Page 32 of The Forgotten Boy

“They were more places of retreat than of escape,” he conceded. “Whatever outlets they might have had are lost to time. At least so far as archaeologists have learned. Which isn’t much since the Somersby family put up that house. They prefer to keep their land private. But I’ve got drawings from the survey done before building that identify a number of foundations from the original priory. Including the chapel. And there was a dig conducted fifty years ago a few miles from here that seems to have been an exit point to an old tunnel. The police went looking for it when young Thomas went missing.”

“They thought he’d gone into a tunnel?”

He shrugged, the wearied sadness on his face a reminder of his age and the death he’d seen on both large and small scales. “He went somewhere. Just nowhere any of us could follow.”

It was a curious word, that—follow. Diana would have expected a more prosaic finish, like “nowhere any of us could find.” Follow implied Thomas Somersby had stepped through some sort of unnatural or otherworldly veil, crossing a threshold that mere mortals could not.

Passing straight from boy to ghost with no steps in-between.

Diana shivered as she thought of Austin Willis and his brother and the dozens of other boys now at Havencross. Whatever was at work there was disturbing them, and she wouldn’t let it go further.

The return walk to Havencross was quiet for the most part, Diana thinking about tunnels and choking and Joshua lost in his own world. When they parted on the upper landing, with the house settled into the end-of-weekend hush around them, he held her hand as he thanked her for coming with him.

He kept holding it when he’d finished speaking, long enough for the same alive awareness that had descended in Clarissa’s bedroom to return.

In another moment, Diana thought, I will kiss him.

He kissed her first. A gentle, almost-brotherly kiss on the cheek. But there was nothing sisterly in her reaction to the bristly roughness of his jaw or her sudden wish to lead him to her secluded corridor and bedroom.

They parted without speaking again, and Diana fell asleep with a hand to the cheek he’d kissed.

She woke, as she’d too often done these last weeks, to a burst of freezing air as her covers were yanked off the bed. Diana almost made a grab for the quilt but a realization that it would not be wise to engage in a tug-of-war with something she couldn’t see stopped her.

When she tried to turn on the bedside lamp it too was yanked from her grasp. I must have knocked it over, Diana thought as it crashed to the floor. But she knew better. She knew. There was someone in her room. Someone who wanted her gone. Someone who hated her. Someone who had dragged their fingernails across her neck, drawing blood.

Someone who could not be seen.

Not that Diana could see much of anything. But even the shadowy outlines of her room began to fade, as though a vortex were coming from the outside in, sucking away all light and heat. And she knew what came next, the terrible choking on dust and darkness to the point where she couldn’t breathe and she would never be able to breathe again or see or move—

Someone pounded on her door with an urgency that spoke of danger. “Diana!”

In an instant, it vanished. The terror, the cold, the dark.

Diana realized she was sitting bolt upright on her bed, hands at her throat as though clawing for air, but whatever presence had been with her was gone. Her covers were still on the floor along with the broken lamp, but Joshua’s voice had banished the rest.

She slid carefully to her feet, avoiding the shards of glass, and threw open the door. Joshua stood there in flannel trousers and a partly buttoned shirt. He looked as though he too had been dragged out of bed.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded, pushing past him for the infirmary and her bag, with all her years of practice at switching instantly from sleep to work.

“Jasper Willis has disappeared.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ISMAY

MAY 1458

Afterward this year was held a counsel at Westminster, to the which came the young lords whose fathers were slain at St. Albans by the Duke of York, and they were lodged without the walls of London. The city would not receive them because they came against the peace. The Duke of York and the Earl of Salisbury came but only with their household men in peaceable manner and thinking no harm. Then the other lords and bishops of the land treated between the parties for peace.

“How do I look?” Elizabeth demanded.

Ismay took her time observing her friend, knowing that Elizabeth’s nerves needed a thoughtful and truthful reply. It was no accident that Ismay chose the compliment that would most give Elizabeth confidence: “You will do your mother very proud.”

“And my husband?”

Right. It was easy to forget that Elizabeth had been a wife for almost four months. Her marriage had been part of the whole tense affair of the late winter. King Henry had recovered his health and determined to reconcile all England’s enemies. It was the only time Ismay had ever heard Duchess Cecily sound anything less than composed. When the summons came for the Duke of York and the Neville family to attend the king in London and account for the Battle of St. Albans, the duchess had said bitterly, “My father, my brothers, my husband, my sons. Will that woman leave me with no one?”

That woman being Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England. If the king, in his mildness, was prepared to both forgive and forget, his queen would do neither. And with a five-year-old son to fight for, she had become only more implacable as time passed.

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