Sweet Songbird

by Sweet Songbird (retail) (epub)

‘Southwold?’ Kitty suggested, straight-faced, ‘Lowestoft? Yarmouth?’ The figure on the beach below was almost upon them now, and clearly defined. She could see the dark, straight hair, so like her own, the lanky, long-limbed frame that Matt had inherited from their father as, to her chagrin, she had herself.

  But from where or from whom, she found herself wondering bleakly and not for the first time, had her brother inherited those long, slim, thieving fingers that had landed him in trouble so often?

  ‘Ugh! Just say the names and I smell fish. I really do! That’s another thing – no fish. When I’m married to my fine gentleman we’ll never eat fish again. And don’t tell me you like fish—’ Anne added, swiftly repressive, ‘—or I’ll throw something at you!’

  ‘Thee’ll sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,’ Kitty quoted, smiling. ‘And feed upon strawberries, sugar and cream—’

  Anne wrinkled a mischievous nose. ‘Sounds all right to me. Except the sewing bit.’ The warm laughter pealed again. ‘You can do that.’

  Kitty laughed with her. The boy on the beach had seen them. He stood by the water’s edge, lifted a hand. Kitty could sense, even at this distance, the wide, engaging smile. She acknowledged his greeting, then turned back to her companion. ‘What about poor Mr Winthrop?’ she asked, slyly.

  Anne raised theatrical hands and eyes to heaven. ‘What about poor Mr Winthrop?’

  ‘You won’t even consider his offer?’

  Anne’s small shriek was halfway between horror and amusement. ‘Consider it? Kitty – what in the world do you take me for? Consider marrying a man three times my age? Consider living in that great old-fashioned draughty barn of a house miles from anywhere with nothing but birds and bits of old stone for company? Heavens – Father’s obsession for stupid, drowned Dunwich is bad enough – Mr Winthrop is a thousand times worse! It was, indeed, he who first infected Papa with this tiresome obsession. What the two of them find so absorbing about a heap of old stones on the seabed I can’t imagine! Marry Mr Winthrop? Don’t be absurd!’

  ‘Your father would like such a match.’

  ‘Then let him marry Mr Winthrop,’ Anne said, pertly. ‘I’m sure they’d be very happy together.’

  Kitty smiled. ‘He has your best interests at heart – your father, I mean.’

  ‘Nonsense. He has his own interests at heart. What could be better – the boys to run the estate, his little girl a scant five miles away and safely out of trouble, and a boon companion who dotes on old bits of stone as much as he does! Lor’ – can you imagine the gay times we’d have? Oh, Kitty, no – not Mr Winthrop!’

  Kitty could not help but laugh. Below them Matt, shirt flapping in the cool breeze, had turned from the water’s edge and was toiling through the steep, shifting shingle towards them, the wind lifting his hair.

  ‘I suppose that’s where Papa and the boys have gone today?’ Anne too was watching the approaching boy. ‘Fishing up bits of Dunwich?’

  ‘Yes. Some of the fishermen dredged up a piece of statuary yesterday. Sir George was anxious to find the place before tomorrow’s high tide. Geoffrey and Patrick went with him.’

  ‘They’re as bad as he is.’ Anne shook a gloomy head. ‘Why can’t they leave the blessed place alone? It’s drowned and gone. And good riddance, as far as I’m concerned.’

  Kitty looked out across the sun-struck sea. ‘Have you ever heard the bells?’

  Anne was impatient. ‘Oh, of course I haven’t! And neither, if you ask me, has anyone else. Because all the towers will have fallen long ago and all the bells buried themselves in the seabed. It’s just a silly story. And I don’t want to hear another word about it. Now – far more important – what are you going to sing for us tonight?’ The change of subject was frank and brooked no contradiction.

  Kitty shook back her hair, tried to stuff it into the battered bonnet. ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.’

  ‘The Green Willow’s my favourite.’ Anne half closed her eyes and sang a snatch of song in a small, breathless voice. ‘Oh, young men are false and they are so deceitful, Young men are false and they seldom prove true—’

  Kitty’s voice joined in, strong and husky, ringing clear and true above the sea-sound. ‘For rambling and ranging, their minds always changing, They’re always a-looking for some girl that’s true—’

  ‘Oh, I do wish I could sing like you!’ Anne watched as Kitty, a little ungainly, scrambled to her feet, then held out her own hand to be helped, contriving to lift from the sandy ground light and graceful as thistledown, her skirts swaying. ‘I’ve never heard such a lovely voice. It’s a gift from God, truly it is.’

  Kitty’s long mouth turned down. ‘You think so? Then perhaps you’d like to have a word in His ear for me next Sunday? While He was handing out gifts I could have done with something a mite more useful.’

  ‘Kitty Daniels!’ Anne clapped a delightedly scandalized hand to her mouth. ‘What a thing to say! Matthew!’ She turned, laughing, to the boy who had just scrambled up the last stretch of sliding shingle to the dunes. ‘Don’t stand too close to Kitty – the thunderbolt meant for her might catch you too!’ She squealed with laughter at her own joke. Brother’s and sister’s eyes met, not yet on the same level, though by the boy’s lanky growth it was obvious that it would not be long before he overtook his tall sister. Kitty’s gaze was daunting, the dark, winged brows – that gave to her face in repose a faint expression of mockery – lifted.

  Matthew grinned easily, unabashed as always by any attempt of Kitty’s to repress him. ‘I shouldn’t like ter see that ’appen.’ His accent, unschooled by Anne or Miss Alexander, held much stronger strains of Suffolk than did his sister’s. Deliberately he exaggerated it. ‘Tha’ss too bad when the good gits a-taken with the bad, i’n’t it?’

  Kitty did not answer. Her attention had been taken from him. She was staring southward, down the beach.

  ‘We are talking of the musical evening,’ Anne said. ‘Kitty’s going to sing Green Willow.’ She brushed minute grains of sand from her skirt.

  ‘Old Ben’s coming,’ Kitty said, puzzlement in her voice. ‘And – that’s Tom with him. And Will Hall. What on earth are they doing here at this hour?’

  ‘—it should be a very pleasant evening. I shall play the piano. And the vicar’s daughter has a passable voice, though not a patch on Kitty’s of course. Matthew – if I persuaded Papa to let you attend – because we’re sadly in need of decent male voices, and Geoffrey thinks it beneath him and Patrick screeches like an owl – if I persuade him, then will you promise me faithfully that—’

  ‘Anne!’ There was a strange sharpness in Kitty’s voice. As she watched the hesitant approach of the men along the beach, an uncomfortable chill of foreboding had crept over her skin.

  The men paused, some way away, conferred, shuffling their feet, averted their heads, reluctantly came on.

  ‘—that you’ll – behave yourself.’ Anne paused delicately before the words. ‘Papa is a patient man, no one knows that better than I, but—’

  ‘Anne!’

  The one, urgent word stopped her. She looked at Kitty in surprise. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Old Ben’s coming. With some of the men.’

  ‘Ben? What’s he doing here? Surely it’s a little early for Miss Alexander to have sent out a search party?’ Anne’s voice was still careless, but the apprehension in Kitty’s had communicated itself surely to her brother. He turned his head, shaded his eyes, watching. The three stood in silence as the men climbed the low sandy cliffs from the wave-washed beach. As they came nearer and their faces were more clearly to be seen, the sea-filled silence stretched, hung all at once with awful apprehension.

  Very, very slowly Anne reached for Kitty’s hand. Kitty took the small fingers in hers. Her throat felt suddenly dry as bone.

  They stood at last, death’s reluctant messengers, their ragged, salt-stained shirts flattened by the wind to brown-skinned arms and torsos, canvas trousers string-tied, feet bare and callo
used, spread toes turned into the sifting sand.

  The two younger men avoided all eyes, casting their own down to the poor, windblown grass at their feet. The man everyone knew as Old Ben had a face of carved mahogany, set now into deep lines of sorrow. Anne’s frightened gaze was fixed on his face: the dependable and loved face of a man she had known since childhood, a man who had told her her first tales of sea-monsters and mermaids, who had guarded her faithfully over the wild North Sea waters when her father had insisted that she ‘try out her good Suffolk sea-legs’; a man who looked at her now with a depth of pity he made no attempt to hide. Stepping back from him she let go of Kitty’s hand, brought both her own very slowly to her mouth. Her eyes never leaving the old man’s, she shook her head, fiercely, as if to deny the very moment.

  ‘What is it?’ Kitty asked at last of the terrible silence. ‘What’s happened?’

  (ii)

  ‘Anne – Anne, please, won’t you try to stop crying?’

  The rage of grief in no way abated, as it had not abated in the hours since Anne Bowyer had collapsed, screaming, upon the sunlit sand at the news of the deaths of her father and brothers. In desperation, her own grief subjugated by concern for this girl who was as close to her as a sister, Kitty had tried everything she could think of to calm her, but to no avail. The bereaved girl was almost demented with shock.

  ‘Anne – please stop it. You’ll make yourself ill—’ Kitty laid an arm about the shaking shoulders. In exhausted anguish Anne leaned weakly upon her, the helpless tears flooding still down the puffed and reddened face, her breath hiccoughing painfully in her throat. She moaned as she cried, like a small animal mortally hurt. The sound was awful. Kitty lifted a tired head, trying to ease her aching neck. So great was the disaster it was all but impossible to believe in it.

  The big room was empty. Apart from Anne’s racking sobs there was no sound, neither from within nor from without the thick walls. It was, Kitty found herself thinking, as if the house, this great, ancient, weather-buffeted refuge of a house, itself mourned its dead. She shook her head at the thought, closing her eyes. It could not, surely, truly have happened? Today – a day like any other; busy, tranquil, exasperating, ordinary – could not have turned to nightmare at a stroke?

  She shivered. The room, despite the summer evening sunshine that struck the distant sea to sullen, metallic light, was cold. Her arm tightened about Anne, and she made soothing, meaningless noises into the damp, disordered tear-wet hair. When the door opened she turned her head, quickly hopeful. Her brother Matt, white-faced and unusually subdued, fidgeted in the doorway, his eyes flicking worriedly to Anne’s distraught face and then sliding away.

  Kitty closed her eyes for a moment. She had not herself realized how much she had longed to hand over the responsibility for the distressed and helpless child that Anne had become to some older and more experienced hand. ‘Matt! Where in heaven’s name is everyone?’ Her voice was strained and sharp. Anne wailed louder at the sound. ‘The servants? Miss Alexander?’

  ‘The servants are in the kitchen, the women that is. Miss Alexander told them to stay there till they were sent for. She’s in the library, doin’ somethin’ with some papers. The men – they’ve gone down to the beach. To – to collect – the bodies.’ Matt almost choked on the words. Understanding seeped slowly into Kitty’s all but paralyzed brain, and brought to her an added shock. Only pure chance had stood between her own brother and death. It was at the last minute that Patrick, Anne’s young brother, had claimed his place with his father and brother on the ill-fated expedition that had cost them all their lives, taking Matt’s place.

  ‘Go and find Miss Alexander for me,’ she said, gently. ‘She ought to be here.’ Under normal circumstances the woman who so resented and despised her would be the last person she would want to see, but at the moment any company, any help, would be welcomed. Then as Matthew turned to go her eye fell upon a cupboard that stood beside the fireplace – an ancient battered thing that Sir George had once told her was as old as the house and in which he kept, she knew, as did everyone else on the estate, his share of the spoils of those moonlit expeditions by the village fishermen to which Sir George, a local magistrate and pillar of the community, turned a convenient blind eye. ‘Wait.’ She pointed. ‘In the cupboard. Brandy. And a glass. Sir George kept—’ She stopped, biting her lip, as Anne’s frantic sobs, which had faded a little from sheer exhaustion, redoubled at the mention of her father’s name.

  Matt found an opened bottle and a glass, set them on the table beside his sister. Kitty with her free hand awkwardly splashed a large amount of the rich amber liquid into the glass. The pungent smell turned her stomach a little. ‘Here, my love.’ She put the glass to Anne’s lips. ‘Just a mouthful. It’ll make you feel better—’

  The girl sipped obediently, spluttered. ‘That’s better,’ Kitty said soothingly. ‘That’s right. A little more—’

  She held the glass steady. Anne drank again. With Matt’s going heavy silence had fallen once more. Kitty felt numbed, helpless with disbelief. Anne had at last moved a little away from her and sat now, huddled into herself, still moaning softly in an awful, wordless way, like a beaten child. Kitty half-heartedly proffered the brandy again. Anne shook her head. Kitty sat for a moment, staring sightlessly into the glass. Then, almost without thought, she tilted her head and sipped the drink herself. It caught in her throat, burned her lips and her mouth. Then came the warmth, the spurious comfort, and she drank again.

  It was the smallest of sounds that caught her ear. She glanced to the dark, open doorway to meet the level, sardonic gaze of the woman who stood there, silently watching. With no word and a world of contempt in each movement Imogen Alexander stalked across the huge, faded carpet, bent to the table and snatched the brandy bottle from it. With sharp, precise movements she went to the cupboard and replaced the bottle, clicking the door decisively as she shut it. Then she turned and surveyed Kitty with a contemptuous eye.

  ‘I – thought it might help Anne—’ Kitty found herself saying, unable to resist the goad of unspoken accusation.

  The raised eyebrows, the downturned, dismissive mouth told her with no breath wasted upon words what Miss Alexander thought of that for an excuse. ‘Miss Daniels,’ the woman said at last in the clear, well-modulated voice that Kitty had come so heartily to detest, ‘might I suggest that poor Anne needs rather more – mature – ministrations than you are able to offer?’

  ‘I – yes. Of course—’

  ‘The house, Miss Daniels, is full of servants – old and trusted servants – who have known Anne since the day she was born.’

  ‘They – didn’t come—’ Always it seemed to Kitty that this woman could reduce her to the status of a half-witted child simply by lifting an eyebrow. The loathsome habit of calling her ‘Miss Daniels’ was in itself enough to reduce her to miserable confusion, as she was sure Miss Alexander knew. No one in her life before had called her ‘Miss Daniels’, but from the day that over Miss Alexander’s furious and undisguised opposition she had been admitted to the schoolroom ‘Miss Daniels’ she had been, the words always spoken with a precise and frigid distaste: a strange and inverted insult – since Anne, the daughter of the house and Miss Alexander’s true charge, was always addressed by her Christian name – that served, as the governess well knew, always to deepen Kitty’s discomfort, her feeling of being an unwelcome intruder.

  Miss Alexander strode now to the tasselled bell-pull that hung by the massive fireplace. ‘They did not come, Miss Daniels,’ she said, her voice chill with hard-tried patience, ‘because you did not ring for them. They cannot read your thoughts.’

  Kitty turned back to the sobbing Anne. In silence, arms folded, Miss Alexander stood guard on the fireplace, and the contraband cupboard. Kitty could feel those blue, scornful eyes upon her like cold shadows on a sunlit day. She kept her head averted.

  The door opened. ‘Yes, ma’am? You rang?’ The white-faced, frightened servant girl looked a
t no one.

  ‘Miss Anne needs attention. A dish of tea, perhaps, strong and with plenty of sugar. And a warming pan in her bed. At once, please.’

  ‘Yes, mum.’ The girl’s whisper was scarcely audible.

  ‘And tell Thomas I shall want to see him in a half hour or so. After we’ve settled Miss Anne.’ Miss Alexander’s voice was crisp and clear. ‘He’s to come to the drawing room.’

  Kitty looked at her with an undisguised dislike that was threaded with disbelief. Did the woman feel nothing of grief, of loss? If she did it certainly did not show.

  It seemed an age before Kitty was able to leave the fitfully sleeping Anne; she sat beside her until the last colour was fading from the sky; lavender to lilac, to rose-hued darkness over the sea. Wearily Kitty stretched her aching back. Very carefully and slowly then she stood, watching the sleeping girl. She could surely leave her now for a little? Just for long enough to slip downstairs to the kitchen? At least there would be company and some comfort there, a sharing of grief and shock. The great kitchens of the Grange, with their vaulted ceilings, their tiny, high arched windows, their mixed smells of yeast and herbs and the warmth of cooking, were her favourite place in the whole house.

  The candles that should have lit the wide wooden staircase had not been kindled, but on the shadowed landing beneath where she stood light fell in a bright splash across the floor from the open drawing-room door. Kitty felt her way down the dangerously shadowed stairs, holding tightly to the great, worn bannister rail. At the open door she stopped.

  ‘—to Southwold immediately.’ Miss Alexander’s voice, clipped and authoritative. ‘The family solicitor must be made aware of what has happened at once. Here. This is his name and address. Do you read?’

  Silence. A muttered reply.

  ‘Then go to The Swan. The landlord will tell you. You may stay there the night and accompany the gentleman back here in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, Miss.’ The groom’s reply was clearer this time, and rang with resentment at having to accept orders from someone he clearly considered to be little better than a servant herself. But then – Kitty thought – who else was there to give them, with Anne senseless in the room above and the house in a turmoil? She moved to the open door. The groom brushed past her without a glance. She stood, uncertain. Candlelight gleamed upon the polished lid of the piano. A recollection caused a sharp pang of pain; could it possibly have been only a matter of hours since that Anne had laughed so, and begged her to sing Green Willow?