The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [27]
After a couple of weeks, I was close to locking the doors, hiding the Mini in the garage and pretending to be out. I’d learnt by this time that I’d been singled out for special favours, since she never visited anyone else, not even Peter, and I began to wonder if Lily had found her as oppressive as I did. One or two people suggested that Jess’s attachment was to Barton House, but I couldn’t see it myself. I thought Peter’s suggestion that she saw me as a wounded bird was a more likely explanation. In her strangely detached way, she appeared to be monitoring me for signs of renewed anxiety.
Surprisingly, I didn’t show any. Not at the beginning, at least. For some reason, I slept better alone in that echoing old house than I had in my parents’ flat. I shouldn’t have done. I should have jumped at every shadow. At night the wisteria tapped on the window-panes and the moon silhouetted finger-like tendrils against the curtains. Downstairs, the numerous French windows invited anyone to break in while I slept.
My way of dealing with that threat was to leave the internal doors open and keep a powerful torch beside my bed. The beauty of Barton House was that every bedroom had a dressing-room with its own door to the landing, which meant I had a second exit if a prowler came along the corridor. It also had two staircases, one at the front and one at the back leading down to the scullery. This gave me confidence that I could outwit any intruder. I sprayed Jess’s WD40 into every external lock on the ground floor, and embraced the doors and windows as escape routes rather than entry points.
Nevertheless, it was Winterbourne Valley that was the real healer. The contrast between the noise and chaos of Baghdad and these peaceful fields of ripening corn and yellow rapeseed couldn’t have been greater. Passing cars were few and far between and people even scarcer. From the upstairs windows I could see all the way to the village in one direction and to the Ridgeway—a fold of land behind Dorset’s coastline—in the other. This gave me a sense of security for, even though the hedgerows and darkness would screen a trespasser, those same concealments would hide me.
JESS WAS A DEDICATED CONSERVATIONIST. Apart from her hostility to social change, she farmed her land in much the same way as her ancestors had done by scrupulously rotating her crops, rationing pesticides, stocking rare breeds and protecting the wild species on her property by conserving their natural habitats. When I asked her once what her favourite novel was, she said it was The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was a rare piece of irony—she knew I’d identify her immediately with the difficult, unloved orphan of the story—but the landscape of the hidden wilderness was certainly one she liked to inhabit.
By contrast, Madeleine liked her landscapes populated. She was at her best in company, where her easy charm and practised manner made her a popular guest. Peter described her as the typical product of an expensive girls’ boarding-school, well-spoken, well-mannered and not overburdened with brains.
I thought her extraordinarily attractive the first time I met her. She had the sweet face and cut-glass English accent of the elegant British movie stars of the forties and fifties, like Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver or Virginia McKenna in Carve Her Name with Pride. It was the second Sunday of my tenancy. Peter had asked me along to meet some of my new neighbours