Pale as the Dead

by Fiona Mountain

  She had begun to explain very briefly about Adam and Bethany, when the waiter returned with notepad and pen to take their order. Steven asked for a bottle of claret and they were ushered through into the restaurant with long French windows beside which a small choir dressed in red and white stood round a grand piano, with lanterns on sticks. They were singing In the Bleak Midwinter.

  ‘Didn’t Christina Rossetti write the lyrics to this?’ Ann said. ‘Yes, I’m sure she did.’ She’d been paying more attention to what they’d been saying than Natasha had given her credit for.

  It had always been one of Natasha’s favourite carols. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  Steven gave her their gift then, a Victorian silver and jet necklace which Natasha knew he’d have chosen. He helped her put it on, lifting her hair to fasten the clasp around her throat. When he said how well it suited her she was aware of Ann’s eyes upon her. Steven had either never noticed or had chosen to ignore what had always been blatantly obvious to Natasha: Ann resented the fact that Steven was closer to Natasha than to Abby. At the back of her mind Natasha wondered too if Ann could be jealous of their relationship, was suspicious of it even.

  Hastily she handed over their presents, a silk scarf for Abby, an early edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom for Steven, which she’d found on the internet, and a Venetian glass figurine for Ann which Natasha had spotted at an antique fair in Stow.

  Ann said it was lovely, then put it to one side, leaving Natasha wondering if she really liked it.

  ‘Has Abby told you about her new job?’ Ann said.

  ‘I’m going to work for a PR company in London.’

  Natasha turned to her sister. ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s one of the big ones,’ said Ann. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ The indulgent pride in Ann’s voice stung but Natasha was determined, as she always was, not to let it show.

  She didn’t quite manage it. ‘I thought you wanted Abby to settle down nearer home.’

  ‘Derbyshire’s far too cold,’ Abby said. ‘Me and mum went down to London last week, checking out flats to rent. We’ve found a great one in Wimbledon. You’ll have to come and stay.’

  ‘I’d love to. I’m glad you’re not going to emigrate anyway. I half thought you might.’

  ‘She’d never do that,’ Ann said witheringly.

  By the time pudding was brought to the table, topped with a blue flame of brandy, Natasha was beginning to feel hot and drowsy. She made the excuse that Boris needed a walk before coffee and Christmas cake were served. Ann said she’d go and freshen up, Abby said she could do with a quick nap. Steven offered to accompany Natasha, as she’d known and hoped he would. There were things she wanted to ask him.

  Nine

  NATASHA LET BORIS out of the car, and they set off towards her favourite part of the town, past Grevel’s House and up Cinder Hill Lane. The sun was a low red ball in the sky, glinting on the weather vanes high on the church tower.

  ‘Marcus was part of our team in Italy for the last week,’ Steven said, falling in step beside her.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ She tried to sound casual, kept her eyes fixed ahead but doubted she’d fooled him. ‘Was he well?’

  ‘Seemed it. Though you can never tell with him. He’s a private sort of fellow. But at least he was fairly light-humoured before … all this.’ The hint of reproach in Steven’s voice was unmistakable. She knew better than to think he was aggrieved on Marcus’s behalf. In Steven’s opinion, it didn’t matter how messy your personal life got, so long as it didn’t interfere with your professional one. But Natasha clung to something he’d said, the implication that Marcus was miserable too.

  ‘I’m the last person he’d talk to, of course,’ Steven said. ‘Let’s just hope communication doesn’t break down between us altogether.’ His obvious irritation irritated her back. All right, it was difficult for him with his daughter and colleague splitting up, but what was she supposed to do about it?

  She also had a sneaking suspicion he was not so much annoyed that the relationship had finished, as that it had ever begun. There was the faintest hint of ‘I told you so’ in his voice.

  Steven had not exactly kept Marcus and her apart, but he’d made no effort for them to meet. Inevitable they would in the end though. Steven was a lecturer at Sheffield University and Marcus was attached to the Medical Artist Department at Manchester. They’d collaborated on several museum and media projects. She’d turned up unexpectedly at a lecture they were giving together, when she was in Manchester consulting canal records for a case. The three of them had gone out for supper in one of the string of Indian restaurants in Rusholme. Then, when Natasha had been staying at her parents’ house, Marcus had started inviting himself for supper. After that he’d come down to Oxford for work, and conveniently happened to be passing through Snowshill. Over three years ago now. She didn’t feel like the same person.

  They turned back down Church Street and outside St James they both paused, breathing in the crisp air, and admiring, or pretending to admire, the ornate gateway and pepper pot lodges of Camden House and Sir Baptist Hicks’s beautiful almshouses.

  ‘He did ask after you, in case you were wondering?’

  ‘Did he?’ She’d almost snapped.

  She ached to know whether Marcus was involved with anyone else, but part of her couldn’t bear to hear what she thought the answer would be. And she was damned if she was going to ask Steven.

  ‘He’s not been in touch then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s going out to Canada first week in January, on exchange with Vancouver University for six months.’

  Natasha felt a prick of tears behind her eyes.

  Steven turned to her. ‘Listen, Natasha. If you want to talk…’

  How could she begin when there was so much she didn’t understand herself.

  ‘We were too alike, I suppose.’ Even as she said it she realised how trite it sounded.

  Steven found a stick, hurled it down the street for Boris to retrieve, then threw it again, running a little ahead to gain momentum.

  It’s a cliché, daughters wanting to marry their fathers, and Steven had always been Natasha’s hero. Subconsciously she used to compare every man she met to him. Now she compared them to Marcus as well. Steven was Marcus’s mentor and perhaps that explained why they were so alike, in personality and outlook. They also resembled one another phyhsically. Both tall and rangy, with eloquent, deep set eyes, angular features and thick dark hair.

  ‘So, it’s definitely all over between you then?’

  ‘Yes.’ She couldn’t help feeling Steven was in some way pleased, or relieved, despite the inconvenience it caused him. But she didn’t want to argue with him.

  ‘You were telling me,’ Steven said. ‘About this girl you’re trying to find, the one with the diary.’

  The motto of the College of Arms, the most august body of genealogists, where Natasha first worked, was ‘Diligent and Secret’. It went against the grain in some way. She was never comfortable with secrets, even when they meant confidentiality and discretion. But she stuck to the promise of that motto with her own clients. Steven, though, had seemed excluded or above that. They had always confided and discussed intricate details of their work and it had always felt perfectly right to do so.

  ‘I found a note in the diary,’ she said carefully. ‘In Bethany Marshall’s writing. I think it might be a suicide note.’

  ‘Good Lord. What have you done about it?’

  ‘Nothing, yet. I wanted to talk to her boyfriend first. The note’s pretty ambiguous. I might be jumping to the wrong conclusions.’

  ‘When have you ever done that?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Not professionally.’ This was true.

  ‘By rights you should report it to the police, of course.’

  ‘I will.’ Soon. When she’d spoken to Adam.

  ‘I met a girl called Bethany once. Petite little thing, very pretty. Actually, she was a friend o
f Marcus’s.’

  Natasha ignored that.

  They started walking again and after a while Steven said thoughtfully, ‘She poses for a photograph as Lizzie Siddal and then she kills herself. History repeating. Intentionally or not.’

  Natasha stared up at the East Banqueting Hall, which offered a glimpse of what Campden House must have been like before the Civil War’s fires destroyed it. ‘No one knows for sure that Lizzie Siddal did kill herself. The verdict at the time was that it was an accidental overdose, wasn’t it?’

  ‘A cover-up more like.’

  When suicide was referred to as ‘self-murder’, not so long ago still punishable by burial at a crossroads, a stake through the heart.

  Nowadays taking your life wasn’t regarded as such a shameful thing, such a terrible crime. Even though it was still impossible to talk about suicide without saying ‘commit’ before it.

  Steven touched her arm, indicating they should turn and walk back in the direction of the Market Hall and the hotel. ‘Of course she is buried in consecrated ground, which is supposed to be sacred, a place of rest, but Rossetti didn’t leave her to rest, did he?’

  ‘Do you think what he did was wrong?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  Natasha was astonished. Steven regularly plundered graves and tombs. ‘How can you say that? You do it all the time.’

  ‘The bodies I disturb are thousands of years old. Well, several hundred at least.’

  ‘I don’t see that that makes any difference.’ She’d always enjoyed these kinds of discussions and sparring sessions with Steven.

  ‘It makes all the difference,’ Steven said.

  Natasha knew what he was driving at.

  Marcus’s work involved putting faces to skulls. It was disturbing, to see the transformation, a face gradually take shape beneath his hands, a reversal of the process of decay. Muscles applied to bone, then flesh. It made you look at the remains in a completely different way, when you could see the person they’d been.

  Steven said, ‘When they opened Lizzie Siddal’s coffin she was supposed to have looked as beautiful as the day she died.’

  Ten

  THERE WAS ONE extravagance Natasha wished she were able to afford. A deep swimming pool, in the corner of a garden, shaded by trees in the summer and heated, so that steam came off it in winter. Membership of the spa at the Lygon Arms Hotel was the next best thing. The pool was surrounded by soft blue lighting and mosaic floors, balconies and potted trees and a high glass roof that could be opened in warm weather. Natasha liked to go there in the evenings, late, when she often had the pool completely to herself, and could lie in the water and gaze up at the stars in the black sky.

  * * *

  When she arrived back home the light on the answering machine was flashing ‘Adam. Returning yours.’

  Shit. She couldn’t believe she’d missed him. She punched 1471. He’d called at six, from the studio in Oxford. It was almost nine now. She hit three anyway.

  ‘Hello.’ A terse male voice, but it didn’t sound like him.

  ‘Could I speak to Adam?’

  There was a second of silence. ‘Not here I’m afraid.’

  ‘This is the right number for him?’

  ‘Who shall I say called?’

  ‘Natasha Blake. He’s…’

  ‘Hi there, Natasha.’

  ‘Hi. He’s got my number.’

  ‘Has he now? You’re another one he’s not told me about then.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Granted. It’s a pleasure talking to you. I hope we have the opportunity to meet sometime?’

  ‘I don’t…’

  ‘How about you tell me what it is you want to talk to Adam about.’ The tone just a little threatening now.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t…’

  Again, he didn’t wait for her to finish. ‘Try his mobile.’ He reeled off a number.

  The line went dead.

  Natasha replaced the receiver, a frown on her face. What was all that about?

  She tried the mobile number, let it ring a dozen times. Then the ringing stopped. ‘Yes?’ There was music in the background, heavy on the bass.

  ‘It’s Natasha. Blake,’ she added. Adam struck her as the type who could easily know at least two girls with the same Christian name.

  ‘So will you help me to find her or not?’ Adam’s voice was faint and crackly.

  She’d forgotten that she’d not officially agreed to take the project on. Well, there was no way she could refuse now. But she didn’t want to tell him about the note over the phone, especially when he was obviously at a New Year’s Eve party. She heard female laughter close by. ‘I’ve started already,’ she said, trying to sound optimistic. ‘I’m pretty sure I’ve got an identity for the diarist’s father.’ She had the feeling Adam wouldn’t be interested in practicalities, but she ran through them in any case. ‘I’ll go to the records centres as soon as they open in the New Year, Monday. I can find out who he married, and if they had a daughter with the initial J. Then it’s a case of finding her marriage details, the birth of her children and their subsequent marriages and offspring, working forward to the present day, through several branches of the family tree if need be, until we find Bethany.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I don’t think the guy I spoke to just now at your studio did. I reckon he had the wrong end of the stick, about something.’

  ‘What did he say?’ His voice was suddenly loud in her ear. She could hear the pop of his breath, as if he was gripping the phone close to his mouth.

  ‘Just something about you not telling him about me?’

  ‘Why the fuck should I?’

  How should I know? The line went even more crackly, as if the connection would be lost any second. ‘Look. I’ll need to see you, she said. ‘After I’ve done the groundwork at the record centres.’

  ‘I’d like that.’ Silence for a second. ‘I’ll be in Oxford for the next couple of weeks.’

  ‘Great.’ Natasha suggested they meet in the Opium Den.

  * * *

  The phone was ringing as Natasha climbed out of the shower. She grabbed a towel, ran into her bedroom, snatched the receiver.

  It was Mary. ‘Just making sure you’re going to be here before the clocks strike midnight. Or you’ll turn into a pumpkin.’

  ‘It was the coach that did that.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘You’ll have to get your fairy stories straight, you being an expectant mother and everything.’

  ‘You’re right. I’d better go. I’ve left James at the bar on his own. The natives’ll be getting restless. We’re taking bets on who’ll stick to their resolutions. Everyone has to write them down and if you’ve not broken them by the end of Feb, drinks are on the house for the evening.’

  ‘Giving up alcohol’s not an option then?’

  ‘Certainly not. Bad for business.’

  ‘That’s OK then.’

  Natasha had spent a pleasant few days since Christmas, going for long walks, visiting a couple of friends for lunch, drinking endless cups of tea in Mary’s kitchen, catching up on reading and paperwork. A couple of afternoons she and Mary had gone swimming at the Lygon Arms, had a massage afterwards, then gone shopping in Cheltenham.

  She slipped into a dress she’d bought, strappy, with a tight low waist and a bias cut skirt that reached almost to the floor, made of satin the colour of a copper beech tree. She flung a black shawl, crocheted with jet sequins and beads, over her shoulders, twisted her thick hair up onto her head, and felt much better.

  It was amazing, the way you could put on a different outfit and feel like a different person. Natasha often wondered if she preferred vintage clothes, and antiques, because they were already imprinted with other people’s personalities which she could borrow for a while.

  Eleven

  THE SNOWSHILL ARMS was busier and noisier than usual. In contrast to the cold outside, it was warm and fuggy, and the glow
from the hanging brass lanterns and coloured lights entwined with garlands of holly, gave the pub the atmosphere of a grotto.

  Through the crowd Natasha spotted Mary’s father-in-law, Arnold Hyatt, a permanent fixture on the three-legged shepherd’s stool beside the open fire. As Natasha entered and Boris slunk through the forest of legs, making a beeline for the hearth, Arnold raised his tankard in silent greeting. Arnold was Snowshill’s wise old sage, who’d seldom travelled even as far as Cheltenham yet had seen the world.

  ‘Hullo, stranger,’ he said to Natasha. It was a long-standing joke between them. Arnold, whose family had farmed the land around Snowshill for at least four generations, held firm to the definition that a stranger was anyone whose parents and grandparents weren’t buried in the graveyard of St Barnabus.

  ‘Just the person. I was having a disagreement with my young grandson. Can you tell me? What are diamonds made from? I reckoned with what you do for a living you’d be able to help out.’

  Natasha stifled a giggle. Geology. Genealogy. Easy enough mistake. ‘From what I remember, diamonds are a crystalline form of carbon.’

  ‘Just the ticket.’

  Natasha elbowed her way through to the bar, where James and Mary were manning their posts.

  James looked up from pulling a pint, raised his voice above the din. ‘Your drink’s going warm. Poured it out hours ago. Actually,’ he scanned the bar top. ‘Some bugger must’ve swiped it. Your usual, is it?’

  Natasha shook her head, fancying something with a bit more bite. ‘I think I’ll have a whisky, thanks.’

  James had only a fleeting likeness to Arnold. He’d caused a terrible rift in his family when he announced he preferred the snug conviviality and late nights of running a country pub to the isolation and frosty dawns of agricultural work. But if Arnold had not entirely forgiven James, blood was thicker than water he said, and he’d come to the decision that there was no point in losing a son as well as the land. Besides, he had more sense than to bar himself from the place that offered the most pleasure in life.

  Mary came over with fingers expertly inserted to carry eight empty tumblers and highballs, which she clinked into the shelf at the back of the bar.