Martha turned, looked at Gabriel and then looked back at the stairs. Imagine tripping and falling now after everything they’d gone through. She peered down into the hallway. Nothing.
“How did you even know to come here?”
Now that there was calm, the questions flooded into Martha’s mind. It suddenly made no sense that Gabriel had turned up out of the blue. They had reached the hallway and Martha stepped out into the glorious sunshine. Birds chirped in the trees above her and a gentle breeze had started to blow, the air cleared by the thunder and lightning. She turned her face to the breeze and breathed in. Ruby’s hair blew gently and she jiggled her legs in delight. It was as if what she had seen had never happened.
Gabriel stepped out behind her and, with a final glance down the hallway, closed the door firmly behind him. “Last time we’ll be in there, hopefully, eh?” he asked, giving the handle a final tug.
Martha didn’t answer. She had thought that too many times to think it even once more, but she hoped Gabriel was right.
The tall man turned to face her. “I got a message to come,” he said.
“But from whom? No one knew I’d come out here – I just wanted to get packed up and on the road.”
“The message was from someone who looks after you,” said Gabriel. “That thin lady that I saw that time?”
Martha was shocked. “My mum,” she said.
Gabriel nodded. “I thought so. She was really worried about you – knew you were in danger and wouldn’t leave me alone until I got up and went to you both. She was especially worried about the bairn.”
Martha was momentarily distracted by a car pulling into the driveway behind her. “What now?” she thought, but focused her attention back on Gabriel. “She knows about Ruby?” She suddenly wanted to know everything that Gabriel knew. Her own mum was looking after her at last, properly. “What –” she began, but was interrupted by a car door slamming and the crunch of footsteps across the gravel.
“What are you doing with my bloody car, you great big ginger bastard!” shouted Will, charging up to Gabriel.
Martha looked at Gabriel who was trying to look innocent, to pretend that Will wasn’t striding toward him with rage in his eyes.
“What the bloody hell is going on here?”
“You drove out here, Gabriel?” grinned Martha. It was suddenly the funniest thing in the world. She started to giggle and couldn’t stop, aware that it was hysteria after what had happened inside the house.
Gabriel shrugged an ‘I don’t know’, and continued to ignore Will.
“You blew your cover for me and Ruby?” laughed Martha.
Gabriel gave her a barely discernable grin back and she threw her head back and laughed more.
“What the hell happened?” demanded Will. “I got your text to get up here to the farm but funny how when I got outside my bloody car was gone! So you can drive, can you? Or did the spirits get you out here? One of them turning the wheel and one on – bloody – gear – duty!”
Gabriel himself snorted, Martha doubled over with hysterical laughter.
“Jeez, Will, no need to insult them!” said Gabriel, pointing upwards and rolling his eyes around. “Christ, I shouldn’t have done that,” he said quickly, putting a hand to his mouth.
This made Martha laugh even harder and she bent over, Ruby starting to grizzle at the uncomfortable position she had been placed in.
“Martha, are you okay?” came a familiar voice and she felt Ruby being lifted from her arms.
“Sue!” she said. It didn’t surprise her that her best friend was there, wouldn’t surprise her if the Queen suddenly turned up in a Routemaster bus. She threw her arms around her friend who looked as bewildered as Will. It was her green Citroën that had brought them there.
“Christ on a bike, Martha, I had a few days off and thought I’d surprise you. Then I call to the village to get some stuff and then I’m driving out here and spot this fellow trying to wave me down with his face looking like something out of Rocky!”
Martha looked at Will. Sure enough his nose was bloodied and he had the beginnings of a swollen lip. “Will?”
He stopped glaring at Gabriel and hugged her. She felt her tense body relax in his arms and breathed in the smell of him, felt safe. She was suddenly aware of the pain in her shoulder, the stinging from her stomach – she wondered if it were bleeding.
“Are you both okay?” said Will, releasing her and looking directly into her face.
Martha’s skin was pale, her eyes red from crying. She nodded. “We’re fine. Gabriel got there on time. Look, can we go back to the B&B or something? I don’t think I can drive to London tonight.”
“London?” said Sue. “What are you driving to London for?”
“To see you, you bloody fool. Thank God you’re here!” Martha released herself from Will’s grasp and threw her arms around her friend again.
“Was it Mannion?” asked Will, breathlessly.
Gabriel nodded and looked back at the house. “She’s still there.”
“Is she?” interrupted Will, a tone of excitement in his voice.
“Leave it, Will,” said Gabriel. “You need to hear what’s happened before you go charging back in with the cameras. Henry’s safe though – definitely gone this time. I had my suspicions that it hadn’t worked the first time. Anyway, what happened to you?”
“Your bloody landlord, Martha,” Will replied, dabbing underneath his nose and checking his finger for blood.
“Rob Mountford?” said Martha. Now she was really puzzled.
“The very man,” said Will, sniffing. “He was staggering out of the pub and getting into his Land Rover when I came out of the B&B to come up here. He was in no condition to drive and I offered him a lift before realising my car was missing. But next thing I know he starts ranting on at me, about who did I think I was, and he was perfectly fine to drive his own car and he belonged in this village and I was no one blah blah blah! Then he bloody recognised me – someone must have told him about me, and he started shouting at me that I had no right being up at his farm and it was his farm and that I was to stay away from his woman and all sorts. Next thing he took a swing at me – I wasn’t expecting it and this is the result. The man’s bloody huge! Thought he was going to knock my head off!”
“Bloody bully,” hissed Martha. “Bullying you, bullying me, bullying poor old ladies – that family is nothing but a bunch of bloody bullies!”
“Oh, he didn’t bully me,” grinned Will.
“Wait till you hear this,” added Sue.
Martha looked at Will, who glanced down at his hand. She noted for the first time a trace of purple on his knuckles. “I bloody punched him, I did!” he said, in a mock Scottish accent.
Gabriel tutted at the stereotype.
“You what!” shrieked Martha.
“He might be big,” said Will, “but I’m fast. He won’t be bullying anyone for a while without a great big bandage on his nose. Of course I’m sure there’ll be a court case, and I’ll be charged with assault, but he started it!”
“Holy shit!” screeched Martha and impulsively she threw her arms around Will again, who staggered backward with surprise.
“Break it up, kids,” said Gabriel. “Let’s get our asses out of here. Things might be calm now but I really don’t want to hang around here any longer, do you?”
Martha released Will but smiled directly into his face. He smiled back, beaming from ear to ear.
Sue climbed back into her Citroën, Gabriel into the Volvo on a nod from Will. “You can bloody drive us back to Edinburgh as well,” he growled, as Gabriel slid into the driver’s seat.
Will sat in next to Martha who had secured Ruby into her seat and was sitting behind the wheel, staring up at Eyrie Farm.
“You want me to drive?” he asked.
She shook her head. Her hand rested on the gear-stick and Will covered it with his own, turning to look directly a
t her.
They sat in silence for a few moments, watching the farmhouse while the others executed three-point turns and crawled down the drive. A part of Will longed to see something – a face perhaps, or a shadow move behind a curtain. Martha was just glad to see the house at rest, if only for a while.
It was Will who broke the silence. “Oh, I heard in the pub that Lil Flynn woman was found dead this afternoon, poor old soul. A man who drops off coal to her, it seems, looking for his money.”
Martha closed her eyes. “I reckoned that,” she said. “And her soul was very rich in the end . . .” She shook her head, letting the melancholy go, and put the car into reverse.
Without a backward glance, Martha, Will and Ruby turned and drove down the gravel driveway of Eyrie Farm for the last time.
Chapter 35
Belvedere,
Brockley’s Marshes,
Shipton Abbey,
Norfolk
England
July 15th, 2008
Dear Henry,
My little darling boy, my own sweetheart, precious little angel. Where are you, my darling? All those names that I once called you when I held you in my arms from the day you were born until the day I never saw you again? What became of you, my boy? I fear that I know too well but all these years I have held a hope in a corner of my heart that I should see you again and hold you once more to me.
If the worst happened to you, sweetest Henry, then I feel I shall see you very soon. The doctors tell me I have cancer in my stomach and that it has spread to other places as well but I don’t listen any more. Their tablets make me half crazy and with the funny way I speak nowadays – you have never heard me speak this way – the villagers think that I am some sort of drunken fool and you know that your Auntie Lily never touched a drop in her life.
I am old now, Henry, discarded, out here on the marshes like a witch that the village cast out. Those Mountfords have had me over a barrel my whole life. They set me up in this house – this prison. Belvedere, they call it – it means ‘a beautiful view’ I think. Is it a joke, I ask myself? They didn’t interfere with my scraping a living but they made sure that everyone thought nothing of me – they even managed to somehow destroy what friendship and loyalty I thought I had with Mrs Collins who delivered you, my only friend. She never came to see me once I moved and when I saw her on the street from then on she turned the other way, pretended not to see me. That can only have been their doing. I thought their hold over me was gone when old Charles died but only a month ago young Robbie, his grandson, a great hulking idiot of a man was out here telling me not to be telling my tales. I pray that soon they’ll have no choice but to leave me alone.
Most of the villagers don’t know me. Some do, but as the old drunk who spends her days in the pub. I do that, Henry, because I feel that if you, or Robert, were ever to return to me it is where you would go to ask if I am still here and I am afraid that the landlord would tell you a false tale about me and you would leave. Also, any news of the Farm would come to me through there. And it is company as I am lonely out here. My customers don’t come here any longer. There’s no need for my skills.
I am very tired today. That woman who has been living at Eyrie Farm has been to see me and I have told her what I think happened to you and what I know happened to the woman who gave birth to you. I gave her my letters, Henry, and if you should ever come back to me then you must go to Eyrie Farm and get them from her. I trust her because she has a child herself and knows what it is to love like a mother. The difference between us is that she gave birth to her own child where that is the one thing that I didn’t do for you Henry, but I feel as though I did.
I have missed you every day for the past fifty years, my lovely dark-haired boy. You were the one constant in my life. Robert wasn’t a constant after all but I hear that he found happiness and bless him for that. I’ve learned that you’re best not building yourself up to love many folk, Henry. The more you love the more you lose. Good luck to the woman who became his wife, to the children that he bore all that distance away in Australia. Oh, that I were her, Henry, that you were his child like we planned. We were only hours away from that happening when Marion came home. Albie wouldn’t have her back and threatened to set the dogs on her when she arrived at his house. I can imagine that she begged and pleaded and probably made a show of herself somehow. She had nothing left to lose, Henry.
When she came back early and saw our bags in the hall she lifted you by the arm away from me, dragged you upstairs, smashing and breaking things all around her like a madwoman. I remember your screams as she pulled you away from me and I heard the noise your arm made when it came out of its socket. I thought my heart would break there and then, little boy. And then it went silent, and then she came out to me and pushed me and the next I knew I was in the hospital and I couldn’t speak at all and I didn’t know where you were gone. I think I know now, my darling, I pray that it was swift and painless for you. For me it is slow and filled with pain but that is my penance for not protecting you, for letting her get you and hurt you. If I could go back and take your place then I would, a thousand times. Why didn’t I leave with Robert when he wanted to take me away the day Albie discovered you, cut and bleeding with the glass from the Sacred Heart?
Robert told me that he came for us, darling. He didn’t let us down that day, but Marion met him at the door and told him we were gone away ahead of him and that I would get in touch with him. She pretended that’s all of my so-called message she understood and sent him away while she finished what she was doing.
It took Robert a day to come back, knowing then that something was wrong. He says I was awake and wandering through the house, bloodstained and confused, but I have no memory of that, just of being brought here to the house on the marsh and him handing over the paperwork for my mortgage and all of my things here from Eyrie Farm. I have never been back up there, Henry, can you believe it? In a village this size, and with all the tales the villagers tell of it, and I have never once in fifty years made the trip back to the Farm. I am afraid of what I would see there. In case I saw the fireplace that I think she bricked up using the tools that the workmen left and the skills she learned from my father back in Dublin.
I never again heard from my father, Henry. I tried writing to him to tell him my new address but I never received a letter back. For all I know he could have been dead by the time everything happened at Eyrie Farm and Marion left Shipton for good. Surely any father who cared would have worried at my news, that I was now living on the marshes, with no mention of Marion or indeed of you. I think my mother’s death finished him, Henry. And he was so ashamed of Marion, of you, God forgive him, that he felt it easier to bear if we didn’t exist.
I can’t write any more, my darling boy. I am going to go to sleep now and perhaps I’ll dream of you, your dark hair and your big smile for me, your mammy. I pray that you are alive and well somewhere. That your mother by birth took you with her when she fled after knocking me down the stairs and that somewhere along the way some kind people took care of you, like I wanted for you when you were born. I fear the worst though, my lovely boy, in which case I will see you very soon.
With all the love I have left,
Your loving mother,
Lily
Chapter 36
December 10th
Martha crunched through the frost in the thick grass, glad she had worn a pair of low-heeled boots. She hadn’t realised she was going to have to trek quite so far over uneven terrain.
The sun had begun to melt the frost, but it was still early and very, very cold. She pulled Ruby’s hat down over her ears and tugged the zip of her snowsuit up as high as it could go. “Ba!” said Ruby, looking upward and Martha glanced up to see where the bird was.
Gabriel was already there, she could see, talking to a man she imagined must be the gravedigger. No sign of Will just yet but then again he had the most important job today. Martha waved at Gabriel who was stom
ping his feet to keep warm. He waved back, and Ruby joined in, clasping her little fingers in and out in her mittens. Martha was surprised the mittens had stayed on this long – normally she felt they needed to be glued onto her hands to keep them on.
Martha stumbled over some more rough ground, edged along the corner of a grave – she couldn’t bring herself to walk directly on it – and stepped down onto the grass. As the gravedigger moved away to wait discreetly in the background, Gabriel came forward and kissed Martha on the cheek.
The two of them stared at the headstone.
It was small, made from local stone, a simple rectangular shape.
‘Lily Alice Flynn – February 1936 – July 2008
He who does not love does not know God, for God is Love’
There was a small space open at the top of the grave, the rest of it covered in green material, the small mound of earth in a pile alongside the headstone.
“Look at her, tucked away in the corner again, like she was out on that bloody marsh,” said Martha.
“Och Martha, she’s not there,” said Gabriel, taking Ruby from her arms. “Hello, precious!”
Martha grinned, remembering how disgusted he’d been at Ruby’s existence the first time they had met.
“You know she’s with Henry and they’re happy,” Gabriel went on. “Neither of them will be in this hole in the ground.”
Martha squinted against the morning sunlight and saw Will’s car pull up. The Lexus certainly was more impressive than the Volvo under the circumstances, although the Volvo was still used when he went on investigations. She smiled to herself as she saw him step out. He looked very tall in a dark blue overcoat and his suit. Bless him for going to all the effort, she thought.
He opened the back door and leaned over the seat, sliding something toward him. She saw that a man who must be Father Timoney had stepped from the passenger seat and had come round to hold the door for Will. The priest closed the car door behind Will as he straightened and looked across the graveyard, and set off toward them, the small white coffin in his hands.
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