Secrets of the Quercus Tree

About the Author

Carol-Anne was born in Fife, Scotland, before moving to the Midlands when she was seven years old and to Cheshire when she was 15. The inspiration for her second book comes from family holidays and adventures with her siblings growing up. She met her husband in Cheshire in 2012; they married in 2013 and three years later, Carol-Anne graduated from Staffordshire University with a PGCE in Primary Education. She is currently a primary school teacher and lives in Lancashire with her husband and their son. She wants to share the magic of her childhood with her son and her readers.

Dedication

Seth, being your mum is a beautiful adventure; this is for you. And to my husband Dom, you give me the courage to keep writing, I love you.

Copyright Information ©

C. N. Naylor 2023

The right of C. N. Naylor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398404526 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398404533 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Growing up, my parents often took my siblings and I on holidays and even today, I have the most remarkable memories including those of the old college building that this story is based on, so I would like to thank my family for the adventures and inspiration. I would like to thank Dom and Seth for allowing me the space and freedom to dedicate time to a second book. Also, I want to acknowledge the support of my friends and colleagues, who have read and re-read my manuscript looking for plot holes, without whom the finished story would not be the same. And finally, to Jacki your tireless editing and proofreading has not gone unnoticed, I cannot thank you enough in words. And finally, to you, my readers, thank you for travelling this journey with me!

Chapter 1

He was bored. There was nothing to do here. NOTHING at all! He couldn’t remember ever being this bored. Well perhaps once. The coach had broken down in Spain, all his games were in his suitcase in the hold under the coach, and he had no roaming on his phone. Even then he had enjoyed watching the elderly couple who were sitting in front of him. They had been playing travel chess, the man getting more and more cross as his wife had slowly taken all of his pieces. She was making him think harder than he was used to. Eddie wondered if they often played chess, or if this was their first tournament. Had she been secretly practicing or did she have a natural flair? In the end though, the old man won. He had a strategy; he knew the game inside out and was clearly a very tactical thinker.

Here and now though, it was a blazing hot day. The windows were wide open but there was no breeze. He was hot – and hot and bored was worse than just hot. He had tried sitting outside under the old oak tree but it was actually cooler inside the old stone house.

Eddie Kinelson was a rather bright nine-almost-ten-year-old fair-haired (but not quite blonde) boy, with piercing blue eyes and a cheeky grin. He wasn’t into football like the other boys his age. Instead, Eddie loved information – finding things out, making new discoveries. It made him tick. He loved to read, find and investigate. He loved a good mystery on the TV and his dad often told him stories of great detectives. Eddie loved to imagine how an author could write such highly inventive plots that always worked out in the end. His favourite part of any mystery was when the detective told everyone how it happened.

He was staying with his great uncle Peter whilst his mum and dad were at the hospital. His father’s uncle was an older man with greying hair who looked as though he should have a posh voice, but didn’t. He didn’t call him ‘Great Uncle Peter’, that made him sound really old and it was quite a mouthful. Uncle Peter sufficed. By the time Eddie’s parents came to collect him, he would be a big brother. He was quite looking forward to it; someone to play with on boring days like today, someone to play jokes on when they were a little bit older maybe, someone to talk to late into the night whilst Mum and Dad shouted up to them that it was bedtime. Secretly he wanted a little brother, but the sonographer (the person who looks at the baby from the outside of Mum’s tummy) couldn’t be sure if it was a boy or a girl; so, it was going to be a surprise. There were no pink or blue balloons, clothes or blankets, just lots of white and cream and yellow, and the odd bit of pale green.

The hours ticked by.

Eddie lay on the old chaise and plumped up the pillow behind his head. He watched the dust as it floated down and settled once more on the old floor boards. It was an old house and it was big, with many floors and many, many rooms on each. Uncle Peter lived here alone and probably only used six of the rooms in total.

The house was once a college where students would live whilst studying art and history, and it had beautifully crafted wooden doors and panels and elegantly carved stairways and fireplaces. They really were a spectacular sight when lit. There were candle stick holders on the walls and long draping red velvet curtains at the windows. He liked to think of this room as the oak lounge, with the furniture all made from oak and the window framing the old oak tree in the garden. In the winter, a great fire would be lit and all the family could spend hours here, drinking and eating, laughing and talking. This was the place to hold any social event – there were certainly enough rooms.

His eyelids were heavy and he realised that in the heat he was drifting off to sleep. That was fine; he didn’t know how long he was going to be here. Mum had insisted that he brought an overnight bag with a few different outfits just in case. A nap would kill some time. He adjusted his weight in the chaise so that he was more comfortable and sunk down deep into the cushions.

He wasn’t sure how long into his nap it was but he vaguely heard the whistling. He heard his great uncle come into the room offering a drink, but in his heavy slumber he couldn’t bring himself to respond. Then, in the place between sleeping and waking, he heard mutterings – soft female voices. Were they singing? Were they even voices? Quercus? What was Quercus? Was that what the voice was saying? Maybe it was just the breeze and the age of the house. He listened carefully. The voices sometimes seemed to be calling out to him, calling his name.

‘Eddie… Eddie!’ Ha! He mused in his half sleeping state; definitely his imagination and he smiled at his creativity. The door clicked shut behind his uncle and slowly, over the next few minutes, Eddie began to stir. He felt rested and the heat wasn’t as bad now that the sunlight had moved past the window it previously shone through.

Opening his bleary eyes, Eddie looked up at the ceiling and the high walls; there were portraits of old headmasters and mistresses, all very stern in their appearance. In fact, looking around, only one portrait showed even the slightest hint of a smile. He wondered who it was, and heaving his sleepy body from the chair he walked across the room. He couldn’t quite see the name from his stance on the floor so he dragged an ugly, upholstered chair from the corner and stood on it to get a better look.

Professor Edward Elkin, 1852–1941

Eddie found himself drawn to the portrait even more when he saw that the man was also called Edward.

He muttered aloud, ‘I bet you didn’t get called Eddie in 1852!’

He could almost hear the professor chuckle. Eddie looked closely at the painting. There were a pair of piercing blue eyes that seemed to follow him as he stood up on tip toe and back down onto flat foot. He knew this was a clever trick that artists did to make their paintings seem real, so he wasn’t freaked out by it.

The moustache under his not-enormous but still large nose had streaks of ginger amongst the grey, and the twisted ends were immaculate. Perhaps the professor once had ginger hair, maybe when he was younger and before the grey set in. Eddie wondered if the artist had painted the ends of the moustache to look that neat, or if the professor was actually meticulous about his appearance. His beard was short and tidy and beneath that he wore a green and red spotted dickie-bow-tie.

Eddie liked him. He reckoned the professor would probably have been quite cool for the time he lived. Looking around at the other portraits and their lack of smiles, he guessed he would also have been quite friendly.

Hearing his great uncle’s footsteps and the slightly out-of-tune whistling echoing down the hallway (it was always the same old tune), Eddie climbed down off the chair and took it back to where it came from. Not that Uncle Peter would have minded or scolded him for standing on the chair, it was just polite not to be seen doing things like that. He followed the sound, feeling slightly peckish and a little thirsty after his sleep.

‘Well rested, are ye, lad? Hungry?’ Uncle Peter mused as Eddie walked into the dining room where his uncle had just set down a tray piled high with sandwiches, crisps, a cake for each of them, a jug of juice and two glasses.

‘Starving!’

Eddie smiled back as he pulled out the chair opposite and sat down.

They started eating in silence until Uncle Peter broke it.

‘Liked the paintings, did ye?’

Eddie, mouth crammed full of sandwiches, blushed and nodded.

‘Related to one of ’em us folke are, ye know!’

‘We’re related to the people in those paintings?’ Eddie managed to ask from the corner of his over-filled mouth.

‘Not all of them, just one.’

Uncle Peter paused, took a bite of his sandwich, and chewed slowly. Eddie watched, impatient.

‘Professor Elkin,’ he continued. Uncle Peter raised his eyebrows. ‘The one you were peeking at…’ He pointed a long bony finger at Eddie, knowingly. ‘The Elkins are apparently our ancestors.’

It felt like Eddie was swallowing a lump of concrete, albeit a barely chewed sandwich but he had to speak. He forced his chin forward in the hope that he could create more space to swallow it down.

‘Ancestors – as in old relations?’ he gasped.

‘Oh aye. The last Elkins disappeared from all public domains over an ’undred years ago, but we found ’em. Well, my uncle did. It’s a complicated bit of the family tree. Bits of it got lost and other bits don’t seem to fit in, but when my uncle disappeared years ago, it turns out he was tracing the family blood line. Got further than me he did.’

He paused, rubbed his forehead and rested his hands on the table in front of him.

‘We all thought he was a bit odd in the head,’ he made a silly face and tapped his fingers to the side of his head. ‘When he came back, he said some strange things, but he was ill so the family put it down to that. He told me what he’d found out and made me promise not to forget. Good job too, cos he died a few months after that.’

‘You traced your family tree?’

‘Aye. I did a bit; he did