Rebecca James - The Woman In The Mirror

He nodded. She waited. But the day Aaron Grewal apologised would be the day the sky fell in. ‘Let’s have tonight together, OK?’ he said instead.

She kissed him, an answer he seemed to accept. The future vibrated with nothing and everything, an empty, fearsome space, yet its promise was the closest she had held to her heart in as long as she could remember. Winterbourne would relinquish its secrets. And if it fought her, if it dared make her wait longer than she already had, she would force its mysteries to the surface through sheer dark grit. She was good at that.

Chapter 9

Cornwall, present day

Rachel didn’t like to delay once her mind was set. Twenty-four hours later she was boarding a train at Paddington, the key to Winterbourne safe in her pocket. She kept touching it, running her fingers over its ancient contours. It looked like a key that could open another world, the key to a trapdoor in the ground, beyond which strange creatures roamed and slept, and the sun rose at dusk and the moon rose at dawn.

A woman sat opposite her with a young girl. The girl was applying nail stickers, her focus entire. The woman flipped out a magazine, its cover detailing minor celebrities on vacation, with the headline SKINNY AND MISERABLE!

The train eased from its platform and a voice announced: ‘ Welcome to this South West Trains service to Penzance, calling at… ’ Rachel reached for her tablet and checked her mail, but it was no good, she couldn’t focus. Instead she looked through the window. It took a while to chug out of London, past the terraces under their drab grey sky, and the motion of the train made her tired. She hadn’t slept on the plane, had barely rested or stopped since she’d opened the letter, and she put her head back now and tried to relax. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw the faces of the two solicitors at Quakers Oatley, sitting opposite her, their expressions by turns fascinated and grave. She had been Alice in Wonderland, tumbling down the rabbit hole, and they were as captivated by her as she was by them. These gatekeepers were about to change her life, everything she had ever thought about herself, every presumption overturned. Her instinct about their being keen to move the case on had been right. Rachel had the impression that Winterbourne was an albatross for them and they welcomed the chance to get rid of its legacy. ‘We weren’t sure we’d be able to find you,’ the woman had said, adjusting her papers in the prim, efficient manner of one pleased at their own good luck, ‘or, if we did, what your reaction would be.’

The man had run through what they knew. Rachel craved more, each answer insufficient, each explanation scattered with holes. She yearned for the names of her mother and father but was left wanting. Her grandfather was identified as a Captain Jonathan de Grey, making Constance, as the letter made clear, Rachel’s aunt. But there was no grandmother. ‘What about the captain’s wife?’ she’d asked, scouring the scant family tree as the solicitors looked apologetically on. ‘That was her, right?’ But the man shook his head. ‘Your mother,’ he said gently, ‘had different parentage…’

It was his way of saying that Captain de Grey had gone elsewhere, and that Rachel’s mother had been born a bastard as a result of his affair. But who had she been? Who was the poor woman who had given birth to Rachel in a London hospital, looked into her baby’s eyes and decided to give her up? Allegedly Constance had been the only person who knew about Rachel, and about this American orphan’s connection to her family. Why hadn’t Constance sought to find her? Why hadn’t she spoken out? Rachel tried not to feel bruised, but it was hard. All her life she had felt fundamentally rejected, and even at the threshold of this incredible discovery that same rejection snapped at her heels. Her aunt had known of her and done nothing, content to let Rachel unearth whatever truths were left behind after she’d died. It didn’t make sense. More questions, more uncertainties: it seemed the more Rachel learned, the more clueless she grew.

When she asked about Constance, the glance the solicitors exchanged implied that she hadn’t been an easy woman. Rachel told herself that, for all the romance and surprise of Winterbourne just falling into her life like a first drift of January snow, she couldn’t for a moment imagine a fairy-tale ending. All her life she had invented pictures that made sense to her – that her birth mother had been unable to cope, or that Rachel had been taken against her will, or that someone had forced her mother to give her up – and there was safety in those knowable limits. Now, every version she’d held dear exploded. It all came to this: this house, this family, and these doubts she might never be able to assuage. Quakers Oatley had dealt with the de Greys for years, but they didn’t know how Rachel fitted in – only that Constance, on her deathbed, had made an assertion that turned out to be true.

It seemed alarmingly easy to inherit one of the country’s grandest estates. Rachel signed documents, provided identification and settled a fee.

In return: a key.

‘The only one,’ said the woman, before letting it go, and Rachel felt the sheer weight of it in her hand and wondered how many had held it in years gone by. It occurred to her that the key was the only thing she had ever touched that her mother, too, might also have touched – apart from herself, of course: her own skin.

She must have dozed because the next thing she knew they were rolling through unbroken countryside and the sun was setting over the hills. The woman opposite and her daughter had gone. Rachel’s carriage was empty.

‘Excuse me,’ she asked a steward on his way past, ‘where are we?’

‘Next stop Polcreath,’ he told her.

She sat back and watched the blackening landscape.

*

Dusk was nearly complete by the time they pulled into the station. The platform was empty apart from a man on a bench, his head tucked into the collar of his coat, and a couple of passengers who had disembarked with her. A sign read TAXI and Rachel followed it out to the road, where a car was parked with its headlights on. She went to the window and named her destination. The driver seemed surprised.

‘You sure?’ he said. ‘I thought it was derelict. No one’s lived there in years.’

‘My aunt lived there.’ It felt wonderful to say it. My.

‘Climb in, then.’

She was hoping he wouldn’t talk. But: ‘You American?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Where from?’

‘New York.’

‘So what brings you here? Winterbourne Hall’s not much of a tourist destination.’

‘Like I said, I have family here. Had. My aunt died recently.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

Rachel sat back, handling the key once more in her pocket. It felt warm, as if radiant, shimmering in anticipation of reaching home.

‘I expect you’ve got lots to sort out, then,’ said the driver, folding a stick of gum into his mouth. He looked at her in the rear-view mirror.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, family affairs and the like. After someone dies. You know.’

‘Yes. Yes, I have.’

‘You’ll be staying a while?’

‘As long as it takes.’

‘There’re people round here that can show you around, if you like.’

‘I’ll be fine. But thank you.’

‘Always friendly faces in Polcreath, you’ll see. And if you’re really short on company, I’m in the Landogger Inn most nights.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ But he’d said it with a twist of humour, which she returned. ‘The Landogger – that’s an unusual name.’

‘Named after the cliffs,’ he said, ‘right by Winterbourne. They’ll surround you. Lethal they are, too: a sudden drop. The house is right on the Landogger Bluff.’