Rebecca's Tale by Sally Beauman

the seeds of Gray’s interest been planted then? It seemed possible. Crime (and punishment) were certainly subjects that interested him.
    Finally, exasperated, I asked him straight out. I put this scenario to him. He denied it. He had been aware of Manderley as a boy, he added—how could he not be when every second shop sold postcards showing views of the house? He and his aunt generally stayed farther up river; they used to rent a tiny waterside cottage near the ancient church at Pelynt. He thought he might have made a visit to the Manderley church to take brass rubbings of the medieval de Winter tombs on one occasion, but he and his aunt moved in very modestsocial circles and he could remember no discussion locally of those exalted beings, Rebecca and Maxim de Winter. As for the inquest and the subsequent fire, he thought he could remember reading about them in the national newspapers—but he was at least fifteen then, and the holidays in this area had ceased.
    He paused; then, as if satisfied with this thumbnail portrait of an earnest little boy, an infant historian in the making, he changed the subject. On balance, I believed that story about brass rubbings. It was in character. Even as an adult, Gray retains a fondness for churches and tombs, and will walk miles in all weathers to visit them. It goes hand in hand with his passion for old books and documents, for the days he spends trawling through archives, newspaper libraries, and antiquarian bookshops.
    This is a man who loves evidence —or so I initially thought—a man who delights in reconstructing the past by means of estate records, church registers, the incunabula of birth, wedding, and death certificates; this is a peruser of wills, a disinterer of dusty forgotten letters, diaries, and notebooks—and I could quite see that for such a man Manderley represented a special challenge. Why? Because there were gaps—huge gaps—and the historian in Gray was at once drawn to this apparent vacuum.
    When Manderley burned down, the contents of the house were destroyed completely. The fire occurred within thirty-six hours of the inquest into Rebecca’s death. It began at night and raged through the building. Everything went: all the exquisite furniture Rebecca had assembled, all those spying portraits that so terrorized me as a child—and all the de Winter family papers.
    But the estate records, as I’ve said, had survived. At the time of the fire, they’d been lodged at the estate office, under Frank Crawley’s fussy care; now they had passed to the very archive where Gray works, and—needless to say—Gray was quick to make himself familiar with them. His fascination with this dry-as-dust stuff amused me at first. That a fit, active young man with a good mind should choose to bury himself in these details of acreages, tenant farms, rents, and crop rotations seemed to me absurd. My own interest in history takes a more romantic turn; Malory has left an enduring legacy. I like love affairs, fatal passions, dastardly deeds, battles, and derring-do—and, fool that I was, I felt patronizing toward Gray for the footling matters that so absorbed him. The more he labored away at the coalface, the less I thought of him.
    I can now see that these labors were preparatory; I suspect Gray may have uncovered several little gems in those records that no one could have foreseen. He has certainly shown a marked interest in one de Winter tenant family, the Carminowes, whom I remember well from my childhood, and about whom I have long held my own conjectures. Their story is a sad one—three sons dead in the first war, their pretty widowed mother left to bring up her two surviving children herself, and one of those children—the boy, Ben—an idiot from birth.
    It was Gray who bothered to follow up on their history, and Gray who discovered that Ben Carminowe, who used to haunt the coves below Manderley, was dead—apparently he ended his days in the county asylum. Maybe it was