by Nicola Upson
And then she smelt the smoke again. It was faint, but not so faint that she could blame it on her imagination, and she realised that it must be after midnight. Boxing Day – the anniversary of the fire at the Red Barn, the day on which those terrible events would be played out again in some other life or time that she didn’t understand. Outside, she heard footsteps. She backed further into the corner of the room, doubting now her own sense of reality, but there it was again: the soft but unmistakable crunch of snow underfoot. Instinctively, she looked to the window that was no longer there, but now she did not need a view of the field where the barn had stood: she could see the silhouetted figure so clearly in her mind, hurrying back to the cottage in the darkness, oblivious still to the damage she had done. When it came, the thundering on the door was louder than anything she could have imagined. Josephine crouched to the floor, her hands over her ears, but still the pounding continued. Then suddenly it stopped, and the silence was worse. She heard Lucy moving about in the rooms below, heard her footsteps on the stairs, and wept tears of frustration and despair because she knew at any moment she would be brought face to face with the darkness that had lain dormant in the cottage for so long. Lost to everything but her own fear, she did not stop to question why the voice calling her name was somehow comforting.
‘Jesus, Josephine, what on earth is going on? Didn’t you hear me? Are you all right?’
Marta was beside her, holding her close, before Josephine’s mind could catch up with her imagination; somehow, she seemed less real than the ghost Josephine had feared and it took her a moment to trust in what she saw. Then she clung to Marta as if her life depended on it, scarcely able to tell if the trembling that shook them both was the terror from her own body or the deathly cold from Marta’s. There was snow on her coat and in her hair, and the shock of its chill brought Josephine to her senses a little. ‘I thought you were Lucy,’ she stammered, neither knowing nor caring how ridiculous she sounded.
‘Why would she be knocking? God, a girl could freeze to death waiting for you to come to the door.’ She spoke gently, trying to ease Josephine out of her panic with humour.
‘But I thought it was the barn. I could smell smoke.’
‘The room’s full of smoke downstairs. When was the last time you had your chimneys swept?’ Marta took Josephine’s face in her hands. ‘There’s only one person stupid enough to come looking for you on a night like this. I might be as cold as the dead, but I’m not a ghost. What’s happened, Josephine? Why were you so frightened?’
‘It’s Lucy Kyte. I think her body is in that chest. Her child, too, probably.’
‘What?’ Marta looked back over her shoulder. ‘Good God, you’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Marta listened while Josephine explained where the chest had come from and what she had read in the diary. ‘She’s been here all this time. I’m wandering round with Christmas decorations and she’s up here in a box.’
The true horror of what she had been living with was only now beginning to dawn on Josephine, and Marta tried to calm her down. ‘Hang on – we don’t know that for sure. You haven’t looked, have you?’
‘No. I was going to, but then I came back up here and the lid was open. I know I closed it.’
‘It can’t just have opened by itself.’
‘Who said anything about opening by itself?’ Josephine snapped. ‘You weren’t here.’ It wasn’t meant to sound like an accusation; she still had no idea what miracle had brought Marta to her door – she was just happy that it had. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. But I’m sure I closed it.’
‘All right.’ Marta reached inside her coat and took out a hip flask. ‘Thank God I brought this for the snow. Your festive hospitality leaves a lot to be desired so far.’ She smiled and offered the flask to Josephine, then swallowed the rest of the whisky herself. ‘Right. I’ll look.’
‘No you won’t. I’ll do it.’
Marta caught Josephine’s arm. ‘I’m not going to stand here and argue about who gets to see the bones first. We’ll do it together.’
Marta moved some candles over to the corner to give more light, and Josephine took a deep breath and lifted the lid. The layers of material were faded and frayed, but one of them was still recognisable as a bedspread. Gently, Marta lifted the fabric and pulled it to one side. Lucy lay wrapped in the quilt that she had sewn with such love for her husband. Her body was doubled up, her head turned to the side, and Josephine stared down at the pathetic collection of bones, the strands of hair still matted to the skull, remembering how Lucy had felt when she saw Maria’s remains in court. Lucy had never been flesh and blood to Josephine, only a voice speaking out from the past, but still she felt some of that pain and that anger at a life so easily cut short. The chest had been lined with sheets, stained dark with blood from the birth or discoloured later as her body rotted away, and some of Lucy’s possessions – an inkstand and the trinket box Samuel had made for her – had been put in with her, a parody of a much grander burial. If they looked further, Josephine was sure that they would find the tiny body of Lucy’s son, but she had seen all that she could bear and it had told them enough. She looked away, and Marta carefully covered Lucy’s face.
Josephine closed the chest, then took a bunch of holly from one of the beams in the bedroom and laid it on the lid, a gesture of remembrance that was nearly a hundred years too late. It was a long time before either of them spoke. ‘What do you think we should do?’ Marta asked eventually.
‘Wait until the morning, I suppose, then go to the rectory. I can telephone Archie from there. Someone will have to take Lucy away, but he’ll know who to call. Then I’d like Stephen to come back and bless her body. I’m not sure I believe in any of that, but it seems the right thing to do.’ Marta shivered, and Josephine took her hand. ‘Come on. You need to get warm.’
She took the blankets off the bed and they went downstairs to the study, both of them glad to be out of the room and as far from it as possible. Josephine poured Marta a drink and built the fire up for her, then left her reading Lucy’s diary while she warmed some soup. When she went back, the journal was put to one side and Marta had obviously been crying. ‘What a wretched fucking life,’ she said quietly. ‘No wonder she needs peace. Do you think Hester knew?’
‘I don’t see how she could have.’ Josephine put the tray down on the floor and sat next to Marta by the fire, pulling the blanket over them both. ‘She would have done something about it, I’m sure. I don’t know whether to wish she could have known the whole story when she felt so drawn to Lucy, or to be glad she was spared the grief.’ She handed Marta a mug of soup. ‘I don’t know how you managed to get here, but I’m so relieved you did.’
‘Well, I wasn’t too worried at first. We didn’t have much snow, but it can change so quickly within a few hundred yards. And anyway, I knew you’d use the slightest flurry as an excuse to miss the party.’ Josephine smiled, but couldn’t argue. ‘Then I started thinking about that bloody Peck woman and what she’d done to Hester. I got it into my head that she might come back here and try to hurt you, so I had to know that you were all right.’
‘You shouldn’t have risked it, though.’
‘Believe me – the bigger risk was to stay. I got out just as everyone else was moving on to Dodie’s for a festive sing-song.’
Josephine laughed, mostly from relief at what she had missed. ‘But what if you’d had an accident?’
‘The snow wasn’t very deep until Stoke, and even after that the main road had been cleared a bit. I got as far as I could, then dumped the car and walked the last mile or so.’
‘Thank you – I mean that, Marta. I thought I was going mad. It must have been exactly how Hester felt.’ Josephine stared into the flames, remembering everything that had happened. ‘How ridiculous of me to think that I could gloss over all that pain with a bit of building work.’ She smiled sadly. ‘It wasn’t quite the way you were supposed to get your Chris
tmas present.’
‘Nice bath, though.’ Marta’s grin faded, and she spoke more seriously. ‘Look, Josephine – I’m not making light of this. God knows, I saw how frightened you were. But don’t underestimate what you’ve done. You haven’t glossed over anything – you wouldn’t let Hester’s death go, and now you’re about to give Lucy the peace she’s never had. This cottage will thank you for that, I know it will. It will make you happy.’
‘Make us happy.’
Marta smiled. ‘It occurred to me while I was reading the diary, though – will they bury Lucy in the churchyard if they know what she did?’
The thought had not crossed Josephine’s mind. ‘Why wouldn’t they? What happened to Molly was an accident, and anyway, Stephen’s not like that. He strikes me as a very compassionate man.’
‘It might not be his decision, though. From what you say, there’s been enough trouble about having Maria Marten in the graveyard, and she’s the victim. Do you honestly think people will turn a blind eye to another murder? Or manslaughter, if we want to be pedantic about it. Perhaps we should make sure.’
‘What are you suggesting?’ She followed Marta’s gaze to the final volume of the journal. ‘Now that we’ve finally got to the truth, you think we should destroy it?’
‘Only the end of it. The rest should stay with her body to help identify her. I’ll do it, if you can’t.’
‘But if the diary’s incomplete, everyone will think that Samuel killed her.’
‘Not necessarily. We can’t say for sure what really happened – how can they?’
‘Even so, shouldn’t we tell the truth and rely on people to understand why she did what she did?’ Marta looked sceptical, and Josephine knew she was right. Lucy had suffered enough for her mistake. Without giving herself time to reconsider she tore the final pages from the diary and put them on the fire, watching as the flames refashioned a history and a justice of their own.
26
Lucy Kyte was laid to rest with her son in February, when the frost made the early spring flowers sparkle on the ground like coloured glass. The church was shrouded in silence, and only the birds in the ivy – sensing the end of a long winter – disturbed the stillness of the air as a band of mourners followed the coffin outside to the grave. Lucy’s story seemed to have touched the village in a way that its more famous history could not, and Josephine was moved to see how many people had come to give her the respect she had waited so long for. Her grave was close to both Samuel’s and Maria’s, but Josephine hoped that she would not be torn between them in death as she had been in life, and that Lucy’s peace – if that’s what it now was – would prove enough for them all. She would bring roses in time, for Lucy and for Maria, but today she put snowdrops on the coffin, remembering what Lucy had written in her diary about their being either the last flower of winter or the first of spring. This time, she hoped they might stand for both an end and a beginning.
When the final prayers had been said, the mourners dispersed to visit their own dead. Josephine was not the only person to have brought flowers for Maria, she noticed, and she laid her snowdrops next to the daffodils that already graced the patch of ground that Stephen had pointed out to her on a foggy October morning. She looked round the churchyard, noticing how the sunlight bled across the sloping fields, touching the lower graves and blessing those who had fallen in the war, but refusing to reach as far as the Corders. The Gospel Oak was in shadow, too, and suddenly Josephine noticed a young woman standing close to its trunk, watching her. She took a few steps forward, but the woman turned and walked away in the direction of the village, disappearing for a moment behind a row of gravestones. Josephine waited for her to emerge again the other side and carry on down the path, but she was nowhere to be seen – and of all the possible explanations, Josephine knew which one she wanted to believe.
Smiling, she rescued Marta from Stephen and Hilary and they walked home along Marten’s Lane, where banks of pink and yellow primroses shone in Maria’s garden. The dead wood of winter already looked out of place, and as she opened her front gate, Josephine found herself looking forward to spring and summer at the cottage, free from all her old reservations about the future. She knew now that she would keep Hester’s gift to her, and that she and Marta could be happy there when it was possible for them to be together, living always with those who had worked and died and made love there before them – but not, any longer, in their shadow. Marta had presented her with a new nameplate for the cottage, something she had had specially made to mark the start of another phase in its history; it stood just inside the door, waiting to be put up, and Josephine could not imagine a better day to say goodbye to the Red Barn once and for all. The old piece of wood came away easily in her hand, as though the house were breathing a sigh of relief. In its place, she proudly hung the sign to Larkspur Cottage.
Author’s Note
I grew up with the story of Maria Marten and William Corder. As a child in Suffolk, I remember summer days out in Polstead with my parents, walking past Maria’s house‚ or William’s, fascinated even then by what had happened there and by the real people behind the legend. I lived a stone’s throw from Moyse’s Hall and its macabre exhibits – so thrilling and so horrifying to a little girl – and I passed the Gaol where Corder was hanged every weekend on the way to my grandmother’s house. My father sings the ballad to this day. So the Red Barn murder is the first crime story I ever knew, and I realised when I started this book that I’ve always wanted to find a different way to tell it.
The character of Lucy Kyte was inspired by three lines of testimony given at Maria Marten’s inquest and reprised at William Corder’s trial. The witness was Lucy Baalham, a servant in the Corder household, but there the similarity ends: the diary’s account of the Red Barn murder and its aftermath is based on fact, but Lucy Kyte’s personal story, her family, and all the events that take place at Red Barn Cottage are entirely fictional.
After being stripped by souvenir hunters, the Red Barn was burned down on Boxing Day, 1842, during a period of great agricultural unrest. Local newspapers report sightings of a tramp in the area on the day of the fire but, despite the offer of a generous reward, the culprit was never caught. More than a hundred years later, Red Barn Cottage was also destroyed by fire.
The melodrama of Maria Marten was first staged in the summer of 1828, while William Corder was still alive, and has been frequently performed ever since; the story has also been the basis of five films and a BBC drama. Norman Carter ‘Tod’ Slaughter (1885–1956) was the finest Corder – and arguably the finest villain of any sort – on stage or screen; his many fans included Graham Greene, whose Spectator review of the 1939 film The Face at the Window described him as ‘one of our finest living actors’. Slaughter played Corder throughout his life, often opposite his wife, Jenny Lynn, and died in his sleep a few hours after strangling Maria Marten for the last time on stage in Derby.
James Curtis’s 1828 book‚ An Authentic and Faithful History of the Mysterious Murder of Maria Marten‚ remains the most detailed account of the Red Barn murder, and was based on contemporary interviews in Polstead as well as time spent with Corder in Bury Gaol prior to his execution. In fact, Curtis became so synonymous with the case that his image was sometimes printed by mistake as the face of the killer. The murder continues to inspire new books, both fact and fiction, some of which question Corder’s guilt, and the original ballad has been reinterpreted by musicians as diverse as The Albion Country Band and Tom Waits.
Moyse’s Hall Museum still has on display a fascinating collection of artefacts relating to the Red Barn murder and its historical context, including Corder’s death mask, his scalp, and a copy of Curtis’s book bound in Corder’s skin. Other relics have come and gone, including Maria Marten’s hand, but her clothes chest is believed still to exist in private ownership. Corder’s skeleton was put on display first at the West Suffolk Hospital and then at the Royal College of Surgeons, and was removed for cremation in
2004. Maria Marten is buried in St Mary’s Church, Polstead, but her gravestone is no longer visible.
‘Josephine Tey’ is one of two pseudonyms created by Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952) during a distinguished career as playwright and novelist; the name was taken from one of her Suffolk ancestors, and first appeared in 1936. Claverhouse was published a year later and is her only work of non-fiction, although she often used historical themes as the basis for her plays and novels, most notably in The Daughter of Time. In a number of Tey’s letters, she expressed a wish for a cottage of her own; sadly, she died before she was able to do anything about it, but I hope she would have enjoyed the one that I’ve chosen for her.
Acknowledgements
I’m indebted to Chris Mycock of Moyse’s Hall, Bury St. Edmunds, for his generous help with research into the Red Barn murder and the life of the museum in the 1930s. Readers who would like to know more about the case can find images and contemporary sources at www.stedmundsburychronicle.co.uk. Works by Donald McCormick and Gareth Jenkins have also given insights into its different aspects. Victorian Studies in Scarlet by Richard Altick is a fascinating picture of peepshows, relics and the grislier side of collecting.
My thanks to Alan Riddleston for sharing memories of his childhood in William Corder’s house, and for painting an invaluable picture of Polstead life; to Dennis and Paule Pym for a warm welcome at Maria Marten’s cottage; to Miss Beattie Keeble for her recollections of Polstead and Stoke-by-Nayland between the wars, as well as some great ghost stories; and to Michael and Deborah at The Cock Inn.