A Set of Lies

by Carolyn McCrae

  “No. It bloody couldn’t.” Henry’s voice was uncharacteristically harsh.

  “But I’d love to go up there to explore,” Audrey had ventured after a few moments of uncomfortable silence.

  “No,” Henry repeated, getting more agitated.

  “You won’t, will you?” Rose said, more persuasively.

  “Why not?

  “Because, as your uncle has said, it is not safe and he doesn’t want you to put yourself or your brother at risk.”

  “Arthur won’t go up there.”

  “Well neither will you. You will promise not to, won’t you?”

  Audrey reluctantly nodded, her fingers crossed behind her back.

  Rose hoped that Audrey would take her warnings to heart. Henry had told her everything about his brother’s fall and the aftermath. His memories of that day had never softened.

  “Say you promise. A nod is not enough,” Rose said firmly.

  “I promise,” Audrey repeated, her fingers still crossed behind her back, a sign which, of course, meant she did not have to keep it.

  *

  Audrey only went up into the attics twice.

  The first time was on a rainy afternoon in the spring of 1941. She had found an old key in a drawer in the kitchen dresser and had spent the afternoon seeing what lock it would open. When she had felt it work on the door on the top floor she knew she had found the way into the attic.

  She had waited until she knew Rose and Henry were in the kitchen with Arthur and she had unlocked the door and climbed the steep and irregular steps.

  She had shone the torch into both rooms and seen the boxes and the pictures covered in cloth, but she had also seen the cobwebs and the skeletons of dead rats. The floorboards creaked ominously and seemed to her to give even under her light weight, so she had turned and climbed back down the stairs. She locked the door behind her but she was careful to keep the key.

  One day she would be brave enough to have a better look at what was up there.

  The second time was in the summer of 1943.

  She had unlocked the door and climbed the stairs, but this time she was prepared for the cobwebs, the rats’ skeletons and the creaking floorboards which didn’t seem very safe. She spent an hour looking at the pictures hidden underneath the heavy cloths and pushing aside broken pieces of furniture to see the section of floor replaced after her father’s fall more than fifty years before.

  After she had climbed back down the stairs and as she was locking the door behind her she heard her name called.

  “Audrey? Are you up here?”

  Audrey froze. Rowan was home on leave but she was early, and she was coming up the stairs. She would know exactly where she had been.

  “Audrey?” Rowan’s voice was closer and Audrey knew she had been found out.

  “Hello,” she said as Rowan’s head came into view at the top of the stairs.

  “Audrey. What on earth are you doing here? You haven’t, have you? I mean you haven’t been up in the attic?”

  She saw the key in Audrey’s hand.

  “Oh Audrey, you naughty girl.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You just couldn’t resist it could you?”

  “Could you?”

  “I wanted to come up here. I really did, but Dad was so very, very against it. I couldn’t.”

  “Do you want to know what’s up there?”

  “No. I don’t. Well, yes. Was there anything interesting?”

  “Just a lot of old junk.”

  “I thought that’s what it would be. But you must promise never to go up there again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my mum and dad tell you not to. Isn’t that good enough reason?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Audrey sat down next to Rowan on the top stair and Rowan took her hand in hers.

  “We had good times here didn’t we, you and me?”

  “Before you went away?”

  “I know we only had a few months together but I did show you some of the places you could explore didn’t I?”

  “The old chapel in the woods?”

  “Yes, and every floor but the attics. I know it must be horridly difficult for you away from your mother and father, living in this strange old house. All these nooks and crannies must be really tempting but you must promise me never to go up into these attics again.”

  “Why not?” Audrey asked.

  “Because it would be very hurtful to my dad if he knew you had. Not just because you promised not to and had broken your promise to them, but because Dad has really bad memories of the last time he went up there and it would be really, really unfair if he realised you had been up there too.”

  “Sorry. I know I promised.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “But I had—”

  “You had your fingers crossed behind your back?”

  Audrey nodded sheepishly.

  “I used to do that too, but it really isn’t right. It doesn’t mean that you cannot keep your promise.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Will you promise me you won’t go back up into these attics?”

  “You?”

  “Yes, me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love my dad and it would hurt him incredibly if he knew you were risking falling, and I love my mum and it would hurt her terribly if she knew you had broken your promise.”

  “All right,” Audrey whispered.

  “If you promise I’ll give you something to remind you to keep that promise.”

  “What?”

  Rowan reached up and passed the gold chain over her head. “Here.”

  “Your pendant?”

  “Yes. Dad gave it to Mum before he went to war in 1914. She wore it all the time Dad he was away. Then she gave it to me for luck just before I joined the WRAF. Dad said it once belonged to your great-grandmother, her name was Josephine, and he believes her father gave it to her so it is very, very old. Now it is yours and you must keep it to remind you of the promise you’ve made never, ever, to go up into those attics again.”

  “I can’t wear it, can I? She’ll know you haven’t got it anymore.”

  “No. You can’t wear it, at least until you’re older.”

  “I’ll keep it in my treasures box.”

  “Yes, you can do that.”

  Audrey held the fine gold chain and the beautiful locket in her hands. “I promise,” she said.

  And this time she meant it.

  Audrey never did wear the pendant.

  She put it into her treasures box which she kept in the drawer in her bedside table and when, two weeks later, news came that Rowan had been killed during an air raid at the airfield in Kent where she had been working as a driver, she decided that she never would.

  Audrey always blamed herself. If Rowan had still had her lucky pendant she would not have been killed.

  *

  The day after Rowan’s funeral Rose asked Audrey into what had been her daughter’s bedroom.

  “You must move into this room now, you are the daughter of the house.”

  Audrey was fourteen years old. She had always loved her cousin’s bedroom. They had spent many hours talking and listening to the radio or playing music on Rowan’s gramophone. It was nothing like her own room, which had failed to shrug off its connotations of once being a nursery. This was a woman’s bedroom and it always seemed to Audrey that that was the afternoon she was allowed to grow up.

  “This will be your room for as long as you want it to be,” Rose had told Audrey, and it was her room for more than sixty years.

  *

  After the war William arranged for twelve-year-old Arthur to go to boarding school. They wanted Audrey to return to London, she was eighteen years old and, despite the post-war austerity, there was a social world re-emerging that Eva was determined Audrey would enjoy. She was to be a debutante and would find an eligible husband, one suitable for the daughter of a baronet.

&nb
sp; But Audrey had other ideas; she had no intention of leaving the Isle of Wight. She loved The Lodge, she loved living on the island, she loved her uncle and aunt and she wanted to look after them. So she stayed.

  When Rose died in the cold winter of 1947 there was never any question but that Audrey would remain with her Great-Uncle Henry at The Lodge.

  “But darling,” Eva breathed persuasively down the phone line, “there are so many young things in town now, you’ll have such fun.”

  “I don’t want fun, Mother, I am happy here. I’ve got friends here and Uncle Henry needs me.”

  “You can’t possibly be happy there!”

  “But I am.”

  “You can’t give up your life to look after your uncle.”

  “It doesn’t seem like giving up my life, Mother, he is a lovely man, he teaches me a lot about things.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “About history, about politics, about being interested in the world.”

  “But he needs looking after, in ways, well, not to put too fine a point on it, in ways a young woman cannot get involved with.”

  “Alan does all that.”

  “Alan?”

  “Alan Wickens. He’s lived on the estate all his life, he’s the grandson of the old estate manager, he does everything to run the house, and he looks after Uncle Henry, he helps him wash and dress, all that kind of stuff.”

  “It’s really not the way you should be living, in a house miles away from anywhere, alone with two men. There isn’t a housekeeper? A woman in the house?”

  “No mother, I am the woman in the house.”

  And Audrey stayed.

  When her mother died in 1950 there was no reason for her not to.

  *

  One morning in late 1970, when Henry knew that his time was coming to an end, he told Audrey about the family Bible. “Bring it to me,” he had said, telling her exactly where he had put it in 1914 before he had gone to war. He was certain no one would have moved it; he had never known anyone disturb the books on the shelves in the library.

  As she carried the book through the hall to Henry, who was sitting in his chair by the range in the kitchen, she had looked at the handwritten entries in the inner cover. Claude Olivierre, born Napoleone Buonaparte; Ajaccio, Corse, fifteenth day of august in the year seventeen hundred and sixty-nine. She sat down on the bottom stair. Fourth day of april 1816, Patience Shaw married Claude Olivierre. She read on. Charles I.IX.1816 died same, Charles III.VIII.1817 died same, Mary Lettice born XXII.XII.1818 departed XIV.I.1820, Josephine VI.VI.1820.

  The implications of what she was reading were not lost on Audrey, but she could not help but think what it must have been like to lose three babies in such a short time. She felt for Patience Shaw. But, Audrey saw, Josephine had survived.

  Josephine Mary Olivierre married William Bernard Lacey IX.VII.1851.

  She read down the entries ending with those that Henry had written and she saw that he and Rose, too, had lost a baby son.

  “Uncle Henry?” she asked uncertainly, not sure how to ask the question uppermost in her mind. “Did you know about Claude?”

  “You’ve read it then.” She noticed the resignation in his voice. “Yes, I’ve known since 1914. I forgot for a while. I forgot many things for a long while.”

  “Yet you’ve remembered and you’ve not done anything with the knowledge.”

  “If you can believe what is written.”

  “No one would have written a lie like that, would they? It must be true.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Audrey handed the Bible to Henry and watched as he felt for the front pages. He had ripped them out before she realised what he was doing. She could not stop him as he ripped the pages to tiny shreds. His resignation had turned to a cold anger.

  “Take this.” He held out his hands and she took the handful of paper from him. “Put it in a saucer.” She did as she was told. “Now set fire to it. I may not be able to see but I will hear and smell if you don’t do as I say.” She obeyed him and watched as tiny flames ate up what was left of the words. “Now take those ashes and wash them down the sink.” Henry could not know that she had kept a few of the scraps of paper to put in her box of treasures.

  “Never speak of this Audrey. Swear to me you will tell no one. Ever.”

  He became agitated when she made no immediate response. “You must swear you will never speak of this. There has been too much war. There has been too much unhappiness. Let it end here. Swear to me, Audrey. On Rowan’s memory.”

  “I swear.”

  “Here. Here’s the Bible. Put your hand on it and swear.”

  “I swear. On this Bible I swear never to say anything about anything I saw to anybody.”

  Audrey never forgot but she was able to push her secret to the back of her mind. Until a bag and a chest were found in a chimney destroyed by lightning.

  *

  For the four years after her fall Audrey was torn between the promise she had made and the Skye’s right to know the truth of her heritage.

  She had always known she would never say anything but she was careful to leave the scraps of paper in her treasures box in the drawer by her bedside table.

  When she was dead Skye could do what she wished with what she found. She was not bound by an oath to stay quiet.

  Chapter 19

  Thursday 9am

  Carl, Fergal and Skye settled in what were becoming their usual places around the table in the kitchen of The Lodge.

  “Before we start this morning I want to say thanks to you, Skye, for putting up with us. I don’t think we’ve been very thoughtful guests, have we Carl?” Fergal said rather formally. “We’ve eaten your pizza and drunk your wine and endless cups of coffee and I don’t think either of us has done anything to help you. I just thought I’d like to say sorry.”

  “Me too,” Carl agreed, so reluctantly Skye knew Fergal had told him to.

  “Apologies accepted. I’ve probably been a bit churlish sometimes.”

  “Just a bit,” Carl replied without a smile.

  “We’ve not been very thoughtful and we haven’t really appreciated how upsetting this all is for you,” Fergal continued. “All this history of the family that is rejecting you and the home you are having to leave. We really have been very tactless. Haven’t we Carl?”

  “We probably have been rather thoughtless,” Carl said as if admitting nothing.

  “We will all try to be nice to each other now, won’t we?” Fergal scowled meaningfully at Carl.

  “I will.”

  “And so will I.”

  “Now that’s all done and dusted, can we move on?” Carl opened his notepad. “Overnight I have made some notes of what we have actually achieved. Feel free to interrupt me if you believe I’m missing something.” He paused, checked he had Fergal’s and Skye’s full attention before continuing. “We have something of the narrative of the lives of all relevant Laceys back to the original Sir Bernard but little on Sir Bernard himself.”

  “Agreed.” Fergal nodded.

  “We have identified where Claude Olivierre fits into the lives of the Laceys.”

  “Agreed,” said Skye, unsure whether she should have spoken or not.

  “We know that Bernard and Claude had connections in very high places.”

  “Though we don’t know the reason for that.” Fergal began to counter Carl’s positive points.

  “We suspect Claude’s backstory was planted in the records.”

  “But were records really that well-kept in those days? Why should we assume every man, every birth, every death, was accurately recorded?”

  “Because without trust in the bureaucracy of the past we would have very little history,” Carl responded.

  “We are no nearer knowing how Claude came to be here, who he might have been, what his relationship was to Bernard,” Fergal continued. “And we have no idea who Bernard really was, nor where he came from. It’s a long list of things
we do not know.”

  “Come, come, we’ve only been working at this for a few days. We can’t expect miracles. We must persevere. We have found much that helps our cause.”

  “Such as…?”

  “Start with William’s links to St Helena. We must not forget Claude’s writings, his letters, and those of William. They are gold dust.” Carl tried to recover the optimism he had felt the previous morning.

  “But they will prove nothing,” Fergal said quietly.

  “They show he was involved in the Napoleonic wars,” Carl pointed out.

  “Most men of his age and status would have been,” Fergal countered. “I really can’t see how we’re going to be able to prove he was who we think he was. We definitely need a breakthrough,” he added lamely.”

  Skye didn’t like feeling that she had made matters worse by not telling them what she had found. The previous evening, while they had eaten the pizza and drunk the wine, while they had gone through the details of the generations of her family, she had said nothing about the book she had found in Gussie’s chest because she thought they were taking her for granted.

  “What sort of breakthrough?” Skye asked tentatively.

  “We need something written down that takes us back to Claude’s time, something that directly links Claude to the General. We need something, anything, that proves that Claude was Napoleon.”

  “And,” added Carl, catching Fergal’s feeling that they could never prove their suspicions, “even if we prove that Claude was the General we will have to provide some sort of realistic mechanism to explain how that scenario came about. And I can’t see that ever being anything we’re going to be able to do.”

  Skye’s doubts were overcome.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and neither Carl nor Fergal understood what she was apologising for. “I’m really sorry.”

  “What for?” Carl spoke first.

  “I should have said something yesterday.”

  “What about?”

  Skye didn’t answer directly. The frustrations of the week came flooding out. “Neither of you have expected much of me, have you? I think your earlier apologies about using me as a provider of food and drink while you got on with the important stuff was really rather half-hearted and it didn’t even address the fact that you’ve hardly valued any of the information I’ve given you. You both poo-pooed my idea of looking through the stuff in the attic yet it seemed the obvious place. It was beneath your academic contempt to look amongst household diaries and estate records. It was far too mundane and un-intellectual. And it was only when you didn’t need my help climbing up and down library steps that you let me spend time up there. It’s what we should have been doing all the time. I mean, I found Gussie’s work on his family tree didn’t I? And neither of you thought to ask me if I’d found anything else.”