***
The end of the afternoon saw Louise with a well-filled order book from her two appointments. The building was nearly empty by the time she sent down her orders to the stock room and finished tidying her desk as she did every evening. She wiped it down with the duster she kept for that purpose—the evening char being forbidden to touch the desk at all—then leaned back in her chair as she surveyed her domain. Each time she did so, she sent up a silent prayer of thanks for the chance that had brought her there. From a penniless amnesiac without a name or a history, she had been lucky enough to make for herself a life, and a good one at that.
Not that she had not worked hard to get to where she was. She had done her utmost, and had been successful. But others worked just as hard, for less reward, and she was conscious of that. Buttoning her coat, she pulled her tam firmly onto her head, light of heart despite the imminent walk home through the soggy cold of early spring. She strode out onto the crowded pavement, skilfully avoiding the huddle of message boys quarrelling over a bag of liquorice bootlaces outside the sweet shop, only to run smack into a small man who had stopped square in the middle of the pavement and was sneezing violently. His armful of packages tumbled to the ground around him, and Louise stooped to help him pick them up. As she straightened, she caught the eye of a tall, spare man who was watching her oddly from the shelter of a neighbouring door. She gave him a friendly nod, but he did not respond, merely watched her continue on her way with that same odd look behind his spectacles. Shrugging, accustomed to London’s wide range of strange folk, she walked on.
Despite the cold and the dark, the wet pavements of Regent Street were busy. The numbers of late shoppers were swelled by the hordes of workers now rushing from doorways and climbing from basements, joining long lines at the omnibus stops and swarming down into the warm, fuggy tunnels of the Underground. Snuggled into her coat and with her tam well pulled down over her ears, Louise enjoyed the walk home. She peered through the windows of Liberty, cast a critical eye over the hats in the shop next door, and further down made a point of walking past the Cafe Royal, peering in through the glass door at the velvet-and-silk-lined entrance hall. At the corner of Glasshouse Street she paused and pulled out her purse, with a smile for the ex-soldier who made his pitch there. Louise stopped to talk to him several times a week, and to buy whatever he had for sale. Sometimes it was matches, sometimes flowers, occasionally newspapers. Today it was violets, and Louise breathed deeply the heady scent as she handed over thruppence for the soggy paper-wrapped bundles he handed up to her.
“I hope you’ve had a good day, Mr Stevens?” she asked doubtfully. He was seated under an overhang of stone and slate that offered some protection, but the rain today had come in from all angles and she knew that he must be uncomfortably damp at the very least.
“Not bad at all, Miss Louise, all things considered,” he replied, with a sweet grin up at her.
Missing a leg, three toes from the other foot and two fingers from his left hand, all of which were buried somewhere near Ypres, the man never acted with anything but gentle courtesy, and seeing him there in all weathers made her heart ache. She could feel nothing but anger for a system that could call its men to arms with flowery words and promises, only to spit them out at the end with nothing. Richard Stevens had been a clerk before he enlisted, a job with prospects, only to end up as one of hundreds of thousands of maimed and tortured men who had willingly served their country and ended up without jobs, or hope, or even a warm place to sit during the day.
“It has been a filthy day,” she said.
His thin face was grey under his cap. She knew that he was not more than thirty years old, but today he looked like an old man.
“You must have something hot to eat tonight, Mr Stevens. I hope your brother comes to get you soon. It’s really too cold here for you.”
He shrugged, and wriggled on the cushion he had fashioned for himself from cardboard and a square of oilskin. Despite a degree of protection from the overhang above him, the compressed paper was disintegrating in the wet, leaving a puddle of papier mâché to drain away downhill towards the kerb. He gave her another smile, but this one was of pragmatism.
“It wasn’t raining when I got here this morning, miss. Almost felt like spring, so it did.”
Checking the tin by his foot, Louise noticed that the contents were not heavy. Seeing the fatigue in his eyes, she added some more coins to the total. Hearing the clinking of the metal as it fell, he started to protest, but Louise was firm. With a thankful smile, he tossed up another posy to her and she caught it deftly.
“Mind you get something good and hot to eat!” she said. “I shall check with you tomorrow. And thank you for the flowers, they do smell delicious.”
Making a show of checking her wristwatch, she hurried homewards with a last wave of the violets, struggling to hide her distress. She knew that his brother would be by to collect him soon, after his shift at the meat market, but she hated to leave the man there, waiting in the rain. She herself had been broken once, but sheer luck had set her back on her feet. Her injuries had healed, and she had found a new life. She doubted men like Stevens would ever be so lucky, and the guilt remained with her.
The air in the shop on Brewer Street where she lodged was warm and floury, as the pasta making at the back of the shop was in full swing. Louise waved at Signor Perdoni, who was gesticulating wildly as he tried to track down a consignment of caperberries whilst muttering Italian curses beneath his breath. Avoiding the white cloud of flour that had the Perdonis’ eldest son, Tony, at its centre, she slipped past a row of dried hams and coarse sausage, through the back door and up the narrow stairs to the family apartments, where she had made her home over the past two years.
Louise considered herself lucky indeed. Not many people would have welcomed another being into a life as busy as theirs, but the Perdonis had not only taken her in, they had made her part of their family. She was lucky to have found them. Just as she was lucky to have been offered the job at Costelloes. That had been the work of Signora Perdoni, who had an acquaintance in the clothing business.
It was not until later, when they were sitting around the kitchen table, eating bottled gooseberries and custard, that Louise was reminded again of her lack of memory. Vanna had waited until the younger boys had been excused to run off to their Scout meeting, and Tony had gone back to the shop. She looked across at Louise keenly.
“You were talking in your sleep again last night,” said Vanna.
Louise sighed, spooning up the last of her fruit before answering. She was aware of Vanna’s concern. The other had been a tower of strength to her over the last two years, since they had met and first become friends. The events of the day had driven last night’s terrors away so completely that until Vanna mentioned it, Louise had truly forgotten her disturbed night. As time progressed, the nightmares came less often, but they were still enough to disturb her greatly. The night before, she had lain for a long time with her heart still thumping, afraid to close her eyes in case the dream was still lurking, ready to ensnare her again.
“Yes,” she admitted. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
Vanna ignored that with a flick of her hand.
“You were dreaming? Same as before?”
Louise nodded.
“It was exactly the same as before. The house, the garden. The way the gravel crunched under my feet. But just for a moment I thought…”
Vanna brightened, her black eyes glinting.
“What? Did you recognise something?”
Vanna was alert. She had heard something in her friend’s voice that had not been there before. Louise was surprised. She hadn’t thought about it like that until now. She took the coffee that Signor Perdoni passed to her, thanking him abstractedly as she sipped at the tiny cup, wrinkling her nose at its strength.
“I did recognise it. I knew where I was,” Louise replied slowly. “I was walking through a garden, then out onto a cliff. The house w
as behind me. I didn’t look at it, but I knew it was there. The turf was wet and my feet were damp. I was wearing canvas shoes. The next thing I knew I was right on the cliff edge. I could hear the sea, I could taste it.”
For a moment the crashing of waves over rocks was all she could hear. She licked her lips without thinking, as though the spume that had filled the air as she stood on the cliff was there, in the warm, stuffy kitchen, cutting fresh and cool through the lingering aroma of osso buco. Then she started, as if someone had slapped her face.
“Then it happened,” she said. “Again. I was looking back, towards the house. Not out to sea. I lost my footing, then I fell.”
She shuddered. No matter how often the nightmare happened, the lurch of her stomach as she took the final step back and encountered nothing but cold damp air, that final scrabbling with her fingers for a hold on the loose scree of the cliff, it never got any easier. Waking up, she still found herself drenched in a terror-driven sweat, her heart racing inside her ribs, her breath uncomfortably short in her throat. She swallowed now, a gulping movement as if her lungs were empty.
Vanna gave her a sympathetic look and passed the majolica bowl of fat, square sugar lumps. As Louise stared at them without seeing, Vanna picked up one and stirred it into the coffee cup.
“Drink your coffee. I’ve sugared it for you,” she said gently.
She watched as Louise picked up the cup with shaking hands and drank. She took up her own cup and tasted it before she spoke again.
“Perhaps next time you will remember something more. You seemed to know where you were. At least in your dream, even if you don’t remember now.”
Louise sipped again, and nodded.
“Perhaps. It has been so long, though.”
They had gone over it, again and again. One of the Perdonis’ large and widespread family was a policeman, patiently working his way through the lower echelons of Scotland Yard. When the dream had first disturbed her and she had remembered the fall, he had pushed through some enquiries, but nothing had come to light. There was no one matching Louise’s description missing from anywhere that might fit her dream, in any part of the country. There were a number of fair young women who were missing, but were believed to have run off with lovers, or on other adventures of their own. A parlourmaid in Tunbridge Wells, another in Cheltenham, a farmer’s daughter in Cornwall, and two shop girls in Yorkshire, one in the North Riding and one in the West. No leads prompted an answer, and finally everyone had been forced to accept the fact that unless some celestial wand was waved, Louise’s life as it was would have to remain as starting on that April night three years ago when she had been found on the doorstep of a suburban Kentish villa, almost dead from a head injury and hypothermia.
In bed later that night, she dreamed again, not of the cliff, but of unspecified fears and darkness, waking over and over and finally rising early from a troubled bed with a bad headache. She walked to work without feeling the hint of spring in the air that Richard Stevens had noticed the day before, and spent most of the day going over the orders from the previous afternoon and discussing them with the other departments before writing them into the schedule.
She was in the Cutting Department when the request to step into Mr Costelloe’s office came down on the speaking tube.
“See what you can do, Mr Timms,” she said, wondering why she had been summoned to the inner sanctum. “A couple of those coats are definitely on the large size. We need to be sure we have enough of that green gabardine.”
Leaving Mr Timms looking askance at the workbook, she ran upstairs, stopping only to tidy her hair and brush some stray wool clippings from her frock before knocking.
“Come in, Miss Faulkner,” Mr Costelloe said, surprising her by opening the door himself.
He ushered her in with gentle celerity, a charming habit he had with all his staff, down to the lowest messenger boy. Louise liked him all the more for it.
By his desk sat a stranger. She looked at him in surprise, and a cold hand squeezed at her heart as she placed him in her mind. It was the man from Liberty’s doorway, the one who had watched her so queerly the previous afternoon. He looked uneasy even now, his eyes questioning as he took her in. She looked from the stranger to Mr Costelloe, hoping for an explanation.
The older man took her hands in his, and the troubled look in his eyes sent a cold shiver along her spine.
“Miss Faulkner, this is Mr Andrew Fenton. He is a lawyer, from Cornwall. He is in town on business and he says… he says…”
Louise was alarmed at the emotion in the man’s voice. She turned to Andrew Fenton to remonstrate, but Mr Costelloe’s next words stopped her in her tracks.
“Louise, Mr Fenton says he knows who you are!”
Chapter 2
The next morning, instead of being at work, Louise found herself in a lawyer’s office near Green Park. The man who had come to 38 Great Lion Street in search of her, Andrew Fenton, sat in a hard-backed chair next to the desk of the owner of the office, a large, untidy but kindly man who had introduced himself as Seymour Banks. He appeared much more relaxed than Andrew Fenton, who sat upright, pulling and worrying at his collar in a way that ensured it would not last the morning, let alone the day.
Two days before, the two men had spent almost twenty-four hours scouring Regent Street and its environs, in search of a slender blonde woman that Andrew Fenton had recognised in a split-second encounter as a woman who had disappeared from her Cornish home three years before. He had rushed to his friend’s office, nearly incoherent with shock. And despite what Seymour Banks had thought was only the slenderest chance in the world, they had succeeded. They had had the good luck to come across Richard Stevens, who had pointed them in the right direction, and the result had been the turning upside down of Louise’s world.
Louise sat on the other side of the desk, with a file of papers in front of her. As she read, she glanced over at the other occupant of the office, the man who had been introduced as her husband, Adrien Creed, and who currently looked the very picture of a dazed and uncomprehending man. He sat without moving, holding himself under such rigid control that it seemed he had created an alternate space for himself within the room. His dark eyes were blank; his hands gripped his hat tightly, clamped like steel around a brim that Louise feared would never recover. He was still in some state of shock, that much was obvious. She knew how he felt.
Adrien Creed had brought with him sufficient paperwork to prove that Louise Faulkner was in fact his wife, and these papers, along with the bona fides provided by Andrew Fenton and Seymour Banks themselves, had convinced Louise that the lawyers’ case was real. She was no longer lost. She had a name. Juliana Penelope Creed. From now on that was to be who she was. She had a past now, to go with the present that she had built. For the first time in months, she truly wished that her memory would return. Over the past years, she had developed a confidence in her own abilities, and had known that she was capable of surviving what life produced even if she never regained her memory. Now, out of the blue, she had been found. But instead of relief, she felt that her confidence was eroded, her life knocked out from under her, and she was scared.
Overnight her past had been presented to her, a pristine book to be read, its pages cut for the first time. She listened to the explanations of the lawyers, saw the marriage certificate, a French one but undoubtedly legal, and read the letters, in her own handwriting. There were photographs, too, that showed her with the silent man by her side. They looked happy together in the pictures, and she glanced over to where Adrien Creed was sitting. Her husband. A man she had met, and married, and lived with for a year and yet of whom she had no memory.
Her memory loss dated back almost exactly three years. Amnesiac since the moment she had been discovered, fevered and broken, on the doorstep of a villa in Kent, from that moment on, she had been no one but whom she made herself. Found on the feast day of St Louise de Marillac, taking the surname of the middle-aged couple who had insi
sted on nursing her back to health, what she was today was her own creation, her own person. At the moment there was nothing of Juliana Creed in her. No recall of anything, no name, no history, no husband. She frowned. Was it possible? Could someone forget themselves so completely, for so long? Forget marriage, a husband? Forget love? Surely no one could forget everything as thoroughly as she appeared to have done.
She looked over at Adrien Creed, searching his face for a flicker of recognition within her. She tried to not to stare, but her eyes were drawn even as she battled to look away. His face looked cold, uncomfortable. Thick, dark hair combed back from a frozen face, his brown eyes sombre as he stared down at the dark red of the carpet under his feet. He had barely managed a smile at her when they had been introduced. He had paled as he took her in, but they had stood apart. A brief handshake, then he had retreated. And yet they had been married. They had, she assumed, loved each other. Lived together. Why then did he look as if his world had shattered?
“Well, Mrs Creed,” said Seymour Banks with a genial smile at the small figure in her dark coat. “I take it that you are happy with the proofs offered by your… by Mr Creed, and Mr Fenton, as to your antecedents?”
Juliana had gone through the folder carefully, but had known the truth from the start. She had known it before setting foot in the office, and the paperwork merely confirmed it. This stranger and she had had a life together. She might not remember it, but she knew in her heart it was the truth.
“Thank you, Mr Banks. Yes, this all seems perfectly satisfactory,” she said, swallowing hard.
With determination, quelling the panic within her, Juliana rose to her feet and lifted her chin. She shook hands with Seymour, and after the slightest pause, she went to Andrew Fenton.
The Dead Woman Who Lived Page 2