‘But we must find the monster that did this!’ His eyes are wild. ‘A madman, perhaps.’
Kelley intervenes. ‘Or as you yourself say, a beast. Maybe a wild dog, or a pack of them. Maybe a performing bear has escaped from a travelling show.’ He hesitates before leaning forward and suggesting, ‘Or a wolf, perhaps?’
The sexton is adamant. ‘There have never been wolves on the Island. Maybe wild dogs, though – I heard tell of some savaged sheep up on Ashey in the summer.’ He looks to me.
I shrug, letting the thought sink in, meeting Kelley’s sharp eyes. Better they think of natural threats than such violence.
The rector turns away as if sick, and coughs. ‘That poor, misguided girl. And her innocent babe, dead inside its mother.’ For I have not told him of the excision of the child.
The sexton, tapping the ground with the long pole he travels with, shakes his head. ‘That ground’s rock ’ard, your honour.’ He pressed it into the soil a few inches. ‘Froze solid. We got the Widow Archer in her son’s barn, hard as iron, waiting five days for decent burial.’
I hear the familiar sound of Lord Anthonie’s horse, a destrier he and I had bred some ten years before, in lighter days. The animal, perhaps scenting the great violence in the metallic stink of blood and death in the air, stamps and shies. My brother dismounts, ties his animal up, and strides over to look down at the body.
‘God’s breath,’ he murmurs to me. ‘Can we stifle the scandal, Vincent?’
‘I know not. But I believe her innocent of witchcraft and any sin but the venal sin of adultery. But to die like this must be punishment enough. The poor girl, she deserved better, whatever her sins.’
‘Viola, my child! What business do you have here?’ My brother was distressed to see his daughter there, but it was no child who answered him.
‘I am here, Father, to make sure this lady gets a Christian burial.’ She reaches a pale hand to Seabourne’s shoulder, and he turns to her and covers his face. ‘This should go no further than us, Father,’ she says. I see the tears caught in her eyes, as if frosted there. She gathers Seabourne into her arms. He rests there, shaking.
Before my brother or the rector can interject, I hold up my hand. ‘This poor woman has been abused enough. We have all played a part in her downfall, and those who should have protected her have failed.’ I crouch down to cover her body again, with the gaily patchworked cloak that so well represented the woman. ‘It is time to let her go to a merciful God.’
Vincent Garland, Steward to Lord Banstock, His Memoir
59
Monday 20th May
A few weeks later, Sage was finally comfortable enough to walk down to the seafront from her flat and meet Nick and Felix. The summer was starting to kick in, and a few mothers with young children already dotted the sand.
Nick reached for her and kissed her. Their relationship had moved on since Elliott’s death. When she was able to leave her own hospital bed, she had sat by Nick’s and cried into his hand before he woke up. They were too bruised and battered to meet after that, Nick staying with his parents on the mainland when he was released from hospital while Sage was driven backwards and forwards across the Island by friends and her parents to see baby Max. Yet somehow she knew that the nights in each other’s arms had created a family.
‘You look good. You look great.’ He beamed at her, looking up and down. ‘You even have some colour.’
She leaned in to hug Felix, who kissed her cheek, his tanned skin wrinkling around his eyes as he smiled. ‘You do look good,’ he said.
‘I feel good. Until I bend or try and lift something.’ Sage sat on a bench, sandwiched between the men. ‘But I want to know what happened at the cottage. That day – Elliott acted so strangely.’
Felix turned towards the sea, suddenly frowning. ‘Elliott had been obsessed with you for quite a while. Didn’t you get any sense of how he felt?’
‘No.’ She thought back over the last few months. ‘He just became very helpful, driving the van back to the office, helping me sort out a backlog of paperwork, that sort of thing. That’s why I made sure he did the excavation. I wanted him to do something that would be good for his PhD.’ She looked at her hand, at the scar raised and pink. ‘I don’t think he ever even touched me until that day. He was very distant.’ Nick put his arm around her.
‘What did the police say?’ Felix asked.
‘He had every paper I’ve ever helped write. He even had a copy of my PhD thesis, stolen from the university library, and press cuttings from the projects I’ve been involved in. He’d cloned my phone, had copies of all my keys after I gave him my spare set for a day.’ Sage leaned back, Nick’s shoulder warm against hers. ‘His neighbours complained he had changed in the last few weeks – since he started work at the cottage. I think something triggered his behaviour from stalking to action.’ She remembered his face when they excavated the first bones and realised they were those of a human baby not a cat. ‘The horror of a baby and a woman down a well. It cast a shadow over all of us.’
‘What about the footage on the nanny cam?’ Nick asked. ‘Someone was in the cottage. How could that have been Elliott?’
‘He was onsite for weeks, watching people come and go. Judith often left the house unlocked; she must have felt safe with us all there. It would have been easy to borrow her key.’ Sage shivered for a moment at the memory. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming, didn’t realise he was so ill. Psychotic.’
Nick took her hand, and she looked down at the entwined fingers. ‘Felix has come up with a couple of theories. I just want you to know I think one of them is pretty strange.’
‘OK.’ Sage turned to Felix. ‘Tell me your strange theory.’
He hesitated. ‘It seems like an odd coincidence, doesn’t it? Agness may have cut Isabeau’s baby out with a knife, then ends up dying in the well. Elliott attacks you with a knife to kill your baby – and he falls down the same well.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘That the carvings in the well were designed as a trap. Maybe it exerted some sort of psychic pressure on Elliott and drew him into the well, to repeat the story of the first deaths.’ Felix grinned. ‘Just a crazy thought. It’s the way a sorcerer like Solomon would have understood it.’
Nick shook his head. ‘Tell her the other theory.’
Felix stood and leaned back on the railing overlooking the beach. ‘This is the scientific theory. I borrowed some equipment and recruited a couple of acoustic engineering students from my university. There is something very odd about the cottage’s fireplace. It produces a range of ultrasonic sounds, inaudible to us, when the wind blows in some directions. It also produces a few weird notes that could be confused with wailing.’ He smiled. ‘It also makes the cottage bloody cold. Elliott was working a few feet from it; it was just as loud outside the chimney stack as inside.’
Sage had to shrug off a shiver as she remembered. ‘That’s what you mentioned before, wasn’t it? Just creepy sounds we can’t hear making us feel haunted.’
‘People repeatedly report seeing “ghosts” in the London Underground after hours. When the daytime noises are gone, the movement of air creates ultrasonic sounds that can induce mood changes, even visual and audible hallucinations. Most people just have a change of mood or imagine things. But perhaps Elliott already had a problem.’ Felix leaned back further and tipped his head into the sunlight. ‘Maybe it brought out, or exaggerated his extreme behaviour, especially as he started to understand the story of the bodies in the well. A baby cut out of its mother? It might have planted a seed of resentment towards your baby. And he did know the bodies were thrown down the well.’
‘Open wells are dangerous things.’ Sage glanced at both men. ‘Actually, I have a theory about Agness of my own.’
‘You do?’ Nick said.
‘Yousuf sent off the DNA from the teeth of the body in the well. Agness Waldren, if it was her, was genetically male.’
Felix sp
oke first. ‘Is that why you weren’t sure at first that the skeleton was female?’
‘Probably. Although the pelvis was ambiguous it was more likely to be female. But the height, the face, just bugged me. It seemed unusual for a woman.’
Nick shook his head. ‘How can that even be?’
‘My theory,’ Sage said, ‘was that Agness was partly androgen-resistant. She should have responded to testosterone in utero, but didn’t so she grew to look superficially like a female. Her male genes still affected her height and features but her genitals would appear female.’
‘What made you test for it?’ said Nick, his hand still in hers. She noticed he had taken his wedding ring off.
‘Yousuf suggested it. Her bones were so androgynous. Five-nine was tall for a man; for an Elizabethan woman it would have been very unusual. She may have been genetically male but she was brought up to be female. She must have felt she didn’t fit in anywhere. She wouldn’t have menstruated, which was the signal that she was ready to marry. It’s rare, but about one in twenty to fifty thousand people are born with complete androgen insensitivity. More have the partial type.’
‘She wouldn’t have menstruated so it would have been known she couldn’t have children. Marriage would have been difficult.’ Felix turned to look out to sea, squinting in the light sparkling off the choppy water. ‘She must have grown up feeling like a woman, but was never able – or allowed – to be one.’
‘So she fell in love with Solomon.’ Sage leaned back in the seat, favouring her tender incision. ‘Or rather, became obsessed with him, enough to take Isabeau’s baby.’
‘I have some new information, too. Rose has a friend at the British Library, and got this copied for you.’ Felix fished around in his holdall for a rather shabby folder, which he handed to Sage. ‘Here. I’m on the four o’clock hovercraft, so I’ll leave you two.’ He smiled down at them, stooping slightly. ‘Invite me to the burials, would you? I’d like to see Isabeau and her baby laid to rest. After all she went through.’
Sage watched him walk away, then opened the folder to reveal several photocopies of an old book. The first page was the frontispiece, ornate and fussy, but the text on the next page was crisp and easy to decipher.
BEING THE POETTRIES AND RHYMES
of the
LADY VIOLA SEABOURNE OF BANSTOCK
Composed in her Youth
Deddicated always to her dear sister and friend,
Isabeau Duchamp, cruelly slain.
60
31st December 1580
To dig the hole commissioned by your lordship, though the ground be frozen four shillings for Wm. Grove, sexton To Edward Marshall, for three gammons, two baskets of trout and several of cockles, for your daughter’s wedding eighteen shillings and four pence
Accounts of Banstock Manor, 1576–1582
Our story that Isabeau died in the delivery of her child has not sufficed. With the absence of Agness, the local people are whispering that Isabeau consorted with the Devil and that he took her and the child to hell. No matter: what is important now is that the woman is buried with dignity. Despite my arguments, Viola insisted the seamstress be buried draped in the dress she was making for the wedding, worth twice her own dowry. In truth, I could not have borne to see Viola wear it.
We found the Frenchwoman’s rosary at the bottom of her workbox, protected in a square of linen, guarded by a ball of needles and beaded pins. Poor child, it cost me nothing to cast it into the coffin, or for the rector to cast his eyes away.
No one questions that Agness was taken by the storm; it is only Viola and I that saw her in the apple store. Seabourne and his servants know the truth, but none will tell what transpired. I am still haunted by the slaughtered Frenchwoman. What was done in revenge was perhaps forgivable. Master Seabourne will bear it on his conscience; I feel no stain on my own. That knife to Viola absolves me of any regret that I did not try to save Agness.
Now, with Christmas gone and us all spending hours on our knees in church, I think we have reflected upon and repented our own parts in the disaster. On the eve of the wedding, with our guests held over from the festivities, I return to my office after the evening meal. I find Viola there, and she seems subdued.
‘Ho, child, you should be abed,’ I say, and admit that too many glasses of good wine may be swaying my tongue. ‘Your last night of childhood.’
‘I cannot sleep.’ She sits upon the high stool, and uncovers my accounts. ‘“To Edward Marshall, for three gammons, two baskets of trout and several of cockles, for your daughter’s wedding, eighteen shillings and four pence.” Will you account every part of my wedding?’
She sounds melancholy. I kiss her cheek. ‘I cannot account what it costs me, child. I will miss you when you are at your sister’s estate, and then in London and Sussex with your husband’s family.’
She leans her cheek against mine. ‘I will write to you.’ She looks at her hands, and I move to light a few candles from the single one that burns on the wall. ‘I will write to you every day.’
‘You will be too busy,’ I say, with some attempt at jollity, but the last day I can hold her is fast dying. ‘You will be busy learning to be a wife and mother with your sister. And growing up ready to be bedded.’ We have agreed that Viola should not consummate her marriage until she is better grown, and Solomon is still deep in his grief for his mistress and his child. We have had glad news from Devonshire. Viola’s sister, after eleven years of fruitless marriage, is to have her first child, and Viola will be welcome to support her and learn to keep house.
‘I have been thinking—’ she hesitates, and turns over the page in the ledger to a blank one. ‘I am to marry a man who loved another so much. How can I ever be sure he loves me?’
‘Great people do not marry for love, child, and if love comes – well, it is a turbulent storm rather than a calm crossing.’
‘Mayhap he will love another.’
I grunt in agreement, for who can know the future. ‘Mayhap he grows great boils or falls from his horse. Mayhap he turns all the iron in the house to solid gold. Who knows, child? We must live each day at our best, to serve each other and our house.’
‘My father was married to my mother, and she loved another.’ She dares to glance at me, looking so like Lady Marion in the candlelight that I catch my breath.
‘That love became a friendship, a strength for us both.’ I cannot speak above a mumble. ‘That man would not betray his brother, nor she her husband.’
She nods slowly. ‘Perhaps that is the greater love.’
I put out my hands and she takes them, slipping down off the stool. Her head just tucks under my chin as I hold her in my arms. ‘Perhaps it is. Write the love down, as I did.’
She pulls away from me, the better to see my face. ‘You wrote poetry?’
I chuckle at that, and pat the ledger that takes up the whole of the desk. ‘This is the story of my love, Viola, every entry. Duty, commerce, birth, death.’
She starts to smile at that. ‘I prefer my poetry to yours.’
And so I let her leave, to bed and marriage upon the morrow. As is my duty and my love, I send her into her new world. But think not that I am detached; no, I shall have an eye upon my fair child wherever she goes.
Vincent Garland, Steward to Lord Banstock, His Memoir
61
Thursday 18th July
Sage tried to park on the vicarage drive, but the number of cars already there forced her to pull up on the grass verge. She opened the door to disentangle baby Max from the car seat’s various straps and buckles, before walking towards the house.
It still daunted her, the idea of one day moving in with Nick, being in the eyes of the community ‘the vicar’s wife’. The sun glowed off the warm brick and gilded the many windows. A crunch on the gravel alerted her to the approach of Mel, Nick’s assistant. Sage lifted the baby and settled him on her shoulder.
‘Oh, he’s adorable!’ Any stiffness in Mel’s manner melted
at the tiny face peering around at her. ‘Can I hold him?’
‘Of course.’ She lifted him into the other woman’s hands, and Mel cradled him. Sage still tensed. That traumatic afternoon had left her overprotective. There was nothing like the insanity of Agness about Mel, she had to tell herself. She was just a lonely woman with a bit of a crush on the vicar. She wasn’t going to snatch a baby.
‘My kids are so old now, it’s hard to remember them when they were this small,’ Mel said.
‘How old are they?’ Sage asked as they walked towards the house. ‘You make it look easy. I still feel like I’m juggling a stack of tennis balls when I hold him.’
Mel rolled her eyes. ‘Hours and hours of practice; neither of mine slept through the night until they were a year old.’ She pushed the big front door open. ‘They’re seven and nine, now, and football-mad. Especially Rosalind.’
The idea that Max, still to get to ten pounds, would ever play football was ridiculous to Sage.
Mel handed the baby back. ‘I’d better go and sort out the sandwiches.’
Before Sage could follow her she caught a flash of colour out of the corner of her eye. She turned to see a tall woman in a flowery dress, watching her. ‘Oh.’ Fliss. She glanced around for Marcus but there was no one else in front of the vicarage.
Fliss walked towards her, unsmiling. ‘The vicar said you would be here.’ Her eyes moved to the baby and her expression softened. ‘He looks well.’
‘He is. He’s been home a month now.’ Sage scanned Fliss for any emotion, but could only see a warmth towards the baby.
‘We have two children, you know. I expect Marcus talked about them.’
‘He mentioned them.’ It was strange to think Marcus’s children were Max’s half-siblings.
‘He looks a bit like Ivy did, when she was little.’ Fliss looked up, stared into Sage’s face. Her eyes were very blue. ‘I’m not going to apologise for saying what I did, that day at Banstock Manor.’
That made Sage smile ruefully. ‘You had every right. For the record, I didn’t know. He said he was separated when we met. But later, I worked out the truth and we carried on. I’m sorry, I truly am. I was selfish. And it’s so over.’
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