The Ghost Tree. Barbara Erskine
the locks if she was nervous; after all, whether or not Timothy was related to her, he was still a stranger.
Her phone made her jump. It was Harriet. ‘How are things going? I’m loving it here in North Berwick. Liz and Pete are being so kind. I can stay as long as I like, so I’ll be here for a while, working on my book.’
The sound of her voice broke the spell. Ruth stood up and, walking round the sofa, drew back the curtains that had blocked half the light from the room. She stood staring out as she relayed the morning’s events.
‘Shit!’ Harriet summed up in one word.
‘I’d never given the inheritance a thought; of course I hadn’t. I’d spoken to James on the phone after Daddy died; he had told me that my father’s will, which he made after Mummy died, left everything to me.’
Harriet snorted. ‘I told you Timothy gave me the creeps. What a bastard! So, what happens next?’
‘I wait to hear from James. He is formally going to contest the will. Apparently, if Timothy is genuinely Daddy’s son, he can claim half the inheritance, whatever the will says, but then so can I.’
‘Ouch. I’m sure he’ll sort it out. Keep calm, Ruthie. It’ll be OK. There’s no way that vile toad could be a relation of yours.’
Switching off her phone, Ruth sat for a moment, staring into space.
The house and all your father’s possessions, his money …
‘Don’t panic,’ James had said as he shook hands with her at his office door. ‘Your father’s bank accounts are frozen and nothing will happen for a while. These things take time.’
And, she reminded herself, he had told her she was entitled to change the locks.
The locksmith said he could make her his last call that evening. Pulling the curtains across once more after a quick look out into the street, she checked the bolt on the front door and then headed back upstairs to the cupboards on the top floor.
Looking at the rail of dresses and coats she was pretty certain they hadn’t been touched; presumably Timothy wasn’t interested in clothes. But what about the other stuff, the boxes and cartons? Now she was looking more carefully she could see paler patches in the dust. Parcel tape had been pulled off and not replaced, latches on old suitcases were standing open when she knew her father, even in the act of banishment, would have made sure they were all neatly closed. He had been too ill to have made it up to the top floor for a long time, never mind stir up the contents of the cupboards like this. This had to have been Timothy. He had rifled through all her mother’s precious possessions, the things she had treasured and loved, her books, papers, jewellery, pictures. Even the little writing box with its inlaid brass initials that Ruth remembered from her childhood was there, lying crookedly on top of another box in the corner.
Methodically she began to take items one by one out of the cupboards and line them neatly on the floor. Tossed in a corner of one of the cupboards was a teddy bear. He had been hers, her beloved Pooh. She picked him up and held him close, burying her face in his threadbare fur. He had lost the warm comforting scent she remembered and smelt of sawdust. She had loved him above all her other toys and, knowing this, her mother had kept him for her; so too, she realised with a sob, had her father.
The locksmith did not miss the fact that her hands were shaking as she fetched him a cup of tea while he attended to the front door. ‘Were you burgled, hen?’ he asked sympathetically as he wielded his screwdriver.
‘No. Expecting to be.’
‘That’s tough. On your own here, are you?’ He was thorough and efficient, testing the new lock, handing her the keys, doing the same in the kitchen where the back door led out into the narrow garden. ‘I’m glad to see you have bolts here. Don’t forget to use them. Maybe get an alarm fitted in the house. Motion sensors. If you’re scared of being attacked, you can think about a link to the police; or at least a rape alarm.’
It hadn’t occurred to her that Timothy might attack her. It was the house and its contents he wanted; her mother’s treasures. Surely she ought to hide them somewhere they couldn’t be found.
Was there no one in Edinburgh she could go to for help? It was then her thoughts turned to Finlay Macdermott. He had been at school with her ex, and one of their greatest friends. It was worth a try.
‘So, what you’re saying is, you need to hide stolen goods, eh!’ The familiar voice rang out of the phone after she called him and explained the situation. To her relief he had sounded pleased to hear from her.
‘Not stolen!’ she protested. ‘They’re mine. Legally. The solicitor said my mother’s things would almost certainly be deemed to be mine as my father disowned them and locked them away. The law would presume he was planning to pass them on to me.’ She wasn’t sure if that bit was true. ‘They’re probably not worth much either, so I am not cheating the government of tax.’
‘Blow the government!’
She realised suddenly how much she had missed Finlay’s irreverent humour, which used to echo so often down the line from Scotland and around their living room in London.
‘I will be over to see you tomorrow, sweetheart. First thing.’
She smiled as he ended the call.
Whatever had precipitated that final quarrel between her parents had echoed in her head forever afterwards. She must have been very young but her mother’s angry denials and pleas and eventual capitulation had haunted her. It was then that her mother’s precious things had first disappeared. Ruth looked round, trying to remember what Lucy had brought to her husband’s Scottish home from her parents’ house in Sussex. One or two of the more robust items were still there, downstairs, the others, the delicate chairs that Ruth as a small child had loved so much, the spindly-legged tables, had vanished overnight. Where were they? There had been portraits of ladies in exotic clothes and bewigged gentlemen and landscapes and drawings and paintings of houses and castles, horses and dogs. Where were those?
There were two boxes of books still in the cupboard, at the very back; presumably Timothy had felt they were valueless. She hauled them out to join the rest of the items on the floor and began to look through them. These were stories of ancient Scotland, the poetry, the works of Sir Walter Scott, a tattered volume entitled The Lives of the Lord Chancellors which had, she assumed, included her mother’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, the same Lord Erskine who had precipitated her father’s rage. She picked them out, handling them with something like reverence. The Lives of the Lord Chancellors was signed by the author, John, Lord Campbell. She stared at the title page in awe. It was a first edition, published in 1847. She flipped open a shabby leather-bound volume of Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward. Another first edition, signed by the author in 1823, and another signed ‘Byron’. She sat back and took a deep breath. Her ancestors had known these people.
When, all those weeks ago in London, she had started the research it had been relatively easy. All she did was call up Lord Erskine on her laptop, after she had threaded her way through all the different men of that name until she had found the one she wanted.
She had clicked on the entry, feeling almost guilty looking him up, but thinking of him as a historical reality helped start to dispel the lingering miasma of superstitious dislike her father had created around his name. This man was someone her mother had been inordinately proud of.
Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine KT PC KC (10 January 1750–17 November 1823) was a British lawyer and politician. He served as Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom between 1806 and 1807 in the Ministry of all the Talents …
He was, it appeared, the son of an earl. That was what her father would have hated most. He would not have resented the fact that the man was a brilliant lawyer, surely, or the fact that to all intents and purposes he was a self-made man. It was the fact that he was the son of the 10th Earl of Buchan, a Scottish aristocrat of ancient lineage, that had got up her father’s nose.
She smiled