The Death of Mrs. Westaway

by Ruth Ware

  She had understood—this was not of her mother’s choosing either. And what little they had, they shared—good times and bad. When there was money, there were treats. When there was hardship, they endured it together. She was doing her best. She was doing it for Hal.

  But this—this revelation . . . this was not something she had done for Hal. This was something she had kept to herself—knowledge she could have shared, but had instead hugged to herself, guarding it.

  And why? What could be so bad about the man who had held the camera that day, the man whose eyes her mother held so steadily, the man she had loved?

  In her jeans pocket was the sheaf of letters—the letters, postmarked from Penzance, that she had found beneath the bed. It had taken her a long time to decipher them, but at last she had read them all. They were letters between Maud and Maggie, and they were planning to run away. They were not dated, but from the sequence of events Hal thought that the last one was the one on top—the one she had read part of when she first opened the packet. Now she got it out of her back pocket as she walked steadily along the coast road, the wind in her face, chapping at her lips, and she bit her lip, and tasted salt.

  Dear Maud, I am sending this to you via Lizzie, as I don’t dare to put this in with the rest of the post. I am so glad you’ve found us a flat. Please don’t worry about the deposit—I have a little money left from my parents and beyond that I’ll—oh, God, I don’t know. I’ll tell fortunes on Brighton Pier, or read palms on the seafront. Anything to get away. I never thought I would write this, but I am afraid—really afraid.

  Write back via Lizzie, her address is at the bottom. She’ll bring it up when she comes to clean—but if it comes to the house YOU KNOW WHO will open it, and all hell will break loose.

  I love you. And please hurry. I can’t cope with it here much longer.

  Mxx

  There was an address on the bottom: 4 Cliff Cottages, St. Piran, Cornwall. The address now in Hal’s phone.

  The paper fluttered in the wind as Hal folded it up, but the words stayed with her. I am afraid—really afraid.

  She had held them inside her all of that long train journey, rattling in her head in time with the wheels of the train.

  When she had first read the letter, curled up on the sofa with her phone in her lap, it was her great-aunt she had imagined, standing in the door of the little room, drawing the bolts. Or maybe Mrs. Warren, with her hissed invective and her hatred. But now, Hal wondered. For her mother had been . . . not fearless, perhaps, but full of courage. Hal could not remember a time when she’d turned away from something because she was frightened. Because it was stupid—yes. Because it was risky, and she had a child to protect and bring up, certainly. But just because she was afraid—no, that never. If something was difficult but necessary, Hal’s mother faced it.

  What had made her so afraid that she had run far away from Cornwall to the other side of the country, and never spoken of that time again?

  Hal wondered. And as the sky darkened with snow clouds and the chill deepened, she realized something. She was afraid too. Not just of what she was about to do. But of what she might find at the end of it.

  CHAPTER 35

  * * *

  St. Piran turned out to be not so much a village as a collection of buildings blown together like driftwood along the roads and lanes that wound down to the sea. Here was a farm, hardy little sheep crouched low against hedgerows, shielding themselves from the wind. There was a petrol station, shuttered up and closed with a cardboard sign in the window: RING BILL NANCARROW OR KNOCK ON COTTAGE FOR KEY TO PUMP.

  The church where the funeral had been held was nowhere to be seen, but as she traipsed down the main road Hal heard a far-off church bell tolling the hour—ten slow strikes, rather mournful.

  At last, Hal saw a red pillar-box and beside it a solitary phone box, sticking out into the road, and as she rounded the bend she saw the post office Abel had described. Inside the pocket of Abel’s coat, her phone buzzed, indicating a turning; pulling out her phone, she checked the route again and saw that she was supposed to turn left down a little unmade road, past a modest row of brick-built council houses, with sensible gardens, low roofs, and storm porches closed against the sea winds. CLIFF COTTAGES, read the sign at the corner as she turned into the road, and Hal felt her heart speed up.

  Number four had a neat square of frosty grass in front of it, and a crazy-paving path up to the front door, and Hal found her hands were trembling, not just with cold, as she licked her lips and tucked her hair behind her ear, and walked up the garden path to ring the bell.

  Somewhere inside the house a novelty chime sounded, and Hal waited, her heart beating hard as she heard the sound of shuffling footsteps and saw a shape appearing through the glass patterned door.

  “Hello?” The woman who stepped into the storm porch was in her forties or fifties, very plump, with rolls of curly hair dyed a slightly improbable shade of yellow that almost matched the wet rubber gloves she was still wearing. But there was something kind about her face, and Hal found herself relaxing a little in spite of her nerves. She swallowed, wishing she had rehearsed what she was about to say.

  “Hello . . . I . . . um . . . so sorry to disturb you, but do you know someone called Lizzie?”

  “I’m Lizzie, yes,” the woman said. She folded her arms. “What can I do for you, my love?”

  Hal felt her heart quicken, hopefully.

  “I . . .” She licked her lips again, tasting the salt that seemed to permeate everything around here. “I—I think you knew my mother.”

  • • •

  ON THE WAY DOWN TO Cornwall, Hal had gone back and forth over the problem of what to say, and how to phrase her questions. She had thought of imaginary cousins . . . fake names . . . even of resurrecting Lil Smith as an alias.

  But when the door opened, and Lizzie had been there in person, with her plump kindly face, and her Cornish accent soft and rich as clotted cream, somehow all of that had fled, and she had found herself saying the last thing she had intended. The truth.

  Now she was sitting in Lizzie’s living room, and the story was tumbling out, so fast that Hal barely had time to consider it.

  Her mother’s death, the lack of money. The letter from Mr. Treswick, and the improbable hope that this mistake might actually be real—followed by the growing conviction that it was not. The disquieting discovery of the photograph, and the bolts on the attic door, and the midnight flight back to Brighton. And then, finally, the diary in her mother’s papers, and the letters, and the care-of address that had led her here.

  “Oh, my lover.” Lizzie’s round, red face was full of concern as Hal came to a halt, and she sat back against a cushion, and fanned herself. “Oh my days, what a right old pickle you’ve got yourself into. And you ent told them?”

  Hal shook her head. “But I will. I know that. I have to. I just— I don’t . . .” She stopped. “I wanted to find out all I could before I burned my bridges.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you all I can, but ’tain’t much. It’s so long ago, and I never saw neither of ’em after they left, so I can’t tell you much beyond what happened here. Your ma, she arrived . . . when must it have been . . . 1994, I suppose it was. Late spring or early summer, I remember her arrived in the taxi from Penzance station and it was a right cold day, and those bloody magpies were wheeling and circling and making a nuisance of ’emselves as usual. She was a lovely girl, your ma. Pretty, and kind, and always happy for a chat. Whereas her cousins . . . I don’t know. They always kept themselves to themselves. It was always very them-and-us, with the villagers. I suppose for so long it had been all of ’em up there in the big house and all of us down here, they was used to it. But your ma being brought up somewhere else, she saw it different. We were always talking when I was supposed to be cleaning, and Mrs. Warren—my, she had a sharp tongue, she’d come along and snap at me with her tea cloth. Fair hurt, it did! And she’d say, ‘Back to work, Lizzie, they don’t
pay you to stand there gabbing.’

  “But I always felt . . . well, I suppose the truth of it was, your ma was lonely. She’d lost her mother and father, and she’d come here expecting to find family, and what did she get? The old maid’s room in the rafters, and the cold shoulder from her aunt and cousins.”

  “But . . . but not from Maud?” Hal said. “In the diary, it reads as if Maud is her friend?”

  “Later, yes. But Maud . . . oh, she was a funny one, right from a little girl. I started cleaning up there when I was fifteen, you know, and she must have been about five or six when I started. And I remember her standing there watching me with her hands on her hips, and I say to her, wanting to make friends, like, ‘I like your dress, Maud, it’s very pretty.’ And she tosses her head, and says, ‘I’d rather be complimented for my mind than my clothes.’ And I couldn’t help it—I just burst out laughing. Mortal offended she was. She didn’t speak to me for weeks after. But when you got to know her, underneath that prickly surface, she was a kind little thing, and fierce when she felt something was wrong. I’d been there a few years when there was trouble over some missing money and Mrs. Warren was interrogating all the staff, and I was the last one to have cleaned the room where it was supposed to have been. And I was all prepared for the sack, but Maud she comes marching into the kitchen, like an avenging angel, ignoring Mrs. Warren telling her to get out, and she says, ‘God damn it, Mrs. Warren, it was Abel took that money and you know it. We all know he steals from Mother’s purse. So leave Lizzie alone.’ And then she stormed out. She couldn’t have been more than ten. But listen to me, rattling on. This isn’t what you want to know.”

  “No . . .” Hal said slowly. “No, it’s fine. To be honest . . . my mother never talked about her time here. It’s sort of . . . fascinating to find out all this. I never knew she had a cousin with the same name, let alone about Abel and Ezra and Harding and all the others. I wish she’d told me. I don’t know why she didn’t.”

  “I don’t think it was a very happy time for her,” Lizzie said, and the light went out of her kind eyes, her face suddenly sad. “She came here after her parents died, and then it wasn’t more than a few months before she got into trouble—with you, I suppose it must have been. Of course, we didn’t know anything about it at first, at least I didn’t. But by December there was starting to be talk. She’d been sick all through the autumn, and tongues started wagging, and by the time Advent came around, she was beginning to show. She was only a slip of a thing, and for all the baggy clothes she’d begun to wear, you could see something wasn’t right. And she had that look to her—I can’t explain it, but you’ll know it. Something a little bit puffy around the face, a way of holding herself when she thought no one was looking. I’d seen it before, and I knew. I think the only person who didn’t suspect anything was Mrs. Westaway, and when she found out—oh, it was like the plagues of Egypt descended on that house. Doors slamming, and poor little Maggie confined to her room for weeks on end. She couldn’t stand to look at her, Mrs. Westaway said, and there were trays sent up and down, and she was barely allowed out. Maud took her meals up whenever she was allowed, and I used to see her coming back down and it looked as if she’d been crying. We all tiptoed around for weeks in the run-up to Christmas, wondering what was going to happen, and who the father was. Someone at her school, we reckoned, though if she knew, she never did say.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Hal broke in urgently. “She did know, and that’s partly why I came here. I was hoping you could help me work it out. It was someone who came to stay at Trepassen House that summer, it must have been in August. A blue-eyed man, or a boy maybe. Do you know who it could be?”

  “Came to stay?” Lizzie was frowning. “I don’t know about that. I can’t remember more than two or three times the children had friends to stay. Ezra, he had a school friend back once, I think, though I can’t remember if it was that summer or the summer before. I don’t remember his eyes. And Abel, he had some friends from university who lived in Cornwall and North Devon, sometimes one of them would come for the day, especially when Mrs. Westaway was out. The house was a different place when she wasn’t around. I’m sorry,” she added, seeing Hal’s expression. “I wish I could help you more, but I’d be lying if I said I remembered. And I only came up a couple of times a week, as the children got older. Mrs. Westaway just didn’t have the money for daily help, by then, and I had my own kids anyway.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hal said, though she felt her heart deflate like a pricked balloon, a great reservoir of hope that she didn’t know she’d been holding on to leaching away. “Tell me about . . . tell me about what happened after. With the letters.”

  “Well. That was the real scandal then. So Maud was invited to interview at an Oxford college in December, and while she was away things got very bad between Mrs. Westaway and your mother. I’m ashamed to say it, but I was glad to get out of the house when I left each day. I’d hear Mrs. Westaway screaming at her, though they were up in the attics, threatening her with all sorts if she didn’t give up the name of the father, and your mother crying and pleading. Once I saw her on the way to the bathroom and she had a black eye and a split lip. I wish now I’d done something but . . .” She trailed off, and Hal saw her blink and rub at the corner of her eye. “Well, Maud came back and it was like she’d seen the light or something. She told me she had an unconditional offer from wherever it was, some women’s college, I think, so that she didn’t need to study anymore, near enough. But she told me not to tell her mother, and in January she got invited back for another interview—or said she did. Afterwards, I wondered if there really was another interview, or if it was just an excuse to get away. And that was when the letters began. Maggie was here, writing to Maud—sometimes in Oxford, and sometimes in Brighton. And Maud was there, writing back, and I felt like a ruddy postman I can tell you, shipping the letters up and down. But by then I was really afraid for your ma, afraid that Mrs. Westaway would go too far, and hit her hard enough to give her a miscarriage or summat. So I was glad to do what I could to help.”

  “You don’t know what any of the letters said?” Hal asked. She almost held her breath, waiting for the reply, but Lizzie shook her head.

  “No, I didn’t open them. Only one I saw—and that because your ma didn’t have an envelope, and she asked me to put it in one for her. It was the last one.”

  “Wh-what did it say?”

  Lizzie looked down at her lap, her pink fingers fretting anxiously with the rubber gloves she held there.

  “I didn’t read it,” she said at last. “I’m not that sort of person. But it was folded in a way I couldn’t help but see one line, and it stuck in my head in a way I’ve never been able to shake. It said, I’ve told him, Maud. It was worse than I ever imagined. Please, please hurry. I am afraid of what might happen now.”

  There was a long silence, Lizzie reliving those memories, Hal turning the words over and over in her mind, feeling the chilly dread within her growing.

  “Who—” she said at last, and then stopped.

  “Who was the ‘him’ in the letter?” Lizzie asked, and Hal nodded dumbly. Lizzie shrugged, her plump, cheerful face grave and rather sad. “I don’t know. But I always assumed . . .” She bit her lip, and Hal knew what she was about to say, before the words were spoken. “I always assumed she’d told your father about her pregnancy at last, and it was him she was afraid of. I’m sorry, my darling.”

  “So . . .” Hal found her lips were dry and she licked them, and took a sip of the tea Lizzie had set before her when they sat down, though it had gone cold in the cup. “So . . . what happened next? I know my mother did move to Brighton and had me. What about Maud?”

  “Well, that set the cat among the pigeons,” Lizzie said. Her face broke into a smile, and she took a long draft of her own tea and set the cup down. “It was maybe late January, or early February. Maud had come back from Oxford or wherever she was supposed to be, but I knew that wasn’t the end of
it. There were letters coming back and forth, and Maud whispering on the phone in the hallway, jumping like a thief when I came round the corner. Anyone else, I would have thought it was a boy, but I knew enough to know it wasn’t that.

  “I wasn’t there the night they left, but I came up the next day to clean and the house was in an uproar. The girls were gone in the night, they’d taken only their clothes, seemingly, and not so much as a note left. Mrs. Westaway was tearing apart the attic room and Maud’s bedroom, saying things I hope never to hear again—foul things about both of them, her own daughter too. But they never called the police, I know that, for my brother-in-law was in the force and he said they never had no official report of the girls going. Perhaps she was afraid of what would come out, I don’t know. So in the end, I suppose, in a way, she let them go. Maud, or maybe Maggie, I was never sure, sent one letter to the house—I know, for I saw the envelope lying on the hall table and I recognized the handwriting from all those days and weeks ferrying papers back and forth—they had rather similar writing, but it was definitely one or the other. I don’t know what it said, but I saw Mrs. Westaway read it through the crack in the drawing room door. She read it, and then she tore it up and threw the scraps in the fire, and then she spat after them.”

  “And that was it?” Hal said uncertainly. “You never heard from them again?”

  “That was it,” Lizzie said. “Almost, at least. I got a postcard from Brighton one day in March. All it said was Thank you, Mx and no return address, but I knew who it was from.”

  “And they never came back,” Hal said. She shook her head wonderingly, but Lizzie shook her head in reply.

  “No, I didn’t say that. I never heard from them again, but Maggie, she came back.”