The Woman In The Lake: Can she escape the shadows of the past?. Nicola Cornick

Constance,’ I said. ‘You are home.’

      She opened sleep-dazed dark eyes and looked at me, waking suddenly, despite the care I had taken not to startle her.

      ‘Home? Lydiard? Oh, madam!’

      She scrambled up and thrust the door wide, jumping down before the groom had stirred to come and help us. I smiled wryly to think that one of us at least was pleased to be here.

      I had not been to Lydiard since the first year of my marriage. I had been happy enough then, although perhaps not as happy as I should have been as a new bride. Marriage had not been at all as I had imagined.

      ‘What on earth were you thinking, Bella?’ my sister Betty had asked bluntly when my betrothal was announced. ‘Were you drunk? Everyone says you must have been to accept Eustace Gerard.’

      It was true that Eustace had proposed to me at Vauxhall Spring Gardens but I had been quite sober that night. It had been a whim, an impulse, I suppose. He had offered escape, or so I had thought, and I had been bored with my pattern card life as a young lady of the ton and had grasped after something different. In those days Eustace had made me laugh. He made no such efforts to amuse a wife. I drew my cloak a little closer about me. For all that this was July the air was chill and fresh out here in the country. It had a different quality to London.

      The lad from the stables had run on ahead to raise the house whilst the groom and coachman dealt with the horses. By the time that Constance and I reached the door, there was a lantern flaring in the hall and Pound, the steward, was shrugging on his jacket and hurrying towards us, cross and flustered. His shirt flapped loose and his hair stood up at the back.

      ‘My lady!’ His gaze darted to my face and registered my bruises with the mere flick of an eyelid before he resorted to his true grievance. ‘We did not expect you! If you had told us—’

      I raised a hand to stem the flow of reproach. I was too weary to hear him out. ‘It is of no consequence. All I require is my usual room made up and some hot water and a little food…’

      He looked appalled. Such simple matters seemed impossible to achieve. For the first time I looked about the hall and saw what the darkness and lamplight had concealed: the cobwebs and dust, the filthy drapes. There was a smell of stale air and old candle wax. It was cold. Probably there were rats.

      ‘Surely,’ I said, my voice sharpening, ‘my lord pays you to maintain his house in an appropriate style even when he is not present?’

      Pound’s face pursed up like a prune. ‘Had we known to expect you—’ he repeated.

      ‘You should always expect me. I do not have to give you notice of my whereabouts.’

      ‘No, my lady.’ His expression smoothed away into blandness but I knew that for all the outward show, he was annoyed. That, however, was not my concern.

      Constance, looking from one of us to the other, stepped forward. ‘I can go to find some food and some hot water, milady,’ she said, ‘if Mr Pound can raise the housekeeper and see to your room.’

      Constance was always the peacemaker. Probably Pound was some distant cousin of hers; she came from a village only a few miles distant and everyone in those parts was related to one another.

      ‘I’ll wait in the drawing room,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Constance.’

      Pound’s gaze flickered between us, hard to read. He seemed surprised that I addressed Constance by her first name. It was not the custom but with a personal maid I always felt the need to be less formal. We were friends of a kind, after all. She dropped a curtsey and sped off towards the kitchen passage. Pound followed more slowly, adjusting his jacket and smoothing his hair for the housekeeper’s benefit if not for mine.

      The drawing room was as unwelcoming as the hall. There was no light so I went back to the hall and took a branch of candles from the table by the door. From upstairs came the sound of voices raised in altercation. I had not met the Lydiard housekeeper and did not know her name but it seemed she had a fine pair of lungs even if she did not know how to keep house.

      Pulling one of the covers off a chair I sat down and waited. Even with the candlelight the room looked sad and dark. Shrouded pictures of Eustace’s ancestors looked down their Gerard noses at me as though I, the daughter of a Duke, was not good enough to marry a mere Viscount. No light or warmth had penetrated here during the day and I thought I smelt damp plaster. The grand marble fireplace yawned cold and empty, full of the winter’s ashes. I wondered for a moment why I had come here, to the end of the world, and then I remembered. I remembered the golden gown, I remembered Eustace’s violence and I remembered that I planned to be revenged on him. Here, at Lydiard, I would settle the score.

      Constance was the perfect accomplice. I knew she was Eustace’s spy. She had been from the moment he appointed her as my maid. They both thought I was unaware of it but I had known all along. It did not matter to me; she was useful in passing on the information I wished Eustace to receive and now I would use her to lure Eustace to Lydiard so that I could deal with him.

      I think I must have fallen asleep where I sat, for when I woke, the candles had gone out and the room was full of darkness and silence. I felt cold, stiff and confused, my mind fogged with dreams. I stumbled to my feet, clumsily bumping into the corner of a table, reaching out to steady myself but touching nothing but thin air. Why had everyone left me alone in the dark? I felt both forlorn and furious at the same time.

      A sliver of light showed in the corner of the room and I groped my way towards it. My fingers met the smooth panels of a door and the hard edge of the doorknob. I turned it and realised that I was in the little dressing room that lay in the north-east corner of the house, facing the church. Faint light fell through the window with its intricate painted diamond panes, suggesting that dawn was coming. I stood for a moment watching the strengthening light deepening the colours in the glass. I had loved that window from the first moment I had seen it. It had given me so many ideas for my drawing and painting; Eustace had laughingly said the room must become my studio.

      But this was odd. If I was in the little dressing room then I could only have come through the door in the corner of the grand bedroom and not from the drawing room, where I had sat down and apparently fallen asleep… And now I looked about it, the room was much changed, painted in blue with a strange-looking desk all gold and black in the alcove, and on the walls were drawings, pastels and sketches in a hand I immediately recognised as my own.

      Except that the pictures were unfamiliar, and their subjects and settings were completely unknown to me.

      A long, cold shiver ran along my skin. I walked up to them to stare more closely. The room was as bright as day now but I had not noticed the change at once because I was too intent on the images on the wall. There was a charming pastel of a woman and a child holding hands and dancing, a drawing of three little rounded cupids sporting together and there, in the corner of the room, a pencil sketch of an elegant lady seated on a terrace with a little dog curled up on a cushion beside her.

      There could be no mistake. I knew my own style and design as one does a hand so familiar that it is instinctive. I turned slowly to take them all in and saw a watercolour of a spray of flowers I had seen in a hedgerow in spring. I had taken a rough copy of them in my notebook and here they were in a painted panel, pale pink and white on blue, entwined with leaves, just as I had envisaged drawing them. There was china and porcelain adorned with the same sorts of patterns. And there, on the shiny black top of the desk, was a portrait framed in wood of a very pretty girl. It was signed with the initials I.A.C.B. I leaned closer to read the square piece of card beneath: ‘ A stipple engraving published by John Boydell in 1782 after Lady Isabella’s 1779 painting of her friend and cousin Lady Georgiana Cavendish.’

      I sat down very abruptly in the little wicker chair by the desk.

      We were in the year 1763.

      I knew nothing of a John Boydell who published stipple engravings.

      As for the china and porcelain, a lady might draw and paint but she did not produce designs for commercial use.