I sip my wine thoughtfully, thinking about Adam and Dosia and how hard it must have been for Adam to see Ralph enjoying the life that should have been his, too. ‘It must have been hard for Dosia too,’ I say, ‘especially when she had a child.’ I hesitate. ‘I saw a photo of Peter.’
‘He was born like that.’ Angie is matter-of-fact. ‘Nowadays it’s called facial deformity syndrome but back then he was just a freak. I don’t think he ever left the estate.’
‘Was he your father?’
‘God, no. I don’t think he would have had much success with the ladies, do you?’ Angie’s voice is light, but the casual cruelty of it makes me grimace. She doesn’t notice. She’s telling me about her father, Marek, born about five years after Peter. ‘Dad was always wild,’ she says. ‘He took after my grandfather but of course he didn’t have a war as an outlet for his recklessness. Instead he got a local girl into trouble and they got married, as they still did in those days, but it wasn’t a success. My mother took off when I was still a toddler.’
I start to say that I’m sorry, but Angie brushes my sympathy aside. ‘It’s not a big tragedy. I don’t even remember her. Dad and I moved back into the Lodge, which was fine by me. After he was killed on his bike a few years later, my grandparents brought me up, and since my grandfather died, it’s just been Babcia and me.’
It’s a sad story. I wonder how much her mother’s abandonment has affected Angie. Is that why she is so good at looking after everybody, and so reluctant to leave the only home she has ever known?
‘Tough on you,’ I say quietly, but Angie only shrugs.
At least I got to grow up at Askerby. If my mother had taken me with her, who knows what dump I’d have ended up in?’ She shudders extravagantly. ‘I can’t believe you’d even consider doing the same to Felix,’ she adds with a sidelong look. ‘Here he’s got a whole estate to run around in. You’ll be lucky if you can even afford a garden.’
I’m not going to rise to that one. ‘What happened to Peter?’
‘He died when I was eleven.’
‘So you remember him?’
‘Yes.’ Something shifts in her eyes, something I can’t identify but that for some reason makes me look over my shoulder. There is no one there. ‘Yes, I do.’
Angie offers to drive me back when we’ve finished the bottle, but it’s still warm and I opt to walk. ‘I’ll make the most of the long summer evenings while we’ve got them.’
The moors are glowing gold in the slanting sunshine as I head back across the parkland. I wish I could be up there on a horse, riding free – or is it Isabel who wishes that? I hardly know any more.
The grass in the park is already yellowing and tired by the middle of July, and everything looks as if it could do with a good tidy. Even the cows who watch me pass with vacant eyes seem faintly raggedy. The hedgerows are clogged with brambles and dead seed heads, and the cow parsley that once stood tall is now slumped and smothered by sticky willy. Every now and then, I swipe at the tangled mess with my stick.
It is very quiet. During the day, the estate is thronging with visitors, but they are all gone now and Askerby seems to be catching its breath. I take my time, not eager to step back into the cold embrace of the Hall which waits at the other side of the park. I can’t shake the notion that it is watching me, its windows fixed on my dawdling approach, glass gleaming black and malicious in the evening light.
I am being fanciful. I stop and take another cross swipe at the thronging weeds with my stick, only to gasp in fright as a pheasant explodes out of the hedge in a whirr of wings. My heart is jumping wildly, and I pat my chest to calm it. It was just a bird, but my nerves are jangling, just as they did when the old woman stepped into my path as I rode back to the Hall one day.
Edmund was away in York, and I had slipped out before Judith could scold me about riding alone. My husband might tease me that I was a poor housekeeper, but he admitted that I was a fine farmer. I liked to ride with him to check on our fields and woods, to see that the hedges were well made and the sheep growing fat, that the corn grew high and the cows were calving as they should, but if he was absent with other duties, as he often was, I would go alone.
I knew every nook and cranny of Askerby: where the cattle huddled to shelter from the rain, the bend in the river where Edmund taught me to tickle for trout, every dip and curve of the track as it wound its way up onto the moors where the sheep summered. I was proud of my orchard where I grew apples and damsons and quinces, and in spring I planted the seeds in the vegetable garden with my own hands, loving the crumbly feel of the soil between my fingers. At harvest time, I held the golden grains in my hand and oversaw the sorting and weighing of corn. I inspected the coppices and bound the wounds of man and animal alike. As long as I was outside, I was fearless and happy.
But when my mare reared as the woman seemed to appear out of nowhere like a creature from the stories Judith read in the evenings, yes, there was a moment when I was afraid.
Chapter Twenty-five
Fear streaked through me, only to vanish as I recognized her. This was no magical creature. This was Eliza Wood, the lack-wit. Bent and twisted as an old tree, she eked out a living on the outskirts of the village, and although folk avoided her where they could, most knew that she was harmless enough. She mumbled and muttered to herself as she hobbled past, and her pale, filmy eyes were vacant. I was cross with myself for being startled by such a creature.
‘What do you want?’ I said, more irritated with myself than with her. Blanche was snorting and sidling in agitation, and most of my attention was on trying to calm her.
Eliza shuffled closer and took hold of my saddle. ‘For you,’ she whispered, holding up a twist of paper, and I took it without thinking.
‘What is this?’
She snorted and snuffled into her hand. ‘Hemlock,’ she said, her mouth stretched in a grotesquely toothless smile, and a sly look swam behind the pale eyes.
‘Hemlock! What do I want with hemlock?’ I demanded, more unnerved by her than I wanted to admit.
‘Eliza asks no questions. She does as she is asked.’
‘Well, I do not want it!’
‘But you asked for it, mistress,’ she whined. ‘You sent for me and asked me to prepare a poison in secret, so here it is. You promised me a penny.’
‘I? No!’
‘A penny, you said.’ Her eyes darted from side to side. ‘A penny for poison.’
‘But I . . .’ I stared at her uneasily.
This was not the first time I had forgotten a conversation. Ever since getting stuck in the garderobe I had been aware of Judith gently reminding me about things I had done or said that I seemed to have wiped from my memory. Just little things. ‘It matters not,’ she always said. Since Kit’s birth it had been happening more often, not every day or even every week, but often enough for me to have a queasy feeling in the pit of my belly.
‘You are a mother now,’ Judith said. ‘You have much to think about. What does it matter if you forget that you told the maid to bring a caudle for the babe? She will take it away again. Do not worry about it.’
But I did worry about it. After Kit was born, I dutifully drank broth made with comfrey and knotgrass; I took spoonfuls of peony seeds powdered into a posset; it seemed for a while as if every dish was flavoured with verbena. I did everything that I was told and as a result I suffered no fevers, but ever since, my head had been fuzzy, and I felt sometimes as if I were suffocating. Edmund and Judith both told me this would pass, that now that my babe was born my body was adjusting itself once more and that all would be well, but the longer I felt blurry and tired, the more anxious I became.
And now this! Surely, surely, I could not have forgotten talking to Eliza? And about poison!
‘I asked you for nothing,’ I said, hating the tremor in my voice. ‘Why would I need poison? Begone with you!’
Eliza wouldn’t let go of my saddle. ‘A penny,’ she insisted. The slyness deepened into cunn
ing. ‘A penny for my trouble, that is what you promised.’
The emptiness in her eyes disturbed me, and my mare sidestepped, fretful. In the end I tossed the old woman a penny as the only way to get rid of her, and she caught it in one gnarled hand. ‘Be off with you now,’ I said firmly, and she vanished into the trees as silently as she had come.
I was left holding the twist of paper. I made to throw it away and then stopped. What if it was indeed poison? Very cautiously, I opened the paper and sniffed at the seeds inside. They had a musty, micey smell. I was no expert in the still room but it seemed like hemlock to me. Shuddering, I emptied the seeds onto the ground and tucked the paper into my sleeve.
Edgy and unsettled, I rode slowly home. ‘I have never spoken to her before,’ I said when I told Judith what had happened. ‘I haven’t!’
‘I believe you, Isabel,’ she said soothingly. ‘Of course you haven’t.’
‘Then why would she say that I had? Why give me poison?’
‘They say she is a witch.’ Judith lowered her voice and looked over her shoulder before leaning closer. ‘I heard she mildewed John Aske’s corn when he refused to give her a loaf. And that she bewitched Mary Kirk’s boy Tom, who is like to die.’
A witch? No!’ I said. ‘But she is very strange. I think she must be . . .’ As always, I faltered at the word, but Judith had no such scruples.
‘Mad? I daresay she is.’ She shivered. ‘I would have been sore afraid if I had met her. You should not go out alone, Isabel,’ she chided me. ‘Indeed you should not. You see what may happen.’
‘She did not hurt me.’ But the encounter had left me with a sense of disquiet. I pulled out the twist of paper. It still had some seeds clinging to it, and I did not want to leave it where some child might find it. ‘What shall I do with this?’
‘Burn it,’ Judith advised, but it was a warm day and there was no fire yet burning in the grate. ‘Give it to me,’ she said. ‘I will take it to the kitchen and burn it for you.’
Remembering that day, I stand by the hedgerow, my hand still fisted against my heart, and unease uncoils within me anew. The sun has slid behind the trees, and as if at a signal, the warmth is leached from the air. A shiver prickles its way down my spine. In the distance, the house is watching me and I could swear it is smirking.
The closer I get, the more my sense of foreboding deepens. It is as if the house is sending out invisible tendrils that are coiling around me, drawing me in so that it can devour me. Part of me wants to turn and run in panic, but I can’t. My son is in there.
Where is my son? That isn’t me, that’s Isabel. She wants Kit, not Felix. Why is she searching for him so desperately? Something terrible is going to happen – has happened – and I need to try to stop it. But how can I change the past?
Find him. They’re not words, more a sense of urgency, of desperation.
If I can find what happened to Kit, will Isabel leave me alone? I test the question in my mind. There’s no answer – did I really think there would be? – just that press of need again. Find him.
I let myself in at the side door, into the boot room with its pervasive smell of dried dog food and damp leather. Battered waxed jackets hang on one side of the room above a line of green wellies and riding boots. Little curls of dried mud from their treads are scattered over the floor like fat worms, like slugs.
The Labradors come to greet me, blundering into each other. It is not enough for them to wag their tails. Their whole back halves swing from side to side in their pleasure at the sight of me. Molly searches around for a present and brings me an oven glove. It is impossible not to feel warmed by their welcome. There cannot be anything wrong with a house where these dogs live in such simple happiness.
Then I catch sight of Pippin watching from the doorway, her lip lifted in a snarl, and I swallow. I think the wrongness is in the house, but she thinks it is in me.
Perhaps she is right.
I settle the dogs down and push through them. Pippin backs away as I leave the boot room and head up the back stairs to the private quarters, but she follows me at a distance. I can hear the television in Margaret’s sitting room. She’ll be in there, her mouth twisting with contempt, but her eyes fixed on the screen. In spite of complaining endlessly about what rubbish it is, she loves to watch television and criticize everyone she sees.
Find him. Felix should be asleep, but I need to see him. I may not be able to find Isabel’s son, but I can make sure that my own is safe. But an impulse I can’t explain makes me turn away from the private wing when I get to the top of the stairs and head for the great chamber instead.
The rooms that are open to the public are still and shadowy. The visitors have gone, the lights are off. Here above the main staircase, the air is thick and seems to hum at a pitch just beyond hearing. I push open the door to the great chamber. In the fading light I can make out the huge bulk of the bed.
The chamber smells of old wood, old fabrics. Like the parlour, this is a dead room, set aside for tourists to gawp at, to marvel at how quaint and old and crooked the past is. How dark and inconvenient. How smelly and uncomfortable. But I don’t remember it like that. I remember laughter, a zest for life. I remember warmth and certainty. I remember colour and smell and taste and texture. The darkness, the shadows, belong in the present; it is the past that is bright and clear.
When I lay in that bed, the curtains were richly embroidered and the sheets made of fine linen. They were packed in chests with lavender and rose petals, and the smell of summer hung in the air.
Edmund was still away and I was on my own. Perhaps it was just a day or two after I had met Eliza. I’m not sure now, but it was a hot night, I do remember that. I missed Edmund. The bed felt lopsided without him, and I tossed and turned, unable to settle. The feather bolster was lumpy, and I was sure I could feel the rough wool under-mattress through the linen sheet, and the feather bed beneath me.
I pushed the coverlet off, and then pulled it over me once more. I lay on one side, and then the other. I stretched across Edmund’s side of the bed, and then wriggled back to my own. The head sheet covering the pillow was all twisted and tangled by then, and in exasperation, I thrust my hand under the pillow to turn it over and beat it into a more comfortable shape before I smoothed out the sheet.
My fingers brushed against something that crackled. Puzzled, I groped for it and drew it out. I could feel that it was a small twist of paper and my heart started to thud painfully. It was too dark to see, but I did not want to light a candle. I knew what it was.
It was the twist of hemlock.
The hemlock I had scattered on the ground, the paper I gave to Judith to burn. I remembered doing it.
How could it be in my bed? I sat bolt upright, turning the paper in the dark. I was frightened. Had poor, mad Eliza crept into the house to leave it for me? But why would she give me poison? And how would she have known where I slept?
The memory of her sly, mad eyes made my scalp shrink and my flesh prickle. I didn’t like the idea of her in my house. What if she found Kit? The thought of those hands reaching for him made me throw back the covers and get out of bed, possessed by an urgency I could not explain. I had to see him, right then. In my nightgown, I felt my way to the door and up to the nursery, where the nurse, Meg, snored in the truckle bed. Kit lay safely swaddled in his cradle. In the dim light, I could barely make him out. I had to lay my hand on him to feel his chest lift and fall, to know that he was breathing. I sighed with relief, and tiptoed to the door.
Very carefully, so as not to wake him or Meg, I closed the door and eased the latch into place. I turned to go back to my chamber and nearly screamed as a figure loomed out of the darkness.
‘Isabel!’ It was Judith’s voice, and my knees buckled with relief. ‘What are you doing creeping around in the dark?’ she whispered.
I could have asked her the same, but my heart was still battering with shock. ‘I had to see Kit.’
‘I heard a noise,’ she
said. She came closer, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see that it was her, small and neat and tidy even in the middle of the night. ‘I did not think to find you here. What is the matter?’
‘I think Eliza Wood may have been in the house,’ I said urgently, and her hands flew to her mouth.
‘The witch?’
I drew her away from Kit’s chamber. ‘I found something in my bed,’ I said, my voice still lowered. ‘Come and see.’
Judith hesitated. ‘Isabel, do you feel quite well? You are behaving most strangely.’
‘I will have to show you or you won’t believe me,’ I said impatiently. The house was so familiar to me by then that it was easy to find my way, Judith following reluctantly in my wake.
In my chamber I used the tinderbox to light a candle. A breeze through the open window sent the flame swooping and a grotesque shadow span around the room, over Judith’s worried face. Sheltering it with my hand, I carried the candle over to the bed where the twist of paper lay where I had cast it aside in my panic to get to Kit.
‘See!’ I said, pointing.
Judith looked at the paper, and then at me. ‘The paper?’ she said carefully, and even though there were just the two of us in the chamber, I lowered my voice further.
‘It is hemlock.’
Judith sucked in a gasp of fright. ‘Hemlock? Dear God, Isabel, why do you have poison?’
‘Eliza put it there.’
Even in the darkness I could see her horrified expression. ‘What are you doing with the witch?’
‘Nothing!’ Something about her reaction felt wrong, and apprehension tickled my spine. ‘I told you, she surprised me while I was riding.’
‘When was this?’
‘The other day. You must remember,’ I said, and the disquiet deepened when she just stared at me. ‘I told you,’ I insisted. ‘She would give me the hemlock and I gave her a penny to let me go. Then I emptied the seeds but brought the paper home for safety and you said you would burn it. You did!’ I said with rising desperation as she slowly shook her head.
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