by Val McDermid
When she reached the main road, she turned right towards Grasmere. Dove Cottage was easy enough to find, right on the main road and clearly signposted. Tenille swung off the road and propped Jane’s bike against the wall. She prowled round the cottage, imagining Wordsworth inside, hunched over the arm of his chair, scribbling a line then pausing for thought. It was weird to think what had been written inside those walls. There was nothing special about the house, she thought. You wouldn’t look at it and think, ‘Wow! Somebody special must live here.’
She walked back to the bike, thinking again how lucky it was that she’d spotted it through the open door of an outbuilding when Jane had walked her to the house. She’d thought then about borrowing it for a night ride. Anything to get out of the slaughterhouse, where she was going stir crazy. She’d known there was no point in asking Jane’s permission, so she’d resolved then and there to wait till after midnight before sneaking out and going for a ride. Then when Jane had told her about her quest, a whole other agenda had opened up.
So here she was at one in the morning, the only person stirring. Tenille turned off the main road and cycled silently into the village proper. And that was when she realised her plan wasn’t going to be quite as straightforward as she had thought. She had no idea where Tillie Swain’s bungalow might be, but she hadn’t imagined it would be hard to find in a little place like this. However, her experience was London, where streets were clearly named and even on estates like the Marshpool, doors had numbers. Grasmere was another creature entirely. Sure, it was pretty. But it wasn’t designed to make life easy for strangers. Some lanes had no markings at all and most houses had no number, just names. And of course, there was nobody to ask.
Finally she found a village map mounted in a glass case outside a gift shop. It was almost impossible to read, but Tenille struggled with it and eventually worked out where she was in relation to Tillie Swain’s house. She cycled back to the main road and turned south. And there it was, right on the edge of the village.
No lights showed in any of the group of four bungalows. Tenille left the bike at the mouth of the close then walked down to Tillie’s house, staying in the shadows as much as possible. She walked down the side of the bungalow, light on her feet as a cat. Round the back, she surveyed her options. There were patio doors, which she knew were supposed to be easy to jemmy out of their runners. But she didn’t have a crowbar and she didn’t want to risk the noise. That left the back door, which looked pretty solid with a mortise lock rather than a Yale. She’d learned about locks at an early age, but it had been a while and she didn’t have the right tools, only a pair of tweezers and some strong wire she’d picked up in the shed where the bike had been. She could do it, but she’d rather not. Her best hope was the heavy pots that were arranged around the patio. Maybe Tillie had secreted a key under a flower pot. She wouldn’t be the first.
Tenille crouched down and began to tilt the pots one by one, groping underneath for anything that felt like a key. She got lucky on the fourth pot. She pulled out a key and grinned. She rubbed it clean of dirt on her trousers and headed for the back door.
A few minutes later, she had to admit defeat. Whatever this was, it wasn’t the back door key. ‘Fuck it,’ she muttered. The only thing left to try was the front door, exposed to any insomniac pensioner who might be sitting in the dark looking out of their window. Well, there was no help for it. She was going to have to go for it.
She crept back to the front of the bungalow and tried the key. The lock turned silently and, within seconds, she was inside the hallway, breathing in the smell of old lady. The house was dark and silent. She stepped silently down the hall and glanced in at the first room on her left. The living room. A good place to start looking. She closed the door behind her and found herself in blackness. Her hand groped for the light switch and clicked it on. If someone saw the light, they’d probably assume Tillie was having trouble sleeping. She hoped.
Quickly she scoped out the room. There was an old-fashioned sideboard against one wall and she made straight for it. Both drawers were crammed with papers. Tenille pulled out the first bundle and started going through it. Receipted bills, postcards, insurance policies, a will in a lawyer’s envelope. Nothing of interest. The second drawer was equally fruitless. Why anybody needed to keep her electricity bills from the 1980s was beyond Tenille.
She took a deep breath. The bedroom was probably where an old lady would hide anything really important. But there was no way she could search in there. It wouldn’t hurt to look, though.
Tenille turned off the light and moved back into the hallway. The door opposite was closed and, with infinite care, she edged it open. It was a bedroom, no question of that. But the curtains were pulled back and the bed was empty. Yet it was obviously Tillie’s bedroom. All the old lady things were on the bedside table–a tumbler of water, a glasses case, a couple of books. A cardigan was tossed carelessly on a chair. Tenille felt a chill in her stomach. Where was the old lady? It wasn’t like there was anywhere to go.
Never mind that, she told herself. She must have gone to stay with family. Whatever. The thing was, she wasn’t here and that was a golden opportunity. Tenille pulled the curtains closed, turned on the bedroom light and started searching.
Twenty minutes later, she had to admit that she’d drawn a blank. The only papers she’d found were some letters tied in faded red ribbon along with a marriage certificate for Donald Swain and Matilda Clewlow. She glanced at her watch. It was almost two. Time to get out of here if she was going to take a look at Edith Clewlow’s cottage as well. There was only the kitchen and bathroom left here, and she didn’t think either of those was a place to store documents.
She turned off the light, opened the curtains again and left as silently as she’d arrived. She replaced the key and headed back for the bike. It seemed as if Tillie Swain had been telling the truth after all.
She cycled back along the quiet roads, seeing nothing except a lorry with a supermarket logo passing in the opposite direction. Even up here, people had to get their own-brand fix. It was harder work going back up the hill to Fellhead, but Tenille persisted. The village was hushed and dark, the only light coming from the one lamppost on the village green. Here, Tenille paused to consult her map and the list of names and addresses she’d helped herself to earlier. The late Edith Clewlow had lived at Langmere Stile, which according to the map was a mile up the fell. Not far, but not fun either, looking at the contour lines. With a sigh, Tenille mounted the bike again and set off up the hill. Man, she was going to be so fit when she got back to London.
She found Lark Cottage with little difficulty. This time, she wheeled the bike round the back. She expected this house to be empty, and she didn’t want to risk anyone passing by and seeing the bike outside. A local would be instantly suspicious, and she wouldn’t mind betting they’d be straight on the phone to the cops.
This time, she wasn’t so lucky with the back door. But the kitchen window wasn’t latched properly and she was able to raise the sash enough to squeeze through. She landed in the sink with a loud clatter and froze for a few seconds, holding her breath. Nothing broke the stillness.
It took much longer to search Edith Clewlow’s house. She had been a hoarder to a degree that would have shamed a squirrel. Tenille wondered if the old woman had ever heard of paper recycling. There were boxes of photographs, drawers stuffed to bursting with letters and postcards, an accordion file rammed full of every official document Edith and David had received. The family Bible turned up in the bedside cabinet, on top of a stack of scribbled notes about Edith’s childhood in Seatoller. Beneath that was a folder filled with newspaper clippings of her family’s exploits, from local football matches to sheepdog trials and village produce shows. But nothing about William Wordsworth or Dorcas Mason.
By the time Tenille had finished, the time was nudging past four a.m. She knew she had to get out before the world around her started waking up. She’d already learned that peopl
e round here seemed to think nothing of getting up in the middle of the night and driving tractors all over the landscape. She pushed a final stack of photographs back in a carved wooden box, then left the way she’d entered.
Within fifteen minutes, she was back at the slaughterhouse, bike safely stowed. She crawled into her sleeping bag, feeling like she’d done a good night’s work. OK, she hadn’t found anything. But at least now, two names could be properly crossed off the list.
Jane was on her second cup of coffee when her father came into the kitchen carrying the morning post, his expression glum. He had, she knew, already been up to the high pastures to check on a wether with suspected water belly, so she said, ‘What do you think, then? Are you going to have to call the vet out?’
He looked momentarily bewildered, then said, ‘The wether? No, I think he’s fine. The vet’s coming out on Thursday anyway, so I’ll get him to have a look then.’
‘That’s good. I thought from your expression that he’d taken a turn for the worse.’
‘To tell you the honest truth, what Adam was just telling me put the wether right out of my head,’ Allan said, going to the fridge and pouring himself a glass of milk.
Adam Blankenship had been delivering the post in Fellhead for as long as Jane could remember, and his van seemed to function as a magnet for all the news for miles around. ‘Bad news?’ Jane asked.
Allan glanced at her sideways. ‘It was Tillie Swain you went to see yesterday afternoon, wasn’t it? Down Grasmere?’
‘Yes. Why? Has she been complaining about me?’
Allan sat down opposite her. ‘She’ll not be doing any complaining now, love. She died last night.’
Jane’s eyes widened in shock. ‘What? She seemed fine when I saw her. Apart from her arthritis, she was quite perky.’
Allan spread his hands helplessly. ‘She was old. It happens.’
‘Do they know what it was?’
Allan shook his head. ‘Adam didn’t have much detail. Apparently, her arthritis was worst in the morning so she had a home help who came in first thing to get her up and bathed. When the woman arrived this morning, she found Tillie on the bathroom floor, cold as ice. Maybe she had a fall, maybe a stroke, maybe a heart attack.’
‘Poor woman. It’s not how you’d choose to go, is it? Lying on the bathroom floor feeling your life ebbing away. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Dying alone must be bad enough without losing your dignity as well.’
Allan ran his thumb up and down the side of his glass. ‘I don’t think there’s any dignity in death, however it comes. All we can do is try to live with dignity.’
There was nothing Jane could find to say to that. ‘It’s a bit spooky, don’t you think? Two deaths in the space of a few days. That seems a lot for such a small area. Especially when they’re both connected to what I’m working on.’
Allan shrugged. ‘It’s just coincidence. I don’t know why it happens that way, but old people often seem to die in clusters. It’s like, one goes and three or four others decide to give up the ghost. I don’t think there’s anything peculiar in them both being from the same family. Everybody from round here’s connected to everybody else. You’re related to half the village one way or another, don’t forget that.’
‘I suppose.’ Jane finished her coffee and got to her feet. ‘I’d better get off. I’m going to see a couple of people in Keswick.’
‘Where’s your mother?’
‘Picking elderberries.’
‘Is it that time of year already? It goes by faster and faster.’
Jane kissed her father’s cheek. ‘Stop trying to pretend you’re an old man.’
Allan gave her a crooked smile. ‘Who says I’m pretending?’
An hour and a half later, Jane was saying goodbye to the genuine article. Eddie Fairfield was a fragile eighty-two-year-old, rheumy-eyed and leather-skinned, his silver hair streaked with yellow from the nicotine cloud of pipe smoke that shrouded him. ‘I gave up when I was fifty, promised myself that, if I made it to eighty, I’d take it up again. Best thing I ever did, it’s the only pleasure I get these days,’ he’d said when he courteously asked Jane’s permission to light up. ‘I can barely walk the length of the street, and I’m damned if I can remember what I had for my tea last night. Our lass brings me in a hot meal every night, otherwise I doubt I’d remember to eat at all. My son wanted to put me in a home, but I told him, as long as I’ve got breath in my body, I’ll stop under my own roof. Have you ever been in one of them old folks’ homes?’
Jane barely had time to admit she had before he was off again. ‘Load of old women staring into space. Or else they’re mad as a box of frogs, thinking they’re eighteen again. No man’s safe from those daft old women, you know. You’d think they’d have lost interest, but not a bit of it.’ He twinkled a smile at her. ‘If they’d have been half as willing when they really were eighteen, they would have made a lot of young lads very happy, let me tell you.’
He’d insisted on making her weak milky coffee and had tottered through from the kitchen with a plate of chocolate digestives. ‘Not often I get a visit from a bonny young lass,’ he said. ‘Least I can do is make you welcome.’
When she’d finally got a word in edgeways and explained the purpose of her visit, he’d grown excited. ‘Aye, I heard tell of yon lass when I were a nipper,’ he said, his Cumbrian dialect thickening as he travelled back into the past.
Jane felt a quiver of excitement. Was this the beginning of the end of her quest? ‘Really?’ she said. ‘What did you hear?’
He closed his eyes. ‘Let me think, now. It was my granny Beattie talked about her. She was born a Clewlow. Beatrice Clewlow, born in 1880. She was the oldest. Her mum and dad, Arthur and Annie, they had four kids: Beattie; Alice, who stopped at home and never married; Edward, who died at the second battle of Ypres, never had any kids that we know of.’ He winked at her conspiratorially. ‘But you never know with them French lasses, do you? And then there was Arthur Junior. Anyway, this Dorcas that you’re after, she was their granny. And I reckon she was as much a one for stories as Granny Beattie.’ His eyes snapped open. ‘She talked about her granny Clewlow quite a bit to me and Annie, my twin. Funny, I hadn’t thought about that for years.’ He smiled triumphantly, pleased at his own feat of memory.
‘What did she tell you about Dorcas?’ Jane asked, trying not to sound as eager as she felt.
He puffed out his lips in a sigh. ‘It was mostly about her later life. When she was widowed and bringing up the children. But I do remember Beattie saying her granny, that would be Dorcas, had been a trusted servant of the Wordsworth family. She said her granny had been there when William Wordsworth breathed his last, that she talked about the sadness of seeing such a noble man laid low.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s all I can remember.’
They’d talked for a while longer, but it soon became clear that Jane had mined the seam of his remembrance to exhaustion. Eddie Fairfield had no recollection of any family papers or secret connected to Dorcas. All he retained was her claim to fame–her presence at Willy’s deathbed.
It was clear that Eddie would have talked to her all day, but Jane was mindful of her lunch appointment with Jake and she finally managed to extricate herself with ten minutes to spare.
She walked down the main street with some lightness of heart. She’d made progress that morning. If nothing else, she could be sure that she was looking at the right family. And she was having lunch with Jake. In spite of her resolve not to trust him, she couldn’t help the rush of blood to the head that prospect provoked. That didn’t mean she had to fall for his charms all over again. Of course it didn’t.
Our early days on Pitcairn were cruel hard. Summer was at its height & stripping our tattered ship of all that could be salvaged was hot & heavy work. Nevertheless, all hands showed equal willingness to ferry our goods ashore. At length when we had stripped her of everything we could carry off, we ran Bounty aground below a 700-foot cliff & on January 23r
d, we set her alight as a safeguard against discovery. She burned clean through to the copper sheathing of her hull & finally, tossed by the waves, she sank, in ten feet of water. There was nothing for it now but that we should settle our colony harmoniously. We divided the land in nine equal shares among the white men, & resolved that the natives should have no land of their own, but rather that they should labour in our service, this being more fitting to their child-like mentality. At first, we lived in rough shelters of sails & branches, but we soon demonstrated our intent by building permanent dwellings of timber. Then, as if to seal our bargain with the island, my wife Isabella gave birth to my first child, Thursday October Christian nine months after our landing. I counted myself a happy man indeed.
