The Puzzle Ring (2 page)

The envelope was of thick parchment, with a row of golden stamps depicting a red heraldic lion. It was addressed to:
The Right Honourable Viscountess of Fairknowe
.

On the back was printed a brilliantly coloured crest. It showed a thorn tree with stars above and roses below. The word
Audacia
was inscribed on a scroll above. Underneath the crest was printed:

The Countess of Wintersloe
Wintersloe Castle
Fairknowe
Loch Lomond
Scotland

Hannah wondered how such an unusual-looking letter could possibly have ended up in their letterbox. She had been born at Loch Lomond, but did not remember anything about it since her mother had brought her from Scotland to Australia when she was only a tiny baby. Hannah thought the letter was most intriguing.

She laid the letter on the table, made some cinnamon toast and carried it to her bedroom. Hannah's room was very different from the rest of the apartment. Her light was swathed in crimson silk, giving the room an exotic gloom, a guitar was propped up against the chair, and her bedside table was crammed with books.

More books filled the bookcase. Books about wizards, witches, fairies, mermaids, dragons, sea-serpents, ogres,
trolls, goblins, boggarts, vampires, werewolves, winged horses, unicorns, magic swords, rings of invisibility, flying carpets, talking mice, frog princes, feisty princesses and vengeful gods.

Hannah refused to read anything else. This troubled her mother, who was a science teacher at Hannah's school. Roz believed in logic and reason and proof. She tried many times to convince Hannah to read nice books about girls who set up babysitting groups, or went to pony club, or dreamt of being ballerinas. Hannah rejected them all scornfully. So Roz reluctantly bought Hannah the books she wanted, worrying in case she was feeding an unhealthy desire to escape from real life.

Hannah was picking out a sad song on her guitar when she heard the sound of her mother's key in the lock. Her stomach twisted. She knew her mother would already have been hauled to the principal's office and told about Hannah's suspension from school. She got up and went out to face Roz, her arms crossed, her face as stony as she could make it.

‘But, Hannah, why on earth would you rub mud into the face of the principal's daughter?' Roz sounded bewildered. Hannah wished she would get angry and shout like other people's mothers. Roz never did, though. She thought Hannah's bad behaviour was because her daughter had no male role model in her life—and this was a source of perpetual grief to Roz.

‘She deserved it,' Hannah said coldly.

‘But what did she say?' Roz took off her glasses and pressed her fingers to the red indentations either side of her nose.

Hannah shrugged.

‘I just don't understand, Hannah. It's not rational! You should be trying to make friends, not throwing mud into people's faces. Won't you tell me what she said?'

Hannah answered unwillingly. ‘She said I was such a loser, it was no wonder my dad walked out.'

Roz closed her hand around the wedding ring she wore on a chain about her neck.

‘I'm not saying sorry,' Hannah said. ‘She deserved it.'

‘It's me who's sorry. So sorry, darling. Your father . . . he loved you very much . . . you know he would never have left us.'

‘So why did she say he did?' Hannah demanded.

‘Well, it's just, when people's bodies aren't found, there are legal problems . . . and people talk . . .' Roz's voice grew choked.

Hannah thought of the photo of her father that she kept hidden in her diary. It was the only photo of the two of them together. Robert had been looking down at his newborn baby with a tired and tender smile. He had the same wild, copper-coloured curls and blue-grey eyes as Hannah herself, and the same long, straight nose. He had disappeared the very next day, three days before Christmas. Roz said that he had walked into the village to visit a friend and had never returned. She thought he had probably fallen into Loch Lomond and drowned. Except his body had never been found.

Hannah did not know if her father really had died that cold winter's evening, or whether her mother just refused to admit the truth of his disappearance. Sometimes, in that dark floating space between waking and sleeping, Hannah would make up stories to explain his absence. Perhaps he had fallen
and knocked his head and forgotten who he was. One day he'd receive another blow to his head and remember, and then he would come to Australia looking for them . . .

Or perhaps he had witnessed a crime, and the bad guys had kidnapped him and kept him locked up in a dark prison from which he would one day escape and come to Australia looking for them . . .

‘So, are they going to expel me?' Hannah asked.

‘Maybe. Mr Devine was very angry.'

Hannah set her jaw. ‘I hate that school anyway.'

‘But, Hannah, I have to work there! It'll be very uncomfortable for me if you're expelled. And it was so convenient . . . we could catch the bus together . . .' Suddenly she stopped, her hand flying up to her mouth. She had seen the letter.

‘I forgot to tell you about that,' Hannah said. ‘Look, it comes from a castle in Scotland, near where we used to live. I wonder what it was doing in our letterbox? It's got our address on it. But no viscountesses live here!' She smiled at the absurdity of the thought.

Her mother sat down limply at the table, staring at the letter.

‘I wonder if the old lady who used to live here was really a viscountess who lost all her money. But none of her other mail is addressed to that name. Isn't it mysterious?'

There was no response.

‘Mum? Are you listening?' Her mother stared at the letter with a strange, fixed expression on her face.

‘It's for me,' Roz said. ‘The letter. It's addressed to me.'

‘What do you mean?' Hannah stared at her mother in utter surprise. ‘You aren't a viscountess!'

Roz looked at her apologetically. ‘Well, technically speaking, I am, I suppose.'

‘What? But your dad was a butcher, not a count!'

‘You mean an earl,' Roz said absently. ‘And, no, of course, he wasn't an earl. But your father . . . well, he was a viscount and so when I married him, I did become a viscountess, ludicrous as it seems. Your great-grandmother is a stickler for etiquette. In her eyes I'm still your father's wife, and so that's how she would address any letter to me.'

‘My father was a viscount?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘And I have a great-grandmother? Who's a countess? How could you not tell me that?' Hannah was white with rage, her hands clenched by her side.

‘I left all that behind me when I left Scotland,' Roz said wearily, picking up the letter and turning it over in her hand. ‘It meant nothing to me, and it should mean nothing to you either, Hannah. We make our own destinies.'

‘Surely I have a right to know something like that!'

‘Hannah, please, don't be angry. You must try and understand. I was brought up to scorn that kind of old-fashioned nonsense, and your father . . . he never used his title. He'd have been embarrassed if anyone did. It's only old fossils like your great-grandmother who still care about that kind of thing . . .'

‘I care!' Hannah shouted. ‘Of course I care! You've never told me anything about my father.'

‘I'm sorry,' Roz said. ‘It's not that I deliberately left you in ignorance . . . I always meant to tell you one day . . . it's just that . . . I wanted to leave all that behind me. Make a fresh start, where no one knew about my past. I was only
a viscountess for such a short time, and it never defined who I was. Can't you understand?'

Hannah could only understand that her mother had lied to her. She folded her arms and stared at her mother accusingly.

‘Hannah, darling, please don't be angry.' Roz crumpled the letter in her hand. ‘I never even changed my name when we got married. Your father's last name was Rose, and Rosamund Rose would have been a bit much, don't you think? Lady Wintersloe did not approve, though. In her day, a wife always took her husband's name.'

‘So, my name's not even really my name! I'm not really Hannah Brown?' She felt stupefied, as if she had knocked her head hard in a fall.

‘I changed your name when I left Scotland. It seemed simpler if we had the same last name . . .'

Hannah snatched the letter away from her. ‘But . . . it's from a castle! My great-grandmother lives in a castle? In Scotland?'

‘It's not really a castle.' Roz sounded tired. ‘The castle burnt down in the sixteenth century. It's really just a house. A big house.'

‘My great-grandmother lives in a castle in Scotland and you never told me?' Hannah was so angry, her words tumbled out over each other.

‘Your great-grandmother and I didn't really see eye to eye,' Roz said. ‘After . . . after your father died . . . we argued . . . she didn't want me to take you away but I couldn't bear to stay. I wanted to get as far away as I could. That's why I came here to Australia.'

‘So my great-grandmother is really a
countess
!'

Roz shrugged, her lips quirking into a wry smile. ‘She's the Countess of Wintersloe. Your father was Lord Robert Rose, Viscount of Fairknowe.'

‘Does that make me a lady too? Lady Hannah Rose?'

‘I guess it does, now that your father is dead. I mean, you are your great-grandmother's only heir. If your father was alive, you would be the Honourable Hannah Rose, but since he's gone, I guess that means you're a lady too.'

‘Lady Hannah Rose,' she repeated wonderingly. ‘Heir to a castle in Scotland . . . It must be a joke! It can't be true.'

‘It's true enough.'

‘Why did you never tell me?' Hannah demanded.

Roz flushed. ‘I've put all that behind me, Hannah. Lady Wintersloe never thought I was good enough for her grandson. I was nothing but a butcher's daughter! And your father and I were married only a month or so before you were born. Lady Wintersloe always thought I was out to get what I could. I saw no reason to stay.'

‘So why is she writing to you now?'

‘I don't know,' Roz said.

‘Well, let's open it, find out!' Hannah's anger was replaced by a fizzy excitement. She tore the envelope open.

Dear Rosamund

I know that you must be surprised to hear from me now, after so many years. I can only say that I am sorry. I should never have spoken so cruelly to you after Robert died. I think we were both half mad with shock and grief. I am writing to you now to beg you to come home to Wintersloe, and to bring Hannah. I would very much like to see Robert's child before I
die. Do not think me maudlin, I have not been well this past year. I fell and broke my femur and have not healed well, I'm afraid. Sitting here day after day, thinking about how the curse has destroyed all that I love, and worrying about the shadow it must cast over Robert's child too, has not helped. Please come home to Wintersloe, and let me make my peace with you, and meet the little one again. It would make an old lady very happy
.

Yours sincerely

Isabelle, Countess of Wintersloe

Hannah had wanted to ask her mother what a femur was, thinking it sounded like some kind of animal, but the very next sentence in the letter drove the question right out of her mind. ‘What does she mean, “the curse”?'

Roz looked uncomfortable. ‘She's an old lady now, and not quite all there, I think.'

‘Does she think she's been cursed?'

‘Lots of Scottish families have strange old stories attached to them. It's just superstitious nonsense.'

‘But what's the story, Mum? Don't you think you've kept enough secrets from me?' Hannah spoke with mock severity.

Roz sighed. ‘It's completely irrational, like all those old tales. Apparently some ancestor of your father's married a fairy princess, they quarrelled, he cast her out, and so she cursed him. I don't really remember the details. Your father knew it all, he was brought up on it.'

‘So Dad's family was cursed? By a fairy princess?' Hannah gave a little snort of laughter. She had read old fairytales where
such things happened, but had never heard of anyone who actually believed it had happened to one of their ancestors.

‘I know! Isn't it ridiculous? Yet your father told me all about it quite seriously when we first fell in love, in case I wanted to have nothing to do with him.'

‘Is that why he just disappeared like that? Because he was cursed?'

Roz moved restlessly. ‘People die all the time, Hannah. It's got nothing to do with some old story about a curse.'

‘His body was never found.'

‘It was Christmas. It was freezing. There was snow everywhere. And Loch Lomond is very deep in parts. Almost two hundred metres deep. He could've fallen in the loch and got caught in something under the water . . . it means nothing that his body wasn't found.'

It still sounds like cursed bad luck
, Hannah thought, but she did not say so. Instead she said, ‘I've always wanted to go to Scotland. When can we leave?'

Roz looked surprised. ‘What do you mean? We can't go to Scotland! What about my job? What about school?'

‘I'm going to be expelled anyway, and you hate that school just as much as I do. Why shouldn't we go to Scotland?'

‘But . . .' Roz looked harassed.

‘My great-grandmother says she's sick. She wants to see me before she dies. Well, I want to see her too! I never even knew I had a great-grandmother. Let alone a castle in Scotland.'

‘It's not a castle,' Roz said. ‘More of a house.'

‘A big house! I know. With a curse on it. I want to see it, Mum.'

There was a long pause. ‘I swore I would never go back,' Roz said quietly.