Change of Heart, page 1
About the Book
Anyone arriving to stay at Stoke Park in Worcestershire could be forgiven for thinking that the house has a timeless quality. Certainly this occurs to Frederick Jourdan, the American composer who has rented the place to escape from overwork and from his well-meaning but exhausting fiancee. He revels in the peace and beauty of the place, until, early one morning, happening upon the heartstopping sight of the reclusive young occupant of the nearby Folly feeding deer at early dawn, he finds his life has been changed for ever.
Time has indeed stood still for Fleur Fisher-Dilke, but for reasons that the new tenant of Stoke Park cannot possibly guess. Born to an ambitious surgeon and his social-climbing wife, as a child Fleur was moved to Worcestershire for the sole purpose of improving the family’s social prospects. Quite by chance, however, she finds she has a prodigious gift, and in spite of her parents’ opposition, her talent blossoms and she becomes famous beyond anyone’s imaginings. Choices are made, but not forgiven, and it is only when her life takes a sudden and tragic turn, and she meets a fascinating and irreverent figure who is her opposite in every way, that Fleur finds that she has suffered a change of heart.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prologue
First Movement: Introduction and Allegro
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Second Movement: Andante Cantabile
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Sound Bytes
Third Movement: Allegro Molto Vivace
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Cadenza
Chapter 42
Finale
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Charlotte Bingham
Copyright
Change of Heart
Charlotte Bingham
For my beloved partner without whom indeed . . . . .
There is more than one reality.
Buddhist belief
Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again
And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before
And loved before
But who knows where or when?
Lorenz Hart
Prologue
They are all around her, silent figures gathered in the half darkness, watching and waiting. He knows that they’re there even though he can only hear them, their footfalls cracking sticks in the bracken, their feet padding softly over beds of leaves. He thinks he can smell them, smell the mixture of sweat and tobacco and gunpowder that a breeze carries to him, a smell that grows stronger as now they pass right by him and begin to run, and he hears their breath hard and short as the chase begins in earnest.
They are in woods lit by the pale light of a summer’s sun not yet risen, its radiant fingers only just beginning to spill over the edge of the world and in the half light he can see them closing on her. They run her up against a fence which is too high for her to jump but somehow she manages to escape and starts to run along the line of the fence, ahead for a moment of her pursuers.
Now she is maddened with terror and panic-struck as she plunges through brambles which tear her and thorns which paint ribbons of blood along her back and sides. The men raise their guns, he can see the sunlight glint on the barrels and tries to call out to warn her, but no sound comes as beside him he suddenly finds a gate just where the risen sun has now entered the woods in one huge beam of clear bright light.
He opens the gate and she runs through it, into the light and is gone, vanished from the shadowy huntsmen who fade silently back into the dark woods which have spawned them.
Turning to follow her he finds he is in a garden which is fresh with a summer dew. The air is pungent with the heady scent of old-fashioned roses, filled with larksong and the music of thrushes who sing like nightingales, while a whisper of wind stirs the leaves of the great beech trees and dapples the bright water of a carp pond.
On the far side of this beautiful place is a group of deer gathered around the foot of a flight of stone steps on which stands a girl who is feeding them. She has her head down so that he cannot yet see her face and he knows she hasn’t yet seen him because she doesn’t look up.
But he knows her. He has this feeling that when she does finally look up he will know exactly who she is.
FIRST MOVEMENT
Introduction and Allegro
1
3rd June 1994
FREDDIE WAS STILL trying to find out which button to press for recording from the radio when Mrs Davies came in to tell him he was wanted on the telephone.
‘Hell,’ he muttered, getting up from the floor with a tangle of hi-fi wires around one foot. ‘Darn it, is it urgent?’
‘It seems so, Mr Jourdan,’ his new housekeeper replied. ‘It’s a Miss Smith-Werner calling from Washington.’
It would have to be, Freddie thought as he pulled the wires from round his foot. Diane only ever called him when he was in the middle of something, and knowing how she talked now not only wouldn’t he be able to record the violin concerto to which he was listening, because he had tuned in late he wouldn’t even know what the music was or who was playing it.
‘Hell and darnation,’ he muttered again as he padded barefoot into the stone-flagged hall. ‘Hell and darnation, anyway.’
‘Freddie?’ said a voice as he picked up the telephone.
‘Hi, Diane,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I was just busy.’
‘I guess that makes a change from sleeping, sweetheart. Every time I ring, that quaint housekeeper of yours tells me you’re asleep. How much sleep does a person need, darling?’
Freddie sat himself down in one of the pair of Chippendale carvers which stood either side of the telephone table, stretched his long legs out in front of him, and hooked his spectacles into the top of his grey tee shirt.
‘I said – how much sleep does a person need, Freddie?’
‘Yes I know you did, Diane,’ Freddie replied, staring up at the ornate ceiling high above him, its plasterwork picked out in pale pink and white. ‘But I just can’t find an answer. You know, how long is a piece of string exactly?’
‘Freddie,’ his fiancée sighed in reprimand at the other end. ‘I was simply worried about the amount of time you were spending sleeping, that was all.’
‘Sure you were, Diane. But isn’t that what I’m here for?’
‘So what in fact were you doing?’
‘I was trying to find out how to work this state-of-the-art hi-fi I’ve rented.’
‘I should get an engineer in, Freddie,’ Diane laughed. ‘You’re the man who can’t even put batteries in a torch, remember? So. Tell me about the house instead. You haven’t really told me anything about the house yet.’
Freddie privately sighed, regretting as always Diane’s habit of overemphasizing parts of her speech and invariably the wrong parts, before describing to her in some detail the handsome Queen Anne house which he had rented for his sabbatical. Like all true WASPS few things interested Diane Smith-Werner more than other people’s possessions, particularly their houses. This one was built in a red brick which had now paled to a warm pink with the passing of nearly three centuries. The main house stood on four floors, only three of which were visible since the kitchens and utility floor lay out of sight in a dry moat below ground level. It was approached up a long drive lined with fine horse-chestnut trees and flanked on either side by iron-railed paddocks which ended in a broad carriage sweep in front of the house, while at the back a flight of fine stone steps led down into formal gardens originally designed and laid out, so he had already been told, by a pupil of the enchantingly nicknamed ‘Capability’ Brown.
‘How do the gardens look now?’ Diane asked. ‘Seeing the house hasn’t been lived in for so long.’
‘The whole place is just perfect,’ Freddie replied, hearing what sounded like the concerto coming to an end and holding the receiver away from his ear in a futile attempt to catch the details of the recording, but from where he stood in the large echoing hallway the announcer’s voice was no more than a barely audible murmur.
‘It sounds very grand,’ he heard Diane saying. ‘I can’t wait to see it.’
‘No it’s a fine house, but it really isn’t what you’d call grand,’ Freddie said, hoping thereby to put her off. The last thing he wanted was Diane coming over anywhere in the foreseeable future.
‘I’ve been looking at my dia
‘No, there’s no point in looking at your diary yet, Diane,’ he said. ‘Heck I’ve only just got here and all I want to do at the moment is crash out, hang out, chill out, blank out – I’m going to do all the outs I can think of.’
‘Good,’ Diane purred approvingly. ‘That is exactly what I was hoping to hear. Just remember the one thing that is most definitely out while we’re talking outs. The one thing you are not to do is work. You’re not even to think about it. Is there a piano there?’
‘Sure there is. Why?’
‘Because you’re to keep it shut and locked, that’s why. You know perfectly well what the doctors said.’
‘They didn’t say anything about not playing the piano, Diane. At least not for pleasure.’
‘They said you were to have a complete rest from everything, Freddie.’
Freddie closed his eyes. He hadn’t forgotten what the doctors had told him, he just didn’t want to be reminded of it. He knew how vital it was that he took this six-month break, but even so the thought of living all that time without working was unbearable. His work was his second nature, like breathing out and breathing in. But there was no point in remonstrating because he knew full well that work to Diane was something that began at nine and ended at five.
So to distract her he told her more about the house, about its proximity to the Malvern Hills where the famous composer Edward Elgar was said to have found so much of his inspiration, about the ornamental lake and the trout stream that ran through its grounds both of which he intended to fish, about the horses which grazed in its paddocks, the courtyard stable block and the staff cottages, the staff themselves – Mrs Davies the cook-housekeeper, Thomas the lugubrious Welshman who managed the house and the grounds, and Enid the sharp-faced endomorph who cycled up every day from the village to clean. He even recounted how just before Diane had telephoned, on only his second day in the house, the very first piece of music he’d heard when he turned on the hi-fi equipment he’d just rented had been appropriately enough Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations which seemed to personify the woods and the countryside by which he was now surrounded.
As he finally put down the phone he realized he’d told Diane everything that had happened to him, and indeed everything he had learned so far about the place, with only one exception. For some reason and he didn’t yet know why, he had told her nothing of the white house which stood in its own grounds on a hill to the north end of the park, a small white-painted Regency house with Gothic windows which, because it stood on higher ground and was completely surrounded by a ring of mature trees, was almost hidden from sight at ground level. It was known, Mrs Davies had told him when asked, as The Folly.
He hadn’t told Diane about it because even after only two days at Stoke Park, he found that for some unknown reason he was already intrigued by it, and he couldn’t have borne hearing Diane make one of her inevitable remarks about it – the sort of remarks she invariably made when Freddie enthused about something and she wished to cut whatever it was back down to size. If he’d tried to describe the pretty little house in the woods which so far he had only seen from his bedroom, she’d have called it something like cute or perfectly Disneyesque, immediately removing some of its magic and its mystery. So he’d left the house on the hill out of the picture he had painted for his fiancée for that very reason, and because he was determined that for as long as possible it should remain his secret.
Later that day, when Freddie was exploring the big house more fully, he found himself up in the attics on the fourth floor. From the largest of the rooms, which judging from the way it was still half furnished must have been the day nursery and which looked out down the long drive and over the parkland, he found there was a perfect view to be had of the house on the hill which half hidden away behind its belt of trees and shimmering in the summer haze looked as if it were something out of a fairy tale. How long he stared at it he had no idea, but when he came out of his reverie he found he was sitting on the window seat with his knees pulled up under his chin and his arms wrapped around his legs, still staring dreamily out across the park. Moreover the sun, which had been at about three o’clock in a cloudless sky was now much nearer four o’clock, and sure enough when he checked his watch he found he must have been sitting there for the best part of an hour.
Sitting there asleep, he decided, yet he had no recollection of taking up the position in which he now found himself nor of waking up. He didn’t feel he had been sleeping either because he had no sense of weariness and none whatsoever of that feeling of slight disorientation people admit to when they find themselves awakening from an unexpected sleep. Instead he felt as he had felt when he’d successfully undergone hypnotherapy to conquer his fear of flying, as if his bodily mechanism had simply been switched off for a given period and then switched back on. At the time his therapist had described it as like being in a spell, just as he imagined ancient enchantments to have been, namely a form of deep hypnosis.
Freddie would have preferred to put this unfathomable slumber down to delayed jet lag had he not remembered that before flying he had taken a recommended dose of melatonin to insure that the body’s biorhythms remained undisturbed by the time change. Besides on the many occasions when he had previously been jet lagged he’d known it, and he’d certainly never before found himself just dropping off into an inexplicable sleep with no recollection of having done so. So something else had happened to him, something else must somehow have mesmerized him and induced a kind of trance. Maybe some unseen siren had sung to him, Freddie grinned to himself, in an effort to lure him on to her rocky island. Or perhaps it was that odd little house over there in the far woods. Perhaps it was enchanted, and while he had been sitting there looking at it, he had been caught up in its spell. In fact the more he looked at it the more he got a growing feeling that his lost hour was all to do with the house, however absurd he knew that seemed, because he felt it was a house he already knew which, of course, was impossible because he had never visited this part of England before in his entire life. So why, he wondered, this feeling of déjà vu? Why this bewildering feeling of familiarity?
As if a closer sight of it might help, he suddenly found himself hurrying off to fetch a pair of powerful field glasses he’d seen hanging downstairs in a cloakroom and then running back up the two floors taking the stairs two at a time in his rush to see what was actually there.
There was no visible sign of life, although through the field glasses he could see the place was quite obviously immaculately maintained, with its lawns freshly mown and the earth in its full-flowering rose borders recently turned over. To one side he could quite clearly see a large ornamental pond decoratively set with shrubs and small trees, which he stared at hard and long because he again felt that he knew it – yet he didn’t know from where. Even so he was certain that the path at the end of the two-tiered lawns led down towards a gate which itself opened onto a beech wood, although he couldn’t see on account of the screen of trees which backed the property. But nowhere was there any other human being to be seen, neither at any of the windows nor anywhere in the gardens.
Then just as he went to put his field glasses down he saw something. Behind the shrubs which surrounded the pond he caught sight of a slowly moving shadowy form. Refocusing the glasses he trained them exactly on that spot, just where he could see the branches of a bush still moving quite vigorously as if someone was tugging at them.
Seconds later the culprit came into view, and the moment Freddie saw it the back of his neck prickled and his hands began to shake, for there standing looking out across the lawn chewing the leaves it had just plucked from the branches of the shrub it had been attacking was a deer.
But that wasn’t what took his breath away. What made him look so hard and look again was the fact that the deer was white. Just as he remembered from somewhere before.
2
AS MRS DAVIES served Freddie his second unappetizing dinner in a row, this time one of cold ham, chicken and an undressed salad of lettuce, tomato, hard-boiled egg and beetroot, he asked her what she knew about the white house at the far end of the park.
