The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Wells

  I jumped when I heard the clunk of the bottom drawer. Nell’s eyes widened and I found that I could no longer look at her, but the sound was followed by that of the drawer being replaced and I realised that, when it suited him, Roy was a gentleman after all.

  Then at last I heard the sound of the key in the lock and the creak of the stairs again.

  ‘I am sorry I had to do that, Agnes,’ Roy said as he returned to his chair.

  I shrugged my shoulders but found that I could not look at him.

  ‘You can be assured that I have not left anything out of place.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I hope you understand I would not want this to sour things between us.’ He hesitated as if waiting for me to reassure him, but when I did not he cleared his throat in a kind of awkward way, picked up his coat and took a few steps across the carpet. It was not until he reached the doorway that he turned back to me. ‘Do you lock your front door?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, confused by the question, then, ‘No, I didn’t back then, nobody did, not unless they would be gone from the house for an hour or so. I would not bother most of the time but, if I knew that I would be away for a long time, then I would put the key on top of the porch under the thatch for Nell to find. She knew I kept the spare key there.’

  ‘Did you notice anything missing from the house on May Day?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, you must have noticed that in the film, Sam and Iris are crossing the green in the direction of Oak Cottage, almost as if they were headed here. The maypole is behind them and the position of the tree would suggest that they would have passed close by or could have even attempted to enter this house.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed,’ I snapped. ‘Anyway, how can you possibly remember one little detail from that evening? Surely all anyone can remember is seeing the face of Iris Caldwell again – a girl thought murdered on that morning, a girl who…’ But I did not complete the thought because I realised that Roy must have seen the film since the viewing at the church hall. The officers must have played it over and over as they pored over every flickering frame, the handle of the projector turned slowly and deliberately before each image faded. Roy would have seen the long shadow cast by the oak tree and the maypole, the man with the cap drawn low over his face and the girl who leant on his shoulder. He would have seen in which direction they walked.

  ‘Is it possible that something more happened in this house? Something which—’

  ‘No, it is not possible!’

  He stepped back slightly and I realised then that I must have shouted.

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered, but I could feel a strange hollowing sensation in my stomach. He was right – something had happened here on May Day morning. I did not know exactly what but it was something that I dared not speak of – a thought that I often banished because I feared that even allowing myself to think about it would somehow make it real.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I am sorry to cause you distress, Agnes. If there is anything else you need, you know where I am.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, relieved that he would not question me further.

  He stood up and went to the hallway, letting himself out of the front door. Then he reached up and put his hand under the thatch on the top of the porch. ‘The key is still here, Agnes,’ he said, waving it in front of me. ‘You should be more careful. Things have been tight since the Depression and there might be undesirables around.’

  ‘Do you mean undesirables like Sam Denman?’ I asked pointedly. ‘Or your men?’

  He did not answer; he just handed the key to me. ‘You have no need to keep it here, Agnes. You should keep it in the house, or on you when you go out.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ I said. ‘It needs to be there in case…’ I stopped myself but he knew what I was going to say.

  ‘Nell will not return,’ he said. ‘You must know that.’

  ‘But I don’t know!’ I cried. ‘That’s the point – nobody can be sure.’

  ‘I’m sorry that this incident has brought back memories,’ he said, ‘and maybe even hopes, but you must know that there is absolutely no evidence that Nell is still alive.’ He walked down the garden path and I followed him silently, shutting the gate behind him, and watched as he crossed the village green towards the police station. I turned back to the house and reached up to put the key back on top of the porch, catching a glimpse of Nell’s face as she watched me through the window.

  7

  The cottage seemed empty after Roy left. Even Nell did not linger, her features blurring and the colours of her dress fading into the pattern of the cushions until she became part of the grey of the morning.

  I sat quietly for a while, the tea that I had made during Roy’s visit cooling in the cup as I listened to the gusts of wind roaring in the chimney and the spatter of rain on the window. Then I stood up stiffly and headed up the stairs to Nell’s bedroom.

  Roy was no longer the young constable who had visited me all those years ago, the lanky youth who had stooped awkwardly through the doorframe and forgotten to remove his boots. He was a grown man now with a daughter of his own and a sense of responsibility but he was a man, after all, and I knew I would not be able to bear it if he had left something out of place. Hearing the clunk of the bottom drawer and knowing that a man had been in my daughter’s room left me cold and I needed to see Nell’s room once more for myself, if only for the reassurance that my daughter’s memory had not been violated.

  I hesitated for just a second as the door dragged a little against the warped timbers of the frame, and then I looked inside. Roy’s presence had not been enough to rid the room of its mustiness but the sparks of dust circling in the grey light from the window confirmed that the stillness had been disturbed. The room had an air of sadness to it and I regretted abandoning it for so long. There was a halo of soot on the carpet by the small fireplace and the paint on the windowsill was cracked, the small panes of glass choked with moss. There was a dark patch on the ceiling where rain must have leaked in, drop by drop, over the years.

  And Nell was not there.

  Her Bible lay on the dressing table and I thought of the times we had spent together reading as we sat on the bed, huddled under a blanket because we could not afford to light the fire. I saw the dim glow of light from the little window and remembered how we had knelt on the bed and pressed our noses up to the panes to glimpse the white chests of the house martins as they swooped up to their nest. The quilt depicting the life of Eve that we had made together was folded on the end of the bed, Nell’s needle still in the fabric as if she intended to return to finish her work. I remembered that there had been happy times in this room and thought that I could even feel a little of her warmth and hear the contented sound of our chatter.

  I took up her pillow and patted the dust from it. Then I looked to the quilt once more. It was a scene that showed the expulsion of Eve, the woman’s body stabbed with Nell’s needle, a trail of red cotton from the eye, and my mind started to wander again. It was the quilt that we had worked on with the ladies who visited me in the parsonage, the ones whom I had counselled on matters too immoral for a child’s ears while Nell sat in her bedroom only yards away. I worried if the staircase and the closed door had been enough to keep such evils from her or if, now and then, she had overheard a vulgar word or some lurid detail.

  There had been other things in the room, things that I knew she had kept from me, hidden at the bottom of her drawers or under the bed. Things that came in striped paper bags from the cheap bookstand at Partridge’s – magazines with silly detective stories and novels with plots that were quite indecent.

  I had first discovered these books the day that we moved into the cottage when I had seen one of these little striped paper bags in the middle of the sitting room where her belongings had been dumped, the mud from the removal men’s boots still wet on the carpet. I had screamed her name and run up the stairs w
ith the bag in my hand but when I got to her room I had found her curled on the bed, sobbing in a way that I had not seen before, something quite different from the tears she would shed when she grazed her knee or was forbidden from staying up late. She had seemed to not see me, and when I put my hand on hers, it was cold. Although I feared for her at the time, I never guessed that I would see her that way again.

  I remembered Nell’s face close to mine, the movements of her mouth and the force of her shout but not the words. She had held one of her silly novels in her hand, and I recalled snatching it from her, the pages fluttering to the carpet as I tore them from the binding. I remembered my hand on her shoulders as I forced her to kneel and pray. I remembered her in a dress, crumpled from a night in the police cell, the vile words that fell from her mouth and the slap of my hand across her cheek. I remembered, so often, the door shut.

  And then there was what I would call her ‘little mishap’, although really it was so much more than that. It was a time that I dared not think of but, after it had happened, I had led her up the stairs to this room and helped her on to the bed where she had lain for hours, neither moving nor speaking.

  I went over to the bed and lay down wearily. Then I saw Nell sitting on the stool by the dressing table, quite clear in the dull light of the morning. Her head was turned to me and she watched me in the silent way that she always did.

  ‘Why don’t you talk?’ I said. ‘Because you do no good just staring at me and following me when you please. You brought me nothing but trouble when you were around, and you were never this demure. You are here, but I feel as if I don’t know you anymore.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘You were so hard to love—’ my voice wavered ‘—which is what makes it so difficult for me. I will always have this guilt that maybe I didn’t love you enough, and I fear that all this mess is somehow down to me – that I drove you to do whatever you did on that day.’

  She turned to look in the mirror, for of course, she had not heard me.

  ‘Please tell me,’ I pleaded. ‘Will you please tell me why I have been keeping your secrets for you? The police now think that maybe Sam and Iris came here, to our home, on May Day morning. But I have always known that you returned here, and I have never been able to tell another soul about it.’

  But still she was silent.

  I got up slowly and left the room. I walked across the landing to my bedroom and pulled a small wooden chest from under my bed, then sat back on my heels to catch my breath, one hand on my aching back. I carried the chest back to Nell’s bedroom where I set it down on her bed and opened it, the smell of mothballs filling the air.

  ‘I was going to use this chest to store your wedding trousseau,’ I said, ‘but I have known for all this time that you would never marry. All I could use this old chest for was to hide the mess you had made.’

  I opened the chest and tilted it towards where she sat, as if she might somehow be able to look inside.

  ‘I found this under your bed,’ I said, my fingers tracing a thin layer of cotton inside. ‘I found it there on the morning of May Day 1912, just before the police came to search your room the first time. But you must have known that I would find it, for only you can have put it there. You returned home that May Day morning – even if just for a short while. God only knows what you did!’

  She seemed to grow a little clearer, but her eyes were still focused somewhere behind me and I knew that the memory I saw was one from long before that fateful day. She would not speak to me, yet I had no one but her to talk to.

  ‘I thought that if I hid this away, then I would forget about it somehow,’ I said, ‘but I cannot. You are my daughter and I have to protect you, no matter what you have done. Even if all that I am protecting is your memory.’

  But still she did not make a sound.

  I put the chest on the dressing table and took out the fabric that was folded inside. The cotton was so cold against my hands that it felt almost damp, my fingertips running over hard knots of embroidery – tiny yellow flowers stitched around the curve of a neckline. I grasped the fabric and reached up high, letting the garment unravel to the floor. It was a long cotton nightgown, just as I had remembered, but the thin fabric that had once been white was now faded. There was a dark brown stain, which ran from the chest and continued to the bottom hem, covering almost half the gown in the seep of dried blood.

  It was the dress of the May Queen. It was what Iris Caldwell had worn on May Day. It told me that Iris was dead, that Sam could be innocent and that Nell had been somehow involved in what happened. Yet it told me nothing of what had become of my daughter after that or whether she too had perished.

  ‘Oh, Nell, why?’ I whispered. ‘If only you could tell me why!’

  From the stool by the dressing table, Nell just watched and smiled.

  Nell

  1912

  8

  It was on the first of March 1912 that I met Iris Caldwell – the first day of spring. Of course, I was just a young girl in 1912 and I could not foresee how what would happen over the next few weeks would lead me to do what I did. We did not know it back then, but Iris and I would not see another spring in Missensham.

  I knew Iris by reputation first. In fact, everybody did. She was the daughter of the grand Member of Parliament who lived in the big house, the girl with the golden hair and slight figure, the one who the boys would stare at when she passed but never have the nerve to whistle at. She was the girl whom I would only ever glimpse in the back of her father’s motorcar as she was driven to church, and in her family’s pew, her face shaded by her smart hat; but this was only ever at Christmas and Easter and the rare times that God deserved her presence.

  She was a girl who was the same age as me but had never attended the village school so I thought her like some exotic creature, one who lived in a world I could never be part of. She was the girl who my mother talked about constantly – her manners, her elocution, her posture, her handwriting – always with a downward glance at me as if she was wishing me away. I was not Iris and I was sure that my mother hated me for that.

  It was through my mother’s work at Haughten Hall that Sir Howard heard about me. He cannot have known much about me – only my age and the fact that I lived in the village – because if he had known any more, he would not have thought me a suitable companion for his daughter. My mother would have also reminded him, several times, that I was the daughter of the dead vicar.

  I will always remember how my mother stood in the hallway waiting for me that morning, my best coat laid out and my boots clean and polished, a frilly white bonnet in her hand as she tapped her foot impatiently.

  ‘I can’t wear that!’ I said as I came down the stairs. ‘It’s a child’s bonnet.’

  But she said nothing and held it out to me as if she was telling not asking.

  I had done something to my hair, you see, restyled it in a way that she said was ‘quite unacceptable’. I had cut it short at the back of my neck and around my ears, but when it was smoothed back, it could pass for long hair that had been scraped back into a bun. I remember when she had first seen it – how her eyes had seemed to fill the thick lenses of her spectacles and she had brought her hands up to her mouth as if she had seen a ghost. My mother’s own hair had such a curl to it that it would never reach past her shoulders so I did not see her problem with what I had done. In fact, I thought I looked quite like Vesta Tilley from the music halls, but Mother thought that music halls were vulgar.

  I did not know why my mother wanted me to wear the bonnet that morning, only that, whatever her plans were, she must have been determined that I would not disgrace her.

  ‘You are to come with me to Haughten Hall,’ she said. ‘You are to provide companionship to Sir Howard’s daughter this morning, while he and I discuss Iris’s progress with her religious studies.’

  ‘Companionship?’ I said. ‘You make me sound like some kind of Victorian lady’s maid!’

  �
�Of course you won’t be a maid!’ she said. ‘You are the daughter of the late vicar, so you have a certain standing in this village. Sir Howard knows that. It will just be companionship.’

  ‘I won’t come,’ I said. ‘I don’t know this girl, I—’

  ‘You need a work reference,’ she said firmly, ‘and you will do it for that. You cannot be a teacher now that you will not get a reference from Miss Potter and I cannot even pass you off as a governess. There is nobody left in this village who has not heard of your exploits.’

  I did not bother to respond for I knew that she had more to say and that I would not get a word in edgeways. It was a rant that I had heard from her so many times about how I had become drunk on wine with Sam Denman and ended up in a police cell. There was no more to it than that but, despite having had a year to get over it, Mother still wallowed in the shame, and my silence did nothing to deter her as she continued to grumble about wagging tongues in the village, wringing her hands and spitting out the words as if they were poison. I pushed past her and took up my coat, forcing my feet into my boots.

  ‘…and what would your poor father have made of what became of you and Sam?’ she said, at last drawing breath but it was no more than a dramatic pause as she did not wait for an answer. ‘He would be turning in his grave!’

  ‘What became of me and Sam?’ I repeated. ‘Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? Sam has been able to get a job because some rich old woman took pity on him, and he likes working at the stables. Maybe if I can’t be a teacher, I should see if I can get a job in service after all. Maybe someone in one of the big houses will take pity on me too.’

  ‘That level of work is fine for the likes of Sam,’ she said, ‘but as the family of the late vicar we have a certain standing in this village. You must remember we may be related to Sam but we are not of his class.’