The Mistletoe Bride(59)
Five minutes turned to ten. Feeling a pleasant drowsiness, a prickling at the base of her neck, and knowing she couldn’t allow herself to drop off, Sophia reluctantly opened her eyes. She only had an hour and a half before the coach came back to pick them up and she wanted to explore the grounds and ruins themselves too.
She looked at her watch. Tapped the glass with her fingernail. The minute hand had been sticking for days, but usually she could jolt it back into life. She tapped again, but this time nothing happened. It had stopped. It was a nuisance – their days were organised to the minute – but Sophia didn’t think she’d been in the chapel very long. Promising herself to find a jeweller’s in Oxford later to replace the battery, Sophia undid the strap, put the watch in her coat pocket and then stood to have a quick look around the chapel.
There was nothing of particular merit. Four plaques with the coat of arms of the Lovell family, a hound in flight, and a wooden bas-relief in the chancel – Sophia picked out a swan and a dove, an animal that might have been a hart or a stag, and a female figure in long, ornate robes. Sophia peered closely. Here was evidence linking the story of the vanished bride to Minster Lovell Hall. Long ribbons threaded through her hair, a beaded dress, slippers on her feet. In her hands, a wedding wreath of winter holly and mistletoe.
Sophia held the young bride’s gaze for a little longer, then moved on. Two brass candlesticks stood on the modest altar with a wooden lectern standing beside. A standard King James Bible, which suggested the chapel was still in use long after the Lovell family had renounced their claims to the estate.
Sophia gave a final glance, then turned and retraced her steps. At the door she paused, noticing an inscription carved on the wooden frame.
Our brief partings on earth will appear one day as nothing
beside the joy of eternity together
Then she noticed a few words had been added underneath in black paint, almost rubbed away in places:
Lost but not forgotten
A piece of historic graffiti, if the ragged and inconsistent size of the letters were anything to go by. Sophia smiled, carried back to a summer long ago. Herself at seven years old – smocked dress, white ankle socks, the feel of cold metal in her hand – carving her name and the date on the bark of a tree with her brother’s penknife: SOPHIA P LOVELL 1955. Her mother had smacked her, yet it had seemed worth it. That all too human desire to stand out, to stamp one’s mark on a place. The fifteenth century, the twentieth, some things never changed. That fierce need in all of us to be remembered.
She peered closer, hoping for a date or name, but there was nothing to reveal who had added the words or for whom.
The sky had clouded over while she’d been inside and there was now an unseasonable chill in the air. Everything looked dull and grey. Sophia shivered. As she walked back through the avenue of trees, the world seemed bleached of colour. No sun burnishing the leaves of the beeches that stood at the furthest edges of the lawns, no birdsong. And the path between them seemed longer than before, the twisting branches that had provided a green canopy now oddly bare.
Sophia stopped. She wasn’t sure how it could have happened, but she had somehow lost her bearings. She wasn’t quite sure where she was. She thought back. The coach had left them on Manor Road, leaving Sophia and her three companions to make their own way past St Kenelm’s church to the ruins of Minster Lovell Hall. She’d excused herself and struck out on her own, following a path through the graveyard towards the river before noticing the chapel and going there instead. Since there was only one door and the path led directly to it, there was no choice but to go in and come out the same way. It was nigh on impossible to have got lost. And yet Sophia had the distinct impression of being in a different place. Or, rather, the same place which no longer looked quite the same.
She looked at her wrist, forgetting her watch was broken and in her pocket, wondering if it was possible the others had left the grounds and taken a short cut through the graveyard of St Kenelm’s. Rubbed the bare skin on her arm. Not that it mattered, she supposed, provided she was waiting at the right place for the coach at the appointed time. She didn’t think it could be anywhere close to twelve yet and, besides, she’d hear the church bells chime.
With the river at her back, she orientated towards the north, fixing the jagged outline and pointed stone gables of Minster Lovell Hall clearly in her sights. With a pinch of relief, Sophia walked towards the ruins. The less tended lawns closer to the river bank gave way to geometric ornamental gardens and the remains of neat foundation walls of Cotswold stone. The variegated shades of autumn, burgundy and gold, had given way to bare trunks and a few defiant firs. Sophia looked again for sight of her companions, keen to be back in company again, but there was no sign of them.