The Murderess

by Jennifer Wells

  ‘Protect me?’ I said. ‘Protect me from what?’

  But she did not need to answer because, by the look on her face, she knew that she had said too much.

  ‘You mean from him, don’t you?’ I said. ‘You mean that Arthur wants to keep me from my real father!’

  She paused, as if she knew what she wanted to say but the actual words would not leave her mouth. At last she said, ‘Look, I did not tell you before, but your real father wanted to see you when he met with Arthur in the garden last year but, with everything considered, we thought it best that he didn’t.’ She looked out of the window as if she would rather not say the words to my face. ‘Let’s just say that he needed some persuasion to stay away.’

  ‘Persuasion?’ I said. ‘What do you…’ but then my memories drew into focus and I remembered the walled garden again, as it had been on that day when I had watched my two fathers – the one who had raised me and the one who had created me – as they stood together and spoke inaudible words as an envelope passed from one to the other. I had witnessed Dad doing what she spoke of – giving away my family’s money in the hope that it would keep what remained of the family together, impoverished maybe, but together.

  But it was not the first time that my real father had wanted to see me. I thought again of the tramp that had terrified me with his leering eyes, his lips forming the words which had meant nothing but terror to me at the time: ‘I shall have you’. Now there was no doubt in my mind – Hugh Paxton may have chosen to abandon my mother and run away from the Grange’s debts but he was my father and had wanted to see me and now I found that I did not think so badly of him.

  ‘I’m sorry Kate,’ said Audrey. ‘I know it has come too late, but at least you have the truth at last.’

  ‘I need some air,’ I said and just that.

  I left the drawing room and ran down the stairs to the kitchen. I curled up in Dad’s old armchair and drew his blanket over my legs. I could see Dad through the window, sitting on the lawn still in his slippers, warming his back in a shaft of sunlight. It was only now that I remembered the letter that I had shoved into my pocket, the one from the parole board. I took it out and looked at the envelope once more, but I found that my heart was still pounding and that to open it now might well send me over the edge to the special world that Dad had lived in for all these years, the one that saw him wearing slippers on the lawn at midday. I told myself that he was not my father – I had none of his blood.

  I took a deep breath and put the letter back in my pocket.

  Chapter 39

  April 1941

  Audrey left the next morning, extravagantly ordering a taxicab to the station as the weight of her wardrobe was too much to bear. She had lingered too long in this little backwater, she said and, with her little darlings gone, she needed to brave the bombs and return to London society while she was still young. Her charity was not bottomless, she said, and, while it was nice for a woman of her standing to have a country estate to return to, she could not be solely responsible for its upkeep. Besides, it was high time that certain people learned to stand on their own two feet and face the realities of the world and, she added, she needed to escape from the persecution of the gutter press. I had nodded and sympathised with her as I sat on her bed and watched her throw evening gowns into a suitcase.

  The truth of the matter was that things had never been the same between us since we had spoken of the scandal that my birth father had caused and I wondered if her departure was nothing more than a way to escape the awkwardness when I served her at suppertime or when we passed in the corridors without speaking.

  I could not face arguing with her as I dragged her luggage down the front steps to the taxi and I did not even mention the gramophone trumpet that I saw poking from the gape in her carpet bag.

  As I watched the taxi driving away, I felt as if I was watching the last of the Livingstone fortune being taken away in the boot of a taxi and that nothing remained but the creaking shell of the old house.

  I returned to the kitchen but the stove had gone out and the drip of the leaking tap drilled in my head. There was a pile of pans stacked in the sink, but it was a job that I could not face starting. I fingered the letter from the review board, still in my pocket, but I could not cope with any more upset, so I slumped down into the armchair and watched the embers in the grate die down into ashes.

  *

  I woke with a start, although I do not remember sleeping, and then came a repetition of the sound that must have woken me – a sharp tapping on the kitchen door. I rushed to the door to find Emma standing on the back step, a sleeping infant resting its bald head on her shoulder. The dress that had once been stretched taut over Emma’s middle was now gathered at her tiny waist and the scrawny baby that she had cradled five months ago was now a fat lump hunched against her chest. She handed me an envelope.

  ‘What’s this?’ I said sharply. ‘Are you leaving the Grange too?’

  ‘I just wanted to repay you a little of the money that we owe,’ she said quickly. ‘But if you want me to come back at another time I—’

  ‘For me?’ I stared at her blankly.

  ‘It is a little of the rent we owe,’ she said.

  ‘It’s actually quite a lot of it,’ I said, leafing through it. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve seen so many ten-bob notes!’

  ‘Me too!’ She laughed.

  ‘So you are leaving then?’ I said downhearted.

  ‘No, Miss Kate, you misunderstand, we can pay our way now. I have taken in some seamstress work and I am training Violet with a needle and she can watch little Kate while I am busy.’ She nodded lovingly to the sprawled heap of snoring baby. ‘The garden will flourish this year, I am sure of it. We have shown our plans to the greengrocer in town and the publican at the Red Lion and even the quartermaster from the barracks at Evesbridge. They will buy our potatoes, carrots, cabbages and blackcurrants for a fair price and what they don’t take, we can sell at the market. The walled garden was always supposed to be a wartime garden and now it will thrive again. We have done our sums and we should make enough to keep the estate ticking over for a good few years. Your share would match this amount for every month until the end of the growing season.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘The walled garden is derelict and overgrown.’

  She laughed. ‘When were you last in there, Miss Kate?’

  I had not been into the garden since I had seen Dad meeting the tramp. At that time Peter’s efforts had been in vain and I had found a place where brambles snaked through the fruit canes and bindweed strangled the spindly crops. But now, as I heard Emma talk of the root crops, salads and berries, I thought of the garden again and hoped that the place I remembered would return.

  I opened my mouth, but then felt my voice catch in my throat.

  Emma laughed. ‘Go and look!’

  I nodded and pushed past her, breaking into a run halfway down the Long Lawn.

  When I reached the brick archway, I found the door closed but not locked and fresh with a new coat of blue paint. I opened it slowly, only looking up once I was fully enclosed inside the brick walls.

  The vegetable beds were covered in a fine powder of soft brown soil and stakes had been set out ready for planting. The brick pathways had been cleaned and fresh mortar glowed from the gaps. Every border and wall had been weeded and cleaned. The pear tree had been pruned, the fresh green leaves forming a neat ball where the paths crossed in between the beds. The glasshouse gleamed like a block of ice, the strut work, newly painted a glaring white. Through the panes I could see row upon row of seedlings, tall, strong and green, stretching to the sun which smoked the glass.

  I sat down on the path by the pear tree where the spring sunshine had warmed the bricks. This place held so many memories but now there was something different about it, something new and promising.

  I took the prison letter from my pocket and stared at it for a few minutes, then I tore it open, unfolded t
he paper and started to read.

  Millicent

  Chapter 40

  January 1916

  The envelope addressed to Mrs Millicent Paxton sat unopened on the dresser.

  I sat in the armchair and stared at it. How could the letter that had brought the news of Jimmy’s death have returned? It was sealed, with no tear or crease to show where I had torn it apart and no scorching to show where I had thrown it into the fire. It had come back to taunt me, to remind me of how I had used it in my lies without a care for Jimmy, whose life it heralded the end of.

  Then there was a tap on my shoulder and I spun round.

  ‘Milly?’ but it was Arthur, his face creased with concern, and not the war-mangled phantom of a young stable boy.

  I pointed to the envelope. ‘Jimmy?’ I whispered.

  ‘No, Milly.’ He said nothing more, he did not have to, his presence alone was enough to jog my senses and realign my understanding of the world. I looked at the envelope again and this time I saw that it never had been opened or torn or burnt. I saw the ink had not faded and that the envelope bore the mark of a GPO telegram and was marked with that day’s date.

  I tried to stand but Arthur stopped me.

  ‘I’m sorry, Milly,’ he said softly, ‘but you must know there can no more news about Jimmy now. This telegram will be about Hugh.’ He reached over to the sideboard and held the envelope out to me. ‘I had the boy from the post office leave it for you,’ he said, ‘but I can stay if you want.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But, please, you open it for me.’

  He tore the envelope open and read quickly, his eyes skimming and his face earnest. After a couple of seconds, he returned it to the dresser. ‘Missing,’ he said. ‘Missing, presumed dead.’

  I nodded. The words brought neither pain nor solace. They were merely an instruction to suspend grief until further notice, and they left me wavering between hope and despair. I had been so sure of Hugh’s death when I read about the losses his company had suffered back in October yet, when no confirmation came, I had come to think of Hugh as living once more. Now with this telegram, I would suffer his death again, although not until all hope had faded.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Arthur said, although there was something about the way he said it that made me think that it was me he was sorry for and not the loss itself.

  I wondered if Hugh had ever received the letter I sent to him in December – whether he had read my lies about Rosalie and my taunts that he had no home to return to. I wondered if my vicious words were the last that he read and if they had formed his final memories of me.

  I put my head in my hands and waited for the grief that I had felt when I heard of Jimmy’s death, the wave that had rippled through my blood and made everything darker, but this time it did not come. I could not grieve, because my mind was already full of other traumas: a husband walking from the stable, brushing straw from his shirt; a necklace torn from a throat; a destitute housemaid with a swollen belly and a single word: ‘presumed’.

  How could I bury a body I did not have? Lament a man who did not want me? Remember a man who had betrayed me? Miss a man who had gone to his death rather than try to rebuild his life with me? How could I grieve when I had been cheated out of mourning? With no grief, there was just emptiness.

  I stood up and slowly walked to the window. I picked up the wire brush from the sill and lent over the draining board, scrubbing the frame furiously.

  ‘Milly!’ Arthur’s voice was close behind me. ‘Please stop that.’

  ‘No,’ I said and the word was deep and shaky. ‘I can’t let something like this stop me. This is my house, it always has been and nobody else’s, so I have to clean this mould away before it spreads to the timbers and rots the beams and the whole house falls down…’

  Arthur put his hand on mine, then he prised my fingers apart and took the brush from me. ‘Millicent, it is clean, you’ve done it already.’

  I looked and saw that it was. The only marks on the window frame were the scratches in the paint from the wire.

  ‘Oh!’ I cried and then the scratches seemed to slip away and my head felt so heavy that I feared it would topple from my shoulders. The room spun a gentle circle. ‘I don’t feel well,’ I said. ‘I had better go upstairs, just for a few minutes, I can read in bed. Oh, I think the blanket is still in the laundry. I will—’

  ‘Go,’ he said. ‘I will bring it up.’

  I do not remember going upstairs, only that the bed was cold and the light through the curtains a strange kind of yellow. Then I recall Arthur coming up with the blanket and stoking the fire. He put a cup of tea on the nightstand and a book on the counterpane.

  ‘Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland,’ I said. ‘I have not seen this for a while.’

  ‘I found it in the nursery,’ he said. ‘Maybe you can escape down the rabbit hole for a bit, to a happier place, to a world that might be mad but still makes more sense than this one.’ Then he added, ‘Actually there wasn’t much choice.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Hugh sold all the books to pay our debts. He only kept this one in the hope of an heir. I used to read this with Audrey. Do you think that remembering happier times will cheer me up, even if I know those times are gone?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘There are the newspapers but you probably should not be reading things that might…’ He stopped.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to treat me like a child. This war is everywhere in everything. Nothing can take it away.’

  In the grate, the fire was taking hold and I could feel a wave of heat, but my skin crawled. Arthur saw me shiver, unfolded a blanket and lay it over me, tucking it in around my shoulders and, as he did so, I breathed a gust of fresh air from his skin and felt the halo of warmth from his body.

  Suddenly I wanted to feel another person, someone alive, someone that was neither a memory nor tainted by them.

  I reached up and put my arms around his neck and kissed him hard. I felt his muscles strain under his shirt, but he did not pull away.

  ‘No, Millicent,’ he said. But then he stooped and sat on the bed and put his arms around me. I fancied that he felt what I did; that if life would not give us any joy, then we would have to make it ourselves. He drew me close and I felt the softness of his lips on mine, his huge hands cupping my face. I pressed my lips on to his and I felt my breaths become long and slow; all the fear and pain that had grown in me over the past weeks released in slow exhalation.

  ‘Not Millicent,’ I said. ‘Millicent could not bring herself to do what we are about to. Please just call me Mercy for today as I will never be Mercy again, she is a stranger to me and only causes harm. After today I can no longer be her.’

  On the bedside table sat a wedding photograph – a bride and a groom, gazing far into the distance. I had thought their eyes blank and expressionless, but now I fancied that they were looking across time itself, their eyes watching everything that had ever happened and everything that was about to.

  Then Arthur stood up and drew the curtains and the savage world went dark.

  Chapter 41

  January 1916

  I lay, tangled in bedsheets, barely conscious of the dull glow of dawn behind the fluttering curtains, the tentative chirp of the first bird or the dark outline of the man that lay next to me. I fancied that if I touched the man’s shoulder, he would roll over and turn to me and in my head I saw Hugh’s face, creased and unshaven, his eyes looking into mine. Hugh’s sleepy face on the pillow next to me was something that I had seen so many times before, but deep inside me, I knew that it was something I would not see again.

  The man who lay beside me was not Hugh, but Arthur, and the night had been unlike all those that had gone before: there had been no locked door and closed curtains; no familiar routine of lying rigid until the bed warmed up and we could face loosening nightclothes and disturbing the counterpane; no glancing at the clock that sat on the bedside table; no thoughts of laundry not done or li
ghting the stove in time for supper or how to occupy the rest of the evening. There had been no gazing at the cobwebs gathering on the ceiling or the pattern made by the light as it escaped through the pelmet, no feigned smiles, no counting of seconds and no apologies.

  There had been no routine afterwards: no customary kiss; no rushing a pillow under my knees to keep the seed within me; no feeling of entrapment as I pondered how long I would have to remain so, while Hugh lay hunched and snoring; no desire to get up and wash away the sticky traces that had not stayed within me and to begin the process of waiting and hoping that the seed had taken. This time had been different. This time had been about two bodies, man and woman, and not what came with them.

  For so long I had thought my body broken. The loss of the infant inside me, a painful reminder that I did not function, that my insides were twisted and poisonous. For three months I had hidden my body, wrapped shawls around my waist and worn long scarves and overcoats despite the warmth from the grates. I had thought it to shield myself from the eyes of others, but even in the bedroom, I had swaddled myself in nightclothes, lest I catch a glimpse of the ugly, broken shell that I was forced to inhabit.

  But that evening had been different. The layers that had enshrouded me were gradually loosened and pulled away by willing hands. The flesh that had been bound so tightly now breathed once more and had warmth rubbed into it. The skin that had become so pale had tingled as it became flushed with life once more. The parts of me that I had detested for so long had swelled as my heart raced and my muscles stiffened and I had felt revived, as if my body was returning to what it had been long ago, back in a time when I truly inhabited it.

  The man that lay beside me had suffered losses, just as I had but, on that night, what had gone before had not mattered.