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There was a low stone wall to the left of the road, beautifully built of knapped flints, which gleamed a dull gray in the dying light of the day. Matthew looked backwards down the road at the receding countryside and saw a deer, poised on the track looking towards him, and then flirting its white tail and disappearing into the trees.
“A deer!” he exclaimed.
“Your deer,” his mother confirmed. “All the game belongs to the manor too.”
“I own deer!” he laughed.
The coach turned through a high stone entrance, rattled down a long drive, and then made a sweeping turn. The wheels crunched on shingle and the carriage stopped before a great wooden door.
“And here we are,” Alys said, glancing nervously at her mother. “Here we are again.”
Alinor was leaning back against the silk squabs of the seats, her hand at her throat as if to steady the heaving of her lungs. The footmen jumped down, let down the steps, and opened the carriage door. The double door of the house was flung open, and a man came out, a woman behind him, and behind them two maids and four house servants in a dark green livery, looking towards the carriage, waiting to meet their new masters.
Matthew got out first and tried to smile confidently at his servants, as if he were accustomed to this life, to the grand house, to the opendoor, to the rows of white-capped curtseys. He turned to help Alys and Alinor from the carriage and saw Alys supporting his grandmother and realized that she could barely stand. He stepped back to the carriage again and helped her down.
“Was the journey too much for her?” he asked Alys fearfully.
“It’s not the journey; it’s the returning.”
Alinor, her feet on the doorstep of the Priory, steadied herself to meet the steward. She had a sudden fear that he would be the same man who had forgiven her rent forty years ago, the man who knew of her terrible shame and public disgrace, the man who had seen her go into the stable loft to nurse a man with the plague and come down radiant, pregnant with his child.
But of course, it was not him. Mr. Tudeley had been an old man then, he had died years ago, and the cook behind him was not her old friend. Alinor did not recognize any of the housemaids nor the stable boys nor the garden lads. She held tightly to Matthew’s arm as he led her into the house and she heard the murmur of names as each servant ducked a bow or bobbed a curtsey, and all of them were unknown.
“The parlor,” the steward said, and Alinor forced herself to follow him, as if she had never before set foot on the polished wooden floor of the hall.
It was so much changed that she felt like the stranger she pretended to be. Wherever she turned was both familiar and hauntingly different. The stairs, where her son Rob had paused to show her his borrowed clothes, were just the same; but they descended into a hall that had been made over, and the little boy with the bright face that she remembered was a grown man with a child of his own. The private chapel which had faced east, opposite the grand staircase, had been transformed into a dining room, its illegal vocation wiped clean; and where the altar had stood, there was now a tall cabinet for showy silverware. Sir William’s gun room overlooking the garden was now the parlor. Alinor smelled rose petals, and missed the scent of cigars and gun oil. Sir William had been dead for years and the parlor had been cleaned and paneled, with matting on the floor and a rich Turkey carpet on theelegant oak gate-leg table with chairs set around a pretty fireplace. The steward led them in and offered them tea, wine, or small ale.
Matthew, looking at Alinor’s white face, ordered mulled wine and water for them all.
“Should you go to your bedroom, Mother Alinor?” he asked her. “Should you lie down and rest?”
She shook her head. “In a moment. I can’t bear to go up yet. Everything is so different, it’s like a homecoming, and yet all strange…”
“I can hardly believe it’s mine,” Matthew said, looking out of the window over the new rose garden and the herb garden beyond. Beyond the herb garden was a high wall set with an inviting door. “I’ll go out and look around. I should see the coach into the stable, and the horses,” Matthew said. “There might be our own carriage here. The lease said farm and stable equipment.”
“Then we could send the Avery carriage back to him at once,” Alys said. “We wouldn’t need it.”
“Nobody will know his name, if you’re afraid of that,” Alinor reminded her. “Nobody will see the crest and think of him. He went under another name then, and nobody will recognize us. It’s like a dream, as if we are ghosts at our old life.”
“This is our life,” Alys said stubbornly. “It is the old life that is forgotten, that is like a dream. It’s him that’s a ghost with no name.”
“What name?” Matthew asked. “What ghost? Who went by another name then?”
“Sir James Avery,” Alys answered when her mother nodded that she might speak. “He came here, years ago, under another name. He lied to us all. He was a spy.”
“Why?”
“It was the war,” Alinor told him. “He had to hide who he was, and it ended badly.”
“He was a liar,” Alys said sharply.
Alinor smiled at her daughter. “There were many lies,” she said gently. “And most of them for love. And all of them either forgotten or forgiven. They are nothing to Matthew.” She turned to him. “You go and explore your new country! There are no pasts or ghosts for you!”
He beamed at her and strode to the door. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe our luck.”
The two women exchanged a look, as if they thought that luck had once been against them.
“You’re a lucky boy,” Alinor told him, as if to defy chance itself. “And now that we are here again, I begin to think that we are lucky too.”
