by Nicola Upson
13 June, 1842
Molly has been sent to stay with Hannah. Samuel found her in the barn with Tabor’s stable lad. After all that has happen’d, I cannot understand why she w’d go there, but she is not the only girl to do her courtin’ in the Red Barn. It is time the master pull’d it down, as no one will learn from Maria’s mistakes, but Samuel says it is needed. There will be no good come of this, but it is the first time that Samuel and I have agreed on anythin’ to do with Molly for as long as I can remember. She will bring shame on us if no one puts a stop to her nonsense, and I will not let her go the same way as Maria. Samuel is thinkin’ of sendin’ her away to service now for her own good, and for ours. It cannot come a day too soon for me.
Josephine looked at the date and tried to remember exactly when the Red Barn was burned down. A thought had crossed her mind, but she dismissed it as too fanciful and read on.
23 July
I have fallen again, but there is no joy in it this time. I am too old, and if God had wanted me to have a child of my own, he w’d have bless’d me when I was young enough to bear it. Samuel still hopes for a son, as he grows old, too, and will not be able to go on for ever as he does. Then I do not know what will happen to us. We will not be able to keep our home if we cannot work for it.
There is much anger on the farms among the workers, who fear for their livelihoods. They have been settin’ the hayricks alight and burnin’ the farm buildings. I do not understand what is happenin’. It is no world to bring a child into. Molly has found a good place at last in Boxford, so that at least is a blessin’ and one less mouth to feed.
1 October
Samuel brought Molly home today. She has lost her place for cheekin’ her missis and makin’ eyes at the master. Samuel is in a rage and will not trust himself to talk to her. She has lock’d herself in her room and will not come out.
3 November
Hannah has been laid low and I have sent Molly to sit with her. The fields are full of water, and I doubt the rain will ever stop. Samuel has caught a chill and is not fit to work, but says the master needs him to move the animals from the fields. It is all I can do to drag myself from my bed. This child makes me so sickly, worse even than before. It is a wicked thing to think, but I wish nature would take her course as she has in the past. Then I c’d be well again.
A loud thud outside the window startled Josephine until she realised that it was just the snow, falling off the roof where the heat from the chimney had melted it. The noise broke the spell for a moment, and she poured another glass of wine and flicked back through the pages. It was taking her much longer to decipher Lucy’s actual entries than it did to read Hester’s transcript, but still she felt the rapid disintegration of a life, of all the ordinary hopes and expectations that any woman was entitled to have. Lucy was special to Josephine – as she had been to Hester – because of her connection to Maria Marten, and because she had faithfully testified to a series of extraordinary events; even so, this part of her life was in no way unique, and it pleased Josephine to think that – if and when her story was published – it would speak for so many women whose struggles had gone unrecorded.
5 November
We are in mournin’ again. Hannah was taken in the night, and Samuel has gone to see the reverend about her buryin’. Molly was with her when she went, and has surpris’d us all by carin’ for her aunt to the end. We have had our differences, but Hannah had a good heart and I will miss her. I am fearful of havin’ this child without her, but am glad now that Molly is home.
12 November
The floods have gone but the air is full o’ frost. Molly is courtin’ the lad from the stables again. He came sniffin’ round like a dog as soon as she was back, and I have seen them goin’ to the Barn again. If she carries on so she will be ruin’d, but she will not listen to me and I dare not tell Samuel for fear of what he may do. He spends more time at the Cock than by his own hearth, and when he is in drink I do not know him. He is tired of me and this life, and I can neither help nor blame him.
2 December
I fear the child will not be long. I have gone to the small room again, as Samuel needs his rest. It is so cold, and there is no comfort.
9 December
It is late, and very cold. Samuel is not home, and Molly left her bed an hour ago to go to the barn. I watch’d her lantern move across the field, and thought of Maria. It is so long ago, and nothin’ has chang’d. There is only one way this will end, and I cannot bear it.
13 December
Samuel says Mr Hoy’s cottage has been raz’d to the ground. They think it is arson, and part of the recent troubles. The master has told us all to keep watch on the barns and cottages, for fear that it will happen again. God forgive me, but I wish they w’d set light to the Red Barn and take this evil from my sight once and for all.
In her heart, Josephine had known earlier that Lucy was going to do something terrible, and although she had suspected what it would be, the next entry still stunned her, its consequences more catastrophic than she could ever have imagined.
28 December
Two days on, the smell of smoke is still strong in the cottage and I cannot bear what I have done. Molly lies close to death, and I know that bathin’ her wounds will make no difference. The men from the village did their best to save the barn, but the wind spread the flames faster than I c’d ever have thought, and in the end it was too fierce. It was ablaze in minutes, and burnt long into the night. Samuel and some of the others climb’d onto the roof of the cottage and threw off the burnin’ embers as they lodg’d upon it. Molly and I pull’d the blankets from our beds and soak’d them in the pond to dampen the thatch. Then she went to help the lad from the stables with the barn, and Samuel c’d not stop her. She was caught in the flames and they brought her back cover’d in burns. And it is all my fault.
I cannot tell Samuel what I have done, and I pray for a miracle so that Molly may live. I thought that by burnin’ the barn I would be savin’ her, and my life with Samuel, but I have brought misery and sorrow on us all. There is nothin’ left but blacken’d earth, but the grief is still here, worse than ever. And this time it is my doin’. Samuel can only watch as I tend his daughter. He thanks me for what I do, and I want to scream at him to stop.
So history was wrong. The Red Barn had not been destroyed by an anonymous hand in a political act, but by a woman whose personal pain had become too much to bear. Lucy had been damned from the moment that Maria Marten left her cottage to walk to the Red Barn, and although there was an inevitability about the sequence of events, Josephine was horrified at how many lives had been shattered by the murder. Samuel and Lucy might have borne the intimate tragedies of their life had they not been forever separated by Maria’s shadow; Molly would have grown up as a carefree little girl, able to make her own mistakes without being continually reminded of others’; and the village could have moved on, creating its own ordinary, quiet history. Instead, on what should have been the happiest of days, the anniversary of her wedding, Lucy had taken fate into her own hands and confined the rest of her life to ashes along with the barn.
31 December
Molly lingers, but there is no savin’ her. Phoebe Stowe came to sit with her while I tried to sleep, and brought some salve for the burns, but she cries with pain when we try to put it on her. Phoebe says they are offerin’ a reward of a hundred pounds for the Boxin’ Day fire at the Barn and for Mr Hoy’s cottage. They think it is the same hand, but it is not. I may not answer to the law, but God knows what I have done.
Josephine knew that Molly would die, and could imagine that grief might have destroyed Samuel, but she still had no idea what Lucy’s fate would be, and she feared the worst: if she had been hanged for what she had done, that would explain her absence from the churchyard. Or perhaps the guilt had forced her to take her own life. That, too, would deny her the peace of consecrated ground. She read on, conscious that very little of the diary was left and desperately hoping that it w
ould not end without giving her the answers she needed.
2 January, 1843
The new year has brought grief, as I knew it w’d. Molly died early today, and she is at peace. Samuel has not left her side these past two nights, and this book that was so full of hope must now be my confession, for I cannot find the words to speak.
3 January
Nan Martin brought some holly thick with berries for Molly. They will bring her coffin tomorrow, and she is to be buried on Friday. I fear that Samuel will not let his daughter leave the house, he is so wretched with grief. He will not eat, and stares into a distant place where I cannot reach him.
2 February
The child is comin’ now, I know. I cannot bring a new life into the world with this in my heart. I must tell him. Please God, let him forgive me.
Lucy’s desperate plea marked the end of any coherence in the diary. There was nothing dated or ordered on the pages that followed, only single words or very short phrases, barely legible and obviously written while she was in great distress, physically and emotionally. Slowly, Josephine deciphered the scrawled, violent letters. Samuel. He will not come to us. My beautiful boy. Cannot feed him. Too weak . . . There is no hope. Who will help us? Beg him . . . No one comes. Forgive for his sake. The last thing that Lucy wrote was please. The ink was faint, a sign of how weak she had become, but to Josephine the word screamed from the page. It was all the narrative she needed to piece the story together image by dreadful image: she saw that bleak, desolate room in the depths of winter; Lucy terrified and in pain, struggling to bring a child into the world on her own, then watching him fade as her husband abandoned them both, unable or unwilling to forgive what she had done. For the most fleeting of moments, Josephine felt Lucy’s grief – her wretchedness – in her own heart, not as a gesture of sympathy but as something that truly belonged to her, something that she had experienced for herself – and she knew, even before she turned to the last page of the journal, that the house had yet to reveal its final, dreadful secret.
Lucy’s diary, her solace and her sanctuary for so many years, was completed by another hand, and that in itself seemed to Josephine a desecration. The words were poured onto the page with no sense of reason or control, and she could feel their anger, even after so many years. You will rot in this room for what you have taken from me. I will not let you lie with Molly. You are not fit to share her earth. May your soul never rest, and God forgive me for the death of my son. The desperate, raw emotion in the letters echoed the request for forgiveness on the window seat, and Josephine understood now that Samuel – not Lucy or Hester – had carved those words; she imagined his remorse when the red film of rage lifted and he faced what he had done to the wife he had loved. By Lucy’s own testimony, he was a sweet and gentle man, and – although she could not be certain – Josephine found it easy to believe that he had punished himself in the way he had punished his wife, by simply allowing himself to die. She looked down at the journal in her hands, and wondered if Lucy had used it as her vehicle of confession, if she had found it easier to show Samuel her diary rather than speak the words herself. It was impossible to know now if Lucy had read her husband’s response; if she had, Josephine could only begin to imagine the horror and fear that must have clawed at her heart in those final days, and she cried for her as she would have cried for a friend.
The cottage taunted her with its silence, goading her to open the chest again and prove herself right. She knew she had no choice – there was nowhere to turn for help on a night like this – but it took her a long time to find the courage to go back upstairs, and the only thing that forced her to her feet in the end was a dread of what might happen if she stayed where she was. Back in October, when she had felt Lucy’s presence so strongly in the cottage, there had been no sense of anything to fear – but that was before she knew what had happened; now, as hard as she tried to picture that harmless face at the window, the Lucy that filled her mind was a malevolent force, the restless spirit of stories and nightmares, and her ghost frightened Josephine even more than the thought of her physical remains. She took another lamp, glad that she had left the candles burning upstairs, and returned to the room whose horrors she thought she had banished. Her courage left her completely the moment she stepped through the door. The chest, which she was sure she had closed, stood wide open now, its lid thrown back against the wall. The contents were in shadow, and Josephine made no attempt to illuminate them; without thinking, she stepped forward and slammed the lid shut again, feeling the tremor of her fear in the floorboards as she backed away. She stood rooted to the spot, reluctant to take her eyes off the trunk but unable to find the strength to face her fear and open it.
And then she smelt the smoke again. It was faint, but not so faint that she could blame it on her imagination, and she realised that it must be after midnight. Boxing Day – the anniversary of the fire at the Red Barn, the day on which those terrible events would be played out again in some other life or time that she didn’t understand. Outside, she heard footsteps. She backed further into the corner of the room, doubting now her own sense of reality, but there it was again: the soft but unmistakable crunch of snow underfoot. Instinctively, she looked to the window that was no longer there, but now she did not need a view of the field where the barn had stood: she could see the silhouetted figure so clearly in her mind, hurrying back to the cottage in the darkness, oblivious still to the damage she had done. When it came, the thundering on the door was louder than anything she could have imagined. Josephine crouched to the floor, her hands over her ears, but still the pounding continued. Then suddenly it stopped, and the silence was worse. She heard Lucy moving about in the rooms below, heard her footsteps on the stairs, and wept tears of frustration and despair because she knew at any moment she would be brought face to face with the darkness that had lain dormant in the cottage for so long. Lost to everything but her own fear, she did not stop to question why the voice calling her name was somehow comforting.
‘Jesus, Josephine, what on earth is going on? Didn’t you hear me? Are you all right?’
Marta was beside her, holding her close, before Josephine’s mind could catch up with her imagination; somehow, she seemed less real than the ghost Josephine had feared and it took her a moment to trust in what she saw. Then she clung to Marta as if her life depended on it, scarcely able to tell if the trembling that shook them both was the terror from her own body or the deathly cold from Marta’s. There was snow on her coat and in her hair, and the shock of its chill brought Josephine to her senses a little. ‘I thought you were Lucy,’ she stammered, neither knowing nor caring how ridiculous she sounded.
‘Why would she be knocking? God, a girl could freeze to death waiting for you to come to the door.’ She spoke gently, trying to ease Josephine out of her panic with humour.
‘But I thought it was the barn. I could smell smoke.’
‘The room’s full of smoke downstairs. When was the last time you had your chimneys swept?’ Marta took Josephine’s face in her hands. ‘There’s only one person stupid enough to come looking for you on a night like this. I might be as cold as the dead, but I’m not a ghost. What’s happened, Josephine? Why were you so frightened?’
‘It’s Lucy Kyte. I think her body is in that chest. Her child, too, probably.’
‘What?’ Marta looked back over her shoulder. ‘Good God, you’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Marta listened while Josephine explained where the chest had come from and what she had read in the diary. ‘She’s been here all this time. I’m wandering round with Christmas decorations and she’s up here in a box.’
The true horror of what she had been living with was only now beginning to dawn on Josephine, and Marta tried to calm her down. ‘Hang on – we don’t know that for sure. You haven’t looked, have you?’
‘No. I was going to, but then I came back up here and the lid was open. I know I closed it.’
‘It can’t just have opened b
y itself.’
‘Who said anything about opening by itself?’ Josephine snapped. ‘You weren’t here.’ It wasn’t meant to sound like an accusation; she still had no idea what miracle had brought Marta to her door – she was just happy that it had. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. But I’m sure I closed it.’
‘All right.’ Marta reached inside her coat and took out a hip flask. ‘Thank God I brought this for the snow. Your festive hospitality leaves a lot to be desired so far.’ She smiled and offered the flask to Josephine, then swallowed the rest of the whisky herself. ‘Right. I’ll look.’
‘No you won’t. I’ll do it.’
Marta caught Josephine’s arm. ‘I’m not going to stand here and argue about who gets to see the bones first. We’ll do it together.’
Marta moved some candles over to the corner to give more light, and Josephine took a deep breath and lifted the lid. The layers of material were faded and frayed, but one of them was still recognisable as a bedspread. Gently, Marta lifted the fabric and pulled it to one side. Lucy lay wrapped in the quilt that she had sewn with such love for her husband. Her body was doubled up, her head turned to the side, and Josephine stared down at the pathetic collection of bones, the strands of hair still matted to the skull, remembering how Lucy had felt when she saw Maria’s remains in court. Lucy had never been flesh and blood to Josephine, only a voice speaking out from the past, but still she felt some of that pain and that anger at a life so easily cut short. The chest had been lined with sheets, stained dark with blood from the birth or discoloured later as her body rotted away, and some of Lucy’s possessions – an inkstand and the trinket box Samuel had made for her – had been put in with her, a parody of a much grander burial. If they looked further, Josephine was sure that they would find the tiny body of Lucy’s son, but she had seen all that she could bear and it had told them enough. She looked away, and Marta carefully covered Lucy’s face.