A Set of Lies

by Carolyn McCrae

  Whenever Audrey talked to Skye about their ancestors she never went back any earlier than Bernard and Catherine.

  There was so much that she knew about Bernard’s father and grandfather but had sworn never to tell. She had seen too much in the family Bible before Uncle Henry had taken it from her, ripped out the pages and torn them to shreds. The memory of his cold anger always unsettled her.

  The storm had passed by the time there was sufficient light in the sky for Audrey to snuff out the candles. “Can’t put it off any longer, you’d better go out and check,” she said firmly.

  “I will be careful,” Skye reassured her aunt as she slipped her phone into a pocket, suspecting that she might need to take pictures for the insurance.

  Her face, as she walked back into the kitchen five minutes later, told Audrey the news was not good.

  “It’s that bad is it?”

  “The old pine trees have fallen.”

  “We lost a few last winter too. Perhaps we should have had them lopped. What else is there? That noise wasn’t a tree falling.”

  “I think a bolt must have hit the chimney. There’s a gaping hole at the bottom and scaffold poles are lying in a jumbled heap with blackened bricks and lumps of stone. I’ve taken photos. Here.”

  Audrey looked at picture after picture without saying a word until she stopped at one. Staring hard at the image on the small screen she was able to focus on what looked to be an unusual shape. “Is that something in the wall?” she asked, handing the phone back to Skye.

  “Where?” At first Skye could see nothing.

  “There in the corner.”

  Skye put her fingers on the phone and stretched the image. “There is something. You’re right. I’ll go out and see.”

  A few minutes later she was back in the kitchen. “There’s a big hole and it isn’t empty.”

  “I don’t think we want to find a skeleton or anything like that.”

  “It’s not a skeleton, it’s just a bag, an old canvas bag.”

  Audrey shivered involuntarily. Without seeing it in any detail and without having any good reason she knew that this bag would be connected to the words she had seen written on the flyleaves of the family Bible.

  “Don’t go back out there. If it’s been there a few hundred years it’ll wait a few more days.” Her voice was sharper than she meant it to be.

  “We can’t do that! Don’t you want to know what it is?” Skye pleaded but Audrey did not answer as she stared across the kitchen to the chair by the Aga which had been Uncle Henry’s place for so many years.

  She was remembering the day when he had told her to fetch the family Bible from the library. “No one else knows it’s there,” he had said. “Look on the west wall, third shelf up, three feet in from the central upright. Bring it to me now and be sure you don’t open it.”

  But she had opened it and she had seen the family details recorded there.

  She had no idea how but he had known that she had looked and he had been very angry, grabbing the book from her hands. She had watched him feel for the first pages, rip them out and tear them to shreds. He had made her burn the pieces and he had made her swear that she would never tell a soul what she had read.

  She had never told anyone, but she had put some of the unburned fragments in the treasures box in the drawer of her bedside table and they were there still, along with Rowan’s locket and the photographs that reminded her of the life she had had before her brother’s daughter had come to live at The Lodge.

  “Don’t you want to know what it is and what’s in it?” Skye asked again.

  “No. And nor should you. What’s past is past and must be left there. Whatever it is it was hidden for a reason. We should leave it be.” She had to try to put a stop to Skye’s curiosity.

  “But we’ve got to look.”

  “Just do as I say and leave it where it is.”

  “But it’s been in the dry. It will get wet now, and it’s beginning to rain again.” Skye thought that what she said made sense and she was impatient to investigate. “I’ll just go out and check.” She opened a drawer and took out a handful of plastic carrier bags and headed back outside, for once ignoring her aunt’s anger.

  Peering into the hole she saw the canvas bag. She reached in and felt for the handles. As it cleared the blackened stones she saw what seemed to be a large wooden box in the cavity. She decided to retrieve it later, when Audrey would not be in the kitchen to see it.

  “Look what I’ve found,” she said cheerfully as she returned to the kitchen.

  “I told you to leave it and I don’t want to know,” Audrey said petulantly, folding her arms and turning towards the window as Skye placed the canvas bag on the kitchen table.

  “It looks very old doesn’t it?”

  “Pretty much a statement of the obvious I would have thought,” Audrey replied tartly without turning to look.

  “I can’t see anything on it to say who it belonged to.” Skye tried to be positive in the face of Audrey’s uncharacteristic reluctance to be interested. “There’s some faded writing but I can’t see what it could be.”

  Audrey shrugged her shoulders. She was thinking of Uncle Henry and the solemn promise she had made to him.

  “Let me take a photo, then I can enhance it. Something may be readable,” Skye suggested.

  Whatever the contents of the bag, Audrey told herself, it was highly unlikely that Skye would find out the truth, if what she had read in the Bible that day had been the truth. “Well why don’t you do just that?” Frightened of the consequences, Audrey spoke more brusquely than she meant to.

  It only took Skye seconds. “There are some letters but I can’t really make them out, and some numbers.”

  Audrey turned slowly but did not look at the bag. Instead she watched Skye who was concentrating on the image on her phone.

  “There are a couple of Cs and Xs.” Skye ran her finger over the screen, tracing the lines. “See?”

  Audrey turned away again. She would not show that she was interested.

  “It looks like it’s a date in Roman numerals. The first letter is an M and next to it there’s a D.”

  As Skye read out the letters she thought her aunt’s silence odd. She was normally curious about everything.

  “There are two Cs. Or is that an L? It’s definitely C C then another possible C then there are three Xs and an I and a V,” she finished with some triumph in her voice.

  Audrey said nothing. She did not want to give any encouragement.

  “MDCCLXXXIV or MDCCCXXXIV that’s either 1784 or 1834,” Skye translated. “Do you think it’s been in the chimney all those years?”

  “I doubt it.” Audrey’s harsh reply did not encourage a response.

  “Shall I open it?” Skye did not wait for an answer as she pulled gently at the leather straps. She reached in and pulled out a thick triangle of cloth and began to unfold it. “It’s a flag. Where’s that the flag of? Do you recognise it?” Skye asked, trying to tempt her aunt to be interested. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  When she received no answer Skye turned to her laptop, ever-present on the kitchen table. “The wonders of the internet,” she said. “Oh shit, there’s no electricity yet. I wonder when they’ll get it back on.”

  “Use a reference book like any sensible person. And please don’t swear.”

  Skye looked at the shelf of books Audrey used for completing crosswords and found one with a section on flags. “Corsica. It’s a Corsican flag,” she said after a few moments. “Apparently it’s the head of a moor in silhouette with a bandana.” Skye turned back to the bag.

  “There’s another flag.” She unfolded another triangle of cloth. “Ah! I recognise this one,” she said as she carefully unfolded it. “This flag is French.”

  Audrey turned around, accepting that she could not now stop Skye’s investigations. “If you insist on carrying on with this then at least get your facts right. Is it blue-white-red or red-white-blue?
Are the stripes the same width or different? Unless you can answer those questions you cannot possibly tell what flag it is.”

  “I’ll look it up later then.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence as Skye turned back to the bag. “How about this! It’s a bit faded but it’s definitely one of those rosette things the revolutionaries in France wore on their hats.”

  “They’re called cockades.”

  “It’s a bit faded and a bit damaged.”

  “So would you be if you you’d been through a revolution.”

  “You think these have been through the French Revolution?”

  “It seems likely, don’t you think? I mean, flags and a cockade are someone’s memories of a very difficult and dangerous time. And those mementoes were sufficiently important to whoever owned them for them to be preserved for posterity in the wall.”

  “Who do you think hid it?”

  “How on earth should I know?” Audrey snapped, annoyed that she had almost allowed herself to be swept up by Skye’s enthusiasm.

  “Were any Laceys involved in the French Revolution? Perhaps whoever it was didn’t want anyone to know, so hid the evidence?”

  “Ridiculous,” Audrey replied tartly. “With your interest in history you should have thought of the explanation.”

  After a few moments Skye prompted her to continue. “Yes?”

  “French officers captured in the Napoleonic wars were often given parole, one of them may have lived here and hidden these. Anyway, no one of the Lacey family lived at The Lodge for a generation or more after those wars ended.”

  Audrey relaxed, satisfied that Skye would not believe that the bag could have anything directly to do with her family.

  “There’s something else in here.” Skye pulled out a jacket. “It looks like part of a uniform.”

  Audrey reached out and gently touched the folds of once-blue cloth, her curiosity getting the better of her fears. “I find it sad that we cannot know who last touched this, and when and why the bag was hidden in the chimney. We cannot ask questions of them and they cannot answer.”

  Audrey turned away from Skye and closed her eyes. She saw again the words on the pages Uncle Henry had ripped to pieces, the fragments of which were still in her box of treasures. She could see the names Claude Olivierre and Napoleon Bonaparte as clearly as if the page was still in front of her.

  Skye, sensing something of her aunt’s mood, carefully packed everything back into the canvas bag and refastened the buckles.

  It was some time before Audrey spoke, and then it was as if to herself. “We spend our fourscore years, incomprehensibly minute dots in time, on a speck of land, on an insignificant planet, spinning around a minor star amongst billions of other stars in an inconsequential galaxy amongst billions of galaxies in a universe we cannot even begin to understand. Why do we ever think that anything we do can be of the slightest importance? The man who packed these things so carefully in this bag may have been very grand in his world and in his time, but even he was completely and utterly insignificant in the overall scheme of things. Why do any of us think we matter?”

  “Audrey?” Skye asked after a few minutes of silence. She noticed tears falling unchecked down her aunt’s cheeks. “Are you OK?”

  “You shouldn’t have opened that bag.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “Because I told you not to.”

  “But I thought you—”

  “No, young lady, you did not think. I told you to leave it alone. You disobeyed me. Young people should always understand that their elders know better. You disobeyed me and I disobeyed…” Audrey didn’t finish the sentence as she struggled to stand.

  “Put the blessed bag away and get me to my room. I’m tired. You have made me do things I should never have done.”

  Having no idea what her aunt meant, nor why she was so upset, Skye did as she was told.

  When she returned to the kitchen, which now felt empty and unusually unwelcoming, she took the canvas bag and placed it in a corner of the little-used library, covering it with a heavy red velvet cloth. If it had upset Audrey so much she would not mention it again.

  After two hours of worrying about the decision Skye retrieved the box she had seen in the chimney wall and placed it, with the canvas bag, under the red cloth in the library.

  *

  Skye did not know whether it was worry about the damaged chimney or the opening of the canvas bag, but from the day of that storm her aunt was a different person, spending most of every day in her room and showing little interest in anything.

  “What about clearing the drive?” Skye had asked the next day. “I should go back to college the day after tomorrow.” When all the reply she got was a shrug of the shoulders she added that she would call a neighbour with a chainsaw. “What about the insurance claim? Do you want to get in touch with them or shall I?” Audrey shook her head slightly, so Skye decided she would do it that afternoon. “Do you want to call the builders? They need to see what they’ve done and start to put it all back together.” When all the response she got was another shrug of the shoulders Skye was really worried. “Don’t you want to yell at them or something?” Still there was no reply.

  Skye became increasingly worried about her aunt, as she spent the last days of her holiday clearing the drive of fallen branches so the builders’ vans could get through.

  *

  Every afternoon for as long as she could remember, when she had arrived home from school or college, Skye had been greeted with a mug of tea, a jam sandwich and Audrey’s enthusiastic question “Well, what have you learned today?” It was a ritual both enjoyed, even when the answer was “Not a lot.”

  After the storm they established a different routine. When Skye returned home the kitchen was dark and quiet. She would switch on the lights, boil a kettle and take mugs of tea up to her aunt who was, more often than not, still in her bed.

  She was thinking that Audrey’s strange mood had lasted over a month as she pushed open the bedroom door.

  “At last. Call a bloody ambulance will you? I’ve broken something.”

  “How long have you been down there?” Skye asked anxiously. “Here, let me make you more comfortable.”

  “Don’t touch me. Just call a bloody ambulance.”

  How long Audrey had lain by her bed unable, or afraid, to move, Skye never discovered.

  *

  At the end of the Easter holidays Audrey was finally fit enough to leave hospital. When people from the Social Services tried to persuade Skye that her aunt would be better off in a home she told them she would look after her at The Lodge. She argued that since Audrey had given up so much to care for her it was only fair that she make Audrey’s last months as comfortable as possible.

  Skye abandoned college and soon lost contact with her friends because from the day Audrey left hospital her time was filled with caring for her increasingly fragile and irritable aunt.

  By the time Skye’s twenty-first birthday, the twenty-seventh of January 2014, passed Audrey’s last months had stretched to nearly four years and Skye had wondered many times whether she had made the right decision.

  *

  The end, when it came, came quickly.

  Skye knew that Audrey’s mood was never good when Sir Arthur was on the televisions news, which he was increasingly often.

  “That bloody brother of mine’s on the bloody television again spouting out his politics of bile and hate.”

  Skye knew no answer was expected of her. “Shall I turn it off?”

  “No. Leave it. Bloody man should be shot.” She settled back against the pillows, staring at the television with a look of undisguised hatred. “Ghastly man, who on earth can possibly take him seriously?”

  Skye began tidying away the remains of Audrey’s breakfast, trying not to watch her father’s performance on the morning chat show.

  “God-awful man,” Audrey shouted. “For God’s sake, why doesn’t someone shoot him?”

>   “Is there anything you want me to bring up?” Skye asked as she picked up the tray.

  “If there was I’d have said,” Audrey snapped.

  Skye knew it was the unremitting pain and the frustrations of her helplessness that had turned the Audrey she had known into the angry and selfish woman she had had to endure for the previous four years, and her mood was always at its worst when Sir Arthur was on the television.

  “Why do you watch him when it upsets you so much?” she asked, but there was no reply as she left the room.

  Ten minutes later she returned.

  “I’ve…”

  Skye looked at her aunt and knew that it was all over. She looked for signs of breathing but there was not even a slight rise and fall of the flat chest. She lifted a thin, veined wrist but felt no resistance and no pulse.

  Skye reached for the remote control and the last thing she saw before she turned the television off was her father smiling in his self-satisfied way at the camera.

  She felt it was almost as if he could see into the room where his sister lay dead.

  *

  In the days before the funeral Skye emptied Audrey’s room of all the equipment and medicines that had been accumulated over four years. When it was returned to the way it had been before the fall she began the task of emptying drawers and the wardrobe, sorting her aunt’s things into what she would keep, what could go to charity and what should be burned.

  She left the drawer in the bedside table to last.

  It had been Audrey’s private place and it took Skye some time to build up the courage to open it. When she did she found it empty apart from a few tissues and an old cigar box with some neat, childish writing on its lid. My Treasures Box, Audrey Catherine Lacey, aged 11 years and 7 months, Christmas Day 1940.

  Tentatively lifting the lid she saw some small, square, black-and-white photographs. She recognised Audrey and her Uncle Henry and Aunt Rose, along with their daughter Rowan, but there were some people she did not recognise and she wondered who they might be.

  There was a piece of ribbon, carefully rolled around a lock of blonde hair. Skye wondered whether it was Rowan’s or perhaps Audrey’s own hair. Ever since she had known her Audrey’s hair had been grey but perhaps she had been blonde when she was young.