NONESUCH
Gabriel King
Start Reading
About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
About Nonesuch
After his cousin died in a fire that ravaged the house, John Dawe has inherited the old manor Nonesuch. John adores the crumbling house, but for his wife, Anna, the legacy is tainted, inextricably linked with John’s cousin, known as the Witch of Ashmore, who tried so hard to destroy Anna and the cats she holds dear.
As John’s obsession with rebuilding Nonesuch intensifies, their relationship disintegrates. And Eleanor, the baby that should have brought them together, drives them further apart, for along with John’s family’s disconcertingly green eyes, she has also inherited some unnerving characteristics. A house full of memories quickly becomes a family full of secrets. As Anna battles to throw off her growing sense of dread, the grim mystery at the heart of Nonesuch will be revealed.
Contents
Welcome Page
About Nonesuch
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
About Gabriel King
The Wild Roads Series
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
For Philippa
‘Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies’
John Donne
Elegies No. 2, ‘The Anagram’
‘The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace’
Andrew Marvell
‘To His Coy Mistress’
Prologue
On his way into the church a little before eight one bright Monday morning, Francis Baynes, vicar of St Mary’s-in-Ashmore, stopped to watch Anna Dawe ride her bicycle towards him and thought what a gift her energy was to the world. Thoughts like this could still surprise him, as if he believed himself not quite mature enough to have them. At the same time, it was impossible to deny, they made him rather pleased with his own progress. He thought of himself as a vessel, which had barely begun to fill up.
Anna Dawe’s bicycle was notorious throughout the parish. You saw it everywhere, an old black ladies’ sit-up-and-beg equipped with the hub gears and worn skirt savers of another age. Its bleached wicker baskets were always full of shopping. It was as unforgiving in use as an old donkey. Nevertheless, she rode it everywhere and when Francis Baynes caught sight of her that morning the machine was moving freely enough, rattling down the hill past the almshouses to pick up speed on the steep stretch past the Green Man. By the time Anna shot out into Church Lane, he estimated later, she had achieved a brisk twenty miles an hour. It was idiotic of him, given this, to wave his arms and step into her path. For a moment they stared at one another in horror, neither quite able to wrench free of the moment. Then, a comical expression of concentration on her face, she swerved around him; while at the same time he stepped back smartly into the protection of the lych-gate.
‘Anna!’
‘Can’t stop. No brakes. Come for tea, Francis. Come at three!’
Banking with a kind of desperate athleticism round the bend at the corner of the churchyard, she was gone. Her shoulder had actually brushed his. Certainly he had been close enough to smell her perfume, something flowery and light-hearted. He raised his hand to wave after her; then, looking round as if he expected to be observed, dropped it suddenly and made his way through the gate.
History, they say, makes for a crowded churchyard; and Ashmore had seen the Saxons come and go. There were graves everywhere, long, eroded wafers of Horsham slab interspersed with stubby plaques of bland grey South African granite, as shiny as the paintwork of an expensive car. Laminated and flaky, emerging at contentious angles from the turf, the oldest stones clustered by the flint-knapped walls of the church, where a massive yew, the candles of which had enlivened a hundred winters, helped shelter them from the wind. Francis Baynes never tired of this quiet corner of his parish. It caught a little sun, even in December, and on late summer evenings the liquid song of a blackbird could be heard from the branches of the tree. Since the good weather began he had made it a habit to spend a few minutes there every morning. He was a diffident man and often felt he had more to offer his dead than his live parishioners. At any rate he liked to begin the day with them.
He bent down to scrape lichen off one of the stones. ‘Wife of’, he read; then, on the next, ‘Hys lovinge sister’. Here lay crowded together the stalwarts and notables of a thousand years of village life, the Millers, the Clements, the Rose Popes and, above all, the Herringes, Ashmore’s most powerful family, whose ancestor Joshua had built the great house Nonesuch in 1482. Herringe influence, uncontested for four hundred years, had waned sharply after the First World War – the family appearing to withdraw, rearrange itself subtly, shift the focus of its attention elsewhere – then further in the 1980s as incomers flooded the village with new money. Would it be eclipsed altogether by the recent bizarre events at Nonesuch? Or would Stella Herringe’s cousin, John Dawe, be able to turn things round again?
In life the Herringes had prospered. In death they had imparted to the turf around them a dark, healthy gloss. ‘Sir William Herringe’, Francis read, ‘He meeteth hys maker with a keene eye.’ Not far off lay the mother of William’s great-grandchildren, Clara de Montfort Herringe. Time had erased Clara’s dates but spared capriciously her curious epitaph: ‘A woman of great self-knowledge’. Clara – who had chosen to be buried alone despite the predecease of a perfectly good husband and whose portrait, done by a pupil of Holbein, had hung in the Long Corridor of Nonesuch until quite recently – was Francis’s favourite Herringe. The portrait, which he had seen only once, a few weeks before its destruction, had shown her dressed in brocade, decked with pearls, holding a stringed instrument. Her eyes had seemed to catch at his, frank with greed, used to power. ‘What a monster!’ he had thought agreeably, thankful he would never have to deal with her. A little under half the Herringe graves harboured women. And here was a curious thing: they were a long-lived family, but until Stella’s death in the unexplained fire that destroyed much of Nonesuch, the women had always outlived the men.
‘Stella Elizabeth Clara Herringe, 1947–1999’, announced her headstone. There were a few unseasonal flowers in a pot at the foot of the grave, arranged, Francis guessed, by Anna Dawe. To him they looked defeated, but he doubted Anna would see it that way. Her strength of character lay in her optimism. The grave itself had yet to settle completely, the turves fitting together over Stella Herringe with a haphazard air, raw and unfinished-looking: something Stella, always so perfectly turned out, would have hated. Appearance had meant so much to her, reputation less. Bizarre rumours, generated in the socially heated village atmosphere after the fire, still entertained the evening drinkers at the Green Man – cruelty to animals, a clandestine laboratory discovered deep inside the old house itself, death forestalling the prosecution of the woman but not of her successful cosmetics business. (This last item had actually made the television news, some months after the main event, puffing Ashmore up with a questionable kind of pride. It was like having your own murderer.) Even before the fire there had been rumours of tension between the two women over Anna’s relationship with John. Stella Herringe, Francis w
as sure, would have shrugged it all off. ‘But a grave like a building site, darling,’ he imagined her saying, ‘is something else again.’ She had been a difficult person, who often reminded him of her own greedy-eyed ancestress; but he had to admit he had rather liked her.
Francis dusted the dry grey particles of lichen from his fingertips and sighed. After a moment he consulted his watch. Passing through the cool shadows of the lych-gate, he looked carefully both ways before he left its shelter. The road was empty; though, crossing it, he experienced a sudden clear memory of the morning’s near disaster. He heard again the sad clank of the approaching bicycle. He heard Anna’s sudden intake of breath. ‘No brakes!’ she had called. ‘Can’t stop!’ For a moment, as she pedalled away from him, sunlight had struck through her yellow dress to give him a glimpse of her long legs and leave him in confusion. Francis Baynes was a little in love with Anna Dawe. What this meant to him as a man he was unsure. What it meant to him as a servant first of God, then his bishop and finally of the parish of Ashmore-under-Crowbury was clear enough. It meant the harrowing of his soul – or, at any rate, a considerable agitation of that entity. He shook his head, shut the lych-gate and set off into the village at a penitential pace.
He was twenty-six years old and, as one of his kinder parishioners put it, ‘still rather feeling his way’.
1
The weather was just warm enough for Anna Dawe’s daughter Eleanor to sit out on a picnic blanket under one of the great Nonesuch cedars, where – to the amusement of one parent and the discomfort of the other – she could spend her time profitably annoying a large marmalade cat called Orlando.
‘Oof,’ said her father. ‘I felt that.’
Eleanor was belabouring Orlando with an old plastic doll’s head she had found somewhere in the rich chaos of the house. The cat would bear her attentions stoically for a while, then move away and sit down somewhere else, the fur on his back twitching with discomfort. Eleanor would promptly follow him and begin again. You could see that he was as much embarrassed as anything: this wasn’t correct behaviour, his body language seemed to suggest, for a human being, even a small and sticky one. Eleanor, he felt, ought to know better. Eventually, he got to his feet, stretched and stalked off in the direction of the house to see what the builders were up to. Orlando got on well with the builders.
‘I wish we could do something about those two,’ Anna said. ‘They should be such good friends.’
John Dawe shrugged. Though clearly amused, he was not quite as interested as he might have been in his daughter’s behaviour. The garden table in front of him was littered with the plans, invoices and lists of building materials which had filled his life since he and Anna had begun to reconstruct the house.
‘She’ll grow out of it,’ he said carelessly. ‘As for the cat, he’s good with the kittens. He’ll never hurt her.’
He looked at his watch and got up. ‘I’m off.’
‘Oh, but must you? Francis Baynes is coming to tea.’
‘Francis! He’s more your friend than mine.’
‘He’d be hurt if he heard you say that.’
‘Hm,’ said John. ‘Well, I haven’t got time today. We’re having an argument about the plaster for the Long Corridor. Do I want cow dung in the mix—’
‘John! How appalling!’
‘—or can I do with something more modern?’ He grinned and for a moment looked rather boyish. ‘I want cow dung, of course,’ he admitted. ‘It’s the real thing.’ His grin vanished abruptly and he ran his fingers through his hair. ‘After that I talk to the bank and try to persuade them to fund the next stage.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Anna. ‘No fun at all.’
‘Not much,’ he admitted.
She touched his hand and he gave her a smile. Despite their problems, she thought, they still managed to maintain the love they felt for one another. Though sometimes it took more maintenance than John seemed to have time for. New fathers, she had read, often became a little difficult to reach. Finding life harder than they had expected, they brought into play that well-known masculine ability to focus on problems rather than people. On his way into the house John knelt down and had a conversation with his daughter. He said something to her and Anna could see him stroking an imaginary Orlando. Nice cat, nice cat. You see, nice pussy cat. They stroked the absent cat together for a moment. Then Eleanor banged it on the head again. John’s bark of a laugh disturbed birds from the cedar. He held out his hand. The little girl appeared to offer him something, which she snatched away at the last minute with a giggle. They played this game until he tried to take it from her anyway, to be warned off with an offended shriek.
Like father like daughter. Eleanor had a passion for objects. Thousands of them had already passed through her fingers (not to say her mouth). Of these, some had occupied her for ten minutes, others a day or two. Her more lasting obsessions had nothing much in common but Eleanor herself. One of her own shoes, a rag book featuring leopards and lions, and an old nail brush had replaced one another in her affections in the space of a month. But the plastic doll’s head, with its curiously smoothed-off features and partly bald skull, seemed to have a staying power the others did not. Eleanor roared if you separated her from it at night; she roared if she woke up without it in the morning. It was constantly covered in loving spit. She introduced it to her dinner. She rolled it in the well-drained earth of the Nonesuch flowerbeds. She banged Orlando on the head with it. (None of the other cats would put up with this; indeed, if they could help it, none of the other cats would remain within arm’s length of Eleanor for more than thirty seconds.) During the day, if you tried to take it off her, she wept real tears.
‘It’s time we got firm about that thing,’ Anna said.
John laughed. ‘Rather you than me,’ he told her.
‘It really is a bit disgusting, John. Can’t we lose it one evening when she’s asleep?’
‘She’ll have forgotten it in a week,’ he said lightly.
‘It really is a bit disgusting.’
He laughed and turned away.
Anna shaded her eyes. ‘Don’t be so offhand, John,’ she called after him.
He stopped and looked back at her – the deep shade of the cedar made it hard to judge his expression – then walked off, his gait managing to convey the kind of puzzled, slightly hurt impatience men do so well when they want to avoid talking about something. He looked rather like Orlando.
Now why did I say that? Anna asked herself. I’ve spoilt a nice afternoon.
*
‘These days we only ever use each other’s names when we’re irritable,’ she found herself confiding to Francis Baynes an hour or two later; and immediately wondered why. It was the dog collar, perhaps. In some lights it made him appear older, in others so young that the ten years separating them made her feel old enough to be his mother. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said immediately. ‘It must be boring to be the recipient of people’s confidences just because of your job. You must feel as if you have no real existence of your own. Like a postbox.’
‘I’d miss it,’ he assured her, ‘if I couldn’t come here and talk.’
Anna didn’t really hear this. ‘I’m not being disloyal to him, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s just life. Babies. Renovations. No money. All that. He has a hard time of it since Ellie arrived – it’s rather knocked the dreamer out of him.’
‘Babies?’
‘Well. Baby.’
Francis received this with his patient smile. ‘I’d like some more tea,’ he ventured, ‘if there is any.’
‘It will be tepid at best,’ Anna warned him.
They were sitting in deckchairs on the lawn, a comfortable litter of plates and knives and jars of jam between them on a weathered old folding table. The sun would soon slant down behind the cedar, filling its branches with glimpses of light. Her face mysteriously transfigured, as if in her dreams she had to concentrate very hard on something wonderful, Eleanor was asleep in the buggy. She real
ly could be the most beautiful little child, Anna thought. It was worth everything just to see her there. Instinctively detecting a window of respite, Orlando the cat had returned to curl up on the picnic blanket. He kept one eye open and his left ear twitched at each clink of the milk jug.
Francis tried his tea, made a face. ‘How are you getting on otherwise?’ he asked.
‘Oh, as best we can. We live in the two or three rooms we’ve managed to finish. The rest is a mess.’ John thought it was fun, but it was a bit too like camping for Anna, a bit like camping out, or being a student again. She had enjoyed it to start with, as part of the fierce excitement of being with him, but it was going on too long now, with no end in sight, and she had suddenly begun to feel haunted by the old building. Two years ago, John’s cousin Stella, maddened with jealousy by John and Anna’s relationship, and believing herself to be the reincarnation of one of her own ancestors kept young by cosmetics made from the placental material of cats, had tried to kill them both. They had watched her burn up in the fire that followed. Thinking of this, she said suddenly to Francis, ‘It’s odd, though, you know; apart from Stella’s apartment, which was completely burned out, the effects of the fire seem quite random. A whole floor will have smoke damage, with two rooms somewhere in the middle of it completely untouched. You’d hardly know anything had happened. Don’t you think that’s strange?’
Francis spread his hands. ‘I know nothing about fire,’ he said politely.
She recognised his mood. He didn’t want to talk about Nonesuch, or Anna’s marriage. He wanted to talk about Anna. He wanted her to gossip about her inner life, so that he could gossip about his. To tease him she said, ‘The latest problem, apparently, is an argument about authenticity in the Long Corridor. Did you know that in the fifteenth century they used cow dung to bind plaster? John is all for it, of course.’