The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,150
had written there and I was about to close the book, when I saw that a corner of the endpaper had come unstuck and there was the edge of a piece of paper covered in writing underneath it. I managed to ease it out without damaging the book further. The writing was faded and small, but it seemed to be part of a letter – and when I’d read it, I wished I’d left it there, because what it described was so horrible!
My eyes widened as I read on and I nearly dropped Mum’s journal. I wasn’t surprised when she finished by saying that she’d almost burned the page, but in the end replaced it in the book and stuck the endpaper down more securely, before returning it to the Hall.
Where, presumably, it still was …
I sat back, thinking that it had been a night of revelations, none of them good.
If only I’d opened this box first and read Mum’s journal, it would have saved me the scene at the pig farm tonight and probably I’d have told Ned my secret ages ago.
And the journal also revealed something that, however awful, Ned ought to know. That he must know.
Suddenly it seemed urgent that I tell him right now: I couldn’t keep this from him, too.
Without even stopping to put on a coat, I abandoned Caspar to his slumbers, rushed out of the flat and ran straight down the dark road, to hammer on Ned’s door.
It must have been after midnight by then, but the lights behind their heavy curtains still glowed and when he opened the door, Ned was still dressed in the clothes he’d worn earlier. His face took on a wary, shuttered and angry look when he saw it was me.
‘I wasn’t expecting visitors,’ he said coolly and it was only then did I realize that Caspar must have hurtled like a comet through Lavender Cottage and out through the cat flap in the back door, to have arrived before me.
Ned’s face changed as he looked down at me and he said, in a gentler, concerned voice that brought tears to my eyes, ‘What is it, Marnie? What’s happened?’
‘I’ve found something you need to see,’ I said, thrusting the sparkly notebook at him and he stared down at it, and then at me, as if I’d run mad. Then he hesitated, before drawing me in and closing the door behind us. Caspar had already sneaked past and was making for the open library door.
‘I shouldn’t have left you like that, earlier,’ Ned muttered. ‘You’re still in a state of shock.’
I shivered and he drew me into the library, where he made me drink a glass of brandy, which I loathe, and when I’d insisted he read that last entry I’d found in Mum’s journal, he poured one for himself, too.
‘It looks from this like Lizzie had second thoughts about revealing the whole truth, after all, and hid a page away,’ he said.
‘I did think when I read through that copy you made for me, that the account jumped a bit abruptly from the end of one page to the top of the next,’ I said. ‘Do you think this book Mum found would have been put in the window seat in here with the others that were moved?’
‘I don’t know, but we’ll soon find out!’ Ned was already across the room and lifting the lid from one of the large window seats. He removed a bundle of old newspapers and then the first of a mouldering stack of old books.
‘She said it was leather bound and quite thick,’ I reminded him, looking on. ‘Unless your uncle Theo had been rummaging in here, it should be fairly near the top.’
Apart from the addition of the newspapers, it didn’t appear that the earlier layers of documents had been disturbed and we found Lizzie Grace’s recipe book very easily.
I put it on the table and opened it at the back, while Ned fetched a saucer of water and a kitchen sponge, with which he began carefully moistening the edges of the marbled endpaper.
Finally, it began to lift away from the back board of the book – and there lay the paper, just as Mum had said.
We knew it was part of Lizzie’s account, even before we compared it with the original – and now we could also see how the new page followed on from the bottom of the one describing her decision to appeal to Horace Lordly-Grace to intercede with