The brass blade of the letter opener caught the morning light as Sera Blackwood pressed it beneath the envelope's sealed flap. A small sound, the paper tearing, then the cream envelope fell open in her hands.
She sat at her workbench in the Camden studio, three flights above a cobbled mews, and the October light came thin through the sash window and turned the dust motes to slow-floating amber. A pot of rabbit-skin glue cooled on the single gas ring. Three books lay in mid-restoration along the bench: a water-damaged Tennyson, a Victorian commonplace book with its spine detached, and an octavo of Keats she had been conserving since spring. The smell of the studio was a particular blend: linseed oil, wheat paste, the faint vinegar tang of old leather, and beneath it all the cold damp of the brick walls that no heating ever quite defeated.
The envelope had arrived in the second post. She had noted the postmark, Whitstable, before she had opened it, and something about the precise formality of the printed address had made her hands move slower than usual. Whitstable. Oysters, sea, the sort of place that sent letters of consequence.
She drew out a single sheet of heavy cream stock and unfolded it.
Dear Miss Blackwood,
We regret to inform you that our client, the late Miss Imogen Blackwood of Saltmerrow House, Maren Cove, Kent, passed away on the third of October. As the last surviving direct descendant of the Blackwood line, you are named as sole beneficiary in the said client's last will and testament, dated the fourteenth of June, 1986.
A copy of the relevant extract from the will is enclosed for your attention, together with a schedule of the property comprised within the bequest. The property known as Saltmerrow House and its surrounding grounds will transfer into your name upon completion of probate, which we anticipate will be within the next four to six months. In the interim, we should be grateful if you could make arrangements to inspect the premises at your earliest convenience, as the property has been unoccupied since the deceased's death and we are mindful of its condition after the recent storms.
Please do not hesitate to contact the undersigned should you require any further information.
Yours faithfully,
P. M. Hollings
Hollings and Crewe, Solicitors
Sera read the letter twice. Then a third time, because the words kept sliding sideways on the page.
She knew, in the abstract, that she had an aunt. She had known since she was a girl. Her mother had spoken of Imogen once or twice, always with the careful neutrality that meant something was being kept from her. Great-aunt Imogen, who had not come to her mother's funeral. Great-aunt Imogen, who lived in Kent, alone, and never wrote. The Blackwood name lived in Sera's mouth like a stone she could neither spit out nor swallow.
She set the letter down on the bench. Her fingers had left a faint tacky print on the cream stock, the oils of her skin transferring to the paper the way they transferred to every old thing she handled. Habit made her wince and reach for a sheet of glassine to slip beneath it.
The studio was very quiet.
She could hear, faintly, the rumble of a train crossing Primrose Hill. The cry of a child somewhere in the mews below. A radio playing in the flat across the landing, the news, a voice that gave way to weather, then to music she could not identify. She stood and crossed to the window and looked out at the slate roofs, at the plane trees that were just beginning to turn, at the white sky that promised nothing.
Saltmerrow House. She had never been there. Her mother had never been there, so far as Sera knew. There had been no photographs, no stories, no Christmas cards exchanged across the silence. The Blackwood branch that had remained in the north had done its own quiet severance decades ago, and the reason for it had never been explained to Sera, only gestured at.
She went back to the bench and reread the schedule of property. Saltmerrow House, a Victorian cliffside residence of approximately eleven rooms, together with its outbuildings, garden walls, and a parcel of adjoining land described as the Blackthorn Meadow. There was a note in the solicitor's hand at the bottom of the page: The title deeds are extensive and will be forwarded separately. The house contains a substantial library and a quantity of household effects which the deceased did not wish to be dispersed.
A substantial library.
Sera sat down slowly on her stool. The Tennyson gave a soft creak beneath her elbow as she leaned past it.
She thought, with the sudden precision of a knife drawn across skin, of all the things her parents had not told her. Of the photograph she had found, years after her mother's death, in the back of a wardrobe in a box marked simply Blackwood. A photograph of a cliff. A house, white, set against grey sea. A woman she did not recognise standing at an upstairs window with one hand raised, palm flat, as if to shade her eyes from the light.
She had kept that photograph in the top drawer of her workbench ever since.
She pulled the drawer open now. The photograph was there, curled faintly at the corners, propped against a brass binding punch. She took it out and laid it beside the solicitor's letter and looked from one to the other.
The house in the photograph matched the architectural description in the will. The cliff was the same grey, and the sky was the same colour as this morning's, and the woman at the window was standing in a room Sera had never entered.
She reached for the telephone.
Vivienne Ashby answered on the second ring, which meant she had been at her desk, which meant she was either writing or pretending to write. Her voice came crisp and amused, the vowels cut like a clean blade.
"Sera. It's half past ten on a Tuesday. You never ring me before lunch."
"I need to come over."
A small pause. Then, with the particular gentleness Vivienne reserved for moments when Sera's voice did something she did not authorise: "Come over, then. I'll put the kettle on. Do you want to tell me now, or when you get here?"
Sera looked at the letter. She looked at the photograph.
"When I get there," she said.
She hung up, put on her coat, and turned the gas ring off. The pot of glue would be cold by evening, and she would have to start it again tomorrow. She left the Tennyson where it was, halfway through its repair, and put the photograph and the letter together into her bag.
The staircase down to the mews smelled of damp brick and someone else's cooking. She passed Mrs. Greaves on the second landing, who asked after her mother, who had been dead for eleven years, and Sera said she was well, thank you, and stepped out into the pale light of the yard.
The bus to Hampstead took twenty minutes. She sat upstairs at the front and watched Camden slide away beneath her, the canal, the cemetery, the long rise of the heath. Her mind kept returning to the same image: a hand raised at a window. A palm flat, shielding the eyes.
Imogen Blackwood, dead at what must have been a considerable age. Sera did not know how old. She did not know anything. She had grown up the last of a line that had chosen, deliberately or otherwise, to forget its origins, and now the origins had reached back and put a hand on her shoulder and said: yours.
At Vivienne's, the kettle was already boiling.
Vivienne lived in a tall narrow house off Flask Walk, three storeys of book and paper and the faintly astringent scent of correction fluid. Her study was on the top floor, where the light was best, and it was there Sera found her, the typewriter silent, a fountain pen uncapped and forgotten on the desk, a manuscript spread across her knee. Vivienne set the pen down without looking at it, looked at Sera, and said nothing.
Sera sat down opposite her and put the letter on the desk between them.
Vivienne read it once, quickly, with the trained attention of someone who edited her own prose for a living. Then she read it again, more slowly. Then she set it down and folded her hands on top of it as if to keep it from escaping.
"Imogen Blackwood," she said. "Maren Cove."
"Yes."
"Your mother's aunt."
"I think so. Great-aunt. I never met her."
"And she's left you the house."
"The house, and a substantial library, and a meadow."
Vivienne tilted her head. "A meadow."
"Blackthorn Meadow."
"A cliffside estate called Saltmerrow House," Vivienne read aloud, "in the coastal village of Maren Cove." She looked up. "And what does Maren Cove look like, do you know?"
Sera took the photograph out of her bag and put it beside the letter.
Vivienne looked at it for a long time. She did not speak. Her face did something Sera had rarely seen it do: it went absolutely still, the wit and the precision and the social sharpness all put away somewhere, and what was left was just attention, pure and grave.
"Where did you find this?"
"After my mother died. In a box in the wardrobe. Labelled Blackwood. There were other things in it. A christening dress, very small. A folded piece of lace. Nothing else that told me anything."
"And you never asked your father?"
Sera shook her head. "He wouldn't have answered. He never spoke about the coast. The sea, Kent, any of it. He was from Northumberland. He met my mother in Edinburgh. The south was a country he'd decided not to visit."
"Decided, or instructed?"
Sera looked at her. Vivienne had a particular talent for asking the question that opened the room behind the door.
"I don't know," Sera said. "I never thought to ask it that way."
"And now she's dead. And you've inherited."
"I have been told I have inherited. Probate is four to six months. The solicitor wants me to go and look at the place."
Vivienne leaned back in her chair. She had the particular stillness of someone whose mind was moving very fast behind a face that gave nothing away. She picked up the photograph again, held it to the light, and studied the house on the cliff.
"You want to go," she said. It was not a question.
"I don't know what I want."
"You want to go. You rang me before you'd finished reading the letter twice. You want to go and stand in that house and find out why your mother never spoke of it."
Sera did not answer. Vivienne waited. The kettle clicked off somewhere downstairs and the silence rushed in to fill the space.
"The library," Sera said at last. "The solicitor says there's a substantial library."
"There's always a library," Vivienne said. "The interesting question is what kind."
"I don't know what kind."
"You will. You'll stand in it and you'll know within thirty seconds whether it's a gentleman's library or a scholar's or a miser's. The smell of the bindings alone will tell you. Foxing, or rot, or the dry sweetness of books that have never been opened."
Vivienne was watching her with the expression she wore when she was about to say something that would rearrange the room.
"I'll come with you," she said.
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to. I'm coming anyway. I'll drive. You'll be useless behind the wheel, you'll be thinking about something else and run us into a ditch in Kent."
"I won't run us into a ditch."
"You absolutely will. Maren Cove. When do we leave?"
Sera looked at the photograph. The woman at the window with her hand raised.
"Tomorrow," she said. "If I can get a train, we can be there by afternoon."
"I'll come with you to the studio and we'll pack a case. We'll need boots, and one of those torches you use for checking the gutter of old bindings. We may need wellingtons. Kent in October, cliffs, the sea, the lot of it. I will bring my camera. I'll bring whisky."
"We'll be sober investigators."
"We will be lightly fortified investigators. There is a difference."
Vivienne stood and went to the window. Flask Walk was bright below, the leaves just turning on the lime trees. A woman was walking a small dog. A boy on a bicycle passed without ringing his bell.
"Sera," Vivienne said, not turning round. "What are you afraid of?"
The question landed clean.
"I don't know," Sera said. "I'm afraid that I'll go there and it will be empty. Just a house. A library of books nobody cared about. A meadow. I'll go there and there'll be nothing to find, and that will mean my mother had nothing to give me and nothing to keep from me, and that is worse than the other possibility."
"And the other possibility?"
Sera looked at the photograph again.
"That there is something there she couldn't bear to tell me. Something in the house, or the library, or the meadow. Something that explains why she left. Something that has my name on it."
Vivienne turned from the window. Her face was very still.
"Then we had better go and look," she said.
The afternoon passed in practicalities. Vivienne rang her agent and explained, with the crisp authority of a woman who had been doing this for fifteen years, that she required four days away from her typewriter and would not be contactable except in extremis. Sera rang the solicitor's number in Whitstable and spoke to a clerk who told her, in the patient tone of someone who had said it before, that yes, the key would be left with the postmistress in Maren Cove, and yes, the property was accessible, and no, she was not the first relative to come looking, and no, the previous relative had not, so far as the clerk knew, come back.
Sera put down the phone. "Not the first relative," she said.
Vivienne, who had been packing her camera case in the corner, looked up. "What does that mean?"
"It means someone else came. Someone who thought they might inherit, perhaps. Or someone the solicitor had to contact first."
"Your father?"
"He died three years before she did. He would have been contacted."
"Another cousin. A second cousin twice removed. Someone who thought they had a better claim."
"Someone who found nothing worth coming back for."
"Or found too much."
They looked at each other. Vivienne's mouth quirked.
"Stop it," Sera said. "You're writing a novel already."
"I am professionally incapable of not writing a novel. It is my curse. Pack your case."
They left Hampstead at six in the evening. The light was already going. Vivienne drove a small grey car that smelled of petrol and old leather and, faintly, of the cigarettes she had given up two years ago and never quite exorcised from the upholstery. They took the A2 out of London, through the Blackwall Tunnel and the long curve of the motorway that unspooled towards the coast.
Sera watched the landscape change. The brick terraces of south London gave way to the flat marshes of Kent, then the gentle rise of the North Downs, then the long descent towards the sea. The sky ahead was a pale grey, almost white, and at the horizon the cloud sat low on the water.
The radio played quietly. Vivienne drove competently and talked about the plot of her new novel, which concerned a cartographer who made maps of places that did not exist and found, to his cost, that one of them had begun to exist without him. Sera listened with half an ear. The other half was busy with the photograph in her bag and the question she had not yet asked.
"Vivienne."
"Mm."
"Why did you really offer to come?"
Vivienne did not answer for a long moment. She changed lanes, indicated, overtook a slow lorry. Her hands on the wheel were very neat.
"Because I have been thinking, for some months, that I would like to leave London," she said. "And because I have not yet found a reason good enough to satisfy my editor. And because you are my oldest and dearest friend, and you have just been told that a woman you have never met has left you a house on a cliff, and I would like to be present when you walk into it."
"That's three reasons."
"I am a woman of several reasons."
"There's a fourth."
Vivienne's mouth twitched. She did not confirm or deny.
The light was almost gone when they came down towards the coast. The road narrowed. The hedgerows grew higher. The smell of the sea came through the vents, salt and weed and the cold vegetable rot of autumn tides. Sera wound her window down an inch and breathed it in.
It was the smell of somewhere she had never been and somehow recognised.
The turning for Maren Cove was a small one, easily missed. A sign, weathered white, with a black serif hand: Maren Cove. They took it and found themselves on a single track that wound down through a wood of hawthorn and ash, the branches nearly meeting overhead, and then the wood thinned, and the sky opened, and there was the sea.
Grey, vast, heaving gently under the lowering cloud. The cliff rose ahead of them, white chalk with bands of flint, and at the top of the cliff stood a house.
Saltmerrow House.
It was larger than the photograph had suggested. Three storeys, Victorian, faced with pale stone that had gone grey with weather. A tower at one end, square, with a flat roof and a railing around it. Windows of every size, some tall and narrow, some squat and many-paned. A conservatory along the south flank, its glass streaked and dull. A walled garden to the east. Beyond it, a meadow that ran to the cliff edge, bristling with the dark shapes of blackthorn.
Vivienne stopped the car. They sat for a moment and looked.
"There it is," Vivienne said quietly.
Sera did not answer. She was looking at the window of the tower. There was a figure behind the glass. A woman, very still, her hand raised, palm flat, as if to shade her eyes from a light that was not there.
"Sera," Vivienne said. "There's no one there."
Sera looked again. The window was empty. The glass reflected the pale sky and the sea behind them.
"I know," she said.
She did not say what she had seen. She opened the car door and stepped out into the salt wind, and the grass of the meadow hissed against her ankles, and somewhere down the cliff the sea struck the rock and the sound rose up to meet her like a long held breath finally released.
The salt wind pressed Sera's coat against her legs as she walked the last few yards to the front gate. The iron had rusted to the colour of old blood, and when she pressed her palm against it, the cold went through her glove and into her bones. The latch gave with a groan that sounded almost like a greeting, or a warning.
Vivienne fell into step beside her, her heels catching in the tussocky grass. She said nothing. She had been silent for most of the drive, since they had left the village of Maren Cove below and begun the climb up the single-track lane that switchbacked through the pine wood. Her silence had the particular quality of a woman choosing her words with great care, and setting them aside.
The path to the door was paved with flagstones that had shifted over the decades, so that the front garden was now a series of shallow pools and hummocks. Sea thrift grew in the cracks, pink and improbable. A stone bench stood to the left of the porch, its surface green with lichen, and beside it a sundial on a pedestal, the bronze face so worn that the numerals had become mere suggestions.
Sera stopped. She looked back at Vivienne.
"You didn't answer my question," she said.
Vivienne's mouth twitched. "You asked three questions. Which one?"
"The one about whether you still think I should have refused the inheritance."
Vivienne considered this. The wind off the sea lifted a strand of her hair and set it across her cheekbone, and she did not push it away.
"I think," she said, "that you are a grown woman. I think you are a writer, and writers are obliged, by their nature and by some dreadful contract they sign in their cradle, to walk into the rooms other people have the sense to leave alone. I think you have never in your life refused a story that wanted telling. And I think," she added, her voice dropping half a register, "that I would have done the same. I would have come. I would have wanted to see."
Sera nodded. She turned back to the house. The front door was of dark oak, banded with iron, and set into it was a brass knocker shaped like a hand holding a ring. Beneath the knocker, a keyhole. Above the lintel, carved into the stone, the date 1847, and beneath it, in smaller letters, the single word FIDELIS .
She took the key from her coat pocket. It was heavy, iron, tied with a ribbon that had once been blue but was now the colour of dust. She fitted it to the lock. It turned with a sound like a sigh.
The door swung inward onto a hall. The air that came out was cool, and it smelled of stone, and of something faintly vegetal, like the inside of an old greenhouse. The floor was tiled in a chessboard of black and white, and dust lay upon it in a fine, even layer, marked only by the tracks of something small, a mouse perhaps, or a weasel, that had crossed from the skirting to the centre of the room and back again.
Vivienne stepped in behind her and closed the door. The sound of the wind outside fell away, and in its place was a deeper silence, the silence of a house that has been listening to itself for a long time.
"Right," Vivienne said softly. "So this is it."
"Yes," Sera said.
She stood for a moment in the dimness. Light came from a window at the far end of the hall, set above a staircase that rose in a shallow curve to the first floor. The wood of the banister was dark and polished to a soft gleam, though no one had touched it in years. On the wall beside the stairs hung a small oval mirror, and in its spotted surface Sera saw her own face, and behind her, Vivienne's, both of them pale and indistinct.
She crossed to the foot of the stairs and looked up. The staircase climbed into shadow. There was a landing halfway, with a window set into the wall, and through it she could see the grey flat of the sea, and above the sea, the sky.
The photograph was in her breast pocket. She could feel the edge of it against her ribs, a small hard rectangle. She had found it that morning, in London, when she had been sorting the papers the solicitor had sent. It had been folded inside the letter of probate, behind the page that listed the contents of the estate, and it had slipped out and fallen face down onto her desk. She had turned it over, and had looked at it for a long time.
Two figures. A man and a woman. Standing before a lighthouse, white against a darker sea. The man was young, his face unremarkable but his posture confident, one hand in his pocket, the other at his side. The woman was taller, or perhaps only standing on higher ground, and she wore a long coat and a hat, and her face had been obliterated. Not damaged. Not faded. Scratched out. The marks were deliberate, made with a sharp point, pressed hard enough to score the paper beneath. Someone had taken a knife or a pin and had erased her, as if to strike her from the record entirely.
Sera had sat with the photograph on her knee and had read the letter again. The last direct descendant of the Blackwood line. The phrase had seemed absurd when she had first read it. The Blackwoods of Maren Cove were a family she had never heard of. Her father had been a clerk in Middlesbrough, her mother a midwife, and they had raised her in a terraced house that smelled of washing and of the sea, because the sea was always present, even in the industrial towns of the north east, a smell of salt and weed that crept in through the window frames.
She had telephoned Vivienne that afternoon. Vivienne had answered on the second ring, her voice bright and busy, the voice of a woman in the middle of a sentence she was glad to interrupt.
"Sera, darling, I have exactly seven minutes before my agent calls back. Tell me everything."
Sera had told her. The letter, the estate, the name she did not recognise. Vivienne had listened without speaking, which was unlike her, and when Sera had finished there had been a silence, and then the sound of a match being struck.
"There's something I should have told you before," Vivienne had said.
The match had flared and steadied. Vivienne smoked rarely, and only when she was about to say something she had been keeping for a long time.
"Your mother had a sister."
Sera had felt the room tilt. "No. She didn't."
"She did. Imogen. Your mother never spoke of her. I only found out by accident, when I was researching my third novel. I went to the county archive in Northallerton. There was a record. Imogen Blackwood, born 1906, died 1962. Excluded from the family in 1928. The word the archivist used was exiled ."
Sera had sat down. The receiver had felt very cold against her ear.
"Exiled for what?"
"I don't know. The relatives wouldn't say. I tried to find out, Sera, I really did. I wrote to three of them. Two never answered. The third wrote back and told me, in the politest possible terms, to mind my own business."
"And my mother?"
"Your mother was the youngest. She was born in 1919. By the time she was nine, Imogen had been gone for years. Whatever it was, it happened before your mother could have understood it. She may not even have known she had a sister."
Sera had been silent for a long time.
"Sera," Vivienne had said. "Listen to me. Don't go."
"I have to."
"You don't. You can refuse the inheritance. You can write to the solicitor and tell him you don't want it. You can stay in London and finish your book and forget this ever happened."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because," Sera had said, and her voice had cracked, just a little, on the word, "because someone scratched her face out. Someone went to the trouble of taking a pin and removing her from a photograph. That's not forgetting. That's hiding. And I want to know what was hidden."
There had been a pause. Then Vivienne had sighed, a long exhalation that Sera had heard through the receiver.
"I'll drive you," Vivienne had said.
And she had. That very morning. She had arrived at Sera's flat at six with a thermos of tea and a bag of provisions, and they had set out north and west, away from London, away from the river, into the country that grew poorer and emptier and eventually, at the last edge of it, gave up altogether and became the sea.
Now they were here. Sera put her hand on the banister and began to climb.
The stairs creaked under her weight, a series of small sounds that ran ahead of her up the flight like the chatter of small animals. Vivienne followed, her hand on the rail, her face turned up toward the landing.
At the top of the stairs a corridor stretched away to the left and to the right. Doors opened off it, closed, all of them. At the far end was a window, and through it the same view of the sea, but lower now, closer.
Sera walked to the first door on her left and tried the handle. It opened onto a drawing room. The furniture was shrouded in dust sheets, white but grey with age, and the shapes beneath them were grotesque, like figures kneeling. The window was tall and gave onto the conservatory, and through the glass Sera could see the dead shapes of geraniums in their pots, and beyond them the glass roof, and beyond that the pale sky.
She closed the door and tried the next. A dining room. A long table, twelve chairs, a sideboard with a decanter of something dark and thick, the stopper crusted. A portrait hung on the wall above the fireplace, and Sera went closer to look at it.
It was a woman. She was young, perhaps nineteen, with dark hair drawn back from her face, and she wore a high-collared blouse of the kind that had been fashionable in the eighteen-nineties. Her expression was reserved, her hands folded in front of her, her eyes looking slightly to the left of the painter, as if she had heard a sound behind him. Beneath the portrait, on a small brass plate, was the name Imogen Blackwood, 1906 .
Sera stared.
"Sera," Vivienne said from the doorway. "What is it?"
"It's her."
"Her who?"
"Imogen. The sister. The one who was exiled."
Vivienne came to stand beside her. They looked at the portrait together. The face above them was composed, careful, the face of a girl who had learned early to keep her thoughts behind her teeth.
"She looks like your mother," Vivienne said.
"I know," Sera said. "I was just thinking the same."
They stood for a moment longer. Then Sera turned away and walked on down the corridor. She opened each door in turn, and looked in, and closed it again. A library, empty of books. A small sitting room, the wallpaper peeling in long strips. A bedroom, the bed still made, the pillow still bearing the impression of a head. A bathroom with a freestanding tub, the taps green with verdigris.
The last door was at the end of the corridor, and it opened onto the tower room.
Sera went in. The room was round, walled in white-painted brick, with windows on every side. The floor was bare wood, and in the centre of it stood a telescope on a tripod, the brass dulled but the lens unbroken. There was a desk against the wall, and on the desk a logbook, open, the pages yellow.
She crossed to the desk and read the last entry. The handwriting was small and neat, and it said: 11th November, 1928. Calm. Visibility poor. Saw nothing.
She looked up. Through the window opposite, she could see the lighthouse. It stood on its own rock a mile out to sea, white, square, a single light burning even in daylight, a small flame no larger than a match head.
"Sera," Vivienne said quietly.
She was standing by the window on the landward side. Below them was the cliff, and the path they had climbed, and the lane, and the wood. And in the lane, just visible through the trees, was a car. Black. It had not been there when they arrived.
Sera looked at Vivienne. Vivienne looked at her.
"Someone knows we're here," Vivienne said.
Sera did not answer. She was looking at the photograph in her hand, the one she had taken from her pocket. The two figures. The lighthouse. The scratched-out face. And now, beneath the window, the car that had followed them up from the village, or had been waiting for them, the way the house had been waiting, with its door unlocked and its key on a ribbon of faded blue.
She put the photograph back into her pocket and turned to the logbook. She turned the pages, slowly, one by one, back through the years, back to the first entry, which was dated the second of January, 1881, and was written in a different hand, a hand she did not recognise, but which she felt, with a certainty she could not have named, she had seen before.
Somewhere in this book, she thought, was the beginning of the story. And somewhere in the house was the woman whose face had been taken from the photograph, and the reason she had been taken from it.
And somewhere, on the lane below, in a black car that had no plates, was the person who did not want her to find either.
Sera sat down at the desk, opened the logbook to the first page, and began to read.