my nephew. He spends a lot of time here, and there’s Marcus too – Sally, his mum, is our gardener. Jamie and Marcus are great friends. So you won’t be entirely surrounded by oldies, Grace.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Grace mumbled, prodding at her slice of quiche. That wasn’t exactly true, but now she felt daunted at the thought of meeting two boys who she gathered, as Mum asked questions, were both fifteen, a year older than her. They might look at her. They might know. Or they might not know, and find out. Which would be worse?

  The dining room must have once been grand. Grace pictured Christina, a newcomer like herself, eating her dinner at a long polished table like the one that now held the buffet. The high ceiling and chandelier and elaborate tiled fireplace must have been here then – they were as old as the house, Roger had said – but there were modern touches too: bright abstract paintings on the walls and gauzy curtains at the open doors to the garden.

  When lunch was over and the art students had drifted off again, Roger showed Grace and Mum the rest of the ground floor. There was a smaller, cosier room furnished with sofas, armchairs and bookshelves; next to that was the book-lined library she’d seen from outside. There was a sort of classroom, and overlooking the front drive was the office, where Mum would work with Roger and sometimes Irina. From the entrance hall a stone-flagged corridor led to the kitchen, where four people – Irina, Pam and two others – were clearing up from lunch, stacking a dishwasher and cleaning the work surfaces.

  ‘I can’t show you the upstairs rooms,’ Roger said, back in the entrance hall. ‘It’s all guest accommodation up there.’

  Looking up the wide staircase, Grace saw a half-landing with a stained-glass window, and felt perversely annoyed at not being allowed to go up. She wanted to see Christina’s room – if anyone knew which one it was.

  ‘Do you live here?’ she asked Roger.

  ‘Not yet,’ Roger said. ‘The plan is, I’ll move into the upstairs flat when it’s ready. The decorators are busy there now. But that depends on whether we manage to keep the place going. For now I’m staying with my brother and his family a couple of miles away. The other staff live out, apart from Sally. She and her family are in the cottage you can see from your windows, behind the stable yard.’

  Grace glanced at Mum. Presumably the impatient van man was the husband of this Sally.

  ‘It’s impressive, this entrance,’ Grace’s mother said. ‘Those are original tiles, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they are. It’s a lovely house altogether, but costs a fortune to maintain – that’s part of our problem. Let’s go back to the office. I want to show you the family tree I’ve been working on. Your family tree.’ Roger paused, looking at them both. ‘I can’t get over having two real-live Russells here. Does it feel like coming home?’

  Mum laughed. ‘I don’t know about that. It’ll take a while.’

  ‘Well, to me it seems right,’ Roger said, and Grace found herself adding, ‘Me, too,’ rather to her own surprise.

  ‘If only you’d started four years earlier.’ Mum followed him into the office, with Grace behind. ‘You could have met Granny Isobel. She was born and brought up here.’

  ‘Oh yes – born during the war; 1916,’ Roger said promptly. ‘I wish I could have met her. But now I’m meeting you. The next best thing.’

  ‘I’ve brought a few of her photographs. There’s an old album at home too,’ said Mum. ‘I’ll bring that when I’ve got my car.’

  Having talked vaguely about getting a car for a while, she had now bought one second-hand, and would collect it tomorrow. On the day she chose it and put down the deposit, she came home looking proud. ‘My very own car! I’ll feel so independent!’ Before, she and Grace’s dad had shared one.

  The office must once have been a sitting room, with shelves flanking the fireplace and a bay window that looked out on to the drive. There were three desks, two of them piled with files and folders and papers. The third was bare apart from a computer and an empty tray.

  ‘I need a good sort-out.’ Roger stood by his messy desk, both hands raised to his head in a hopeless gesture. ‘But first, let me show you this.’

  He took a box file down from a shelf and spread a large sheet of paper on the desk that would be Mum’s, the only uncluttered space.

  ‘Here you all are. The Russells of Flambards, as far as I’ve got. Maybe you can help fill in a few more.’

  Grace’s eyes took in the branching lines, the handwritten names with dates of births and
deaths, the confusing repetitions of Williams and Jameses. Following Roger’s pointing finger she homed in on Mum’s name: Polly Ann Russell, b. 1980, and the m for married: m Paul John Forbes 2002, d 2017. The d, Grace realized after a startled moment, meant divorced, not dead. That bit had been added in pencil, whereas the rest was written in ink. Roger must have added those details after getting them from Mum when she visited the first time.

  ‘Is that your writing?’ Grace asked, and Roger nodded. It was distinctive, artistic: italic, in black ink, with swooping downstrokes. Not somehow the handwriting she’d have expected him to have.

  Underneath her parents was her own name: Grace Alice Forbes-Russell, b. 2004.

  It was just Russell now. Mum hadn’t changed her name when she married, and at school Grace had been Grace Forbes, as they all agreed that Forbes-Russell was too posh-sounding for everyday use. After the separation she’d gone back to Russell, to be the same as Mum – which put her immediately after Marie-Louise, whose surname was Rénard, in their form’s register.

  Roger’s pointing finger went up the page, a generation at a time: from Grace to Mum to Neil Robert Russell (Granddad), Isobel Grace Russell (Granny Izz), then Christina, who had been Christina Parsons until she married William, one of her Russell cousins.

  ‘And there’s Christina’s three husbands,’ Mum said, leaning over to look at the three lines and close writing. ‘William first, then Richard Wright – then Mark, William’s brother.’

  ‘She married both her cousins, didn’t she?’ Grace said, looking at Roger. ‘There can’t be many people who’ve done that. I didn’t know it was even allowed, to marry your cousin.’

  ‘It’s not actually illegal. But in fact Christina and the two Russell sons were half-cousins, look. There was a second marriage in the generation before, so Christina’s mother was only half-sister to their father, the first William. What was illegal, till after the war, was marrying your brother-in-law. That changed in 1921 and Christina married Mark soon after.’

  ‘Granny Izz used to say that local people thought Christina was scandalous, being married three times,’ Mum told him. ‘All while she was still quite young. And Gran would have shocked them too – having a son without being married, in an age when that was seen as disgraceful.’

  ‘I’m glad she didn’t marry,’ Roger said. ‘If she had, your name wouldn’t be Russell, and I wouldn’t have found you. It’s a piece of luck, as you’ve descended mainly through the female line.’

  ‘She didn’t see the point of getting married,’ Mum said. ‘That must have taken some strength of character, in her day. I think all the Russells must have been strong-minded, in their different ways.’

  Grace was remembering some of the things Granny Izz had told her about Christina. She’d flown across the Channel with Will in his tiny aeroplane in the early days of flying, and had been a brilliant rider as well, never afraid. She had run the Flambards farm while most of the men were away at war; she carried on hunting until well into her sixties, Granny Izz had said, and even had a go at motor-racing, at a time when few women drove cars.

  I’m a Russell too, Grace thought with a sense of pride that was quickly overtaken by loss. I’d have done those things if I had the chance. Well, not the hunting. But the flying, the boldness, the willingness to have a go – Christina must have been brave, adventurous, with nothing to dent her confidence. As always, Grace felt the sense of resentment rise like a lump in her throat – bitter, inescapable – for the loss of her own chances. It would always be there.

  ‘I’ve brought these to show you.’ Mum took three black-and-white photographs out of an envelope and laid them out on the desk for Roger to see, and there was Christina. Grace had seen them before, but it felt different now, because she was at Flambards – in Christina’s house. She studied them with new interest.

  In all three, Christina was older than Grace, but still young, eighteen or nineteen, perhaps, and beautiful in an unshowy way. One picture showed her in a white dress in the garden, holding a bunch of flowers; in another she was mounted on a horse, sidesaddle; for the third she was posing next to a rickety-looking aeroplane with a thin-faced, smiling young man, almost a boy still.

  ‘That’s William,’ Mum told Roger. ‘My great-grandfather. Grace’s great-great-grandfather. Only he was killed before he even knew he’d fathered a child. It makes our whole existence seem a bit chancey, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose everyone’s is, one way or another,’ Roger said, his eyes on the picture. ‘What a photograph! Christina’s lovely, and I like the look of William too – the way he’s caught there. He looks clever but humorous, as if he could laugh at himself.’

  Grace glanced at him sidelong, surprised by this.

  ‘And so young,’ her mother said. She turned the picture over to show some faint pencilled words on the back. ‘June 1914. He only had two more years to live.’

  Roger nodded slowly. Grace knew the story: Will’s aircraft had been shot down while he was flying on reconnaissance over the German lines in France. He was killed, and Christina returned to Flambards to grieve, only later discovering that she was pregnant. So Granny Izz had known her father only from a few photographs and what Christina had told her about him.

  ‘I know he joined the Royal Flying Corps as soon as war broke out,’ Roger said. ‘So that would have been barely a month after this picture was taken. He was already an experienced amateur flyer. But losses were enormous at that time. The odds were well stacked against him.’

  They were all silent for a moment.

  ‘Poor Will. Poor Christina,’ Mum said. ‘And look – we know her second marriage, to Richard Wright, ended in divorce. But her third marriage didn’t last long, either.’ She placed a finger on the dates of Christina’s third husband, Mark Russell.

  With a jolt Grace saw that the date of Mark’s death followed soon after the marriage. She had known that, of course, from Granny Izz, who had spent most of her childhood without either father or stepfather, but it was still a shock to see the dates written there so starkly.

  ‘Poor Christina!’ Mum said again. ‘She may have had wealth and looks and this lovely home, but she was terribly unlucky. Twice a widow, within the space of a few years. She was still only in her twenties when Mark died.’

  It was another link. Grace felt perversely pleased that Christina, who had so much, had had her share of bad luck too. But there was more: Roger was saying, ‘And she lost her son, Robert – her son and Mark’s. In 1940, in the Battle of Britain. He was just eighteen.’

  ‘Awful.’ Mum shook her head. ‘That must have been devastating.’

  Roger’s finger was tracing the line again. ‘So your Granny Isobel was Christina’s only surviving child.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mum said. ‘She used to talk about Flambards, a lot, but she never lived here again once she left for London.’

  Grace could still hear Granny Izz’s voice, sometimes, and remember things she’d said; that was comforting. In her mind, loud and clear, Granny Izz told her: ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t like Flambards. I did – I loved it. But there was Hitler’s war, and my work took me to London, and there was so much to do, always something I had to work for. I couldn’t go back and bury myself in the country.’

  ‘I can give you a few more names,’ Mum said, pointing at the diagram to show where. ‘My dad’s – Neil’s – two half-sisters, and their children. But none of those are Russells.’

  So it’s down to us, Grace thought, with a tremor of importance. Me. For the Russells of Flambards to reach into the future, she would one day have to have children of her own. How would that happen? Who would ever – but no, she didn’t want to start thinking that way.

  ‘When you get a chance,’ Roger said, ‘have a look at the war memorial in the churchyard. There’s a whole list of surnames, some of them of families who are still living here. And your William Russell’s on there, of course, though his grave’s in France.’

  ‘We’ll go and s
ee, won’t we, Grace?’ Mum said.

  ‘My relations are there too,’ Roger said after a moment. ‘And there’s a link to your William and the Royal Flying Corps. My great-grandfather was in it, and he was shot down too. Badly burned.’

  ‘Killed?’ asked Grace, her interest caught by this more than by war memorials.

  Roger shook his head. ‘No; he was lucky to survive. Though it can’t have felt like that at the time – he had a terrible disfigurement, half his face burned away. Later he had facial reconstruction. That was an important development after the war, with so many people needing it.’

  ‘Poor man!’ said Mum, while Grace thought of something Jenna had come out with, in hospital: At least nothing’s happened to your face. You still look the same. Nothing, that was, apart from cuts and bruises that had soon healed. Imagine if your face was terribly changed, and that was the first thing people saw when they met you. The old Grace had barely given a thought to disabilities or disfigurement. Now reminders seemed to pop up everywhere. It was like being a new member of a club she hadn’t asked to join.

  Roger looked at his watch. ‘Let’s have a quick look at the barn. Then, Polly, I’ll introduce you to the wonders of our office systems.’

  As they left the house by the front door, Grace saw a wheelbarrow and a canvas bag of tools on the far side of the lawn, but no gardener. Roger said that Sally would be around somewhere, and led them in the direction of the stables, taking a track that forked off just before the brick arch and led to the big yard area Grace had seen from her bedroom window. The large barn on the far side had double doors open at the front; two women leaned on the outside wall, one of them smoking, while inside several other people were busy at their easels or talking to Frank.

  ‘This is our biggest working space,’ Roger said, as they went in. ‘We use it for the larger groups, and it’s great for dance and yoga and things like that, with a sprung floor.’