by Nicola Upson
‘He’d done something that couldn’t be denied.’
‘Will you please stop talking in bloody riddles and just tell me what else you know? When was the last time you saw Harry?’ Morveth hesitated, so he asked again. ‘Did you see him on the night he died?’
‘Yes.’
‘At last – we’re getting somewhere,’ he said. ‘Tell me what happened.’
Hesitantly, Harry took a step towards Morwenna and went to touch her face, trying to blot out the memory of the last time the two of them had stood here together, when he had raised his hand to her in anger.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, taking a step backwards. Her voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘Don’t come anywhere near me.’
The combination of shock and loathing in her eyes almost made him falter, but he carried on, desperate to make her understand. ‘At least let me explain,’ he said.
‘Has someone kept you away from here until now? Held you prisoner, and prevented you from popping home to tell me that you weren’t actually dead?’
‘No, of course not…’
‘Then how can you possibly explain what you’ve put me through? Do you know what it was like waiting by that lake every day, dreading the moment they found you and yet hoping against hope that you really were dead? Of course you don’t – if you had any idea, you wouldn’t be here now. You left me alone to pick up the pieces of the mess you ran away from. And what about Loveday? All right, so you could do it to me, but how could you make her suffer? Unless… oh God, no – have I really been that stupid?’ Blindly, Morwenna felt behind her for the door handle, then turned and left the house.
‘Unless what?’ he shouted, following her out into the garden. He grabbed her by the arm and made her turn back towards him. ‘Morwenna, tell me what you mean.’
‘Did she know all along? Is this something you made up between you – one of those precious secrets she kept telling me about? She must have known. How else could she have been so sure?’
‘No – I swear Loveday didn’t know. No one knew. I did this for you – only for you. For us.’
‘There is no us, Harry,’ Morwenna said, looking at him, and the quiet certainty with which she spoke frightened him more than her anger or her scorn. ‘There never really has been, has there? We were a sickness, you and I – that much was obvious to me when I found out that you could move on so easily. Everything I thought I was – every honest feeling I’ve ever had – was twisted and warped beyond all recognition when you betrayed me with Loveday. What sort of life do you think that left me with? Now you walk back in here and start talking about us – with God knows who in your grave and some other poor woman going through the hell of not knowing what’s happened to the person she cares about. And do you know what the most priceless thing of all is, Harry? You honestly thought I’d be pleased to see you, didn’t you? Well, didn’t you?’ she shouted, infuriated by his silence.
‘Not straight away, perhaps,’ he lied, trying to ignore the emptiness in her voice whenever she spoke his name, ‘but when you’d had a chance…’
‘A chance to what? Calm down?’
‘To understand.’
‘You just don’t get it, do you? Do you really want to know what I felt when I turned round and saw you standing there, holding Loveday’s hand? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.’
‘That isn’t true,’ he said, more defiantly than he felt. He had played out his meeting with Morwenna a thousand times in his head, anticipating her anger, her horror, her disbelief. Not once, though, had he imagined that she could be indifferent and, even to his own ears, his insistence that she would eventually understand felt hollow and ridiculous. He remembered now how tongue-tied he always became whenever they argued as children, how her spirit made everything he said sound slow-witted and insensitive, and suddenly, standing in front of her, his despair was greater than it had ever been in those long weeks apart.
‘There’s nothing left here, Harry, where it matters,’ Morwenna said, holding her hand against her chest. ‘You made sure of that. Ironic, isn’t it? Both of us back here, alive and dead at the same time.’ She laughed bitterly and took his face in her hands, forcing him to confront the darkness in her eyes that he had tried so hard to ignore. ‘Look at me – look at what you’ve done. We were two parts of the same person, you and I – locked together, for better or worse. What you’ve done has tainted us both. When you ceased to exist, so did I. But there’s no coming back for me – not any more. That’s the difference between us.’ He felt her fingers trace the thick growth of stubble, searching for the familiar contours of his face as if she could somehow find their past there. ‘Why didn’t you let me die when I wanted to?’ she asked. ‘It would have been so much kinder than this.’
In the distance, Harry could hear the sound of a car engine. Quickly, he pulled Morwenna into one of the stables next to the house, out of sight of the road. The threat of the outside world seemed to renew his sense of urgency. ‘Because I couldn’t let you die believing that of me,’ he said, and now it was his turn to force her to look at him. ‘It isn’t true. Whatever you think and no matter why you believe it, I’ve never loved anybody but you. Loveday’s a child, for God’s sake – she’s our little sister. How could you ever think I’d hurt either of you like that?’ She tried to pull away, but he refused to let her. ‘You know me. The most intimate moments of my life have all been spent with you. Every physical and emotional instinct I have has been shaped and guided by you. Is that honestly what you think you’ve created? A monster?’
‘You’re lying, Harry – otherwise, you’d have denied it straight away. Has it taken you all this time to think of a convincing story? Well, don’t waste your breath. I’ve had enough.’
‘How did you expect me to react? You’d just accused me of never loving you and fucking our sister, who we’ve brought up like our own daughter since she was six years old.’ She flinched as though he’d struck her again, and he tried to stay calm. ‘I was angry when you told me – angry and frightened and dazed, and I didn’t know what I was doing. Then I hit you, and suddenly I no longer trusted myself to be near you. I had to get out before I really hurt you.’
‘But what about later – at the boathouse? You were calm enough then.’ There was a long silence as Harry wondered how to go on, and he sensed a change in Morwenna: for the first time, she wanted to believe him. ‘Don’t play with me, Harry,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘Loveday reminds me of everything I hate most – the thrill of you, the knowledge that I can’t have you – and I know what it means to fear the violence in yourself. You’re lucky I didn’t kill you both back there.’
He risked a smile. ‘You can’t kill a ghost.’
‘If you knew how often I’d died since you left, you would never say that.’ She sat down on a bale of straw, and asked him again. ‘Why didn’t you even try to convince me the last time I saw you? Weren’t we worth saving?’
He pretended not to have heard the past tense. ‘Of course we’re worth saving – that’s all I’ve ever tried to do. But something happened that night after I left you, Morwenna, something I never planned. By the time I saw you again at the boathouse, things were different. I’d done something I couldn’t undo, no matter how badly I wanted to.’
‘Could there really be anything worse than what I was already thinking, Harry?’ she asked sadly. ‘You’re right, though – I do need to understand.’
‘I met him on the coastal path,’ Morveth said, and she spoke so quietly that Josephine had to lean forward to hear. ‘It was one of those nights when the mist comes in from the sea more quickly than you’d think possible. I’d been up late, talking to Beth Jacks while her husband was out looking for poachers, and by the time I got to the edge of the lake, I was beginning to wish I’d taken the road through the village home – I could hardly see a step in front of me and the torch I had was next to no good. But it seemed such a long way to go back and I was already tired, so I pressed on as quickl
y as I could. I thought the mist would be better away from the Bar, but I was wrong – it was tenacious, so bad that even the sea sounded a long way away. I heard the horse before I saw Harry – just a quiet nicker, nothing more than that, a warning to his master, I suppose – but it seemed so loud in the stillness that I stopped, just in case someone was about to run me down. Nothing happened, so I carried on for a bit and there he was, sitting by the side of the path. I didn’t know it was him straight away, of course – all I could make out was a man’s figure – but I recognised Shilling, and then it was obvious. I said his name and he looked up, but he barely seemed to know what he was doing. When I got close enough, I could see how terrible he looked. At first, I thought he’d had an accident – come off Shilling in the mist or something – and it might be my imagination playing tricks on me now, but I could smell the blood on him. When I looked harder in the torchlight, I could see he’d been fighting; his left eye was badly swollen and there was a nasty cut on his lip, and more, I guessed, that I couldn’t see. I made him come back to the cottage with me. He didn’t want to but I insisted, and he was in no state to argue – he looked as though all the fight had been knocked out of him at last. I think holding on to that horse’s reins was the only thing that kept him upright along the last bit of path. When we got in, I sat him down by the range, bathed his cuts and tried to sponge the worst of the blood off his shirt, and all the time he was crying.
‘When I’d done the best I could, I tried to find out what had happened to him. As I thought, he’d been at the Commercial Inn all night. He’d had a terrible row with Morwenna earlier in the evening – I could guess what about, but I didn’t say anything – and he’d tried to drink himself into oblivion. It was a trick he’d learned from Caplin and his friends just lately, but that night it got out of hand. There was a group of young men from up country at the bar, all office workers down here on holiday, and you know what it’s like – they have a week’s worth of drink in one night and think they’re invincible. Anyway, there was a fight – not just Harry, a lot of the local lads got stuck in – and they were all thrown out. Harry thought that was that, and he started to walk home with Shilling – he was too drunk to ride – but one of the visitors went after him. Before he got far along the path, he heard footsteps behind him and somebody tried to wrestle him to the ground. He pushed him away easily enough – Harry was so strong – but the lad wouldn’t let it go. He followed him, goading him a bit – pointless, infantile stuff, really, and nothing Harry couldn’t handle, but then the man started hitting Shilling. Well, that was it. Harry was close to breaking point anyway, but you know how he loved that horse. He said he couldn’t explain what happened next; it was like he was standing outside his own body, while this person he didn’t recognise picked up a rock and started hitting the stranger with it, over and over again, until he stopped struggling. When the anger subsided and he came to his senses, Harry knew he’d killed the man – he literally beat him to death. He was sickened by what he’d done and horrified at the thought of what might happen to him. His first instinct was to get as far away as possible and he started to walk away, but he knew in his heart there was nowhere left to run. That’s how I found him – lost, scared and hurt.
‘He asked me what he should do, and I told him there was only one option left open to him. His first instinct was right – he had to leave, and go for good. I know it was wrong of me, but I couldn’t tell him to give himself up – not when there was so much at stake, and not when Morwenna was already sick with grief for what he’d done to her. I couldn’t put her through watching him hang – it would have put a rope around her neck, too. And I saw a chance to give her some peace, so I took it. I knew the only way she’d ever break this hold that Harry had over her was if she thought he’d deserted her, so I told him that if he valued his own life and hers, he’d get as far away from the Loe estate as possible and never come back. He argued, of course – said he couldn’t leave like that without a word, but I managed to persuade him that it was for the best. He left in the early hours of the morning. I didn’t know he intended to see Morwenna one last time to tell her what he was going to do; if I had, I’d have advised him not to in case it weakened his resolve. But as it turned out, he knew he couldn’t stay. Things had gone too far for that. But that’s what happened in between. When he went back to Morwenna, he had another man’s blood on his hands.’
The room was unnaturally quiet when Morveth finished speaking. ‘So what happened to the body?’ Archie asked.
*
‘Morveth told me it was the only way you’d ever find peace.’ Harry tried to gauge what Morwenna was thinking as he talked, but her face was impossible to read. ‘She’s always known how to play us, hasn’t she? She knew your happiness was the only reasoning I’d ever listen to.’
‘I think happiness is a bit ambitious now. Too much has happened.’
‘To spare you from even more pain, then.’ He sat down beside her on the straw, and took comfort from the fact that she didn’t move away. ‘If I stayed, I knew it wouldn’t stop at what I’d done to that man. The fire would come back to haunt us, and everything that led up to it – and once everyone knew about that, no one would have believed me about Loveday. People don’t differentiate between evils – bad is bad, and that’s all they see.’ He rubbed his eyes, determined not to give in to an overwhelming tiredness before he finished what he had to say. ‘And as I sat there in Morveth’s kitchen, with that man’s blood on me, I began to think they were right – I’d blighted your life from the moment we were born, and it was time to stop. That sounds like self-pity, I know, but it’s not meant to – I honestly wanted to do what was best for you.’
She looked sadly at him. ‘I believe you, but I meant what I said about feeling nothing, Harry. This is going to hurt you, but it would have been the same for me whatever you’d chosen to do.’ Saying nothing, he stood and walked over to the empty stall which had once been Shilling’s, and she watched as he touched the familiar things that belonged to a happier time – bridles, a saddle and the long leather leading rein she had given him on their eighteenth birthday. ‘He’s all right, you know – Shilling, I mean. William Motley took him – I just couldn’t bear to look at him after what happened. I know it wasn’t his fault, but he was too great a reminder of you. He’ll be well looked after where he is.’
‘I know. I’ve been to see him.’
‘You’ve been to the stables? What if someone had seen you?’
‘I was careful, but I had to go. You’re not the only one I’ve let down.’
Suddenly Morwenna smiled, a genuine expression of warmth which seemed to surprise her as much as it did him. ‘My God, you’ve got a nerve,’ she said. ‘How could I have forgotten that about you? It was always one of the things I loved most.’
He brushed the moment away, wary of investing too much hope in it. ‘Shilling wasn’t any more pleased to see me than you were, as it happens. I’ve a long way to go to rebuild his trust.’
‘What happened after you left Morveth?’ she asked, and he sensed that she was shying away from the future that his words had hinted at. ‘Did you go back to the body?’
‘No, not straight away. When it first happened, I panicked and hid it as best I could in the undergrowth on the edges of the wood by the pool. It wasn’t very well concealed, and I knew it was only a matter of time before it was discovered, but I couldn’t face going back to it again and seeing what I’d done. Anyway, I’d made up my mind to disappear, and it didn’t seem as important as getting out as soon as possible. The mist had cleared by then, so I got back here quite quickly to collect some things and say goodbye to you, but the cottage was empty.’
‘Loveday wasn’t in bed?’
‘No, there was no one here and I couldn’t think where you’d gone. I was frantic because I couldn’t leave without seeing you, but I knew time was against me, so I forgot about the clothes and everything else except finding you. I got back on Shilling and went to a
ll our special places, one by one. Then I saw you from the woods on this side of the pool, sitting by the boathouse, and I knew instantly what you were going to do – what I’d driven you to. I had to stop you, even if it meant risking my get away.’
‘And yet you still didn’t talk to me about Loveday? You didn’t even mention her name, as if you were glossing over the whole thing. The easiest way to talk me out of killing myself would have been to convince me that I’d misunderstood. Why didn’t you try, Harry? Things could have been so different.’
‘Some things would always have been the same. I’ve never done anything but care for Loveday, but I did kill our parents and I did kill that man.’
‘We could have said it was an accident – he provoked you, for God’s sake. And Nathaniel would have kept quiet if you’d begged him to – he’d have done anything for you.’
He looked away from her. ‘No one would have believed it was an accident. I didn’t just hit him once, Morwenna – I smashed his face to pieces. And Nathaniel…’ He paused, thinking about his friend. ‘Nathaniel would always have done the right thing,’ he said eventually, a note of bitterness in his voice. ‘Morveth was right – there was no going back.’
‘But I gave in anyway. I couldn’t argue with you any longer, and the more you talked, the more you said you loved me, the more I hated myself for what we’d done and what it had led to. You thought you were bringing me back from that water by giving me hope, while all you were really doing was proving to me that I had to pay for everything that had gone wrong. And I couldn’t do that by taking the easy way out.’
‘So I persuaded you to punish yourself by living?’
‘Yes. We’ve always been selfish, you and I, and I’ve never really felt any great impetus to make amends for what I’ve taken – but I did then. I looked at your face, and it was cut and bruised and ugly – and that seemed to say everything about the way I’d loved you. Nathaniel would have said that I was paying for my sins, I suppose, but there was nothing noble about it, nothing good, and I don’t expect any great reward for it in another life. This one has been more than enough for me. I thought you’d tricked me, you know.’