You’ve never been able to get this. I need to see that place. I need to find out about where I came from, the people I came from, my mother, my father, I have no clue who they were. I’ll probably never know, now this last link is gone. But I have to go there, be there, touch it and feel it. I’ve thought of nothing else since I read that letter – and it goes back to way before then. I’ve thought about this, or some version of it, ever since I found out I was adopted. Finally I’ve got the chance at resolution. And once I find that resolution, I can come home.’
Aaron ran a hand through his hair. ‘You’ve been through a lot, Rachel.’
‘I know what I’ve been through.’
‘I don’t want to see you go through any more.’
‘You won’t. I’m going on my own. You won’t have to see anything.’
Perhaps she should have kept the whole thing to herself. She supposed that she had wanted to share it with someone. She had wanted to talk about it with someone because it was too big to take in on her own.
It was hard to think about the person she really wished to discuss it with. His wisdom, his good sense, his kindness, how he would have taken her in his arms… He had always been her first port of call, and Rachel liked that expression because it was true: he’d been the harbour for her little ship that had been bouncing alone on the tides for too many years. He had taken her in, given her shelter, and she’d put too much on him, of course she had, mistaking him for the whole family she lacked, so that when he left it wasn’t just a husband, someone she had hoped to have kids with. It was everyone. It was the past as well as the future. She missed him. Oh, she did.
‘I have to do this, Aaron,’ she said. ‘And frankly I don’t care what you think.’
He nodded. She waited. But the day Aaron Grewal apologised would be the day the sky fell in. ‘Let’s have tonight together, OK?’ he said instead.
She kissed him, an answer he seemed to accept. The future vibrated with nothing and everything, an empty, fearsome space, yet its promise was the closest she had held to her heart in as long as she could remember. Winterbourne would relinquish its secrets. And if it fought her, if it dared make her wait longer than she already had, she would force its mysteries to the surface through sheer dark grit. She was good at that.
Cornwall, present day
Rachel didn’t like to delay once her mind was set. Twenty-four hours later she was boarding a train at Paddington, the key to Winterbourne safe in her pocket. She kept touching it, running her fingers over its ancient contours. It looked like a key that could open another world, the key to a trapdoor in the ground, beyond which strange creatures roamed and slept, and the sun rose at dusk and the moon rose at dawn.
A woman sat opposite her with a young girl. The girl was applying nail stickers, her focus entire. The woman flipped out a magazine, its cover detailing minor celebrities on vacation, with the headline SKINNY AND MISERABLE!
The train eased from its platform and a voice announced: ‘Welcome to this South West Trains service to Penzance, calling at…’ Rachel reached for her tablet and checked her mail, but it was no good, she couldn’t focus. Instead she looked through the window. It took a while to chug out of London, past the terraces under their drab grey sky, and the motion of the train made her tired. She hadn’t slept on the plane, had barely rested or stopped since she’d opened the letter, and she put her head back now and tried to relax. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw the faces of the two solicitors at Quakers Oatley, sitting opposite her, their expressions by turns fascinated and grave. She had been Alice in Wonderland, tumbling down the rabbit hole, and they were as captivated by her as she was by them. These gatekeepers were about to change her life, everything she had ever thought about herself, every presumption overturned. Her instinct about their being keen to move the case on had been right. Rachel had the impression that Winterbourne was an albatross for them and they welcomed the chance to get rid of its legacy. ‘We weren’t sure we’d be able to find you,’ the woman had said, adjusting her papers in the prim, efficient manner of one pleased at their own good luck, ‘or, if we did, what your reaction would be.’
The man had run through what they knew. Rachel craved more, each answer insufficient, each explanation scattered with holes. She yearned for the names of her mother and father but was left wanting. Her grandfather was identified as a Captain Jonathan de Grey, making Constance, as the letter made clear, Rachel’s aunt. But there was no grandmother. ‘What about the captain’s wife?’ she’d asked, scouring the scant family tree as the solicitors looked apologetically on. ‘That was her, right?’ But the man shook his head. ‘Your mother,’ he said gently, ‘had different parentage…’
It was his way of saying that Captain de Grey had gone elsewhere, and that Rachel’s mother had been born a bastard as a result of his affair. But who had she been? Who was the poor woman who had given birth to Rachel in a London hospital, looked into her baby’s eyes and decided to give her up? Allegedly Constance had been the only person who knew about Rachel, and about this American orphan’s connection to her family. Why hadn’t Constance sought to find her? Why hadn’t she spoken out? Rachel tried not to feel bruised, but it was hard. All her life she had felt fundamentally rejected, and even at the threshold of this incredible discovery that same rejection snapped at her heels. Her aunt had known of her and done nothing, content to let Rachel unearth whatever truths were left behind after she’d died. It didn’t make sense. More questions, more uncertainties: it seemed the more Rachel learned, the more clueless she grew.
When she asked about Constance, the glance the solicitors exchanged implied that she hadn’t been an easy woman. Rachel told herself that, for all the romance and surprise of Winterbourne just falling into her life like a first drift of January snow, she couldn’t for a moment imagine a fairy-tale ending. All her life she had invented pictures that made sense to her – that her birth mother had been unable to cope, or that Rachel had been taken against her will, or that someone had forced her mother to give her up – and there was safety in those knowable limits. Now, every version she’d held dear exploded. It all came to this: this house, this family, and these doubts she might never be able to assuage. Quakers Oatley had dealt with the de Greys for years, but they didn’t know how Rachel fitted in – only that Constance, on her deathbed, had made an assertion that turned out to be true.
It seemed alarmingly easy to inherit one of the country’s grandest estates. Rachel signed documents, provided identification and settled a fee.
In return: a key.
‘The only one,’ said the woman, before letting it go, and Rachel felt the sheer weight of it in her hand and wondered how many had held it in years gone by. It occurred to her that the key was the only thing she had ever touched that her mother, too, might also have touched – apart from herself, of course: her own skin.
She must have dozed because the next thing she knew they were rolling through unbroken countryside and the sun was setting over the hills. The woman opposite and her daughter had gone. Rachel’s carriage was empty.
‘Excuse me,’ she asked a steward on his way past, ‘where are we?’
‘Next stop Polcreath,’ he told her.
She sat back and watched the blackening landscape.
*
Dusk was nearly complete by the time they pulled into the station. The platform was
