“Bridezilla?” I ask her.
“We’ve got a big society wedding at the weekend,” LadyB says. “Normally wouldn’t host one when the prize is on, but the father of the bride is some big cheese in Parliament, and Albert says it’s best to keep him sweet. But the bride! You’d think that no one else had ever been married before. The girl’s a tyrant! Which reminds me. I need to talk to the gardener about finding exactly the right sort of rosebuds.”
LadyB gives the kids a final wave, and they respond with smiles, and waves and shouts of thanks.
“It’s almost like they are not all terrible monsters,” I say more to myself than to Hal.
“Your experience of childhood and school was a particularlytraumatic one,” Hal says. “You might benefit from talking therapies to help you process those latent feelings.” Then he smiles at me, a sweet and gentle smile. “But I know you don’t enjoy meeting strangers. So, you can always talk to me. I’ve acquired several qualifications in psychiatry since I began.”
“Really?” I look up at him. “When?”
“I don’t really sleep,” he says. “This version of me sleeps. This body needs rest and fuel just like any other. But my mind is here”—he taps his head—“and in your system too. And it just goes on and on, thinking, learning, and growing.”
“That sounds exhausting,” I say.
“I am starting to understand what it means to be tired,” Hal tells me. “It’s actually quite a pleasant sensation, especially after a productive day.” He looks at the long queue in the buffet that I forgot to join. “You will be sad if you miss the sandwiches. I’ll fetch you some.”
He heads off before I can agree or otherwise and, to be fair, there has never been a day in my life when I have not wanted sandwiches. So, you could say Hal’s making assumptions, but you could also say he just knows me so well that I don’t have to ask, or worry about asking, or how other people might see me and my love of sandwiches and whether or not they are judging me, somehow. And that is actually lovely.
“Ava!” Rani calls out to me from across the terrace. No doubt she was covertly observing my conversation with Hal, and I know she noticed me checking out his thighs and probably even clocked my flustered blush when he talked about tongues. She is coming over here right now to interrogate me in detail. Just inside, Hal is piling a plate high with sandwiches, as Rani is making her waythrough the crowd to get to me. Rani has absolutely no faults whatsoever, except maybe that she is always extremely interested in what I’m thinking and feeling. You might say that is the mark of a true friend, and I agree with you, but I’m not ready to enter a full forensic dissection yet. These thoughts and feelings I’m having for Hal are not only confusing but brand-new and I want to keep them to myself for just a little longer.
Dammit, I have to let the sandwiches go and make my escape. Rani is my best friend, but I can’t talk to her about what all this means yet when I don’t know. So I pretend I haven’t seen her and make a break for a collection of big trees in the opposite direction from the maze of doom, using some local businessmen as cover as I slink down the steps and out of sight.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The group of elegant trees that I am seeking refuge behind are big and very old cedar trees. Their trunks are so wide that I could not put my arms around even one-third. Their bark is reddish brown and sweet-smelling, sticky with sap, and the grass underfoot is covered with needles that collect in amongst the gnarled and twisted feet of their roots.
As soon as I walk under the all-encompassing spread of their branches, the sound of the kids yelling and laughing on the lawn drops away along with the chatter of the adults on the terrace. Instead, a crow caws to its mate in the treetops and the soft touch of a faint breeze brushes my bare skin.
Breathing in the scent of pine, I enjoy the crunch in the rusty fallen needles beneath my feet and the gentle creak and nods of the downward-sweeping boughs. I might not go outside all that much, but when I do, I love to find a good tree to hang out with. There’s something so reassuring about an ancient tree, to know it has stood in that spot for a century or more, like a silent witness, stalwart and firm. I press my hand against the rough bark and take a deep breath. It almost feels as if the tree is breathing with me.
Then I notice something I hadn’t seen before. Tucked away behind a wall of huge rhododendron bushes in full bloom is what has to be another folly, although it seems a bit too well hidden to play a major part in the fairy-tale landscape created when the castle was first built three hundred years ago.
Not a medieval tower or Greek temple, but a tiny chapel, with the remains of arched Gothic windows at either end, though neither one has glass, and the roof is entirely gone. Then from inside I hear the laughter of a little girl.
At once I think of Eliza and how I lost her on the stairs, leaving her all alone in the dark. But when I run in through the chapel door I am amazed by what I see. The entire footprint of the chapel is filled with wildflowers of every conceivable colour, exploding into life amongst long, lush soft green grass. And the laughter I heard doesn’t belong to a lost ghost child but to Artie, who is standing in the centre of the flowers, twisting and twirling and letting the long grass graze the palms of her hands.
“Ava!” she says when she sees me. “Come on!”
Her invitation is impossible to resist, and before I know it I’m twisting, twisting on my heels, alongside Artie, laughing as butterflies flutter upwards, like fairies taking flight.
“No, come back,” I call to them. “I’m sorry, come back!”
Artie and I laugh and twirl, and twirl and laugh until I stop spinning and the world doesn’t. For one delicious moment I feel like I might fall off the face of the planet and into the sky, and then I collapse into the long grass in a fit of giggles alongside Artie.
“We were butterflies,” she tells me, her eyes bright with mirth, “and now we are worms!”
For some reason that is the most hilarious thing I have ever heard, and we are off again, borne along on a renewed gale of laughter. Then a face appears over us, Forrest. He’s wearing a quizzical expression caught somewhere between confusion and delight.
“I had no idea,” he says, looking down at me. Feeling as if I’ve been caught out or exposed somehow, I scramble to my feet, followed at a far more leisurely pace by Artie.
“No idea about what?” I say, brushing grass seeds off my presentation skirt, which had ridden up quite a bit to reveal my thighs. Hastily I smooth it back down to its usual respectable knee-grazing length.
“That you were so whimsical,” he said. “Then again, I suppose you do believe in ghosts and love looking at the stars with a passion. The signs were all there, Ava. You might be a scientist, but you’re a creative too.”
“Of course I am,” I tell him. “All scientists are.”
“Yeah, Dad,” Artie says, displaying excellent early signs of having a girl’s back.
