by Nicola Upson
Wide awake now, she went downstairs and lit the oil lamp in the study, using its reflection in the window as a comforting shield against the darkness outside. A pile of scrapbooks had toppled over onto the floor, and she opened the nearest one, delighted by the photographs of Hester in a series of contrasting roles. The year was 1901, the theatre a very different place from the modern stage, but it was a world that she could just about remember, and it was captured perfectly here: soft gas lamps, so like natural light; backcloths painted in a slapdash style and tattered around the edges; fumes from the warm, yellow footlights, creating a veil in front of the actors, and making them remote and mysterious to the audience. The scrapbook finished with a pantomime, Babes in the Wood, and she caught her breath when she reached the final picture, taken backstage and labelled simply ‘Christmas, Inverness’. Hester was dressed as Robin Hood, but she had removed the feathered hat and given it to the little girl in her lap, and Josephine did not need to see the reflection in the dressing-room mirror to know that her mother had taken the photograph. The memory that had nagged at her in John MacDonald’s office began to take shape: the house lights fading to a glimmer as the leader of the orchestra drew soft, shivering music from his men; the curtain rolling up to reveal the actors’ feet, then their knees, then their faces, and finally the whole scene – all so magical to a five-year-old. Afterwards, her mother had taken her hand and led her round to the stage door, and she could still recall the bustle and laughter of the dressing room, the excitement of being allowed into a world that was out of bounds to ordinary people. She felt it to this day, even though she had earned her right to be backstage in any theatre, and she realised now that Hester’s legacy to her was more than bricks and mortar.
Gently, she removed the photograph from the page and turned it over. Sure enough, there was her mother’s handwriting, a mild admonishment to a friend to come home more often. She looked again at the happiness on Hester’s face and the loving way in which she held her goddaughter, and knew her for the first time as more than a ghost. In her mind, she could hear Hester’s laughter, the sweetness of her voice, but it was impossible to know after so many years if it was a genuine memory or an obliging trick of the imagination, conjured up to soften the longing for all she had missed – all those years when she could have got to know Hester properly, perhaps even shared the grief of her mother’s death. She tucked the picture in Curtis’s book, which she had found and packed for the train, saddened by the knowledge of moments gone – precious moments, and she not there to see them.
6
Glancing through the window of Stewart, Rule & Co., Josephine marvelled at the deception practised by any decent secretary. The ability to go unnoticed was an essential requirement amongst a certain type of professional woman, and Jane Peck – small, quiet, faded Jane Peck – had excellent credentials: very few people would have given her a second glance, but in the tidy, unambitious world of Stewart, Rule & Co. she was a giant, and Josephine’s experience of the firm over the years had shown very clearly who kept it going.
The secretary looked up as she heard the door, and smiled at her visitor across a modest, organised desk. ‘How lovely to see you, Miss Tey – and congratulations. I hear your new book is to be made into a film. Your father told me all about it while I was shopping the other day.’
Of course he did, Josephine thought, picturing the pride on her father’s face as he piled fruit into the basket of a captive audience. Normally she would have been embarrassed, but Miss Peck loved theatre and had shown a genuine interest in her work over the years, and she was one of the few people in Inverness whose good wishes could be taken at face value. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘although I’ve no idea if I’ll still be pleased when I’ve seen it. My meeting with Mr Hitchcock wasn’t without its surprises.’ That was an understatement, but she saw little point in disturbing the calm routine of the office with anything more. ‘I’ve brought some papers for Mr MacDonald to look through.’
Miss Peck took the envelope from her and placed it on the desk with the rest of the morning’s post. ‘He’s busy with a client at the moment, but I’ll give them to him as soon as he’s free.’
‘They’re not urgent – just some bank books and financial bits and pieces from Miss Larkspur’s cottage. He asked me to look out for them while I was there.’
In a rare display of curiosity, Miss Peck seized her moment. ‘We’ve been longing to know how you got on,’ she admitted. ‘Do you mind if I ask how you found the cottage?’
‘It’s winning me over gradually,’ Josephine said, happy to indulge a glimmer of human curiosity from someone whose discretion she had always believed to be flawless to the point of indecent. ‘It’s in need of some love and it’s far more isolated than I expected, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I’ve only met a few of the locals, but I think we’ll take a while to get used to each other.’
Miss Peck nodded, apparently knowing exactly what she meant. ‘The best way to deal with any village is to go about your business and keep your head down,’ she said. In Josephine’s opinion, it was a strategy that needn’t be confined to village life, but she kept her thoughts to herself. ‘And what sort of state is the house in?’ Miss Peck asked. ‘Were you able to stay there?’
‘Yes, although I was tempted to flee to something on your list for comfort. Let’s just say I got through an awful lot of bleach and I’ve taken out shares in ant powder.’
The secretary laughed, and gestured to the envelope that Josephine had brought with her. ‘Well, at least you’ve made good progress in sorting through Miss Larkspur’s papers. That must be a great weight off your mind.’
‘To be honest, I’ve barely scratched the surface. I swear there’s enough material there for three lifetimes, not one.’
‘It’s a very kind thing that you do,’ Miss Peck said, and her sudden seriousness took Josephine by surprise. ‘A decent thing. Sorting through someone’s effects after a death can be distressing. We all do it as a duty, but not many of us would volunteer.’
She spoke from the heart, and Josephine remembered that she had had her own bereavement in recent months, a brother to whom she had been devoted and whose care throughout a long illness had fallen to her, the unmarried daughter of the family. ‘I was sorry to hear about your loss,’ she said.
‘Thank you, but it was expected.’
It was the standard response from someone whose grief was still too raw to cope with kindness; Josephine had used it herself for months after her mother’s death. In Miss Peck’s case, she suspected that the sorrow of the loss itself was beginning to blur with a more complex mourning for sacrifices that had been asked of her own life. Josephine could only imagine the pain of acknowledging those lost, unreclaimable years, no matter how freely they had been given – although in time there was a chance she would know exactly how that felt. ‘It must be difficult,’ she said gently. ‘When you’ve cared for someone for a long time, it’s hard to find yourself again.’
She wondered if she had overstepped the mark with someone she barely knew, but Jane Peck seemed grateful for the understanding. ‘I was certainly glad to come back to work,’ she admitted. ‘Giving this job up during those final months, when Cameron needed me all the time, was like losing my last hold on a normal life. It was good of Mr MacDonald to let me come back.’ She glanced affectionately at the closed office door. ‘It certainly keeps me occupied.’
Josephine allowed Miss Peck her pride, and wished that she did not know from gossip in the town that the secretary needed more than something to do. A woman of her age – late fifties, Josephine guessed, although she could not remember a time when Jane Peck had looked any different – should not have to work, but financial security was just one of the casualties of illness. ‘I’m sure the firm was only too pleased to have you back,’ she said, hoping not to sound as patronising as she felt.
‘It does feel as though we’ve never been apart, I must say, and that makes things easier. And I wa
s pleased to see your father looking so well.’
There was an implied solidarity in the comment, a comparison of their respective situations that Josephine resented but could not entirely dismiss. The knowledge of how her life would change if her father’s health deteriorated was something she tried to push from her mind, although it often visited her late at night, when sleep was elusive. Was that how people would look at her? she wondered. With the same well-intentioned pity she felt for Miss Peck? ‘Yes, he’s very well,’ she said firmly, as if she could will it to continue indefinitely.
Her defensiveness was obvious and Miss Peck respected it by turning back to business. ‘Anyway, what I was going to say was that if you change your mind and decide you’ve taken on too much after all, just let Mr MacDonald know and he’ll pay someone out of the estate to clear the cottage.’
Josephine nodded. ‘That’s kind of you, but I’m afraid I’m already hooked. Apart from anything else, I’ve started to come across things that my mother sent to Hester, and I couldn’t possibly let a stranger dispose of those.’
‘No, of course not. I understand.’ She thought for a moment, then added: ‘An unlikely friendship, I always thought. They were so different. Sometimes that helps, though, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose so,’ Josephine said. One of the things she hated most about living in a small town was this shared history amongst families: in Inverness, people always seemed to know each other well enough to have an opinion, but never well enough for it to be accurate. As far as she could tell, her mother and Hester had shared a sense of fun and independence, a love for those closest to them, which made them obvious companions.
‘Your mother must have missed her dreadfully when she left,’ Miss Peck continued. ‘Still, it was the right thing for Miss Larkspur, no doubt. It left her free to have a life of her own, and she certainly made the most of it.’ The words were positive enough, but they carried a note of resentment that Josephine had often heard in the voices of women whose lives bound them to Inverness; she herself was a peculiar hybrid of captive and deserter, fitting comfortably into neither camp, and she was glad when the telephone gave her an excuse not to respond. She waited patiently while Miss Peck dealt with the call, thinking about the expectations that her mother and Hester must have had placed on them when they were young. Her own family had once entertained the notion that she might enter into an understanding with the local gunsmith’s son, and she had had to disillusion them with a phrase that contained the words ‘dead’ and ‘body’; it must have been so much worse for an earlier generation of women, who had not had the barbed encouragement of war to persuade them of their own worth. Hester had rebelled, but, as far as she knew, her mother had always been happy with the quieter life she had chosen in her home town. Perhaps Miss Peck had been right after all: it was their differences that made them close.
‘Has Lucy Kyte turned up yet?’ she asked as the secretary replaced the receiver.
Miss Peck hesitated. ‘Not to my knowledge, no,’ she said, and her tone implied that Josephine was putting her in a difficult position by asking about a part of Hester’s will that did not concern her.
‘I’m surprised she didn’t make herself known at the funeral. Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. Mr MacDonald said that you spoke to Tod Slaughter?’
‘That’s right. He was charming once I’d got used to how tall he is.’
Josephine smiled. ‘Did he say anything about why Hester pulled out of the Maria Marten film?’
‘No, but to be fair I didn’t ask him. He made a very gracious speech about working with Miss Larkspur and Mr Paget at the Elephant and Castle, but when I spoke to him afterwards he spent most of the time telling me about his garden. Do you know him?’ Josephine shook her head. ‘Well, I rather got the impression he prefers plants to actors these days.’
‘There are times when I’m inclined to agree with him.’ She looked at Miss Peck, who seemed not to have heard the last comment. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘No, it’s just that you’ve got me thinking now – about Lucy Kyte and the funeral.’
‘Oh?’
‘There was a woman at the church. Let me see – it was after the service, and I was in a group of people listening to Sybil Thorndike. She was saying what a versatile actress Miss Larkspur was, and how impressive she was when they were in The Old Women together in the early twenties. Did you see it?’
‘No. I was working away at the time, and I didn’t get to see much theatre.’
Miss Peck shuddered. ‘It was a horrible little play – a whole evening of horrible little plays, if I remember rightly. There was a scene in it where a young girl had her eyes gouged out with a needle. Not my cup of tea, at all.’
‘And the woman?’ Josephine prompted.
‘Oh yes. She came up to us and I thought it was Miss Thorndike she wanted to speak to, but then she started asking me about the cottage.’
‘What did she want to know?’
‘Oh, what was going to happen to it, who was going to live there now.’ She saw the look on Josephine’s face and was quick to reassure her. ‘I didn’t mention you, of course. I thought at the time that she was just one of Miss Larkspur’s fans, come to pay her respects, but I suppose there could have been more to it.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Quite ordinary, really. About my age, perhaps a bit younger; dark-haired and slim, smartly dressed, but not extravagant. I wish I could remember her name, but I’m not sure that she even introduced herself.’
‘It’s probably not important,’ Josephine said, getting up to go. ‘I’m sure Lucy Kyte would have made herself known if she’d been there. This woman is far more likely to be a fan, as you say, or even someone from the village who was curious about her new neighbour.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She smiled. ‘Anyway, I’ll tell Mr MacDonald your news and let him have these right away.’
‘Thank you. I’m going back to Suffolk in a few days’ time, so if there’s anything else I think he should see, I’ll bring it back with me.’
‘Excellent. Enjoy it, and do get in touch if there’s anything we can help with.’
Josephine thought about the long days of tidying and sorting that still lay ahead of her at Red Barn Cottage. ‘Be careful what you offer,’ she warned. ‘I might just take you up on it.’
7
The first thing Josephine noticed when she arrived back at Red Barn Cottage was that someone had repaired the study window. She looked at the new pane of glass, unsettled by the idea of strangers coming and going in her absence, and wondered if it was churlish of her to feel that all Bert’s acts of kindness were a little ‘off’. It had to be Bert – his wife was the only person who knew it needed fixing – and she should have been grateful, but that in itself irritated. Perhaps the row with Hester had stemmed from the same thing: feeling ever more beholden to someone for unsolicited favours might easily have exasperated her godmother sufficiently to break off all contact. She would probably never find out, but whatever had gone on in the past, Josephine knew that if Bert’s wife was aware of his latest good deed, her name would be mud in the Willis household.
She got the fire under way in the range and laid out some good intentions of her own on the table: a few carefully selected research books for the biography of Claverhouse. Set against old photo albums and boxes of Hester’s correspondence, The Scots Peerage, The Despot’s Champion, and learned volumes by Barrington, Morris and Sanford Terry looked even less inviting than they had at home, and she wondered how long it would be before one of them was opened. Hours of travelling had made her too restless to read, so she left the cottage and set out over the fields, eager to see how the countryside had changed without her.
It was one of those soft September evenings, where the distinction between summer and autumn is lost. The dark green of the woodland was broken by the first telltale threads of gold, and the harvest was almost complete: sheaves of corn
stood abandoned, like the forgotten tents of a retreating army, and the industry of the day – an industry to which the whole cycle of the year was geared – had been replaced by stillness. Chance rather than purpose led Josephine towards Maria Marten’s cottage, but, when she realised where she was, she lingered by an obliging gap in the trees, her interest in the case intensified by the somewhat lurid account she had read while back in Inverness. James Curtis had used all the tricks of his profession to lift the story to the status of legend, but neither the sensationalism nor the moralising could completely obscure what was, essentially, a very human tragedy, and Josephine looked in fascination at the house Maria had left one midday in May to walk to her death. The cottage was shabby and neglected, and it occurred to Josephine that the handful of pristine houses around the village green was hardly typical of Polstead or of the area in general; Suffolk was an agricultural county whose fortunes had declined with the industry, and she had noticed from the train today how few of its farm buildings looked prosperous or even well kept. Like Red Barn Cottage, the house stood as it was built, a typical labourer’s dwelling with nothing to distinguish it except the woman who had once lived there; it was modest in size, four rooms or five at the most, and Josephine could imagine how claustrophobic it must have been for Maria, living not only with her parents, siblings and a son of her own, but with the weight of her family’s disapproval and the shame of her situation. No wonder she had aimed high, to use Hilary’s phrase.