Final Witness

by Simon Tolkien

  Just as it had done a thousand times before, Thomas’s mind flew to his mother, sleeping so peacefully in her bed with the moonlight shining down through the half-drawn curtains. Sleeping in the same room where her parents had slept. Where her father had died looking up at the portrait of his wife on the wall. Where Thomas had often slept himself, driven by the Suffolk storms to find comfort beside his mother in the small hours. Life and love and death going on through the generations of the Sackvilles, until Greta came.

  Hardly anyone had been in the room since Lady Anne’s death. Sir Peter never came, and it was only Jane Martin who went in there once a week to dust, and she didn’t stay long. She had not yet been able to face the task of disposing of Lady Anne’s clothes. The dresses still hung in the closets just as they had before their owner’s death, as if nothing had happened.

  Thomas kept his distance. He had been determined from the outset to remain in the House of the Four Winds. He was his mother’s heir. To leave would have meant defeat, and he honored her by remaining, but at a cost. Everywhere he went reminded him of her. He tried to help himself by avoiding the front stairs and his mother’s bedroom, but he often found himself standing outside his own bedroom as he was now, gazing down the corridor to the closed door at the end, remembering his failure.

  Over and over again he’d replayed it in his mind. He’d had to shake her so hard to get her to wake up, and there’d been no time. He could hear the men downstairs. Perhaps if he’d been quicker or made her go in front, then she’d have gotten inside the hiding place and the man with the scar would never have seen her, never have shot her, never have taken her away. Put her in a black, wet hole in the Flyte churchyard.

  Suddenly Thomas felt violently sick. His legs went weak and he was barely able to make it into the bathroom before he threw up, kneeling on the tiles with his arms hugging the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl. He retched again and again until he had nothing left.

  Back in his bedroom Thomas tried to think of something good. The trouble was that the past was his mother and her death had destroyed it all. Made it unbearable. He looked out the window again and tried to reclaim the north lawn for his own. It was across the lawn to the north gate that he would go with Barton at his side almost every morning of the holidays for as long as he could remember. Walking barefoot with the Labrador padding after him, making a path through the glistening dew on their way to the beach. There Thomas would break off a piece of driftwood and throw it high and far and the dog would rush headlong across the sand and into the sea, grasping it miraculously from the clutch of the waves before bringing back the prize to his master.

  At night there was a ritual. The word bedtime, said by Lady Anne even in the softest voice, would transform Barton into a wolf. He would growl menacingly and push Thomas up the back stairs toward his room. Protests were useless. The growls would redouble in volume and even turn into snarls until Thomas reached his door, whereupon the dog would spring onto the bed and curl up in contentment.

  Thomas loved the Labrador passionately, and Barton loved him. The two were almost inseparable. When Thomas wrote stories about being marooned on a desert island, he never imagined himself alone. Barton was there to keep him company, protecting him from the wild animals that tried to attack their camp after the sun went down. If Thomas was a knight of the Round Table dressed in the helmet and breastplate that Jane Martin had given him for his tenth birthday, then Barton would be his black charger dressed up for the tournament in one of Lady Anne’s most beautiful silk handkerchiefs.

  Time passed and Barton grew older. He could no longer always catch the sticks that Thomas threw out into the waves. The dog would stand at the water’s edge looking puzzled as the tide took his prize away, and the sleek black tail that had always crashed from side to side with the joy of being alive now hung still. Thomas put his arm around Barton’s warm neck and went to tell his mother.

  The vet in Flyte listened to Barton’s heart and shook his head a fraction.

  “There’s a murmur. Give him these tablets and don’t let him strain himself. He’s an old boy now, Thomas. Nearly ninety in our years.”

  Nearly ninety? Barton wasn’t ninety. He was three years younger than Thomas. “But dogs don’t live that long, darling,” said Lady Anne in the car on the way home. “We must enjoy them while we can.”

  Two months later Barton could not get up the stairs. Thomas picked up the old dog and carried him up to his room. He slept on the bed all night, but toward dawn he began to whimper and Thomas fetched his mother.

  In the morning Barton was no better, and they called the vet.

  “It’s not fair to Barton to make him carry on,” said Lady Anne to her son. “He’s hurting inside, Tom. You can see that.”

  “But I don’t want him to die,” cried Thomas with his pajama-clad arm wrapped around the old dog’s neck.

  Barton looked up at his master and tried to get to his feet, but the effort was too much and he laid his head down on the floor again.

  “He’s trusting us. Trusting us to help him. You have to understand that, Tom.” And Thomas did. Love worked both ways.

  He kissed the dog and held his paw while the vet prepared the injection. And then it was all over in an instant. It was something that Thomas never forgot: the thinness of the line between life and death.

  He and his mother buried Barton in the garden under the old elm tree that stood by the north gate so that Thomas could see the grave from his bedroom window. They held hands and said a prayer thanking God for Barton’s life, and the next day Thomas made a wooden cross with Barton’s name and dates and dug it deep into the soil.

  Lady Anne had thought of buying a puppy before Barton died so that Thomas would have another dog already there when Barton was gone. However, she ended up not doing so. It wouldn’t have been fair to the old dog to see a puppy rushing about as he lost his strength and couldn’t compete for Thomas’s attention.

  Lady Anne took care also to allow her son enough time to properly mourn his friend. Thomas and she would pick the wildflowers that grew on the edges of the marsh and bring them back to lay on Barton’s grave, but Lady Anne soon came to realize that these walks were only making things worse. Thomas would forget what had happened and look up expecting to see Barton bounding toward him across the dunes, only to realize that the Labrador was gone for good and nothing would bring him back.

  After two weeks Lady Anne decided that it was time to act. Breakfast was over, and Thomas was sitting on the front step watching the early sun make patterns on the hall carpet as it shone down through the yew trees. A paperback copy of Robinson Crusoe lay face up beside him, but in truth he hadn’t read anything since Barton’s death. The sea was quiet, and as Thomas looked down over the lawn to the front gate and the houses beyond the road, he felt an enormous desolation settling over the world. There seemed to be nowhere to go and nothing to do.

  The voice of his mother calling to him from the top of the stairs startled him out of his lethargy.

  “Come on, Tom, we need to get packed.”

  “Packed. Why?”

  “Because we’re going to London. This afternoon. Everything’s arranged.”

  “London. Why are we going to London?”

  “For a holiday, Tom. For a change of scenery. To put some color in your cheeks so you stop walking around looking like the Carmouth Ghost.”

  “I don’t look like the Carmouth Ghost. She was a woman who killed her husband with a steak knife, and I’m a — ”

  “You’re a fourteen-year-old who’s been having a terrible time and doesn’t know what to do with himself.”

  “But Mum, you hate London. You know you do. That’s what you always say to Dad when he wants you to go up there for one of his political things.”

  “I’m not going up there for them. I’m going to London to spend time with you.”

  “And Dad?”

  “Yes, of course. He’s promised to take time out to be with us. He knows you�
�re having a bad time at the moment. That’s why he wrote you that letter.”

  “Not exactly a letter. Five lines. ‘I was sorry to hear about Barton. Here’s ten pounds. Buy yourself something at the shop.’”

  “He’s very busy, darling. He meant well.”

  “No, he didn’t. If he cared, he’d have come down here last weekend.”

  “He couldn’t. There was a conference he had to go to. You know that.”

  “I know that he doesn’t care about me. Or you. That’s what I know.”

  “That’s not true, Thomas.”

  “It is true. Spending all his time with Greta. Green-eyed Greta.”

  “She’s his personal assistant, Tom. And the fact that she’s got green eyes has got nothing to do with it. She’s very good at her job, and we must try to like her for your father’s sake.”

  “Everything is for his sake. Nothing is for ours,” said Thomas, becoming visibly angry. He kicked his book to one side and went and stood at the top of the steps leading down to the drive.

  Behind him he felt his mother approaching, but he did not turn his head even when she came to stand beside him. He fought to hold back the tears that were starting in his eyes and bunched his hands into hard fists.

  Lady Anne worried for her son as she stood beside him between the yews. He was so rigid and unbending as he fought to control emotions of anger and grief that threatened to overwhelm him. She thought of the old beech tree by the south gate, broken by the great storm in January when the fisherman had drowned in the bay. It had been too rigid, unlike the yews that swayed in the wind.

  Peter had been here that night. With Greta. Driving Gracie Marsh down to the harbor. Lady Anne didn’t like Greta. She had formed that opinion long before her son had found the woman trying on her clothes. She had seen Greta watching everyone, insinuating herself into their lives, but Anne had held her peace because Greta had done nothing wrong and it was clear that Peter needed her so much for his work.

  Anne could tell that Greta had changed her accent, and she felt that the girl was watching her in order to imitate her. It sometimes almost seemed as if Greta was trying to become her.

  “She’s not one of us,” she had once caught herself saying to her husband in an unguarded moment, but she had accepted his retaliatory accusation of snobbery as just. Forgiveness was part of the code of manners by which Lady Anne lived her life, and she had forced herself to accept Peter’s explanation for why Greta had tried on the dresses. She had money and Greta didn’t, and if she’d been nicer to her, then perhaps Greta would have felt able to ask to borrow a dress or two.

  Thomas, of course, didn’t see it that way. It was ironic, given all the efforts that Greta had made to get on with him. All those books she’d read about Suffolk. Lady Anne didn’t know how she’d found time. It was as if something more had happened in her bedroom when Thomas found Greta trying on her clothes, but there was no point in asking her son. He’d found it difficult enough to tell her about the dresses.

  “Let’s not talk about Greta or your father, Tom. I know things aren’t easy at the moment with what’s happened with Barton, but you shouldn’t try to make them worse. You’re not the only one who misses Barton. Jane loved him and so did I. What we both need is a change of scenery. London’ll be good for us.”

  There was a note of appeal in his mother’s voice that Thomas could not resist. He loved his mother and could not bear to make her anxious or distressed. That would lead to one of the terrible migraines that hurt her so badly. The long afternoons when his mother lay on her bed with her face covered by a flannel sighing with the pain were the worst days of his childhood. Afterward she would be weak for days, sitting in the rocking chair by the kitchen door in her dressing gown, drinking the cups of peppermint tea that Aunt Jane made for her in a special teapot.

  “Yes, Mum. I’m being silly. I’d love to go with you. I’ll go and get packed.”

  “Jane’s washed your shirts. They’re in the laundry room. And you’ll need to take your blazer for the theater.”

  “The theater? What are we going to see?”

  “Macbeth. At the Globe. I’ve got tickets for Thursday night. Just you and me.”

  “Macbeth! Oh, Mummy, I love you! It’s the one I’ve always wanted to see.” Thomas ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and hurried to his room to get ready.

  Lady Anne smiled. What a strange boy he was! It was the first time in two weeks that she’d heard real happiness in his voice, and what was it that had caused this change? A tale of ghosts and bloody murder, treachery and treason.

  They drove with the top of the Aston Martin down. It was a beautiful car that Lady Anne had had since she was in her twenties. The garage in Flyte that had looked after her father’s Rolls-Royce had done the same for the bright red sports car that he had given her for her twenty-first birthday. Driving it made her feel young again. The world that flew by in a blur of fields and haystacks seemed full of possibility. She was a fool to have shut herself and Thomas up in the house for so long.

  Thomas also felt exhilarated. He loved to watch his mother drive. Her beautiful hands laced themselves around the spokes of the steering wheel, which was small like in a racing car, as she sat back in her tan leather seat and allowed the wind to blow her brown hair over her shoulders. She was wearing a white summer dress with an open neck, and Thomas could see her favorite gold locket glinting in the sun where it lay heart-shaped on her breastbone. His father had given it to his mother on their wedding day, with a picture of them both shut inside.

  On her finger Lady Anne wore a blue, square-cut sapphire ring. The stone had been brought back from India by Thomas’s great-grandfather just before the First World War. There was a family rumor passed down through the generations that old Sir Stephen Sackville had stolen it from its native owner, who had then cursed him and his descendants, but no one believed the story. The jewel seemed so pure and magical, and the portrait of Sir Stephen hanging in the drawing room at the House of the Four Winds was of a kindly old man, saddened by the early death of his daughter, Lady Anne’s mother, in a riding accident. She had only been forty when she died, the same age that Thomas’s mother was now, and Thomas had often come into his mother’s bedroom to find her sitting at her dressing table gazing up at the portrait of her mother hanging on the wall above the fireplace.

  “I’m wearing the ring for you,” said Lady Anne, sensing her son’s attention to the sapphire. “I know it’s your favorite.”

  “Grandmother’s wearing it in the portrait, isn’t she?” asked Thomas, who loved family history. “I was looking at it yesterday.”

  “Yes, she always wore it. Her father gave it to her when she was twenty-one. There’s that old story I told you about it. About where it came from in India. I’ve got a letter about it somewhere. I’ll have to dig it out. The sapphire’s so very beautiful. Wearing it makes me feel close to her. It’s silly, I know.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You’re right. It’s not.” Lady Anne smiled at the certainty in her son’s voice.

  “I do so wonder what she was like, Tom,” she went on after a pause. “My father used to say that she was a daredevil. Always getting into scrapes and running up huge debts that old Sir Stephen had to pay off. But everyone forgave her because she was so pretty and full of life. Then suddenly she was dead. Killed by a horse, of all things.”

  “How old were you, Mum?”

  “When it happened? Five. I’d just turned five.”

  “It must’ve been awful. Really awful.” Thomas suddenly wished that he’d not brought up the subject of his grandmother.

  “I don’t know, to be honest,” said Lady Anne. “I mean, yes, it must have completely traumatized me, which is why I can’t remember anything about it except one image, which may have nothing to do with her death except that I feel sure it does. It’s seeing my father sitting on the front stairs. I can’t remember if he was crying or not, but I know that he never sat anyw
here except on a chair and there he was sitting on the stairs.”

  “The front stairs?”

  “Yes. And for many years I couldn’t remember anything about my mother at all. I would look at the old photograph albums, but they didn’t mean anything, and curiously it was that painting that you like that gave me the strongest sense of her. It used to hang in the hall, and I’d gaze at it for hours until one day a memory came back to me.

  “I was in a park on a swing. It must’ve been like a children’s playground, and I’ve never been able to work out where it is, although I can see a grove of big green Christmas trees nearby. Anyway, there’s someone pushing the swing, and I go up, up, up in the air so high that my little patent leather black shoes are right above my head.”

  “But where’s your mother?” asked Thomas.

  “She’s pushing the swing. I can’t see her but I know she is. And that’s why I’m so happy. Going so high but feeling so safe because she’s pushing me. That’s my memory of her.”

  Lady Anne stopped talking and wiped a tear from her eye. Unlike many boys his age, Thomas was not repelled by emotion. He had the quality of empathy, and so he leaned across the hand brake and kissed his mother on her wet cheek.

  “Thank you, Tom. You’re a good boy.”

  This did upset Thomas, who didn’t feel he was a boy at all. He moved uncomfortably in his seat, but Lady Anne didn’t seem to notice. She was still thinking of her mother.

  “So anyway, after my father died and I moved into the big room with Peter, I took the portrait up there with me and hung it over the fireplace.”

  “Was the safe already there?” asked Thomas irrelevantly.

  “No, that was your father’s idea. He wanted me to put all the jewelry in a bank vault because it was much too valuable to be left lying around. You know what he’s like. Practical, unlike me.”

  “Yes.” Thomas responded with feeling. Practicality had always been his father’s code word for what he felt was missing in his son.

  “But I wouldn’t have it. What’s the point in having beautiful things if they’re shut away where no one can ever see them? And so we compromised. Your father installed his big, ugly safe, and I hung your grandmother’s portrait over it.”