The Glass Guardian Read online

  THE GLASS GUARDIAN

  Linda Gillard

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2012 Linda Gillard

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Cover design by Nicola Coffield

  www.lindagillard.co.uk

  Ebook Formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

  For my daughter Amy

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Other books by Linda Gillard...

  Connect with Linda

  Prologue

  When I was a child I nearly drowned. In a pond. Nothing dramatic, apart from the fact that I nearly died. I fell into a big pool at my Aunt Janet’s house on the Isle of Skye.

  I fell from a wooden bridge over the pool. At least, I think I fell. I don’t remember falling. All I remember is drowning - almost drowning - and then I remember being very cold and so sick, I thought I must have vomited up my insides.

  I was rescued - well, obviously - but I don’t remember being hauled out of the water. Such memories as I have of the event are just what my aunt told me afterwards, about how I lay gasping and retching on the grass, black with mud and slime, covered in pondweed, like some sinister water sprite.

  I do remember one thing though. I remember Aunt Janet shouting at my little playmate, the child who must have rescued me from the pond. She shrieked at him, over and over, ‘Who was it? Did you see him?’ I think she wanted to know who’d pulled me out. Or pushed me in. I remember her screaming (was it in anger or terror?) at the boy who’d apparently saved my life, ‘You can’t have! You’re not even wet! Who was it?’

  After she’d given me a good scolding and forbidden me to play on the bridge ever again, Aunt Janet never mentioned my near-drowning. I suppose it was something too terrible to talk about.

  But I used to dream about it. I still do.

  It’s a black, choking dream in which I feel so cold, it seems more likely I’ll freeze to death than drown. Then something moves through the water, something very pale. And strong. It pulls me, drags me upwards, toward the light. The strange thing is, in the dream, I don’t want to go. I want to stay down in the darkness. I want to die. Or rather, I don’t mind dying.

  But despite myself, I rise upwards, then just as I’m about to break through, into the light, I wake up. I wake up soaked with sweat, drenched and cold, almost as if I’ve actually been in the water. It’s a horrible dream. So real.

  I didn’t drown, but every time I have this dream, I feel as if I did, but that I was given a reprieve. Another chance. Another go at life.

  I didn’t have that dream last night. What happened last night was worse. Far worse. But you won’t understand unless I start at the beginning. And even then, you still might not understand.

  In the end I decided it wasn’t so much a case of understanding, but believing. Believing it was possible. Because not believing just wasn’t an option.

  Chapter One

  I wasn’t sorry to leave London. It was high time. People have short memories when it comes to TV programmes, but occasionally someone would accost me in a supermarket aisle.

  ‘Excuse me, but didn’t you use to be Ruth Travers?’

  I would stand tall, pull my tummy in and say, ‘Actually, I still am.’

  Undeterred, my tormentor (usually female) would peer at my face, as if I were an unusual specimen in a zoo. ‘You looked younger on TV,’ she would say, accusingly. ‘Fancy seeing you in here. “Delia of the Delphiniums”!’

  ‘You know, in five years I only made one programme about delphiniums.’

  ‘Suppose you’ll turn up on Hallmark eventually. There’s so many channels now, they don’t know how to fill up the schedules, do they?’

  ‘Really, I have no idea. I don’t even watch TV these days, let alone appear on it.’ Glancing ostentatiously at my watch, I would form a startled O with my lips and exclaim, ‘Is that the time? You must excuse me. I’m going to be late for a meeting with Prince Charles. He wants to pick my brains about growing comfrey as green manure. Sorry! Must fly!’

  Ignoring a belated request for an autograph, I’d make my escape, diving into the nearest tube station, anxious to resume the life of anonymity and quiet desperation I’d known since losing my lover, my father and the woman I’d regarded as a mother.

  I called it The Year of Deaths. 2010. My annus horribilis.

  It began with David dropping dead on New Year’s Day as he shovelled snow. He was fifty-four. I wish I could say he died a happy man, but two hours earlier, I’d finally summoned up the courage to tell him I thought our relationship was going nowhere. Unable to process the information, he’d gone out to clear the drive as a displacement activity and suffered a fatal heart attack.

  I was given leave of absence from my TV gardening show and was gearing up for a return in the spring when my irascible and difficult father was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. He was a widower and I was his only child, so I turned my back on a lucrative television career and the horticultural work I loved, in order to spend more time with my father and eventually to nurse him.

  I took his ashes to the Isle of Skye. Dad had spent little time there himself, but I knew it well. I was only eight when my mother died, but my father virtually gave up on the real world and retreated into academia, his first love and great consolation. He sent me to Skye every year to spend the summer with his sister-in-law, Janet, while he stayed behind in Cambridge to research and write.

  Aunt Janet did her best to fill the breach and became mother, father and friend to me. It was she who taught me to grow things and to love the natural world, so after I’d scattered my father’s ashes, I decided to stay with Janet for a while, hoping to recover from the combined shock of the loss of my partner and my father’s sudden decline.

  But there was to be no let-up for me. Janet had one of her dizzy spells in the garden and fell down a small flight of stone steps. She broke her arm and collarbone and never recovered. She was eighty-two and, confined to bed, her mental and physical decline was rapid. Her GP advised me to prepare for the worst.

  I’d borne up pretty well losing David and then my father, but when Janet died I went to pieces. Smithereens. I was inconsolable and thought I would go mad with grief. (Perhaps I did. That would account for what happened later. Or seemed to happen.) Janet’s kindly GP looked after me and said my reaction wasn’t just about losing my aunt. It was pent-up grief that had accumulated during that terrible year.

  I couldn’t face a return to London and my stal
led career, let alone the prospect of dating at the age of forty-two. Nor could I face clearing out Tigh-na-Linne, Janet’s beloved home, which now belonged to me. So I shuttled back and forth from Skye to London, collecting my things, tidying up loose ends, shutting up my flat, finally returning to Tigh-na-Linne, where I spent my time in a sort of daze, grieving, resting and tending Janet’s beautiful garden.

  Then something unaccountable happened.

  One day, I went into the study, determined to make a start on sorting out her personal things. I should perhaps point out that, unlike me, Aunt Janet was obsessively tidy. Since her death I’d tried to keep the house in good order, with everything in its place, just as she would have wished. I think I must have been scared of letting her go, of forgetting her, and this was my way of keeping her with me for a little while longer.

  As I sank into the battered leather chair behind Janet’s desk, I noticed the top was off her gold fountain pen. Pen and pen-top lay on the blotter, leaking fresh ink. Beside the pen, Janet’s RHS gardening diary (my Christmas present to her every year) lay open. Glancing at the blank page, I registered with a pang that the diary was open at the week of her death. Puzzled and not a little unnerved, I scanned the rest of the desk. My eye came to rest on the brass perpetual calendar which Janet hadn’t been able to alter since the day of her fall. It said Thursday, October 21st.

  Today’s date.

  Janet had been dead for about a month. She employed no cleaner or any other domestic staff. There had been a gardener who put in a few hours a week, but once it became clear I was staying, Janet gave him notice, insisting (for my own good, I think) that I took responsibility for the garden.

  As far as I knew, no one had keys to the house apart from me. Janet’s nearest neighbours were currently in Australia. Dr Mackenzie had looked in on me two weeks ago, but I’d had no visitor since, unless you counted the postman. No one and nothing had disturbed my hermit’s existence. I was quite alone. At least, I thought I was.

  I put it down to strain. I’d been in a bad way after Janet died and Dr Mackenzie had had to prescribe a tranquilliser to get me through the funeral, so I concluded I must have had some sort of delayed reaction to the drug, some drastic memory lapse that prevented me from remembering that I’d wandered into Janet’s study and messed about with her things.

  Or perhaps I’d taken to sleepwalking. Wasn’t that supposed to be a reaction to stress?... I’d never done such a thing in the two years I’d been sleeping with David, but with all my loved ones wiped out in less than a year, who knew what sort of reaction might set in? And if it was a reaction to grief, I might well have touched my aunt’s precious things, arranged her desk to look as if she’d just popped out of the room. (Except that Aunt Janet would no more leave the top off her pen than leave the house in her underwear.)

  I tidied these troubling thoughts away, along with Janet’s pen and diary, which I put into the desk drawer, shutting it firmly. My enthusiasm for making a start on her papers had evaporated, leaving me feeling unsettled. I decided I would go to the music room instead and sort out her sheet music.

  In her youth, Janet Gillespie had been a fine pianist. She’d hoped for a performing career, but she’d never fulfilled her early promise and, in such a competitive field, it was easy for a woman (rather a plain woman, it has to be said) to be overlooked. Janet eventually abandoned her performing career and channelled her energies into teaching and composing. After an inauspicious start - a chamber opera that flopped and a set of piano pieces that critics condemned as “trite” - Janet seemed to find her voice in the 1950s and began to enjoy some success, notably with a romantic song cycle, In Memoriam, a poignant and pacifist response to the First World War, in which several of her forebears had died.

  In Memoriam made Janet’s name and she never looked back. Success seemed to unleash her creativity and her new compositions met with acclaim. Since her death I’d received emails from academics asking if I wished to sell Janet’s musical archive. One persistent but polite musicologist from Toronto University had asked if he could visit Tigh-na-Linne to make a study of her manuscripts as he was writing a book about female composers. Since Janet would have loathed the idea of being relegated to such a ghetto, I’d said no.

  So far I’d ignored all other requests, but I knew I’d have to deal with them eventually. Janet’s musical legacy was important. It was probably also valuable. So I decided I’d spend a pleasant morning in the music room, her favourite room in the house and the one with the best view.

  On Janet’s death I’d become the owner of Tigh-na-Linne, (Gaelic for “the house by the pool”), a large Victorian country house on the Isle of Skye in the region of Sleat (pronounced “Slate”.) Sleat was known as “the garden of Skye” on account of the lushness of its vegetation. It was appropriate that Janet should live there since she divided her time and energy between her two great loves: music and gardening. Hers was a seasonal existence. She composed in winter and gardened from spring (very late on Skye) until the end of autumn.

  Tigh-na-Linne was draughty, leaky and, as the estate agents say, in need of refurbishment. (To judge from some of the wallpapers and carpets, I don’t think Janet had decorated since the 1980s.) But because it was largely unmodernised, the house retained a lot of period features: marble fireplaces, wooden shutters and sanitary ware of surprising loveliness. When I used to come and stay as a child, I felt as if I’d wandered in to the pages of one of the classics: The Railway Children or The Water Babies. There was even a big mirror over the mantelpiece, like the one in Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Standing on a chair, I’d attempted to penetrate it by pressing my hands against the glass, but I’d found it unyielding. (So was Aunt Janet when she saw the grubby fingerprints I’d left on the mirror.)

  Modernised and refurbished, Tigh-na-Linne would be worth a tidy amount. What was impossible to value was the house’s location. Rattling windows, water-stained ceilings and idiosyncratic plumbing paled into insignificance when one looked out of the big windows at the view over Loch Eishort, a sea loch, to the Black Cuillin mountains beyond and the distant islands of Canna and Rhum.

  Janet had spent most of her life at Tigh-na-Linne. She’d been born there and so had her mother, Grace, only surviving child of James and Agnes Munro, who lost their three sons in the so-called Great War. Not long before she died, I asked Janet if she’d ever grown tired of her incomparable view, or if she’d just become inured to it after eighty years. Without pausing to think, she announced, in that abrupt way she had that sounded impatient but really masked an essential shyness, ‘Och, you never get used to beauty, Ruth. Never! All that happens is you become increasingly intolerant of ugliness and wonder why on earth folk put up with it.’

  Now with Janet gone, all that beauty was mine to enjoy.

  Alone.

  Having discovered Janet’s desk in disarray, I was a little nervous as I entered the music room and made my way toward the cabinet where she stored all her music. I hadn’t entered the room since her death. Before that I’d only come in once a week, at Janet’s request, to dust. She couldn’t bear for the Bechstein grand piano to stand unused, but as I couldn’t play and she had a broken arm, it had to remain untouched, but not entirely neglected. I dusted it carefully and always left it as Janet would wish to find it: open and ready to play.

  I didn’t notice the piano until I turned round, my arms full of sheet music and sheaves of manuscript paper. As soon as I saw it, I cried out and dropped all the music. As it fell to the floor, loose sheets fluttered upwards, then sank again with a sigh. I stood and stared, open-mouthed.

  The piano was closed. The lid was down and the keyboard was shut away. Not only was there no music open on the elaborately carved music stand, the stand itself had been folded away inside the piano. Never had I seen Aunt Janet’s piano in this sorry state. It was a point of honour that her beloved Bechstein - her partner in life almost - should always stand ready to play. To close it up would have been a kind of sacr
ilege.

  But closed it was.

  Stepping over the piles of music on the floor, I headed for the sitting room where I poured myself a brandy, my mind reeling. Someone was playing games with me. But who? Dear old Dr Mackenzie? Surely not! Could it be the gardener Janet had laid off, unemployed and nursing a grudge? It surely couldn’t be a random intruder, shutting up a grand piano and leaving the top off a fountain pen. It had to be someone with malicious intent who knew both Janet and me very well. But who knew both of us? Only Dr Mackenzie. And why would he do such a thing?

  The brandy wasn’t helping, but I needed a distraction and I liked the feel of the heavy bottle in my hands, like an improvised weapon. I took a deep, calming breath and considered. Gardener-with-a-grudge had to be Suspect No. 1. Perhaps Janet had once lent him a key, or he’d seen one hanging up somewhere. Perhaps he knew of a secret way in to the house. I decided I would check every door and window, after which I would speak to the man whose name and number were recorded on the kitchen notice board.

  Despite the mildness of the October day, I was shivering as I drained my glass.

  Chapter Two

  I found all the windows locked or impossible to open from the outside and all the doors locked, apart from the back door, which was my concession to local custom. This was the Isle of Skye where trusting souls paid scant attention to security. Nevertheless, I now locked the back door, which would annoy the postman who was used to opening it without ceremony and dumping the post on the kitchen worktop. Too bad. He would have to knock. Perhaps he was my mysterious intruder. I was taking no chances.

  The scrap of paper on the kitchen notice board said only Howard - gardener, followed by a mobile number. The writing wasn’t Janet’s and I had no idea if this was the man’s surname or his first name. I picked up the phone and tapped in the number. After a couple of rings, he answered.