The Death of Mrs. Westaway

by Ruth Ware

  She flicked forwards through the album, faster now, through pictures of Abel toddling on the beach, playing with a ball; through a holiday in France, or perhaps Italy, Harding and Abel sitting serious-faced on the steps of some European church, ice creams in their fists; through a family Christmas, and then . . .

  Two little babies, swaddled side by side. Margarida Miriam (l) and Ezra Daniel, 2 days old.

  They were asleep, eyes tight closed, and with their eyes shut she would not have been able to tell which was which, without the caption. How strange, that two twins who had looked so similar in babyhood, had grown up so unlike each other. Their faces were peaceful, turned to each other as they must have turned in their mother’s womb, no hint of the strife and pain that was to come.

  Maud.

  Hal let her gaze rest on the tranquil little face, cherubic in repose.

  Where are you, Maud? she wanted to ask. Dead? Running? Hiding? But how could she do that—how could she leave her brothers, her twin in pain for so many years?

  She turned the page, to see Maud as a fat-legged toddler pushing a battered wooden dog across a hearthrug, and beside her Ezra, playing with a huge bear, almost larger than himself. The next few pages were just of Ezra—age four, on a brand-new bicycle, shining in the sun. Age five, grinning a gap-toothed smile. Hal shook her head, remembering Abel’s bitter remark about Ezra being his mother’s favorite.

  She was about to turn the page, in search of another picture of Maud—but suddenly it was too painful to carry on, watching this little girl growing towards whatever oblivion had snatched her up, and Hal sighed and closed the album, pressing her fingers into her eyes, pushing back the ache in her head, and her heart.

  Whatever answers she was looking for, she had been foolish to think they would be here. She should put it back where it came from, go to bed, to sleep, and follow Ezra’s advice to forget the past—give up this stupid obsession with finding out what had happened, so many years ago.

  But who had got the album down, that first morning? One of the brothers? Edward? He had barely arrived, but he might have just had time. The only other option was Mrs. Warren, and that was stranger still.

  One thing was for sure—the truth about her mother did not lie within these pages. Unless—

  She stopped, the thought snagging at her, and then opened her eyes, her blurred vision refocusing painfully on the buttercup-yellow cover in front of her. Once again, she picked it up and leafed slowly forwards through the pages, her stomach clenched with uncertainty, unsure of what she was about to see.

  The confirmation came slowly—not from a single picture, but shimmering into focus, like a Polaroid photo developing in the light, features appearing from an unformed blur.

  First there was a round, childish face sharpening into features that were painfully familiar, baby-blue eyes deepening and darkening into black ones. Limbs lengthening, skin tanning, an expression that changed slowly from openhearted trust to wariness.

  And then at last, the final photograph in the book—The Twins’ 11th birthday—there she was. Staring out of the page through a dark, tangled fringe, her dark eyes alight with the bright reflection of the candles, so like her brother that Hal wondered how she had ever managed to miss it.

  Margarida. Maud. Hal’s mother.

  CHAPTER 45

  * * *

  If Hal had not already been sitting down, she would have had to grope for a chair.

  Her mother was Maud. Maud. There was no other explanation. The girl in those photographs, Ezra’s twin, growing up alongside him at Trepassen, was Hal’s mother. It was unmistakable.

  And yet—it made no sense.

  It had to be true. The pictures in the book did not lie. There was her mother’s face, shimmering into focus in front of her very eyes, page after page, from babyhood through to first school days, into her almost-teenage self, all the time growing towards the woman Hal knew painfully well. Her mother was not Maggie.

  Which meant . . . It meant that Hester Westaway was her grandmother.

  It meant that the will was valid.

  But what about the birth certificate? What about the diary? What about—

  And then Hal realized, and it was like the moon coming out from behind a cloud. All those shapes that had been formless black confusion in the clouded darkness were illuminated, falling into their rightful places in a landscape that suddenly made sense. She could not be sure. But if she was right . . . if she was right, she had been looking at this upside down the whole time.

  If she was right, nothing was as she had thought it was.

  If she was right, she had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

  The snow outside was still falling, and Hal pulled her coat closer around her as she turned the pages. But it was not only the cold that made her shiver this time. It was a sense of foreboding suddenly gathering around her—of the weight of the secrets of the past, and the dam that she was about to break. The deluge.

  This time, as she leafed through the fading pictures with their yellowed coverings, this time there was no sense of wonder or nostalgia. This time, she felt as if she were plunging down a rabbit hole into the past.

  Because the child in the photographs, laughing and playing with her twin brother in the grounds of Trepassen, was not Hal’s aunt. It was her mother—her dark eyes unmistakably like Hal’s own—but not Hal’s own.

  Which meant that Maggie, the girl who had come to Trepassen, who had written that diary, who had got pregnant, who had run away and disappeared—was a stranger. Yet Hal was Maggie’s daughter. There was no other explanation. However Hal worked the maths in her head, the result was the same—Maud could not have been pregnant at the time of Hal’s birth. And Maggie was.

  There was only one possibility, and it had been staring her in the face ever since she opened Mr. Treswick’s letter, but she had been too blind to see it.

  Hal’s mother—the woman who had loved her, and brought her up, and cared for her—was not the woman who had given birth to her.

  But what had happened? How had it happened?

  Hal put her hands to her head. She felt as if she were carrying a load, immensely heavy, and immensely fragile and dangerous. She had the sense of herself tiptoeing along a narrow tightrope, and in her arms a bomb, ticking gently, and about to go off at any moment.

  Because if this meant what she thought it did . . .

  But she was getting ahead of herself.

  Don’t rush—her mother’s voice in her head. Build your story. Lay it out—card by card.

  Card by card, then.

  So. What did Hal know for sure?

  She knew that Maggie had escaped—that much was clear from the diary, and from Maud’s letters. Maud had helped her get away sometime in January or February, and the two of them had come to Brighton to make a life together. There, in the peace and quiet of the little flat, Maggie had given birth to her baby daughter, and Maud . . . Maud could not have gone home. Lizzie had made that clear. She had never seen her family again, from the moment she walked out. So she must have stayed with her cousin, taking care of her, biding her time, hugging her acceptance letter from Oxford and waiting for autumn when she would take up her place at last.

  But then, for whatever reason, Maggie had gone back to Trepassen. Something had drawn her back—and whatever it was, it must have been a good reason, for her to return to the place she had tried so hard to escape from. She had packed her bags, left her baby with her cousin, and taken the train down to Trepassen alone, with a “Joan of Arc look” upon her face, “like a maid going into battle,” as Lizzie had said.

  Was it money that had driven her back? The realization that, try as they might, two young women not yet out of school could barely afford to feed and clothe themselves, let alone a baby? I have a little money left from my parents, she had told Maud in her letter. But that little money would not have lasted long, even supplemented with earnings from the pier, not with Maud soon off to university, and no childcare
for Hal. Perhaps she had gone to fight for support for her child.

  Whatever it was, it had gone terribly wrong. Maggie—not Maud—had disappeared. She had left Hal motherless, and left Maud to pick up the pieces of her life—her flat, her little booth on the pier . . . and her child.

  In one respect, it must have been easy, with Margarida Westaway on the birth certificate and on the flat lease, and on the sign above the door at the pier. Her mother was Margarida Westaway—she had the passport and birth certificate to prove it. There was no dispute there. Maud had simply slipped into her cousin’s life.

  But Hal’s heart ached at the thought of how hard it must have been too. Maud had given up everything—that freedom she had fought so hard for, her university place, her hard-won future—she had given it all up, for Hal. She had picked up her cousin’s child, and she had taken over the booth on the pier for one reason and one reason only—to put food on the table, because she had no other option.

  No wonder the open, questing girl in the diary had read like a different person from the cynical, skeptical woman who had raised Hal. They were different women. It was not that Maggie had changed her mind; it was that Maud had never done so.

  What was it Maggie had said, quoting Maud? Load of wafty BS, that was it. It had struck a chord with Hal, and she had laughed and connected with the remark in a way that she had not quite understood. But now she did.

  Now she understood why Maud had shone so clearly out of the pages, that connection she had felt, reaching back through the years.

  It was because they were connected. Maud was not just her aunt—she was the only mother Hal had ever known. The person she had loved beyond her own life, beyond reason, beyond bearing, when she had lost her.

  Urgent questions beat inside Hal’s heart. How. Why.

  But she had to take this step by step . . . with the slow, measured pace of a reading. She had to turn each card as it came, consider it, find its place in the story.

  And the next card . . . the next card was one that made Hal feel terribly uneasy in a way that she couldn’t completely pin down.

  For the next card was not a card at all: it was a photograph. The photograph. The one that Abel had given her that first day at Trepassen.

  Hal pulled the Golden Virginia tin out of her pocket and prized it open. The photograph was there on top, folded in half, and she unfolded it, staring at the picture with fresh eyes.

  There was Maud—staring out at the camera, with that defiant gaze. But there, too, was Maggie. Maggie who had written the diary. And she wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking at Ezra, with her blue, blue eyes.

  Blue eyes met dark . . .

  She had had it the wrong way round, all this time.

  Hal had not inherited her dark eyes from her mother, for her mother was blond.

  She had inherited them from her father. The man who had set up the camera on its tripod, started the timer, and returned to take his place in the photo.

  Ezra. Daniel.

  Ed.

  Ezra was her father.

  CHAPTER 46

  * * *

  Hal’s phone was upstairs in the attic, and she wore no watch, but she was sure from the stillness of the house that it must be gone midnight, probably long gone.

  But there was no way she could go back to bed with this weight of truth heavy inside her, and the questions churning and churning.

  There was only one person she could go to—one person who might tell her the truth.

  Mrs. Warren.

  And she had to go now, before Ezra woke up. If she left it until dawn . . .

  Hal picked up the album, pushed back the chair, and stood, trying to summon her courage, remembering the thread across the stairs, the hissed invective in Mrs. Warren’s voice—Get out—if you know what’s good for you . . .

  Like Joan of Arc, her mother had been. Like a maid going into battle.

  Well, she had not inherited much from Maggie. Not her features, not her eyes or her hair, not even her sense of humor and skepticism. But perhaps she had inherited her mother’s courage.

  Hal took a deep breath, steadying herself, trying to quiet the questions clamoring inside her—and then she opened the study door and stepped softly through the orangery to knock at the door of Mrs. Warren’s sitting room.

  There was no answer at first, and Hal knocked a little harder, and as she did the door swung inwards, unlatched, and she saw that the gas fire in the little sitting room was on, and that the lamp on the table was burning.

  Had Mrs. Warren fallen asleep in her chair?

  It was pushed in front of the fire, close up, a blanket slung over the back of it making a dark shape that could have been a hunched old lady—but when Hal went cautiously forwards, her free hand outstretched in the flickering darkness, it only rocked away and then back, unmoored, and she saw that it was empty except for a couple of cushions.

  “Mrs. Warren?” Hal called quietly. She tried not to let her voice shake, but there was something very eerie about the silence, broken only by the low rise and fall of a radio, and the creak, creak of the rocking chair upon the boards.

  After the study, the sitting room was stiflingly overheated, and Hal wiped her brow, feeling sweat prickle across the back of her neck.

  The sound of the radio was coming from behind a door at the back of the sitting room, and Hal took a cautious step towards it, but as she did so she nudged a little side table covered with pictures, and they fell, half a dozen of them.

  “Shit!”

  She grabbed for it, steadying the table before it could topple, but the pictures were like dominoes, clattering down in sequence, and Hal stood, frozen for a moment, her heart in her mouth, feeling its panicked thumping.

  “Mrs. Warren?” she managed, her voice shaking. “I’m sorry, it’s only me, Hal.”

  But no one came, and with trembling hands she began to right the pictures, one after the other.

  As she did, she saw, with a growing sense of disquiet, what they were.

  Ezra. All of them.

  Ezra as a baby, in Mrs. Warren’s arms, his soft hand reaching out for her cheek.

  Ezra as a toddler, running across the lawn.

  Ezra as a young man, almost unbearably handsome, his smile flashing out, unguarded and full of wry mischief.

  Ezra, Ezra, Ezra—a shrine, almost, to a lost little boy.

  There was one of the three brothers together on the mantelpiece. None of Maggie, though that, perhaps, was not surprising. Not a single one of Maud. And none, save for that one picture with Ezra in her arms, of Mrs. Warren herself.

  It was as if all the love in that twisted old heart, all the caring and gentleness, had settled on a single person, concentrated into a beam of adoration so ferocious that Hal felt that it could have burned the skin.

  “Mrs. Warren,” she said again, a lump in her throat now, though whether it was pity or fear, she could not have said. “Mrs. Warren, wake up, please, I need to speak to you.”

  But nothing. Silence.

  Hal’s hands were shaking as she crept, inch by inch, across the firelit room, towards the door at the back, holding the yellow album out in front of her now, like a shield. She imagined pushing it open, the hunched figure standing behind in silence and darkness, just as she had that night outside the attic, waiting, watching.

  “Mrs. Warren!” There was a note of pleading in her voice now, almost a sob. “Please. Wake up.”

  She was at the door now. Nothing. No sound, no movement.

  Her hand was on the panel.

  And then she pushed, and the door swung open, showing a narrow bedroom with a single iron cot bedstead, a flowered flannel nightgown folded neatly at the foot.

  Beneath the bed were two carpet slippers, side by side, and a coat was hanging on a peg next to the door.

  Of Mrs. Warren herself, there was no sign at all.

  Hal felt her heart steady in her chest, relief flooding her momentarily, but then another kind of uneasiness
took hold.

  If Mrs. Warren was not asleep or in her sitting room, where was she?

  “Mrs. Warren!” she shouted, making herself jump with the shock of the noise above the quiet hiss of the gas. “Mrs. Warren, where are you?”

  And then, at the back of the bedroom, Hal saw another door, and it was standing ajar.

  “Mrs. Warren?”

  She stepped into the bedroom, her sense of intrusion growing at the feeling that, with every step, she was venturing farther and farther into Mrs. Warren’s private sanctum. Part of her quaked at the thought of the woman’s fury if she discovered Hal here, but part of her was driven on by a kind of fascination—taking in the cross on the wall above the austere bedstead, the photograph of Ezra on the nightstand, and the small, pathetically small, flannel nightgown folded across the foot of the bed.

  She wanted to turn back—but it was impossible now. It was more than a sick curiosity to know what was behind Mrs. Warren’s formidable façade. It was a desire—no, a need for answers. Answers only Mrs. Warren could give.

  Her hand was outstretched. She was almost at the door—

  “Hal?”

  The voice came from behind her, making her jump convulsively and swing around, eyes wide in the darkness.

  “Wh-who’s there?”

  No sign of anyone at first, and then something moved—a dark shape in the doorway, and he stepped forwards into the little room.

  The snow had stopped, she realized with a sense of detached wonderment, and the moon had come out, sending a thin white light slanting across the bare boards between them.

  “Hal, what are you doing?” There was no censure in his deep voice, just a kind of concerned curiosity.

  “E-Ezra,” she stammered. “I was—I was looking for—for Mrs. Warren.”

  It was true, after all.

  “Why? Is something wrong”

  “I’m fine,” she managed. But it was not true. Her heart was beating so hard and fast it made a hissing in her ears, a roar she could barely silence enough to hear her own thoughts.