by Nicola Upson
By the time the sheets were hung on the line, Josephine felt as though she had already done a full day’s work and it was only half past ten. She used the rest of the hot water to sluice down the flagstones in the scullery, then made herself respectable and set off into the village, wondering how accurate Bert’s half-mile would prove to be. Her path made its way between the wood and a fragrant hay meadow, still to be cut and rich in buttercups, scabious and thistles. The day was warm for its hour, and Josephine was content to walk in the shade of the trees and marvel at the beauty of the English countryside, a scene as carefully shaped by generations of craftsmen as any line of buildings or architectural triumph. She found it impossible to say why England moved her so – whether it was her roots here on her mother’s side or the places she had been happy in, or some far less tangible emotion – but it had always been this way. Scotland was in her blood and she would defend it to her very last breath, but England gave her a sense of peace and belonging that needed no defence – and for that she blessed it.
Everything was still as the route led her past another pond and into a woodland thicket: there was no scurrying in the bushes, no flapping of wings from branch to branch, and the birds seemed too hot even to sing. Before very long, she caught sight of some chimneys through the trees and the path brought her out onto the village green, opposite Bert’s garage. There was no sign of him, but two young girls – identical except for their clothes – were playing in the small yard at the front. ‘Is your father about?’ she asked, walking over to them.
‘He’s up at the Hall, fixing the Bentley again,’ one of them said, and something in the exaggerated way she gestured with her arm told Josephine that this was the Lizzie of theatrical ambition. ‘He won’t be back until dinner-time.’
‘Then perhaps you could give him a message for me?’
Lizzie nodded, but before Josephine could tell her what it was, a woman came out from the house. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
The voice was an octave higher, but the tone matched Bert’s first words to her exactly. Josephine smiled and introduced herself. ‘You must be Mrs Willis?’
The woman – an older version of her daughters and the source of their red hair and freckled skin – shook the hand that was offered to her but made no other show of friendship, and Josephine acknowledged the foolishness of assuming that affability ran in families; she had reckoned without the natural suspicions of the female sex. ‘I wanted to thank your husband for his help yesterday,’ she said. ‘He gave me a lift to Red Barn Cottage.’
‘Yes, he mentioned it.’
‘He also said I should come and see you if I needed anything, and there’s a broken window at the cottage. I wondered . . .’
‘Bert’s very busy at the moment.’
‘Oh I didn’t mean I wanted him to mend it. I just wondered if he could tell me who might. Or perhaps you know someone?’ Josephine looked at the woman’s stony face and felt herself begin to ramble. ‘I’m still finding my feet and I have no idea who does what in the village, but I’d like to get the basics done while I’m here.’
‘Are you selling it, then?’
She was tempted to remind Mrs Willis whose business that was, but stuck to the simple truth. ‘I haven’t decided.’
‘Well, Deaves will sort you out. He’s over in Stoke. Odd jobs aren’t really Bert’s sort of thing. He did enough of those for Miss Larkspur and precious little thanks he got for it.’ To Josephine, a car seemed a reasonable acknowledgement of kindness; Bert’s wife seemed to know what she was thinking. ‘Oh I don’t mean the car. What use is that to us? I mean her attitude to him and the kids before she died. Friendly with them for years and then nothing. It was as if they didn’t exist. I don’t mind people keeping themselves to themselves – the world might be a better place if a few more of us did that. But you can’t give friendship and then take it back for no reason. They worshipped her, all three of them.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Josephine said, resenting the apology but feeling obliged to make it. ‘I had no idea there was a problem. Your husband didn’t say anything.’
‘He wouldn’t. Too soft by halves, my Bert.’ There was a slight emphasis on the ‘my’, and Josephine wondered how much of Mrs Willis’s anger on behalf of her family was actually a more personal resentment. She pulled the twins close to her, as though afraid of history repeating itself, then said again: ‘It’s Tom Deaves you want. He’ll sort out anything that needs doing around the cottage.’
Josephine thanked her and walked back across the green, bewildered by such an unexpected confrontation and wondering – almost as a challenge to herself – whom she could offend now with a simple request for groceries. There was a small sweet shop on the corner, but nothing more substantial so she set off down the hill, wary of asking directions. She found what she was looking for at the top of a lane leading off the main street, but stopped before she got to it, distracted by a striking sixteenth-century farmhouse – the only building that fitted Bert’s description of William Corder’s house. It dominated the hill, looking out across the village pond and distant countryside, and it occurred to Josephine that such a commanding position would not have been quite so enviable once news of the murder got out. There was a small boy playing under an old cherry tree, but no other signs of modern life and the house must have changed very little in the last hundred years. She looked up at the dark windows, trying to imagine what they had seen: the pain of Corder’s family – if he had had a family – the simmering resentments of class within the village which must have been intensified by the murder. She knew next to nothing about it, but what interested her was what interested her about any crime: how ordinary people had felt, caught up in the violence through no fault of their own, their lives changed for ever by a few minutes. Somehow, she didn’t think she would find the answers in Hester’s melodrama.
Sounds from the shop brought her back to the present day – the clang of a bell and soft murmur of voices; the hiss of rice poured onto scales and chime of coins in the till. Bracing herself as she went in, she found herself in a queue of three and the object of a barely disguised curiosity. The shop was, she was pleased to see, very well stocked, although it seemed to be arranged according to the same principles as Hester’s cupboards. ‘Won’t keep you a moment, Miss Tey,’ said the woman behind the counter, her familiarity suggesting that Josephine had been shopping there for years. The speed with which news had travelled unsettled her but she, of all people, shouldn’t have been surprised: everything there was to know about Inverness passed through her father’s high-street shop and she swore sometimes that he knew other people’s business better than they did; there was no reason to think it would be any different here.
‘Right – what can I get you?’
The other women had finished their shopping but showed no sign of leaving, so Josephine handed over her list. ‘There’s rather a lot, I’m afraid.’
‘And you’d like it delivered?’
‘Yes please, except for the fresh food. I’ll take that now. When will the oil arrive? I ran out last night.’
‘You spent the night in that cottage?’
Josephine looked at her. ‘Of course,’ she said, as though the thought of going elsewhere had never entered her head. ‘Why ever not?’
The bystanders exchanged a glance and Josephine thought she saw one of them shudder, but the proprietress recovered quickly. ‘Oh, just that you must be used to your home comforts,’ she said, so convincingly that Josephine almost believed it was what she had meant. ‘You’ll be selling it, I expect.’
The determination to get her out of the village before she had even settled in was, she supposed, a natural reaction to outsiders and not reserved especially for her, but it was beginning to grate on Josephine and she said, a little waspishly, ‘Not at the moment, no. There’s a lot to sort out and I want to spend some time there.’
‘Probably just as well. You’d be hard-pushed to find a buyer, stuck all the way out there on its own.’
For Josephine, that was beginning to be one of the cottage’s most attractive features. ‘My godmother loved it for its history,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she’s not the only person who finds that interesting.’
‘Yes, we saw you having a look at the old Corder place.’
‘It’s a handsome house,’ Josephine said defensively, then stopped trying to hide her interest; if Hester had been brazen about it, why shouldn’t she? ‘Are there any Corders or Martens left in the village?’
The elder of the two customers gave her a filthy look. ‘They’d hardly show their faces round here, would they?’
Quite why two families – and particularly the family of the victim – should be held responsible for a hundred-year-old crime was beyond Josephine, but she didn’t argue. ‘Well, you must be pleased to be opposite one of the attractions,’ she said brightly, picking up her basket. ‘I expect it’s good for trade. Now – can you tell me how to get to Stoke?’
‘It’s a couple of miles out on the Mill Road, past the rectory,’ the shopkeeper said, her words barely audible over the muttering in Josephine’s left ear.
‘Thank you, Miss . . . ?’
‘Elsie Gladding. Mrs Elsie Gladding. And the oil will be round later.’
Josephine closed the door behind her, wondering if one of the legacies of Maria Marten’s fate was an obsession with the marital state: the women of Polstead seemed very keen to lay claim to their husbands. Her brief visit to the shop had given her plenty to think about: she had declared her intention to spend time at Red Barn Cottage out of sheer defiance, but she realised now that it was true. If she worked hard, the cottage would be in good shape by the weekend and she could leave it ready to come back to in September, when she had had time to make arrangements at home. It would give her the peace and quiet she needed to get to grips with Claverhouse, as well as sorting through Hester’s papers; she could even ask Marta to join her for a few days. Having made her decision, she smiled all the way down the hill, her pace quickened by the smell of bread baked that morning and the prospect of a decent lunch.
As she started down the track to the cottage, she saw someone leave the garden by the far gate and head out across the fields. It was a woman, but that was all Josephine could be sure of from a distance, and her calls went unheeded; by the time she reached the gate herself, the visitor was out of sight. She went round to the back, where she had left the door open to dry the scullery floor, and knew instantly that someone had been inside – not from any tangible signs, but from the subtle imprint in the air of a room that has recently been occupied. In the parlour, she found the proof of her suspicions: two parcels stacked neatly on the table, one addressed to her in Marta’s handwriting, the other to Hester and postmarked London. She breathed a sigh of relief: it wasn’t the most orthodox of postal methods and she resented the intrusion, but at least the caller had had no other motive. Although she had tried to put it from her mind, the prospect of an unannounced visit from Lucy Kyte was not something that Josephine welcomed and she hoped John MacDonald would be able to track the woman down before it happened.
The post was poignant: two names and only one address, another reminder of the changes that the cottage had lived through. She put Hester’s package to one side and tore the paper off her own, thinking how typical it was of Marta to find a way of welcoming her without intruding. The present was a book – a gift from Marta invariably belonged on a shelf or in a vase – and Josephine laughed when she saw the title: First Home, First Class: The Modern Woman’s Guide to Household Management. Inside, she found The Modern Woman engaged in a series of domestic tasks, each of which she accomplished with irritating perfection by following the manual to the letter, and she took comfort from the thought that one encounter with Elsie Gladding, Mrs, would soon wipe the modern smirk off her modern face. She turned to the inscription on the flyleaf – ‘Let me know when it’s decent. I won’t sleep with slugs, even for you.’ – and pictured Marta’s face on seeing the state of the scullery. Her message, as she no doubt knew, was a greater incentive to Josephine than any words of wisdom from the manual’s anonymous author.
There was already enough post in the box upstairs, so she unwrapped the parcel meant for Hester, too. It was another book, but this one came from a dealer in London and there was nothing remotely modern about it. Intrigued, Josephine read the accompanying letter.
My dear Miss Larkspur,
Please accept my apologies for the delay in sending your 1811 edition of The Old English Baron by Mrs Clara Reeve, but I have only recently returned to London from France. The validation which you requested – quite rightly, I might add – also proved more difficult to obtain than I first anticipated, but I enclose the book now with every assurance of its authenticity and I trust you will agree that it is well worth the wait. It is, as you are aware, a very special volume – one of the most precious I have come across – and it gives me great pleasure to know that it could not have ended up in better hands. As a small point of interest, its author was local to you – born in Ipswich – and the novel was originally published as The Champion of Virtue. There is an irony in that which I am sure you will appreciate when you consider the book’s history!
It has recently been my good fortune to acquire something which I think you will find even more fascinating than the present volume. When I am satisfied that the object is genuine, I will write to you with the details and perhaps you would care to drop by next time you are in town? It is always a joy to see you.
The letter was signed by a John Moore. Looking at the accompanying bill, Josephine found it easy to believe that his joy was genuine; she was astonished by how much Hester had been willing to pay for what seemed to her a perfectly ordinary book. It was a nice edition, illustrated with a series of elegant engravings, but the binding was scuffed and worn and the flyleaf – inscribed by a vicar whose name Josephine could not quite make out – suggested nothing more out of the ordinary than a Sunday school prize. Hester had valued it, though, and the delay in its dispatch mattered more than the bookseller could have known. It saddened Josephine to think that her godmother would never see something that she had obviously coveted. Although Gothic novels were hardly her cup of tea, she resolved to keep it to read. One day.
Tempting as it was to while away the day looking through Hester’s book collection, Josephine resisted. There was work to be done upstairs which she wasn’t looking forward to, and the sooner she made a start, the better. Other than setting aside some financial papers to leave with John MacDonald when she was back in Inverness, she made no attempt to sort through the mound of post or to rationalise the chaos under Hester’s bed; instead, she put it all in a box to deal with next time, and shut it away in the small end room where it was at least out of sight. It took her the rest of the day to scrub the floorboards upstairs, clean the windows and make up a comfortable bed in Hester’s old room. By the time she had finished, late into the evening, she was ready to fall into it.
4
The climbing rose put up a good fight, but eventually Josephine cleared enough of its branches away to free the scullery window. She picked up the debris, cursing as the thorns caught her hands, and was about to take it round to the back when she heard the click of the front gate. A woman – smartly dressed and around her own age – was peering through the study window, and there was a bicycle propped up against the hedge.
‘Ah! You are here – splendid. Thought I’d had a wasted trip.’ The woman advanced towards Josephine with her hand outstretched. ‘Hilary Lampton. Vicar’s wife, for my sins – quite literally, I sometimes think. I was hoping you might give me a few lines for the parish newsletter.’ She must have seen Josephine’s face fall because she added: ‘I know. We’re a dreadful breed but, if it helps, I wasn’t born to it and I’m generally thought to fall rather short of the mark. We’ll have some tea, shall we? I’ve left the children with their father so there’s plenty of time. I love them dearly, of course I do, but it’s so nice
to pretend they’re someone else’s for a while.’ All of this was said in a single breath, and she was inside the cottage before Josephine had a chance to argue. ‘Gosh, it’s changed since I was last here. You have been busy.’
Josephine looked round the only room she hadn’t touched, and was distracted from expressing a polite interest in the vicar’s children. ‘Changed in what way?’
‘Emptier. It’s been a couple of years since I was here, I suppose. It was when Miss Larkspur got a part in that film – something for the bloody newsletter again. I don’t remember exactly, but she had some lovely things – paintings, antique furniture, that sort of stuff. We all have different tastes, though, don’t we? And there’s much more space now.’ The compliment was recompense for an imagined faux pas and Josephine opened her mouth to explain, but Hilary had moved on for both of them. ‘Madeira,’ she said, bouncing a cake onto the table. ‘Don’t worry – I didn’t bake it myself. One of Stephen’s parishioners sent it over. I’ve no idea which one. So many women in the village are desperate to look after him and I’m not sure he needs me at all – but it does mean there’s always something to pop round with.’ She looked doubtfully at the cake and moved it to a different angle. ‘Bit bashed from the basket but I’m sure it’ll taste all right.’
It took Josephine a moment or two to catch up with the way in which her peace had been shattered, and only when her guest sat down and beamed expectantly at her did she remember that she was supposed to be boiling the kettle. ‘I see you’ve caught the bug,’ Hilary said into the pause, picking up the copy of the melodrama that Josephine had got out to read. ‘Funny how it does that to incomers. I was exactly the same when I moved here, but people who are born in the village don’t give a hoot about the Red Barn murder.’
‘So I’ve noticed. I made the mistake of asking about it in the shop.’