The Last Days of Summer: The best feel-good summer read for 2017

“Why’s it special?” Caro asked, pulling her legs up and wrapping her arms around them.

“Because it’s about this house,” he explained, “and the people who used to live here.” At his words, I knew instantly the tale he would tell. I wasn’t entirely sure it was suitable for a nine-year-old, but maybe Nathaniel would edit it for Caro. A consummate storyteller, he always was a great judge of his audience.

As the others disappeared in search of digestifs, I pulled my chair in closer to better hear the story. Across the table, I realised, Edward was doing the same. I raised my eyebrows at him and he shrugged. “I’m a sucker for a good story,” he said. “How else do you think I got pulled into this gig?”

“If everyone is quite comfortable,” Nathaniel said, feigning considerably more patience than I happened to know he possessed, “then I’ll begin.

“This house has stood on this land for hundreds of years.” His voice had dropped into a cadence I recognised from childhood – that of a storyteller, rather than a writer. The sound of it, warm and familiar, washed over me and I shivered as I listened to his tale. “There are so many stories in its walls, I could never have time to tell them all. But this is a story of the first family to live here.

“Long ago, a man named John Harrow, a merchant, bought this land and commissioned a fine house to be built. But what is a fine house without gardens? So once the house was finished, Harrow hired a head gardener, a man of impeccable reputation. And that gardener brought with him his apprentice: a boy with incredible talent, a boy who, local people said, could make dead plants bloom.”

“Is that possible?” Caro whispered loudly, leaning back towards Edward.

“Absolutely,” he replied, straight-faced. “But very rare.” I hid my smile.

Nathaniel raised his eyebrows until Caro settled back down, then continued. “Now, Harrow had only one child, a daughter, the apple of his eye. She was young and beautiful and ready for love.”

“Did she fall in love with the apprentice?” Caro asked, bouncing slightly. Nathaniel ignored her.

“The moment she set eyes on the apprentice, one summer’s day in the new Rose Garden, she fell in love. And he, by return, worshipped her from the moment he saw her.”

“I knew it,” Caroline whispered, to me this time.

“The young couple knew that John Harrow wouldn’t approve,” Nathaniel said, raising his voice a little. “So they kept their love a secret, and met only by moonlight, in the Rose Garden where they first fell in love. And as summer turned to winter, the apprentice picked impossible flowers from the dormant rose bushes for his beloved.

“All was wonderful, until the day John Harrow saw roses in his house at a time of year when nothing blooms, and his daughter watching the apprentice from the balcony of what is now the Yellow Room.”

“And you complained about sleeping there,” Edward murmured across the table to me. He raised his eyebrows and I blushed, remembering exactly what he’d seen on that balcony that afternoon.

“I didn’t realise I was part of a literary tradition,” I whispered back. I was fairly sure that detail was a new addition to the story. Nathaniel never could tell a story quite the same way twice.

“Suspicious, Harrow lay awake that night, listening for his daughter. When he heard the staircase creak in the darkness, he picked up his gun and silently followed her to the Rose Garden, where he saw her kissing the apprentice.”

Nathaniel’s voice dropped again, and we all leant in closer to listen. “Harrow went crazy with rage. His beloved daughter, kissing a gardener? It was unthinkable. He called to her to get away from the apprentice, but the young man put himself between his love and her father. Harrow wasted no time. He pulled out his gun and shot the apprentice.”

Caroline jumped as Nathaniel’s voice rose suddenly at the shot being fired. “Was he okay?” she asked.

Nathaniel shook his head sadly. “The apprentice died that evening, and that same night Harrow’s daughter took to her bed and stayed there. She wouldn’t eat, would drink nothing but a little water, no matter how much her father begged her.”

Caroline’s eyes were huge, now, with all her attention on Nathaniel. “What happened next?” she asked in a whisper.

“Nothing happened. Nothing happened for eleven days and eleven nights. She stayed in bed all over Christmas, and refused to move until New Year’s Eve came around. Then, that night, she asked to be taken out to the Rose Garden.

“Her father, hoping that she might be ready to forgive him, agreed, and she was carried out in her blankets. There, she asked to be placed on the bench where she’d sat with her love. ‘There are no more flowers,’ she said, looking around the garden. Her father tried to reassure her that they’d be back with the spring, but the young woman said, ‘No. There are no more flowers for me.’ Then, with a final breath, she died.”

Caroline gulped a sob, and it occurred to me again that this possibly wasn’t the most appropriate story for a nine-year-old, just before bedtime. But Nathaniel wasn’t finished.

“It’s said,” he continued, his voice almost inaudible, “that she walks there still, on moonlit nights, looking for her lost love.”

“A ghost?” Caro asked, all excitement again. “We have our own ghost? That’s brilliant.” Slipping off Nathaniel’s knee, she skipped towards the door. “I’m going to go see!”

Was that the explanation for the strange girl I’d seen in the Rose Garden that afternoon? Even for Rosewood, it seemed impossible.

Nathaniel stretched his legs out under the table, and pushed back his chair. “Well, now I’m in trouble.”

“I think you already were,” Edward pointed out, before finishing off the wine in his glass.

From the hallway, we all heard Isabelle saying sharply, “Caroline Ryan, you are not going out in the garden now. It’s past your bedtime. You are going to go up those stairs and put on your pyjamas.” There was a short pause, before she added, “Now,” over whatever objections Caro was trying to raise.

I checked my watch; it was almost eleven – more than past Caro’s bedtime, it was very nearly mine. It had, after all, been quite the day. “I think that might be my cue,” I said, and got to my feet.

Nathaniel stood, too, and put his arms around me, pulling me in close so I could smell the pipe smoke on his jumper. “It’s good to have you home, Kia.”

“It’s good to be here,” I mumbled back, burying my face against the scratchy wool. And, just for a moment, it was good. Whatever happened tomorrow, whatever Ellie had told everyone, right then, there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be but Rosewood.

Upstairs in the Yellow Room, I could just make out the sound of Caroline protesting pyjamas. Switching off the bedroom light, I sat by the balcony, looking out at the darkened garden, Nathaniel’s story fresh in my mind.

I didn’t see any ghosts, but I watched for a while, just in case, before climbing into bed and dreaming of meadows of flowers in winter.

Chapter Three (#ulink_bdea5385-1ebb-586c-812b-4d110246b085)

“Everyone keeps their ghosts in the attic, Agnes. It’s the only place no one ever wants to look.”

Ghosts in the Attic, by Nathaniel Drury (1973)

I’d left a lot of stuff behind when I escaped to Scotland. I’d been living at Rosewood full time for almost two years when I left, working on a local paper nearby, and I’d accumulated a significant amount of junk that hadn’t fitted in my suitcase. If Caroline was sleeping in my attic room, then someone would have had to move my stuff to make space for her.

I woke up the next morning with a desire to rediscover what I had left behind.

It was only just eight, but the day already felt warm. Sorting through the clothes I’d brought with me, I realised that the office wear I’d filled my Perth wardrobe with just didn’t fit in at Rosewood. Maybe, if I could find my belongings, there’d be some more suitable clothes there.

Eventually, I settled on a pair of jeans that usually got worn with stilettos, so hung over the ends of my bare feet, and a lace and silk camisole that only normally saw the light of day through a slightly-too-sheer work cardigan I’d somehow neglected to pack. It would do until I found something else, anyway. Fixing my hair back from my face, I set out to investigate the attic.

The obvious place to start was my old room, tucked under the eaves of the house, up in the attic, so I climbed the rickety wooden staircase at the end of the corridor and knocked lightly on Caro’s door. There was no response, so I slowly turned the handle and pushed the door open, wincing at the awful creaking it made.

Luckily it didn’t matter, since Caroline was already up and out. “Probably ghost-hunting,” I muttered, glancing around the room. The walls and the furniture were the same, as was the bright pink radiator I’d insisted on, installed against the only full-height wall. The other walls sloped downwards to the low window and window seat, familiar pink pillows still stacked along the wooden bench.

But there was no sign of anything else that belonged to me. The brush set on the dressing table, the clothes hung over the back of the chair, the books on the bookcases, even the pictures on the wall – none of them were mine. I shut the door behind me.

There was a large storage area just along the hallway, which I remembered as dusty, stuffy and full of rotting cardboard boxes. Of course that was where they’d have stashed my stuff.

The door was unlocked, and as I pulled it towards me a rush of hot, stale air hit my lungs. With one last deep breath, I headed in, leaving the door open behind me in the hope of ventilation.

The attic was much as I remembered, and I tripped over piles of messily rolled rugs and faded cushions on my way through the box maze. On the far side of the space there was a window, and I made my way towards it, hoping it hadn’t been painted shut.

It hadn’t, and the morning air breezing in over the gardens was cool and fresh. Beating dust out of a large floor cushion, I settled down at the base of the window, and started pulling likely looking boxes towards me. As I pulled out books and pictures, the musty smell of damp paper rose up from the prematurely yellowed and crinkled pages.

Every box I looked in awakened waves of memory I hadn’t even been aware I was suppressing. A storybook Nathaniel wrote me for my eighth birthday; a pair of absurdly expensive pink heels I’d bought with my first student loan and never really worn, because they didn’t fit with the agreed student uniform of jeans and slobby jumpers; postcards of Devon from Ellie and Greg’s first holiday away together; a wire-bound copy of a series of fantastical short stories I’d written for a creative writing course as part of my degree, taking their starting points from my childhood at Rosewood. A hundred wonderful things I’d forgotten all about.