Thunder rumbled above her and she paused, straining her ears for snippets of haunting piano music, but all she heard was the teeming rain. The distraction was enough to help her panic subside, and by the time she reached the first-floor landing, she felt calmer.
At the top of the stairs was Laurence – a full suit of armour. He was from the late mediaeval period and had been discovered in the attics when Edith was a girl.
‘He used to terrify me when I was young,’ Gulliver had admitted a few days after Tabitha had first moved to Cerensthorpe Abbey. ‘I was convinced I’d heard him moving around at night. Auntie Edie heard me whispering this to Mum and said, “Of course he patrols at night, Gull, it’s his job to keep us all safe.” It made me feel far better, but it was years before I realised she was joking.’
‘Perhaps she wasn’t,’ Tabitha had replied.
‘Maybe not,’ Gulliver had agreed. ‘Although, she also told me she believes the armour once belonged to George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, for which she has no verifiable source. Wedo know Elizabeth Howard, who became Elizabeth Boleyn, was granted this house in her dowry and it was later passed to her daughter, Mary, but there are no records suggesting George Boleyn even visited or divested himself of a suit of armour on the estate.’
‘Elizabeth Boleyn, mother of Anne Boleyn?’ Tabitha had asked and Gulliver had nodded.
She had stared at him, agog at the casualness with which Gulliver had dropped this information into conversation. There was no conceit on his part, it was family lore and he was obviously so used to his ancestry, he had forgotten how impressive it was to outsiders.
‘Auntie Edie has hundreds of stories about the abbey – not all from reliable sources – but they’re very entertaining and she loves telling them. I suspect she’s made a lot of them up herself, but the Boleyn connection is one we can verify through paperwork and the family tree. Whenever I ask her about the others, she always says the history of the house runs in her blood, as though this is the definitive response and we must not challenge her. How about your family? Any unexpected ancestors?’
‘We have a few,’ Tabitha had admitted. ‘I’ve been researching our family tree for years. On my mum’s side, there’s a legend stating when a woman of the Mott-Drayson line is upset or trying to hide something, any candle flames nearby will bend sideways and flutter, even if there’s no breeze. My grandmother called it the “feather flame”. It was supposed to originate with a Jane Carye who married Sir Thomas Mott. She was our first “natural-born witch”.’
Gulliver had stared at her in surprise. ‘Wow. Why did she call it that? It’s quite an odd thing to happen,’ he had said.
‘The story that’s come down to us is that they were “twin flames” – their love was so great for each other, they could not bear to be apart.’
‘What’s a “twin flame”?’ he had asked and his eyes had held an intensity, locking on to her gaze.
‘It’s like a soulmate,’ she had replied, her breath catching in her throat. ‘A twin flame is formed when a soul grows so full of love, it splits into two and two people carry half each. When you meet your twin flame, there’s a sense of having known one another before, forever, through all eternity. In Greek mythology, the original humans had two faces, four arms and four legs, but, scared of their power, Zeus divided them into two separate beings to make them less powerful and easier to control. This is where the idea of the soulmate came from, we’re searching for our other half. The twin flame is a more elemental version.’
They had stared at each other, aware of their own immediate friendship, the bond between them and – Tabitha had acknowledged to herself – the feeling she had known Gulliver forever.
‘Any others?’ he had asked and she had been relieved to move the subject on.
‘Apparently, every few generations, a daughter is born who’s “a dreamer”. She sees fragments of other lives, sometimes centuries old. My mum has odd dreams, so do I. The family call us “the dreaming girls” or, thanks to our ancestor Jane, “our natural-born witches”. There’s also a rhyme:“Feather, flame and whisper bind – what is lost, the heart will find” – none of us know what it means, but all the women of the family say it together at births, weddings and funerals. It’s tradition. My gran used to insist upon it, stating throughout folklore from Celtic and Norse to early Christian, feathers are messages fromthe ancestors, blessings or warnings and our rhyme kept us safe from harm, as well as connecting us to our past.’
Gulliver had grinned. ‘You must tell Auntie Edie, she’s been searching our family tree for a witch for years, she’ll be delighted.’
‘But I’m not on your family tree,’ she had protested.
He had given her an intense look. ‘Perhaps you are, the family tree is huge and I’m sure we have a Mott somewhere.’
Now, Tabitha stood beside Laurence, examining the intricate engraving on the cuirass or breast plate. She loved the idea it might have belonged to George Boleyn, the brother of Henry VIII’s second queen, Anne Boleyn. Gulliver had explained there was a link to Elizabeth Boleyn through her dowry and Tabitha had a fleeting image of two girls in Tudor dress, giggling together as they hurried through the winding corridors of Cerensthorpe Abbey.Anne and Mary, she thought,but where was George?Then she snapped back to the present and decided, when she had time, she would ask Gulliver or Edith to allow her to examine the family tree as her other passion was genealogy and she was eager to see the infamous names written on the same document as those of people she knew, it would feel like touching history.
‘Watch over me while I examine the painting,’ Tabitha murmured to Laurence, tracing her finger across the cool metal before turning towards the long corridor that led to several of the many bedrooms in the abbey.
Edith’s and Gulliver’s suites of rooms were on the opposite side of the house, overlooking the river Ceren, which ran through the grounds and out towards the rolling Hampshirecountryside. This wing housed the guest rooms with views of the ancient wood and the ruins of the original church within the abbey grounds.
The wind howled and rain battered the diamond-paned windows as Tabitha made her way along the corridor before turning left and halting in front of the painting. There was a cruelty to the image, a visceral anger that went beyond the red tooth and claw of nature, as though the artist was exercising their own despair.
Tabitha resumed her breathing exercises to control a spike of anxiety and when she felt calm again, she formulated a plan; with great care, she lifted the picture off the wall and began her examination.
Turning it around, she checked the back. From speaking to Gulliver’s mother, Molly, who managed the cleaning teams, Tabitha knew the smaller, less valuable paintings were regularly removed from the walls for dusting. Logic told her, if there was anything attached to the back, it would have been spotted long ago. Instead, she hoped there might be writing, but the smooth swathe of brown paper that sealed the rear was unmarked. There were a few wrinkles at the corners caused by the passage of time, but it was otherwise intact. Tabitha did not feel it was her place to remove the backing and check inside. If they were to dismantle it, Edith would have to be present.
With a sigh, wondering if she was wasting her time, Tabitha turned the painting around and propped it back against the wall. She flicked on the torch on her phone and, doing her best not to retch at the blood and gore, examined the image in detail. As she swept her torch across the feathers of the different birds, she was surprised to see the strokes were finer than she had expected, likewise the bark on the branch where the merlin and golden eagle observed the vulture below. Her eyes followed the bright light of the torch down the twisted line of the tree trunk and asshe peered into the darkest corner of the image, she looked more closely at a paler section of paint.
She had always assumed this odd splash of white was an affectation of the artist, perhaps a poorly executed suggestion of the sun intruding on the clearing where the birds dwelled, but as her torchlight flooded it, Tabitha realised it was an unrolled scroll. She moved closer and saw there were words; tiny, faded brown letters.
She snapped a series of pictures, enlarging and refining them until she could make sense of the words and as they shone on her phone, she gasped in surprise.
The great queen of battle, Morrigan,
The bird with the warrior soul
