House of Small Shadows

FIVE

‘Well, they seem pretty keen to work with you, my girl, because you have been cordially invited to the Masons’ home, the Red House, no less. To discuss an evaluation this Friday. It’s out Magbar Wood way. Can you make it?’

Leonard’s unfolding of the letter, fussing with the desk lamp, and the removal of his other glasses from their case was slow and methodical, as was every administrative chore he performed behind his desk. Part of Catherine still operated on deeply ingrained London time and something inside her chest, that she would never be able to extract, turned and tightened as these lengthy preparation rites preceded the most simple of tasks.

But his fastidious rituals were also a source of reassurance. Because at Leonard Osberne’s in Little Malvern, life was never frantic or tense with power struggles. No one undermined you and there was no favouritism. She never felt sick before meetings, or stayed awake an entire night transfixed with rage after one. By the time she left London, she’d come to believe that human nature forbade places like Leonard Osberne’s from existing. The closest Leonard ever came to a reprimand took the form of requests for her to ‘please don’t worry’ and to ‘slow down’. He always tempered his most judgemental remarks about the oddballs they dealt with into something warm. Leonard was genuinely kind, a quality she would never take for granted. And some days, she and Leonard did little besides eat biscuits, drink tea and chat.

Catherine hung her coat over the back of her chair. ‘Of course I can. My gut is telling me this is going to be the equivalent of a lottery win, Len.’

Leonard grinned across his desk. ‘This is the type of auction that happens once in a career, Kitten. When you’re my age you’ll still be boring your assistant by recounting the story.’ He smoothed a hand over his fringe and Catherine tried not to stare at the futile gesture at tidying an unruly strand of hair. Because the only thing she would change about her boss was the terrible grey hairpiece. Though even that she was getting used to. It may have taken her six months, but it was the one facet of the meticulously dressed man that didn’t fit. The wig was ghastly and left a small space between his thin face and the false hair. Today, he hadn’t fitted it properly again, as if he were deliberately trying to provoke derision from anyone who saw him. When she met Leonard for the job interview, a few minutes were required to discipline herself to not stare at his wig while they talked.

‘You know it. I haven’t seen dolls even close to being in that condition since my days at the Museum of Childhood. Which reminds me, I need to call them. Put some feelers out. I still have a few contacts down in Bethnal Green. They might take a few. And there were so many in that room. The Masons even have a perfect Pierotti!’

‘All in good time.’ Leonard peered over his glasses. His watery eyes were framed between tortoiseshell spectacle frames and a thicket of ungroomed eyebrow that looked as rigid as steel wire, and didn’t quite match his hairpiece. ‘We haven’t signed a contract yet. I sold some of her uncle’s pieces in the seventies, and Edith Mason led me a merry dance, I can tell you. This was before I even laid eyes on what she wanted to sell. One of M. H. Mason’s dioramas, some voles in their whites playing cricket. I’d never seen anything like it. The umpires were field mice and the groundsman was a weasel. You should have seen the pavilion. Absolutely marvellous. Though from what I understood from Edith Mason, her uncle never recovered from the Great War. You know he killed himself?’

Catherine nodded. ‘I read that somewhere.’

‘Cut his own throat with a straight razor.’

‘God, no.’

Leonard sighed and shook his head. ‘Terrible. Hardly anything of his work has ever come up for auction, so beyond the dolls, I am very intrigued by what else Edith might have hidden in that heap she lives in. Though after Mr Dore’s bizarre absence at the viewing, I’d hazard a guess that Edith Mason hasn’t changed her tactics one jot since our brief business. I’m staggered she even remembers me.’

‘There was a lot of loot in that room.’

‘You think she should go bigger?’

‘What I saw will get on TV, Leonard. There’s enough for an exhibition. And if there are Mason pieces available too, well… Potter’s estate went for a million.’

‘And Potter wasn’t fit to tie M. H. Mason’s bootlaces. But we can handle it, Kitten. This firm once auctioned the contents of a castle.’

Catherine laughed. Leonard began to smile, too, and chuckle. ‘Oh, will you make the tea? Can’t you see I’m comfortable sitting down?’ Leonard slapped the armrests of his wheelchair.

‘Stop it!’ She never wanted to laugh when he made jokes about his incapacity, and always felt guilty afterwards if she did.

‘Here,’ Leonard offered the letter from Edith Mason.

‘Nice paper.’

‘I know. She really shouldn’t be using stationery that valuable. She should let us sell it. That’s Crane paper with a high linen rag content. At least eighty years old. I know a collector in Austria who’d have it off us like that.’ Leonard snapped two long fingers in the air beside his awful hairpiece. ‘But her handwriting’s not what it was. She must be close to a letter from Her Majesty. And she’ll be madder than a mongoose by now, too. But I know you can handle her. You’ve got form, girl.’

‘I think I love my job.’

Leonard snorted in appreciation, then frowned. ‘Curious part of the world, though, Magbar Wood. I’ve been down there once or twice.’ He looked around the walls of the office. ‘Before I had this place. Even then it was the land that time forgot. Ever been? Didn’t you spend some time down that way?’

‘The Hell. Ellyll Fields. Yes. Part of my so-called childhood.’ Catherine thought of the service station and empty grey dual carriageways. ‘I went there, where I used to live. After the viewing in Green Willow. It’s changed a lot. What I remember is gone. All of it. How did you know I was from there?’

‘You mentioned it once.’

‘Did I?’

‘Must have done. And the place has an unfortunate history. Kids went missing from a school there, before you were born I think.’

Not all of them. Catherine busied herself with the tea things so Leonard wouldn’t see her face. Margaret Reid, Angela Prescott and Helen Teme: she could even remember their names. Everyone in Ellyll Fields in the seventies was familiar with those small smiling faces, photographed in black and white. To an older generation they were close to icons in Ellyll Fields. Though when Catherine was the same age the girls were when they went missing, they were icons fading on the newsprint that bore their remembered images. When her nan told her the story of the missing girls who were never found, probably as a warning about strangers, she had shown Catherine her own yellowing cuttings that she kept in an old shortbread biscuit tin. Back in the day, only the local nans still kept the horror alive in Ellyll Fields. No one else seemed keen on remembering the abductions. And once Catherine brought her curiosity about the three missing girls to her home, along with the awful black danger she attributed as existing beyond their grainy likenesses, her father lost his temper with her nan for ‘filling her head with horrible things like that’. When Alice Galloway went missing, not for the first time did Catherine attribute a great wisdom to her nan.

‘I hardly remember all that. We moved away when I was six. I had no idea Green Willow was close to Ellyll Fields. I only found out by looking on a map to find that guest house. I’ve never been to Magbar Wood either. With the exception of a family holiday to the seaside I doubt I ever went further than a mile from our house. We were skint. My mum and dad never talk about that time in their lives. Pretty sure they’ve never been back either.’

‘Ellyll Fields is between the two places. They’re still all aligned on a Roman road, despite town planners meddling with that whole area, in all kinds of ways. And they have been doing so since before you came into this world, my girl. You know, I took you for a border girl the first time I laid eyes on you.’

‘Get away.’

‘It’s the fiery hair and green eyes with those astounding freckles. Even after Monmouth was shoved on the map, the valleys have always been full of beautiful girls with your colouring. Like it or not, you are a classic example of a Dobunni maiden.’

‘A what?’

‘The tribe that was down there before the Romans. Raised merry hell.’

‘You’re old enough to know that? I never took you for a day over seventy-five.’

‘Steady. Don’t make me come over there. I could still reach you by lunchtime, and don’t you forget it, my girl.’

Laughing, Catherine came out of the kitchen with the tea things, but felt a couple of inches taller as she moved. Leonard had an eye for a strange beauty in the artefacts they valued and sold, in the same way he noticed things about her. Little things she couldn’t possibly identify through the opaque fog that worrying about her weight often enshrouded her within. He made her feel better about herself than she ever could, and more than any boyfriend had done too. It wasn’t that Leonard was incorrigible — he wasn’t. She always understood that he genuinely admired her and was proud of her. Even protective. After her debacle in London, his gentle mentoring and grace had done far more for her than a course of antidepressants and a new therapist.

‘Well, I look forward to meeting the frightful Edith Mason on Friday.’

‘If you get past the housekeeper. It says in that letter that there is one of those too.’ Leonard grinned. ‘Never underestimate a housekeeper, Kitten.’