Nicola Cornick - The Phantom Tree

‘It was authenticated,’ Adam said now, almost to himself. He straightened and pushed away from the desk, taking several strides across the gallery before turning back towards her, all repressed frustration and energy. ‘We found it with some other Tudor artefacts,’ he said. ‘There was no doubt about the dating. Then there was the box with the initials on it…’

‘The box still exists?’ Alison cut in quickly. ‘The one in the portrait?’

Adam stared at her. ‘Yes. Why?’

‘Oh.’ Alison moderated her tone, realising she had sounded too eager. ‘I thought there might be something interesting in it, that’s all. Something to do with Mary, I mean.’

Adam was still watching her. It was unsettling. She had always thought she was a good liar but now she was starting to doubt it.

‘There were some items inside,’ he agreed. ‘If that is indeed Mary Seymour in the portrait, I suppose they might have some connection to her.’ He did not elaborate and Alison knew it was deliberate. There was no reason why he would satisfy her curiosity.

Her heart was thumping. She could feel herself shaking. She knew she should not push this now but desperation was driving her harder than she had ever known it. Mary seemed only a breath away. And Arthur… What clues had Mary left her to Arthur?

‘Where did you find the box?’ she asked, and she could hear the quiver in her voice.

Adam shook his head. There was a faint smile playing about his lips now.

‘I’ll trade you that information – and more,’ he said, ‘to see the genealogical research you’ve done on Mary Seymour.’

There was a small, deadly pause.

Alison knew she was trapped. She could not see any way that she could show Adam the work she had done on tracing Mary without disclosing her own history. He had been right: she had not told him a single thing about her family. She had never spoken of them. But they were all there on the pages of notes she had so painstakingly compiled. The Seymour family tree linked them together, tangled as the roots of the old oaks of Savernake Forest. They were all there: she, Edward, Mary, Arthur…

The silence stretched out whilst her mind scrambled for a solution, but then Adam shifted and smiled a condescending smile that made her itch to smack him.

‘I thought not,’ he said pleasantly. ‘There is no research, is there?’ He ran a hand through his thick, fair hair. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why you’ve suddenly turned up after all this time, Alison, but there’s really no point. I moved on a long time ago—’

‘What? Wait!’ Alison drew back. ‘Are you implying I’m here because I wanted to see you ? I didn’t even know about your talk!’ She threw out a hand, narrowly missing the ceramic vase. ‘I came in because of her,’ she said, pointing at Mary’s picture. ‘It was nothing to do with you—’

‘Whatever.’ Adam raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘I’m not interested.’

‘Fine,’ Alison snapped. ‘Then I hope you don’t find that some other person more academically credible than I blows your Anne Boleyn theory to smithereens.’

She pushed open the door of the gallery and stepped out into the driving rain. She thought she heard Adam call after her as she slipped out into the dark but she did not wait, pulling up the hood of her jacket and hunching deeper inside it when the wind caught her with its icy edge. The disconsolate re-enactors were closing down their stalls and heading to the pub. A woman was wheeling a pushchair erratically across the pavement and was dragging a small child along with her other hand. He had toffee apple smeared across his face and was screaming.

Emotion pierced Alison deep inside where the hurt and the loneliness were locked away. She shuddered, blocking out the child’s scrunched-up face and the mother’s harassed scolding. Only fifty yards further along the wet pavement was her hotel. A small bay tree stood shivering in a planter on each side of the door. She hurried inside.

She’d chosen somewhere modern and exclusive rather than one of Marlborough’s more traditional places to stay. She’d always found that embracing the present was the best way to keep the past at bay. Except that in Marlborough tonight the past had swept back like a dark tide.

She was still shaking. She knew that rationally she could not blame Adam for thinking that she was only trying to stir up trouble, but rationality had nothing to do with the fury and frustration that welled up in her now. She felt the hot prick of angry tears against her eyelids. She had waited so long for word from Mary, each time she failed to find her, absorbing the blank wall of silence and the bitterness of defeat. And now here was Mary—and the box—and Adam was thwarting her attempts to get closer.

The winter storm was gathering, sending litter skipping along the gutters, dimming the Christmas lights with a fresh downpour of rain but, inside, the hotel was warm, opulent and lit discreetly by lamps with striped beige and cream shades. A smiling receptionist handed Alison her key. So often, Alison found light and warmth – the most basic trappings of modern life – gave her comfort and made her feel safe. Tonight, though, they only served to emphasise her sense of dislocation. So did the impersonal luxury of her room.

She dropped her soaking jacket on the floor and lay down on the bed, staring at the orange glow of the streetlights beyond the windows. She knew she did not have much choice. Adam had information she needed. He had the portrait, the box, possibly other artefacts connected to Mary. She had been waiting for five hundred years for news of her son. She could not let the chance slip now.

Mary, Wiltshire, 1557

Alison Banestre and I were cousins of a kind. We were both orphans. There the bond between us began and ended: Alison, my enemy.

We made a bargain, she and I. She helped me to escape; I helped her to find her son. It is entirely possible to bargain with an enemy if there is something that you both want and so it proved. Thus we were bound together through time.

We met at Wolf Hall. I came there in the summer of fifteen hundred and fifty-seven, in the fourth year of the reign of Mary the Queen. I was a Mary, too, cousin of the late king, Edward, daughter to one dead queen and niece to another, with a famous name and not a penny to pay my way. I was ten years old and I already had a reputation for witchcraft.

‘The child is possessed, your grace,’ the cook at Grimsthorpe told the Duchess of Suffolk when, at the age of five, I was found sitting under a table in the kitchens, holding a posset that had curdled. ‘That cream was as fresh as a daisy only a moment ago.’

‘Mary broke my spinning top!’ one of my Seymour cousins wailed one day when the wooden toy was found to have split neatly into two halves like a cut pear. ‘She put a spell on it!’

That was the first time I realised that I possessed the magic. He had been tormenting me and I had hated him; the anger had boiled over within me and I had wanted nothing more than to teach him a lesson.

I did not want such power though. I wanted no more than to be ordinary, accepted. My mother, many years before, had been within inches of arrest for heresy. Witchcraft was but one strand of such blasphemy and dissent and the thought of following her fate terrified me. Yet I could not escape. It came with me to Savernake, the whisper of witchcraft, wrapped like a cloak about me, for I was different, other, an outsider, whether I wished it or not.