unbearable, except of course somehow you have to bear it.’
‘We’ll get through it,’ Arthur said. ‘We’re strong enough. It’s better to know the truth anyway. Like I said, secrets have a way of coming out in the end.’
‘Yes.’ Lizzie’s heart sank as she remembered the last secret of them all. She went over to the dresser, sliding open the drawer and taking out the little silver phoenix that had hung on the driving mirror in Arthur’s car.
‘I have something of yours that I need to give back,’ she said. ‘I found it in my bedroom. I think it must have fallen on the floor of your car when the chain broke and somehow got snagged on my coat.’
Arthur was very still. He didn’t take it from her outstretched hand so after a moment she put it on the table. ‘It had the initials JG in it,’ Lizzie said. ‘I guessed it had belonged to Jenna, your Jenna.’
‘I didn’t realise I’d lost it,’ Arthur said. He cleared his throat. ‘I kept it in the car like a little talisman. It was just a stupid, small thing, a present I gave Jenna when we got engaged. The phoenix is supposed to signify endurance and eternal life. I was into all that spiritual stuff at the time and I thought it was a nice way to show I’d love her for ever without sounding too sentimental about it.’
He looked at Lizzie. ‘You read it, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘You read its history.’
‘I didn’t do it deliberately,’ Lizzie said. ‘I wish I hadn’t but you know how this works – I have no warning. Sometimes I see things and sometimes I don’t. It’s fickle, this gift. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like it. I didn’t want to read the talisman.’ She stopped. ‘It felt private,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to know.’
Arthur was silent. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. When it came to reading Arthur, it only worked when he wanted her to do it. She thought it was only fair that he should be able to deny her that insight but his reserve, his impenetrability, made this doubly difficult. She couldn’t leave it unsaid, though. She was committed now. This was the last secret between them and it had to be laid to rest, no matter what happened afterwards.
‘I always wondered why you hated Dudley so much,’ she said slowly. ‘I sensed it in you from the very first. I knew you disliked me, and I thought that was because you believed I was having an affair with Dudley, but you hated Dudley even more. I thought it was because of what had happened to Amelia. That was a part of it, of course, but it wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was Jenna.’ She waited, but Arthur said nothing. Still she could not read any of his emotions. That door was slammed in her face but she could feel the tension coming off him like static.
‘Avery said that there were three other cases she knew of that mirrored in some way Amy Robsart’s death,’ Lizzie said. ‘There was Amethyst Green, the serving maid at Oakhangar, and there was Amyas Latimer, the clerk in Oxford. There was Amelia, of course. But there was a fourth, someone called Mia.’
‘Mia was Jenna’s real name,’ Arthur said. His voice sounded dull.
‘Yes,’ Lizzie said. ‘I didn’t work it out straight away because of the names, but of course Jenna Gascoyne was her stage name; her real name was Mia Roberts.’ She took a gulp of the lemonade. It felt cool and sweet, soothing.
‘Avery told me that Jenna couldn’t cope with the pressures that came with her work,’ Lizzie said. ‘You told me yourself that she was messed up and you did everything you could to help and support her. Everyone says the same; that Jenna developed anorexia and her life spiralled into depression and drug-taking and she died. What the reports don’t say—’ she cleared her throat, ‘what I saw when I touched the phoenix, was that Jenna had been partying with Dudley’s band, with Call Back Summer, just before she died. It was Dudley who gave her the drugs – and was too pissed to save her when she fell in the swimming pool at Oakhangar. It was an accident, but in so many ways he was culpable all the same.’
Arthur stirred at last. ‘The band’s management hushed it up because it would have been too damaging,’ he said. His voice