by Rachel Hore
Agnes was wrenched out of sleep by shouting and screaming, then the slamming of doors. Then a low exchange of angry words as Vanessa and Gerald dealt one another the verbal blows that spelled the death of their marriage.
Gerald was inconsolable. He would hardly speak to Agnes, but spent long hours at the office, even sleeping there. After a fortnight, during which Vanessa sent a motor van round to collect her possessions, sorted and packed into boxes by the weeping Jeanette, Gerald summoned Miss Selcott from Seddington Rectory. Her instructions were simple: to be Agnes’s constant companion, her chaperone and her carer. She was to make arrangements for Agnes’s confinement in Suffolk and, in due course, for the adoption of the baby. Above all, nobody in Suffolk – none of the neighbours – and as few people as possible in London, were to learn of this terrible further disgrace that had struck the Melton family. Enough people were gossiping about Raven and Vanessa. Somehow, Agnes must be saved from shameful public humiliation.
Agnes, stunned by the hard reality of Vanessa and Raven’s betrayal, which she had been up to then too naive to see clearly, and by the sight of her father once more brought to his knees by grief, felt only compassion for Gerald. She meekly complied. She would live a quiet, sequestered life, she would put up with the ministrations of Miss Selcott. The one thing she would not do was part with the baby.
‘I will not let you give it away,’ she sobbed at him. ‘I love its father and I can’t let the baby go. I will bring it up quietly, find somewhere away from you if that is what you want.’
‘You couldn’t look after yourself and a baby all alone,’ he said gently. ‘And, Agnes, what chance do you think you would have of a life of your own, with a child with no name? What man would look at you twice? And think of the child – it would be vilified. You must allow the baby to be adopted, my love, it is yours and his only chance for future happiness.’
‘It will not be given away,’ she said stubbornly.
Her father studied her gravely. ‘Think about what I have said to you, my dear,’ he said. ‘I will not do anything without your consent, but I beg you to give me that consent.’
As the birth approached, Agnes believed more and more strongly that she must keep this child of her love. No matter what kind of life she might have to lead, she would find a way to mother this baby.
Gerald rented a cottage in Hertfordshire, and she and Miss Selcott lived there quietly. Miss Selcott had made arrangements with a small hospital on the Suffolk coast to admit Agnes when the time drew near for the baby to be born, and it was with a view to travelling on there that they were to stay at Seddington House for a few days over the Easter holiday. Now, of course, all their plans were thrown into confusion by the baby’s early arrival.
As the morning sun strengthened, there was still no sign of the doctor. ‘Lister’s gone out now to see if he can find him,’ said Miss Selcott vaguely.
Agnes felt a change shudder through her body, as if she were being sucked into a vortex, then a terrible, burning pain as the baby began to push down inside her. She gasped and grunted, kicking off the tangle of hot, restricting bedclothes that Miss Selcott had modestly replaced each time Agnes had freed herself of them.
Miss Selcott rose from her chair, clutching her handkerchief uselessly, then, forgetting delicacy, cried out as she saw that the baby was coming. She caught it as it slithered out and Agnes fell back on the bed, exhausted.
Agnes was to go over and over this birth as the days, weeks, months and years elapsed, and each time, the certainty became rooted in her more strongly that, throughout the whole event, Miss Selcott’s behaviour had been strangely furtive. And now that the baby was born, Miss Selcott must have busied herself cutting the cord and wrapping the child in a towel. It didn’t cry, and the governess immediately left the room with her bundle.
Briefly occupied as she was with the further contractions that racked her body, and the shocking liver-like placenta that slipped out from between her thighs, part of Agnes’s mind was crying out for the baby. Where had Miss Selcott taken her child?
She called out, but could do nothing but lie there and wait for the strength to return to her limbs.
A few minutes later, Miss Selcott opened the door quietly and came and stood by the bed. Her face was grave.
‘How are you now, Agnes?’ she asked.
‘I’d like to see my baby,’ Agnes said, ignoring the question.
‘I’m afraid I have bad news for you, dear. The little boy did not survive. I am sorry.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s true, my dear. It must be terrible to take in. The child is dead. I have given him to Lister who will make the necessary arrangements.’
‘I must see him.’
‘No. It’s not right. It will just upset you more.’
‘I must see him!’
‘You cannot. Lister has already taken him away. And he will bring the doctor. We are told the doctor was busy all night. There were more deserving mothers who needed his help you know.’
Agnes tried to pull herself up. ‘I don’t believe you. I don’t believe any of this. You’ve taken him, haven’t you? You’ve taken him.’ Her voice rose to a scream. ‘I want my baby!
‘It’s a dreadful thing to have happened, but you will come to see that it’s for the best,’ the woman told the hysterically weeping girl. ‘You’d have had a wretched life bringing up a child of shame, and you’re a selfish, stubborn girl refusing to let a married couple give it a respectable home. Just think, every time your father saw the boy it would have been a reminder of your wickedness. With the child dead there’s a chance now that some kind man might marry you, and you’ll have more children – but in the right way this time. God has been kind.’ Miss Selcott’s eyes almost glittered as she delivered this sanctimonious speech and she leaned in towards Agnes so the girl had to brush the spittle from her face.
‘Give me my baby!’ Agnes screamed.
The scream Kate heard was her own, as she was wrenched out of sleep in Paradise Cottage, the perspiration pouring down her face, her heart thudding in terror. Something was lost. A baby. Her babies. Sam. Daisy. She threw back the duvet and was halfway across the room before she recognized the familiar shape of the chest of drawers, the homely smell of pine and polish, and realized that she and her children were safe in Paradise Cottage. Pulling open the door, she padded out across the landing and into their room. They were both deeply asleep. Kate stroked a strand of hair from Daisy’s forehead and straightened Sam’s pillow, dropping a gentle kiss on his downy cheek before returning to her own bed.
She was too alert now to sleep. She lay waiting for the terror of her dream to dispel, and thought of Agnes and everything she had gone through. After a minute, she turned on the light and started to leaf through the diary once more.
The earlier entries covered the traumatic events of August and September 1928. Agnes had charted the progress of her affair with Harry and its break-up, then, in several long entries, the discovery and aftermath of Raven and Vanessa’s betrayal. She had been furious at herself for not recognizing what was going on under her nose. Perhaps she could have done something . . . ? The entries for the months leading up to her giving birth were a testimony to Jane Selcott’s petty power games, the loyal governess’s warped determination to restore peace and respectability to the Melton family, or what was left of it.
Then, between the last four weeks of her pregnancy and the following May, Agnes had laid down her pen.
The account of the birth of her baby, which she set down in one single entry, was therefore informed by the advantage of hindsight and overlaid by a cold hatred of Jane Selcott. Two things further Kate learned. One was that in the days after the birth Agnes came to realize that her half of the locket was missing. The other was that the day before Agnes sat down to write the account of the birth and disappearance of her child, Gerald Melton had had enough. Jane Selcott had been asked to leave at once.
He can bear no more of h
er fawning, her petty rages, her tyrannical behaviour towards the other servants. Mrs Duncan, whom Father had persuaded to return to cook for us, has threatened to leave once more and Father has chosen between them. And now Diana tells me the old witch has quitted her parents’ house with rent unpaid. She has left no forwarding address and carries no reference. And good riddance. May God preserve all other children from her ministrations.
Kate closed the diary and lay back on the pillows, gazing at the whorls of plaster on the ceiling. Outside an owl hooted. So Agnes must have lain in Seddington House over seventy years before, having consigned her passion to the page, feeling her life was over before it had properly begun.
‘I’ll try and find what happened to him, Agnes, I promise,’ Kate whispered, turning out the light.
If you don’t lose the house to Simon or even to Max if he sues, said the little voice in her head. Or you could lose it to Agnes’s son or grandchildren, if you find them. They, too, might sue for the family home.
Yes, that was a risk. But Seddington House was partly important to her because of what Agnes meant to her, and the young woman’s terrible grief at the loss of her only child was key to understanding Agnes. Kate had promised her to look for him, and she would not betray that promise.
But if the baby had survived, what on earth had happened to him? And what an appalling, wicked thing for Miss Selcott to have done! Kate supposed the woman to have been deranged. Her actions had apparently been motivated by her desire to protect Gerald from further shame. Presumably she expected his gratitude and possibly a financial reward for spiriting away his illegitimate grandson.
There were so many unanswered questions! First, it seemed that Lister must have been involved in the deception. Then, surely, if a doctor had examined Agnes he would have wanted to know what had happened to the child. If told it had died, he would have needed to see it in order to issue a certificate giving the cause of death. And Agnes would surely have protested to Gerald about the loss of her baby. Someone must know what had happened to that little newborn baby! Kate shuddered at the thought of having Sam or Daisy taken from her at birth like that. How had poor Agnes endured it?
But now Kate had learned the full secret of Agnes’s past. Who knew, but perhaps in death Agnes had been reunited with Harry, the lover she could not have and hold in life. All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. And Kate sent up a prayer that this should be so.
Chapter 33
The following day Kate was due at Seddington House at ten o’clock, but the children slept late. Kate dropped Daisy off at Debbie’s easily enough. The trouble came with Sam. The little boy was due to play at Sebastian’s house, but he hadn’t been there before, and when Kate pulled up outside their thatched farmhouse, he refused to get out of the car.
‘I don’t want to go,’ he whined from his slumped position in the back seat.
Kate sighed. Sam had been very quiet this morning but she had hoped he was just tired. She got out and opened the back door. Sam merely rolled over and buried his face in the seat, so she lowered herself down next to him and gave him an awkward hug.
‘Would you rather come with me, then?’ she asked. ‘It won’t be very interesting, darling. I have to be looking at pictures and papers at Aunt Agnes’s.’
Sam stiffened, then lifted his head. ‘Don’t want you. Want Daddy,’ he said, and rolled back into the seat. But he turned his face in time to watch his mother’s rictus of pain.
Fortunately, Sebastian’s face appeared at the other door. He was holding a large white cat. Sam sat up, suddenly alert.
‘This is Rosie,’ Sebastian said to him through the open window. ‘And Mummy says we can go on the computer. Are you coming?’
All troubles forgotten, Sam shoved the door open and, without looking back at his mother, rushed off towards the farmhouse after Sebastian and Rosie. Kate felt guilty at the force of her feeling of relief.
She didn’t arrive at Seddington House until eleven. The same team was there as the day before, with the addition of an expert in eighteenth-century genre painting. Max had some business to catch up with in Norwich but Dan had arrived to help sort some of the material stashed in bedrooms and attics, and it wasn’t long before Kate was able to talk to him alone. They were standing in one of the attic rooms.
‘I wanted to ask your advice, you see,’ she said, having pieced together for him the story she had gleaned from the diaries. ‘And I’d love you to read them sometime. It might be that you would recognize some of the names from the village or suggest how I can follow up matters locally. What happened to the family of Agnes’s friend Diana, for instance, who the governess lodged with after Gerald’s marriage to Vanessa? They should be easy to trace since Diana’s father was rector.’
‘His name and dates will be up on the board in the church, won’t they? There might even be a family grave if they died in the parish. You could start there, at least.’ He thought for a moment. ‘And it should be possible to get the name of the local doctor then. There’s a little museum at Halesworth station. They might have a sort of archive. Or ask the council.’
‘What about Lister the butler and the cook, Mrs Duncan. Are they names you recognize?’
Dan shook his head. ‘No. Mind you, you don’t know what else you’ll find in this house,’ he said.
‘I am sure that Agnes herself would have made all the same enquiries, many years ago, and over and over again.’ Kate felt discouraged.
‘Come on, I’d better get this lot out and blow the dust off it.’ Dan nodded at a stack of framed pictures leaning against an old sofa in the attic where they stood. Kate helped him take them downstairs to be tagged and catalogued. The valuer decided to take several away with him for further scrutiny.
Upstairs, fishing a last shabby print out from behind the sofa, Dan’s hand brushed against something underneath and he pulled out a photograph. He glanced at it and passed it to Kate. She found herself looking at a family portrait – an Edwardian gentleman and his wife, two very young children, one only a baby, all solemnly staring back at her.
‘Do you think the baby could be Agnes?’ she asked Dan, passing it back to him.
He squinted at it. ‘Could be. It would be the right period, wouldn’t it?’
‘And the boy does have very dark hair and the look of Raven. You know, this could be the attic where Agnes had her den,’ she said. ‘There might be something else of interest here.’ At the back of her mind was the vain hope that the missing half of the locket might emerge, but Agnes herself must have looked everywhere over the years. Now, the search revealed nothing, except an old copy of Keats’s complete poems that had lost its cover.
Kate perched on the seat of the dusty old sofa, flicking through the book reading out some of the heavily underlined passages.
‘Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet, –
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes: St Agnes’ moon hath set.’
Dan listened, then sank down onto the cushion next to her as she slowly shut the book. After a moment he reached out and touched her arm. ‘You look sad. How are you?’
She smiled at him. ‘Numb,’ she said. ‘And I haven’t heard from Simon for days. Sometimes I kid myself that it’s just another ordinary week with him away again, but then I remember. And the kids miss him. They keep asking when he’s coming home, even though they’ve been used to him being away.’
He nodded.
She sighed, pulling her fingers through her hair. ‘Yeuch,’ she said, finding it lank with grime. ‘I don’t know why everything here’s gone so wrong,’ she said gloomily.
‘You mean Simon?’
‘Simon and the school and Agnes dying, then it looks as if I might lose the house, if Simon has his way. This process will probably go on for ever, won’t it? Listing the contents, sorting out probate,
the stress of waiting to see who actually gets the place.’
‘It will all work itself out in time.’
‘This move to Suffolk was so important to me, Dan, don’t you see? Everything was going to be wonderful. A beautiful house, my own home. Simon and I watching our family grow up in a lovely place away from the rat race. Creating the love and security I never had when I was little. But nothing seems worth it now without Simon. Even this place.’
‘Houses are just bricks and mortar without the people you love, aren’t they?’ Dan said quietly. ‘Even one as lovely as this.’
‘Everything was going to be so perfect,’ she said, almost to herself.
‘But life never is perfect, Kate. I don’t think humans have the ability to stand perfection anyway. We smash it up somehow.’
Once again, Kate’s eyes swam with tears.
Dan snaked an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her gently. She felt herself moving towards him, burying her face in his torn Oxford shirt. He smelled of dust and polish and something faintly musky. After a moment, he raised her face towards his and smiled sleepily at her in a way that made her blood thud in her veins. Then he leaned forward slowly and planted a kiss on her mouth. She closed her eyes. He kissed her again, this time the tip of his tongue probing its way along her teeth. Her body was turning to liquid, electricity pulsed through her.
And then, suddenly, she came to her senses. What was she doing? Exactly what Simon had done.
Dan, sensing the life go out of her, dropped his hands and moved away. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said hoarsely, unable to meet her eyes.
‘It’s too soon,’ she said miserably. ‘I can’t.’
Dan stood up, then came to crouch in front of her. His face was shining, tender. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for so long,’ he whispered. ‘Forgive me, I thought you wanted it, too.’
Kate looked up at him. ‘I don’t know what I want at the moment, Dan. Everything’s stirred up, raw.’
‘You’re very special to me, Kate. Well, I hope there might be a time when both of us . . .’ He stopped and gestured uselessly, then stood up, ducked through the doorway and was gone. She heard his footsteps crashing down the staircase.