by Nicola Upson
Josephine realised – a little late, admittedly – that she had no real answer to that question, and certainly nothing as direct to offer in return. ‘Look, Rose,’ she said, deciding to see where honesty got her, ‘I have no idea what went on between you and my godmother. I didn’t know Hester Larkspur, and we only met properly when I was a very small child, far too young to remember anything about her. Until she died, I didn’t even know that she was an actress. I certainly wasn’t expecting her to leave me anything in her will. All that should have gone to my mother, who was Hester’s closest friend, but my mother is dead and now I find myself in a strange cottage, hundreds of miles away from my family, where nothing makes sense to me. Quite frankly . . . well, quite frankly I need some help. Can we start again?’
Rose wasn’t going to forgive and forget that easily, but she softened a little and a smile played on her lips. ‘You’ve met her, then?’
‘Met whom?’
‘Lucy.’
Josephine had never had any intention of discussing Lucy with Rose – either the diary, or the unexplained presence in the cottage – and she was shocked to have the rug pulled from under her. ‘What do you know about Lucy?’ she asked cautiously.
‘Only what Miss Larkspur told me,’ Rose said, and the fact that Hester had told her anything indicated to Josephine how well the two of them had got along. ‘Who she was and when she lived in the cottage, that sort of thing. I never saw her myself, though, except in the photograph. I always hoped I would one day, if she got to know me and trust me, but it never happened.’ She shrugged. ‘Some people are more open to that sort of thing, aren’t they? I must be about as psychic as a plank, because I could never see anything at the vicarage, either. You obviously take after Miss Larkspur. You’re lucky. What’s Lucy been up to?’
Josephine could not quite believe that they were discussing a dead woman as if she were just another girl from down the road who might turn up at any moment. It was hard to decide if Rose’s calm acceptance of the situation was reassuring or disturbing, and she sidestepped the question with one of her own. ‘What did you mean about seeing Lucy in a photograph?’
‘It was the one of Mr Paget that Miss Larkspur kept on her desk. There’s a woman in the background with Maria’s rose, and that’s her.’ Josephine brought the picture to mind, and realised that the face she had seen at the window was indeed the same as the face in the photograph; that was why it had seemed familiar. She tried to recall how often she had looked at the image, and whether it was planted firmly enough in her mind for her to imprint it elsewhere, but in hindsight it was impossible to be sure. ‘I always thought it was another daily woman,’ Rose said, ‘but Miss Larkspur told me I was the first help she’d had.’ She glared at Josephine, misinterpreting her confusion. ‘If you’re not going to believe me, I’m wasting my time sitting here.’
She got up to leave, but Josephine grabbed her arm, conscious that Mrs Boreham was watching intently from the bar. ‘No, Rose – please stay. It’s not that I don’t believe you. I’m just having trouble coming to terms with what’s been going on.’ She smiled. ‘Until now, I thought I was cut from the same plank as you. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.’
The girl took her seat again. ‘That’s what Miss Larkspur told me. She said it was the cottage that did it.’
‘I’m sure she was right. Did she talk to you about what happened, the things she saw?’
‘She said that Lucy was always around – she’d hear her coming up and downstairs sometimes, or things would move about the cottage for no reason. It always sounded a bit creepy to me, but Miss Larkspur liked having her there, said Lucy kept her company and it was better than being on her own. I’d hear her talking to her sometimes, to her and to Walter.’
‘But nothing more sinister than that? Did she ever mention that room off her bedroom?’
‘She hated that room. Filled it with junk, and never let me clean it. She said it had always been sad, even when they first moved in. You could smell the pain, she said.’
So the boxroom had been desolate even before Hester’s death, Josephine thought. That answered one question, but it did not solve the mystery of why she had chosen to die in a room she hated. ‘Did Hester ever see Lucy?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Rose said, as if it were the most natural question in the world. ‘Often in the garden, apparently, or standing by her bed. Sometimes she’d see her out in the field where the barn used to be. Once she told me that she would occasionally hear the sound of a fire and people shouting and screaming, said it was like being there when the barn burned down.’
‘And you believed her, even though you never saw Lucy yourself?’
‘Of course. It stands to reason that the poor cow wasn’t going to rest in peace after everything that happened.’
Josephine felt as though the reins of the conversation had slipped her grasp some time ago, and she decided just to let Rose have her head. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, picking up her sandwich.
For the first time, Rose hesitated. ‘Miss Larkspur swore me to secrecy, but I don’t suppose it matters now, and you’ll know about it anyway now you’re living there. I mean all the stuff that Lucy wrote in her diary. I don’t know how she did it, moving into that cottage so close to where her best friend was butchered. I couldn’t have done it, but I don’t suppose she had any choice. What else was she going to do, on her own with no job and tainted by working for the Corders?’
There was no doubt that Rose had read the diary, Josephine thought, and if Hester had talked about it all the time, Rose would also know its value. Would she be stupid enough to admit all this, though, if it was she who had stolen it and sold it to John Moore? ‘When did Hester tell you about the diary?’ she asked.
‘When I’d been with her about six months. I was moaning about cleaning the fires one day, and she laughed and told me that girls had never had it so good. She’d often tease me like that.’ She smiled, and Josephine could tell that whatever happened later, she had loved working for Hester. ‘That’s when she read me some of the diary – and she was right, too. I don’t know how many hours Lucy had in her day with all the work she had to do. After that, she’d read bits to me all the time. I couldn’t wait.’
‘Did she say where she got the diary?’
‘She found it in the cottage when they were having some work done. The house was a wreck when they bought it. It was empty for years – there were sheep in the kitchen when they moved in – and Mr Paget got the farmer to sell it to them because of its history. Miss Larkspur said he must have seen them coming but they didn’t care. It was part of the story for them, and worth every penny. She said that Lucy was there from the start, and it was as if she wanted the diary to be found. Miss Larkspur had worked on it for years. She said it was what got her through losing her Walter, and she felt that Lucy had saved her somehow. Stopped her from going mad with grief and doing something stupid.’ So that was the kindness mentioned in the will, Josephine thought. ‘She wanted to pay Lucy back by telling her story. Then a couple of months before she died, she asked me to help her with it. She made it out to be a treat for me – and it was a treat – but I knew it was really because she couldn’t read it herself any more.’
‘She told you she was losing her eyesight?’
‘Not as such, but it was obvious. She was a lot less fussy about the dust, for a start, and she looked different. Small things – her jewellery didn’t quite match or her hair was wrong at the front, but you notice those when you’re a woman, don’t you? Especially when someone’s always been so particular. She knew I’d guessed, but neither of us ever mentioned it. We just went on as normal, and I helped her as much as I could without her knowing I was doing it. We’re all entitled to a bit of pride.’ It sounded as though Hester had come to rely heavily on Rose; like Bert, she had been in a position of trust, and like Bert she could easily have abused it. Josephine looked at the girl in front of her: she was wilful, cheeky and no do
ubt wily enough to have twisted a vulnerable old woman round her little finger, but Hester had obviously seen something special in her, and Josephine – without any good cause – trusted her godmother’s judgement. ‘So we had a system – I’d read the diary out loud, and Miss Larkspur would write down what she wanted to use. She said that Lucy would turn in her grave if she knew.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m on the wrong side. We’re related to the Corders,’ Rose explained when she saw Josephine’s blank expression. ‘William’s sister married a Boreham – great-great-great-uncle Jeremiah to be precise. He was a miller. Miss Larkspur used to tease me about that as well, but you can’t help who you’re born to.’
‘Did Hester know what happened to Lucy later, after the diary finishes?’
‘No. It was enough for her to have Maria’s story, I think.’
‘What was she going to do when she’d finished transcribing it?’
‘She wanted to get it published. Will you do that now for her?’
Rose’s assumption was obviously that the diary had passed straight to Josephine without ever leaving the cottage; unless she was an exceptionally accomplished liar, that was another mark in favour of her innocence. ‘Yes, if I can. When was the last time you saw the diary?’
The strangeness of the question didn’t go unnoticed. ‘The last day I worked at Red Barn Cottage,’ Rose said warily. ‘Why? Has something happened to it?’ She looked at Josephine, suddenly unsure of who she was talking to and worried that she might have been tricked into saying too much.
‘No, it’s safely where it’s always been,’ Josephine said, choosing to miss out the interlude in Leather Lane. ‘But have you told anyone else about it? Anyone at all?’
Rose shook her head. ‘No. I haven’t even told my mum and dad. Like I said, Miss Larkspur swore me to secrecy.’
‘I know, but you could be forgiven for reneging on that sort of loyalty when you and Hester fell out.’ Rose said nothing, but the way she shook her head told Josephine what she thought of that sort of pettiness. ‘So what happened?’ she asked gently. ‘What went so wrong that you had to stop working there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You must have some idea.’
The girl’s face clouded over, but she remained adamant that her dismissal was a mystery to her. ‘All I know is that things were never the same after that woman came to see her.’
‘Hester had a visitor?’
‘Yes. She didn’t see many people once her eyesight started going. She couldn’t travel to London any more, and even going to the vicarage or doing her own shopping about the village got too much for her. It made her bad-tempered sometimes, and the thought of people knowing and feeling sorry for her was the last thing she wanted, so she stopped encouraging people to call. There was a bloke from the village who’d do things for her like I did, without making a big deal of it, but that was about it.’
‘Bert Willis, you mean?’
‘That’s right. But one morning I got there and she told me that she’d had an unexpected visitor the day before. She made light of it, like it had been a nice surprise, but I could tell it had bothered her. She was distracted all day.’
‘So you didn’t meet this person?’
‘No.’
‘Did Hester tell you who it was?’
‘Only that she’d come up from London – from her old life, she said. They hadn’t seen each other for years.’ Josephine thought about the woman whom Miss Peck had met at Hester’s funeral, the one who had been asking what would happen to the cottage; was it the same person, she wondered, and if so, who could it be? The only woman from Hester’s old life whom she knew about was the theatrical dresser who had been mentioned in her will. Nichols – that was it. Dilys Nichols. She tried the name out on Rose, but the girl just shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think she told me the woman’s name. Like I said – she didn’t make a big fuss about it.’
‘Did the woman ever come back?’
‘If she did, Miss Larkspur didn’t tell me about it. But she was never herself again after that. She seemed agitated all the time, as if she had something on her mind. We’d always had such fun. Even after her eyes started to go, she was still interested in things, still full of life, but all that stopped. She lost weight, too, as though she wasn’t bothering to look after herself any more.’
‘Did you ask her what was wrong?’
‘Yes, eventually. It took me a while to pluck up the courage, because she hated any fuss, but one day she said something very odd – she said that even Lucy had turned against her, and I asked her then if there was anything I could do. She didn’t answer for ages, then she took my hand and told me that everything beautiful had a cost. That’s all she said.’ The rowdiness was building next door, and Josephine saw Mrs Boreham trying to catch her daughter’s eye, but Rose was intent on her story. ‘Then the following Monday I got there at the usual time and she wouldn’t let me in. She told me I’d let her down, and she wouldn’t be needing me any more. I tried to get her to come out and explain what I’d done to upset her, but she wouldn’t. My mum went up there the next day. Furious, she was – she still hadn’t forgiven me for chucking in the vicarage to go there, but it didn’t do any good. Miss Larkspur said the same things to her, and worse besides. I never did find out what I’d done wrong.’
Josephine believed her, and felt desperately sorry for the girl. Injustice was such a strong emotion, and so scarring, especially at Rose’s age; nobody ever forgot the first time they learned that the world was not designed for fairness, and she well understood the potent mix of rage, helplessness and resentment that Rose must have felt since that day, not to mention the shame and disappointment of losing a position she had obviously loved. There was nothing that could be done to calm that rage, either; it just had to burn itself out, but she tried at least to show she understood. ‘Rose, my godmother wasn’t herself when she died. Something made her turn her back on people who cared about her. She did the same thing to Bert. I don’t know what happened, but I’m trying to find out and if I do, I promise I’ll come and explain.’
‘She’d lost her mind, hadn’t she? That’s what was wrong.’
‘Why do you say that?’
Rose looked over to the bar and scowled at her mother, mouthing an ‘I’m busy’ in response to an unspoken question, and Josephine hid a smile: whatever had happened with Hester, she couldn’t help but feel that Rose’s days in service were numbered. ‘I went back to Red Barn Cottage to try one more time,’ she said. ‘After I got over the shock, I wanted to have it out with her. Mrs Lampton wouldn’t take me back at the vicarage, and I wanted to tell Miss Larkspur that she couldn’t treat people like that.’ She smiled at her own bravado. ‘Well, that’s what I told myself, anyway. What I really wanted was to find that she couldn’t cope without me, and to be welcomed back with open arms. She didn’t answer the door, so I let myself in. I knew she’d be there – she never went out. There was no one downstairs, so I called up to her but she didn’t answer. I was worried then, in case she was ill or had hurt herself somehow, so I went up. She must have heard me on the stairs, because she started screaming long before I got to the top. She was on the floor in the corner of her bedroom, huddled under a blanket.’ Rose paused, struggling with the scene in her mind, and Josephine waited for her to go on. ‘She looked terrible. Far too thin, and there were burn marks on her hand from the fire or the hot plate or something. She wasn’t in a state to look after herself. I went over to her, telling her it was me and saying I wanted to help her, but she didn’t know who I was. She kept screaming, and I’ve never heard anyone make a noise like that. She was like an animal, when they’re frightened and they don’t know you’re trying to help. There was no reasoning with her. And it was the same thing, over and over again. “Leave me alone or tell me what you want.” This might sound daft, but I think she thought I was Lucy.’
‘You mean she thought Lucy was tormenting her?’
>
‘Yes. She said her name a couple of times. And I did feel it then, Miss – a presence in that cottage. It was the first time I’d ever sensed anything like that there, and it wasn’t nice. I left Miss Larkspur then. I know I should have stayed to help, but I was frightened and I just wanted to get out.’ She looked at Josephine. ‘Is that what’s happened to you? You’ve felt that too?’
Josephine was too shocked and saddened by the image of Hester to answer immediately, and Rose had to repeat the question. ‘I have felt something,’ she admitted, ‘and I’ve seen and heard things I don’t understand, but I couldn’t honestly say that it was hostile. It frightens me, because I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life, but I’ve never got the impression that Lucy – if that’s who it is – means me any harm. It’s sadness rather than anger.’ Rose’s description of Hester’s fear rang true with the way that Bert had found her body, although there was still no explanation for Hester’s being in that room: if her mind was telling her that Lucy was trying to hurt her – and Josephine was particular in how she phrased the question to herself; she was not prepared yet to subscribe to the notion of vengeful spirits, if only for her own sanity – why would she retreat to the room most affected by Lucy’s presence? ‘Did you notice anything strange about the cottage that day?’ she asked.