Chapter 43
I will never fully understand the notion of a suicide mission. For us it is relatively simple, entailing only the considerable boredom of youth as its primary consequence. Certainly I regretted how likely it seemed that I was going to have to blow a hole in my own skull to escape the situation I had so effectively talked myself into, but by far the more intimidating prospect would have been capture and questioning, and I considered a few years' boredom to be infinitely preferable to that.
But I have seen men for whom death truly is the end walk towards their demise for reasons no greater than that it was what they were told to do. On the beaches of Normandy, where the bodies floated in the water beside the falling ramps of the landing craft, I saw men run into machine-gun fire who would say, "Hell, I never thought it would come to this, but now I'm here, what's a guy to do?" With no going back, and no going forward, they went to their deaths with no better plan immediately to hand, having gambled that their choices would not narrow so far, and having been found to be wrong.
For my part, it seemed likely that I would die in this place for little more than a speculation. For a crystal in a radio which was a few years ahead of its time; for the name of a man who saw the future; for a secret hidden by men with guns.
The commander was so good as to point all of this out to me. "You're going to die here," he explained as we sat in his office, waiting for Karpenko to come. "Make it easier for yourself."
I grinned. "Make it easier for yourself" implied that death was my primary concern, as well as being a phrase I associated with New York policemen rather than Soviet commanders in a hidden base. My levity surprised him, his thin grey eyebrows twitching over his paper face. "You're handling this very calmly," I pointed out, "for a man on the wrong end of a gun."
He shrugged. "I've had my time and lived it well. You, though–you are a young man. You will have things which tie you to this world. Are you married?"
"That's a very pious question," I answered. "Will it have the same emotional implication if I say that I enjoy living in sin?"
"What else do you enjoy? Perhaps you can enjoy them again."
"That's a really nice thought–" I sighed "–and I'm grateful for it, but there comes a point when one realises that gratification of the flesh is only so fulfilling. It's fantastic while it lasts, but comes with so many questions of emotional baggage and doubt that frankly I begin to question whether the grief involved outweighs the satisfaction gained."
To my surprise, he raised his eyebrows. "You clearly aren't having the right sort of gratification."
"A professional ear masseuse in Bangkok once said exactly those words to me."
"You're not Russian," he suggested.
"Is there something wrong with my accent?"
"No Russian would do this."
"That's a terrible indictment of the Soviet spirit."
"You misunderstand. You do not appear to be in a fragile enough state to have chosen this as your particular suicide, and yet neither do you seem to have an agenda which could further the cause of others. I see in you no clear explanation for what you do…"
"So why assume I'm foreign?"
He shrugged. "Call it instinct." That was a little distressing. Instinct was one of the few factors which I had no great ability to alter or control. "Comrade," he went on, "you seem too intelligent to be doing this for nothing. Is there really no other path open to you?"
"None which engages me so much," I replied. A knock at the door cut short any further soul-searching. I gestured at the commander to be silent behind his desk and, tucking the gun into my coat, slipped on to the one stool besides his desk.
A nod, and the commander called,
"Enter!"
The door opened. The man who came in was already in the middle of a sentence, which had clearly begun for him some several seconds before actually receiving permission to come inside.
"… very busy right now and really can't be—"
The sentence stopped.
The man looked from the commander to me, and his face broke into a smile. "Good God," he said, each word dropping like a pebble in a pond. "Fancy seeing you here."
Chapter 44
Many lives ago, in that busy summer when Vincent Rankis and I first began to truly examine each other's minds, and before that cold night when he learned of the Cronus Club and left me with some light bruises and some heavy doubts for my pains, we went punting down the river Cam.
I have never liked punting, always feeling that, as means of transport went, it was one of the least sensible available and, more to the point, as it appeared to be practised in Cambridge, a skill as much valued in the incompetence as the mastery. A good trip on the river would not be complete for both students and some of my peers unless it involved hitting a bridge, causing a pile-up, running aground on a muddy bank, dropping the pole in fast-flowing waters and, ideally, at least one person falling in. I have similar feelings about gondolas in Venice, where the skill of the pilot is almost entirely cancelled out by the size of the fee and the sense that you are, in your own naïve way, contributing to a cliché that will in later years serve more gondoliers to defraud more tourists of their cash.
"That's your problem, Harry," Vincent had explained. "You've never understood the concept of doing things by halves."
I had grumbled my way to the riverbank, and grumbled my way on to the punt, and grumbled as we bumped our way between students, and grumbled as Vincent opened up his wicker basket, packed for the purpose, to produce flasks of gin with a dash of tonic, and perfectly cut cucumber sandwiches.
"The cucumber sandwiches," he'd explained, "are vital if we are to fulfil our roles."
"What are our roles?" I sulked.
"We are the living proof of the notion that rationality and intellectual vigour are slaves to social pressure and pleasant sunlight. For you and I may know, Harry," he exclaimed, sloshing the pole through the water with pointed enthusiasm, "that this is a truly ridiculous pastime for any self-respecting scholar of the universe to indulge in, and yet, for no rational reason that I can possibly devise, this is what must be done."
Our companions giggled.
I wasn't at all convinced by Vincent's choice of associates for this trip. I'd only met them at the riverbank, and their presence had further added to my sense of impending doom. She was Leticia, and she was Frances, but which was which I still couldn't quite put my finger on. They were dressed very properly in high-buttoned summer dresses and with their hair immaculately curled by their ears, but alas, from their propriety also came their frivolity, for they knew–of course they knew!–that taking a punt ride with two young bachelors in the summer sun was very much something Mother Would Not Approve Of, and any other thoughts they might have had on the course of our journey were rather subsumed by this all-encompassing revelation.
"Leticia's father is something in biochemistry," Vincent whispered in my ear, "and Frances has been claimed, apparently, by Hugh, who's a thoroughly repugnant creature but is playing tennis today down on the lawns. When we get there, Harry, I'm afraid it's either your or my ghastly duty to ensure that one of us kisses Frances on the lips, for Hugh to see; better not get the timing wrong, else we'll have to go through the entire procedure again until he notices."
I begged tutor's privilege, announcing it was bad enough to be seen to be on the river with students, let alone kissing one. Vincent sighed profoundly, and when we got to the lawns he did, indeed, as promised, contrive to drop the pole into the river and insist that myself and Leticia paddle against the current to collect it while he engaged in the loud and important business of temporarily seducing Frances. The calamity of our situation drew everyone's attention; the sight of the small, slightly round figure of Vincent entering into a sensual embrace with the spry Frances held it, and his work was done.
To my surprise, as I dried my freezing hands on my trousers and returned the pole to the safety of the punt, I realised I was laughing. Quite when the absurdity of the situation had begun to outweigh my resentment at its circumstances, I couldn't say, but no matter how hard I tried, I found it almost impossible to maintain a foul mood. Even the cucumber sandwiches, thin, tasteless and forlorn, entertained me for all of the above qualities. I had a worry that Leticia, feeling left out, expected me to do something sensual with her too, and my polite refusals to do so led to a rumour within the campus that I was, in fact, gay and enjoyed Vincent for his body, not his mind.
"Damn me, it's nice that someone does," said Vincent when the rumour reached his ears. "It's a lot of hard work, falling back on intellectual brilliance and emotional intelligence to seduce girls these days."
Should I have seen the clues?
Should I have spotted what Vincent was?
He was a novelty. He was unusual, ridiculous, brilliant, sombre and absurd. He was innovation in a stodgy town. When the day was done, and our companions had been returned to the stony embraces of their families, unsullied if not uncorrupted, we sat in my rooms, drinking the last of the gin–a nearly empty bottle being far sadder, in Vincent's mind, than a finished one–and discussed once again the perpetual subject of Vincent's final-year thesis.
"I don't know, Harry. None of it seems really… important enough."
Not important enough? The turning of the stars in the heavens, the breaking of the atoms of existence, the bending of light in our sky, the rolling of electromagnetic waves through our very bodies…
"Yes yes yes." He flapped his hands. "That's all important! But ten thousand words of thesis is… well, it's nothing, is it? And then there's this assumption that I should focus on one thing alone, as if it's possible to comprehend the structure of the sun without truly understanding the nature of atomic behaviour!"
Here it was again, the familiar rant.
"We talk about a theory of everything," he spat, "as if it were a thing which will just be discovered overnight. As if a second Einstein will one day sit up in his bed and exclaim, 'Mein Gott! Ich habe es gesehen!' and that's it, the universe comprehended. I find it offensive, genuinely offensive, to think that the solution is going to be found in numbers, or in atoms, or in great galactic forces–as if our petty academia could truly comprehend on a single side of A4 the structure of the universe. X = Y, we seem to say; one day there will be a theory of everything and then we can stop. We'll have won–all things will be known. Codswallop."
"Codswallop?"
"Codswallop and barney," he agreed firmly, "to paraphrase Dr Johnson."
Perhaps, I suggested, the fate of the universe could briefly take second place to the thorny issue of graduating with honours?
He blew loudly between his lips, a liquid sound of contempt. "That," he exclaimed, "is precisely what's wrong with academics."
Chapter 45
"Good God," he said. "Fancy seeing you here."
He was only a few years older since I'd seen him last, those centuries ago, still a fresh-faced young man barely clipping his early thirties. Somehow he'd managed to find a pair of grey suit trousers and well-kept brown leather shoes, polished up bright to wear. An oversized greenish tunic was more in keeping with his Soviet style, and a thin beard of fragile curls was an attempt to enhance his age, and he was Karpenko, and he was Vincent Rankis. He was followed almost immediately by two armed guards, rifles raised. They at once shouted at me to get down, to put my hands above my head, but he silenced them with a gesture.
"It's all right," said the man known as Karpenko. "Let me handle this."
Vincent Rankis, sometime student, as British as they came, his Russian flawless, his eyes full of recollection. The night he'd attacked me in Cambridge, he'd also vanished from his rooms. I'd used every resource in my power to track him down, but every name had led to an empty nothing, every enquiry ended in a failure. Vincent Rankis, I'd been forced to conclude, had, legally speaking, never existed. But then neither had I.
For a moment I couldn't speak, all the tactics and questions I'd had in mind briefly suspended at the sight of him. He took the opportunity to flash me a brilliant smile, before glancing at the commander and saying, "Comrade, may I have the room?"
The commander looked to me, and through lips turned to sand I mumbled, "Fine by me."
The commander rose carefully, walked to Vincent and paused, turning his head by the young man's side to murmur, quietly but audibly, "He has a gun."
"That's fine," replied Vincent. "I'll handle it."
With a nod, he dismissed the other soldiers and, moving around the commander's desk, settled himself down in the large chair with an easy confidence, folding his fingers together in front of his chin, elbow resting on his crossed-over knee.
"Hello, Harry," he said at last.
"Hello, Vincent."
"You here about our Daniel van Thiel, I assume?"
"He pointed the way."
"Self-important little man," said Vincent. "Had this incredibly annoying habit of telling everyone how brilliant they were, which was of course nothing more than a demand to be informed how brilliant he was himself. I'd hoped he'd help resolve some of the monitoring issues we've been having, but in the end I had to let him go. Little wart was bright enough to remember a few technical specifications, though. Should have killed him months ago. And your journey here–via Professor Gulakov? Did you like him?"
"Yes, very much."
"I'm afraid he's been sent away for re-education."
"I'm sorry to hear that. But then this is a very gun-heavy operation you seem to be running. Had to kill many to preserve it?"
He puffed impatiently. "You know how it is, Harry. Can't risk introducing too much new technology into the course of the linear timeline without being able to control the consequences. Risks drawing attention, rocking the boat–you're Cronus Club, you must know all about that. Speaking of which…" he flicked a fingernail casually against the ridge of its neighbour, making a soft thwap-thwap noise "… should I be expecting the combined forces of the world's Clubs to descend on me any second now?"
"The Clubs know my suspicions, if that's what you're wondering, and are under orders to pursue the matter if I vanish."
He groaned, throwing his eyes up to heaven in exasperation. "That's incredibly tedious, Harry, actually. What people never realise about the Soviet Union is how much bureaucracy there is at the middling level. It's all very well if you're the general secretary–people know better than to take notes then–but for anyone further down than Politburo there's a huge amount of documentation that has to be accounted for whenever shutting down or moving these projects."
"Doesn't sound very secure," I admitted.
"Politics," he spat. "Everyone is always looking for material to use against everybody else–my point being, Harry, I could really do without the frustration of having to move bases again. Do you think the Club will find you, if you vanish?"
"Maybe," I replied with a shrug. "Is that the situation we're looking at here? Am I going to vanish?"
"I don't know, Harry," he murmured thoughtfully. "What do you think?"
For the first time our gazes locked, and there was no student there, no young man wanting to go punting on the Cam with a girl called Frances to embarrass a rival, but an old, old man in a young man's body, staring out from those still-round eyes. I pulled the gun from my coat, laid it quietly in my lap, finger inside the trigger guard. The movement caused his eyes briefly to flicker, before settling back on me.
"Not for me, I trust?"
"Just in case reporting back becomes difficult."
"Of course–a bullet for your brain. How determined of you. Although…" he shifted gently in his seat, shoulders twitching in what might have been a shrug "… what do you really have to report?"
I sighed. "I don't suppose it would be too much for you to tell me what's going on here?"
"Not at all, Harry. Indeed, it is my hope that, once you are aware, you may even join us." He stood, gesturing courteously towards the door. "Shall we?"
Chapter 46
My father.
I think of my father.
Both of them, in fact.
I think of Patrick August sitting silently across from me by the fireside, peeling the whole skin off an apple, one twist of the fruit at a time.
I think of Rory Hulne, an old man with a great swelling in his left leg, who in one not so special life in 1952 sent a letter informing me that he was holidaying on Holy Island; would I join him? I was a professor of mathematics, married to a doctor of English literature, Elizabeth. Lizzy wanted children and berated herself for the fact that we seemed unable to have them. I loved Lizzy as a loyal companion and a kind soul, and stayed with her until her death in 1973 from a series of strokes which left her largely paralysed down the left-hand side, and did not seek her out in future lives.
I am on Holy Island, the letter said. May you join me?
"Who is this Mr Hulne?" asked Lizzy.
"He was the master of the house where I grew up."
"Were you close?"
"No. Not in this life."
"Why in God's name does he want to see you now?"
"I don't know."
"Will you go?"
"Maybe. He will be dying by now."
"Harry," she chided, "that's an awful thing to say."
It was seven hours by train to Alnmouth, the train pausing at Newcastle to let the black-faced driver take his deserved break on the green wooden benches of the red-brick station. When he pulled his cap off, there was a line of soot across his forehead, stopping at the headband, and two owl-circles around his eyes when he lowered his goggles. A child waved at me excitedly from its mother's lap on the opposite platform. I waved back. The infant kept waving for the fifteen minutes we were in the station, and, wearily, I felt obliged to return the gesture. By the time we left, my arm ached, as did my smile, and the feeling that this journey was a terrible mistake grew on me. I flicked through the newspaper on my lap, but had read it some few lives ago and grew irritated by its naïve coverage of events yet unfolding. The crossword in the back frustrated me–I had answered nearly every clue three lives ago, when I attempted this same crossword during a break from the Europe desk at the Foreign Office, and three lives ago I had been stumped by the very same clue which now I could not penetrate: "Hark–a twist in the road, I perceive", eight letters and, I was infuriated to find, as impossible now as it had been those centuries before. Maybe, for one life only, I could be the man who wrote to the newspapers to complain.
The tide was in, Holy Island cut off from the mainland, the causeway visible only as a few sticks protruding above the surface of the water. I paid an old man with a rowing boat full of crab cages and no crabs for a ride across the water. He said nothing the entire length of the journey, and rowed with a rhythm so steady you could have set a pacemaker by it. As he rowed, the fog rose up across the water, smothering land and sea, obscuring the black remains of the castle that crowned the island's hill. By the time we reached the shore, the fog had cut visibility down to a few white cottages peering out from the edge of the hill, through which the mournful call of the thick-fleeced lost sheep wailed. The island was yet to discover its role as a tourist temple, selling almost-home-made jam and practically-hand-made candles, but had a reputation as a place where people went to be alone, to forget and, yes, even to die beneath the old Celtic crosses. It wasn't hard to find my father–the strangers in town were all well noted. I was directed to a room above a small-doored cottage owned by a Mrs Mason, a cheerful, rose-faced woman who could crack a chicken's neck between thumb and forefinger and who didn't believe in this new-fangled NHS business, not when there were gooseberries in the garden and rosehip cordial in the kitchen cupboard.
"You be here for Mr Hulne?" she asked brightly. "I'll bring up some tea."
Up a staircase designed to decapitate anyone higher than seven years old, through a wooden door with a black iron latch on it was a room with a small orange fire burning against the wall and a series of poorly painted images showing still waters bedecked with lilac flowers. There was a small single-person bed and a rocking chair by the fire. In the rocking chair, more blanket than man, was Rory Edmond Hulne, and he was, right on schedule, dying. From the yellow tinge at the end of his flaking nails to the protruding weakly throbbing veins on his chicken-neck, he was a man for whom little more could be provided than palliative care and a little emotional redemption. It took very little to assess which one I was.
I perched on the end of the bed, put my bag down on the floor and, as his eyes flickered open against the gum that weighed his lashes down, I said, "Hello, Mr Hulne."
When had I seen him last? A warm May in 1925 of this life, when I had, as I always did, finally mustered enough self-awareness and recollection to regain my former self and composure, and had written in my firmest hand to the Cronus Club, requesting extraction from the tedium of childhood. Charity Hazelmere, that great matron of the Club, had replied at once, informing Patrick and Harriet that a generous scholar was offering to pay for the education and board of deprived youths, and my name had been put forward for a position. A figure had been named, and I had absolved my foster-parents of all guilt at my departure by exclaiming gleefully how exciting the prospect would be, and how I had longed for a chance to better myself, and would write home often, though they could both of them barely read. They had packed my one bag of tatty clothes and put me in the back of my foster-father's cart to take me to the station, and Rory Hulne had come out of his house to watch me go, and stood in the door, and said nothing. In some lives, as we went through this ritual, he would come to shake my hand and tell me to be a brave young man; not this time, though quite what it was in my behaviour that so altered his, life to life, I can never say.
That had been nearly thirty years ago. On the few occasions I returned north, to spend Christmas silently with Patrick or to attend Harriet's funeral–that constant fixture of my childhood–my father had not been there. Away on business, or taking the waters, or up in town, or other such emptinesses of occupation. Yet now, here he sat, dying before my eyes, alone in a cottage on an island, no signs of wealth or power about him, a frail old man by a fire.
"Who are you?" he murmured, voice grown as thin as his frame. "What do you want?"
"It's Harry, sir," I replied, the deference of youth intruding despite myself. "Harry August."
"Harry? I wrote you a letter."
"That's why I came."
"Didn't think you would."
"Well… I did."
Hundreds of years of living, and why could this man still reduce me to empty platitudes, make me feel a child again, hiding from the glare of a master?
"Are you well, Harry?" he asked, as the silence grew too thin and high between us. "Are you rich?"
"I do all right," I replied carefully. "I teach mathematics."
"Mathematics? Why?"
"I enjoy it. The subject is… engaging, and the antics of the students are always curious."
"You have… children?"
"No. I don't."
He grunted, a sound which conveyed to me almost satisfaction. A wrist flicked towards the fire, a command to put another log on. I did, crouching down by the brazier and poking it with the end of a stick before tossing that too into the flames. When I straightened up, he was staring right at me with a face that would one day be my own, and though his body was fading, his mind was still very much alive. He grabbed my arm as I moved back to the bed, holding me in place, staring up urgently into my eyes.
"Do you have money?" he demanded softly. "Are you rich?"
"I told you, Mr Hulne, I teach—"
"I heard you were rich. My sisters… the house…" A flicker of pain passed over his face, his hand falling from my wrist as if it suddenly lacked the strength to hold on. "Soon there'll be nothing left."
I sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed. "Do you need… a loan, Mr Hulne?" I spoke very slowly, to keep my rising anger out of my voice. Had I been summoned after twenty-seven years to serve as a walking bank to a man who wouldn't even acknowledge me his heir?
"The Depression…" he grunted. "The war… the new government, the land, the times… Constance is dead, Victoria dead, Alexandra has to work in a shop–a shop of all things. Clement will inherit the title, but he's drinking it all–all of it, all gone. We sold half the land to pay the debt on the mortgage, not even the mortgage itself! They'll take the house and fill it with union men," he spat the words, "with middle-class bankers and their spawn, with lawyers or accountants. They'll auction it all off, all of it, and there'll be nothing left. All gone. All for nothing."
I had to force my body into stillness, felt the twitch in my knee, wanted to fold my arms, cross my legs, as if the very muscles in my being had to express their rising hostility.
"Is there something you want to say to me, Mr Hulne?"
"You always liked Alexandra, didn't you?" he said. "She was nice to you when you were a child, yes?"
"She was kind," I admitted. "In more ways than I suspect I saw."
"Clement is a disgusting little creature," he added bitterly. "Do you know he's had three wives? He wants to sell it all and move to California."
"Mr Hulne," I repeated, harder now, "I don't see what it is you expect me to do about this."
His eyes flickered upwards, and there was liquid brimming on the bottom of the gummy eyelids. As so often is the case with men who refuse to cry, the awareness of his own tears seemed to cause them to rise even faster, shame mixing with grief, and even as they began to dribble down his face he clung to the side of the chair, refusing to acknowledge their presence on his skin. "You can't let it die," he whimpered. "It's your past too, Harry–the house, the lands. You understand, don't you? You want to keep them alive too."
"As the poet says–the times they are a-changing," I replied firmly. "Or perhaps he hasn't said it yet, but time will cure that absence. I am sorry for your situation, Mr Hulne. I regret that Alexandra is in difficulty; she was always kind. But Clement was a bully, even as a child, and the house was a monster of stone-praised vanity and quiet tragedy. Constance was a tyrant, more focused on perceptions than truth; Victoria was a drug addict; Lydia was an innocent who you tormented beyond—"
"How dare you!" His body jerked as if he would rise from the chair and hit me, but he didn't have the strength to do it, so stayed put, shaking all over, the tears fading now against the rising flush in his cheeks. "How dare you? How dare you speak of them like… like you knew, like you…? You were a child, you left us! You left us and never looked back. How dare—"
"Tell me," I cut in. His voice was angrier, but mine was more powerful. "When you raped my mother, did she scream?"
He could have gone either way. The rage was there in him, ready to plough straight through my words, but instead, it seems, they ploughed through him, knocking him back against his seat and pinning him there like a butterfly. I made sure he stayed put, adding, "I met a woman called Prudence Crannich once, who delivered a baby in the women's washroom of Berwick-upon-Tweed station, on New Year's Day. The mother died, but I tracked down her family and listened to her mother–my grandmother–tell the story of Lisa Leadmill, who went down south to find her fortune and who met her death in the arms of strangers. Cold is an enemy in trauma care–it slows down clotting, making it easier for patients to bleed out. Perhaps, if I'd been born in summer, my mother would have lived. Of course no one but you and Lisa will ever know if you truly raped her, but she was a young lonely woman in the house of an angry, potentially violent master who believed that his wife had betrayed him and was himself quite probably psychologically damaged from his time at the front. I imagine you caught her by the arm and kissed her, loud and rough, so that your wife would know you had done it. I imagine she was terrified, not understanding her role as a pawn in your marriage. You tell her that her position is becoming untenable; she begs you not to do it. You say that it'll make things easier for everyone, that if she screams the household will know and she'll be sent out without pay or references, branded a whore–better to be docile, better to be quiet… I suppose you could tell yourself that it wasn't rape, if she didn't scream. Did she scream when you pushed her down? Did she scream?"
His knuckles were yellow-white where they gripped the chair, his body still shaking now but not, I felt, with rage.
"There was a time," I went on, calmer now, "when I wanted to know you. I wrote you a letter once, telling you about the horrors I'd seen, the sins I'd committed, the pain I was in. I needed a stranger who cared, someone who was obliged by the bond of blood between us to understand but not judge. I thought perhaps you could still be my father. You replied as one soldier to another, but I realise now I've never really been a son to you. An heir, perhaps, a bastard heir, a sign of shame, a reminder of your failings, a retribution in human form, but never really a son. I don't think you've ever really had it in you to be what a father should."
I picked up my bag, getting to my feet and turning to the door. "I thought for a moment," I continued, "that you might be about to propose that I, as your blood, inherited Hulne House. I wondered if you believed that I might feel a fondness for the place, a desire to preserve it, that Clement lacks. Or if, with my humble origins, I might be so awed by the gift that I would somehow turn it into a monument to you and your name. As it is, I feel I should tell you that, were you to give me the house now and all its lands, and the home where I grew up under Patrick and Harriet's care, I would raze it all to the ground, to the very lowest foundation stone, and transform it into… a pleasure centre for bankers and their children, or a casino for the quirky, or maybe I'd just leave the land barren, and let the earth reclaim its own."
I turned to leave him.
As I got to the door he called after me, "Harry! You can't… It's your past, Harry. It's your past."
I walked away and didn't look back.
Two lives later I did come into possession of Hulne House. The catalyst was, aged twenty-one, attending my grandmother Constance's funeral. I had never been to her funeral before, never wanted to. Aunt Alexandra, who all those years ago had saved my life and insisted I was taken in, and who would always, in every life, save me, fell to talking to me by the graveside and we grew, in our way, close. She was the strongest of the family, saw the way the wind was blowing and let it carry her in its path. I never found out what she said to my father, but three months before his death he changed the will, and I inherited the estate. I kept it exactly as it was, not a brick changed, and turned it into a charitable trust for the treatment of mental illness. At my next death it was of course restored to its usual state beneath the watchful eye of Constance, but I liked to think that somewhere, in a world lost to my sight, Hulne House had finally made a difference.