The Murderess

by Jennifer Wells

  ‘You are right,’ I said. ‘Your child is nothing to do with me and you have no right to ask for my help. You need Hugh’s help and he has abandoned you, just like he has abandoned me.’ I slammed the door shut and drew the bolts. ‘Go away, Rosalie,’ I screamed. ‘There is nothing for you here!’

  Chapter 31

  October 1915

  The letter was on the kitchen table. It was addressed to me but the envelope had already been torn ragged. I looked for a postmark but saw only the stamp of the army censor. I picked it up, the paper quivering in my hand.

  ‘Millicent?’ Arthur stood in the doorway. ‘You should sit down.’

  ‘My Hugh?’ I gasped.

  ‘What?’ he paused then said, ‘No, no,’ quite quickly and pulled out one of the kitchen chairs. ‘Please sit down,’ he said softly. ‘It was Jimmy.’

  ‘Jimmy?’ He had not said Hugh so the words had no meaning. He had not said the name of my husband. Why had he not said Hugh?

  ‘It was in Ypres,’ he said. ‘Most of Jimmy’s company went down, the Missensham 3rds. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Jimmy,’ I repeated, realising at last what news the letter had brought. ‘No, it must be a mistake, he should still be in training, he cannot have been out there for more than a few weeks!’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not a mistake,’ he said. ‘The army have been desperate for troops; training periods have been reduced. If there was doubt it would say that Jimmy was missing, but it does not say that, it says that he—’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t make sense, why would the letter come here?’

  ‘Jimmy always said that he had no family,’ said Arthur quietly, ‘but I did not know that he had put you as next of kin when he enlisted. He saw the Grange as home.’

  I thought of Jimmy sat on the bale polishing the tack, of him rubbing Igor’s belly on the lawn, of the red jacket with the turned-up sleeves that he had worn on the day that he left and of the helmet that had pressed down on his ears. I thought of him standing by the unfinished garden wall and then I thought of Hugh approaching him, aiming a branch like a rifle, and of Jimmy clutching at his heart and falling as Hugh shot him, shot him dead.

  Arthur’s head was bent, a little choking noise came from his throat then he slumped in the chair that he had pulled out for me and put his head in his hands.

  ‘Jimmy,’ I said over and over. ‘Jimmy. Oh God!’ Then the table, the chair and Arthur seemed to ripple, and I hastily wiped the tears on my apron.

  I bit my lip hard until the flesh ached and I tasted blood and then at last the tears retreated. Then I walked calmly to the sink and filled the kettle, heaving it on to the stove. I stood at the window and looked out over the garden. So much had happened since Jimmy had left. The garden had gone from bloom to seed, the earth cooling as the green of the leaves and grasses became muddied with the colours of autumn. But now I noticed a new emptiness, not a rabbit on the lawn, nor a bird in a tree. We had been a household of five for so many years, and although Jimmy had left us over a month ago, the Grange had been haunted with the expectation of his return: his work gloves still on the path where he had dropped them; the white helmet which had balanced on the folds of his ears now hanging cold on the stable door; his cup still on the draining board, neither used nor tidied away; and Igor, who tarried in the stable yard, sniffing the air, his ears raised. Everything had been waiting for Jimmy’s return. But now even these little things had no meaning and the house felt another loss, as if his spirit and his memory were also leaving us.

  I heard a hissing noise somewhere behind me. I thought it a mouse in the kindling at first or the hiss of a green log on the fire but then I realised that Arthur was desperately trying to control sobs. This big man, this trained soldier, this man who could wrestle tree stumps from the ground and did not flinch when he twisted the necks of the rabbits in the gin traps, sat sobbing into his handkerchief. I remembered the times that the men had spent together in the garden, working from dusk till dawn as they built the wall and dug the vegetable beds and I realised whatever loss I was feeling, Arthur’s must be greater. Yet he was a man, and I could not embarrass him by turning, so I looked upon the garden some more, the kettle still only a breathy whistle.

  Arthur had grown up in the village, he would have come to the Grange as a child for the May Day celebration and the hunt balls. But he had seen wars abroad and the death of my parents, the decline of the house and now he saw the cracks in the plaster and the mildew on the walls and he was aging too. I had always thought that a man his age should have a wife and a family but I had never realised that Jimmy had been like a son to him all along, and I had been too blind to it. But maybe he had not realised it himself and it was only now that Arthur was coming to grieve the son that he never knew he had, the one that had been by his side for so long.

  He was a man, a tough one who would not want me to witness his grief, yet he was still someone who now suffered the greatest of losses, and I felt that he should not be alone. I abandoned the kettle and sat next to Arthur, put my arm around him. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘It will be all right.’

  ‘I am sorry, Millicent,’ he muttered.

  ‘We will arrange a service at St Cuthbert’s,’ I said quietly into his ear. ‘We will make sure to invite the whole village and do everything properly. We can sell the horse brasses to pay for a plaque in the transept, something to commemorate him, we will—’

  ‘Oh Millicent,’ he said shakily. ‘You are good at taking care of things, you have always been a practical woman.’ Then he stopped and cleared his throat. ‘But you must not work yourself up.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean!’ I said, pulling away from him.

  ‘It is just that there have been times when, well, you have had too much to deal with and I wish I could have helped you more. It is not so long since the shock of the night when Hugh left and…’

  ‘That was not me,’ I said. ‘I was not myself. I attacked Rosalie but then I fled. Look—’ I held my hands up in front of him, the palms open. ‘—I could have done no real harm. My hands are so small.’

  He wiped his nose on his handkerchief and nodded. ‘There was another time though – another time that you suffered a loss. I know that Hugh did his best to comfort you but he too was grieving and—’

  ‘You mean what happened last year,’ I said. ‘Well, that time is over now and all is mended.’ I patted my stomach. ‘The baby is returned to us, you see, it might sound fanciful but I lost the first child I was carrying, but now I feel as if this new one is the same soul returning, and maybe Jimmy’s soul will return too, one day, and we shall see him again, even if it is just a glimpse of him in the face of another.’ For a moment, I feared that I sounded foolish, but he did not contradict me, just smiled and nodded. ‘So you don’t need to worry about me,’ I added.

  ‘You are such a good woman, Millicent,’ he said. ‘A good woman.’

  I put my arms around him again as I could not bear for him to see my face, and in my head I said, I am not.

  Over his shoulder I could see into the laundry room, the door still propped open with the coal scuttle. A low whine came from the corner and the glint of two large eyes shining from the darkness.

  ‘There is something I need to tell you about that day last year,’ I whispered into his ear. ‘About what happened to Igor, he did not fall into the coal hole, I…’ but then I stopped because I fancied that the eyes that were watching me were not those of the aged Igor, but the eyes of the young pup, as Igor was in his youth, younger, fitter, when he could run the length of the Long Lawn without limping and hold his head steady and high, his nose twitching and his ears cocked and alert. But this young and lively hound was just a memory lost in shadow – nothing but two bright eyes shining accusingly from the gloom.

  ‘It was me—’ I began, but then, when I peered into the darkness again, I saw another memory – Igor with his head low, white woollen threads between his paws, his powerful jaws gnawing
at tiny pompoms, pale threads trailing from his teeth like sinew.

  It was the bonnet that I had knitted for the baby I was expecting, the infant that had been newly lost to me. The bonnet had been all that I had to commemorate her, and in that moment it too was lost, destroyed in the jaws of that beast.

  I shut my eyes quickly, trying to erase the memory but it did no good because I felt the chill of the laundry room all around me again and smelt the wet linen. I heard the strike of my footsteps on the flagstones as I had approached him, the thud of my boot, the crack of bone, the yelp of pain.

  These were my memories but they felt like those of another; someone harder, someone crueller. The thoughts that plagued my mind were of a time that I wanted to forget, events that I could not speak of for fear that recounting them to others would make them real, although, deep down, I knew that they always had been.

  I pulled back from Arthur, so that I could look him in the eye. ‘It was me,’ I said. ‘I—’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘I am not a good woman,’ I said, ‘for there is no good in the world. There is just no good…’

  From the dark corner of the housemaid’s room, the glowing eyes watched me.

  Chapter 32

  October 1915

  I could recall her face quite clearly as she spoke those hateful words, see her standing in the doorway with her shabby mauve dress stretched taut across her bloated abdomen. She had looked me in the eye, bold as brass, and spoken of her love for my husband, demanded my charity. Then her eyes had darted downwards, her gaze dropping until it fell upon my middle, and she had put a hand on her bulging girdle while she stared at my waist and what she saw was thin, flat and bound tight with apron strings.

  ‘Where is your baby, Millicent?’ she had said.

  ‘Where is your baby, Millicent?’ I repeated to myself, staring at my body in my dressing mirror and squeezing the fabric of my dress to my waist. ‘Where is my baby?’

  I had told myself that I was getting bigger, that I could feel Kate moving inside me, that I had morning sickness but now I thought not of a baby, but a girdle shrunken in the hot wash, of nausea brought on by the stress of the recent events and the rumble of my stomach craving the food that was becoming so scarce. Then I remembered what everyone else thought – the doctor, the mother-in-law, and the neighbours who shook their heads. They had all thought it to themselves, shared these thoughts in whispers maybe, but it was only Hugh who had said it out loud: ‘She cannot hold on to the babies, they slip out of her.’

  I glazed at my reflection and saw a gaunt aging woman, with a tiny waist. And then this woman in the mirror spoke: ‘I cannot hold on to the babies,’ she echoed.

  Where was my baby?

  There was a loud tap on the front door and I jumped. Then I took one last look in the mirror, adjusted my clothing and left the bedroom. I stopped on the landing and glanced inside the nursery, then I shut the door and turned the key in the lock and headed to the front door to receive the visitor.

  ‘Mr Walker!’ I exclaimed. ‘I did not expect you.’

  ‘I know that, Mrs Paxton,’ he said, ‘but I do hope that I am not unwelcome.’ It was a strange thing to say and, on previous occasions, he would have been right – I had always found him a bold ostentatious man and one that I had endured for the sake of my husband. But, as he stood on the doorstep, I now saw that something about his demeanour had become strangely humble and I found – having spent so long in a cold an empty house with little to fill my stomach – that this was something that we now shared.

  ‘Of course you are welcome,’ I said, and something in my voice seemed to confirm that he was indeed.

  He smiled and we shook hands.

  ‘You know that my husband—’ I began.

  ‘I do, Mrs Paxton. Captain Paxton wrote to me from Ypres. Enlisting is a very noble thing to do—’

  ‘Not in his circumstances, Mr Walker,’ I said bluntly.

  ‘You are right of course,’ he said. ‘I do hope you will let me express my sympathies. Captain Paxton always seemed like such an upright fellow and always held you in the highest regard. I know that the loss you suffered last year was quite unbearable for him, although I know that this does in no way excuse—’

  ‘You are right,’ I said. ‘It does not.’

  He nodded. ‘But enough about Captain Paxton, for it was you that I wanted to see.’

  ‘You do know I will not sell the Sunningdale Farm to you, Mr Walker,’ I said.

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Deep down I really do know that, but please indulge me…’

  ‘Shall we take a walk in the gardens?’ I said. ‘I can take you to a nice spot.’

  We took the path past the stables and cut across the Long Lawn. The garden had died back since Mr Walker’s last visit. The grass was patched with mud and worm casts and only browned stems remained of the once colourful blooms, but the trees were rich with warm autumn colours and a pale patch of sun glowed through the low white haze. At the far end of the lawn, Arthur was fixing a solid timber door in the brick archway of the new walled garden, the chink of his hammer blunted by the mist.

  It had been over a month since Clement Walker’s last visit to the Grange and he seemed much changed. Now that he was not sat on the velvet settee in the drawing room or stood on the running board of his motorcar, I noticed that he was barely taller than myself. He had wrinkles round his eyes and wisps of grey in his hair and I fancied that, despite all his wealth and privilege, life’s hardships had at last caught up with him.

  ‘I note that you have still not taken on another tenant at the farm,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘things have been quite disrupted here since your last visit, but I have kept on top of the farm’s paperwork. My gardener and I have been managing things and the women volunteers are holding the place together.’

  ‘Well, I would urge you to take on no more tenants, Mrs Paxton,’ he said. ‘After all I have invested a fair amount of money in the survey of your land—’

  ‘With never an assurance that I would sell, Mr Walker!’ I cried.

  ‘Mrs Paxton, I must advise you that now would be a good time to sell,’ he persisted, ‘and one which will be of benefit to you personally. What with no tenant and your husband away, you need to prepare for an uncertain future. A woman on her own will face hard times.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said shortly.

  ‘Today, I am able to offer you a good price for the land, but I must warn you that this offer is not one that I will be able to equal at a later date.’

  ‘I will take that risk,’ I said.

  ‘I need to inform you that the war will be over in just a few months and that now is a good time to sell. Trust me that women know little of these things.’

  It was the exact words that Hugh had used a few months ago, and now I realised where he had heard them. Hugh’s opinion had not been due to any business sense or conclusion of his own making, just his blind faith in Clement Walker. The problem was that months had passed since Hugh had spoken the same words, the words which promised an imminent end to the hostilities, yet the newspapers now spoke of poison gas, torpedoed ocean liners and war with Bulgaria, but never an end to the hostilities, nothing that even hinted at it.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Walker,’ I said, ‘but I will be advertising for another tenant shortly. The estate needs an income and the country needs food. I am not prepared to leave the land idle while we wait for the war to end.’

  ‘Well you would be going against my advice, Mrs Paxton,’ he shook his head, as if feigning weariness. ‘I have it on very good authority that the war will be over in a couple of months.’

  ‘Well the town hall do not share your views, Mr Walker. In fact, the plans to build a station at Missensham have been completely halted.’ I stopped walking and turned to him, our eyes level. ‘Was the station not the very thing that was supposed to make your new estate worthwhile? After all, what would your development
of commuter homes be with no station?’

  ‘You have made enquiries at the town hall, Mrs Paxton?’ he said, his eyes widening.

  ‘I have, Mr Walker. Is that not the first thing that one would do in this situation? For really, I haven’t a clue – women know so little of these things!’

  He hesitated for a moment, then nodded his head briefly, like punctuation, I thought, to end our conversation.

  We sat down together on the bench by the flower beds and watched the leaves slowly spiralling down from the trees.

  ‘You agreed to indulge me, Mrs Paxton, and you did me that courtesy,’ he said, ‘I thank you for that.’

  ‘It is my pleasure,’ I said. ‘I do not think that you are a bad person, Clement. I believe that you are seeking an arrangement that would be beneficial to us both. In fact I would be willing to sell the land to you, maybe at some point in the future when land prices and the government’s plans would make things even more so.’

  He nodded again and stared across the lawn. ‘This is indeed a nice spot,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Nice would describe it, but in the springtime it was lovely, for back then there was no wall for the market garden and all you could see was the lawn and flower beds and, behind them, the meadows of the Sunningdale Farm stretching as far as the eye could see.’ I raised my finger in the direction of the walled garden, as if pointing to the flower beds and meadows that I spoke of– the view that could no longer be seen. ‘You see we must have some sort of income, Clement. War or not, we need to extend our growing season and produce enough to sell. We are close enough to the markets of London and we even plan a glasshouse to grow grapes for the London restaurants.’