Mrs P’s Book of Secrets
LORNA GRAY
One More Chapter
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Lorna Gray 2019
Cover design by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
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Lorna Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008368258
Ebook Edition © December 2019 ISBN: 9780008368241
Version: 2019-10-10
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
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
A note on the text
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
For all the people who have contributed to the making of this book
December 1946, Moreton-in-Marsh
My grandmother and mother performed a rather unusual war service. Through the medium of regular séances, they worked – and still do work – to guide the wandering souls of poor lost soldiers out of the filthy quagmire of war.
There were some, they say, who found the shock of their violent end so sudden and so disorientating that it bewildered their soul. The living senses might have made the switch from the roar of bombs to the silence of the hereafter, but the shadow of the men they had been would sometimes remain there still. Detached from the nightmare of the battlefield, but bound to it; staggered and confused.
The process of reaching them called for no miasma, no rattling tables. My grandmother and her little gathering of fellow spiritualists simply treasured the serious belief that they were extending a kindly hand to those rudderless souls, before steering them first towards acceptance, and secondly into peace.
When my husband was killed, I refused flatly to let them do it.
I couldn’t bear to think of his soul being stranded in those dismal terms. And not because I was selfish, or enjoyed the kind of superior cynicism that masquerades as lucid reason. Everyone has their own way of dealing with loss. But for me it felt as if real selfishness would dwell in that sort of calling out of his name. I would never stand by while they did it without me, but if I joined them and some part of it worked, my husband might learn the truth from me – that I didn’t want to let him go.
Because, real or not, it would never feel like whispering a tender farewell to him across the divide. It would be like calling him back.
It would feel like I was telling him flatly that I can grasp him wherever he is, and that I mean to shackle him to me, when surely, of all things, I have to trust in the deeper workings of my heart and believe he has already found his release.
So, for now, I keep to life and leave my husband well alone.
I was first carried home to this place by that feeling eight weeks ago. This was the time, after all, when our newfound peace was stumbling towards its second Christmas in all the monotony of rationing. And in the spirit of the year’s end and the time of darkness and so on, it has lately seemed to me that nowhere was a better light shining for me than in my uncle’s little book printing business in the north Cotswolds town of Moreton-in-Marsh.
I was enjoying the process of reacquainting myself with his busy little first floor office, above the street front shop and the narrow printworks in the outbuildings behind. My uncle wasn’t staid, but his building was.
The rooms for Kershaw and Kathay Book Press Ltd ought to have belonged to a legal office or an academic’s study. Every surface was made of dark wood, and quiet studiousness had taken root in the dry corners behind the cabinets.
There were three of us working up here on the first floor. Robert Underhill was my uncle’s second-in-command, and he had the office that ran in a narrow line along the end wall from front to back. He also had possession of one of the fireplaces and the first of the windows that overlooked the street. For the few hours when the winter’s day outside grew bright enough to have any effect, white lines showed in the warped gaps between the wooden panels that divided his space from mine.
My