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Juliet closed the door before Nell had cleared the yard in her sleek Audi and leaned against it, eyes closed and head pounding.
Alone. Exactly what she wanted.
Wasn’t it?
CHAPTER TWO
JULIET
2018
The first thing Juliet wanted to do was the first thing she always did when she traveled: unpack and organize so that she wouldn’t be living in a state of chaos. Nell Somersby-Sims had directed her to a ground-floor arrangement of sitting room, bedroom, and a 1940s en suite that had been Clarissa Somersby’s last home. Clarissa had been born at Havencross in 1894 and died in this downstairs space at age ninety-eight. Juliet wasn’t superstitious about death—she’d spent a large part of the last six months thinking of little else—but she found the indicated suite claustrophobic and defiantly dragged her bags upstairs before making her own tour of the second floor. First floor, she corrected herself, though it hardly seemed to matter when she was alone and didn’t have to worry about pressing the wrong elevator button.
Juliet had always loved the eccentricities of English architecture, but a house like this pushed that love to the limit. It had been built as a family home at a time when large families and even larger belowstairs staffs were the rule, then adapted for the needs of a boys’ boarding school before being commandeered as a military training center in the Second World War. With that history, it took her a few minutes to identify what each particular room had been originally used for.
There were two very large rooms on either side of the open staircase landings that must have been reception areas of some sort, though not as large as the cavernous and more formal spaces on the ground floor. She guessed that one had been a music room, based on the carvings of various instruments and musical notations that adorned the fireplace surround and the frieze work. The other might have been a morning room, that space reserved for upper-class women to attend to their private correspondence; here they could appear in less formal dress than the public spaces.
Both rooms had a smattering of furniture, as varied as a Chippendale sideboard, a reproduction medieval settle that would have fit ten school boys side by side, and army-issued metal desks. Clearly Clarissa had chosen not to use these rooms upon her return to the house in the late seventies.
Beyond these rooms, on both the east and west sides of the house, stretched long corridors. The west wing contained bedrooms of various sizes and one massive bathroom fitted out in full art deco glamour, including mint-green tiles on both floor and walls.
The largest bedroom at the far western end had four narrow windows across the side of the house and two overlooking the river, stretching nearly floor to ceiling with heavy green damask curtains, a mahogany four-poster bed that must have been constructed inside the room for even in pieces no one could have carried it up here, built-in bookcases flanking the marble fireplace, and a beautiful dressing table. An inner door led to a Victorian dressing room and another door leading to a smaller bedroom that would have been for the husband whose wife did not always welcome his presence in bed.
There were plenty of things here to be cleared through, for someone had repopulated these rooms with personal books and files of papers and even trunks of vintage clothing. This must have been Clarissa’s room before age had forced her downstairs. Though Juliet looked forward to going through it all—and the side windows gave a lovely view of the original walled garden—she had no desire to sleep here.
She finally chose a room in the oldest section of the house. Not overlarge but charming with its multiple angles of wall and ceiling, a window seat, and hand-painted wallpaper whose jewel-bright colors had faded to a pleasing background. The woodwork had been painted a Dresden-blue at some point; it reminded Juliet of the décor in the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts. (She and Duncan used to love Salem.) There was a similar room across the corridor that she could use as a study or small sitting room.
By the time she’d unpacked and decided it was safe to use the nearest toilet—though she would have to trek to the downstairs suite if she wanted to shower—the sun had gone down. Nell and her bosses had already updated the wiring in the most critical sections of the house. But even with new bulbs in the corridor and hall, Havencross seemed to swallow the light.
Juliet used to be afraid of the dark. A neighbor once noted that she always knew when Duncan was gone, because there were lights burning all night long in the house. But since May, Juliet had no room left in her for imaginary fears. So after heating up soup in the kitchen, she went back up to the first floor and then kept climbing to the top of the Victorian section of the house.
She meant to just get an idea of where the most work and clearing would be required. And yes, she surveyed any number of small servants’ rooms filled with boxes and discarded household objects. But the most surprising space was high-ceilinged and airy, and seemed to be used much more recently than World War II if the cordless telephone was anything to go by.
It could only have been Clarissa—as far as she knew, no one else had lived here in sixty years. Juliet inspected her surroundings with curiosity. It was not the room or office of a sad and eccentric recluse; even empty for all these years, it retained a vibrancy and individuality of mind that made Juliet think she would have liked Clarissa. And why not? Clarissa had been her mother’s great-aunt. That made Juliet her … well, they were related somehow.
The lighting up here was dim, so Juliet could only take a cursory look. There were drawers filled with both typed and handwritten pages, and a quick scan of the shelves left an impression of a great interest in English history.
She was about to switch off the light when something glinted in the corner of her eye from one of the lower bookshelves: a silver frame, much tarnished, with a vintage photo of a small boy. Dark hair, round cheeks, starched white shirt, and knee-length breeches of an era before World War I; even in the frozen photography of the past, he possessed an irrepressible charm, as though at any moment he would burst into a wide grin and jump into your arms for a hug.
Juliet stared at the boy for much longer than the photo itself warranted, until grief threatened to choke her and she fled for the safety of her bedroom and sleeping pills.
CHAPTER THREE
JULIET
2018
Juliet had always used to notice how poorly she slept her first night in a different place. But these days sleeping badly was her usual, so she was no more tired than normal when her alarm went off. She checked her texts and replied to the one her mother had sent at midnight Pennsylvania time when she’d been asleep: How’s the haunted house?
She typed back, No ghosts yet, just a lot of dust and boxes.
When the job had been offered, Juliet’s mother had spent an afternoon hour reminiscing about her great-aunt Clarissa. Juliet’s English grandmother had moved to Philadelphia when she was ten, and family visits back had been mostly confined to London. But one August week when Juliet’s mother was fourteen, she had spent a week with Clarissa at Havencross while her parents toured Switzerland.
“Brilliant,” Juliet’s mother had stated. “I mean really brilliant, like genius level. She had a master of arts from Cambridge and studied mathematics in Germany. She was in Paris when the French surrendered in 1940 and spent the rest of the war doing … something. She wouldn’t talk about it. It was 1974 when I visited, and she’d only returned to Havencross the year before.”
“And the house?” Juliet had asked, since that would be her job.
Her usually talkative mother had taken her time answering. “It didn’t feel like a house that had been empty for years. Even with just Clarissa and me there, Havencross felt lived in. It had its own life, that house, or a memory of life. You felt that the house itself carried on no matter who might be there at any given time.”
