by Nicola Upson
Marta looked sceptical. ‘I know it’s all a bit strange and mysterious, but there is a simpler explanation for those last-minute doubts. Perhaps she was frightened of your knowing what she’d become. From what you’ve said to me, she was obviously quite something in her heyday and we all want to be remembered for our finest hour. She must have known that the state of the cottage would give her away. Perhaps all that stuff about your deciding what was important was just an elaborate way of telling you to remember how she lived and all she achieved.’ She smiled provocatively at Josephine. ‘Are you sure you’re working on the right biography? Couldn’t the Scottish chap wait?’
‘I’ve accepted money for the Scottish chap, God help me.’
‘All the same, you should think about it. Hester’s life interwoven with the character she played and that murder you told me about. Wouldn’t that be an interesting book?’
‘Yes, it would,’ Josephine admitted, warming to the idea. ‘I can only imagine how that would go down round here, though. A celebration of Maria Marten, on stage and in real life.’
‘Well, maybe that’s what Hester wanted – a tribute to them both. In which case, she could hardly have left her secrets in better hands. And it would be good for you, too – a way of working through the strangeness of all this and getting Hester out of your system.’ She looked curiously at Josephine. ‘Why are you smiling at me like that?’
‘Because I’m so pleased to see you.’ She took the drink from Marta’s hand and drew her into a long, intense kiss. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Now let’s forget all about Hester and Maria, and go and eat.’
They took the long way round the garden to the house. ‘I’m not surprised you’re having trouble,’ Marta said, bending down to smell the roses. ‘She’s still here.’
‘You sense that too?’
‘Yes, very much. She’s everywhere.’
‘I thought it was just me. I didn’t want to say anything for fear of sounding like the vicar’s wife. She dropped in with a Madeira cake and left a stream of ghosts and spectres in her wake. Apparently, they’ve got a headless horse at the rectory. I don’t really feel I can compete with just the odd faded memory and a nightmare or two.’
‘They’re far worse, if you ask me – you can choose not to believe in the headless horse. No, I don’t mean that Hester’s hovering in that room in a white sheet, unable to rest until you’ve sorted her paperwork. But houses hold traces, don’t they? Happy or sad. At least, I hope they do. We must make a mark somehow while we’re here, or what’s the point? Hester hasn’t given up the cottage yet, and she won’t unless you help her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You need to make it yours, Josephine. If you want to keep it – and I think you do – you need to sort through Hester’s stuff, get rid of what you don’t want and fill it with things you do. Like I said, it’s time we went shopping. Have a good time with the Scottish chap’s cheque. Where’s the nearest town with decent shops?’
‘Bury St Edmunds, I suppose, or Ipswich.’
‘Right. Choose one of them, and we’ll go tomorrow.’
‘If we went to Bury, we could visit the museum that Hester left some things to in her will.’
‘What have I just said? You need a day off from Hester. We’ll go to Ipswich.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting a pilgrimage,’ Josephine said, laughing at Marta’s impatience. ‘I found some sets and props from the melodrama in the garage, and I wondered if the museum would like them to add to its Red Barn collection. They’ll only gather dust if they stay here.’
‘Excellent – Bury it is, then. I’m all in favour of anything that encourages Miss Larkspur to move over a bit.’ She caught Josephine’s hand by the door. ‘Why don’t you show me that room before we eat? You shouldn’t let anything spoil this for you, and you might feel better about it if you faced up to it.’
It was the last thing Josephine wanted, although she appreciated what Marta was trying to do. ‘I know what you mean and I’d love you to be here when I do it, but not now. It’s not how I want to spend our first night.’ She held Marta’s hand against her own cheek and kissed her palm. ‘If you feel short-changed on the tour of the bedroom, though, dinner can wait.’
Later, Josephine lay awake for a long time, watching Marta as she slept, freed now from the shyness she still felt whenever her gaze was returned. The candlelight flickered on Marta’s face, emphasising her cheekbones and the lines at the corners of her eyes, giving her hair the radiant gold of sunlight on snow. The closeness they shared was something that Josephine had never wanted with anyone until now, man or woman, and the strength of her own feelings astonished her. Marta turned over in her sleep, and as her hand found Josephine’s body next to her, she smiled; the response was entirely unconscious, an innate expression of happiness and trust, and it moved Josephine more deeply than any words could have done. ‘I love you,’ she murmured into Marta’s hair, hoping that – even in sleep – Marta would know how much she meant it.
9
Bury St Edmunds had a peaceful, settled spirit that delighted Josephine from the moment they got there. As they drove towards the centre, she was astonished by how much of its original character it seemed to have preserved, not just in two great churches and some impressive monastic ruins, but in open squares and tiny lanes packed with houses from every age but the current one. The town had a quiet confidence and a beauty that came entirely from its sense of history: Josephine looked in admiration at the ruins of the Abbey, incorporated easily into everyday life with great pillars in domestic lawns and modern roofs built onto ancient flint walls, and it occurred to her that Bury could teach Polstead a thing or two about finding a peace with its past.
They parked on Angel Hill, a large square in front of the Abbey gate, and asked directions to the museum. ‘I’m not sure I’m entirely cut out for rural isolation,’ Josephine admitted, feeling instantly at home in the bustle of a country town. ‘This is lovely.’
Marta nodded. ‘It is nice. I bet they’ve even got electricity.’
Moyse’s Hall was tucked neatly into the corner of the market square, a twelfth-century building whose walls seemed to offer more knowledge of the town’s history than any number of deliberately fashioned exhibits ever could. ‘Do you want to go shopping while I get this done?’ Josephine asked, knowing how much the sort of artefacts on display would upset Marta.
‘No, I’ll come in with you. I’d like to see what Hester gave them and get a sense of who she was.’
‘They’re not the only things on display, Marta. There are exhibits from the real murder, too, details of the execution.’
‘I know what you’re trying to do and it’s kind of you, but I don’t need protecting, Josephine. I’ve become an expert in knowing what I can cope with and what I can’t. Anyway, this was years ago. It’s completely different.’
The only time Marta ever spoke to her like that was on this subject, and Josephine knew it was pointless to argue. She gave up and walked over to Moyse’s Hall, wishing she had thought more carefully and insisted on going to Ipswich. There was a small admissions desk just inside the door, and she smiled at the woman on duty. ‘I should have telephoned first,’ she said apologetically, ‘but I’m here about the items that Hester Larkspur gave to the museum.’
‘Ah, yes. They’re just behind you. All the Red Barn artefacts are together in that section.’
Josephine turned and saw that the murder occupied pride of place at the front of the museum. One of Hester’s Maria Marten costumes was on a mannequin in the centre of the display, and it sat incongruously next to what she assumed was Corder’s death mask, bringing the romance of the stage entertainment into stark contrast with the story’s grim reality. She explained her purpose in more detail, and the woman seemed intrigued. ‘You’ll need to talk to Mr Andrews, the curator. If you don’t mind waiting a moment, I’ll see if he’s free.’
‘I don’t want to interrupt him. It’s rather a spur-of-the-
moment visit, so I’m happy to make an appointment if necessary.’
‘No, no – I’m sure he’ll be only too pleased to meet you.’
She returned almost immediately, her optimism vindicated, and Marta and Josephine followed her up to the first floor. Josephine’s surprise at the man who greeted them said more about her own prejudices than it did about the qualifications necessary to run a museum: experience had taught her to expect curators to be contemporary with at least some of the exhibits they watched over, but this one was barely more than thirty.
‘How lovely of you to come,’ he said, looking up from a case of gargoyles. ‘I’m Henry Andrews, and this is my sister, Sybil.’
The woman he introduced sat by the window, a sketchbook on her lap. She waved, but did not get up for fear of knocking over the pots of brushes and paints that she had balanced precariously on the ledge in front of her. ‘I hope you’re not offering him anything too grisly,’ she said, smiling. ‘We’ve got enough body parts in this museum already and I don’t think . . .’
The rest of what she said was lost in a barrage of hammering from outside, and Andrews showed them through to a tiny office where the windows were shut fast against the noise. ‘They’re building a cinema just behind us,’ he explained wearily, ‘and they’ve only just started. I think it’s going to be a long year. Now – I understand you’re Hester’s niece.’
‘Her goddaughter. We’re not related and I never knew her, but she was my mother’s closest friend.’
‘I only met her a few times myself, but she was an amazing lady,’ he said, with genuine warmth. ‘Very knowledgeable about the history of the area, as incomers often are, and incredibly passionate about Maria Marten.’
Something in the way he said it made Josephine smile. ‘Obsessed, you mean?’
He laughed. ‘I didn’t say that. Obsession is just a word people use to describe passion if they’re not interested in the subject, but I know what you mean and I think it would be fair to say that very few people knew more about the Red Barn murder than Hester.’ The familiarity with which he referred to her godmother interested Josephine, but it didn’t surprise her; although not conventionally handsome, Henry Andrews had a warmth and charm that made him instantly attractive, and that – coupled with his interest in her favourite subject – would no doubt have appealed to Hester and disposed her to be generous. ‘I’ll never forget going to Polstead to collect the items she lent us,’ he said, unprompted. ‘She gave me a whole education in one afternoon – an education, and some very fine sherry.’
‘When was that?’
‘Three or four years ago, not long after I’d taken over here. I was born in Bury but I’ve spent a lot of my time in the Far East, and I didn’t know much about the murder then. I wanted to make the museum more local, though, so Hester’s offer to expand our collection of artefacts was like a gift from heaven.’
‘I bet you knew more about it by the time you left her,’ Marta said.
‘I did indeed. She gave me a guided tour of the village – Corder’s house and Maria’s, the churchyard, the site of the barn.’
‘Where did she say it was?’ Josephine asked, intrigued. ‘No one I’ve met seems entirely sure.’
‘About two-thirds of the way down the track to her cottage, as far as I can remember. She showed me some cherry trees which the people who lived there at the time had planted at that end of the house to shield themselves from the tragedy of it.’
‘How on earth could she know that?’ Josephine asked, bringing the trees to mind but unable to keep a sceptical note out of her voice.
He shrugged. ‘The same way we seem to know lots of things about the Red Barn murder, I suppose: guesswork and a bit of wishful thinking. Hester was very convincing in the stories she told, of course, but it makes perfect sense. There was a lot of talk in the press of how sinister the barn seemed after the murder, desecrated by souvenir hunters and left to rot – and of course it was haunted. The villagers wouldn’t go near it at night, so I can’t imagine it was the most comfortable feeling to lie in bed and see that silhouette against a darkening sky, all creaking timbers and screaming maidens.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Josephine thought about the way in which the cottage still tenaciously hid that particular view, and wished she hadn’t pursued the subject: the last thing she needed was another reason to fear the room that Hester had died in. ‘How did it burn down?’
‘Vandalism. There was a lot of unrest among farmers in the 1840s, and the barn was a casualty of those disturbances. But going back to Hester – the quality of her collection was extraordinary. Well, you know that – it’s your collection now. I remember thinking while she was showing it to me that it was as close to living in that time as one could ever get, and that made it more than a story, somehow. The excitement of it was infectious, and it made me want to do that here. Have you seen the displays?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Come and have a look.’
He led the way downstairs, Marta following less eagerly than Josephine. ‘I’m with his sister on the body parts,’ she whispered, pulling a face. ‘If it turns out to be more fact than fiction, I’ll meet you outside when you’ve finished.’
Josephine nodded. ‘Why do you think it was so famous?’ she asked, as they walked past Etruscan tombs, bits of Egyptology and endless proud photographs of colonels from the Suffolk Regiment, Bury being – like Inverness – a garrison town.
‘Well, it’s partly because not much else was happening at the time Maria’s body was discovered – not until Burke and Hare later that year, anyway, so the coverage in both the broadsheets and the tabloids was remarkable. The supernatural element helped a lot, of course. Not many bodies had been dug up after a dream, and that gave all the melodramas an excuse to include Maria’s ghost in the story. And people like your godmother have kept the story alive: audiences see the play or hear the ballad and they want to know more.’
A family with two overexcited young boys was poring over the displays at the front of the museum, and Andrews hung back until they had finished. As she approached the glass cases, the first thing Josephine noticed – by chance or by the prominence with which it was displayed – was a section of William Corder’s scalp and ear, blackened and wrinkled now and scarcely recognisable as something that had ever belonged to a human being. Next to it was Curtis’s account of the trial, and Henry opened the book so that Josephine and Marta could read the inscription. ‘The binding of this book is the skin of the murderer William Corder,’ it said, ‘taken from his body and tanned by myself in the year 1828.’ It was signed George Creed. ‘He was the surgeon who dissected Corder’s body,’ Andrews explained. ‘They say that bits of skin were passed around the town afterwards so that people could taste it to see if it was different from normal leather. There’s a chunk of it in a Cambridge college, I believe.’ He saw the expression on Marta’s face, and sympathised. ‘I know. If I’m honest, I feel much the same way but these two items bring more people into the museum than the rest of the collections put together, so I feel obliged to make the most of them. And I live in fear of being offered Corder’s skeleton. That really would be a moral dilemma.’
Marta looked horrified. ‘Haven’t they buried him?’ she asked.
‘No. He’s on display at the hospital here. They use him for anatomy classes, and I’m told the nurses sometimes take him to dances. At one point, he was in the entrance hall with a spring in his arm that made him point to a charity box whenever someone approached.’
‘How dignified,’ Marta said, when she realised that Andrews wasn’t joking.
‘He made about £50 a year, I think. I suppose today we’d call it prisoner rehabilitation.’ He smiled, and added more seriously: ‘Corder was a rarity, I’m pleased to say. They abolished dissection as a punishment four years after he hanged.’
‘Thank God for that.’
Andrews began to remove a pair of pistols from another case. Marta squeezed Josephine’s
hand and wandered quietly off to another part of the museum. Josephine watched her, concerned about how she must feel and sorry that they had come here at all. ‘These are the guns that Corder was supposed to have used that day. See – they removed the hammers before the trial so they couldn’t be discharged by mistake in court.’
Josephine tried to concentrate on what Andrews was telling her, and looked at the pistols in surprise: they were only about six inches long, and seemed barely capable of harming anyone. ‘He claimed Maria shot herself, didn’t he?’ she said, remembering the line of defence that Curtis had reported.
‘At first, yes. But it was unclear how she had died – that’s why they charged him with ten counts, so he couldn’t get off on a technicality. It made legal history. But he denied stabbing her right to the end; he said the stab wounds were made afterwards, when they were prodding about the barn floor, looking for her body. That’s feasible, because she was only nine inches or so below the surface. This is what they’re supposed to have used. It was her father’s.’
He pointed to a mole spud, and Josephine shuddered when she thought of how Thomas Marten must have felt when he uncovered his daughter’s rotting body. The other items on display were less sensational, but somehow more evocative: a horn lantern, used to find the body; a snuffbox in the shape of a shoe, made out of wood from the Red Barn; and a pair of box irons belonging to Maria, the only thing that testified to her life rather than her death. ‘There’s not much about the real Maria here, is there?’ she said. ‘That’s not a criticism. I just find it interesting that history tends to remember the murderer and not the victim, while the melodramas all seem to celebrate her name.’
‘I know exactly what you mean.’ He grinned at her, and Josephine sensed that she had given him the opportunity he was waiting for; when it came, his pitch was both charming and shameless. ‘Of course, you could put that right if you would ever consider loaning the rest of Hester’s collection to the museum. We’d take very good care of it, and it would rather redress the imbalance to have more of Maria’s things on display.’