The Murderess

by Jennifer Wells

  He said nothing and I took his silence as a sign that our issues were resolved and we were at peace with one another. We watched the leaves falling a little more but then the pale sun faded into the mists and we stood up and began our walk back to the house.

  ‘You certainly have plans, Mrs Paxton,’ he said. ‘Even in your husband’s absence you strike me as quite a formidable woman. I have no doubt that you and your child will flourish here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, grateful that someone, no matter how distant, had acknowledged my unborn child, but his sentiments had come too late. After Rosalie’s parting words and seeing my body in the dressing mirror that morning, it was something that even I now struggled to do. ‘What will you do now, Mr Walker?’ I asked.

  ‘Without a site for the development, I will lose my investors,’ he said. ‘The house in Mayfair will have to go. But I have other properties, other interests. We both know that times are hard at the moment, but there are many less fortunate than ourselves.’ He paused and I fancied that the weariness I had seen in him was actually a sense of peace. He had suffered some losses, but he was still with us, when many were not. ‘The girl,’ he said after a while. ‘The girl who left with me last time I was here…’

  I nodded but could not bring myself to say her name.

  ‘I found her a job in my clothing factory job with accommodation attached, I trust she will do well there.’

  ‘I’m sure she will,’ I said.

  ‘Such a foolish mistake,’ he said, ‘but for a girl in her situation, the consequences could have been far worse. I think we have done the kindest thing all considered. She could not stay here, but we saw to it that she would not starve and I am content with that knowledge.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said and nothing more, because I too was content with my knowledge.

  We shook hands.

  ‘It is good weather, I shall enjoy the walk to the bus stop,’ he said.

  ‘You no longer have your motorcar, Clement?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It was the first thing to go. We live in uncertain times and we should be grateful for everything that we have, especially today.’

  ‘What do you mean by “today”, Clement?’

  ‘Why the headlines, Mrs Paxton? In your Missensham Herald,’ he stopped walking and turned to me. ‘I do beg your pardon but there was a copy left on your doorstep. I couldn’t help but take a look when I arrived. There have been more losses, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh! Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘Of course I was aware of that, but we must put a brave face on these things, mustn’t we?’

  We shook hands, but I did not feel his grasp as my own hand had gone quite numb. Then he walked down the driveway and, as he reached the road, he turned to wave and I waved back, forcing my trembling lips into a smile.

  Then I ran to the doorstep to find the newspaper.

  Chapter 33

  October 1915

  It was as he had said, and as I had feared.

  Like so many of us, Clement Walker had become used to reading the war reports in the newspapers. He had become accustomed to headlines which told of victories and glory, he was used to scanning the newsprint for facts and numbers but, even then, held little belief in them. When the newspaper that he had found on my doorstep that morning did not lead with one of these stories, he knew that a great loss must have been suffered.

  After I had waved him off, I had run to the doorstep and seized the paper, then sat on the top step to scan the lines of newsprint – as he had said, there had been losses. It was an angry little article; the lead paragraphs spoke only of the movement of troops and the digging of trenches. I took in little of the details, for my eyes searched the text for mentions of Hugh’s company, the Missensham 3rds. And then I found it – there had been ‘significant losses’.

  I had received no telegram to inform me of Hugh’s death, nevertheless I turned the page looking for the casualties list, but there was none – it was too early to name the losses from this battle, yet I still feared Hugh among them.

  I had often thought of Hugh’s death, but not like this, not in this way. After living with him as his wife for so long, it had only seemed natural that I filled his absence with thoughts about him, and those thoughts had caused me nothing but torment. There had been times when these thoughts had become overwhelming and I found that I had sat for hours, unable to read past the first line of a book or drift off to sleep despite the late hour. It was in these times that my thoughts became the darkest. Hugh was no longer in my life, yet knowing that he existed somewhere else was too much to bear, and I thought how much simpler the world would be without Hugh in it. And, despite myself, I would will him to be shot or bayonetted even, but always cleanly, maybe from behind, for him to be simply and swiftly erased from the world, with maybe one final repentant thought about me. I had never wanted him to suffer and now as I read about the trenches and muddied battlefields, I realised that deep down I wanted neither his suffering, nor his loss.

  I tried to picture Hugh on a battlefield, shouting orders through gritted teeth, he would be exhausted, weighed down by a rifle, dirty, but alive and well, but no matter how many times I read the lines in the newspaper, I could not imagine Hugh in a war such as this. I had always thought of Hugh as a soldier, but a soldier shadowed by a batman, one serving in exotic climes against a rabble of weak and unarmed natives. I thought of him fussing Igor on the lawn and entrancing Jimmy with his stories, and I thought of him standing in front of the dressing mirror as he smoothed his moustache and adjusted the medal on his jacket.

  Then another image of him came into my head – Hugh in his double-breasted dinner jacket with a branch cocked like a rifle under his arm. He was not stood in the bedroom or garden but in the middle of a battlefield where barbed wire writhed over the sodden earth and the sky rained with bullets, and somehow I found that this was the image of Hugh that did endure. ‘Significant losses’ – my loss.

  Then suddenly I felt a weight in my head and everything around me seemed blurred and sluggish. My petticoat became flushed with warmth and dampness spread between my legs. I threw the newspaper down on the doorstep and rushed inside, using my skirts to blot the drips which threatened to slide down my legs.

  I could not face the bathroom; a bathroom door that was closed for too long would cause Arthur to worry and I needed time to myself, time to be alone. I ran into my bedroom and locked the door.

  I had feared the worst as soon as I had left the doorstep but the shock of seeing the red staining my petticoat and the blood pooling in the chamber pot made my head lurch. I thought again of the doctor’s shaken head, the pitying glances of the neighbours and the disappointment on the face of my mother-in-law, but they were only snatches of memory, fading as quickly as they appeared. My main thoughts were not about what had happened, but what could have been: the newborn who would never wear the bonnet I had made for her; the baby who would never be christened in a lace gown; and the little girl who would never wave to me on her first day of school. This was goodbye to Kate, a girl I would never know.

  I stayed in the bedroom until dusk.

  Chapter 34

  October 1915

  Arthur always took tea with me in the kitchen in those days. It was something we did at ten o’clock, at three, and then again just before we would retire for the night. Arthur had no need to come to the kitchen in the evening but he would do so, using the excuse that he needed the kettle to fill his hot-water bottle, and we would drink tea together and talk until the bottle he filled had cooled again on his lap. I knew as well as he did that the autumn had been a mild one, and that he had no need for a hot-water bottle, but I did not point it out to him.

  On the day of Clement walker’s visit, of the newspaper headline about loss and my own loss that had followed, it was the expectation of Arthur’s night-time visit alone that caused me to leave the bedroom; had it not been for that, I fear that I might never have.

  I had lain hunched on the
bed, staring into the expressionless eyes of Mr and Mrs Hugh Paxton as they watched me from their wedding photograph on the bedside table. The curtains had twitched in the breeze and the clatter of horses’ hooves had risen and faded in the lane outside but time itself had been measured only by the fading of daylight.

  I had barely moved a muscle for six hours, but on hearing the strike of the hour from the church bell, I stood shakily from the floor and changed my clothes, pinching my cheeks and adjusting my hair in the glass. Then I walked calmly down to the kitchen, filled the kettle and lit the lamps and, when Arthur came in through the back door, I found that I could manage my usual greeting.

  I did not mention where I had been all afternoon and offered no explanation for my locked bedroom door and my lack of response when he had called up to ask me to join him for supper. I said nothing of my spinning head, the sting in my eyes nor the chamber pot of bloodied rags hidden under my bed.

  And as we sipped our tea, I did not speak of what had happened. There was no right time to discuss such a thing, to drop it into a conversation or mention it in passing. I would wait a few weeks before I knew for sure, and it would not do to speak of something that actually would have no meaning in the big scheme of things. These were the things that I told myself, but I knew also that I could not speak words that my throat would close round and would only turn in to sobs as they left my lips.

  So we sat in silence and when the clock chimed I handed Arthur his hot-water bottle and bid him goodnight and shut the door behind him, leaving me alone in the chill of the night.

  Chapter 35

  December 1915

  She wanted him. She did not want me. Yet it was to me that she had returned.

  I sat in the armchair, peering through the kitchen window as I watched her walk slowly across the frosted grass of the Long Lawn, an arm crooked under her belly to support the growing weight. As she approached the kitchen door I saw how much she had changed. Her figure had always been so slight that I had expected pregnancy to be kind to her, for all the symptoms of pregnancy to be contained in one neat bump. But she was not one of those fortunate women, for even under her heavy coat and scarf, I could see that her whole body had become swollen and every step that she took bore an extra roll of the hip, an extra furrow in her brow, making her progress painfully slow.

  I sat back and tried to slow my breaths and calm the fluttering in my chest. She had come to taunt me again. She had lived under my roof, but used my stable for fornication. She had accepted my wages yet brought shame upon my house; she had feigned friendship with me yet laughed behind my back; she had the love of my man but caused him to leave. Now she had the one thing I had always wanted. It was something so physically manifested in her that I could not ignore it and every glance upon her bloated body was yet another insult.

  She could not see me suffer this way, she could not think that I spent all day lingering by the window, lonely and lost in thought, and that every time she called she would find me in the same spot, wallowing in self-pity, in a realm once meant for servants. I looked about me frantically, searching for a task for her to interrupt, some important business that her intrusion would upset, but I saw only the door to the room she had once occupied, the milk can that had contained her lover’s flowers, the draining board she had steadied herself against when I struck her and the spot under the sink where the jade necklace had fallen.

  Then my eyes fell upon the envelope on the dresser with its military typeface and the censor’s stamp. It was the letter which bore the grief about Jimmy but, in the two months that had passed since Arthur and I had read it, neither of us had the heart to remove it from the dresser. Why was it not her who was taken? Why Jimmy, who had never harmed a soul? She deserved her share of grief, she should suffer for what she did.

  I waited until I could hear her breaths heavy at the door but I did not give her the chance to knock.

  I grabbed the envelope from the dresser, opened the door and waved it in front of her. ‘You want your news?’ I yelled. ‘Well here it is!’

  I put the envelope in her face so that she could see the postmark, the stamp of the censor, and the mark of the company – the Missensham 3rds. It was an envelope that had brought news of the death of a soldier. The letter inside it contained tidings of shock and grief and futures forever altered, but it was not the letter that she saw, just an army envelope addressed to me, Mrs Millicent Paxton at Missensham Grange, and said no more than that. There was only one soldier she knew of, only one she cared about and if death had not yet taken him from her, then at least I could.

  ‘Hugh is dead,’ I shouted. ‘He died in Ypres, he will not be coming back for you or any of us.’

  She did not question me; the sight of the envelope had been enough; she clutched that bastard stomach and collapsed weeping.

  ‘Don’t you ever come back. There is nothing for you here!’ I yelled and slammed the door. Then I ran out of the kitchen, up the stairs and to the drawing room, for I could not stay in the kitchen while she sobbed on the doorstep. I had to be far away from her, in a place which I had once ruled, a place where she had only existed to deliver trays of refreshments, or pour tea. Yet it was among the velvet settee and silver service that I stood, willing myself not to look out of the window lest I catch a glimpse of her, when I saw the envelope still in my hand.

  It was a letter that had marked the end of a life, a life taken too young. It had sat on the dresser for two months, like a third member of the household, watching silently as Arthur and I took tea and discussed the damage that the rabbits were doing to the lawn or the risk of snow on the farmland or anything that we could think of to try and fool ourselves that our life was normal. We had nodded in its direction when we could not bear to say his name, touched it for comfort, bid it goodnight. It was all that was left of him, that poor sweet boy, and now I had tainted it.

  ‘Oh, Jimmy!’ I gasped, ‘I am so sorry.’

  I tore the letter to shreds and threw it in to the fire and, as it burned, the paper sparked and crackled, like gunfire.

  Chapter 36

  December 1915

  My dear husband,

  I do hope this letter finds you unharmed and that you and the Missensham company enjoyed a tolerable Christmas in Flanders. I had feared you dead when I read the news of the losses that the 3rds suffered in October but now, after two long months, I have received no fateful telegram. The casualty lists have borne so many names that I recognise from the village, yet yours, thankfully, has not been among them and I take this as a sign of hope. I write as a terrible year comes to an end, so let us look forward to new beginnings…

  I knew that the first part of the letter would be easy to write, it was the rest that would be the problem.

  I had not put pen to paper for weeks but, as I sat at the kitchen table, I found it easy to slip back into the usual wishes of good health and the conveyance of fond regards from relatives. Despite all that had happened, I found that my pleasantries were forthcoming. I had been so sure that Hugh was dead but my certainty had faded with each day that passed with no news and been replaced with a tentative sense of relief.

  But I found that I could not draw out the conventions of polite correspondence for more than a couple of paragraphs and it was then that I had to sit back in the chair and stare at the blank sheet of paper, my pen swelling a blot of ink into the paper.

  Outside the window, I could hear the thud of Arthur’s axe on the woodblock and Igor’s gentle snore drifting from the housemaid’s room. Everything was normal, yet everything had changed, and it was Hugh that had changed it.

  I wanted to know whether Rosalie’s words were true; did he really love her? I wanted to know if I really had been blind to his grief when we lost our first child. I wanted to know about the change he had seen in me since it had happened, and how much had he seen of her; the part of me that took over and became harsh and cruel.

  I wanted to tell him about the rage that I still felt inside: about how
I could no longer hold my head up in the village, how I feared bumping in to old acquaintances who would ask after my well-being; about how his mother shunned me socially, somehow blaming me for her son’s misadventures; about how I saw him hiding in every shadow and glimpsed his face on that of every passing stranger; and about how I woke every morning on a tear-soaked pillow only for the weight to sink back down into my stomach when I remembered that I had to spend another day as the disgraced Millicent Paxton.

  But I did not write any of this, I was not permitted, by who or what I do not know, but a little wife with no other problems than lighting the stove and a leaking washtub was not allowed to complain because her problems would never be valid in the face of the war that her husband was fighting, one that had already caused so much suffering.

  So I wrote about the walled garden instead; I told him about how the starkness of the new bricks was already beginning to soften with lichens and moss. I told him about the frosts we had been having, how a spade that Arthur had left upright in the soil was frozen fast and could not be removed for three days. I told him about how the rabbits were kept at bay by the chill and how Igor now left his bed every morning and crawled on his belly to the halo of warmth from the stove.

  It was harder to tell him about poor Jimmy, although I did wonder if he had been with Jimmy at the end or if news would have reached him along the trenches, but I told him anyway. I recounted how I missed the odd everyday things about Jimmy – the way his ears reddened when he was spoken to, the way he would rub Igor’s belly and about how he had almost left for war with an old helmet which would have slipped down over his eyes – and, after a while, I felt as if I were talking to Hugh, the way I had always done during our chats in his study and I felt that I could almost hear his replies.

  It was difficult to tell him that I had lost another baby, and I struggled to find the words, but in the end, I did tell him, although on this subject I could not hear his reply.