(2011) What Lies Beneath

by Sarah Rayne

  And as I passed this round I saw the relieved acceptance in all their faces.

  So there it was yet again: the Cadences closing ranks. Protecting their own, because the might of the law must never, God forbid, touch any of the family. Never mind that the family commits half the crimes in the Newgate Calendar (and let’s face it, I’ve certainly done so), a Cadence must never be subjected to the vulgar rigours and indignities of the judicial system.

  My idea for scotching any rumours Brenda Ford might spread worked quite well, I think. I managed to get a story into the local newspaper about her having been attacked, stressing there was no truth in the rumour that her assailant had been a German spy left over from the war. The war had been over for several years, but people were still nervous about Germans, and from time to time there were small panics about spies and fifth columnists. Denying the rumour had the effect of putting it into people’s minds. So if Brenda did tell people the child’s father was a Cadence, in the light of the article no one was likely to believe her.

  The child . . .

  I had no particular emotion about the child. I couldn’t see that it would make any difference to my life, apart from having to send a cheque or a money order of some kind each month to its mother. I thought about it long and carefully, but I couldn’t see that the child would ever have any effect on my life.

  Chapter 41

  Jamie Cadence’s Journal, Concluding Pages

  Over the last seven days, writing this, I’ve sought to put a barricade between myself and the inevitable ending to my story. I’ve poured out my emotions and my fears and confessed my sins (most of them), to this journal, all the time pushing away what I know is ahead. There was even that brief space when I thought I might escape, but I know now that the wall at the back of the half-concealed cupboard won’t provide a way out. There’s little more to write now. I’ve squeezed every drop out of the memories while writing this journal and there’s little more to say. And already I can hear the sounds beyond my window. I know what they mean. Oh God, I know only too well . . .

  But before I lay down my pen for what I think will be the last time (and there’s a splendidly dramatic line to write!), there are perhaps a few loose ends I should tie up.

  After that venal little slut Brenda Ford succeeded in screwing money out of Serena – including the deeds to a tiny cottage in Bramley – it was agreed that we had to create what would effectively be a prison for Saul.

  ‘As much,’ said Colm, ‘to protect people from him as to prevent him being taken away to some grim institution.’

  ‘Or worse,’ put in Martlet.

  ‘You think he’d be regarded as responsible for his actions?’ said Colm, surprised.

  ‘I think it’s a risk we don’t want to take,’ said Martlet drily.

  The Cadences may cheat a bit, but they do have social consciences where the rest of the populace is concerned (except for me. I never had a social conscience or anything approaching it). But they agreed that Saul had to be strictly confined, and they looked to me, as always, to deal with the practicalities.

  I surprised myself over that, because I rather enjoyed it. I had never thought of myself as very practical, but it was interesting to draw up the plans and arrange for workmen to come down from London, and turn the lodge into a virtual prison house.

  There was a big bedroom on the first floor and it was not difficult to create a small bathroom opening directly off it. Bars were fitted to both windows – thick strong iron staves, driven deep into the fabric of the walls at top and bottom. The windows overlooked the main drive leading up to the manor. In fact, one window had a direct view through the trees of the main entrance. Anyone going up to the manor would probably see the bars at the lodge’s upstairs windows, but it was a risk that had to be taken. And not many people did come to the manor by then.

  While the workmen were there, I got them to build shelves on each side of the fireplace, and I stocked the shelves with books. I bought a second, more up-to-date gramophone, and later, when such things were more easily obtainable, I added a wireless. Saul liked music and by then it was a necessary part of life for me. It drove the darkness back – not every time and not always completely, but it was a powerful defence.

  I believe Colm told the various workmen a mixed version of the truth – that an elderly member of the family was given to wandering off and it was necessary to create a degree of security. For safety’s sake, he said, there needed to be bars and locks. Very sad, but there it was.

  He was believed, of course; no one who ever met Colm would have suspected him of any kind of deceit. And it wasn’t so long since the aristocracy hid away their mad relatives, rather than consign them to some bleak asylum.

  After the work was finished and the workmen had left Priors Bramley, I managed to fix two stout bolts: one to the outside of the door of Saul’s room and another to the main outside door. It meant both doors could easily be secured from outside. I think I did a very good job there.

  Serena insisted the lodge should be as comfortable as possible. There were certain standards one should not lose, she said. I looked at her, and I saw how the disease had marked her and how she walked so slowly and painfully around her dim rooms, and for the first time I was aware of an unwilling admiration. I wrote that she had my promise that Saul should be comfortable in his prison.

  And so he was, for the next ten years. He really was, I can say that honestly.

  Food was sent down from the manor, and either Hetty or Dora – both of them ageing considerably by that time – came each day to cook and clean.

  The strange thing is that Saul and I found a degree of companionship during those years. We had our books and our music, and we listened to the wireless in the evenings. There were plays and concerts and discussions. I even taught him to play chess, although he was very slow and I nearly always won. But he thought it a grand, grown-up thing to do and he was fascinated by the carved ivory chessmen, which had been his grandfather’s and which were kept in a carved wooden box from Florence.

  At times when I thought he was sufficiently sedated we walked in the grounds of the manor, but the walks were as slow as the chess games; the constant sedatives had given him a kind of shambling gait. Or perhaps it wasn’t the sedatives, perhaps it was simply that the syphilis was getting hold of his bones by then. If I said I felt guilty about that I would be lying. I didn’t feel guilty. I still wanted Cadences and all that went with it as much as ever, and I wasn’t going to let this half-demented creature cheat me, not now, not when it was within touching distance.

  We weren’t entirely isolated. Serena sometimes got Flagg to drive her down to the lodge, where she sat in her son’s room and sipped a glass of sherry or a cup of tea. Flagg was far too old to drive by then, but in a place like Priors Bramley no one noticed or probably even cared. Saul sat quietly and obediently in his chair on those occasions, watching Serena speak, occasionally mouthing the words she said, like a child learning to talk. Later, of course, Serena was too infirm to move very much and she stopped coming. Martlet and Colm still came, though, and once Martlet brought down a colleague for a new opinion on Saul’s condition. That only confirmed what we already knew.

  In the main, Saul’s life had not altered so very much from when he lived at the manor. Or had it? There were times when he would look at me very pensively, not saying anything, just looking, as if he was trying to see into my mind.

  It was Serena who suggested there should be a good stock of provisions inside the lodge. Colm had died the previous year – Flagg found him at his desk, apparently bent over his books but in fact stone dead – and her own health was deteriorating fast. I think she was becoming aware of the frailty, even the mortality, of all humans.

  ‘Supposing,’ she said, seated very stiff and upright in her shadowy room in the manor, ‘something were to happen to you, Jamie? I don’t mean anything dreadful, but what if you were taken ill, or you fell while out walking and broke an ankle, and Saul was l
ocked in that room, unable to reach anyone.’

  The words, ‘And you couldn’t call for help or use a phone,’ hung on the air between us.

  It was a reasonable concern. Serena, for all her faults, wasn’t without intelligence or, indeed, a degree of imagination. Flagg and Mrs Flagg had retired by then, Hetty had left to live with an elderly sister, and there was only the faithful, and somewhat younger, Dora to look after Serena. Dora came to the lodge just twice a week by that time, bringing stews and pies that could be reheated, and bread, which she bought in the village, together with butter, cheese, eggs and milk. She cleaned the rooms while she was there and took washing back to the manor. I used to walk up to the manor to dine or have lunch with Serena two or three times a week.

  So we called workmen out again, and a big walk-in store cupboard was made off Saul’s room. The shelves were stocked with a variety of tinned food; rationing had recently been withdrawn and most food could be bought easily by then. There were tins of meat and fruit; sardines and herring in tomato sauce, and soup squares. Condensed milk, lunch biscuits and packets of dried egg. And large canisters of tea and sugar, and bottled coffee. I had a couple of cases of wine and several bottles of brandy as well. Saul never drank that, of course – or, if he did, it was at my subtle invitation, when Martlet or one of the others was expected and could see him in a slurred-speech, blurred-eye condition.

  Perhaps the lingering memory of the siege in the fort at Edirne, and of Gil going out with the soldiers to shoot the rats, was still with me, because when I saw the shelves of food, I felt surprisingly comfortable and secure.

  Did I say I never expected Brenda Ford’s child to impinge on my life? That statement is another of the ironies about my life.

  In fact I never saw the girl until that sultry autumn evening when Brenda brought her to the manor – I think either to complain that the money wasn’t reaching her, or perhaps to ask for more. I never knew which.

  I didn’t see exactly what happened that evening. I was in Colm’s library; I had walked up to the manor to see if he had had any books on late eighteenth-century music. I had put a gramophone record on – I remember it was my beloved Deserted Village overture – and left the doors open while I searched. Serena never minded my doing that, even though the old gramophone at the manor was a bit unreliable and scratchy. Once or twice she even said the music soothed her.

  But even from the library I heard Brenda shrieking that night, saying something about needing money. Then I heard Serena’s furious voice, although I didn’t hear exactly what she said. But even though she was so fragile you could have snapped her bones in two with your hand, she still had that indomitable spirit. Without it I doubt she’d have lived as long as she did, for the disease that had killed my mother and old Julius had ravaged her very severely. Even so, she was not prepared to be browbeaten by anybody – and she did not like or trust Brenda Ford.

  I left them to it. I couldn’t risk confronting Brenda, even after so many years. I stayed in the library until I heard her go, then I went downstairs. I remember how I went into the drawing room, not realizing what had happened at first, just seeing her seated in her usual place. I remember, as well, how the gramophone had been restarted. I thought Serena had done that; it wasn’t until afterwards I understood it must have been Brenda Ford, trying to put everything back as it had been, trying to cover up what she had done.

  I never thought Brenda deliberately killed Serena. I don’t think she was capable of killing. Whatever had happened had been an accident. I was just taking in the fact of her death when the child came back. She didn’t immediately see me, but I saw her. My daughter. You’d have expected me to feel some rush of emotion, some recognition, but I didn’t. I studied her dispassionately, seeing that she was very like Brenda and hardly like me at all. She was staring at Serena with horror and it was only when I reached out to switch off the gramophone that she realized I was there. She stared at me, then ran out almost at once, and even though she couldn’t possibly have seen me in any detail in that dark room, I always had the feeling she never forgot me.

  Whatever the truth behind Serena’s death, as far as I was concerned it was another thing to lay at Saul’s door. I didn’t have to think twice. I locked the room with Serena’s body seated in its chair like a stiff-legged, staring-eyed doll, and got Dora to telephone Martlet. He came that same evening, arriving just before midnight in a hired car.

  He said, ‘Was it Saul who did it?’ and I nodded. Even though Cadences was no longer the beckoning prize it once had been, I still instinctively added this new and useful crime to Saul’s account. Because I didn’t know what the future might hold. I still had that tiny unquenchable hope that one day Cadences might be rich again, and the deceit and the lies might still be worth it. They might even be worth the agony I suffered in that Turkish courtyard, with the stench of blood and fear tainting the air.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Martlet sadly, and wrote the death certificate out there and then.

  That was when Cadence Manor was closed for good. Dora went back to her family’s home somewhere in the north and Martlet returned to London. I don’t think he had any patients by then; I think the creation of the National Health Service had altered the practice of medicine radically, and he was too old to bother.

  It meant Saul and I were on our own and I had to address myself to the practicalities of living. It was unthinkable that I should ever go openly into Priors Bramley, or, indeed, anywhere else. After thought, I wrote and posted an order for provisions to be delivered every two weeks from a big neighbouring town. Anonymous, you see? The account would be settled through the bank each quarter and the order was to be exactly the same each time. The carrier was to leave it at the gates where it would be collected. What they thought of such an arrangement I have no idea. Probably they assumed some eccentric remnant of the family still lived in the decaying old manor. I didn’t much care what they thought.

  And for the next four or five months everything was perfectly all right. Life went along quietly and peacefully – until that spring afternoon when I found a local newspaper someone had left in St Anselm’s church. Blazoned across it were the headlines:

  PRIORS BRAMLEY TO BE SUBJECT OF GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT. AEROPLANE TO FLY OVER VILLAGE AND DROP EXPLOSIVE DEVICE TO DISPERSE VARIOUS CHEMICAL SUBSTANCES. VILLAGE TO BE SEALED SO THAT EFFECTS OF ‘GERANOS’ CAN BE STUDIED.

  Beneath that again was a sub-heading which said, ‘Geranos is a compound, believed to contain sulphur mustard.’

  I stood in the old church, reading the newspaper article, and panic seized me.

  The article described the evacuation of the village. They actually used the word ‘evacuation’, which must have been dreadfully reminiscent of the war for many people. There was information about how a new road had been planned and then postponed, and details of compensation paid, compulsory purchase orders and rehousing. Several of the older inhabitants had resisted being moved, but had finally yielded and gone to live in one of the neighbouring villages. I hardly took that in, because one single fact was burning deep into my brain.

  It was the date of the paper. This was old news. People had known about it for two months, but I, in my island of isolation within the grounds of the manor, had known nothing, heard nothing.

  The date when the Geranos would be dropped was given. It was in eight days’ time. There was a lot of technical information about the composition of Geranos, and a lot of false-sounding reassurance as to how it was not harmful, but that the village was to be sealed off as a precaution.

  I took little notice of these empty reassurances, because I knew – I knew – what sulphur mustard did to people. I had heard the screams of the soldiers in Edirne. And in one week, Priors Bramley was to be drenched in the stuff.

  I had eight days to get out of the lodge and find somewhere to live.

  * * *

  I risked walking a little way along the village street, ready to bolt for the concealment of the church, but I
saw no one. Eerily and disturbingly, this had become the deserted village of Goldsmith’s poem, but it was not the tyrannical hand of Enclosure that had emptied the village; it was the governmental one of planning and experimentation.

  I returned to the lodge because I had nowhere else to go. Once inside, I shut the doors and sat down in the little sitting room, which I had made into my own retreat. My books were there and my gramophone. All the things I had amassed over the past ten years, all the things that were precious to me. Not a single one was of any help now. I had absolutely no idea what to do, or who to ask for help. The lodge had no phone, and even if it had I could not have used it. All my communication with the outside world had been through Serena or Colm or the servants. Since Serena died and the remaining servants left, if I needed to contact someone I simply wrote a letter and posted it in the pillar box in the lane by St Anselm’s.

  Vague ideas of trying to get to the old London house went through my mind, but the house had been rented to some government department during the war, and had stood empty since. And there was another difficulty: it was forty years since I had travelled with Crispian and Gil to Greece and Turkey; since then I had set foot outside the manor’s gates only to go as far as the church. I, who had plotted and schemed to control a once-thriving international private bank, had now developed a cottage mentality akin to Saul’s and I was afraid of the world beyond the gates.

  I can understand now that when they cleared the village they thought they had cleared all the dwellings. Cadence Manor was empty – it had been empty since Serena’s death the previous autumn – and I presume, although I can’t know for sure, that some sort of compensation had been paid for it. But I don’t know who got it. I don’t know to whom any letters about the evacuation of the village would have been sent. Certainly not to the manor, nor, of course, to the lodge, which would be assumed empty. The only person who knew Saul and I were here was old Martlet, miles away in London.