Rites of Spring Anders Motte (classic children's novels txt) 📖

‘She likes you,’ Thea says unnecessarily.

The comment evokes a wry smile. ‘Animals usually do.’

‘Don’t you have a dog of your own? Most people around here seem to.’

Hubert shakes his head. ‘We used to have them when I was little. Hunting dogs, outdoors in the kennels over by the stables. That was how my father wanted it. His dogs, not mine.’

Thea notices that he speaks in short sentences.

He produces a packet of cigarettes and offers it to her. She takes one, waits while he lights it and another for himself. She ought to go home really. Carry on reading the documents, find out what David and his friends saw that night. But this strange little man interests her.

The cigarettes he smokes are slender, with no filter. They remind her of the ones Margaux used to smoke. He turns towards the water. The smell of the marsh is unmistakable. Emee sits down between them, and they smoke in silence for a while.

‘What did you do before you came here?’ he asks.

‘I worked for Doctors Without Borders. At a field hospital in Idlib in Syria. We were bombed . . .’

She takes a deep drag, holds the smoke in her lungs. Why is she telling him this? She doesn’t even know him. And yet . . . The feeling is there again, the sense that she and this little man share something. The same kind of pain. The same kind of sorrow.

‘It was utter chaos,’ she goes on. ‘I lost colleagues, friends. I spent several weeks in hospital. I’m not fully recovered yet, to be honest.’ She falls silent. Her eyes are smarting. Maybe it’s the smoke, maybe not.

‘Your friend who’s sick – was she there?’ Hubert asks without turning his head.

‘Yes.’

He doesn’t ask any more questions; she is grateful for that. Instead he finishes his cigarette and tosses it into the moat, just as he did with the first one.

‘May I offer you a cup of coffee?’ he says.

*

The front door is small in comparison to the wing itself. Hubert’s old Land Rover is parked outside.

They go up the stone staircase and find themselves at the end of a long corridor on the first floor. To the right are two tall double doors equipped with a heavy steel bolt. There is a cross on one of the doors; this must be the chapel, which Dr Andersson mentioned. Straight ahead another door leads to the rest of the castle; it too is bolted.

Hubert guides her to the left. The ceilings are high, the floor made of huge, smooth slabs of stone. On the walls are gloomy paintings of stern men in wigs and uniforms, with the odd woman in a shiny dress, her face whitened with powder.

‘My ancestors,’ Hubert says, anticipating her question. ‘Eight generations of Gordons in chronological order.’

They pass several more closed doors until they reach one that is open. Thea is surprised to see a modern little kitchen.

‘Take a seat in the library.’ Hubert points towards the end of the corridor. ‘I’ll bring the coffee. You can let the dog off the lead if you like.’

Thea does as he suggests, and Emee runs off ahead of her, as if she already knows the way.

The room is large, it must be over a hundred square metres, with triple aspect windows. There are thick, valuable rugs on the floor, and the walls are lined with dark bookcases; you would need a ladder to reach the top shelves. The smell of cigars and old books makes Emee snuffle and sneeze before she gets down to the serious business of investigating the corners.

Thea goes over to the window facing onto the garden. She pushes the heavy velvet curtain aside and looks out. This must have been where Hubert was standing when she caught sight of him on the night of the storm.

She moves to another window on the short wall of the wing, with a view of the moat, the bridge and the forest. A skein of geese is flying high in the sky, and over to the right she can see the roof of the coach house.

Emee is still checking out the room, and has stopped by the drinks trolley. Up above her on the wall hangs a more modern portrait than the ones in the hallway. A hook-nosed, grim-faced elderly man in a suit is standing beside a beautiful, considerably younger woman with skin like alabaster. Between them is a boy in a sailor suit. He must be seven or eight years old, and the artist has done his best to tone down the scar on his upper lip. There is no mistaking the fact that the boy is Hubert Gordon, which means the adults must be his parents.

‘Mother and Father,’ Hubert confirms as he enters the room with a tray. ‘The last Count Gordon. The family dies out with me.’

He places the tray on a table between two wing-backed armchairs and gestures to her to take a seat as he pours the coffee.

‘No more Gordons at Bokelund,’ he continues. ‘Probably just as well . . .’

‘Why do you say that?’

He leans back in his chair. ‘Because the Gordons are terrible people.’

Thea raises her eyebrows.

‘Have you heard about the girls who haunt this place, Isabelle and Eleonor? How they died?’ Hubert’s tone is lighter, less tense.

‘One fell through the ice on her way to a secret tryst with her lover, and the other came off her horse,’ Thea says, remembering what David said during the TV interview.

Hubert shakes his head.

‘Isabelle drowned at the end of April 1753. At least that’s what it says in the parish records. The ice on the moat has never lasted beyond the end of March, not even in the worst of winters.’ He takes a sip of coffee. ‘And Eleonor was expecting a baby when she broke her neck in 1891. A pregnant woman riding out on a fox hunt sounds a little strange. According to the rumours, her own father was the father of the child.’

‘You