Chapter Twenty-One
The kitchen was
April’s favourite part of her grandpa’s house. Unlike the rest of
Thomas’s mansion, it was always warm and welcoming, the shiny black
Aga at the far end of the room usually full of cinnamon buns or
delicious casseroles courtesy of Mrs Stanton, the butler’s wife and
her grandpa’s long-standing housekeeper. When she was a little
girl, April would slip down to the kitchen and hide in the corner
reading a book while Mrs Stanton bustled around mixing up scones or
meringues. Sometimes her dad would even come to join her and play
games under the big wooden table - he was probably hiding from the
grown-ups too. Today, after her fight with her mother, April needed
somewhere to hide herself and the kitchen was dark and deserted;
the housekeeper had gone to visit her sister that
morning.
No, not completely
deserted …
‘God, you made me
jump!’ breathed April as she saw her grandfather sitting at the
table.
‘Sorry, darling,’
said Thomas. ‘Sometimes I like to sit in the dark. Helps me
think.’
She walked over and
kissed his head. ‘Me too. Can I join you?’
‘Sure,’ he said.‘Grab
a cup, Mrs Stanton’s left me a thermos. Hot chocolate, my
grandmother’s recipe.’
April took a mug from
the cupboard and sat down next to her grandfather. He poured her
some hot chocolate and they sat in contented silence for a
while.
‘I used to play with
my dad under this table,’ said April quietly. ‘We’d pretend it was
a wigwam or the pirate ship from Peter
Pan.’
‘Ha! Peter Pan, that suits your father all
right.’
‘Gramps, please,’
said April. ‘He’s dead. Can’t you be nice about him even
now?’
‘I’m sorry,
Princess,’ he said, tapping her hand. ‘You’re right. He was a good
man. I didn’t agree with him on many things, but he loved you - and
your mother. For that, I mourn your loss, I truly do.’
‘I know you still
think of me as a little girl with pigtails—’
‘Not at all!’ he
roared, squeezing her tightly. ‘You are a fine, beautiful woman,
Princess,’ he said, then quickly corrected herself. ‘Sorry,’ he
said, evidently remembering her outburst before the Halloween
party. ‘No more Princess for you.’
‘No, it’s okay
Gramps,’ she said, touching his huge hand. ‘You can call me
Princess if you want. But I still need you to treat me like a
grown-up. Especially now.’
He looked at her
sideways. ‘What do you need?’
‘I need to know what
actually happened to my dad.’
Thomas began to
protest, but April put her hand on his arm.
‘Gramps, I need to
know. How can I let him go if I don’t know what
happened?’
‘Some things are
better left alone, Princess.’
‘Please, Gramps.
Please.’
He stared down at his
cup, then nodded. ‘I’ve spoken to my friends in the police and I
can only tell you what they told me. They think that someone was
waiting for him when he came home from work.’
‘Oh no,’ said April,
her hand over her mouth.
‘There was a struggle
in the living room and your father’s study. Then whoever it was …
they cut his throat. Your dad bled to death.’
April was crying now
and Thomas held her close. ‘I’m so sorry, Princess, I wish it
wasn’t so. I honestly do.’
‘But why, Gramps? Why
would someone do that to him?’
‘I think a lot of
people ask themselves the same thing every day and I think the
answer is always the same: we’ve moved too far from
nature.’
‘I don’t
understand.’
‘It’s simple. We
surround ourselves with concrete, we walk on carpets, only touching
wood when we sit at a desk, and so we assume we have all come such
a long way from our caveman roots. But the animal is there, just
under the skin, ready to kill someone for a crust of bread. Or in
this day and age, for drugs or money. I know there’s no comfort in
this for you, but it’s the truth.’
To her surprise,
April found great comfort in it. She had been treated like an
adult; her grandfather had assumed she could handle the truth. And
she thought he was right about human nature. Since she had come to
London she had encountered nothing but aggression and
mean-spiritedness. Yes, she had made a few friends, but it was
certainly easy to see the people he described just below the
civilised surface: teeth bared, claws extended, ready to climb over
each other to get what they wanted. And now, for whatever reason,
those same animals had taken her beloved, gentle father from her.
It wasn’t a comfortable truth, no, but it felt good to face up to
it nonetheless. Her tears soaked into her grandfather’s shirt and
strong shoulder and April breathed in his familiar scent; clinging
to something real, something solid.
‘Can I ask you
something else?’ she said, wiping her eyes on his
handkerchief.
‘Of
course.’
‘Why is the family
called Hamilton?’
Thomas glanced at
her, as if for a moment he was unsure of her meaning. Then he
laughed. ‘What a curious question,’ he said, an amused smile on his
mouth.
‘Not really,’ said
April. ‘I don’t know anything about our family history, apart from
the fact that we come from “the Old Country”. Whenever I ask anyone
about it, they say something vague about Eastern European royalty.
I’ve never got a straight answer.’
Thomas shrugged.
‘Like all families, Princess, we have a few skeletons in our
cupboards. That’s why we don’t talk about it much, but you can be
sure you are from a good family with a noble
ancestry.’
‘But why Hamilton? If
you came from Romania, then why such an English name?’
Thomas smiled. ‘That
was my doing, I’m afraid. When I came here in the sixties there was
still a very strong class system and there was a lot of prejudice
against anyone, well, ‛different.I am
proud of my heritage, make no mistake about that, but I took a
practical decision: I guessed if I changed my name to something
more English, lost my accent and put on a three-piece suit, I would
be accepted.’ He gestured upwards towards the house. ‘I was
right.’
April nodded. She
could tell there was more to say, such as why did her grandfather
come here in the first place if he was so family-orientated and
what were those skeletons in the cupboard, exactly? But for now,
April was happy that no one was ducking her questions. She had
enough to deal with at the moment without finding out that her
family were wanted by Interpol or something.
‘So what do I do now,
Gramps?’
‘You go on. You may
not feel it right now, but you are from a long line of strong
women. Your mother, however? I think you know this is hitting her
harder than she will tell you, so you’re going to have to be strong
for her. It’s not what you want, but it’s what families do, what
they have always done. And the Lord watches over good families like
ours.’
‘That’s nice, but I’m
not sure I—’
‘Believe in such
things?’ he finished her sentence for her. ‘Don’t worry, little
one, it doesn’t matter to Him, He will still protect you. Anyway,
it’s good to believe in things. That was something your father and
I agreed on. He believed in something. It’s too rare these
days.’
‘What did he believe
in?’
‘Many old-fashioned
things. Honour, family, hard work. All good things. And he also
believed in you, my darling.’
‘Why does everyone
keep telling me that now?’
‘Sometimes it’s hard
to say what we really mean in life.’
For some reason,
April suddenly thought of her afternoon in Highgate Cemetery, all
those gravestones with their heartfelt words. Did all those people
under the earth know how their loved ones felt about them? Probably
not. Maybe it had always been this way; only the poets really said
what they meant. Then she thought of Gabriel. Well, I’m not going to make that mistake again, she
thought fiercely. I’m not going to waste my
time on something that isn’t true. It was time to dry her
tears and do what she had to: find out who had killed her father -
and why.