A Set of Lies

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Leave that. Come over here. I need more light.”

  Henry left the picture of the woman he did not know was his grandmother and did as his brother said.

  “Don’t get the candle too close,” William warned.

  “You wanted the light,” Henry complained.

  “I didn’t mean for you to set the house on fire.”

  “We’d get a real the beating for that.”

  “Probably an inside one,” William warned seriously. What’s that over there?”

  William edged past his brother and had almost reached the middle of the room when he let out a strangled scream and disappeared from his brother’s sight.

  Henry froze. He knew that they would now be in the most dreadful trouble.

  He held his candle over the hole in the floor to peer through but the draught blew out the flame and he was in the pitch black.

  “William?”

  There was no answer.

  “William?” he called more loudly, as loudly as he dared, but there was still no answer.

  “William?” he called again, but there was still no answer. He daren’t lean out over the hole again for fear of falling as well.

  Somehow he had to edge round the gaping hole towards the door and the landing. Somehow he had to get down those thirteen uneven steps and get help.

  Slowly he felt his way back past the trunks and through the door, edging forward, trying to avoid the rat, trying to remember how far it was to the top of those steps. Holding on to the wall he shuffled inch by inch until he felt the void. He sat down, his feet on the top step and then, step by step, worked his way down the stairs.

  Standing up at the bottom he felt for the door and pushed.

  It was locked. And William had the key.

  Henry knew that he would be in terrible trouble but he had to get someone’s attention so he banged on the door as loudly as he could and screamed at the top of his voice for help.

  To him it seemed like an age before anyone answered him.

  “Master Henry?”

  “Becky? Becky?”

  “Yes, Master Henry, it’s Becky.”

  “It’s William. He’s got the key.”

  “The key?”

  “The key to the door. And he’s fallen through the ceiling. You’ve got to get help.”

  Henry sat in the dark thinking how Becky had to go down the stairs to the kitchen and get the butler who had to come all the way up the stairs to find them. Would he interrupt the important meeting and bring his father upstairs? Of course he would. And his mother and all the aunts and uncles? Of course they’d come up too.

  Henry sat in the dark, behind the locked door, and sobbed.

  When the door finally opened and Henry was let out of his captivity he was met by the blackest look he had ever had from his father.

  “Go to your room. Do not wash. Do not speak. Do not move until I come to you.” Henry had expected his father to be angry but this cold calm was something he didn’t understand.

  Henry sat in his room, filthy from the dirt and cobwebs of the attic, wondering if his brother was dead and dreading the beating his father would give him.

  Henry had no idea how long he was left alone waiting to learn his fate. It had been morning when they had climbed the stairs into the attics and he was still alone as the light outside began to fade.

  It was dark when his father came into his room. Henry heard him close the door and he heard the key turn in the lock.

  Henry screwed his eyes up so he did not have to look at his father.

  “Your brother has told me everything.”

  “He’s not dead?”

  The smart of his father’s belt on the side of his head told him not to interrupt.

  “He has told me how you stole the key from the pantry.”

  Henry winced as the belt buckle bit into his cheek.

  “He has told us how you persuaded him to go up to the attics though you knew it was expressly forbidden.”

  The buckle bit again into Henry’s cheek and he could feel the warm trickle of blood reach the corner of his mouth.

  “He has told us all how you pushed him across the fragile floor so that he fell.”

  Henry had no opportunity to say William was lying as the buckle hit the top of his head and made his ears ring with the pain.

  “Because of you William will be crippled. He will live, thanks only to the skill of the doctor, but he will not walk straight ever again. He will limp. He will be the butt of cruel jokes forever. Because of you his life is ruined.”

  Henry could say nothing in the face of so much horror.

  “And through your selfishness, not only have you crippled your brother, you have disrupted our meeting. Men will lose their livelihoods, families will starve because mines will now have to close and farms will have to be sold. For the rest of your wretched life you will live with the consequences of your actions. I cannot clear your conscience but I can make sure you will never forget what you have done.”

  Moonlight streamed in through the window as Henry bit into his lip, terrified of what was to come.

  “Drop your filthy trousers.”

  Now was the beating Henry had dreaded. He felt his father’s hands on his shoulders, turning him round and then he felt an enormous pain, a pain he could not understand.

  As his father pushed into him again, and again, and again, each time the pain was greater, each time he thought his body would split open, each time he screamed until a hand closed over his mouth so he could hardly breathe. It seemed a very long time before his father let out a long sigh and pulled away.

  But that was not the end of the pain.

  Henry fell to the floor and curled up in a ball. He bit his tongue to stop himself from crying out but he could not stop the tears coursing down his cheeks. He knew nothing could ever ease his pain and the confusion he felt.

  Through that night no one came to his room. No maid, not their nanny nor his mother. He was entirely alone. All through the night he could not move from the floor. It was only as daylight was spreading across the sky that the pain subsided enough to allow Henry to think about what his father had said.

  William had lied.

  From the moment he understood that his brother had blamed him for everything Henry knew that he was alone in the world. He no longer had a brother or a friend.

  Through the next day Henry remained locked in his room. As he became hungry he overcame the feeling by thinking of the children in Wales who would no longer have food on their tables, because their fathers had lost their jobs because decisions had not been made, because William had fallen through the attic floor.

  He knew everything was his brother’s fault but he also knew that William would never accept one ounce of the blame.

  On the third day of his isolation Becky let herself into his room and gave him a glass of milk and some bread. She told him that he was to stay in his room until the family had left. She told him that the noises he heard were workmen repairing the damage caused to the butler’s bedroom ceiling and boarding up the door to the attics. She told him no one was ever to be able to go to the top floor of The Lodge again.

  As he ventured down the stairs two days later holding a secret he could never tell, Henry knew that nothing could ever be the same again.

  *

  The incident with his father was never repeated but the memory of it never left him and, as the years past, the fear of it led him to obey his father, his mother and his brother in everything they demanded of him.

  William’s interests, encouraged by his mother, were in the leisurely pursuits of the landed families on the Isle of Wight. He showed neither aptitude nor interest in learning about the running of the mines and the property, the banks and industry of Wales that would one day be his.

  “Many families lost their livelihoods because of you. Many children starved,” Henry was told by his mother on many occasions. “You owe it to your family and the businesses to make amends, so muc
h profit has been lost because of you.” Though he knew none of it had been his fault Henry accepted the responsibility.

  In the spring of 1899 he took his first trip to South Wales aboard one of the coasters plying their trade between Newport, Isle of Wight and Newport, Monmouthshire. He was eighteen years old and no one stopped him visiting his one sympathetic aunt. He soon realised that his father had told him lies that dreadful night ten years before. Men would have lost their jobs whatever had been decided in that meeting.

  Henry spent the summer and autumn investigating ways to improve the working conditions in their factories, safety in the mines and productivity on the land. He had ideas about workers’ rights and mutual funds to support the victims of accidents and had argued with his uncles and his parents for a better understanding of the lives of the people who worked, and sometimes died, for the profit of the businesses that funded their extravagant lifestyles.

  It was Henry who met the tenants, who wrote the reports and came up with the ideas that his brother claimed for his own in the Board meetings Henry was given no leave to attend.

  The nearest he had to friends, as the years passed, were the estate workers, the miners and the farmers whose hard work provided poor subsistence for themselves and their families, but added to the already significant wealth of the Lacey and de Burgh families.

  *

  “Are you planning on going to Wales again?” Catherine asked Henry as she sat with her sons after dinner on the day of his twenty-first birthday, which had not been marked by any celebration.

  “You are mixing with very rough types,” William added menacingly. “Are you fomenting revolution? I hear you have been talking with men who advocate illegally withdrawing their labour.”

  “A man has responsibilities to his employer, certainly, but also the employer has responsibilities to the man.”

  “You are a filthy socialist.”

  “If I believe that every man, whatever his station in life, is worthy of respect then yes, I am a socialist. But I do not believe, as some do, that force will be required to overthrow the ruling classes. I believe the ruling classes will be the authors of their own downfall. Just as you will be the author of yours. And yes Mother, I am going to Wales tomorrow. But this time I will not be coming back.”

  *

  The day before his birthday Henry had walked to the old chapel in the woods. It was where he felt comfortable.

  “Master Henry?”

  “Wickens.”

  “Or should I call you Mr Henry? You are twenty-one years tomorrow?”

  Henry smiled and nodded as the old man sat on the stone bench next to him.

  “I’ve known you since you were born Mr Henry, and I’ve watched you grow and I’ve watched you change.”

  “Change?”

  “You were an open-hearted boy, but after your brother’s accident you changed.”

  Henry said nothing. Nobody could know the truth.

  “You know me as I work on Oakridge but for years my father and my mother and I served your grandmother and your grandfather at The Lodge, until your mother swept in with her new broom. There’s been a Wickens serving at The Lodge or at Oakridge since the beginning of the last century.”

  “I’m leaving,” Henry said without preamble.

  “I thought you would. But you have to leave in order that, one day, you may return.”

  “That’s an odd thing to say?”

  “The best member of your family left and returned.”

  “The best?”

  “Mr William, your grandfather.”

  “He was the best?”

  “There are things you need to know, Mr Henry, things about your family that you will never know if I don’t tell you. Will you listen to me?”

  And Henry listened as Wickens told him things he had never known. How his great-grandfather, a man from Jersey, had been a kind man and a good master despite being a foreigner. How this man’s daughter, Henry’s grandmother, had waited nearly ten years for her William to return from the other side of the world. How that William had loved rocks and had found gold and had brought the tree that stood by the front door of The Lodge from a faraway island, and how he had died underneath it with a smile on his face.

  “There are secrets in any family, Mr Henry, but your family has more than most.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I sat on this very bench with your grandfather William and he would talk of his hopes and dreams. You are the son he would have wanted, but instead—”

  “Instead he got my father?”

  “Your father was not the son he would have had. If he lived today he would be able to tell you the secrets he could never tell his son.”

  “Secrets?”

  “He never told me what they were, Mr Henry. There’s nothing I can pass on. He just spoke of things no one could know until the time was right.”

  “One day, maybe, I’ll learn what they are.”

  “Maybe, one day, Mr Henry, when you return to The Lodge.”

  *

  “And what could you do, brother?” William asked, confidently lounging back in his chair.

  “I will earn my living as honest men do.”

  “You are lucky that you have a complete body to work with. Your selfish stupidity left me with a weakness that means I must depend upon my brains, something you could not do.”

  “There is an honesty in working with your hands that you cannot possibly understand. You have no interest in how your wealth is made, you don’t care how many men’s backs were broken to make that wealth.”

  “Wealth, I would remind you, of which you have had the advantage since your birth.”

  “I accept that. But now I am twenty-one and no one has any say in my life I will make an honest living, causing no man but me to die to put bread on my table.”

  “Oh listen to yourself! Such self-righteousness! I give you a year and you’ll be back, grovelling for an allowance paid from the work done by others. What makes you so much better than your family now?”

  “Perhaps I have seen the wrong in the way we have lived and want to do something about it.”

  “Revolution? You are to be a Bolshevik?” William laughed. “We’re all quaking in our boots!”

  “I will find a better way,” Henry replied as he stood up from the table. “You will not see me again.”

  The next day Henry walked to Newport where he caught a familiar collier to South Wales, and to Rose.

  *

  On one of his visits to the valleys Henry had walked across a mountain to a village his family did not own and he had spotted Rose struggling with a heavy bag up the steep hill lined with identical terraced houses. At first she said she didn’t need any help but when she had a good look at him she decided to accept, though she did not know him. She thought him a good-looking lad, despite the scar on his cheek.

  Henry had made a point of walking up and down that street on his next trip to the valleys and had been rewarded by a smile and a nod and a ‘hello’.

  After several such meetings they would stop and talk. It was when her mother saw them talking in the street that he was invited into their home. He had been noticed and the neighbours wanted to know what his interest was in Rose.

  Henry did not tell Rose’s mother who he was, instead he created a false life for himself. He said his name was Harry Oliver and his family came from Surrey. He explained his good manners and his way of speaking by inventing a father and mother who had worked in service and an education provided by a local charity school. Despite knowing exactly who he was, the Jones family allowed the pretence, discussing between themselves that he must have his reasons for not wanting to admit his true identity. As they liked Harry, they assumed those reasons were good ones.

  When Harry knocked on their door in October 1911 asking for lodging, Rose’s father agreed and arranged a job for Harry in the mine. It intrigued him that Harry wanted to live and work as one of them. He did not question him or mention
his true identity to those who did not know as Harry learned the hard way what it was to be born in the lower strata of society.

  After he had lodged several months with the Jones family Rose met him on the street corner as he returned from his shift.

  “Harry?”

  “Yes?”

  “You know what we’ve been doing?”

  “Yes?”

  “You know there can be consequences?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, there have been.”

  “You’re expecting?” He was unsure of his feelings.

  “I tried to get rid of it. There’s an old woman who sorts these things out, but what she did hasn’t worked.”

  “Hasn’t worked? How far gone are you?”

  “Six months now.”

  “You want to get wed?”

  “We’ll have to. Me da’ll kill you when he notices.”

  But they didn’t have to get married as the following week Rose was kept in her bed by her mother.

  “She’s not well,” she said when the family was gathered round the tea table. “Women’s things.” She cast a glance at Harry who did everything he could not to catch her eye.

  That evening Mrs Jones cornered Harry in the scullery.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Me?”

  “You got our Rosie into trouble.”

  Harry nodded. Much as he feared Mrs Jones’ anger he loved Rose too much to deny the accusation. “Yes Missus, it was me. I will wed her.”

  “No need now, but you need to know you had a son. It was born too early and was dead. But it was a boy and Rosie’s grieving for it as if it was a proper baby. You go to her. I’ll sort out her da.”

  The relationship between her daughter and their lodger was something that Mrs Jones had accepted. She liked Harry and liked the way he had never admitted to his breeding, nor tried to take advantage of his connections with the de Burghs.

  When, a year later, Mrs Jones told Harry that Rose was expecting again they arranged the marriage. On the first possible day, in the small chapel high in the hills above the village, Rose became Mrs Harry Oliver.