Chapter 37

"Iremember this!" Marcus cried out, "I was hiding from my father. I had discovered this place trying to get as far from him as I could. And I found that Arthur already knew of it, had been here before me. He had carved his name and the date of his birth on this beam and I did the same! He was only hours older, but as my birth was after midnight, he was born a day before me. He would tease me about it too, and I would despise it!" he roared in laughter.

Selina, too, laughed for joy at the sudden, unexpected revelation. "Does this prove who you are, do you think?" she asked.

"You can see that the engraving is old. The exposed wood has been so for a while. How else would my name appear here unless I am a son of Jeffrey Roy?" Marcus said, "they will say that I added this here myself to support my claim but any carpenter should be able to look at those engravings and give an estimate on how old they are."

He hugged her impulsively, laughing and she gladly returned the embrace. They had been guided here by destiny, driven to despair and anger, and through that emotion finding the proof that they needed. Selina could feel the relief flood through Marcus' body as he slumped against the beams, looking up at the old carving, touching it.

"I had forgotten this day, as though it had never existed. But now I remember it. I remember the smell of this room. I said so when we first set foot here. The longer we've been here, the more comes back to me. They were not always so dusty and inaccessible. Not always simply used for storage…"

He had been tracing the carving with his finger, over and over again as he spoke. Now, he froze. His eyes glazed over for a moment as though he were seeing through the gloom and the dust into a brighter past.

"I remember being here with my mother," he whispered.

Selina made to sit next to him but he was on his feet like a shot, so quickly that he banged his head on a beam.

"Selina! I remember being here with my mother. She was leading me by the hand. She was…she was laughing, smiling. Kind. My god but I always thought that she had been in league with my father, that she didn't care. But, being here has unlocked a memory and…I have to find it!"

"Find what? What are you talking about?" Selina protested.

But Marcus was snatching up the lantern and hurrying away into the shadows. Selina followed.

"Does this have something to do with the proof we were looking for?" she asked.

"It is the proof we were looking for," Marcus said, looking back over his shoulder with a triumphant grin, "there is a place up here, I will know it when I see it. I can't say for sure how to find it but…at the highest point of Valebridge, there is a circular window. You can just about see it from the outside, but the room that it belongs to is lost. Beveridge believes it is a false window but I've remembered being on the other side of it, looking out. With my mother beside me. It is in these attic rooms somewhere. It was a private space for her, her own escape from my father."

They continued their search along narrow passageways, up and down stairs beneath thick, cobwebbed beams.

"I think I remember Arthur telling me something of a refuge for your mother. That his father had it boarded up? I assumed it was a room of the house."

"Boarded up? That must have happened after I left. I have no memory of that," Marcus replied thoughtfully, "that will make it harder to find, although if I am right, it should be right around…"

They turned a bend in a passageway in which they had to stoop to avoid the roof beams. Ahead of them was a dead end. Thick boards crisscrossed the space ahead. Marcus held up the lantern, scrutinizing the boards and comparing them to the wood that made up the walls of the passageway.

"These boards are a different kind of wood to the rest of the construction and newer," he said, "this is it. Stand back."

Selina took a few steps back and Marcus lifted a booted foot and kicked out at the lowest of the boards. It cracked and splintered. Two more kicks and it had snapped in two. Marcus began attacking the next, then the next. Finally, there was enough room for Selina to crouch and shove the lantern into the gap revealed to see what lay beyond.

"I see the window!" she cried, "you were right."

Encouraged, Marcus renewed his assault on the other boards, pulling at them and ramming them with his shoulder until they had all been cleared. Beyond was a broad room with a sloping roof to either side and a window at the far end. A chaise longe lay against one wall. A small armchair, clearly made for a child, stood next to it. A large picture leaned against the sloping roof opposite the chaise. There wasn't much daylight coming into the room through the grimy window. Marcus went over and rubbed at the years of accumulated dirt with his sleeve, clearing a patch for pale daylight to shine through.

"Is this your mother?" Selina asked.

Marcus turned with trepidation. When he had returned home, there had been no pictures of his mother on the walls. He himself had removed any of his father and had assumed that Arthur had disposed of those in which their mother was the subject. Now he looked at her and it was as though a lock had been turned in his mind, opening a door into the past. The picture was of a woman with auburn hair and green eyes. Her skin was pale and her full lips upturned in a secretive smile. Her cheeks were high and angled, giving her a look of the exotic. Beside her stood two boys of five or six years old.

"This one is you. I can see the resemblance," Selina said wonderingly, "and that is Arthur. This is your proof, Marcus!"

But Marcus was staring at the painting, seeing through it to a day of the distant past.

"She brought me up here to watch the swallows flying from the eaves of the house. That window over there gave a perfect view of them. Father was angry and mother wanted me out of his way. To protect me. I stayed here while she went to fetch supper from the kitchens. I fell asleep on the chaise. When I woke up, it was my father in the room, not her. He dragged me downstairs and that was when this room was discovered. He couldn't bear that we had an escape from him, an innocent respite from his cruelty. I have a memory of sitting in that armchair while my mother wrote in a book. I asked her what she was writing and she just said a word I didn't understand at the time. Posterity."

"So, she kept a diary?" Selina asked.

"Yes, though I've never found it. But then I had forgotten all about this room."

He looked about himself with wonder, memories flooding back to him. Some were no more than blurred sensory impressions, a smell, or a sound. Some were more concrete. He felt guilty that he had forgotten so much of his mother, that his mind had erased those memories.

And I did not even have the courage to walk into the asylum in which she spent her last years. I owed her that much. She was not cruel, she was as much a victim as Arthur and I.

He went to the chaise, seeing the elegant, gentle form of his mother sitting there writing in her diary. Saw himself sitting in the little armchair, feet dangling and drawing squiggly lines in his own jotter, pretending to write. Sitting on the chaise, he ran his hands over the cushion where it joined the arm, then the back. But there was nothing.

"It was too much to hope for," he said with chagrin, "I had thought that maybe she would have hidden the diary here. I suppose there is nowhere to hide it that father would not have found it."

Selina sat next to him, taking his hands. As she sat, the sound of something hitting the floor came from beneath the chaise. They looked at each other for a moment and then scrambled to look. Selina saw it first, reaching beneath the chaise to the wood-bound book that must have been secured to the underside of the furniture. Over time, the fastening had perished, until Selina's slight weight was enough to dislodge it. And there was the final answer they sought. The carving and the picture linked him to the house and now the private journal of the Duchess of Valebridge, who loved her children above all else. Marcus opened it with shaking hands. He was presented with a neat, elegant hand. Each page was headed with a date but there were inconsistent gaps of time between the dates.

The earliest entry was around the time that Marcus would have been three or four. He skimmed the dates, looking for a reference to a birthday or Christmas, where children might be mentioned. Part of him wanted to read the book from cover to cover but he knew there wasn't time. Selina was reading over his shoulder as he impatiently rifled through the pages and it was she who saw it.

"There! Go back, look Marcus!" she said excitedly.

A moment later, Marcus saw what she had seen. A passage written in a more untidy hand than the other pages. He saw among that hasty scrawl his own name.

‘The monster has finally done it. He has finally gone through with his threat after all these years. And god forgive me I do not have the courage to fight him, nor to leave him. Marcus has been sent away. I do not know where, only that it is somewhere that I will never find him. Of that, Jeffrey was positively gleeful about. By now he is lost to me and while I want to leave this devil masquerading as a man, I cannot. For I still have Arthur. Of my two sons, I still have one. The blackguard has decided that Marcus is too weak to be Duke, that he must be exiled and written out of our family history…'

Marcus could read no more. The book fell from nerveless fingers, his eyes blurring with tears. Selina was there, embracing him and he felt his head cushioned by her bosom. She held him tightly as he cried.