The Murderess

by Jennifer Wells

  ‘No, I hadn’t—’

  ‘It is my farm and I am not ready to sell it,’ I said, angry that he saw my ownership of the farm as a trivial detail in his plan.

  ‘Darling, you know that the farm will have to be sold at some point and it makes sense to do it now,’ he had started to speak slowly, as if to a child. ‘Even when we married we were unifying two dwindling fortunes, and things haven’t improved since then, have they? Now the Grange and Chaverly are both at risk, but we have the chance to ensure their future with this sale.’ He turned back to the mirror and fussed with his tie, as if the discussion had been resolved by his simple truths.

  But I was not finished. ‘The farm gives us a small income,’ I said, ‘but it is regular and will improve – a war is upon us, the boats and the ports will be at risk and people will need food. Even the government seems to think so – the sale of farmland for development is forbidden, I read it in the newspapers.’

  Hugh’s expression was blank as if he heard only my voice and not the points that I was making.

  ‘The war has halted the works on the underground railway too,’ I continued. ‘The plans for a station at Missensham might never happen and then how would these so-called commuters on the new estate travel to their work in the city with no train? We would get a relatively small sum, even if we are permitted to sell now, whereas the income from the farm could improve.’

  I had been mulling the speech over in my head for many weeks. Always thinking of new arguments and reasons, yet now that I finally had the chance to put my points across to him, they had rushed out at once, and they had come on an occasion where Hugh’s main concern was straightening his tie and not keeping Clement Walker waiting in the Red Lion.

  I wished that I had kept hold of the things that I had read – the newspaper articles and government pamphlets; they were things I was sure he would have considered if he had seen them in print, written by experts, but the words must have sounded so trivial to him coming from me – a wife, a civilian and a woman.

  I stood up and put his hand to my middle, pressing it into the flesh below my ribs. ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘it is not just us our futures that we will need the income for—’

  He removed his hand impatiently. ’Darling,’ he said, ‘I know women have sentimental attachments to these things but—’

  ‘It is nothing sentimental,’ I said crossly, wondering if he had heard me at all.

  ‘Is it the idea of selling that you don’t like or the fact that it would be selling to Clement Walker? You have never liked him. Women tend to make these decisions on instinct not practicalities.’

  ‘The only thing I don’t like about Clement Walker is the fact that he knows we will have no other offers for the farm,’ I said. ‘The war has made such a lot of uncertainty and it will change everything, we don’t know what state the country or—’

  ‘It will be over in a few months, little will change and we will be victorious. Women know little of—’

  But then came a bang – a noise so loud that it seemed to slam through every wall and window. I watched Hugh’s lips as they formed his words but heard nothing but the slap of sound in my ears. Then there was a dull rattle in the window frames and a gentle echo rolling over the hills. I jumped and ran to the window – there was still the rumble of the echo in the air but nothing to be seen. Then there were more bangs, closer together like the crackle of dry wood on a fire.

  ‘What was that?’ I cried.

  ‘Gunfire,’ he said calmly.

  ‘Hunting?’ I said. ‘And so many shots! No; it is not the season!’ I ran to him and grabbed his hands. ‘Please, Hugh, what was it?’

  ‘They have set up a new training ground in Evesbridge,’ he said.

  ‘Training!’ I said, but my mind could not connect his words to the sound. ‘What for?’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘It is army training for the village men.’

  ‘For war!’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘For this very reason,’ he said. ‘Look at you, you have got yourself into a state over a few shots.’ Then he laughed. ‘My mother always said you were highly strung. She said that it was how she came to overlook your lack of fortune; because she knew you were of good stock.’ He put his hand on my chest. ‘Your heart is racing!’

  ‘The cadets won’t have rifles already will they?’

  ‘Drill ammo,’ he said. ‘They will do no harm. I was about to tell you that women know little of war.’ Then he put his arms around me. ‘Now, if Clement brings up the subject of the farm tonight, I will say that we’ll consider it. What do you think?’ He spoke of the farm again as if the gunshots had never happened as if they had been the clump of horses’ hooves or the call of a bird that had interrupted the conversation, but I could not forget them so easily.

  ‘But surely this means that things are getting serious,’ I said. ‘They did not do this for the Boer and you went all the way to Oxworth when you were a reservist. Surely it means that this war will go on for longer.’

  ‘No, they are training hard now in order to finish things off quickly,’ he said, then added, ‘we should prepare for a sale in the next few months.’

  ‘The money from the sale will last a while,’ I said, taking his hand and putting it on my belly again, hoping that he would understand. ‘Maybe for our lifetimes but not long enough for the life of—’

  But he pulled my hand away again. ‘Millicent, we are in ruin, we have nothing else. I do not have my ancestors’ fortune or the business acumen of your family. I do not even have the income of an army reservist any more. This is my chance to give you the life you deserve, at least let me entertain this simple dream.’

  Suddenly I no longer saw the Hugh that I had become so used to – the privileged gentleman in the dinner jacket – but a simple man who was struggling to uphold his family name, provide for the estates of his wife and mother and keep a roof over his head. With age had come the loss of his identity as a soldier, and he now spent his days in the study, scrutinising the accounts and crop rotations for a burden of a farm that his wife would not sell.

  I realised that this was not the time to tell him of my pregnancy. All my arguments would be seen as nagging, and I would not allow the news of the heir that he had always wanted to be turned against me as another responsibility to shoulder and another mouth to feed. I put my arms around him. ‘You are right,’ I said. ‘I will reconsider selling.’

  I walked him to the front door and kissed him goodbye on the porch. He seemed to have forgiven me as he set off whistling, the notes of ‘Greensleeves’ lilting on his breath.

  Arthur was returning from the village with a wheelbarrow of bricks for the walled garden and the men nodded to one another as they passed on the drive. He set the wheelbarrow down next to me. ‘He is dressed up nice,’ he said. ‘Medal and all.’

  ‘He is meeting with Clement Walker,’ I replied.

  ‘Ah,’ said Arthur but nothing more.

  ‘He does not think about our future,’ I said. ‘All he ever talks of is Tibet and selling the Sunningdale Farm to Clement-bloody-Walker.’

  But, as I expected, Arthur did not answer me, as it was not his place to.

  ‘I would fear that he would re-enlist if he were not already too old,’ I added.

  We watched Hugh in silence as he disappeared down the drive.

  ‘You never speak of it, Arthur, all these mountains and palaces and natives, you must share some of these stories, or at least have your own!’

  ‘The war that your husband saw was not the one that I did,’ he muttered grimly, but said no more on the subject.

  When he reached the gate, Hugh turned back and waved and I raised my hand in return.

  Somewhere over the hills of Evesbridge, the guns fired.

  Chapter 10

  July 1915

  The room was small and painted white. It had a clockwork mobile that was never wound and a fire that was never lit. There was an old-fashioned n
ursing chair and a shelf of stuffed toys, their eyes round and staring as if witnessing the horror of the passing years that had seen them neither remembered nor loved. In one corner was the cot that had once been Audrey’s and, in the other, the skeletal frame of my childhood bed, the mattress lying beside it on the bare floorboards.

  Igor strained to raise his head when I entered but he did not move from the mattress.

  ‘Hello, boy, it’s me!’ I said, putting my hand down to him.

  He lowered his head and let out a low whine.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘please don’t be like this.’

  But he got up slowly and limped to the door, his tail between his legs and his head lolling close to the floor.

  I put my hand on his back but he shrunk away and I felt only the softness of his coat.

  ‘Bye, boy,’ I said. ‘I’m moving you to a nice new room. I’ll see you downstairs.’

  I grappled with the mattress, forced it on to its end and propped it up against the wall. It was worn in several places and had a yellowed area in the middle, the size and shape of a large dog curled nose to tail. In the absence of a child, the nursery and mattress had been gifted to Igor, the creature that the man of the house could cherish and love when his wife had failed to provide.

  I watched Igor slowly lolloping down the stairs. It was his turn to leave the nursery, just as everyone else had. My little sister, Audrey, had been the first, although it wasn’t just the nursery that she had escaped but the Grange and Missensham. She had married well and moved to a townhouse in Kensington where she could call on her friends and enjoy the society in London. My parents had been next, taken by cholera, and I had inherited a house of nothing but fading memories and empty rooms. When I had married Hugh, things had changed, I thought, but over the years I had watched his fortune dwindle along with my chances of providing an heir to his family, and I had begun to fear that the nursery would always be empty.

  But things were about to change. I began to imagine the nursery with dim lights and hushed voices. I had always wanted a daughter and I knew that the life growing inside me would be her. I had waited for her for so long and, after each bleed that marked my body’s failure, the child that had been born in my imagination aged another month and I had found myself thinking not of a newborn but of a plump baby wrapped in lace at her flower-strewn christening, and then a little girl outside the schoolhouse with her hair in pigtails. I already knew how I would dress her, what colour her hair would be, and now at last she was coming. She would be Catherine Anne, my girl, my baby, my Kate.

  I eased the mattress through the nursery door and on to the landing.

  Hugh appeared from the study. ‘I heard the door rattling,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m sorry if I disturbed you, darling,’ I said, ‘but I am moving Igor’s mattress downstairs to the laundry room.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’ he said. ‘It is dark and windowless!’

  ‘There is always a lit fire in the kitchen,’ I said. ‘The heat would reach him if we kept the doors open and he would be next to Rosalie’s room, he would have her for company in the evenings.’

  ‘Whatever you think,’ he said, ‘but I don’t really see why you are bothering.’ He turned to go.

  ‘Wait!’ I grabbed his arm. ‘It would be nice to use this room again wouldn’t it?’

  ‘We have been using it,’ he said. ‘It has been for Igor.’

  ‘But we always used to keep him downstairs,’ I said. ‘It was only after his accident that we moved him upstairs because we needed to keep an eye on him. His condition is stable now and has been for months. He no longer needs to be up here. If we move him out we can use the room properly.’

  ‘You mean clear it out?’ he said. ‘Rosalie should be doing that, not you. It’s the kind of thing we pay her for.’

  ‘No, darling,’ I said. I leant the mattress against the wall and took his hands in mine. I thought that I would not have to say any more, but his face was blank. ‘I am trying to tell you what you have wanted to hear for so long,’ I said, pressing his hand to my stomach. ‘I am in the family way!’

  His mouth opened just a little, but I could wait no longer and took the words from him.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ I said. ‘Soon there will be little feet running along this corridor and little snores coming through this doorway, the house will feel alive again, and you – you shall have your heir…’ But I stopped when I saw that his face had not changed.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and just that.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said quietly. ‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You always wanted a child, it is what we always planned.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course it is, darling. Come here.’ He put his arms around me. ‘It is great news,’ he said.

  ‘But you didn’t seem happy when I told you!’ I said.

  ‘I am, of course I am, it’s just that…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well I think we need to be cautious,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, we should not get too excited about it, not everyone need know our business.’

  ‘It is everyone’s business,’ I said. ‘Soon we will need to budget for an extra place at our table and schoolbooks and we will need to repaint the nursery and plan for a christening and-’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Then what?’ I said, wriggling from his grip and looking up at his face.

  ‘Well, we got this far before once, didn’t we?’ He frowned as if searching for the words. ‘I am talking about the loss we suffered last year. We had so much hope back then but it all came to nothing. It was a difficult time for everyone.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean that it will happen again this time,’ I said, but I felt my heart sinking as I realised that he was probably right.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t, but we both know that you are prone to becoming emotional. I don’t want to lose you over this.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean!’

  ‘Well you just didn’t seem to be with us after things went wrong last year and, well, you were very anxious and,’ he paused, ‘agitated.’

  ‘Well what would you expect?’ I spat.

  ‘I was suffering too, Milly,’ he said. ‘But you were in such a bad way that you were unable to see that I understood your pain, I would have been there for you if only you had let me.’ He put his arms round me again. ‘I just wish you had seen the doctor, that’s all.’

  ‘I saw the doctor on several—’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘The other doctor.’

  And then I realised what he meant.

  ‘The doctor I arranged for you to see at St Catherine’s,’ he continued.

  ‘St Catherine’s is an asylum!’ I cried. ‘I was just upset at suffering a miss. After we had tried for so long, everything seemed so unfair. Anyone would have been the same given the circumstances.’

  ‘Yes, yes, sorry, darling,’ he said quickly.

  But his apology had come too late. His words had been a reminder of my failure – the failure of my body to do what my sex were built for and the failure of my mind to cope with the consequences.

  ‘I just meant that we need to take better care of you this time, take it each day at a time.’ He kissed the top of my head. ‘And, well, we have Rosalie now to give you some support. You weren’t always up to running the house after our loss, and things happened.’

  ‘Things happened?’ I echoed. ‘What things?’

  ‘Well, it was around that time that Igor had his accident, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I said almost automatically. ‘It was not me that left the coal hole open.’

  He opened his mouth and I expected the lecture I had heard before – the speech about making sure that the coal hole was shut and how things should have been secured with a puppy on the premises. But he didn’t and instead he said, ‘Well, the truth is that I’ve never real
ly been sure about what happened back then. You know that when I found Igor he had no coal dust on him and someone must have replaced the cover over the hole.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  He put his hand on my arm. ‘Don’t worry about it, darling’ he said. ‘I just think that this is one of those times when your stories seem--’ he hesitated ‘--a little confused.’

  ‘There is nothing to be confused about; he fell in the coal hole!’

  He pulled away from me and I realised that I must have shouted. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘I’m just worried, that’s all. These womanly matters do seem to take their toll on you and if we were to suffer a loss again…’

  ‘Can’t you just hope that we might be lucky this time?’ I said. ‘It feels different. This baby has been growing for longer, I can feel it.’

  Then he smiled properly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You are right. We can’t change the past just hope for the future. Besides, it is a father’s prerogative to worry.’

  We both lifted the mattress to the top of the stairs lay it flat and watched it slide down to the floor below. Then we followed it to the hallway and Hugh lifted it down the servants’ stairs and past the kitchen. We settled on a spot in the laundry room and put it in front of the little hearth, in a place that meant Igor could see through the corridor and into the kitchen without getting up. Then we propped the door open with a coal scuttle.

  At the sight of Hugh, Igor appeared from the garden, his tail thumping against the door. He leant his head into Hugh’s thigh and when Hugh patted the mattress he jumped up immediately and rolled over for a tummy rub.

  When Hugh returned to the study to work, he obeyed the command of ‘stay’, but his excitement left with Hugh and he seemed to wilt slowly down on to the mattress, his head resting on his paws but one eye always open, watching me from the darkness as I unpacked my sewing basket on the kitchen table.

  Then I did something that I had not done for nearly a year, I dug deep in the pocket of my apron and took out the bonnet that I had started to crochet when I was last expecting a baby. I had never had the time to finish it, for the time between learning of the pregnancy and its sudden end had been cruelly brief. Then, just like the baby, the bonnet had been lost to me – it had been torn and the stitching wrenched apart. I had thought it beyond repair, that I did not have the skill to mend it, but now, as I ran my finger over the soft, white wool, I thought that, with a little bleach to refresh the colour and a long stich over the tear, it could be saved.