The Lost Girls of Devon Read online

  I nodded and anchored my bag more firmly over my shoulder. Gran had left the lights on, but she would have long been abed. “Come on, sweetheart. Nearly done.” I remembered well how emotional I’d often been when I’d arrived at one home or the other—grieving the people left behind, eager to see the ones in the new place, never sure which emotion was more appropriate.

  She allowed my hand on her shoulder, guiding her gently toward the ancient steps. In his carrier, Mósí meowed plaintively. He’d made the trip several times, but no one could make him like it.

  The door flew open, revealing a small woman haloed by yellow lamplight. “Here you are!” Gran cried. “Come in, come in! Are you hungry?”

  I ran up the steps, reaching to embrace my grandmother in a rush of longing and love and relief. She was made of nothing but bones and loose skin these days, but she smelled the same: hairspray and Taylor of London Lily of the Valley talcum powder, and a sweet note of lavender that belonged to her alone. I breathed it in, letting it ground me.

  “Oh, sweet girl,” Gran said quietly, hugging me back. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  “Me too.” For one long second I let myself rest in this space, with the person who loved me the most in all the world, then reluctantly released her and turned to include Isabel, who was the person I loved most in the world.

  “Hello, dear,” Gran said, opening her arms. “I have had some sandwiches sent to your room, so you can go up straightaway.”

  Isabel kissed Lillian’s cheek and for just a moment bent down low enough to rest her head on Lillian’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “I shall spare you the exclamations of how you’ve grown. Your mother can take you to your room.”

  “I know where it is,” Isabel said.

  “Not the old room, I’m afraid. We’ve had some trouble with the roof, and I’ve settled you in the Willow Room.”

  Isabel narrowed her eyes. “That’s the room that’s haunted by the girl who was drowned, isn’t it? I don’t want to sleep in a haunted room.”

  “It’s not haunted, child,” Gran said. “It’s the Rowan Room that’s haunted.”

  Isabel looked at me, eyebrow raised.

  “I don’t think either of them are haunted, and I lived here most of my life,” I said with some exasperation, “but it’s the Rowan Room that gets the bad press.” It had been the bedroom of a girl from the seventeenth century who’d been cast into the sea as a witch.

  “Why don’t you sleep in it, then?” she asked with a hint of her old sauciness.

  “Because I have my room and I love it.” I kissed her head. “Let’s go up together.”

  “You won’t have a cup of tea?” Gran asked. For a moment I hesitated, but she must have seen me swaying. “Never mind. Get yourself to bed, the both of you, and we’ll chat in the morning.”

  Guilt plucked my heart. “No, I’ll stay.”

  “Nonsense. Off you go. I should be going to bed as well.”

  In my bedroom, the fluffy white duvet had been turned back and a lamp lit in the long narrow room. I wondered who’d done the work, since much of this was beyond Gran now. I would have to find out if she’d hired some help, or needed to do so. I rubbed the spot between my brows and logged the task on my phone’s reminder list.

  Even after I showered in the tiny bathroom and changed into warm pajamas, I found that my exhaustion would not turn to sleep. The nightmare gremlins tossed out visions of Diana brutally murdered; of Isabel growing more and more wan, never living up to the radiant, talented woman I saw inside of her; of Gran falling down the stairs and breaking a hip.

  Not helpful.

  After an hour, I wandered to one of a row of windows that overlooked the sea. It was calm tonight, shimmering under the moonlight. Boats of several varieties were anchored a little way offshore. They sat as still as boulders on the mirror of water.

  I rested my head on the pane, feeling myself at seven looking for my mother to return up the road, at twelve wishing my father would just leave me be in my comfortable place here in England instead of forcing me to shuttle back and forth, and at sixteen swooning in passionate teenage love.

  In those days, I’d dreamed of going to the Royal College of Art in London, or perhaps Glasgow, which I’d visited on a school trip. I’d fallen in love with the MacIntosh Building, the elegant art nouveau lines and flourishes, the sheer joy of beauty for the sake of beauty in every detail.

  Being in this room always reminded me of the young painter I’d been, the girl who yearned to become someone, to be someone important. It haunted me whenever I came home, where I’d spent so many hours dreaming of the paintings I’d create, the acclaim I would find.

  So many big dreams.

  Now here I was again, in my grandmother’s house, my daughter in tow, and my life looked nothing like what I’d imagined it would. Instead of becoming a great artist, I was a practical graphic designer, working an ordinary sort of job in an office, divorced and unattached. Where had that girl gone?

  But did any of us end up where we wanted to be?

  With an impatient tsk at myself, I shoved the memories away. I didn’t have time for angsty navel-gazing. I had a daughter in crisis, a grandmother growing more frail by the month, and a friend who’d gone missing without a word.

  Unlike my mother, I showed up for the people who loved me. At the moment, that meant trying to find out where Diana had gone, giving Isabel a chance to heal from whatever had happened to her, and giving my grandmother a good helping of love and attention.

  Where are you, my old friend? I wondered. Guilt at not responding to her last text washed through me, before I finally, finally, drifted off into sleep.

  Chapter Three

  Poppy

  Jennie Cleverdon had first come to me for readings when she’d suffered a beating from a boy she’d fancied herself in love with, a brute whose father worked as a cook at the yacht club. Only fifteen and neglected by her mother, she’d had no one but me to tell her life could be different, so I brought her into the shop and settled her in the cozy nook where I did my readings. She had a bruise on her jaw and that particular sorrowful longing that often marks an abused woman. I took her hand and spread my fingers over her palm, where I discovered that untimely death lived on her small white hand. That slash of a life line, cut so short it barely qualified.

  I lied, as any conscientious person would. I warned her away from the boy, but she never listened.

  And now here she was, coming into my shop on a sunny May morning. “Morning, Ms. Fairchild,” she said in her rolling north Devon accent. “I’ve come to have a reading on my daughter. Can I do that?”

  The baby girl was four months old, a laughing lass with a full head of the blackest hair. She peeked out of her carrier at me and grinned, reminding me so much of Zoe that an arrow zinged right through my diaphragm. Her cheeks were red as roses, like a baby in a fairy tale, and when Jennie pulled her out and offered her with a smile as haunted as any room in Woodhurst Hall, my mother’s house on the hill, I couldn’t help but take her. My only granddaughter was four thousand miles away, and her mother, that very Zoe, had never let me see her.

  To my surprise, the longings of a grandmother were quite different from those of a mother.

  “What a beautiful little soul you are, Magdalena!” I cooed, curling her close to my bosom, where she wiggled and settled in, pursing her tiny red mouth into a coo of her own, low and sweet, like a pigeon’s. “And such a big name for such a wee thing. Can we call you Maggie?”

  Jennie leaned in, all collarbones and elbow joints, too young to have a baby already, cutting short so many of her options. An old story, one of the oldest, and still it repeated and repeated and repeated. My heart ached for her. She stroked the baby’s cheek. “I do already, I’m afraid. I thought I’d keep it long and beautiful, but it’s Maggie.”

  Maggie grasped my finger in her tiny fist, and I laughed when she widened those black eyes as if in first discovery. “I can’t read
for her, love,” I said. “She’s innocent and fresh, and we’ll just leave that be, shall we?”

  Jennie’s big eyes met mine. “Are you afraid of curses?”

  I smiled softly. “No.” In truth, magic and readings were only ways for me to let people settle and get comfortable enough to talk so that I could find ways to offer them hope, a little healing. “She’s just too young.”

  She nodded, twining a finger through Maggie’s curls. “Now that Diana’s gone missing, I’m going to have to take her up to my aunt.” Diana had taken Jennie in when her drunken father had kicked her out in a fit of rage. Jennie had lived with her for eight months and had blossomed under her care. “She said she’d look after her while I look for work in Exeter. Get a fresh start, maybe.”

  I thought of Jennie’s abbreviated life line, the tarot that predicted dire things, the rotten luck of being born into a brutal family with no money and no prospects but her own wits. She was trying to save her life. Maybe she could. “Are you going to stay with your aunt?”

  Something flickered over her face. “No, she’ll only take the baby. I’ve got to find a room on my own.”

  Worry slithered through me. She was hiding something. “All right, love. Come sit down. Let me make us a pot of tea, and I’ll read your cards. For free.”

  Of course, they turned up the Tower and upside-down Cups and all manner of cautionary cards. As I took in the spread, inviting insight and intuition, all I felt was dread. “Are you sure you need to go, Jennie?”

  “I am.” She bounced the baby gently, letting the tiny fingers curl around her own. “Now that Diana’s gone, I’ve got to learn to make my own way.”

  The dire spread on the table took on new layers, and I suddenly swept them all into a pile. Fate was never fixed. I’d make an offering to the Mother this evening, poppy seed cake and wine. I also picked out a travel amulet for her, a simple disk carved with runes, and pressed it into her hand. “Be safe, sweetheart,” I said and kissed her forehead.

  She hugged me hard, pressing her face into my shoulder, her arms tight. “Thank you, Poppy.”

  “Keep in touch, child, or I’ll worry. Text me.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  When I awakened the next morning, Jennie was on my mind. I lay in bed for a little while, thinking about her, wondering if she’d made it safely to her aunt’s house. I’d insisted that she leave her mobile number with me, but I knew all manner of things befell girls in a world that only wanted to exploit them. She was pretty and lost, the worst combination.

  Although it was not yet light, I rose and dressed warmly for my chores. That hour of dark, so fresh and unspoiled, had always been one of my favorites, even when I was a wee girl in my parents’ house, creeping downstairs to the kitchen before the staff awakened. There were only two, a cook and a housekeeper, and they each had a set of rooms off the kitchen, but as my parents never came down before ten, neither did they bother to get up only for the needs of a small girl.

  I could tend to my own needs now, in my own house, Greencombe Cottage, which I had bought for myself upon my return to Axestowe not quite a year ago. The stairs were narrow from the bedroom to the kitchen, a room warmed by a Rayburn in the corner. On the counter were my masala tins, battered and no longer shiny after so many years, and the walls were hung with things collected in my travels: a pair of miniature paintings of lovers from Udaipur, a bright and cheerful Ganesha from some market stall I no longer remembered, a photo of a man in a crisply pressed linen kurta, his eyes dark and twinkling. I touched it as I passed.

  The room was quiet, though beneath the silence of the modern day, I could sense the imprint of all the people and animals who’d once been housed here, hundreds of years of them. Greencombe Cottage was built in 1540 and had been occupied ever since, standing fallow for only a handful of years after plague swept the village on one of its rounds. The names of the occupants were carefully recorded in the church rolls: first the Tuckers, then the Clarkes, then the Hoopers.

  And now me, Pamela Elizabeth Fairchild, known as Poppy. Student of the world, daughter of Lillian, mother of Zoe, grandmother of Isabel. My relationship was still thin and rocky with my mother, and Zoe did not claim me or allow me to meet my granddaughter, but distance did not alter the fact of our relationships. Time taught you anything could happen, even healing.

  Like the others in my cottage before me, I kept farm animals. I’d learned to love them when Zoe was a baby, long ago in New Mexico, where I’d first become attuned to the rhythms of the land. Zoe’s father, Ben, had tended sheep from his family herd, and goats, and chickens. At first it had seemed romantic, rising early to collect eggs and check on the sheep to make sure there were the same number as there had been the night before.

  I’d fallen in love with goats in those days, their irrepressible natures and dazzling eyes, and now had two of my own, Gandalf and Boudica, who kept the grass around the cottage clipped to manageable levels. In the crisp morning air, I strode through the garden toward their pen, next to the barn, where they bedded down in hay. They rushed out to greet me, prancing and nudging my hands and pockets. “Yes, my sweets, good morrow to you too. Was it a good night?” Boudica bleated, always the communicator. I led them to their spots—Gandalf on the hill and Boudica near the house.

  The chickens heard me and came running down from the henhouse, which my handyman, Jacob, had built for me. I scattered feed and collected a nice clutch of blue and green and brown eggs. “Thank you, ladies. Perhaps I’ll bake a cake today.”

  As I walked back up to the house through the gardens of rue and lavender, peppermint, chives, and mugwort, I thought about Sage and his ecological projects, one of which was counting the eggs of ring ouzel and cuckoo and other threatened birds. Egg poachers prized the rarest of eggs to steal and sell. Highly illegal, of course, but wealthy foodies would do almost anything to up the ante within their circle. The problem had grown more severe with all the strangers flooding in on their yachts, creating a market for the forbidden and the rare.

  Sage had stopped by the shop yesterday to tell me someone had made away with a pair of striped plover eggs, and he was furious.

  I’d made him a tea of tulsi leaves and honey with a squeeze of lemon and ushered him into one of the big, soft chairs sitting by the side window. Sage was a volunteer on the moor to help count not only birds but butterflies and hares and all manner of wild things. He was a bit of a wild thing himself, born and raised away from the town, spending all his time on the moor with his dogs.

  Sage and I had become friends since my return, as Diana and I had. Surprisingly, both of my daughter’s best friends had made room for me upon my return, unlike Zoe herself, who had displayed a remarkable talent for holding a grudge.

  As the sun began its jeweled ascent over the eastern trees, I paused. Breathe in suffering, breathe out peace. I took in the darkness, the heat of anger, my own and that in the world, and the sorrow, and the greed, and held it.

  I imagined scrubbing the dark mass into something fresh and shiny, and exhaled, letting it go.

  Whether it helped the world or not was unclear. It did, however, lighten my step.

  Three things were on my mind as I cracked two eggs into a bowl and scrambled them gently with goat cheese that a friend down the lane had made with the milk I’d given him.

  The first was Diana. It was Wednesday. In two days, she would have been gone for two full weeks. My stomach ached with the possibilities of what had happened to her. Had she fallen from a cliff? Drowned? Been kidnapped? I didn’t believe she’d run off with a man, not with Jennie living with her these past eight months.

  Second, I knew that Zoe and Isabel had arrived at Woodhurst. I’d made up their beds and scrubbed the bathrooms to a shiny polish, and by now they would have arrived. Knowing that they were within a mile of where I now stood lent a certain hopeful cast to the day. Maybe, with a little luck, Zoe would thaw enough to allow me to meet her daughter at last. Failing that, I might run into t
hem in the village or at the Tesco so at least I might get a glimpse of them. Some part of me hoped that if Zoe looked into my face, she might soften.

  Though really, why would she? I kept hoping for a movie ending to our story, a big swell of Bollywood music in the background as mother and daughter embraced and broke into a big dance number. But that was highly unlikely. Zoe had rejected every overture I’d made the past seven years.

  Still, I loved the vision of a Bollywood ending to our tale. Smiling gently at my fanciful longings, I sat at the table to eat my eggs and toast, drinking hot milky tea from a big mug a potter friend of mine had thrown.

  The third thing on my mind was my mother and what would become of her now that Diana was missing. I had been looking after her quite a lot, but with Diana’s disappearance, she would need more from me. Which I was more than willing to give, but Zoe would not want me there, and honestly, I wasn’t sure Lillian would want me around the clock. Our relationship was mending, but it was not yet healed.

  The trouble was, she had grown noticeably more frail in recent months. She needed a housekeeper but disliked having one in the house, although she loved the gardener, who came in three times a week to tend the vast beds of roses and figs, delphiniums and foxgloves. More than once a magazine had come to shoot photos of my mother’s splendiferous gardens.

  Now she mainly puttered and stopped to smell a peony or a lily carefully sheltered behind a row of tall boxwood and hawthorn trees to protect them from the hard coast winds up there on the cliffs.

  Despite her advancing years and increasing frailty, Lillian did not want to leave Woodhurst Hall, however decrepit it might be, and I held that wish in great respect. I’d have to come up with a plan of some sort to keep her in her office tower with the view of the sea that she’d loved her entire adult life. My mother and I did not always get on well, but I loved her. Whatever had to be done to keep her there, I would do.