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They’d reached her motorbike. He didn’t linger but mounted his horse with the same ease and gazed down at her. “I didn’t just tell you this for gossip’s sake, or to make you feel sorry for her. Like all boys everywhere, the students get to know these things. There have always been stories running among them about the ghost of a boy who died there. The older ones use it sometimes to frighten the youngest. Death is not a stranger to most of them now, and it will be easy for them to transmute their grief into a safe haunting. You might want to be on alert for that.”
With a flick of his hand to his head, almost a salute, he rode off. Diana watched until he was long out of sight, thinking of Thomas and the many lost and forgotten boys she’d known in the last four years.
CHAPTER NINE
JULIET
2018
After Rachel’s visit, Juliet decided to create a schedule for herself. That was the problem with spending months without a job. As an adjunct history professor for the last three years, her schedule had changed with every new semester, but the basics had remained the same. Getting up early, doing some yoga, teaching class, attending office hours in a squashed corner of whatever space the tenured professors allowed, grading papers, prepping for the next day’s classes, eating dinner with Duncan on the nights he came home, and going to bed. When doctor’s visits began creeping into her life with depressing regularity—even in the aftermath of three miscarriages in two years—Juliet had clung to the structure of her days.
For months now, she’d hardly been able to tell the days apart, broken only by her parents’ insistence that she see a therapist weekly. And though Juliet had gone simply because resisting would have taken too much energy, slowly she had begun to pick up the various threads of daily life.
“Start small,” her therapist had said. “Take a shower every day. That’s all you have to do for now.”
Showering had been followed by getting dressed, then leaving her bedroom during daylight hours. Instead of watching Parks and Rec, pick up a book. Instead of lying on the couch, do stretches for ten minutes.
Clearly, it had worked well enough to get her here. Now that she was here, Juliet didn’t want to lose her momentum. She didn’t want to just drift anymore. She wanted to accomplish things. And the therapist’s stepping-stone process had shown her the value of a schedule.
So … split each day between cleaning and organizing the many rooms of Havencross, and doing the research needed for her dissertation. She would aim for a seventy/thirty split at first, but if things went smoothly in the house she could spend more time writing as she went along. And she needn’t feel guilty, because a large part of her job was simply to be at Havencross through the winter to ensure there were no structural disasters or opportunistic thievery. It’s not as though they had her keeping a timesheet.
They meaning the law firm who represented the hotel investors, which meant in practice Nell Somersby-Sims. While she was being so productive, Juliet sent off an email to Nell with a list and photographs attached of the various valuable items she thought would be worth selling, and a couple questions about heating and water supply.
She added one last question after dithering back and forth: Do you have any paperwork on the previous ownership and/or history of Havencross? It was worth a shot. Probably lawyers didn’t care about ownership past a certain time—it wasn’t as though the inhabitants of the medieval priory were going to suddenly make a claim on the estate.
For two days, Juliet kept strictly to her schedule of early bedtime and early rising and moved through the old army offices in a flurry, tossing out old papers, cleaning decades of grime off desks and chairs and stacking them neatly against walls. With each hour, it became easier to see the house as it had been when a family had lived and loved there, or when dozens of boys had scrambled through corridors between classes and meals.
On Friday afternoon—having called first, despite Rachel’s open invitation—Juliet drove her rental car across the narrow bridge then three miles to White Rose Farm. Another reference to the fifteenth century and the North’s support of the Yorkist cause, she noted. They seemed to be popping up everywhere.
Winifred Murray opened the door to the low stone farmhouse herself and greeted Juliet with a formal courtesy that made her nervous. Rachel’s great-aunt must be in her eighties, and she dressed like Juliet imagined a World War II country-house matron would: tweed skirt, cardigan, and discreet pearls. But the woman’s dignity was paired with genuine warmth, and Juliet found it surprisingly easy to talk to her.
Juliet accepted tea, and they sat in a shabby but welcoming room with books jammed onto shelves and piled haphazardly on almost every flat surface. A fire—of course there was a fire, there was probably a nanny upstairs somewhere too—burned cozily, and she thought it one of the most relaxing rooms she’d ever been in.
“Rachel told me you grew up in this house,” Juliet said.
“Yes, there have been Murrays at White Rose Farm for hundreds of years. No matter how far we roam, most of us remain anchored here.”
“I hope you don’t think me unbearably inquisitive, but I’m curious about the family tree. Rachel’s surname is Bennett—”
“Why isn’t she a Murray?” Winifred anticipated the question. “Goodness, child, never apologize to an old woman for asking questions. There’s little I like better than talking about myself and the past. My parents had four children. Two girls and a boy in quick succession, then me nearly a decade later. Sadly, my brother Andrew died on a Normandy beach on D-Day. In the sixties, the farm passed to my sister Ellice and her husband Charles Bennett, then onto their son Josiah, who is Rachel’s father. But make no mistake—just because her name is Bennett doesn’t mean Rachel hasn’t inherited every last bit of Murray love for this farm.”
“I could tell,” Juliet agreed. “It must be lovely to be surrounded by your own history. My mother’s mother is English, but I couldn’t even tell you where the rest of my ancestors were three hundred years ago. I think that’s one reason I was always drawn to history.”
Winifred eyed her intently over her teacup. “Rachel says you’re interested in Havencross and the influenza pandemic of 1918.”
“I am, yes. Havencross was still a school when you were young, correct?”
“Until 1939. The school had survived one war; no one had the heart to keep it going for a second. And of course, Clarissa Somersby had moved on long before then.”
“Did you know her?” Juliet asked.
“She was my godmother. I knew her mostly through letters when I was young, but after the war—World War Two—I often spent summers with her in London or Paris or Rome. She helped me prep for university and encouraged me to think beyond teaching or nursing. Not that those aren’t honorable occupations, but I was never suited for caretaking. I worked in the Foreign Office for thirty years instead.”
Winifred levered herself up carefully from the chair—only her cautious movements revealed her advanced age—and searched for something on the overfilled bookshelves as Juliet stood. Instead of a book, she selected a silver frame with a black-and-white photograph. She handed it to Juliet, who had stood up when Winifred did.
It was a familiar photograph—two women in ankle-length skirts sitting on the brick garden wall at Havencross. One woman with laughing eyes, and one with defined cheekbones and glossy, dark hair.
“I’ve seen this,” Juliet said. “I found it at Havencross, among Clarissa’s belongings.”
