The Tuscan Child Page 4

  He hauled himself up and out until he was crouching on the good wing, out of reach of the flames, holding on for dear life as the wind buffeted him. Still he hesitated, picturing one of those Messerschmitts lurking to pick him off if he parachuted down. He listened but couldn’t pick up the telltale rumble of an enemy fighter, only the deep growl of his own right engine—the left having died. He tried to remember that distant and brief session of parachute training—how to launch himself and how many seconds to count before pulling the cord so that the chute didn’t tangle with the plane. His mind was a hopeless jumble of confusion.

  He took a deep breath, then threw himself from the plane. For a few seconds, he felt himself plunging to earth. Then he tugged on the cord and was jerked upright as the parachute opened. The descent seemed to last forever. Somewhere above him, he heard the deep thump of an explosion as the fuel tank on his plane blew up. He watched the Blenheim spiral down past him. He didn’t actually see the moment when it crashed to earth, but he heard the impact. Then he was aware of the dark shapes of hills around him—the ground rushing up to meet him. Again, he tried to recall his brief moments of parachute training. Brace? Roll? He seemed to be coming in awfully fast. Maybe the parachute had not opened fully. Maybe it had been damaged in the fire. He glanced up and could see the faint, whitish circle hovering over him. It seemed to be intact. Then he looked down, trying to make out what the ground looked like below him. He could just about see the shape of the land, the outlines of hills, some of them now level with him. And trees. Lots of trees.

  There was the faintest hint of dawn in the eastern sky, silhouetting the dark outlines of the hills. No sign of rooftops or a town. At least that was good news. He wasn’t likely to be observed or instantly captured. But he was also quite likely to find himself caught in the branches of a tree, hanging helplessly until he was found. He could actually hear his heart pounding in his chest. The night was so still that he almost believed the sound would carry for miles, alerting anybody who was up this early.

  Then, as he came lower, he heard sounds: the rustle of wind through dead leaves, the creak of a branch, and the barking of a distant dog. So there were people nearby. And if they were peasants, they’d be rising with the dawn. The last seconds of the descent seemed an eternity. He felt helpless and horribly exposed, imagining German soldiers on the ground, standing by their vehicles, their rifles trained on him, waiting for him to come into range.

  He could make out shapes now: to his left, a rocky crag of some sort, rearing above the gentler landscape. And trees—bare trees covering the hilltops and, below, more trees, in regular, orderly rows. But no empty fields. Nowhere guaranteeing a gentle landing. It doesn’t matter that much, he thought grimly. He didn’t have the skill to make the parachute go where he wanted it to.

  The ground was coming up fast now. He could make out the rows of trees stretching up a hillside ahead of him. They were small, neat trees, still bearing their leaves and clearly cultivated. An orchard of some kind, with space between the rows to land if he could line himself up properly. He gulped in a big breath of frigid air. Branches snatched at him, knocking him off course. His feet made contact with the ground. His legs buckled under him, and he was half flung, half dragged forward.

  “Release the chute, you idiot!” he yelled at himself. He tried to fumble with the harness release as his face bounced against frozen earth, then the parachute must have snagged on something. He lay still, smelling the loamy soil against his cheek. He tried to get up and move, but a searing pain from his leg shot through him. The last thing he heard before he blacked out was the song of a bird, greeting the dawn.

  CHAPTER TWO

  JOANNA

  Surrey, England, April 1973

  I had never thought of my father as anything but old—old and bitter, remote and resigned, one who had long ago given up on the world. In my memory, his hair had always been grey. His face was deeply etched with lines that gave him a perpetual scowl, even when he was thinking happy thoughts, which certainly wasn’t often, and he walked with a bit of a limp. So it was not a complete shock to me when I received the telegram notifying me of his death. What did shock me was to learn that he was only sixty-four.

  I fought with conflicting emotions as I walked along the lane leading to Langley Hall. The countryside was bursting with spring glory. The banks were dotted with primroses. The first bluebells were appearing in the woodland beyond. The horse chestnuts that bordered the lane were sprouting their first bright green leaves. I found myself glancing up instinctively and thinking about conkers—the shiny brown horse chestnut seeds that would come later in the year. When I was a young child, the village boys would come out here with sticks to knock down the biggest and best conkers in their prickly green cases and then would thread a string through them and harden them for endless fights. I helped them in retrieving the conkers but was not allowed to join in the fights. Father did not approve of my mixing with the village children, even though our lifestyle was certainly no grander than theirs.

  Overhead, a blackbird was singing, and in the distance I thought I could hear a cuckoo. I remembered how we had always listened for the first cuckoo of the year. Didn’t the song go, “In April, I open my bill”?

  Other than the birdsong, the world lay in almost complete stillness. I was conscious of the sound of my footsteps echoing back from the high hedgerows that bordered the lane. After the constant noise and bustle of London, it was a shock to the system to feel that I was the only person in this universe. I suddenly realised how long it had been since I had come home. Was it over a year? Not even for Christmas, because Father didn’t approve of Adrian and had made it quite clear that he wasn’t welcome, and I was too stubborn to visit without him. Actually, he didn’t disapprove of Adrian per se. Who could find fault with a top graduate from University College London’s law school who had been accepted as a pupil in one of the most distinguished chambers at Temple Bar and was well on his way to becoming a successful barrister? It was only my living with Adrian that Father frowned upon. Father was of the old school, raised to do the right thing at all times. One did not live with a person of the opposite sex. Marriage was expected as soon as possible, and sex was something one anticipated on the wedding night. That was how the son of the squire at Langley Hall behaved, setting an example of morality and clean living to the peasants around him. Horribly quaint and anachronistic in a time when the rest of the world was enjoying a perpetual orgy of free speech, freedom of dress, and free love.

  “Stupid,” I muttered out loud and wasn’t sure if I was referring to myself or to Father. I’d certainly been stupid enough, too, and if I’d only listened to Father’s admonitions, I would not be in the position I was now. It was too bad he had died before he’d had a chance to say, “I told you so.” He would have enjoyed that.

  A pair of pigeons fluttered up from the grass in front of me, their wings making a sound like laundry flapping on a line, startling me out of my thoughts. I could detect other sounds now: a tractor working in a distant field, the hum of bees in the apple blossoms on the other side of the lane, and the rhythmic clickety-clack of a lawn mower. These were the sounds of my childhood: safe and reassuring. How long ago that seemed.

  It was unusually warm and sunny for April, and I regretted wearing my one good winter coat. It was the only black garment I possessed, and I thought it was only fitting that I appeared at my birthplace dressed in mourning. I brushed a bead of sweat from my forehead. I should have sprung for a taxi from the station. In the old days, the two miles never seemed that far to walk. I had walked home from the village school until I was eleven, and that was a good mile away. I remembered coming home for holidays from university and managing the distance carrying my heavy suitcase. I realised I must still be quite frail. Understandable, really, since it wasn’t too long that I had been out of hospital. They had told me my broken ribs would take time to heal. How long my heart would take they didn’t say.

  The tall brick
wall surrounding the Langley estate replaced the copse of trees, and involuntarily I picked up my pace, driven by memories of coming home. I’d always broken into a run for the last yards when I was coming home from the village school. I’d burst into the kitchen, and my mother would look up from the stove, where she was always preparing some sort of food. The warm smell of baking would envelop me. She’d be wearing a big white apron, her face would be red, and she’d be liberally sprinkled with flour. She’d open her arms and wrap me in a big hug.

  “How was school?” she’d asked. “Were you a good girl and did what your teacher told you?”

  “I’m always a good girl. And I always do what I’m told,” I’d replied, and added some minor triumph. “And guess what? I was the only one who could do the long division problem in sums today.”

  “Well done.” She’d kissed the top of my head, then we’d looked up when my father came in.

  “She was the only one who could finish the arithmetic problem in school today,” my mother had said proudly.

  “Well, naturally,” he’d replied. “They are village children.” And he’d gone through to the living room, settling himself with the newspaper. Mum had looked at me, and we’d exchanged a grin of understanding.

  The memory of my mother brought sudden tears to my eyes. All these years gone and I still missed her. If only she’d still been alive, things would have been so different. She’d have known what to do and say. She would have been my refuge. Hastily, I brushed the tears away. I was not going to let anybody see me cry.

  As this memory played itself out in my head, the wall came to an abrupt end, and I found myself standing outside the massive wrought-iron gates that led to Langley Hall. On the other side of the gates the raked driveway ran between manicured flower beds to the house. The red brick of the Tudor façade glowed in the afternoon sunshine. The sun winked back from leaded paned windows. The front part of the house was pure Tudor, the property given to Sir Edward Langley by King Henry VIII for helping him to dismantle and plunder the monasteries. In fact, this very property used to be home to a monastery until my ancestor destroyed it, drove out the monks, and built himself a fine new house in its place. I suppose I should have guessed from this that a curse would eventually catch up with us.

  The house was bigger than it seemed from the front. Subsequent Langleys had added on two fine Georgian wings and a touch of Victorian monstrosity in a corner tower and large conservatory at the rear. I stood still, gawking like a tourist, my hands wrapped around the bars of the gate, as if seeing it for the first time and admiring its beauty. My ancestral home. Home of the Langleys for four hundred years. And I was not unaware of the irony that I had never personally lived in the house—only in the small, dark, and poky gatekeeper’s lodge.

  The sign on the wall beside the gate proclaimed it to be “Langley Hall School for Girls.” Instead of attempting to open one of the gates, I went past to a small door in the wall and let myself in the way I had always done. I turned off up the narrow path to the lodge and tried the front door. It was locked. I don’t know who I’d been expecting to find there. My father had lived alone after I had gone to university. We had lived together there, just the two of us, after my mother died when I was eleven.

  I stood outside the front door and noticed the peeling paint, the dirty windows, the tiny square of lawn that badly needed mowing, the neglected flower beds, with just a few brave daffodils showing through. A shiver of regret shot through me. I should have swallowed my stupid pride and come to visit. Instead, I had let him die all alone.

  I hesitated, unsure what to do next. Langley Hall School was closed for the Easter holidays, but there should still have been someone in residence since the telegram had been sent from that address, indicating that Father had been found on school grounds. I presumed it had been sent by the headmistress, Miss Honeywell. She had a suite of rooms in the hall—what had been, according to my father, the best bedroom in the old days. I turned away from the lodge and willed myself to walk up the drive and confront my former nemesis from when I had spent seven miserable years at that school. After my father had been forced to sell Langley Hall and it had been turned into a girl’s boarding school, he had been allowed to stay on as art master and to have the use of the gatekeeper’s lodge. And when my mother had died, I was offered a scholarship to attend the school as a day girl. I suppose it was meant well—a kindly gesture. My father was delighted that I’d finally be mixing with the right sort of girls and would get the right sort of education. I would rather have gone to the local grammar school with the brightest of my classmates from the village, but one did not argue with my father when he had made up his mind.

  And so I acquired a green and white uniform, with a striped tie, a panama hat for summer and a wide-brimmed velour one for winter, and a blazer with the school crest on it—which was our old family crest, acquired with the building. I entered what was for me a life of misery. Langley Hall could not be called an academic institution. Instead, it attracted the daughters of the upper class and of those who could pay to be considered upper class, and it readied these girls for good marriages. Of course, this was the nineteen sixties, and one did not actually broadcast this quaint notion. Girls were expected to learn useful skills to help them work in suitable jobs—PR, publishing, the BBC, maybe running art galleries or designing clothes—until they met the right sort of husband with the correct amount of money.

  So from the very beginning I was an anomaly: I might have had a father with a title, but he was the art master at the school. I lived in the lodge and I was attending the school on a scholarship. And, worst of all, I was bright and driven. I asked questions of the teachers and longed for harder problems in maths classes. Some of the teachers loved me and encouraged my lively mind. The lazier and less qualified ones found me a nuisance and disruptive. They would send me to the headmistress and put me into detention, where I had to write out, one hundred times, “I must not interrupt my teachers,” or, “I must not question my teachers.”

  Miss Honeywell’s skull-like face with its high cheekbones and withering sneer came back clearly into my consciousness. “So you think that you know better than Miss Snode, do you, Joanna?” or, “May I remind you that you are only here as a gesture of my goodwill because your father is no longer able to look after you properly?”

  The latter was undoubtedly true. My father had never cooked a meal or ironed a shirt in his life. My mother had taken perfect care of us both. And so my becoming a pupil at Langley Hall also included taking my evening meal with the girls and doing my prep with them in the study hall, going home only to sleep. I was glad of at least that small mercy. Sharing a dorm with my enemies would have been the last straw.

  Not that all the girls were against me. I did make friends: quiet, studious girls like myself. We read and exchanged books and discussed them as we walked the grounds. But it was that core group of popular girls who moved in a pack, like wolves, and loved to pick on anyone weaker than them who made it quite clear that I did not belong.

  “Sorry, there’s no room at this table,” they would say when I needed a place to sit with my lunch tray.

  My gym shoes would mysteriously disappear. The wolf pack smirked as I got into trouble for losing my equipment. Unlike them, I’d had no private tennis lessons, and they mocked my feeble attempts to hit the ball. They talked loudly about where they would be going skiing or if they were off to a villa in France. As we got older, these pranks eventually stopped, partly because I never let the girls see that they were getting to me, but also because boys and parties became more important. Then they would talk loudly about which dances they would attend and which boys were being given fabulous cars for their eighteenth birthdays and might drive down to visit, giving the girls an incentive to sneak out at midnight. The trouble was that they were all part of the same social set—all interconnected in a giant web by family or business. I was one of the few outsiders.

  And so I had endured until I reached t
he sixth form. I was driven by a burning desire and a plan for life. I was going to go to university, become a lawyer, be brilliantly successful, make a lot of money, and buy back Langley Hall. I pictured myself taking my father by the arm and leading him up the drive. “This is now ours again,” I would say. “You are back where you belong—lord of the manor.”

  And to Miss Honeywell I’d say, “I’m so sorry, but I need you to be out of here at the end of this term.” And I’d smile.

  I had to smile now at my naïve optimism. Now my father was dead. I was the last of the line. The title would die out and there would be no point in restoring Langley Hall to its former glory. I took a deep breath as I went up the broad steps to the front door and pressed on the bell.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JOANNA

  April 1973

  I heard the bell echoing through the foyer, and then, after a long interval, the door opened, revealing Miss Honeywell herself. I had been expecting a porter or a maid and took an involuntary step backward when I saw that face. As always, her face was a perfect mask of makeup, her eyebrows plucked and drawn in as thin brown lines, and her hair, now greyer than I remembered, had been permed into perfect layers. What I had not been expecting was for her to be wearing slacks and an open-necked shirt. During the school year, I remembered her as wearing a tailored suit in winter with a gold pin on her lapel, and in summer a crisp linen dress and pearls.