by Nicola Upson
She stood up, eager to be distracted by more practical considerations. The first decision she had to make was where she was going to spend the night, and she couldn’t do that until she knew the state of the cottage. She found the key in her bag and used it with as little ceremony as possible, trying to calm her nerves by acting as if this were normal. The door opened straight into a kitchen-parlour, cast in shadow now that the sun had moved round, and she went to the windows to pull the curtains back. There was a range at one end with an armchair either side, and it wasn’t hard to see which Hester had favoured: the cushions on the left were flattened and misshapen from years of use and a small rosewood table stood next to the chair, piled with day-to-day necessities – a magnifying glass and some indigestion powders, knitting shoved unfinished into a bag and a cup and saucer. Were it not for the dust and the flies and the sickly, cloying smell of a cottage so unnaturally sealed over the summer, Josephine could easily have believed that Hester would return at any minute. The intimacy of these redundant, commonplace items moved her, and she felt again the lack of privacy in death that had so horrified her in her own home.
The rest of the room was well furnished, but sparse: a dresser and Wedgwood dinner service; a central table, missing the chairs she had seen earlier; and a heavy oak sideboard with an oil lamp and wireless set, the latter placed within easy reach of Hester’s chair. A clock on the wall above it must have met with an accident at some point because the glass from its face was missing; Josephine set the hands to half past three, then wound it and was pleased to find it working. The clock had a light, amiable tick, not one of those ponderous sounds that seem to drain the life from a room, and only when it filled the air did she realise how silent the house had been. Her foot caught something under the sideboard and she bent down to look at an old wicker dog basket, covered with a blanket; there was a ball inside, chewed and squashed out of shape, and Josephine wondered what had happened to the dog. She looked round the room and the self-contained life it bore witness to: an animal’s love, the voice of a stranger on the radio – all the company that Hester had wanted.
In the far corner of the parlour, an open doorway led through to a scullery and a brown velvet curtain covered the entrance to the staircase. There was another downstairs room, but Josephine went over to the windows first: the air in the cottage was stale and oppressive, and she wanted to let the outside world in again, to fill the house with the contentment she had felt in the garden. She opened each casement as far as fragile hinges would allow, much to the relief of the flies that tapped pointlessly against the glass; many had not been so lucky, and she brushed them off the window ledge with the edge of the curtain. A rich fragrance rose up from the flower beds below, and she was glad of the time of year: the bleakness of winter would have made a sad task unbearable.
When she walked into the room next door, she found the first real traces of the person she had read about: the parlour could have belonged to any elderly woman, but this was unmistakably the home of an actress. Production photographs and framed playbills covered the walls, and Josephine’s attention was drawn to the poster in the centre, an advertisement for a week-long run of Maria Marten in Lincoln starring Hester and her husband. She was interested to see that the 1910 cast had included a young Tod Slaughter, and that Walter Paget had also arranged the music; the upright piano at the end of the room was probably his, she thought, and she wondered if Hester had played, too. A modest bookcase along one wall had exceeded its limits long ago, and the books spilled out onto the floor – play texts, mostly, interspersed with well-thumbed memoirs by Hester’s contemporaries and a few novels, read less avidly if their spines were anything to go by. There were several editions of the Red Barn melodrama, some with acting notes scribbled in the margins, and Josephine was touched when she recognised her own play Richard of Bordeaux among the volumes. She walked over to Hester’s desk and picked up the address book that lay open on a blotter; the desk stood under the window with the missing pane and rain had stained some of the pages, but enough was still visible to show the circle of people that Hester and Walter had numbered among their friends. Josephine was struck by the contrast between her godmother’s married and widowed lives, and she wondered which had come more naturally to her – conviviality, or solitude? The handwriting, bold and flamboyant, suggested the former.
The drawers were full of letters and bills, stashed away without any apparent order; only one of them was locked, and Josephine hoped that she might find the rumoured memoir there when she eventually located the key. In the mean time, she contented herself with a closer look at what Hester had surely regarded as the most precious thing her desk had to offer – a photograph of her husband. He was pictured many times on the wall, but this image – with only his wife for an audience – was relaxed and spontaneous. He was sitting on the bench where Josephine had sat earlier, dressed in old gardening clothes, and, from the immaturity of the flower beds, she guessed it had been taken when the cottage was still new to them. In the background, she could see a figure tending the climbing rose – perhaps a daily woman, hired to look after the cottage while they were away on tour – but nothing could detract from the true focus of the picture: the love and happiness on Walter’s face. A vase of dead roses stood next to the frame and, as Josephine leaned forward to open the window, she caught a faint whiff of foul-smelling water; she picked up the vase and emptied it into the bushes, then put it back in place, ready to be refilled.
There was a cupboard in the corner of the room, but the clutter of the desk had made a coward of her and she decided it could wait; she wasn’t ready yet to see the full extent of what Hester had asked her to do, and there was still another level to go. She lifted the latch on the staircase door and found that the unevenness of the floor prevented it from opening any wider than a few inches; no doubt there would be other quirks to get used to, changes in the cottage as it had shifted and settled over the years, and she squeezed through the gap and climbed the stairs, careful not to catch her head on a low beam as she came out into what must have been Hester’s bedroom, the room where she had died. Someone had made a cursory attempt to tidy the sheets and restore some dignity to the bed, but the rest of the room was in chaos: clothes and books under the bedstead, shoes all over the floor, and piles of unopened post spilling out of a box in the corner. A section of the room had been partitioned off, probably to form a children’s bedroom in the days when the cottage had housed a large family, and Josephine could see through the open doorway that there was still a bed inside, piled high with clothes, knick-knacks and a miscellany of boxes. Her heart sank, not just for herself and what she had agreed to do, but for the lack of care with which Hester had obviously lived; her professional life – the life she had shared – was preserved and valued, but everyday pleasures seemed to have brought her little comfort. How anyone could have slept in a room like this was beyond Josephine; it held no peace, no sense of stillness or retreat. She flung open the windows, caring little now for their fragility. There was an unpleasant smell in the room that came partly from its staleness and partly from her own imagination, fed by the awareness of death, and she wanted it gone. It occurred to her for the first time that she had no idea who had found Hester’s body, or – with her solitary way of life – how long she had lain here undiscovered.
The layout upstairs followed the one below and Josephine hesitated at the door to the final room, suddenly uneasy about what she might find on the other side. The sadnesses of her godmother’s life and death had been cumulative, filling her with a growing melancholy as she moved through the house, and she was reluctant to look at anything else that would damage her sense of Hester’s spirit and vitality. She took a deep breath and lifted the latch. The room was empty except for a neatly made single bed and small dressing table, and its tidiness was as disconcerting to Josephine as the confusion next door: she had never thought of Hester as the type to keep a room ready for guests. It was cleaner than the rest of the house, perha
ps because there was less to trap the dust: a silver hand-held mirror and a rose bowl on the dressing table were the only signs of use, and Josephine had the odd sensation of standing in a room that had been prepared for someone who had never arrived. The roses here were faded but still alive, and she collected a handful of fallen petals and crushed them between her fingers, breathing in the smell of summer as a welcome relief from the staleness of the cottage. Had someone got this room ready for her? She dismissed the idea immediately: no one had known she was coming, and even if they had, it was an unlikely gesture of hospitality from a village that had never been welcome here. The flowers were fresher than they should have been, but they were the only intimation that Hester’s instructions about access had not been observed and she put the thought to the back of her mind, preferring to believe in a trick of nature.
In the far corner there was an open doorway to a second staircase and she realised with relief that it led to the study, emerging in what she had believed to be a cupboard. One of the windows gave a view of the woods and the path to the village, the other looked out over fields that had changed neither their shape nor their purpose for hundreds of years. She watched as a horse pulled a cart up the hill, making easy work of a punishing rise, and thought about those who had stood here before her, contemplating the very same scene. The barn that had given the cottage its name might be long gone, but it was easy to see how the crime had lived on; there were no barriers to the past in this landscape, and Josephine could understand how real Maria Marten must have seemed to Hester here, how effortlessly she might have imagined herself back in that time.
The room’s dual aspect made it airier than the rest of the house, its emptiness was more peaceful, but Josephine knew that she could not sleep here. It wasn’t so much the knowledge that Hester had died next door – in a building as old as this, it would be more remarkable if someone hadn’t reached the end of their days within its walls – it was more a sense of intrusion, stronger here than anywhere else in the cottage. The instinct would have been hard to explain and even harder to rationalise, but it seemed to Josephine that Hester had never really been comfortable in this room and the feeling was infectious. She considered her options: choosing somewhere from Miss Peck’s list meant either ingratiating herself in the village or finding some transport to go further afield, and she was tired and not in the mood for conversation. She also knew that the longer she avoided spending a night at Red Barn Cottage, the more significant its drawbacks would become in her mind. Better to start as she meant to go on. The study was the room she felt most at home in, where there was an open fireplace and a chaise longue. It would do, at least for now.
Back downstairs, she realised how much she took for granted in her own kitchen. It would be a miracle here if she could make a cup of tea before nightfall, let alone anything more substantial, and she cursed herself for not bringing any basic supplies with her; the village shop – if such a thing even existed – would have closed long ago. There was a bucket of coke standing ready by the range, and she used it to give herself at least the prospect of hot water; the water pump, she had noticed, was by the back door and she prayed that the Suffolk summer had not been sufficiently hot to dry the well, but she was in luck – when the water hit the bottom of the pail, it was clear and plentiful. One of the hotplate covers was missing from the range and the lid of the kettle was nowhere to be found, but she put the two together in good faith and hoped that the system would prove more efficient than it looked.
The scullery was dark, even with the back door ajar. Over the years, the climbing rose had been allowed to cover the window, making it impossible to open the casement or to see anyone approaching the cottage from the track to the road. Josephine rejected several lamps before finding one with some oil left in it, but she persevered in her search because the gloom was depressing. It would have to be used sparingly, because there were only stub ends in the candlesticks and she could not rely on being able to find replacements, but she did not intend to spend long in this part of the house and it would see her through a cursory investigation of the cupboards and, if she was lucky, the makings of some sort of meal; after that, she could retreat to the study with a fire for company and worry about everything else in the morning. As soon as the lamp was lit, she wondered if ignorance had perhaps not been better after all. She had not expected the floor to be clean – the stickiness and crunch of sugar underfoot had told her as much – but she was unprepared for the volume of ants and other insects that it seemed possible to squeeze into a Polstead square inch. In the absence of any other interest, nature had set about taking the cottage back, and nowhere more vigorously than in a damp patch on the outside wall, where a family of slugs seemed so at home that Josephine was tempted to ask them where they kept the tea. Shuddering, she forced herself to open the nearest cupboard door and was surprised to find it piled high with tins and packets. There was no order to the arrangement, and nor were the supplies limited to food items: tomato soup sat alongside weedkiller, corned beef next to furniture polish, and she eventually found the tea caddy hiding behind a tub of ant powder. She checked to make sure the tea was what she thought it was, and emptied the ant powder onto the floor.
The cups and plates from the dresser were dirty and stained, and she knew as soon as she looked at them that the first kettle of hot water would not be wasted on tea. As she piled the crockery into the sink ready to wash, she noticed the marks of age and use and smiled when she remembered what John MacDonald had said: if the kitchen sink was what Lucy Kyte wanted from the cottage, she was welcome to it. She chose an unambitious meal from the newer-looking tins, and allowed herself to be lured back out into the garden. It amazed her, as it did every year, that summer passed so quickly, slipping through her fingers into August long before she felt she had made the most of its beauty. The dense canopy of woodland was reassuring, though, its leaves still tightly stitched together, its green a youthful contrast to the hedgeless acres of corn. The persistent call of a wood pigeon seemed to deepen the silence as she opened the garden gate and walked out into the field to look back at the cottage from a distance. A thin pencil line of smoke rose leisurely from one of the chimneys now, and Josephine wondered why that small gesture of something restored should hearten her so. She had a long night in a strange house ahead of her; no bed to speak of, tinned ham for supper and a whole house to clean before she could even begin to make sense of Hester’s past. If she had known the extent of what awaited her, she might never have got on the train; now she was here, she had rarely felt more content.
3
Josephine woke early to a morning full of sunshine, a bright, no-nonsense day that matched her mood. She had slept like the dead, despite the inadequacies of her makeshift bed, but the crick in her back and neck soon brought her to her senses: however reasonable her reservations about the bedrooms, she could not continue to behave like a nervous guest in her own home. While the kettle began its leisurely journey towards boiling, she went upstairs and stripped both beds, not allowing herself to look too closely at anything, then took the bundle of laundry outside. The washhouse was at the back of the cottage next to the lavatory, and the path to both was marked by a rope at waist height – a practical gesture for which Josephine had been grateful when she ventured out reluctantly the night before. She loaded the sheets into the copper and made several trips to the pump, vowing to be more lenient with Mrs McPherson the next time her laundry came back with something missing or damaged.
The water would take some time to heat – a country life, it seemed, involved a lot of waiting when you were new to it – and she took her tea out to the garden to see what had been missed the day before. The state of the land belied the years of work that had gone into making it beautiful, and she wondered if Hester had had any help, or if it had simply been a labour of love. On closer inspection, the vegetable patch was not as redundant as it had seemed: the potato plants had flowered and withered, signalling the time to dig, and there were goo
d crops of both peas and beetroot – never her favourite food, but she supposed she would find a use for it. Most of the soft fruits had been lost to the birds but, from the various birdbaths and seed trays that she had seen dotted around, Josephine guessed that they would not have been grudged their victory. In the far corner, where the nettles were advancing from the shade of the woodland, she found a couple of collapsed henhouses and an old well, reclaimed by ivy and scrambling bindweed, its handsome flowers covering the brickwork with hundreds of small white parasols. For something so crucial to most of her daily comforts, the well was in a woeful state. She lifted the lid gingerly, afraid that the rotting wood might disintegrate in her hand, and peered inside; the rope was frayed and the bucket long gone, so she threw a stone down and hoped for the best; the splash came quickly and Josephine replaced the lid, confident that the water was plentiful for now and grateful to an unseen network of underground streams. There was a certain magic in the idea of cool, clear water running silently below the earth, rewarding the faith of generations even when the grass was brown and the soil dry and cracked from the sun; all the same, as she walked back to the cottage, she found herself calculating the cost of a new drainage system.