The Dead Summer

by Helen Moorhouse

  She gazed upward at the majesty of the ruined abbey and her thoughts turned to how incredibly huge the monastery as a whole must once have been – a small city of its time, she supposed – with lands as far as Bickford and other neighbouring towns – lands as far as Eyrie Farm . . .

  She couldn’t get the house from her mind, what had happened there, how it made her feel. She remembered at first how it had been a haven. How carefree it had all felt, just a month ago, like the first few days of being on holiday. But now that holiday was well and truly over and she had a lot of work to do, a small child to care for and Eyrie Farm to deal with. It bothered Martha to feel that the house should be ‘dealt with’. She should just be able to live there, for heaven’s sake. Instead she never knew what was going to happen next with the noises and the shadows, the constant feeling of unease. A thought struck Martha that had been floating around the back of her mind for some time now but that she hadn’t acknowledged. She never felt alone at the cottage, always felt like she was working around someone else . . . always a guest . . . but never a welcome one . . .

  A cloud passed over the sun and the shaded area where Martha sat grew gloomy. She shivered, and noticed that Ruby had stopped playing with the grass and was looking up, trying to see where the sun had gone. Time to go home, thought Martha. But where was that? Not in London any more, not with her father and stepmother . . . but Hawthorn Cottage or Eyrie Farm. And that certainly didn’t feel like the home it should be.

  Maybe Sue had been right. Martha stood up and gathered Ruby to her. Maybe this was all wrong for her. Maybe it was time to return to the city and her so-called friends. A wave of sadness washed over her and unexpected tears pricked her eyes as she bent to lower Ruby back into pushchair. One landed on the baby’s leg with a plop.

  Martha sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Sorry, love,” she said, as Ruby stared at her, puzzled. “Mummy’s fine, and she’ll take care of you no matter what.”

  Chapter 19

  Eyrie Farm,

  Shipton Abbey,Norfolk,

  England

  August 8th, 1953

  Dear Caroline,

  Praise be to God for he has sent us a light in our suffering! The baby is here – Henry Joseph Flynn, named after our great patriot Henry Grattan and our own dear father. He is a tiny bundle of beauty, with our mother’s dark eyes, God rest her soul, that seem to look everywhere for something new to learn when he is awake, and tiny pink lips that I cannot help but kiss.

  Marion’s pains started early in the morning and she came to my room and told me to fetch the doctor immediately. I got dressed and rushed to get him, and he drove me back in his motor car, which was a great thrill, my bike in the boot! When we got back, Marion’s waters had broken – Mammy, Lord rest her, had been right – I knew exactly what had happened. I had never seen Marion so terrified, but even in the throes of her pains she managed to make a holy show of us by kicking out at the doctor and telling him to get out, and then to get rid of the pains, and then to make the baby go away. And the doctor would tell her to walk around, that the pains would get worse before they got better and she’d shout swear words at him till she was gripped with another pain and then she’d bend over and hold the bars of the chairs till it passed. The doctor said he would leave us then, and said he’d send for Mrs Collins, the midwife, to come to Marion in a few hours. I couldn’t imagine how she could sustain the pains any longer, for by the way she was acting it was as if the devil himself were killing her. The doctor said that all was well and that the baby would probably be born some time the following day. At that, I thought Marion would kill him stone dead, such was the look of fury in her eyes but she was gripped by another pain then and the doctor made his escape!

  Such a night we put in then, with Marion roaring and screaming, saying things like she was being broken in two and that she didn’t care if the baby died so long as the pains would stop. Mrs Collins came later in the day and took Marion to her bedroom and didn’t allow me in, except to bring water for a cloth for Marion’s brow. When it came close to the time, Mrs Collins called me to the room and bade me hold Marion’s hand as hard as I could, and to mop her brow with a cool flannel when she needed it. Marion was hysterical with the pains, and one minute wanted to push and the next minute didn’t want to push and then she was swearing and cursing and telling me all sorts of curse words and saying evil about the baby and our poor dead mother. All I could do was pray that this would pass but I feared that Marion would die.

  And then with one great push he was with us, little baby Henry. Mrs Collins held him upside down and smacked him on the bottom, would you believe, and he let a great roar of a cry from his little body and I couldn’t keep from crying myself that he was alive and all right because he was a funny colour. Mrs Collins swaddled him then in a blanket that had belonged to the Mountfords and tried to hand him to Marion but she wanted none of it, so little Henry was placed in my arms with his little face all wrinkled up and his nose squashed to one side, but Mammy said that I had come out the same way, Lord rest her, and not to expect any baby to be beautiful. But he is, Caroline, he is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. He opens his eyes and looks at me like I am a thing of wonder and he makes my heart melt.

  Marion refused to feed him with her own milk, but Mrs Collins has given us some powdered formula, they call it, which is better for babies by all accounts. She has shown me how to make it up and then how to give Henry his bottle and wind him and settle him to sleep. He sleeps a lot and scarcely cries, bless him. I am sad for Marion for it is such a joy to hold him but she refuses to take him from me and I am left to look after him. I don’t mind, but I will find it very hard to hand him away when the time comes but I must remember that he is not my baby, and perhaps Marion is too afraid to become attached to him for it must only be a matter of time before someone comes to take him to his new home.

  Henry sleeps in a cot by my bed now. Marion is very tired after her labours and needs all her sleep. I then have to get up in the night to give Henry his bottle but it is a wonderful thing to have him so near, and to hear his tiny breathing in the silence of my room at night. Mrs Collins says that she will come back in a day or so to check him and to show me how to bathe him. She says also that she will share the news with Mr Mountford who will telephone Daddy. I pray the news that both Marion and the child are safe and well will provide him with some light in his darkness. I haven’t heard a word from him since my mother’s passing and I worry so, and fret, that he is all right. Surely he will be in touch soon to tell us when we are to return home. What an adventure this has been!

  I must go now – little Henry has roused from his nap and will need another bottle. He is a small baby so I pray that he will grow big and strong. I have something else to confess to you, Caroline. I baptised Henry myself! I hope I remembered how to do it properly, the way the nuns taught us at school. I know lay people are only supposed to do it in an emergency, but what if he died unexpectedly, Caroline, as babies sometimes do, and his little soul was condemned to stay in Limbo for all eternity? Isn’t that an emergency, surely? Anyway, I did it. I tried to make it special with a candle and Henry in a white gown that was in the box of things the Mountfords sent for him. So now, I hope, if he dies, he can join Mammy in heaven.

  Please pray, Caroline, that a loving mammy and daddy will be his new parents and look after him, for he is surely a little angel on earth.

  May God be with you,

  Lily

  Chapter 20

  July 11th

  Martha breathed a silent prayer that there would be no thunder and lightning that night.

  Another week had passed. The septic-tank job remained uncompleted as Rob was continually tied up with administrative problems at the Meadows. One of his workers had uncovered a coin on the site and it seemed that any more work had to be suspended until it was investigated further. As a result, Rob was in a foul humour and told Martha when he called her to expla
in that he didn’t have time for “sodding archaeologists and their bloody digging”. Rumour had it that the coin was Roman and a full dig would be warranted at the site. Martha stayed well out of Rob’s way.

  Her own mood remained black. She was worried about Ruby – irrational fears of what would happen if she herself was hurt or injured. This in turn caused her crippling writer’s block. She sat each morning at her desk, growing steadily more uneasy about her ability to finish the book she so desperately wanted to write, but Rufus refused to be his usual magical self. Then she would be a complete failure, she thought – as a wife, as a writer – Ruby would never respect her.

  Martha also worried that she had no friends here in Shipton Abbey other than Mary Stockwell, that her main source of human contact was dropping Ruby to crèche each morning. The other mothers remained complete strangers to her. Kai’s mum was eighteen and waiting for exam results. Ella’s mum closer to Martha in age but each morning she literally handed the toddler over to Mary or Aneta and swept back out to her Range Rover with a brusque “Hi”. She was a solicitor in Bickford, Mary told her, and her sharp suits and dresses made Martha feel a little intimidated.

  Martha’s melancholy wasn’t helped by a series of power cuts at the cottage. Plugging in the kettle was liable to trip the main power switch and Martha developed the habit of keeping a torch, a candle and matches beside her as the evenings grew dark. She never knew when an investigation of the fusebox might be required, or simply just a couple of hours in the dark waiting for the mains to come back on. Martha grew to dread bedtimes. She hated to admit it but she slept with the light on most nights and feared waking in the dark to another power cut. It was also so stiflingly hot all the time that she slept on top of her covers which made her feel uneasy and exposed. Sometimes she read by candlelight, a nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach as she waited for the first rumble of thunder.

  Martha hated thunder, had an abject fear of being alone in a storm. It took her back to the night that her mother died, when a stern baby-sitter left her alone in the dark in pyjamas that were too warm – the terror she had experienced, too frightened to get out of bed, stiflingly hot under the covers where she was hiding from the storm. It was a time in her life that Martha couldn’t bring herself to think about, but lying in her bed in Hawthorn Cottage, the five-year-old child that she had been that night was there again – sweating and terrified of the dark.

  What woke her at three thirty wasn’t a storm, but the cold. She was freezing. In her dream, she had been outside on a cold, damp day and woke to find that her mind had simply created this because of the drop in temperature in her room. At first she tried to stay asleep and reached for the covers that she had pushed aside earlier and pulled them back over her body. She turned on her stomach, her head to one side and snuggled down to try to regain her body heat. Her eyes flickered, she registered that the room was dark – there must be another power cut as she had gone to sleep with her bedside light on. At the same time, she heard Ruby’s cries coming from the monitor and realised she had to go settle her daughter.

  She flung back the covers, pushed herself slightly off the pillow and went to bend her right leg to turn herself over but found that she couldn’t. She tried again, fully awake now, registering that all was not well in the room around her. She couldn’t move her left leg either.

  Ruby’s screams were increasing in intensity and Martha felt a surge of panic run from her gut through to her throat. At first, her brain couldn’t process what was happening – it was too unlikely, impossible even – but it was clear what was happening. She could move neither leg to turn over because someone was holding her ankles.

  Ruby screamed even louder, a panic to her cry, gasping now for breath between the screams. Martha was flooded with terror and instinctively scrabbled wildly with her feet but whoever was holding them down wouldn’t let go. In fact the grip was getting stronger. Martha pushed herself up on her elbows and tried to turn her upper body to see who her assailant was, to make out some shape in the pitch darkness. As she did, however, her elbows gave way from underneath her. Whoever was holding her had started to pull and Martha slid down the bed in a sudden and rapid movement.

  “No!” she shouted, and grabbed at the sheet, her whole body struggling. She had to get free to go to Ruby – she knew that, but why couldn’t she? Who was stopping her?

  The baby’s cries were unbearable – great gasps for air and screams of abject terror which to Martha, her brain on high alert, sounded muffled. Someone’s hurting my baby, screamed her mind as she was pulled further down the bed by hands she couldn’t see.

  Helpless, Martha tried her hardest to kick out with her legs but succeeded only in kicking at the air. Suddenly, as quickly as it had begun, the attack stopped and Martha came to an abrupt halt, her ankles flailing around wildly as she found herself resisting a grip that was no longer there. She felt rage rather than terror bubble through her body as she was finally able to flip herself over.

  “Who are you?” she roared as she turned.

  It was dark but she could see enough to make out that whoever had been there was gone. Martha blinked, turned her head rapidly from side to side – she could make out no unusual shapes in the room.

  Ruby was still screaming, the sound more muffled than before but the panic still clearly there. If someone had been hurting Ruby from the start, she thought, then who had been in her room – were there two of them? It struck her that even though what she could hear was horrific, it meant that Ruby was still there – no one had taken her away – and she was still alive.

  She scrambled from the bed and fled for her daughter’s bedroom. In the blink of an eye, thoughts flashed through her head. She should have armed herself, she knew, but the primal urge to have her daughter in her arms was too strong. If she could just touch her, then Ruby would be okay. She knew her attacker might be in the darkness of the landing, waiting for her as she ran across, but the urge to get to Ruby was so strong that she couldn’t have stopped herself if she tried.

  She flung herself inside Ruby’s room, screaming from the bottom of her gut for them to leave her baby alone. The crying continued, the sound of a child in pain and terror. As soon as Martha screamed, however, the screaming was joined by a second low whimper. Martha stopped in her tracks and surveyed the room before her. She felt like she was being elevated from her own body for a moment, and as though the floor had started to rotate around her. The desperate screaming and crying continued but there was no attacker or abductor in the room. The moons and stars circled the walls, casting a dim glow around the room – how was that happening in a power cut? – and Ruby was just starting to grizzle at being woken unexpectedly.

  Martha gasped. It wasn’t her daughter screaming and crying – it was the wall.

  She took a step backward in complete shock, gazing at the chimney-breast from where the sound seemed to come, the exposed brick still slightly visible under the picture of the hare. The crying filled her head – she longed to clap her hands over her ears and run, to do anything so that the terrible wailing and gasping would stop – so that the suffering that she could hear would come to an end. What kind of an animal could make such a human noise?

  She willed herself to the light switch. If the nightlight was working, there had to be power. She flicked the switch up and down a number of times. Nothing. There was a power cut, but a small electric light was still working – how? Panic engulfed her and a small cry escaped from her lips. Yet again, nothing made sense. She looked around the room, not knowing what it was she sought.

  Ruby, she thought. Must get Ruby out of here. She rushed to the cot where her daughter lay – silent but with arms outstretched, looking to be picked up, her face contorted in fear at the sound that surrounded her.

  The dreadful crying had lessened a little – sobs now – horrible, sad, pathetic little sobs and gasps for air. Martha could now make out the scrabbling noise that she was so used to hearing. It flashed
across her mind – what if it’s not an animal?

  She picked Ruby into her arms and held her head close to her, trying to block the sound from her ears, still scanning the room uncertainly. She bent and picked up Ruby’s blanket, popped her pacifier back in her mouth, took Hugo and turned to leave. She stepped toward the door.

  A wrenching sob came from the wall and something in her snapped.

  “For the love of God, stop it!” she cried at the top of her voice, close to tears herself. “Just shut up, shut up!” she roared.

  Immediately the room fell silent. The only crying now came from Ruby – a gentle, tired whimper of confusion and fear at her mother’s loud voice. Martha stopped for a moment to focus, her heart pounding so hard that her eyes swam with little stars.

  She gathered herself together and moved toward the door, stepping into the corridor, back out into the pitch darkness. She scanned the landing, tried to make out what she could from the dim glow that Ruby’s nightlight cast from her room – how is that working? She could see nothing, but then again the light was next to useless. Gingerly she edged toward the stairs in the black darkness, trying to move as quickly as she could in her bare feet. She kept moving, virtually blind in the dark, peering over Ruby’s shoulder to see what little she could. Her arms were full with the child, the blanket, the teddy bear, making it awkward to move, knocking her off balance.

  Frustration and terror coursed through her and she squeezed back hot tears of panic. She extended her foot and tried to feel in front of her for the top step of the stairs. She had to be careful – she couldn’t stumble or trip or both she and Ruby would fall down.

  Where had her attacker gone? Was he – or they – in hiding somewhere, getting ready to pounce on them both? Was it their intention to snatch Ruby? Where had they gone?