by Clare Flynn
She studied his face, then said, ‘I hate to shatter your tender dreams, darling. You’re such an innocent. Always seeing the best in everyone.’ She gave her head a little shake then said, ‘So, Mrs Walters hasn’t told you that your late father paid her father and Harold Walters a substantial sum each, in order for Walters to marry her?’
Christopher tried to swallow but his mouth was dry. Where was this going?
His mother shook her head again. ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings particularly as in this instance I have to tell you something that will make you see your father in a different light.’
Suddenly cold, he shivered.
His mother got up and walked over to a side table, where she poured whisky into a glass from a decanter and handed it to him. ‘Here, you’re going to need this.’
He took the drink from her and placed it on the small table in front of him, without drinking. It was water he craved, not whisky. ‘I’ve told you, I don’t want to hear – and whatever you say, nothing will alter my feelings for Martha.’
‘Your father – how shall I put it – always had an eye for a pretty face. Sadly, the younger the better. I learned early on in our marriage that I was never going to be enough for him. After you were born, it was effectively the end of that side of our marriage. Something I never missed. When I tell you what I am about to tell you, you’ll understand why.’
She turned her head away from him to stare through the window at the advancing dusk. ‘I am finding this difficult so I will be as blunt and as brief as possible. Your father had sexual relations with Martha Tubbs, as she was known then. She was little more than a child. Only about fifteen.’
‘Fourteen.’
‘So she told you?’
‘She told me the truth, which was that she was raped by the man her father forced her to marry. Harold Walters.’
‘Harold Walters married her because he was paid to do so by your father to prevent a scandal. And her father was paid too. Not to go to the police.’
Christopher got out of the chair. ‘I won’t hear any more of this. You’ve gone too far. I’m not listening any more.’
‘I warned you you wouldn’t like what I had to say.’
‘You’re sick, Mother. To come up with a packet of lies like that. To impugn the reputation of my father, your husband of thirty years, to try to stop me marrying Martha because she’s not of our class. I’m disgusted with you. You’re beneath contempt.’
She reached out a hand and gripped his arm. Pushing him back into his chair she said, ‘There’s proof. That’s what I was looking for when you came in.’
He threw her a look of unconcealed loathing, picked up the tumbler of whisky and drank the contents straight down.
‘The girl was in the sitting house, cleaning out the nesting boxes. George knew she was in there and did what he did to her there.’
‘You’re lying.’
She shook her head and fixed her eyes on him. He shivered.
‘I’m not enjoying this, Christopher. Not one little bit. Telling my son that his father was a rapist. That he violated a young girl and then paid off her family.’
‘I don’t believe you. Why would you even know this? Father would hardly come back here and tell you what he’d done if it was true.’
‘He didn’t. Of course he didn’t. I only found out because the girl’s father burst into the house brandishing a shotgun and screaming the place down.’
She got up and walked over to the desk again. ‘After they had finished talking, I came in here and confronted your father. He tried to fob me off but I’d heard enough not to let him get away with that. Eventually he told me that the matter was resolved and he had paid off the father and the Walters man.’ She pointed at the papers on the desk. ‘Somewhere here will be the evidence. He was always most meticulous in accounting for everything and kept the counterfoils for every cheque he ever paid. One hundred and fifty pounds to each of them – and that was worth more than twice what it’s worth now. They were only too happy to go along with helping him cover up what he’d done.’
Christopher sat in silence, too stunned to speak. He felt nausea rising in him and his mouth was sour with the taste of the whisky he had gulped down.
Eventually, he said, ‘I don’t care. It makes no difference to my feelings for Martha. What my father did to her was not her fault.’
‘You may choose to believe that. I tend to think she brought it on herself. She’s not exactly pretty. The only way your father would have done what he did was if she led him on.’
This was more than he could take. He got to his feet and picking up the whisky glass from the table, flung it against the wall where it shattered into shards. He moved towards the door.
Edwina got there first and leaned her back against the door panels. ‘Wait. I’ve not finished.’
He stood in front of her, hating her, wanting to make her disappear. Wishing he had never come home tonight. Wishing he had never let his mother speak to him. Wishing he had never heard the poison that had come from her mouth.
‘Tubbs and Walters came back with demands for more money. Three months later. The girl was expecting a baby and they both swore it was your father’s. Apparently Walters had never been near her since the wedding. He had more scruples than your father had about violating a child, even if the child was his now his wife.’ She paused then added, ‘Although your father always suspected women were not the Walters man’s first choice.’
‘None of this is true.’ Christopher stood in front of her, his eyes closed. ‘It’s not what she told me.’
‘I can’t help what she’s told you. Maybe she’s created an alternative story for herself. Or more likely she’s lied to you because she knows you wouldn’t want anything to do with her if you knew she’d been your father’s fancy woman.’ Her eyes were angry. ‘He used to go down to that little house in the woods and have his way with her, all the darned time.’ She screamed at him. ‘Don’t you think I didn’t know! I was his wife.’
He had never seen his mother like this before. Pent up anger released like a shaken-up champagne bottle, uncorked.
‘Percy was eight. You were four years old. I wanted nothing more to do with George Shipley. Told him he was no longer welcome in my bed.’
Christopher felt his knees buckling. He moved towards the chair and slumped down, a sharp pain bursting up through his missing leg. He saw the tremors in his hands.
‘I found out that she was expecting a child, because by then I was so suspicious about everything your father did that I regularly went through his desk. I found the cheque stubs paying the monthly fees to the institution.’
The room was spinning around him. He bent forward, head in his hands. Without looking at her he asked, ‘What institution?’
‘Martha Tubbs was little more than a child. Both mother and baby nearly died. She was too small to give birth. Too narrow. The baby got stuck in the birth canal.’
She reached across the desk, opened a mother-of-pearl box and removed a cigarette which she lit. Christopher had never seen her smoke before.
‘The labour went on too long – nearly four days and the girl was so weak the midwife was afraid she was dying, so Tubbs ran over here and asked your father to pay for a doctor to attend her. The baby’s skull was damaged by the forceps when the doctor delivered it.’
‘Martha had a child?’ Kit was finding it hard to assimilate all the information.
His mother said nothing. She stared back at him.
‘The baby survived?’ Kit’s voice was barely a whisper.
‘It was brain damaged but yes, it lived. A girl.’
Christopher struggled to comprehend the import of her words. Martha had a daughter. By his father. A bilious feeling swept through him and he gagged. He had a half-sister. He took a deep breath. ‘You said she was in an institution?’
His mother nodded. ‘She’s still there now. Must be twenty.’
‘And Martha knows this?’
Edwina shrugged. ‘Probably not. But it’s possible she found out. I’ve no idea. At the time, they felt it best to tell her the child had died.’
Christopher was numb. ‘How can you possibly know all this? All these details?’
‘Because ever since I discovered your father’s true nature, I made it my business to know everything that happened on this estate. As I still do now.’
Christopher shivered at the implication of her words. She probably knew about Martha working in the sunken garden. A dull throb was hammering in his temple. ‘Martha told me she couldn’t have children. She said her husband beat her because of it. Called her barren.’
‘Maybe that’s true and she can’t. After what she went through having that child it would have been a miracle if she could have had any more. But your father never went near her again after she was pregnant. Learnt his lesson. And as I said, the rumours were that Walters wasn’t interested in women.’
Feeling wretched, Christopher got to his feet and went to the door. ‘I don’t believe you. You’re telling me all this to wreck what I have with Martha. There must be something wrong with you to want to say such terrible things. You want to rule my life. No – worse – you want to destroy it.’
‘I only want what’s best for you. And the best thing for you is for Martha Walters to leave here, for you to forget she ever existed and marry Lady Lavinia Bourne. Don’t you see, darling, it’s the only way to put all this behind us.’
‘I will never marry Lavinia. And I don’t believe what you’ve told me. It’s all lies. Nasty, twisted lies.’ He ran his hands through his hair, which was damp with sweat.
Edwina Shipley handed him a piece of paper. ‘If you don’t believe me, go and see the halfwit who is her daughter.’
He stared at the sheet of paper.
‘That’s the address of the place where they keep her. The fees are paid from the Shipley estate account. Her name is Jane Walters.’
He stuffed the paper inside his jacket pocket and left the room.
Back in the sanctuary of his bedroom, Christopher flung himself into a chair. The last of the daylight had gone and the dusk was illuminated by the magnificence of a blood red sunset. Looking out over the rolling land that one day would be his, all he wanted was to be thousands of miles away. To be free of Newlands, his mother and everything they stood for. More than that, he wanted to travel further than earthly miles – he wanted to go back in time, to wind the clocks back to the time before the poison had passed from his mother’s lips and polluted his mind, souring his image of Martha.
He should have never returned home but stayed in the cottage with Martha and gone straight from there to Cambridge, taking her with him. He tried to blot out the things his mother had told him, but they could never be unsaid. Worst of all, he feared them to be true.
Why had Martha lied to him? Why had he believed the tangled web of untruths she had spun for him? Was his mother right and she had deliberately sought to entrap him, to win him over to her cause with her tale of a brutish husband and a barren womb? With her story of Walters raping her. And how could it be possible that she didn’t know she had had a child? A living child. Not only had she lied to him about the baby’s survival, she had lied about its very existence at all.
Her betrayal was devastating. He struggled to breathe. He had never felt so alone – not since lying in a mud-filled crater at Messines with a blasted leg, as the Third Battle of Ypres went on without him. Lying in agony in that muddy hole, shaking with terror as shells burst around him, he had fully expected to die. Now, he was trapped in a limbo with no way to move forward and his retreat cut off by the shocking words his mother had spoken.
He didn’t know whom he hated most – his mother for her cruelty in telling him all this, in shattering his illusions about both his lover and his father – or Martha for the way she had lied about everything. An hour earlier he had felt sheer joy, happiness and love for her. He had had his future ahead of him and had been brimming with hope for it. Now he was squirming in a bottomless pit with no obvious way to escape.
And the future? He had none now. He was only too well aware that his mother had told him all this, intending that despair would make him weak and thus susceptible to her pressure for him to marry Lavinia. It was working. All the fight had gone from him.
He got up and paced the room, in front of the windows, his thoughts contradicting each other.
He wouldn’t give into his mother. Never. Not after what she had done to him. He would go back to Borneo alone. Lose himself in the sultry heat of the rainforest, far away from the shame George Shipley had brought upon him and the family. Maybe eventually he’d find comfort in his work. It wouldn’t remove the pain, the hurt – how could that ever heal? But distance and displacement might one day ease it.
As he tried to force these thoughts, these rational responses, to the surface, an overwhelming sense of loneliness, desolation and despair swamped him, so that he struggled again to breathe and his whole body shuddered.
He remembered the poisonous mushrooms he and Martha had come upon under the tree. How long ago was that? Less than two hours, but it felt like a lifetime. How easy would it be to return there, pluck those toadstools and eat them? He relished the idea, taking satisfaction from the prospect of his mother finding his body and knowing that she had driven him to take his own life.
But he was enough of a scientist to know that such a death would be an agonising and protracted one. If he was going to kill himself there were less messy and painful ways to do so. He slumped back into the chair, his head in his hands.
He forced himself to remember a time before the war when he had felt differently. Back in the forests of Borneo he had always been full of purpose, every day had felt fresh – new things to discover, new sights to see. The people around him were uncomplicated – or the fact that he had been limited in his means of communicating with them kept interactions down to a simple level. He could go back there – recreate that feeling of freshness and discovery. Such a feeling might seem impossible and unattainable now, but surely he could recapture it if he went back.
A wave of anger swept over him. Anger at Martha, at his mother, at the whole damned world which was rotten to the core. He remembered a German word he had learned at school – weltschmerz – pain at the world and weariness with it all. He let the anger seep into him, drawing strength from it. His mother wasn’t going to get her way. He wasn’t going to give in like that. Capitulate. Bend to her will.
Through the window, he saw a deer running across the grasslands beyond the ha-ha and into the woods. It made him think of Martha again. Had she really lied to him? Was their brief love affair a confection to allow her to manipulate him? Everything his mother had said led to that conclusion. But he couldn’t believe that Martha was so devious, so calculating. Instead she had seemed vulnerable, trusting him despite her innate cautiousness. He thought of her that afternoon, lying in his arms, looking into his eyes. He remembered the little cries she had made when he had moved inside her, the tenderness in her eyes. How could that have been simulated? The more he thought about it the more convinced he was that it wasn’t.
His mother must be lying. That was the only possibility.
He must visit the mental institution and find out if Martha's daughter did exist. After all, his mother hadn’t actually managed to find the proof she had been seeking in the drawers of George Shipley’s desk.
A half-sister? The addle-brained child of a violent and abusive relationship. How was that possible? Going to the place where this Jane was supposedly kept was the only way he could be absolutely sure of the truth of his mother's words. He looked again at the sheet of paper she had given him. The place was called St Crispin’s and was in a small market town about sixty miles away. He would go there tomorrow. Cambridge could wait. He would go alone – there was no possibility he could risk Rawson driving him and word getting out among the servants about the visit. But if his mother was telli
ng the truth, then perhaps all of Newlands already knew about his father's behaviour?
Tossing and turning through the night, he gave up the battle for sleep, rising before six. He left the house before his mother had stirred, without taking breakfast. His stomach was rumbling with hunger and he remembered he had not eaten the previous evening. He would stop at an inn on the way.
Chapter 12
The growth of mental asylums had burgeoned during the nineteenth century, with over one hundred thousand patients living inside these institutions in England by the time of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901. The inmates were labelled, not always correctly, as lunatics. Women were disproportionately represented – many with nothing wrong with them but an illegitimate pregnancy or an ill-fated love affair.
After the war, the return of thousands of injured combatants from the Front meant many asylums were repurposed as military hospitals to treat both physical and mental injuries. It was deemed appropriate, since mental illness was viewed as shameful, for the civilian mental patients to be rehoused, to remove any indication that these were now anything other than military hospitals. The original inmates were cast out onto the mercy of their families or communities or shunted into other asylums which consequently became overstretched and overcrowded.
The sun was shining on the huge brick structure of St Crispin’s as Christopher drove between the tall gateposts and down a long tree-lined driveway, through parkland that was not unlike Newlands. His nerves were jangling and he asked himself again why he was doing this.
The drive ended in a large turning circle in front of the imposing facade of the institution, its frontage dominated by a central clock tower. It appeared a forbidding and unwelcoming place. Yet in contrast to the severity of the buildings, offset to one side was a cricket pitch and pavilion with tennis courts on the other.
Christopher parked the Bentley and made his way across the gravel to the front door. He passed under the engraved stone portal which proclaimed the virtues of the original benefactor who had founded the place in 1821.
