The Daughters of Foxcote Manor

by Eve Chase

  “I don’t understand. I don’t . . .” Mother’s voice is a rasp. A whisper. A ghost. “How?”

  The forest stills. Big Rita says nothing. She doesn’t even glance at me. And I know this means she isn’t going to mention my name, or that I thought I’d shot something. Not someone. I could get away with it. Mother never need know. This makes it worse. And I think how all the thoughts and noises and smells that were Don have gone forever. How I’ve wanted to kill him for days. “I didn’t mean to do it.”

  42

  Rita

  Rita watches Hera run, legs flashing, until the mist rubs her away. A volt of shock travels down her spine. The nightmare on the ground flashes, pulses—real, unreal. Her brain can’t register it. Don is marble white. A fallen statue. Jeannie is cradled over him, mewling, the chips of mirror work on her dress glinting, dark stars.

  Rita’s mind loops, trying to find a way out. Don is dead. Hera thinks she did it. And Rita can smell blood. Meat. Like Fred’s butcher’s shop counter. And something sweeter, riper, draining out of his body, sinking into the earth. A stag beetle is already investigating Don’s outstretched hand, the stiffening fingers curling inward.

  She shudders and tries to collect herself. But she can’t think straight. Jeannie is groaning, shaking. The temperature of the air seems to plunge. Rita kneels down, hugging Jeannie’s shoulders. She can feel Jeannie’s goose bumps against her own skin, a birdlike tremble in her bones. “Jeannie,” she whispers. She can’t think of what else to say, how to make things better. “Jeannie . . .”

  Very slowly Jeannie looks up, her face contorted and ugly with grief. “Hera did it?” she breathes, gagging her sobs with cupped hands.

  “I don’t know. I don’t . . . know.” And Rita doesn’t. She truly can’t believe it. “She thought she was shooting a deer . . .” The words buckle.

  “It . . . it looks bad,” stammers Jeannie.

  Rita can’t deny this.

  “Hera will be sent to an institution.” Jeannie covers her mouth with a hand and groans, that sound again, deep and raw, coming from a place Rita isn’t sure she’s been. “Like The Lawns. Or worse, much worse. Oh, god.”

  Rita’s horror at Don’s death tips into something else. Fear for those left behind. Hera wouldn’t survive such a place. She wouldn’t last a week. The beetle is on his arm now, a moving black spot.

  “The gun?” Something has changed, sharpened, in Jeannie’s face. “Where’s the gun?”

  “Hera dropped it.” Rita’s teeth involuntarily start to chatter. “I—I don’t know where.”

  “We must dig!” Jeannie grabs Rita’s arm, her fingernails biting sickles into Rita’s skin. Her eyes grow wild. “Come on.” She stands up, pulling Rita with her.

  “Dig?” The word curdles sickeningly. “What . . . what do you mean?”

  “Bury him. We’ll say he left. Arabia. Yes, yes,” jabbers Jeannie, manically. “He left for Arabia yesterday.”

  Rita blinks. She feels cornered. Snared. Her power draining away. Fred was right: she’s going down with their ship.

  “Hera’s life is ahead of her. Don’s gone. But we can save Hera. We must, Rita.” Jeannie glances about in a frenzy. “No one has seen us. No one will ever know. You’ll help me, won’t you? For Hera’s sake? I can’t lose everyone I love. I can’t, Rita. For pity’s sake, help me.”

  Rita agitates at the edge of acquiescence. The urge to say yes and relieve some of Jeannie’s agony is overwhelming. And yet. Something inside—forged in the heat of her evening with Robbie, a tiny granite fragment—resists.

  “Rita?” Jeannie begs. She shakes her by the arms, back and forth. “You are so strong. I can’t do this on my own. Please.”

  The trees seem to lean toward Rita then, narrowing the night sky, entombing her in the dark. She thinks of her mother inside the glowing lantern of the blazing car, her hands splayed on the glass; her mother dying, not growing, like the plants Rita’s nurtured all these years, trying, she suddenly realizes, to reverse those forces. The joy she finds in small things. A fern frond unfurling. A crystal of sea salt on the tip of her tongue. New socks.

  Her life is insignificant, she knows that. One of a plain single woman, lacking riches or status, never to have a family of her own or anyone to mourn or miss her. But dare she risk that life, however small and modest, for a prison cell? For the Harringtons?

  “We need spades.” Jeannie tugs her harder now. “Come on.”

  “I can’t bury him, Jeannie.” The hardest thing she’s ever said. Tears slide down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What?” gasps Jeannie. “But you have to—I’m telling you . . .”

  And then they hear it. The sound of something in the trees. Twig snaps. Footsteps. Voices. Rita puts a finger to her lips. They stand rigid, not daring to exhale. And just when they think the people have gone, a beam of torchlight reaches toward them through the swirling mist, like a jailer’s arm.

  43

  Sylvie

  Good riddance, that’s what we said.” Marge sips her sherry and splutters on it, with a small laugh. The residue gleams greasily on her upper lip. She’s enjoying an audience. “Didn’t we, Fingers?”

  “No, Marge,” Fingers hisses through gritted teeth and a rictus smile. “Rest in peace. That’s what we said when Armstrong got tragically shot, Marge. Rest in peace.”

  The live-in carer is odder than his name, tall, shoelace thin, with a shock of ice-white hair and a pearly translucence to his face and eyes. Unable to stay still, he stalks around Marge’s living room, like an agitated survivor of a hideous natural disaster. “She gets in a right muddle.” He makes an exaggerated whirly sign with a finger at his temple, which only makes everything else seem even more unhinged. He offers me the plate of biscuits. “Another fig roll?”

  I shake my head, unable to rip my eyes from the old woman in the chintz armchair, holding the silver-cased lipstick aloft, moving it back and forth for a long-sighted inspection, and murmuring, “Looks just like a bullet, come to think of it.”

  Fingers stiffens at her side and lets out a strangled laugh.

  “I married a man just like Armstrong,” Marge continues blithely. She takes the lid off the lipstick and sniffs. “Bastard. Lived a double life. Didn’t give a damn who he hurt. This does smell fancy.”

  “Who did it?” I ask, trying to fill in the headlines of an imaginary newspaper article. My mind winds back to the pap-snap of a broken-looking Walter Harrington, hurrying from courthouse to car. “Who shot Armstrong, Marge?”

  To my astonishment, Marge starts to giggle. Fingers looks like he might grab a cushion and smother his charge at any moment. A chilling thought streaks through my head: He did it.

  Then another. No one knows where I am. I’ve got scratchy mobile reception. I’m not entirely sure where I parked the car. This stuffy room is fogging my brain, trapping me in 1971 by means of its swirly green carpet and peeling wallpaper, the color of horses’ teeth. The cluttered house’s desolate air is made worse by the cardboard boxes stacked against the walls, the bin liners, slumped, half full of rubbish: an imminent move into sheltered accommodation. “Won’t go,” she’s already told me defiantly, and I felt for her, knowing she will, and the heartbreak involved in packing up a home, dismantling memories. In the end our houses are furnished less with tables and chairs than with these.

  I flinch as Fingers touches my back and I catch the tang of his body odor, almost an animal scent. Like how I imagine an old badger den might smell. “I’ll see you out, Sylvie.”

  “Thanks.” I grab my bag, relieved to be going. Caroline’s right. I should never have come. What am I doing? I should be with Annie, googling secondhand Bugaboos and debating silly celebrity baby names, not pressing my nose against the past, peering at the horrors inside.

  “Oh, but she’s Big Rita’s girl. Big Rita, remember, Fingers? You had a mad crush on
Big Rita once.” Marge winks. “You peeping Tom, you.”

  Fingers’s grayish-skinned face blazes. Rain starts to grease the living-room windows.

  Marge nods at me. “Now, your mother could keep a secret.”

  And don’t I know it.

  “Big heart.” Another sip of sherry. The alcohol is loosening her. “And feet! Gordon Bennett, those feet. What a lot of trouble they caused.”

  Again Fingers tries to maneuver me out of the room. But I stand firm, sensing the undertow of a different story. “What sort of trouble?”

  “Her boot mark on Don’s cheek.”

  Christ. Was Mum a suspect? No wonder she never wanted to speak about it. Then a new possibility, unimaginable seconds before, wheels toward me: Did Mum shoot the man?

  “She lives in the past, this one.” Fingers bends down to my ear. His breath is damp, dank as soil. “But can’t remember it right.”

  Marge rolls her eyes and turns to me, her tone conspiratorial. “Take no notice. I’m all he’s got. When you don’t have real family, like we don’t, you find your own kin. You’ve always been scared of losing me, haven’t you, my little Green Man?”

  Fingers bows his head, unexpectedly submissive and boyish all of a sudden. This is not a normal carer/patient relationship, I begin to realize. Something else is going on here. She pats his hand, a maternal gesture and yet also an assertion of dominance. “Settle down or I’ll dock your supper,” she murmurs under her breath. And for a moment he just stands there, chastised, silent, swaying like a tall tree.

  “Anyway, I call a spade a spade,” she says, turning back to me, seeming to pick up our conversation about Armstrong again. “Only cared about that truncheon dangling between his legs. Ruining things for that baby, he was.”

  “Jo’s baby?” I test, sure they must be able to hear my heart thumping. My tiny unknown self slips into the conversation, silk over glass.

  “Aye.” She looks at me, confused, frowning, trying to place me or something I said. Her gaze grows milkier, clouded by age.

  She walked away. I can’t get beyond this. But I still must ask: “Do . . . do you remember her surname?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Fingers asks, springing back to life and widening his eyes at Marge, some sort of warning.

  “I . . .” Part of me, I realize, is asking because I think I should, because you’re meant to want to know. We’re told that’s how adoption tales play out, the long-lost mother, the tearful reunion . . .

  “Did you know Jo?” Marge stares at me, frowning. She taps a yellow thumbnail against her front tooth. “What’s the connection again?”

  “I . . .” Cringing inside, I whisper out the rarely spoken truth: “I was found in the forest that summer.”

  Fingers’s leg starts to bounce feverishly in the corner of my vision.

  “What?” Marge’s face scrunches, uncomprehending. “What are you saying?”

  “I was the abandoned baby, Marge,” I say more loudly, stripping the words of their talismanic power. “It was me.” Louder still.

  Her face chalks. “You’re lying!” she hisses.

  Fingers mutters, “Codswallop,” under his breath.

  I’m so taken aback, struck down by the absurdity that it’s taken me this many bloody years to speak the truth out loud—and sober—to a stranger, to claim it as my own, only to be accused of making it up, that for a moment I don’t know what to say and teeter on the verge of hysterical laughter.

  “I’d recognize Jo’s baby.” Her voice breaks. Her rage ruptures, like a wound. Tears spill down the creases of her cheeks. She turns to Fingers, her voice desperate. “Wouldn’t I? Even all these years later.”

  “Of course, dear.” Fingers splays his hand on her frail shoulder protectively, talking over her wispy head. “This is all very distressing for Marge. Quite unnecessary.”

  I’m baffled and frustrated. After years of burying my story, rejecting it, I feel the urgent need to own it. Because it’s mine, I realize. Running through my veins. Part of me. My own beautiful damage. “But . . .”

  “Lies!” Marge throws her fig roll at me and starts to sob. “A cruel trick! Out! Out!”

  “Well, Sylvie.” Fingers claps his huge white hands together with a twisted smile. “I believe we’re done here.”

  44

  Hera

  Outside the bedroom window, two fuzzy headlights, like glowing eyes, wind their way through the trees toward us. More police? The ambulance? The two police constables who found Mother and Rita in the woods are now on our sofa, their torches on the coffee table, notebooks on their laps. They’re “taking us through the evening” and asking questions, in hushed voices, like people in a library. I feel distant, like I’m watching from the ceiling.

  The woman wears serious glasses with magnifying lenses. There’s a ladder in her tights. The policeman looks flushed. Their radios constantly hiss and buzz. I worry the noise will wake Teddy and he’ll stumble downstairs to discover what’s happened. What has happened? I want to ask the police for details. Or at least to check my version 0f events against Big Rita’s. My brain is a big blank space, like an ice rink, cold and skiddy. Thoughts can’t stand up on it properly. Everything slides about. The policeman keeps staring at me.

  A member of the public called the station, he’s saying, glancing back at Mother. An anonymous tip-off. He can’t quite hide the squeaking thrill in his voice. I guess if you’re a policeman, finding a murdered man counts as a good day at the office, especially in this sleepy sort of place. I’m not sure they visit many houses like this, either. The policewoman is staring around the room, her gaze sticking to the grandfather clock, the oil paintings, and then, of course, the terrarium, the sparkling wreck on the floor. I wonder if it’ll look like my motive for killing Don. I hope it doesn’t look like Big Rita’s.

  Problem is, Big Rita is acting guilty. She’s a bag of nerves, her knee bouncing up and down. Sobs crackle up in her throat; then she swallows them. The baby dozes over her shoulder, wrapped in the yellow blanket, and Rita clings to her little body like she’s expecting the police to snatch her out of her arms at any minute. But the police haven’t even asked about the baby. They’re asking about other things. Big Rita keeps tripping over her words, especially when the policewoman mentions the boot print on Don’s face, the boots Rita wore earlier and the police have now slipped into a special plastic bag. “So they belong to Robbie Rigby?” the policeman asks intently. “Correct?”

  “Correct,” Rita mumbles, and wipes away a tear with the sleeve of her pink cardigan.

  “Can you confirm this, Mrs. Harrington?”

  “Yes, Officer.” You’d never know that she and Don were having one of their “naps” a few hours ago. She looks like a mother again. Her legs are crossed at the ankle. She’s covered her floaty black dress with a long cream cardigan—a good idea, since some of the tiny mirrors embroidered into it are pink with blood—and tucked her hair behind her ears so she doesn’t look deranged, just sad and shocked, like a woman might be to discover “a family friend” dead in the grounds.

  There’s a sense of mission about her too. Her jaw is set, her gaze steady. And when the police aren’t looking, her eyes burn into me, as if they’re desperately trying to tell me something. But I don’t know what. Only that she hates me and always will and her hate is part of me now. I worry the police can see it too, because when I look up from my feet, I find them both staring, as if there’s something about me they find unsettling. Finally the policeman clears his throat and glances down at his notes. “So, Heerr . . .”—he stumbles over my name, like everyone does—“Hera.”

  I nod. My heart starts to kick in my ears. I realize it might help if I started crying, like normal girls are supposed to, but I can’t. My feelings are all stuck.

  “It’s important you tell the truth, you know that, don’t you?” he says, speaking slowly, a
s if I were stupid.

  “Nothing but the truth.” I’ve heard this on the telly.

  Mother chokes back a small sob and shakes her head at me like the truth is the last thing I should be telling. This is confusing, because all my life Mother’s said, “Just tell the truth, Hera. I’ll be less cross with you if you just tell the bloody truth.” And who else could have shot Don but me?

  Also, there’s a relief in being caught. I know what happens next. I’ll be taken away from Teddy to live with other bad, dangerous children, somewhere harsh and lonely, like the school in Jane Eyre. Aunt Edie will likely visit, just not every weekend because she’s so busy and abroad all the time. Big Rita will come and arrange her face into a smile. Will Mother? Probably not. Why should she forgive me? She’ll go back to Daddy, and Baby Forest will take my place. Teddy will love his new sister just as much. Daddy will be grateful Mother’s happy. And I can’t blame anyone but myself. Everything’s been leading to this point, I realize, from the moment I draped the curtains across the lamp’s scorching lightbulb in Primrose Hill. I didn’t burn down the house, not completely. But I ended up destroying everything just the same, like I always feared I would.

  “So Hera went out with her brother Teddy and the deceased and a . . .”—he clears his throat—“gun?” The policewoman flicks Mother a sideways look of disgust, as if to say, What sort of mother are you?

  “It was Don’s idea,” says Big Rita. “He said they were in safe hands.”

  The policeman raises an eyebrow. “Go on, Hera.”

  Upstairs, the sound of the cuckoo clock. It makes me think of the woodpecker, the one that lives outside Big Rita’s bedroom window, and I wonder if I’ll ever hear it again, if they’ll take me now or in the morning.

  “Can you try to tell us, Hera?” the policewoman says more kindly.

  “I thought I saw a deer, something moving . . .”