in the Oxfordshire countryside. Eventually Robert, keen to be rid of his inconvenient wife in order to marry the Queen, had allegedly arranged Amy’s murder. ‘The corpse of their wretched victim was precipitated down a flight of stone stairs, which led from the long gallery to the hall below, under the hope that it might give a plausibility to a tale by which they intended to conceal their crime,’ Lizzie read in Tighe’s lurid prose. ‘From this time the vengeance of heaven appears to have fallen, not only on the perpetrators of this atrocious murder, but also on the house in which it was committed.’
Lizzie shivered violently. This was close to the story that Avery had told of an emotional memory being held captive in the very fabric of Cumnor Hall and subsequently transferred to Oakhangar, where the curse had repeated itself with Amelia falling down the stairs and breaking her neck in precisely the same way that Amy had. Except that Amy’s death had apparently been murder… She wondered if that was true. She wondered if Johnny knew the story and if so, what he had thought of it. Parallels, echoes of history, memories captured in stone…
She could hear Johnny’s voice: ‘This was once the site of a royal palace, you know. It was called Baynard’s Castle. The foundations are right under this building.’ Down by the river he had caught her hand and pulled her over to the wall to show her the plaque. When she had touched it, Johnny had been right beside her. She had seen his shadow in the vision, cutting across the sun…
She thought about the CCTV footage and the explosion of white light. Perhaps that had been a manifestation of the psychometry that couldn’t be caught by the naked eye, in the way that spirit orbs were apparently captured on camera. She knew very little about that sort of thing but it might explain the lack of any physical evidence at the scene. Nothing, though, could explain why Johnny had been there one moment – caught in the frame – and the next, he had gone. Unless… She could see him sitting in the kitchen that night, the chocolate cup in front of him, spoon in hand, and he had asked her if she had the gift of time travel as well as the gift of psychometry. And she had laughed it off because of course time travel was a fantasy, wasn’t it?
Johnny the fey one, the one with the telepathic gift. He had seemed so much more at ease with the psychic stuff than she was. He knew she possessed the gift of psychometry. He’d seen her read the stone angel when he had only been six years old. He’d seen her read Arthur’s mind that day at the flat. He knew she could read objects and people, and he had suggested that her gift was a great one and that she shouldn’t be afraid of it. Perhaps he had already suspected that she could connect to the memories captured in buildings as well as in objects. Perhaps he had wanted to test that theory by taking her down to the remains of Baynard’s Castle and seeing if she could call a memory from the stone. It would explain why he had asked her to go with him that night.
The book clattered to the floor as Lizzie jumped to her feet. She didn’t notice. She walked over to the window, touching the cold, cobwebbed panes, trying to clear her mind. Johnny understood her psychic powers so much better than she knew them herself. There could be a number of explanations for that but given that he had admitted to being telepathic himself, one reason might be that he was a great deal more gifted than she was. She had assumed that his talent for telepathy worked only with Amelia – it certainly hadn’t existed with her, and Arthur had referred to it as Johnny and Amelia’s party trick. She hadn’t imagined that Johnny might have other paranormal abilities as he hadn’t mentioned them to her at all. But perhaps that had been deliberate. Perhaps he had not wanted her to know. He had told her enough so that she had thought they were kindred spirits but not so much that he would scare her.
She saw again the picture from the Embankment. Johnny had been beside her. She had touched the stone and inadvertently called up the vision of the old palace, and