‘Grandmama – what do you mean?’
She shook her head, not looking at him. ‘Even that is a lie,’ she said. ‘I am not your grandmother.’ She looked at him, clear pain in her eyes. ‘Sadly we are not even actually related. Though truly I’ve loved you as if you were.’
The boy stared at her, uncomprehending.
On a sudden fierce spurt of anger Maria struck the table with her hand. ‘Why did you have to force me to this?’
The silence was fretted with tension.
Jessica watched as with an effort her mother straightened and squared her narrow shoulders. ‘Patrick, you are not Edward’s son. You are a byblow of William, my husband, upon a young Cambridge girl, Anne Stewart, whose mother was the true grandmother that you remember, who brought you to us when she knew she was dying and could no longer care for you. You are not heir to New Hall. You are bastard half-brother to my sons.’
‘No!’
‘I’m sorry, but yes. It’s true.’
‘You’re lying.’ Patrick sounded dazed. ‘You must be lying—’
She shook her head.
‘But – the proof! There was proof—!’
Maria moved to a chair and lowered herself painfully into it, resting her elbows on the table. Her face was haggard. ‘Forged,’ she said. ‘Forged, perjured and bought. Have you not discovered that anything – anything! – can be bought by one willing and able to pay the price? Anything and almost anyone—’
‘But – Sir Charles! A reputable lawyer! You surely couldn’t have—?’
She made a small, tiredly impatient gesture. ‘Of course not. One doesn’t have to buy fools. They give themselves away for nothing. I bribed a man of the cloth and the son of a peer. Impeccable witnesses. I don’t think it crossed Sir Charles’ pathetic, parchment-bound mind to doubt them. The best forger in the land worked for two days and nights to reproduce the parish register of St Margaret’s. Every entry is absolutely authentic. Except one.’
‘I don’t believe it.’ His voice was flat with shock.
She took a very long breath. ‘I’m afraid you must. It’s true. Your extraordinary resemblance to your half-brother Edward – the thing that first put the plan into my mind – made it all quite ridiculously easy. Even Giles was fooled by that, and decided not to fight. But, if he had, it would have made no difference. He would have found nothing. With the help of your grandmother – your real grandmother – I was very thorough.’
Jessica saw that she was trembling a little. ‘Mother – how could you—?’ she asked, softly.
Faint defiance lit the tired face. ‘I had my reasons.’
‘You?’ Patrick asked, his voice shaking. ‘You had your reasons? Is that all you’re going to say? What about me? What about me?’
Maria threw her head back. Her face was anguished. ‘You need never have known! I never intended that you should! But you have forced me to it! I have to stop you. You have to understand. Before you ruin us all! You have to know that if you don’t curb yourself—’ she stopped.
He stepped back, shaking his head.
Jessica reached an urgent hand to him. ‘Patrick—!’
He shook her off, roughly. ‘Leave me alone!’
‘Patrick – please – listen to me—’
‘Leave me alone, I say!’ He was backing to the door. His face was livid, his wide eyes fixed upon Maria’s face. ‘You talk about me!’ he said, wildly. ‘You’re the wicked one! Wicked and heartless! You’ll go to hell for this!’ There was an edge of hysteria in the young voice, ‘And you deserve to! You deserve to!’
‘Patrick!’ Jessica jumped forward as he lunged for the door handle. ‘Don’t go! Wait – we have to talk—’
He pushed her away with muted violence. ‘Talk? What is there to talk about? Leave me alone, do you hear? Leave me – alone!’ And he was gone, slamming the door behind him, his running footsteps echoing down the corridor.
Appalled, Jessica turned to her mother. The old woman was sitting ramrod-straight, her hands folded before her upon the table. In the light from the window the bright tear-furrows shone on the age-softened cheeks. Jessica stepped forward and stopped, her hand outstretched, as her mother turned her head to face her. It was the first time in her life that Jessica had seen Maria Hawthorne cry. ‘I shouldn’t have told him,’ she said, very steadily. ‘I thought it was the right thing to do. But I was wrong. Find him, Jessica. Bring him back to me.’
Jessica hesitated for only a moment longer. Then she turned and ran back to the door.
Patrick was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
It was two hours before he was found. Two hours in which Jessica searched every corner of the house she could think of. Two hours in which Maria sat, pale-faced and silent at the window of her small sitting room. Jessica, returning finally to report a fruitless search, to her surprise found Giles with her. He was standing by the window. Something in his stance, the grim look on his face, alerted her. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Patrick,’ he said.
Her heart was beating with a horrible rhythm, thumping in her chest, drumming in her ears. ‘What?’
He turned to look at her, his eyes sombre. ‘They’ve just found him. In the barn.’
Maria, very slowly, bowed her head and covered her face with her hands. Giles stepped back from the window. In the distance Jessica could see the roof of the ancient barn, where once long ago Giles had imprisoned Bran and a child had cried as if the end of the world had come.
Across the park came a small, mournful procession. Bareheaded the estate workers bore their burden. A girl – one of the servants – walked beside them, weeping into her pinafore. She was carrying an empty bottle and a shotgun. Upon the door that the men carried carefully between them lay a long, shapeless mound covered in a blanket. At its head a dark stain spread, black in the bright light of midday.
No one in the room made a sound as the solemn group crossed the garden and disappeared from sight beneath the window.
Chapter Fifteen
The scandal, Jessica noted bitterly, remembering her mother’s words to Patrick, was kept to a minimum. Anything and anyone can be bought, Maria had told the bastard boy who until that moment had believed himself to be her grandson, by one who is able and willing to pay the price; and so it proved again. It was an open secret on the estate and in the village that poor young Mr Patrick had got drunk in the barn and shot himself, and as a suicide should not be buried in hallowed ground. The young man had been popular enough in the district, however, for there to be a more or less charitable acceptance of the fiction that the shooting had been a tragic accident – so said Giles’ fellow Justice, and so agreed the Church. The tactful and face-saving suggestion that the boy should be buried at St Agatha’s rather than the village church silenced the last of the tongues, and if New Hall’s already considerably shrunken coffers were further depleted by an extremely handsome donation towards the restoration of the tower of the parish church no one complained, least of all Giles and Clara, who were now reinstated at New Hall with full authority and honour. Speculation about the cause of the tragedy, however, was rather more difficult to stop – no threat and no amount of money could keep the gossips’ tongues from that particularly fascinating subject. But so far as Jessica could tell no one came near to guessing the truth. Patrick’s growing wildness had been known and noted in house and village: that he gambled and drank to excess was also a fact that had not passed unremarked. A family row – a high-strung and overwrought youngster – it was easy enough for the busy tongues to fit the pieces of the puzzle to make an acceptable whole – a whole, Jessica thought that, ironically, was a lot less bizarre than the squalid truth.
Jessica herself, whilst her mother sat in withdrawn silence in her room, told first Robert and then – after much heart-searching – Giles the truth of what had happened. She was thankful that her mother had not yet recovered enough to instruct her, for she suspected that had Maria Hawthorne been in full
possession of her faculties she would have fought tooth and nail to prevent the rest of the family – and especially Giles – from hearing the true cause of Patrick’s death. Jessica, however, was not ready to protect such a secret, not even for her mother’s sake. Whatever happened now, Jessica was Hawthorne enough to know that family ranks must be closed. What was done was done and to risk it becoming public would do nothing but harm to anyone. To keep such a dangerous secret from Giles, as the head of the family, made no sense. To leave the family ignorant would be to leave the family defenceless if at some time in the future the truth were discovered. And so she told him.
Giles was angry enough to kill. He was making for the door with long angry strides when Jessica, her own nerves strung almost to breaking point, stepped in front of him. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Where do you think? To see her! To tell her—!’
‘No!’
He glared at her. A corded vein in his neck throbbed violently.
She did not budge. ‘You can’t do that,’ she said, only the faint tremor in her voice betraying her. ‘I told you because I thought you should know. But I won’t – you hear me? – I won’t have you make Mother suffer for it. Not now. It’s too late, and whatever you may think she’s suffered enough. What’s been done can’t be undone. You’ll cause nothing but strife if you try to face her with it—’
‘Strife? Jesus Christ! What of me? What of the strife my loving mother and father’s bastard have caused me? They’ve run the place into the ground between them! It’ll take years to sort out the mess they’ve made—’
‘Then sort it out! You won’t change anything by persecuting Mother. Giles, for God’s sake! – You’ve got what you wanted – what you always wanted. Isn’t that enough?’ She paused, and as he savagely made to push past her caught his arm. ‘We both know what you did to get it.’ He turned on her but she did not flinch. ‘When you live in a glass house, Giles, it’s extremely unwise to cast the first stone. Don’t you think?’
He threw back his head. His colour was high, the bones of his face stark with anger. It took every ounce of will not to shrink from him. But she knew she must not. On the day of Patrick’s death Maria Hawthorne had given up her cane and taken to a wheelchair, from which in her doctor’s opinion she was unlikely to rise. ‘Leave her alone, Giles. She’s an old woman, her health is poor, and this has all but broken her. She’s failed in what she tried to do and in the most tragic way possible. That’s surely enough, even for you. Leave it at that.’
He looked at her for an unnervingly long time. Then ‘Or?’ he asked, his voice perilously quiet.
She shook her head. ‘I’m not threatening you. I’m asking you. For her sake and for the sake of the family.’ With an enormous effort she kept the sharp edge of fear from her voice. The rage that she sensed in him had the force of summer lightning, held the same promise of sudden violence and danger. But she faced him and she would not let him see her fear. And somehow – she did not understand herself how – she had won. Giles had slammed from the room and from that day had not spoken one word to his mother nor acknowledged her existence. But at least the confrontation that Jessica had been convinced might have killed the sick woman had been avoided. On the day before Patrick’s funeral Maria, with a nurse and small staff, had been moved to Tollgate House, where Giles and Clara had lived in exile on the far side of the estate for six long years. Her dream shattered, her health broken and with Patrick’s death to haunt her she had left New Hall for the last time with no farewell and no kind word.
On the warm and windy afternoon that followed Jessica walked, Gabriella’s small hand in hers, behind the little dogcart that carried her mother in the sad procession of mourners that wound through the parkland and the bright autumn woodlands and wondered, as she had wondered so often in the past days, at Maria’s motives for the terrible deception. She pondered the antagonism between Giles and his mother, exacerbated as it had been by the arrival of Clara and her determination to usurp her mother-in-law’s authority. Certainly somewhere there, she assumed, must be the key. Jessica had often wondered how much her mother guessed about the circumstances surrounding her beloved eldest son’s death. It was beyond doubt that she had never forgiven Giles for not saving his brother. And then Clara had come and Maria had seen her position truly threatened. Patrick’s astounding likeness to his half-brother must have come like a temptation straight from the devil himself. Jessica remembered all too clearly how much the child had reminded her of Edward when first she had met him in the park with his grandmother. She blinked, recalling the handsome little boy with his marigold head and bright, innocent eyes.
Ahead of them the carriage bearing the coffin had ended its sad journey and come to the church gate. The well-schooled horses stood like statues, the dark plumes upon their harness blowing in the wind. The bearers took the weight upon their shoulders and turned through the gate and down the narrow path. A small army of estate workers had in the past few days cleared the way. The grass was neatly scythed, the weeds and nettles gone. The lake gleamed in sunlight through the trees, the surface rippling like molten gold in the wind.
Jessica’s mind was still on that day so many years before. She, Jessica, had sent the woman and the child to her mother. How long had it taken for like to recognize like, she wondered? The one fighting for the future of her grandson who was about to be abandoned alone and defenceless in a hostile world, the other still mourning the death of a son and another loss that had cut almost as deep – the loss of an influence she had wielded all her adult life. The child’s uncanny likeness to his father’s eldest son must have spawned the conspiracy very quickly in Maria’s subtle mind. And the child’s true grandmother, who must in desperation have come to New Hall to throw herself and the bastard child upon the mercy of strangers, would have been an extraordinary woman indeed to stand against the strength of Maria Hawthorne. For Maria the opportunity to take the child, mould him to her own purposes, must have been all but irresistible in face of Giles’ stubborn refusal to bow to her authority.
Jessica sighed and turned her head a little to find her mother’s still disconcertingly clear blue gaze fixed upon her face, as if almost she guessed her thoughts. Whatever the truth of the matter, conjecture was all that Jessica had; Maria, quietly but firmly, had made it very clear to her daughter on the only occasion that she had attempted to broach the matter that she had no intention either of excusing or explaining her actions, not now nor at any time in the future. ‘I am close enough to death,’ she had said, simply, ‘not to care what the world thinks of me or of my actions. I will make my case to the final Judge, and not before.’ And with that Jessica had had to be content.
They walked the path of the little churchyard, threaded their way through the worn and ancient stones. A serving man gently lifted Maria from the dogcart and another followed carrying a sturdy and comfortable armchair. It had been over the fierce protests of doctor and nurse that Maria had insisted upon attending the service. Jessica, watching her, wondered bleakly how she could bear it.
The rector was waiting, pious hands folded, eyes downcast, robes billowing like rainclouds on a sunny afternoon. ‘“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery—”’
Jessica tried hard not to listen. She hated the burial service.
The wind was blustering to gale force. It tugged at the heavy black skirts and the veils of the mourning women, lifted the coat-tails of the men and tousled the hair of their bared heads. Gabriella’s small hand had crept back uncertainly into her mother’s. Jessica squeezed it gently and attempted to smile reassurance; and as she turned her eyes were caught by a figure who stood alone beyond the low wall of the graveyard in the shadow of the trees. She frowned a little, trying to focus her eyes through the blowing veil, peering around Robert, who stood beside her holding Gabriella’s other hand.
‘“In the midst of life we are in death—”’
The outlandish figure in its flowin
g robes could not have been more foreign – yet there was something so familiar about the stance, the straight brown hair that blew in the wind, that she could not drag her eyes away. The long dusty black soutane blew, flattened against the wearer’s legs, and the wind played with the wide hat, the like of which she had so often seen in Italy, held in a brown hand.
‘“Suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death to fall from thee—”’
John.
In the moment she thought his name he caught her eye and smiled a little.
John!
She could hardly believe her eyes, but John, the brother she had not seen and had hardly thought of in so many years it was. She glanced at her mother. Maria’s veil was lifted, her face utterly stony. She had not seen the unexpected newcomer. She sat ramrod-straight in her chair, her useless legs covered by a blanket, staring with unblinking eyes at the shining mahogany casket with its bright brass decoration.
Jessica turned her head again. John lifted a hand in greeting. He was much thinner than she remembered him, his eyes were steady and his skin was brown.
‘“We therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life—”’
Beside her Gabriella, only half-understanding the sombre proceedings, was overcome and sobbed suddenly, burying her face in her mother’s skirt. One of the serving girls standing with the staff that was ranked behind the family had also given way to open and noisy tears. Maria’s face, harshly disciplined, still showed no flicker of emotion, and her back was straight as an arrow. Jessica drew her daughter to her, a comforting arm about her shoulders. The shining box disappeared, swallowed by the earth, the spray of white lilies that lay upon it stirring in a last sudden boisterous gust of warm wind.
Jessica willed herself not to think of a tall, handsome laughing boy. Her part in his death, innocent as it had been, would haunt her for as long as she lived. The scene, darkened by the cloud of her veil, blurred for a moment and was lost in tears. She heard the dreary sound of earth falling onto hollow wood.
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