Also by Mary Stewart

Madam, Will You Talk?

Wildfire at Midnight

Thunder on the Right

Nine Coaches Waiting

My Brother Michael

The Moonspinners

This Rough Magic

Airs Above the Ground

The Gabriel Hounds

Touch Not the Cat

Thornyhold

Stormy Petrel

Rose Cottage

THE ARTHURIAN NOVELS

The Crystal Cave

The Hollow Hills

The Last Enchantment

The Wicked Day

The Prince and the Pilgrim

POEMS

Frost on the Window

FOR CHILDREN

The Little Broomstick

Ludo and the Star Horse

A Walk in Wolf Wood

MARY STEWART

The Ivy Tree

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1961 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Mary Stewart 1961

The right of Mary Stewart to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Epub ISBN: 9781444720471

Paperback ISBN: 9781444720464

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

For Fredith and Thomas Kemp

A north country maid up to London had stray’d,

Although with her nature it did not agree;

She wept, and she sighed, and she bitterly cried:

‘I wish once again in the north I could be!

Oh! the oak and the ash, and the bonny ivy tree,

They flourish at home in the North Country.

‘No doubt, did I please, I could marry with ease;

Where maidens are fair many lovers will come:

But he who I wed must be North Country bred,

And carry me back to my North Country home.

Oh! the oak and the ash, and the bonny ivy tree,

They flourish at home in my own country.’

Seventeenth Century Traditional

1

Come you not from Newcastle?

Come you not there away?

Oh, met you not my true love?

Traditional.

I might have been alone in a painted landscape. The sky was still and blue, and the high cauliflower clouds over towards the south seemed to hang without movement. Against their curded bases the fells curved and folded, blue foothills of the Pennines giving way to the misty green of pasture, where, small in the distance as hedge-parsley, trees showed in the folded valleys, symbols, perhaps, of houses and farms. But in all that windless, wide landscape, I could see no sign of man’s hand, except the lines – as old as the ridge-and-furrow of the pasture below me – of the dry stone walls, and the arrogant stride of the great Wall which Hadrian had driven across Northumberland, nearly two thousand years ago.

The blocks of the Roman-cut stone were warm against my back. Where I sat, the Wall ran high along a ridge. To the right, the cliff fell sheer away to water, the long reach of Crag Lough, now quiet as glass in the sun. To the left, the sweeping, magnificent view to the Pennines. Ahead of me, ridge after ridge, running west, with the Wall cresting each curve like a stallion’s mane.

There was a sycamore in the gully just below me. Some stray current of air rustled its leaves, momentarily, with a sound like rain. Two lambs, their mother astray somewhere not far away, were sleeping, closely cuddled together, in the warm May sunshine. They had watched me for a time, but I sat there without moving, except for the hand that lifted the cigarette to my mouth, and after a while the two heads went down again to the warm grass, and they slept.

I sat in the sun, and thought. Nothing definite, but if I had been asked to define my thoughts they would all have come to one word. England. This turf, this sky, the heartsease in the grass; the old lines of ridge-and-furrow, and the still older ghosts of Roman road and Wall; the ordered, spare beauty of the northern fells; this, at my feet now, was England. This little world. This other Eden, demi-paradise . . .

It was lonely enough, certainly. We had it to ourselves, I and the lambs, and the curlew away up above, and the fritillaries that flickered like amber sparks over the spring grasses. I might have been the first and only woman in it; Eve, sitting there in the sunlight and dreaming of Adam . . .

‘Annabel!’

He spoke from behind me. I hadn’t heard him approach. He must have come quietly along the turf to the south of the Wall, with his dog trotting gently at heel. He was less than four yards from me when I whirled round, my cigarette flying from startled fingers down among the wild thyme and yellow cinquefoil that furred the lower courses of the Roman stones.

Dimly I was aware that the lambs had bolted, crying.

The man who had shattered the dream had stopped two yards from me. Not Adam; just a young man in shabby, serviceable country tweeds. He was tall, and slenderly built, with that whippy look to him that told you he would be an ugly customer in a fight – and with something else about him that made it sufficiently obvious that he would not need much excuse to join any fight that was going. Possibly it is a look that is inbred with the Irish, for there could be no doubt about this young man’s ancestry. He had the almost excessive good looks of a certain type of Irishman, black hair, eyes of startling blue, and charm in the long, mobile mouth. His skin was fair, but had acquired that hard tan which is the result of weathering rather than of sunburn, and which would, in another twenty years, carve his face into a handsome mask of oak. He had a stick in one hand, and a collie hung watchfully at his heels, a beautiful creature with the same kind of springy, rapier grace as the master, and the same air of self-confident good breeding.

Not Adam, no, this intruder into my demi-Eden. But quite possibly the serpent. He was looking just about as friendly and as safe as a black mamba.

He took in his breath in a long sound that might even have been described as a hiss.

‘So it is you! I thought I couldn’t be mistaken! It is you . . . The old man always insisted you couldn’t be dead, and that you’d come back one day . . . and by God, who’d have thought he was right?’

He was speaking quite softly, but just what was underlying that very pleasant voice I can’t quite describe. The dog heard it, too. It would be too much to say that its hackles lifted, but I saw its ears flatten momentarily, as it rolled him an upward, white-eyed look, and the thick collie-ruff stirred on its neck.

I hadn’t moved. I must have sat there, dumb and stiff as the stones themselves, gaping up at the man. I did open my mouth to say something, but the quiet, angry voice swept on, edged now with what sounded (fantastic though it should have seemed on that lovely afternoon) like danger.

‘And what have you come back for? Tell me that! Just what do you propose to do? Walk straight home and hang up your hat? Because if that’s the idea, my girl, you can think again, and fast! It’s not your grandfather you’ll be dealing with now, you know, it’s me . . . I’m in charge, sweetheart, and I’m staying that way. So be warned.’

I did manage to speak then. In face of whatever strong emotion was burning the air between us, anything that I could think of to say could hardly fail to sound absurd. What I achieved at last, in a feeble sort of croak that sounded half paralysed with fright was merely: ‘I – I beg your pardon?’

‘I saw you get off the bus at Chollerford.’ He was breathing hard, and the fine nostrils were white and pinched looking. ‘I don’t know where you’d been – I suppose you’d been down at Whitescar, blast you. You got on the Housesteads bus, and I followed you. I didn’t want you to recognise me coming up the field, so I waited to let you get right up here, because I wanted to talk to you. Alone.’

At the final word, with its deliberately lingering emphasis, something must have shown in my face. I saw a flash of satisfaction pass over his. I was scared, and the fact pleased him.

Something, some prick of humiliation perhaps, passing for courage, helped me to pull myself together.

I said, abruptly, and a good deal too loudly: ‘Look, you’re making a mistake! I don’t—’

‘Mistake? Don’t try and give me that!’ He made a slight movement that managed to convey – his body was as eloquent as his face – a menace as genuine and as startling as his next words. ‘You’ve got a nerve, you bitch, haven’t you? After all these years . . . walking back as calm as you please, and in broad daylight! Well, here am I, too . . .’ His teeth showed. ‘It doesn’t necessarily have to be midnight, does it, when you and I go walking at the edge of a cliff with water at the bottom? Remember? You’d never have come mooning up here alone, would you, darling, if you’d known I was coming too?’

This brought me to my feet, really frightened now. It was no longer imagination to think that he looked thoroughly dangerous. His astounding good looks, oddly enough, helped the impression. They gave him a touch of the theatrical which made violence and even tragedy part of the acceptable pattern of action.

I remember how steep, suddenly, the cliff looked, dropping sharply away within feet of me. At its foot Crag Lough stirred and gleamed under some stray breeze, like a sheet of blown nylon. It looked a long way down.

He took a step towards me. I saw his knuckles whiten round the heavy stick. For a mad moment I thought I would turn and run; but there was the steep broken slope behind me, and the Wall at my right, and, on the left, the sheer cliff to the water. And there was the dog.

He was saying sharply, and I knew the question mattered: ‘Had you been down to the farm already? To Whitescar? Had you?’

This was absurd. It had to be stopped. Somehow I managed to grab at the fraying edges of panic. I found my senses, and my voice. I said flatly, and much too loudly: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about! I don’t know you! I told you you’d made a mistake, and as far as I’m concerned you’re also behaving like a dangerous lunatic! I’ve no idea who you think you’re talking to, but I never saw you before in my life!’

He hadn’t been moving, but the effect was as if I’d stopped him with a charge of shot. Where I had been sitting I had been half turned away from him. As I rose I had turned to face him, and was standing now only two paces from him. I saw his eyes widen in startled disbelief, then, at the sound of my voice, a sort of flicker of uncertainty went across his face, taking the anger out of it, and with the anger, the menace.

I followed up my advantage. I said, rudely, because I had been frightened, and so felt foolish: ‘And now will you please go away and leave me alone?’

He didn’t move. He stood there staring, then said, still in that edged, angry tone that was somehow smudged by doubt: ‘Are you trying to pretend that you don’t recognise me? I’m your cousin Con.’

‘I told you I didn’t. I never saw you in my life. And I never had a cousin Con.’ I took a deep, steadying breath. ‘It seems I’m lucky in that. You must be a very happy and united family. But you’ll excuse me if I don’t stay to get to know you better. Goodbye.’

‘Look, just a minute – no, please, don’t go! I’m most terribly sorry if I’ve made a mistake! But, really—’ He was still standing squarely in the path which would take me back to the farm track, and the main road. The cliff was still sheer to one side, and the water, far below us, smooth once more, glassed the unruffled sky. But what had seemed to be a dramatic symbol of menace towering between me and freedom, had dwindled now simply into a nice-looking young man standing in the sunshine, with doubt melting on his face into horrified apology.

‘I really am most desperately sorry! I must have frightened you. Good God, what on earth can you think of me? You must have thought I was crazy or something. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I, well, I thought you were someone I used to know.’

I said, very drily: ‘I rather gathered that.’

‘Look, please don’t be angry. I admit you’ve every right, but really – I mean, it’s pretty remarkable. You could be her, you really could. Even now that I see you closely . . . oh, perhaps there are differences, when one comes to look for them, but – well, I could still swear—’

He stopped abruptly. He was still breathing rather fast. It was plain that he had indeed suffered a considerable shock. And, for all his apology, he was still staring at me as though he found it difficult to believe me against the evidence of his eyes.

I said: ‘And I’ll swear too, if you like. I don’t know you. I never did. My name isn’t Annabel, it’s Mary. Mary Grey. And I’ve never even been to this part of the world before.’

‘You’re American, aren’t you. Your voice. It’s very slight, but—’

‘Canadian.’

He said slowly: ‘She went to the States . . .’

I said violently and angrily: ‘Now, look here—’

‘No, please, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it!’ He smiled then, for the first time. The charm was beginning to surface, now, through what I realised had been still a faint filming of disbelief. ‘I believe you, truly I do, though it gets more fantastic every minute I look at you, even with the foreign accent! You might be her twin . . .’ With an effort, it seemed, he dragged his uncomfortably intent stare from my face, and bent to caress the dog’s ears. ‘Please forgive me!’ The swift upward glance held nothing now but a charming apology. ‘I must have scared you, charging up like that and looming over you like a threat from the past.’

‘My past,’ I retorted, ‘never produced anything quite like this! That was some welcome your poor Prodigal was going to get, wasn’t it? I – er, I did gather you weren’t exactly going to kill the fatted calf for Annabel? You did say Annabel?’

‘Annabel. Well, no, perhaps I wasn’t.’ He looked away from me, down at the stretch of gleaming water. He seemed to be intent on a pair of swans sailing along near the reeds of the further shore. ‘You’d gather I was trying to frighten her, with all that talk.’

It was a statement, not a question, but it had a curiously tentative effect. I said: ‘I did, rather.’

‘You didn’t imagine I meant any of that nonsense, I hope?’

I said calmly: ‘Not knowing the circumstances, I have no idea. But I definitely formed the impression that this cliff was a great deal too high, and the road was a great deal too far away.’

‘Did you now?’ There, at last, was the faintest undercurrent of an Irish lilt. He turned his head, and our eyes met.

I was angry to find that I was slightly breathless again, though it was obvious that, if this excessively dramatic young man really had intended murder five minutes ago, he had abandoned the intention. He was smiling at me now, Irish charm turned full on, looking, I thought irritably, so like the traditional answer to the maiden’s prayer that it couldn’t possibly be true. He was offering me his cigarette-case, and saying, with a beautifully calculated lift of one eyebrow: ‘You’ve forgiven me? You’re not going to bolt straight away?’

I ought, of course, to have turned and gone then and there. But the situation was no longer – if, indeed, it had ever been – dangerous. I had already looked, and felt, fool enough for one day; it would look infinitely more foolish now to turn and hurry off, quite apart from its being difficult to do with dignity. Besides, as my fright had subsided, my curiosity had taken over. There were things I wanted to know. It isn’t every day that one is recognised – and attacked – for a ‘double’ some years dead.

So I stayed where I was, returned his smile of amused apology, and accepted the cigarette.

I sat down again where I had been before, and he sat on the wall a yard away, with the collie at his feet. He was half turned to face me, one knee up, and his hands clasping it. His cigarette hung in the corner of his mouth, the smoke wisping up past his narrowed eyes.

‘Are you staying near by? No, I suppose you can’t be, or everyone would be talking . . . You’ve a face well known in these parts. You’re just up here for the day, then? Over here on holiday?’

‘In a way. Actually I work in Newcastle, in a café. This is my day off.’

‘In Newcastle?’ He repeated it in a tone of the blankest surprise. ‘You?’

‘Yes. Why on earth not? It’s a nice town.’

‘Of course. It’s only that . . . well, all things considered, it seems odd that you should have come to this part of the world. What brought you here?’

A little pause. I said abruptly: ‘You know, you still don’t quite believe me. Do you?’

For a moment he didn’t reply, that narrow gaze still intent through the smoke of the cigarette. I met it squarely. Then he unclasped his hands slowly, and took the cigarette out of his mouth. He tapped ash off it, watching the small gout of grey feathering away in the air to nothing.

‘Yes. I believe you. But you mustn’t blame me too much for being rude, and staring. It’s a queer experience, running into the double of someone you knew.’

‘Believe me, it’s even queerer learning that one has a double,’ I said. ‘Funnily enough, it’s a thing one’s inclined to resent.’

‘Do you know, I hadn’t thought of that, but I believe you’re right! I should hate like hell to think there were two of me.’

I thought: and I believe you; though I didn’t say it aloud. I smiled. ‘It’s a violation of one’s individuality, I suppose. A survival of a primitive feeling of – what can one call it – identity? Self-hood? You want to be you, and nobody else. And it’s uncomfortably like magic. You feel like a savage with a looking-glass, or Shelley seeing his doppelgänger one morning before breakfast.’

‘Did he?’

‘He said so. It was supposed to be a presage of evil, probably death.’

He grinned. ‘I’ll risk it.’

‘Oh, lord, not your death. The one that meets the image is the one who dies.’

‘Well, that is me. You’re the image, aren’t you?’

‘There you are,’ I said, ‘that’s just the core of the matter. That’s just what one resents. We none of us want to be “the image”. We’re the thing itself.’

‘Fair enough. You’re the thing itself, and Annabel’s the ghost. After all, she’s dead.’

It wasn’t so much the casual phrasing that was shocking, as the lack of something in his voice that ought to have been there. The effect was as startling and as definite as if he had used an obscene word.

I said, uncomfortably: ‘You know, I didn’t mean to . . . I should have realised that talking like this can’t be pleasant for you, even if you, well, didn’t get on with Annabel. After all, she was a relative; your cousin, didn’t you say?’

‘I was going to marry her.’

I was just drawing on my cigarette as he spoke. I almost choked over the smoke. I must have stared with my mouth open for quite five seconds. Then I said feebly: ‘Really?’

His mouth curved. It was odd that the lineaments of beauty could lend themselves to something quite different. ‘You’re thinking, maybe, that there’d have been very little love lost? Well, you might be right. Or you might not. She ran away, sooner than marry me. Disappeared into the blue eight years ago with nothing but a note from the States to her grandfather to say she was safe, and we none of us need expect to hear from her again. Oh, I admit there’d been a quarrel, and I might have been’ – a pause, and a little shrug – ‘well, anyway she went, and never a word to me since that day. How easily do you expect a man to forgive that?’

You? Never, I thought. There it was once more, the touch of something dark and clouded that altered his whole face; something lost and uncertain moving like a stranger behind the smooth façade of assurance that physical beauty gives. No, a rebuff was the one thing he would never forgive.

I said: ‘Eight years is a long time, though, to nurse a grudge. After all, you’ve probably been happily married to someone else for most of that time.’

‘I’m not married.’

‘No?’ I must have sounded surprised. He would be all of thirty, and with that exterior, he must, to say the least of it, have had opportunities.

He grinned at my tone, the assurance back in his face, as smoothly armoured as if there had never been a flaw. ‘My sister keeps house at Whitescar; my half-sister, I should say. She’s a wonderful cook, and she thinks a lot of me. With Lisa around, I don’t need a wife.’

‘Whitescar, that’s your farm, you said?’ There was a tuft of sea-pink growing in a crevice beside me. I ran a finger over its springy cushion of green, watching how the tiny rosettes sprang back into place as the finger was withdrawn. ‘You’re the owner? You and your sister?’

‘I am.’ The words sounded curt, almost snapped off. He must have felt this himself, for he went on to explain in some detail.

‘It’s more than a farm; it’s “the Winslow place”. We’ve been there for donkey’s ages . . . longer than the local gentry who’ve built their park round us, and tried to shift us, time out of mind. Whitescar’s a kind of enclave, older than the oldest tree in the park – about a quarter the age of that wall you’re sitting on. It gets its name, they say, from an old quarry up near the road, and nobody knows how old those workings are. Anyway, you can’t shift Whitescar. The Hall tried hard enough in the old days, and now the Hall’s gone, but we’re still here . . . You’re not listening.’

‘I am. Go on. What happened to the Hall?’

But he was off at a tangent, still obviously dwelling on my likeness to his cousin. ‘Have you ever lived on a farm?’

‘Yes. In Canada. But it’s not my thing, I’m afraid.’

‘What is?’

‘Lord, I don’t know; that’s my trouble. Country life, certainly, but not farming. A house, gardening, cooking – I’ve spent the last few years living with a friend who had a house near Montreal, and looking after her. She’d had polio, and was crippled. I was very happy there, but she died six months ago. That was when I decided to come over here. But I’ve no training for anything, if that’s what you mean.’ I smiled. ‘I stayed at home too long. I know that’s not fashionable any more, but that’s the way it happened.’

‘You ought to have married.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Horses, now. Do you ride?’

The question was so sudden and seemingly irrelevant that I must have looked and sounded almost startled. ‘Horses? Good heavens, no! Why?’

‘Oh, just a hangover from your looking so like Annabel. That was her thing. She was a wizard, a witch I should say, with horses. She could whisper them.’

‘She could what?’

‘You know, whisper to them like a gipsy, and then they’d do any blessed thing for her. If she’d been dark like me, instead of blond, she’d have been taken for a horse-thieving gipsy’s changeling.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I do know one end of a horse from the other, and on principle I keep clear of both . . . You know, I wish you’d stop staring.’

‘I’m sorry. But I – well, I can’t leave it alone, this likeness of yours to Annabel. It’s uncanny. I know you’re not her; it was absurd anyway ever to think she might have come back . . . if she’d been alive she’d have been here long since, she had too much to lose by staying away But what was I to think, seeing you sitting here, in the same place, with not a stone of it changed, and you only changed a little? It was like seeing the pages of a book turned back, or a film flashing back to where it was eight years ago.’

‘Eight years is a long time.’

‘Yes. She was nineteen when she ran away.’

A pause. He looked at me, so obviously expectant that I laughed. ‘All right. You didn’t ask . . . quite. I’m twenty-seven. Nearly twenty-eight.’

I heard him take in his breath. ‘I told you it was uncanny. Even sitting as close to you as this, and talking to you; even with that accent of yours . . . it’s not really an accent, just a sort of slur . . . rather nice. And she’d have changed, too, in eight years.’

‘She might even have acquired the accent,’ I said cheerfully.

‘Yes. She might.’ Some quality in his voice made me look quickly at him. He said: ‘Am I still staring? I’m sorry. I was thinking. I – it’s something one feels one ought not to let pass. As if it was . . . meant.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Skip it. Tell me about yourself. You were just going to. Forget Annabel; I want to hear about you. You’ve told me you’re Mary Grey, from Canada, with a job in Newcastle. I still want to know what brought you there, and then up here to the Wall, and why you were on that bus from Bellingham to Chollerford today, going within a stone’s throw of the Winslow land.’ He threw the butt of his cigarette over the cliff, and clasped both hands round the uplifted knee. All his movements had a grace that seemed a perfectly normal part of his physical beauty. ‘I’m not pretending I’ve any right to ask you. But you must see that it’s an odd thing to accept, to say the least. I refuse to believe that such a likeness is pure chance. Or the fact that you came here. I think, under the circumstances, I’m entitled to be curious’ – that swift and charming smile again – ‘if nothing else.’

‘Yes, of course I see that.’ I paused for a moment. ‘You know, you may be right; about this likeness not being chance, I mean. I don’t know. My people did come from hereabouts, so my grandmother told me.’

‘Did they now? From Whitescar?’

I shook my head. ‘I never heard the name, that I remember. I was very little when Granny died, and she only knew what my great-grandmother told her, anyway. My own mother was never much interested in the past. But I know my family did originally come from somewhere in Northumberland, though I’ve never heard Granny mention the name Winslow. Hers was Armstrong.’

‘It’s a common name along the borders.’

‘So she said, and not with a very savoury history, some of them! Wasn’t there an Armstrong once who actually lived just here, in the Roman Fort at Housesteads? Wasn’t he a horse thief? If I could only “whisper” horses like your cousin Annabel, you might suppose—’

‘Do you know when your people left England?’ he asked, not so much ignoring my red herring as oblivious of it. He seemed to be pursuing some very definite line of his own.

‘I suppose in my great-grandfather’s time. Would that be somewhere about the middle of the last century? About then, anyway. The family settled first at a place called Antigonish, in Nova Scotia, but after my father married, he—’

‘What brought you back to England?’ The singleness of purpose that seemed to be prompting his questions robbed the interruption of rudeness. Like an examiner, I thought, bringing the candidate back to the point . . . Certainly his questions seemed to be directed towards some definite end. They had never been quite idle, and now they were sharp with purpose.

I said, perhaps a little warily: ‘What brings anyone over? My people are dead, and there was nothing to keep me at home, and I’d always wanted to see England. When I was little, Granny used to talk and talk about England. She’d never seen it, but she’d been brought up on her own mother’s stories of “home”. Oh yes, I heard all about “bonny Northumberland”, and what an exciting city Newcastle was – I almost expected to see the sailing ships lying along the wharves, and the horse trams in the streets, she’d made it all so vivid for me. And Hexham, and Sundays in the Abbey, and the market there on Tuesdays, and the road along the Tyne to Corbridge, and the Roman Wall with all those lovely names . . . Castle Nick and Boreovicium and Aesica and the Nine Nicks of Thirlwall . . . I read about it all, too. I’ve always liked history. I’d always promised myself that some day I’d come over, maybe to visit, maybe – if I liked it – to stay.’

‘To stay?’

I laughed. ‘That’s what I’d told myself. But I hadn’t seen myself coming back quite like this, I’m afraid. I – well, I was left pretty badly off. I got my fare together, and enough to tide me over till I got a job, and that’s my situation now. It sounds like the opposite of the usual story, doesn’t it? Usually the lone wolf sets out to the New World to make his way, but I – well, I wanted to come over here. The New World can be a bit wearing when you’re on your own, and – don’t laugh – but I thought I might fit in better here.’

‘Because your roots are here?’ He smiled at my look. ‘They are, you know. I’m sure I’m right. There must have been someone, some Winslow, ’way back in the last century, who went to Canada from here. Probably more than one, you know how it was then; in the days when everybody had thirteen children, and they all had thirteen children, I’m pretty sure that one or two Winslows went abroad to stay. Whitescar wouldn’t have been big enough, anyway, and nobody would have got a look-in except the eldest son . . . Yes, that’s it, that explains it. Some Winslow went to Canada, and one of his daughters – your great-grandmother, would it be? – married an Armstrong there. Or something like that. There’ll be records at Whitescar, surely? I don’t know, I wasn’t brought up there. But that must be it.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Well,’ he said, with that charmingly quizzical lift of the eyebrow that was perhaps just a little too well practised, ‘that does make us cousins, doesn’t it?’

‘Does it?’

‘Of course it does. It’s as plain as a pikestaff that you must be a Winslow. Nothing else would account for the likeness; I refuse to believe in pure chance. You’re a type, the Winslow type, it’s unmistakable – that fair hair, and your eyes that queer colour between green and grey, and those lovely dark eyelashes . . .’

‘Carefully darkened,’ I said calmly. ‘After all, why go through life with light lashes if you don’t have to?’

‘Then Annabel’s must have been darkened, too. By heaven, yes, they were! I remember now, when I first came to Whitescar she’d be only fifteen, and I suppose she hadn’t started using that sort of thing. Yes, they were light. I don’t even remember when the change took place! I was only nineteen when I came, you know, and straight from the back of beyond. I just took her for granted as the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.’

He spoke, for once, quite simply. I felt myself going scarlet, as if the tribute had been aimed at me. As, in a way, it was.

I said, to cover my embarrassment: ‘You talk of me as being a “Winslow type”. Where do you come in? You don’t seem to conform.’

‘Oh, I’m a sport.’ The white teeth showed. ‘Pure Irish, like my mother.’

‘Then you are Irish? I thought you looked it. Is Con short for Connor?’

‘Sure. She was from Galway. I’ve her colouring. But the good looks come from the Winslows. We’re all beauties.’

‘Well, well,’ I said drily, ‘it’s a pity I haven’t a better claim, isn’t it?’ I stubbed out my cigarette on the stone beside me, then flicked the butt out over the cliff’s edge. I watched the place where it had vanished for a moment. ‘There is . . . one thing. Something I do remember, I think. It came back as we were talking. I don’t know if it means anything . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘It was just – I’m sure I remember Granny talking about a forest, some forest near Bellingham. Is there something near your “Winslow place”, perhaps, that—’

‘Forrest!’ He looked excited. ‘Indeed there is! You remember I told you that Whitescar was a kind of enclave in the park belonging to the local bigwigs? That’s Forrest Park; the Park’s really a big tract of land enclosed in a loop of the river, almost an island. The whole place is usually just spoken of as “Forrest” – and the Forrests, the family, were there for generations. It was all theirs, except the one piece by the river, in the centre of the loop; that’s Whitescar. I told you how they tried to winkle us out of it. The big house was Forrest Hall.’

‘Was? Oh, yes, you said the Hall had “gone”. What happened? Who were they? This does sound as if my great-grandmother, at any rate, may have come from hereabouts, doesn’t it?’

‘It certainly does. I knew it couldn’t be sheer chance, that likeness. Why, this means—’

‘Who were the Forrests? Could she have known the family? What happened to them?’

‘She’d certainly have known them if she lived at Whitescar. The family wasn’t an especially old one, merchant adventurers who made a fortune trading with the East India Company in the seventeenth century, then built the Hall and settled down as landed gentry. By the middle of the nineteenth, they’d made another fortune out of railway shares. They extended their gardens, and did a spot of landscaping in the park, and built some rather extravagant stables – the last owner ran it as a stud at one time – and did their damnedest to buy the Winslows out of Whitescar. They couldn’t, of course. Another cigarette?’

‘No, thank you.’

He talked on for a few minutes more about Whitescar and Forrest; there had been in no sense, he said, a ‘feud’ between the families, it was only that the Winslows had held their small parcel of excellent land for generations, and were fiercely proud of it, and of their position as yeomen farmers independent of the family at the Hall, which, in its palmy days, had managed to acquire all the countryside from Darkwater Bank to Greenside, with the single exception of Whitescar, entrenched on its very doorstep.

‘Then, of course, with the mid-twentieth century, came the end, the tragic Fall of the House of Forrest.’ He grinned. It was very evident that, whatever tragedy had touched the Hall, it didn’t matter a damn if it hadn’t also touched Whitescar. ‘Even if the Hall hadn’t been burned down, they’d have had to give it up. Old Mr Forrest had lost a packet during the slump, and then after his death, what with taxes and death duties—’

‘It was burned down? What happened? When you said “tragic”, you didn’t mean that anyone was killed?’

‘Oh, lord, no. Everyone got out all right. There were only the Forrests themselves in the house, and the couple who ran the garden and house between them, Johnny Rudd and his wife, and old Miss Wragg who looked after Mrs Forrest. But it was quite a night, believe me. You could see the flames from Bellingham.’

‘I suppose you were there? It must have been awful.’

‘There wasn’t much anyone could do. By the time the fire brigade could get there the place was well away.’ He talked about the scene for a little longer, describing it quite graphically, then went on: ‘It had started in Mrs Forrest’s bedroom, apparently, in the small hours. Her poodle raised the place, and Forrest went along. The bed was alight by that time. He managed to drag the bedclothes off her – she was unconscious – and carry her downstairs.’ A sideways look. ‘They were damned lucky to get the insurance paid up, if you ask me. There was talk of an empty brandy bottle in her room, and sleeping pills, and of how there’d been a small fire once before in her bedroom, and Forrest had forbidden Miss Wragg to let her have cigarettes in her room at night. But there’s always talk when these things happen – and heaven knows there’d been enough gossip about the Forrests . . . of every sort. There always is, when a couple doesn’t get on. I always liked him, so did everybody else for that matter, but the old woman, Miss Wragg, used to blackguard him right and left to anyone who’d listen. She’d been Crystal Forrest’s nurse, and had come to look after her when she decided to be a chronic invalid, and she had a tongue like poison.’

‘Decided to be – that’s an odd way of putting it.’

‘Believe me, Crystal Forrest was a damned odd sort of woman. How any man ever – oh well, they say he married her for her money anyway. Must have, if you ask me. If it was true, he certainly paid for every penny of it that he’d put into that stud of his, poor devil. There can’t have been much money, actually, because I know for a fact that when they left England after the fire they lived pretty much on the insurance, and on what he’d got for the horses. They went to live in Florence – bought a small villa there, but then she got worse, went right round the bend, one gathers, and he took her off to some man in Vienna. Till she died, two years ago, she’d been in one psychiatric clinic after another – or whatever is the fashionable name for the more expensive loony-bins – in Vienna, and that had taken everything. When Forrest got back from Austria eventually, to finish selling up here, there was nothing left.’

‘He’s back, then?’

‘No, he’s not here now. He only came over to sell the place. The Forestry Commission have the parkland, and they’ve planted the lot, blast them. That’s the whole point. If I’d been able to lay my hands on a bit—’ He broke off.

‘The whole point?’

‘Skip it. Where was I? Oh, yes. The Hall’s gone completely, of course, and the gardens are running wild. But the Rudds – they were the couple who used to work at the Hall – the Rudds have moved across to the other side of the Park, where the West Lodge and the stables are. Johnny Rudd runs the place now as a sort of smallholding, and when Forrest was over here last year, he and Johnny got the old gardens going again, as a market garden, and I believe it’s doing quite well. Johnny’s running it now, with a couple of local boys.’

He was gazing away from me as he talked, almost dreamily, as if his attention was not fully on what he was saying. His profile was as handsome as the rest of him, and something about the way he lifted his chin and blew out a long jet of smoke, told me that he knew it, and knew I was watching him, too.

‘And Mr Forrest?’ I asked, idly. ‘Does he live permanently in Italy now?’

‘Mm? Italy? Yes, I told you, he has this place near Florence. He’s there now . . . and the place is abandoned to Johnny Rudd, and the Forestry Commission . . . and Whitescar.’ He turned his head. The long mouth curved with satisfaction. ‘Well? How’s that for a dramatic story of your homeland, Mary Grey? The Fall of the House of Forrest!’ Then, accusingly, as I was silent: ‘You weren’t even listening!’

‘Oh, I was. I was, really. You made a good story of it.’

I didn’t add what I had been thinking while I watched him; that he had told the dreary, sad little tale – about a man he liked – with rather less feeling and sympathy than there would have been in a newspaper report; had told it, in fact, as if he were rounding off a thoroughly satisfactory episode. Except, that is, for that one curious remark about the Forestry Commission’s planting programme.

He had also told it as if he had had no doubt of my own absorbed interest in every detail. I wondered why . . .

If I had some suspicion of the answer, I wasn’t prepared to wait and see if I was right. I looked round me for my handbag.

He said quickly: ‘What is it?’

The bag was on the ground at the foot of the Wall. I picked it up. ‘I’ll have to go now. I’d forgotten the time. My bus—’

‘But you can’t go yet! This was just getting exciting! If your great-grandmother knew about Forrest, it might mean—’

‘Yes, I suppose it might. But I’ll still have to go. We work Sunday evenings at my café.’ I got to my feet. ‘I’m sorry, but there it is. Well, Mr Winslow, it’s been interesting meeting you, and I—’

‘Look, you can’t just go like this!’ He had risen too. He made a sudden little movement almost as if he would have detained me, but he didn’t touch me. The rather conscious charm had gone from his face. He spoke quickly, with a kind of urgency. ‘I’m serious. Don’t go yet. My car’s here. I can run you back.’

‘I wouldn’t think of letting you. No, really, it’s been—’

‘Don’t tell me again that it’s been “interesting”. It’s been a hell of a lot more than that. It’s been important.’

I stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I told you. This sort of thing isn’t pure chance. I tell you, it was meant.’

‘Meant?’

‘Ordained. Destined. Kismet.’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘It’s not absurd. This thing that’s happened, it’s more than just queer. We can’t simply walk away in opposite directions now and forget it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not?’ He said it almost explosively. ‘Because – oh, hell, I can’t explain, because I haven’t had time to think, but at any rate tell me the address of this place where you work.’ He was searching his pockets while he spoke, and eventually produced a used envelope and a pencil. When I didn’t answer, he looked up sharply. ‘Well?’

I said slowly: ‘Forgive me, I can’t explain either. But . . . I’d rather not.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Just that I would rather – what did you say? – that we walked away in opposite directions now, and forgot all about it. I’m sorry. Please try to understand.’

‘I don’t even begin to understand! It’s perfectly obvious to me that this likeness of yours to Annabel Winslow isn’t pure chance. Your people came from hereabout. I wasn’t only joking when I said we were long-lost cousins . . .’

‘Possibly we are. But can’t you grasp this? Let me be blunt. Whitescar and Winslows and all the rest may mean a lot to you, but why should they mean anything to me? I’ve been on my own a good long time now, and I like it that way.’

‘A job in a café? Doing what? Waiting? Cash desk? Washing up? You? Don’t be a fool!’

‘You take this imaginary cousinship a bit too much for granted, don’t you?’

‘All right. I’m sorry I was rude. But I meant it. You can’t just walk away and – after all, you told me you were nearly broke.’

I said, after a pause: ‘You – you take your family responsibilities very seriously, don’t you, Mr Winslow? Am I to take it you were thinking of offering me a job?’

He said slowly: ‘Do you know, I might, at that. I . . . might.’ He laughed suddenly, and added, very lightly: ‘Blood being thicker than water, Mary Grey.’

I must have sounded as much at a loss as I felt. ‘Well it’s very nice of you, but really . . . you can hardly expect me to take you up on it, can you, even if our families might just possibly have been connected a hundred years or so ago? No, thanks very much, Mr Winslow, but I meant what I said.’ I smiled. ‘You know, you can’t have thought. Just what sort of a sensation would there be if I did turn up at Whitescar with you? Had you thought of that?’

He said, in a very strange voice: ‘Oddly enough, I had.’

For a moment our eyes met, and held. I had the oddest feeling that for just those few seconds each knew what the other was thinking.

I said abruptly: ‘I must go. Really. Please, let’s leave it at that. I won’t annoy you by telling you again that it’s been interesting. It’s been – quite an experience. But forgive me if I say it’s one I don’t want to take any further. I mean that. Thank you for your offer of help. It was kind of you. And now this really is goodbye . . .’

I held out my hand. The formal gesture seemed, in these surroundings, and after what had passed, faintly absurd, but it would, I hoped, give the touch of finality to the interview, and provide the cue on which I could turn my back and leave him standing there.

To my relief, after a moment’s hesitation, he made no further protest. He took the hand quite simply, in a sort of courteous recognition of defeat.

‘Goodbye, then, Mary Grey. I’m sorry. All the best.’

As I left him I was very conscious of him standing there and staring after me.