“I’m not saying there was any link between the two events,” the postmistress of Tambilla, Mrs. Edith Pigott, was heard to say to Mrs. Betty Diamond (who, as proprietress of the tearoom, was the recipient of most town “reckonology”), “but as you know, and I said it at the time, they were tempting fate to put that shiny new sign on the road gate. Halcyon indeed! It wasn’t a halcyon place for Mr. Wentworth, and neither was it, as things turned out, for them.”
Others drew an even more direct link between the house and the fate of those who lived within its walls.
“I tried to warn her,” said Mrs. Marjorie Fisher, recently widowed and even more pious than usual in grief. “Soon after they moved in, I told her there are some houses that bring ill fortune. All to do with the land itself. Blood spilled, old curses. Things from the past.”
Mrs. Turner had, indeed, received such news and advice, and had accepted both with typical equanimity. Sad things happened; people died. No one who had lost both parents in quick succession only to graduate from boarding school and launch herself alone into the world on the eve of a five-year war could have thought any differently.
“But don’t you ever get a strange feeling when you’re alone up there in that big house?” she had been asked more than once.
“Not at all,” she always answered.
“You’re not even the tiniest bit nervous?”
“Only that I might leave a door open and find a brown snake waiting for me in the loo.”
Mrs. Turner had little time for superstition. She was her father’s daughter, a scientist, governed by the twin principles of logic and reason. At the Woodford Dormitory School, she had won the prize for chemistry and been awarded a place at Somerville College. She would have gone up to Oxford had the war not intervened.
That said, there had been one matter relating to the house on which she had allowed emotion to overrule reason. When they first arrived, much of the original furniture had remained in place, under sheets, with still more in storage in the shed at the top of the driveway. Books and personal items had filled the shelves; art had hung on the walls. Above the sweeping central staircase, surveying the balcony that ran around the second floor and glaring down into the entrance hall, had been a large gilt-framed portrait of Mr. Wentworth.
Mrs. Turner had taken an immediate, strong dislike to the painting. It was the eyes, she had decided: angry eyes that followed one across the room, furious that people should be living in his house, that children should laugh and run down the stairs and tear around the balcony. She’d have gladly got rid of it for good, had even made noises about burning “the horrid thing,” but Mr. Turner, made reverent by signs of provenance, had been aghast. “The father of this house! Has the poor man not suffered enough?”
With the patience of a newlywed, Mrs. Turner had agreed that it could stay—“So long as I don’t have to look at it,” she’d added, according to Mr. Drumming, who had been called upon to move the offending portrait.
For a time, they’d just turned old Mr. Wentworth to face the wall, until finally a place was found for him in a room on the southern side of the entrance hall. They’d already taken to calling it Mr. Wentworth’s Parlor on account of the large collection of hunting trophies and pilfered colonial spoils that lined its shelves. The arrangement had satisfied Mrs. Turner. She had no plans ever to cross the threshold.
“She hated that room—she found it cold and stuffy,” Mrs. Esme Pike, the longtime housekeeper at Halcyon, was to recount in the week following the deaths. “And she wasn’t wrong. Even on the hottest day of summer, it could bring on a chill. She didn’t like the wallpaper, either. Called it ‘demoralizing’ and said that it reminded herof a room she’d sat in a long time ago, after the death of her mother, when she was waiting to learn what would become of her.”
Mrs. Turner was seven years old when her mother died—a shocking thing to happen to a child at any time, but especially traumatic coming only five weeks after the death of her father in a fall from the Clò Mòr Cliffs while counting puffins. Mother and child had repaired to Inverness after the accident, where they were taken in by one of her father’s scientific colleagues, the wife of whom, with a perdurable Protestant faith in the stiff upper lip, promptly outfitted young Isabel in “appropriate attire” and sent her along to school with the children of the household. It was from the chilly Inverness classroom, with its wall-length chalkboard and rows of wooden desks, that she had been collected unexpectedly by an unfamiliar woman with a serious face and taken to the austere library, whereupon the crushing news of her mother’s death was delivered.
Miss Bathsheba Stern, headmistress at the Sussex boarding school to which young Isabel was then sent, did not consider it appropriate to discuss the particulars of her students’ personal circumstances, even twenty years after a girl’s graduation and in the face of a police investigation into her untimely death. However, Miss Stern was willing to concede that the “child in question” had been “unlucky” to suffer two such terrible losses in quick succession. Reports sent from Miss Stern to the girl’s guardian—a distant great-uncle on her mother’s side, who lived in a stone farmhouse in the Bourgogne region of France—describe “a resilient child, not afraid of hard work, unshakable once her mind is set. Gifted in the sciences.” One letter, referring to previous correspondence that has since disappeared, provided the only suggestion that young Isabel had suffered in adjusting to her new circumstances. “You will be glad to hear that there has been some improvement with respect to her sleep habits. She no longer pines with quite the same zeal, and I predict that she will, in time, overcome her hardships.”
On the face of it, Mrs. Turnerhadovercome the hardships ofher childhood. With her enduring marriage to a charming man, her brood of spirited and handsome children, her grand house and glorious garden, there were few among the locals of Tambilla who could fathom that she might have been anything other than exceedingly happy. Indeed, the most common question conducted back and forth between the main street shoppers and customers in Betty Diamond’s tearoom during the early weeks of 1960, when suspicions began to spin and dart in new directions, was, “But she had everything, didn’t she?”
“There’s always more to a person’s situation than meets the eye, though, isn’t there,” Mrs. Pike was to comment in her interview at the Tambilla police station. “And it’s the peaceful-looking water holes that hide the sharpest rocks. Mrs. Turner was a discreet person—we were alike in that, I think. We each respected the other’s privacy. She didn’t much talk about herself, her past. I suppose that’s what made it so odd when she mentioned Mr. Wentworth’s parlor and how it reminded her of being a child after her mother died. In fact...”
“Mrs. Pike?”
The poor woman had adopted a most anguished expression and begun twisting her hands together in her lap. She glanced up at the young policeman. “It’s only that, well, she’d been doing quite a bit of reminiscing lately. It struck me as somewhat unusual at the time, but I didn’tdoanything. Now, though, considering all that’s happened, I just can’t help thinking that I should have seen it coming.”
***
4
An unseen bird, cutting from one treetop to another, dragged its shadow across the garden, causing Mrs. Turner to startle. The teacup she’d been balancing on its saucer slipped from her hand and fell to the bricks, shattering into a hundred small and smaller fragments. Years later, residents at the house would still be finding shards of fine French porcelain in the paving cracks.
Mrs. Turner knelt to pick up the larger pieces. She had not always been a nervy person—quite the opposite. She had received an award for valor at the end of the war; she had done brave and dangerous things. Not only had she learned to perceive risk and act anyway, but she had also enjoyed it.
“Issy was ever resolute,” explained Miss Gemma Hancock, a school friend with whom Mrs. Turner had gradually lost contact after she moved to Australia. “The sort of person who needed to feel vital, like she was working to a higher purpose. Some of us resented putting our lives on hold during the war, but she wasn’t like that. She was furious when she found out she was pregnant and had to wind back her efforts before it ended.”
Smarty, the cat, meowed disdainfully and executed a graceful exit as Mrs. Turner sat on the end of his garden bench. She turned the pieces over in her lap. The cup was one of the few items in her possession that had come with her from her past. Limoges, with hand-painted purple violets on each side and decorative gilding along the rim and handle. In one of the rare moments of disclosure that had so struck Mrs. Pike, Mrs. Turner had told the housekeeper she could remember her mother drinking from the teacup in the evening, after supper, while finishing the day’s sketches. Her family had moved a lot back then, “home” determined by the demands of her father’s work, but no matter where they’d been stationed the cup had accompanied them, carefully wrapped in tissue at the end of each assignment and carried to the next.
It had come to Isabel some years after their deaths, according to Mrs. Pike. Her parents’ immediate legacy had been a stipend allowing for the payment of school fees, accounts to be administered by the maternal great-uncle in France. On her graduation, whichcoincided with her eighteenth birthday, she’d inherited a bank account with a none-too-shabby balance, along with a leather steamer trunk containing various items that had, according to the accompanying note, belonged to her mother.
“Issy” had been a serious eighteen-year-old, remembered by school friends as “determined,” “capable,” and “jolly intelligent.” When she completed school, she said goodbye to her teachers and the indomitable Miss Stern and headed to London for the summer. There, she’d taken a cheap-but-cheerful bedsit in Bloomsbury, convincing the landlady—a fastidious widow with mauve curls and a hutch of rabbits in the back garden—that she was a worthy tenant by paying two months in advance. There hadn’t been much to the room, but it had been sufficient. Boarding school had conditioned her to straitened circumstances, and she was grateful for the view of checkerboard gardens from the small rear window of the terrace.
The trunk, which had been sent by sea from France, had arrived during her second week in her new home. The men from the shipping company deposited it, as instructed, on the floorboards in the middle of the bedsit, and for three days she left it there, unopened, observing it from all angles, walking as wide a circle around it as the small space would allow. Her mother’s maiden name, Mlle Amélie F. Pinot, was stenciled in faded gold ink along one side of the tan leather lid.
Much like that adventurous young woman who had followed her heart from France to England, Isabel Turner had arrived at a crossroad in her own life’s journey. She had sat the entrance exams for Oxford, but a part of her craved travel. “She spoke about going as far north as Orkney,” her friend, Miss Hancock, remembered. “She wanted to see things she’d never seen before, and I suppose she did by going to Australia. You can’t get much farther than that.”
