Daughter of Dark River Farm

by Terri Nixon

  ‘I’ll have Evie chasing me up hill and down dale if I tire you out,’ I said, standing up. ‘I’ll leave you to sleep now.’ I leaned over and kissed him lightly on the forehead. ‘Thank you, Will. I miss Oli dreadfully, but you’re the perfect big brother.’

  ‘Happy to oblige,’ he murmured. ‘Now off you go and tell Archie what a little idiot you are.’

  The Matthew who had sent the telegram was, I was surprised to learn, Samuel Wingfield’s son. I would never have guessed it from the warmth of the greeting extended by both Lily and Evie; I’d understood the enmity between the two families to be severe, yet Evie clearly trusted him, and Lily liked him. I gathered he was the only member of the Wingfield family who had earned himself the epithet of ‘uncle’, with the Creswell children.

  ‘How is Constance?’ Evie asked, as we went in to dinner. No-one had yet mentioned Samuel; it seemed everyone, including his son, was reluctant to bring his name out and turn the evening sour.

  ‘Constance is Uncle Matthew’s sister,’ Evie explained, seeing me trying to keep up with it all. ‘And, to make things more confusing, she was once engaged to marry Uncle Jack.’

  ‘Now there’s a chap I always respected,’ Mr Wingfield said, and by the way he looked at Evie I guessed he knew more about Jack than Lily did, and was aware that Evie knew it too. Presumably then, he would be the one to confirm her suspicions, although the more I thought about that, the less likely it seemed. Jack Carlisle was impressive, imposing even, and there was a distinct sense that he knew a great many influential people, but when I thought of the man who’d taken such pains to put me at my ease during Oli’s trial; the man who’d moved mountains, and furniture, to ensure I’d be as comfortable with him as I could be; the man who loved the same people I did… How could anyone imagine he was capable of murder?

  By dessert, Evie had had enough of tiptoeing around the subject, and as soon as Dodsworth had left the room she turned to Mr Wingfield. ‘Uncle Matthew, you said you would explain how your father died. That is, if you’re not too—’

  ‘Not at all, dear.’ Mr Wingfield patted his mouth with the thick napkin, and replaced it on the table next to him, deliberately arranging it, and using the time to gather his thoughts.

  ‘My father’s body was found close to the Swiss border,’ he said. ‘He’d been shot, once. A clean shot, between the eyes.’

  ‘An assassin’s shot,’ Lily murmured, and I was jolted by the phrase.

  Evie saw my expression, and although her face had paled, her voice was steady. ‘It’s what my father used to call snipers. Both our side and the enemy’s. Uncle Jack hated it. He always said it was an assassin when it was them, but a marksman when it was our side.’

  ‘You won’t have any love to share for snipers, Evie,’ Mr Wingfield said gently. ‘Let’s not talk about that now; it’s not helping.’

  ‘So why do you think your father was killed?’ Evie asked.

  ‘He’d been carrying…papers, evidently. Classified papers.’ He cast a look at Lily, and I read uncertainty in it. ‘Lily, I’m not sure if you knew this, but my father was a spy.’

  I nearly dropped my fork. Part of me was fizzing with excitement at the thought of all I’d have to tell Belinda, but a colder part of me realised the implication, and I caught Evie’s eye. She gave the slightest, warning shake of her head, and I dropped my gaze back to my food, pulse racing. Jack was a spy as well, then…and Archie?

  My breath caught at the thought, and I began to choke. Eyes streaming, I turned to Lily for help, and she absently handed me a glass of water before turning her stunned attention back on Samuel. I was able to force a tiny dribble down the frighteningly small passage of my constricted throat, and made myself breathe very slowly, swallowing time and time again until I could feel the air moving more easily. By then Mr Wingfield had finished talking, and there was a heavy silence lying over the table. He rose and poured Lily’s wine for her himself. Lily drank half the glass down at once, and set it back on the table with a trembling hand.

  Mr Wingfield reached for that hand, and it lay unresponsive in his, as he spoke very gently. ‘Jack’s a spy, too, Lily. But Samuel was working for the Germans, and Jack’s one of ours.’

  ‘Hush!’ Lily glanced over at Evie, as if to indicate this was not the time to reveal such devastating news. But Evie looked away, expressionless, and Lily’s face tightened. ‘You knew, Evangeline?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Last year. When Samuel took the Kalteng Star and Lizzy was hurt.’

  Lily’s face wore an expression of one for whom many different puzzle pieces were slotting into place all at once. She kept opening her mouth to say something, remembering something else, and subsiding. In the end she picked up her glass again and finished her drink before standing up. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said in an oddly calm voice. ‘I’d very much like to be left alone for a while.’

  When she had left the room, a piece of that puzzle slipped into place for me, too, but I didn’t want to voice it in front of Matthew Wingfield, just in case he was not the kindly man he appeared to be. After all, he was Samuel’s son. I looked at Evie, who nodded. Her father had also been a spy—the secret Jack had been protecting.

  The question that burned in my mind now, and wouldn’t be quenched by any amount of wine, was whether Archie was who he seemed to be after all.

  Chapter Twelve

  Up and down the country, every country, lives and families were being torn apart. Changed, reshaped, misshaped, broken. Telegrams, lists on post-office walls and windows, and in the newspapers—a crookedly typed name that, to most people would be simply two words, eliciting vague sorrow, but unrecognised and unremembered. Reluctant eyes the whole world over scanned those lists, relief building with every unfamiliar name that passed…and then that one. The one that stopped the breath in the throat, impersonal black marks on a piece of paper that those suddenly burning, blurring eyes fixed upon, willing them to change, to be the trick of a cruel imagination. A lie.

  Oaklands Manor, with its fairy-tale turrets and beautiful grounds, with its sense of peace and its quiet strength, was not spared. The news of Lawrence’s death fell over us, a cold, heavy blanket, smothering all talk. Eyes would not make contact. Stunned faces remained blank in the view of others, but low sobs and disbelieving cries echoed through the house as fresh grief took hold somewhere, in someone. Lily moved through the rooms in dazed incomprehension, and Evie was torn between tending to her, and to her husband. Will remained in his room and I could only imagine the thoughts that claimed him; there was nothing else to think about.

  I spent most of those days in the walled garden. I sat by the two apple trees, planted with such love, and in such deep grief, and I remembered Lawrence’s fond memories of the man who had planted them, and nurtured them when he could. Caring for them as he had done for his friend’s children, and now the youngest of those children was gone. For days I fought the pain, and then, on the day of Lawrence’s memorial service at the little church in Breckenhall, I stopped fighting it and let it take over. Sweet Lawrence, so young… His blue eyes should have been filled with fun, with excitement and mischief, but in the short time I’d known him they’d been shadowed with fear, and with the knowledge of a love that could never be returned.

  He’d been terrified of going back, but I’d told him he would be safe. It was what you said to ward off the fear, and the bad luck that seemed like a living being, dogging your footsteps unless you found some kind of talisman to give you courage. Lawrence’s talisman was speaking aloud the fear of injury; if he said it, it wouldn’t happen.

  But within two days of his return to France, his tank unit had pushed through the enemy lines—a time of celebration and of triumph, until a lone German, courageously refusing to leave his gun, managed to load and fire his mortar directly beneath Lawrence’s machine. I tried to shut my ears to the phantom
screams that tore through my head when I imagined how it must have been, and to close my eyes against the horror… It was Lawrence.

  The service, where the names of too many other boys and men were read out, marked the beginning of some kind of acceptance in Lawrence’s family, too. There was no body to lay to rest, not even over in France, but still, somehow, we managed to feel we were saying goodbye. Afterwards we all returned to Oaklands, still quiet, but now and again finding some anecdote that earned a flicker of a smile, blurred by tears, but a smile nevertheless. We were a small group, united in grief, and there existed between us a kind of bond, forged by darkness, but not held prisoner by it.

  It was only two days later that everything changed again.

  Mr Dodsworth came to find me after breakfast on the last day of July. ‘Her Ladyship would like to speak to you, Miss Maitland. In the morning room.’

  I followed him from the library, through the hall, and waited at the door of Lily’s favourite room, while he knocked and waited to be called in. Then he left with without a word, leaving me standing, rather adrift, in the middle of a large, rather cluttered room. The summer sunshine spilled through the huge windows onto the desk, at which Lily sat, her fingers twiddling with her pen. She looked up and I was struck by the hollowness of her expression. The light had retreated from her eyes until they seemed nothing but darkened caves in the pale perfection of her face. Her voice, too, had lost its strength, and it was because of this that the harshness of her words did not at first sink in. Then I realised what she’d said.

  ‘You must leave us now, Kitty. Tomorrow will be quite all right, but I’d like you to be gone by mid-morning at the latest.’

  I wasn’t sure what to say; I was a visitor, it was true, but we were all of the understanding that, with all that had happened, I was welcome to stay until Will was strong enough to return to Dark River Farm. I started to say as much, in a stammering voice, but Lily held up a hand, effectively cutting me off after only a few words.

  ‘Will is family. You are not.’

  ‘You wanted me to be!’ I flashed back, without thinking. Had I really felt I belonged here, after all?

  Lily focused first on my shocked face, then on the way my hands clasped one another in an attempt to hide the trembling betrayal. Then she looked away. ‘I was prepared to accept you,’ she corrected.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ But I realised, and went cold. ‘Lady Creswell…’

  She rose and turned to look out of the window. ‘Your reputation would have been difficult to reconcile, but our family name was strong enough to have withstood it.’

  ‘And now it isn’t?’

  ‘Strength is no longer the question,’ Lily said bleakly. ‘The name, and the family, will soon be gone. Everything is ruined.’

  ‘Because of the diamond.’

  ‘Yes!’ she shouted, and I jumped as she banged her hand flat on the desk. ‘Because of the diamond! Evangeline always hated it, but she was happy enough to live off what it gave us!’

  ‘She seems content enough living at the farm,’ I said. ‘She never needed all this,’ I waved my hand at the room in general, and at the glorious, incongruously summery garden beyond the French window, contrasting so sharply with the icy atmosphere in the room. ‘She was even happier in Flanders. I used to wonder why, when she could live in luxury like this. She nearly always cried with relief when she came back to the mess we lived in out there.’

  ‘And now you have such a deep knowledge of our family.’

  The sarcasm was so thick it buried my good sense, and before I knew what had happened I had blurted out, ‘I know more about some of it than you do!’

  She sat down again, her elegant hands clenched into fists, the knuckles bone-white. ‘What are you talking about? What do you know?’

  ‘I…nothing.’ I could have slapped myself, but the words were out now, and hung between us. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Oh, I think it does,’ she said softly, then shrugged. ‘I’ll get the truth out of Evangeline, anyway. I assume that’s where you learned it, whatever it is. I know she’s hiding something about Jack Carlisle.’

  ‘You’ll hurt her if you do,’ I said. ‘Is that what you want to do?’

  ‘Of course not! Whatever you may think, I love my childr…’ she swallowed hard ‘…I love Evie.’

  I felt wretched already, and now I had to tell her something that would stop her dragging the terrible truth about her husband, out of her grieving, and still confused daughter. ‘It’s not about Evie, or Jack,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s about Lawrence.’

  She paled even further. ‘What about him?’

  I took a deep breath and sent a silent apology to Lawrence. At least it couldn’t hurt him now. ‘He would never have married me, or given you a grandson.’

  ‘He might have had a daughter.’ Her voice shook, and she cleared her throat. ‘A daughter would have kept us for another generation, at least.’

  ‘No. He…he was in love with someone else.’

  ‘Then he would have married her instead! In the absence of anyone else, Katherine, you were merely a convenient—’

  ‘It was Will!’ She was struggling to find something to say, but I went on, ‘Your son was in love with your daughter’s husband.’

  There was a long silence. Then she spoke, in hardly more than a whisper. ‘Get out.’

  ‘It’s not Will’s fault; he doesn’t know—’

  ‘Now.’

  I left, my heart hammering and my hands slick with sweat. It was true it couldn’t hurt Lawrence, and it would save Evie the anguish of having to reveal the truth about her father, but what had I done to Lily?

  The next morning my dreams woke me once more, but this time the sun was already creeping under the heavy curtain, throwing shadows across the floor. I stared at them while the panic gradually subsided… Just as before, the familiar dream had left me with more than the usual tightness in my belly, and with a deeper sense of terror. More than anything though, there was a white-hot fury that still licked through me even now, minutes after re-establishing myself in my safe surroundings. But now I knew why.

  This time, in the back of the ambulance, there had been someone else besides myself and Lieutenant Colonel Drewe. A small shadow, crouching by the other stretcher, trying to sink into the floor. A child. I’d tried to tell her to push aside the canvas flap and climb out, but my words were coming out as jumbled nonsense, and with no volume no matter how loudly I tried to scream. Then a hand was across my mouth—a memory hand, not a dream one—and all I could do was try to reach the girl with my mind; she had to get away, before he finished with me and turned to her…

  Amy. Of course it was Amy. Evie’s words echoed insistently in my mind. Her fears had become mine and now they would not go away. I remembered the idea that had hit me moments before Lily had come into the library with the news about Samuel Wingfield, but it was too late to mention it now. Bringing the child back here was out of the question. My eyes went to the suitcase that lay on the ottoman at the foot of the bed, open and awaiting only my nightclothes and toiletries. I had packed it at Dark River with such high hopes, such relief and such excitement, and now look at me.

  Evie had expressed disappointment at what I’d told her had been my decision—whether or not Lily set the story straight later didn’t matter; I just didn’t want the two of them to argue over it—but she had given me money for the train fare.

  ‘Travel safely, Skittles. Will and I should be back home soon.’

  Home. She was right; Dark River had been dancing on the edge of my mind at first, but my time here had first been too exciting, and then too emotionally draining, to spare the Dartmoor farm more than a fleeting thought, and I felt a pang of guilt as I realised I hadn’t even put pen to paper since I’d arrived at Oaklands.

  I dressed in my travelling clothes once more, and closed my suitcase, the dream still tugging at my memory and distracting me from my preparations. The idea came again, alter
ed, and it made me stop everything and sit down for a minute, mulling it over. I looked at the clock. There was time, if I left now, and I seized my suitcase; breakfast would have to fall by the wayside today, but it would be worth it…if I wasn’t too late.

  Lily had arranged for the car to take me to the station. She came out of the morning room and saw Mr Dodsworth handing my bag to the gardener, who did duty as a driver whenever necessary.

  ‘Kitty,’ she called, and I stopped in my tracks. She came over, and hesitantly touched my arm. ‘What you said yesterday, about Lawrence—’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘No-one else knows.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I was…harsh,’ she said. I looked at her closely, wondering if this was simply her way of sweetening things between us so I wouldn’t tell anyone. But she did look sorry, and her face, always pale, now also looked much older. The combined loss of her treasured son and her comfortable life had taken a strong, beautiful woman, and added at least ten harsh years in the space of a few weeks.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ I said. However much it had hurt to have this woman I respected look at me with the same condemning eyes as my own family, I’d rubbed salt in her still-raw wounds. That it had been a necessary cruelty, to protect her from even worse pain, did not matter; I had been the one to inflict it so how could I blame her for still wanting me to go? ‘I understand everything, truly. It’s been an honour to meet you, Lady Creswell, and I’m only sorry it has ended like this.’

  She nodded her acceptance, and turned away quickly, as if worried I might take her olive branch as an invitation to stay after all. But we both knew my days at Oaklands Manor were at an end, and I followed Dodsworth out to the car, and didn’t look back as we turned onto the main road into town. It was only when we passed the spot where a young and besotted Will had overturned the butcher’s van, and Lawrence had experienced the first, bittersweet pangs of love, that I felt a tear sliding slowly down my cheek.