by Nicola Upson
After the brief respite of a psalm, Stephen Lampton took to the pulpit and Josephine smiled when she remembered what Hilary had said about his sermons. The words were certainly well considered, thought-provoking without being pompous, but what really stood out was the beauty of his voice; as far as Josephine was concerned, he could have spoken gibberish for the whole ten minutes and she would still have been riveted. When he had finished, she noticed several people passing a private verdict on his address and wondered how long the Reverend Lampton would have to preach in the parish before his performance went unjudged; sixteen years seemed an unnecessarily long trial period.
There followed a series of readings from parishioners, and Josephine could only imagine the amount of feathers that had been ruffled in the selection of readers. Some lines from Corinthians drifted out to her but she could see no one; only when she craned her neck did she realise that the man was too short to see over the lectern. It was an impressive effect, the words seeming to come genuinely from on high, and she wondered if Stephen had judged it carefully or simply struck lucky. As a choir of four began a surprisingly rousing rendition of ‘Oh Lord, My God, When I in Awesome Wonder’, Marta leaned over to her. ‘That’s the woman from the pub,’ she said. ‘I think her name’s Marion.’
‘Margaret.’ The whisper came sharply from behind, and Josephine stifled another laugh. She recognised Margaret as one of the women who had been in the village shop on her first visit, and she looked at her now in admiration as she delivered the line ‘when Christ shall come with shout of acclamation and take me home what joy shall fill my heart’ with real conviction – although the longer the service went on, the more attractive the sentiment became. At last, the Lord’s Prayer signalled that the end was in sight. Josephine looked round at the bowed heads and thought about the words and how easily they were spoken. She thought of Maria Marten, lying close by in an unmarked grave, and remembered the look of hatred on the faces when she had asked about descendants of the families: there had been no forgiveness there, even after a hundred years, and she doubted that things had been different in any past congregation.
Two of Stephen’s women stood for the collection, and Josephine wondered if either of them had been responsible for the Madeira cake. There was a mass exodus during the final hymn, as people left to prepare the harvest supper, and Josephine took the opportunity to turn round casually and see how accurately she had pictured the warbler. She was too late: the pew was empty and the woman had gone, her identity for ever a mystery. As soon as it was decent, Josephine and Marta slipped from their own seats and headed for the door before Hilary could renew her exhortations to come to supper. The hollow church clock struck eight as they walked through the graveyard to the gate, choosing their steps carefully in the darkness. Marta took her hand and Josephine looked round anxiously. ‘Don’t worry,’ Marta said. ‘It’s pitch-black out here. No one can see what we’re doing and even if they could, I’m not sure we could disgrace ourselves any more tonight than we already have.’
‘That’s true. Thank God I’m not a churchgoer, if that makes any sense. I’ll never be able to show my face in there again.’
‘I told you it would be fun.’
‘Yes, I suppose it was – in a twisted sort of way.’
They headed for the green to collect the car, guided only by the stars. As they rounded the pond, the flap of swans’ wings against the water sounded unnaturally loud in the darkness, and Josephine held Marta back. ‘Look – that’s the Corder house.’ The lamps were lit in every room, the curtains drawn back, as if the house were trying to prove to the rest of the village that it had nothing left to hide. As Josephine watched, a shadow passed the window upstairs – so fleeting, and in rooms so unchanged, that it was easy to believe it had nothing to do with the current occupants; that the house, too, was trapped in its own history, scarred by the past, and still living with a shame for which it had not yet been forgiven.
11
It was a morning of soft, thin cloud which – if the pattern of the last few days was to be followed – would clear by lunchtime into a warm, sunny afternoon. Josephine walked down Polstead Hill, sorry that Marta had chosen to stay at the cottage but glad of some time to think quietly about what she had learned over the last few days. In her heart, she did not think that the treasures Henry Andrews had described were still in the cottage, and she wondered what might have persuaded Hester to sell them. An operation, perhaps? Bert had said that nothing could be done for her eyes, but maybe she had learned something to the contrary; that, surely, would have been worth the sacrifice. It was odd, too, that Hester had not thought to mention such precious items by name in her will if their value was indeed greater than the cottage. Josephine wished now that she had looked at Hester’s financial papers before handing them all over to her solicitor; they might at least have told her if Hester had received any large sums of money recently, and laid to rest her own fears that something more sinister lay behind the disappearance of those artefacts. Hester had obviously not made any secret of what she owned and that would have made her vulnerable, either to an opportunist from the village – she tried to keep this hypothetical and not picture Bert when the phrase came to mind – or to one of the more ruthless dealers in relics. From there, it was only a short step to imagining a darker scenario around Hester’s death, and, for now, Josephine pushed the thought to the back of her mind.
The shop was busy with deliveries, and Elsie Gladding offered nothing more combative than a raised eyebrow at the idea that she might stock tinned asparagus. Outside, the clouds had cleared on cue, and the sun-touched houses looked as inviting now as they had on the day she first arrived, a subtle collage of white, pale ochre and chalky green. More striking still, though, was the gilding that no one had chosen: trees laden with burnished apples; rosehips, pyracantha and Virginia creeper, and it seemed appropriate to Josephine that red should be the predominant colour of nature in the village. She reached the bottom of the hill and turned left past the post office, towards Marten’s Lane. As soon as she was out of the sun, the cold air against her face reminded her that it was autumn, and she felt the brittle crunch of acorns underfoot. Passing Maria’s cottage, she wondered if the arrangement of its rooms reflected her own and tried again to work out what it was that unnerved her so about Hester’s boxroom. Not a squeamishness about death, certainly; she had cared for the sick herself, and no one with her training in nursing was superstitious about the body’s physical humiliations. No, her fear – and fear was what it was – stemmed almost entirely from a growing conviction that the room had known a sadness too great to be contained within a single generation. Judging by its uncared-for state, Hester had felt exactly the same way herself – which raised the question, why would she choose to die there?
The ‘godforsaken field’ looked anything but this morning, and Josephine paused at the top of the track, thinking about Red Barn Cottage and its reputation. Everyone grew up knowing a house like that. As children, she and her sisters had played near a derelict building in Daviot, and she could see it now in her mind’s eye – a dark silhouette on the lonely bend of a narrow road, shadowed by melancholy elms and surrounded by hemlock and nettles. Encouraged by local stories and by the fertility of a child’s imagination, she had filled that house with every conceivable horror, of this world and the next, and she wondered if Polstead’s children would think of Red Barn Cottage in a similar way, if – in their memories – one legend would grow and tumble into the next: the house that saw the murder and the fire; the old woman who lived there, obsessed with the past until it drove her mad.
When she got back to the cottage, she found the table in the parlour looking like something from a church jumble sale. ‘You were quick,’ Marta said, struggling downstairs with another box and swearing as the bump in the stone floor thwarted all her efforts to force it through the door. ‘I thought I’d be able to get everything out before you got back.’
‘I wondered why you were so ke
en to get rid of me.’ Josephine looked at the growing pile of clutter, touched that Marta had wanted to help her through something she was dreading, but horrified at the Pandora’s Box it had unleashed; once started, it would have to be finished, as Marta no doubt knew. ‘But you’re leaving tomorrow. We can’t spend your last day on this.’
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Marta insisted, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. ‘It won’t take all day. Here – grab some of this to sort through in the garden while I finish the clothes and scrub the floorboards.’
‘You don’t have to do this,’ Josephine said, although she was more grateful than she would have known how to express. ‘It should be my responsibility, not yours.’
Marta put the box down and held her close. ‘That’s why it’s easier for me than it is for you. I don’t want to leave here with this still hanging over you.’ She grinned. ‘Anyway, the sooner that room is cleared, the sooner I get a bathroom. It would be perfect.’
‘No sign of Maria’s clothes chest, I don’t suppose? That would buy you a bathroom to die for.’
‘I’m afraid not, but look on the bright side – there’s no sign of her hand either.’
‘What on earth would Maria Marten think if she knew how valuable her death had made her‚ I wonder.’
‘Probably much the same as I do: that the whole world had gone mad.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. I bet she’d happily have settled for a little more recognition while she was alive.’
‘Quite. I did find this, though.’ She showed Josephine a small collection of broken pottery that she had placed carefully on the sideboard. ‘It was under the bed, already broken. I thought it might be one of those figures you mentioned, but it’s not Staffordshire. As far as I can tell, it’s an actress in character and it looks a bit like Hester. All the pieces are there, in case you ever have enough hours in your life to mend it.’
‘Was this there as well?’ Josephine asked, holding up a tiny key.
‘Yes, between the floorboards.’
‘It must be the key to the bureau drawer. I’ve been looking for that for ages. I thought I was going to have to force it.’
‘Good, but you’re not using it now.’ She took it from Josephine’s hand, laughing at the expression on her face. ‘We’re finishing this bloody room if it kills me. You can rummage through the bureau for as long as you like after I’ve left, but now I want you to go and sit in the sun and throw away as much of Hester’s junk as you can bear to. I won’t be long.’
Josephine picked up the suitcase nearest to her and did as she was told. It didn’t take her long to realise that Hester had packed her entire Inverness life away into one modest piece of luggage, probably the very case that she had left home with. Intrigued, she glanced through a pile of photographs of the town as it was before she was born, recognising buildings and rituals more often than people. They were interesting, but most of them meant nothing to her, so – with the exception of one or two pictures that featured Hester or members of her own family – Josephine put them to one side to give to the Inverness Museum.
The bundles of letters were harder to pass off as someone else’s problem. Josephine found herself sifting through the envelopes, instinctively looking for her mother’s handwriting, and it did not take her long to find what she was looking for. Hester seemed to have kept even the most inconsequential correspondence from her friend, and, to Josephine’s surprise, the suitcase also contained some letters that had passed the other way, parcelled up by Josephine’s father and returned to Hester a year or so after his wife’s death. It amused her to see that, as young girls, they had written to each other even while living side by side in Crown Street. She read at random – letters about school and other friends, about their families and life in the town, postcards from holidays, notes about books they had read, and, as they got older, thoughts of what they wanted to do with their lives, journeys they longed to take, boys they admired and others who admired them. In the briefest of snatches that Josephine read, their separate personalities shouted from the page: Hester’s language, even as a child, was elaborate and dramatic, as though she were continually trying out different personas to see which one suited her best; her mother’s tone was far more down to earth, but with a streak of dry humour that cut through Hester’s wilder fancies without seeming to cause offence. Josephine picked up another envelope, the first she had found with a non-Inverness address; it had been sent to Hester in Newcastle, and was dated November, 1890.
My dearest Etta,
Well, you’ve gone, as I always knew you would one day. Restlessness is not something to be grown out of when it has been as carefully nurtured and encouraged as yours has, and I suppose I realised a long time ago that we would not live side by side for ever, watching our children grow up together like we did, growing old in the town we were born in.
You are right to go, no doubt, and you must have the courage of conviction in your decision. You owe it to Walter as well as to yourself not to allow the happiness you have found together to be poisoned by guilt. People love, or they don’t love. That is the simplest fact of life, if sometimes the hardest to accept, and you cannot choose where your heart goes. A marriage where you did not love would never have suited you. It would only have brought more pain to everyone in the long run. Ronnie will forgive you eventually, and so will his family. You know how we are in this town, how we have always been – one grudge is soon forgotten for fear of missing the next.
I’m sorry we argued before you left, and for everything I said, but I was angry and sad, and I spoke out of selfishness. We have always had each other, and this town seems very different without you. But Etta, you were wrong, too, to say that I settle for too little. Perhaps there was a time when I dreamed of those adventures – escape and travel and all the things we talked about. But that’s all it was for me – a dream. Everything was always possible for you: there was no such thing as fantasy, only lives you hadn’t lived yet. Did you never know how much I envied you for that? But please don’t blame me now for needing different things. We’re not children any more.
Travel safely, my dear, difficult friend, and have the adventures for both of us. I hope in my heart that you will find happiness wherever you are, and that Walter will bring you the joy you deserve. One day, perhaps, I will see your name outside a theatre and think: ‘So she has found herself after all.’ That would make me very happy.
Intrigued by what Hester might have left behind in Inverness, Josephine looked for a reply but Marta interrupted her before she could find one. ‘Jesus, you can’t move in this garden without tripping over something.’ She disentangled herself from a particularly determined bramble and sat down on the bench.
It was true, Josephine thought; the paths were littered with statues and overgrown plants, and she wondered how Hester had coped. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, watching Marta light a cigarette. The cheerful determination of earlier had completely gone; she seemed out of sorts, angry even, and Josephine took her hand, surprised to find it like ice. ‘Why are you so cold?’
‘I don’t think that room has been warm in a hundred years.’ Marta inhaled deeply, and lifted her face to the sun. ‘There’s something you need to see up there. I was going to cover it up but you’ll find it sooner or later, so there’s no point in my trying to pretend it’s not there.’
‘What is it?’
‘Let me finish this and I’ll come up with you.’
‘No, I’ve let you do too much already. Stay here and get warm.’
Josephine climbed the stairs, her mind teeming with possibilities, each less welcome than the last. The door to the room was wide open and, now that Marta had freed it from most of its contents, it looked bigger than she had originally thought. She stepped inside, and noticed that the window was still fastened with the scarf she had used as a temporary fix, but outside the rose had grown back over the glass, more virulent than ever, and the sun struggled to get through. The room was above the
scullery, Josephine told herself; of course it would be cold. Even so, the chill in the air was surprising, as noticeable against her face as the difference between sun and shadow, and she felt the same sense of sadness as she had when walking home, accompanied by the season’s proof that another summer was lost to her. Marta had stripped the bed and bundled all the clothes into pillowcases, but she had been able to do nothing about the staining on the mattress, and an air of utter desolation hung over the room. As she stood there, Josephine had the curious sensation of intruding on someone’s grief, as much a part of the building as the stone and the wood. It was, she thought, a room entirely without hope.
The smell that she had found so claustrophobic was barely noticeable now that the clothes were gone and the floor had been scrubbed with soap and water. Marta had pulled the bed away to get to the boards underneath, and Josephine could see that a wooden window seat had been built into the wall on that side of the room. It did not take her long to realise that it was this, and not the atmosphere in general, that Marta had found so disturbing. Immediately below the window, the word ‘sorry’ had been scratched again and again into the wood, the letters running into each other until they were barely legible. Too shocked to think properly, Josephine traced the marks with her fingers, feeling how deeply each had been scored into the oak, sensing the desperation with which they had been made. What in God’s name had Hester done to drive her to a penitence like this? The only response to her question was silence, a silence which echoed the death that stood between Josephine and all she wanted to know.
‘Perhaps it wasn’t Hester,’ Marta said from the doorway. ‘Perhaps someone else did it.’
Josephine looked at the doubtful expression on her face. ‘You don’t believe that any more than I do.’