(2011) What Lies Beneath

by Sarah Rayne

  There was nothing very special about Brenda Ford, nothing that should have tempted me or stirred up the darkness. She wasn’t especially pretty or attractive. She had nice hair, though, I do remember that. I also remember that she looked and moved like a trollop – that’s a word you don’t often hear used nowadays. But when I was much younger it was a word people did use and Brenda Ford would certainly have been marked out as a trollop. It wasn’t so much the way she dressed or used lipstick – she was actually rather modest about that. It was the way she walked, with a kind of swing to the rump, and the way she looked at people with a kind of come-hither expression.

  I’d seen her from a distance several times. She worked in one of the village pubs, and I think she probably had a bit of a reputation among the young men of the area. It’s not difficult to spot that: the giggling, the deliberately provocative glances. Twice to my knowledge she saw me. I always wore a deep-brimmed hat to shade my face and turned up the collar of whatever coat I was wearing, but she certainly looked at me at least twice. The second time I felt the excitement start to beat in my mind and I felt the darkness stir. I thought: the next time the darkness comes over me properly, I’ll have you, my dear!

  And so I did. It was a remarkably satisfying experience. When I caught her up in the lane along the side of the manor at first she put up a small show of resistance, saying she wouldn’t have any truck with a man who wouldn’t tell her who he was.

  ‘I’ve seen you watching me,’ she said. ‘Real silent mystery man, aren’t you? Just like on the pictures.’

  God knows who she was likening me to. There was a bit of a pretence at coyness – a token protest that she didn’t usually do this kind of thing. Like hell she didn’t. Once down on the grass she writhed against me like a snake, and in the first five seconds it was clear she knew most of the moves in the book. When finally I left her, she giggled and said, ‘Good night, silent mystery man. I hope we meet again.’

  Three months later the stupid little bitch came squealing up to the manor in floods of tears, to tell Serena Cadence she was pregnant.

  Chapter 40

  Cadence Manor, Late 1940s

  Serena, looking back over the years since Saul’s birth, thought they had managed things as well as anyone could have done. The handful of people who knew the truth about him – Dr Martlet and the trustees, and dear Jamie, of course – said how extremely tragic that none of the treatments had done much to alleviate the disease in him. Serena supposed she should have known that the child born from that mad, angry, darkness – the child who had clung on in the womb despite all her attempts to expel it – would eventually succumb to the madness of his father.

  None of them said it was even more tragic that the treatments had not alleviated the disease in Serena herself, though.

  ‘But we can be thankful for the periods of remission,’ Dr Martlet said.

  She had never endured the mercury procedure again. Dr Martlet had suggested it, but Serena shuddered away from it. There had been pills of some kind, which she had swallowed diligently, but little by little the disgusting disease had crept over her. She lived, now, in the same twilit world in which Colm’s wife, Fay, had lived all those years ago. She did not go out and no one came to the house except Jamie and Dr Martlet, growing old and grizzled nowadays, but devoted as ever. He gave her draughts for the pains that racked her bones and soothing lotions for the sores on her skin. As he said, there were times when the disease seemed to withdraw its teeth and she was free of it. Neither of them said, but both knew, that these times became progressively shorter.

  Serena often wondered what they would have done without Jamie, so patient with Saul, so trustworthy in every way. Jamie had guarded and safeguarded Saul through all the difficulties, acting as tutor and almost as gaoler in equal measures. He would not let Saul sink into the same darkness as his father, wrote Jamie on the slate he always kept with him. Serena could trust him over that.

  The years slid by. The Second World War – the war people said was really a continuation of the Great War – was not very troublesome in the depths of the country, although Mrs Flagg, growing cantankerous with the years, said it was not easy to get food, and if Mr Churchill thought a family could eat a proper nourishing meal on the scrimping rations allowed, Mrs Flagg would just like to see him try it.

  But despite wars and shortages and the increasingly shrill tone of the modern world, Serena was able to find a degree of contentment. She need not go beyond the manor’s grounds if she did not want to – and she seldom wanted. Occasionally she and her small household went to St Anselm’s for a service; there had been a very pleasant Christmas service one year, after Jamie arranged for the church to have the new organ. Jamie had become very knowledgeable about music; Serena thought it was something to do with him having been in the East all those years ago with Crispian and Gil Martlet. She knew – she supposed they all knew – that Jamie sometimes went quietly along to St Anselm’s to play the organ when the church was deserted. There was no particular secret about it and one was pleased to think of him having such a hobby. Occasionally it occurred to her that Jamie did not have much of a life, but he always seemed content.

  And then, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, came the event that was to knock the placidity of Cadence Manor and Priors Bramley into tumult.

  ‘A person to see you, madam.’ Flagg, becoming more tottery with every year but determinedly clinging to the old standards, made the announcement while Serena was sipping a cup of afternoon tea. She enjoyed her afternoon tea; it was so nice to be able to obtain good China tea again, and she generally had the small silver flask to hand so that a judicious measure of brandy could be added if she felt unwell.

  ‘Does this person have a name, Flagg?’

  ‘Ford, madam. A Miss Ford, I believe.’

  The name meant nothing to Serena and she did not want to see this person, this Ford, whom Flagg clearly considered beneath her notice. Despite the Lapsang Souchong with its spike of brandy, today her skin felt as if it was on fire, and there was an ache deep in her bones as if they were being pounded to ground glass. But she said, ‘I can see her for five minutes, I suppose.’

  Ford turned out to be a rather pert-looking girl with cheap shiny stockings and a skirt and coat that tried rather unsuccessfully to imitate the current fashion. Serena took this in at a glance; living quietly in the country did not mean she did not take notice of what people in the wider world wore. Fashion magazines were delivered to the house and the accounts at Harrods and Debenham and Freebody were still used.

  She sat up very straight in her chair, ignoring the wrench of pain in her spine, and said, ‘Yes, Ford?’

  The girl said, ‘I’m here because your . . .’ A pause as if she might be trying to sort something out in her mind. ‘Your son raped me three months ago,’ she said. ‘And I’ve just found out I’m pregnant because of it.’

  Serena stared at her. ‘Nonsense,’ she said crisply.

  ‘You’ll excuse me, Lady Cadence, but it’s the truth.’

  ‘You may well be pregnant, but my son can’t have anything to do with it. He’s an invalid. He lives quietly here and seldom goes out.’

  ‘Your son,’ said the girl, ‘attacked me just outside the walls of this mausoleum one night –’ she paused to cast a disparaging glance around her – ‘and he left me lying on the ground while he scuttled back through the gates.’

  Serena said at once, ‘If it was night how could you know his identity?’

  ‘Who else would it be? He lived here, in the manor – I saw him come back inside.’

  ‘That proves nothing,’ said Serena after a moment.

  ‘It was him all right,’ said the girl. ‘Your precious family isn’t going to wriggle out of the responsibility for this.’

  ‘How dare you speak to me like that?’

  ‘Oh, come out of the Dark Ages, Lady Cadence,’ said Ford. ‘I can speak how I want. Your sort don’t own the world any longer. We’re equa
ls nowadays, or hadn’t you noticed? Did the Second World War pass you by, like the First did?’

  The First World War . . . Crispian going so courageously into the grey mud of the battlefields, and never returning . . .

  Anger rose in Serena because this girl knew nothing, nothing. But she said icily, ‘I think you’re here purely to get money. This is all lies.’ She stood up, indicating the interview was at an end, and saw the girl hesitate.

  But she stood her ground. She said, ‘I’m telling the truth. And if you don’t agree to help me, I’ll tell everyone what Saul did to me.’

  Saul . . . The casual familiar use of Saul’s name stung Serena but it also set off a small alarm in her mind. Supposing there was some truth in this?

  She said, ‘I will consider what you have said. But I make no promises.’ She thought for a moment. Dr Martlet would be here at the weekend; he, along with Jamie and Colm, would deal with this. ‘Return here on Saturday,’ said Serena. ‘There will be a doctor here who will verify your condition.’

  ‘I’m agreeable to that,’ said Ford.

  ‘In the meantime, I shall discuss this with my family, and let you have a decision then.’

  After the girl had left, Serena sat for a long time, staring straight ahead of her, the tea forgotten. She would talk to Dr Martlet when he arrived, but before that she would, of course, talk to Jamie. She could not imagine what she would do without Jamie.

  Jamie Cadence’s Journal

  That business with Brenda Ford could so easily have gone disastrously wrong. Quite apart from anything else, Saul, confronted with the problem, would certainly have denied it, even in his increasingly torpid state. The Ford girl herself, faced with Saul, might have withdrawn her charge. Worse than that, she might have identified me.

  The charge she made of rape I found interesting. I had most certainly not raped her that night; she had been willing and eager. Avid, almost. ‘Good night, silent mystery man,’ she had said. ‘I hope we meet again.’ Would a girl say that to her rapist? So unless there had been a second encounter after the one with me – unlikely, although not impossible – Miss Ford must have concocted the rape story to save her reputation and apply more pressure to the family.

  It might be vanity that prompts me to say I handled things with subtlety and skill (they say all murderers are vain), but I do think I dealt with that business well.

  The first concern was Saul. He had grown docile and biddable over the years. That was in large part due to the constant sedatives – and to the fact that I doubled and tripled the dose Martlet prescribed – but I think it was also because he lived such a retired life. When you don’t see people or talk to them, there’s no mental stimulation. Saul had never been mentally stimulated and he had hardly been beyond the confines of the manor. The expression ‘cottage mentality’ perhaps applied to him.

  It was to this cottage mentality that I made my approach. I wrote a careful account for him – not too complex, which would have bewildered him – explaining a silly village girl had accused him of attacking her. I didn’t use the word rape: he knew, in theory, about sex, but unless he was fooling me to an extraordinary degree, he had no experience of it.

  I wrote that there were greedy and wicked people in the world, and the girl who had made the accusation was both those things. Watching him read that, a frown creased his brow, and he looked up, seeking reassurance. A thin shaft of sunlight fell across his face and I saw that the radiating lesions around his mouth and eyes were cruelly clear.

  I reached for the slate.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about any of it,’ I wrote. ‘I know you didn’t do it.’ There was a twinge of irony in writing that. ‘And I’ll make sure you aren’t punished.’

  ‘Thank you, Jamie,’ he said, and went back to reading the rest of what I had written. In essence, it was that I would look after him and that he need do nothing at all.

  ‘You’ll keep the bad people away?’ he said.

  I nodded, and took his hand and squeezed it. There was sometimes a curious affinity between us. I could often sense his thoughts, although it’s as well that he never sensed mine.

  I know all this portrays me as the worst kind of cheating conniving blackguard and villain, but it’s what I am. It’s what I’ve always been.

  The thing that worked in my favour over the Brenda Ford business was that the ground was already prepared. Colm had seen me that night, and he thought I had rescued that long-ago girl from Saul’s brutality. So, for once he came out of his scholarly seclusion, and seated himself at the dining table with Serena, old Martlet, and me. That dining room and that long oak table had seen some assemblies in its time, but I’d lay good money it had never played host to four people, one of whom was a murderer and a rapist, discussing how best to pay off a blackmailing village girl. For Brenda Ford was blackmailing us, of course. We all knew it, but none of us could see how to sidestep it. Even I couldn’t. But none of us, for different reasons, was going to tell her to speak out and be damned: Serena, because she wanted to protect Saul and also her own fragile seclusion; Martlet because he wanted to protect Serena; and Colm, because he could not bear to think the world might intrude into his ivory tower. As for me, well, I had any number of reasons for not wanting too close scrutiny on the origins of Brenda Ford’s unborn child.

  Martlet had examined Miss Ford and confirmed her condition, giving it as his opinion that the pregnancy was about three months advanced.

  Colm then told the story of how, some time earlier, Saul had apparently attacked a local girl. ‘It was only Jamie’s intervention that saved her,’ he said. ‘You remember that night, Jamie? We met unexpectedly and you told me what had happened.’

  I nodded reluctantly.

  ‘He tried to protect Saul,’ said Colm, and Martlet nodded, as if this was the behaviour he would expect of me.

  ‘So you see,’ said Colm, ‘in the light of that, it seems likely that Miss Ford is telling the truth.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Martlet. ‘And all she wants is to bring the child up decently. She wants a degree of financial security.’

  ‘I don’t trust her,’ said Serena.

  ‘She’s fighting to get help for the child,’ said Colm, mildly. ‘That’s understandable. Even admirable.’

  I wrote, ‘Martlet, what did you make of her?’

  ‘It’d be my guess she’s been something of a flirt,’ he said. ‘But I think she’s genuine enough about this.’

  ‘She’s a hard-faced little liar, who’s out to get money from us at any price,’ said Serena tartly. ‘You’re all far too ready to give in to her.’

  ‘Lady Cadence, if we don’t make her an allowance, she will undoubtedly tell people she was raped by Saul and that the family refused to help her.’

  ‘How do we know she won’t do that anyway? I don’t care for being blackmailed by the likes of Ford,’ said Serena in her iciest voice.

  I wrote, ‘I think I have an idea for blocking that.’

  ‘None of us can be sure she won’t spread the story anyway,’ said Colm. ‘But, Serena, are you prepared to risk the secrets of this family being bruited around Bramley and all the villages? I’m certainly not.’ He paused, then said, very gently, ‘And there are too many secrets, Serena. Julius and Saul. Even Jamie . . .’

  ‘There’s nothing discreditable about Jamie’s condition,’ said Serena, and I saw Colm start to say something. I could guess it was that I had been accused of being a spy all those years ago in Edirne.

  Serena guessed it as well, I think, because she said, impatiently, ‘Oh, very well, do what you want. But make sure the money’s paid to her regularly. Through a bank, if she possesses a bank account. I don’t want the slut coming up here to demand money. I shall deal her very short shrift if she does, I promise you.’

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ said Colm, but the look he sent me made it clear that he knew I would be the one who would really take care of it.

  ‘And now,’ said Martlet, clearly
relieved, ‘what should we do about Saul?’

  I reached for the slate and wrote quickly. ‘I’m afraid we’ve reached a time when Saul will have to be kept under restraint.’

  They read it and looked at each other, and I could see the memories surging up: Old Julius and that shameful locked room at the top of the London house; Crispian and I getting him out of the country, out of the reach of wagging tongues and rumour mills. With that knowledge, I wrote, ‘Lock and key?’ on my slate and passed it round the table.

  ‘A locked room,’ said Martlet at last, ‘would need a gaoler.’

  There was a long silence. I waited and I enjoyed waiting, all the while knowing they were hoping I would volunteer for the task. None of them had the courage to actually ask me, though, so I let the silence stretch out. Then I wrote, ‘Let him live in the lodge. I’ll live there with him. I’ll be his gaoler.’

  It was Martlet who said, warningly, ‘It could be for many years, Jamie.’

  I wrote, ‘I know that. But I feel responsible for what’s happened. I should have kept a closer watch on him.’

  ‘That girl,’ said Serena, and for the first time there was a sob in her voice. ‘Because of her Saul will have to be locked away. Jamie will have to act as gaoler to him.’ She beat on the table angrily with her fist. ‘Because of Brenda Ford, several lives are being ruined.’

  ‘Saul was always likely to be a risk,’ said Martlet gently.

  ‘I can’t see it like that,’ said Serena. ‘I can only see that she’s responsible for my son being locked away for the rest of his life.’

  ‘The rest of his life,’ said Colm slowly. ‘Jamie, are you sure you’re prepared to do this?’

  I nodded, then wrote, ‘I will do it for as long as necessary.’