Lily's Journey

by Tania Crosse

  Well, that was another snippet of new information. My father was still in the Army, or at least had been at that date. I was feeling far less anxious and increasingly intrigued.

  I have completely broken with Ellen Hayes now. I shan’t give her my new address. But one thing has been troubling me. All those years ago, I led Kevin to believe that his daughter died in the raid with her mother. I wonder now if I shouldn’t try to find him and tell him the truth. Confess my sin and make amends. I believe his ship is based at Devonport. Perhaps I should drive down and see if there is any way I can trace him. But I don’t know if I can face him.

  I frowned, and my heart was gripped with some horrible sense of foreboding. My real father believed I was dead! How cruel had Sidney been to let him think that! It was vengeful. So my father had stayed on in the Navy, not the Army. Was that why Sidney had come down from London to Devon? But why had he stayed in the area? And there was another thing. Sidney had told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t drive, and yet…?

  I glanced at Wendy and she shrugged at the cuttings.

  ‘Nothing much,’ she told me dismissively. ‘Some chap was knocked down by a hit and run driver. Seems the culprit was never found.’

  ‘A bit like the devil who forced Daniel off the road,’ I commented bitterly. ‘The diary’s getting interesting, though. You can read it in a minute. Have a look at those other bits and pieces if you want.’

  I hadn’t explained what I had found. It didn’t all make sense yet, like piecing together a jigsaw. My eyes skimmed over the next few entries. Sidney had come down to Plymouth and found digs in the Devonport area so that he would be near the Royal Navy Dockyards. Nothing earth-shattering there, then. I turned over several pages before there was any further reference to my father.

  At long last his ship has come in. Three months I’ve waited and now my patience has been rewarded. Of course, I wasn’t sure it was still his ship. We haven’t been in contact since I told him about Cynthia and the lie over the girl. Forgive me, Lord, for I was weak when I sinned. I only heard about him through a mutual acquaintance who had no idea what had passed between us. But today I saw him.

  My attic room has a good view down over the river and when I saw a frigate coming up the Hamoaze, I fetched my binoculars. I couldn’t believe it when I read the name. It was as if I was being called to Judgement. I hurried down to the dockyard gate the sailors seem to use, and waited. Almost all day. But a crew doesn’t just abandon its ship when it docks. There are things to do, and when leave comes, it is usually in shifts. I have no way of knowing. Sailors came and went, whether from the ship or not, I couldn’t say. Kevin is some sort of petty officer so he could remain on board for days, and the ship could be in port for weeks.

  I was about to give up, go home for dinner with my landlady and return later. I would have to keep coming back for as long as it took. Maybe I would never see him and the ship would sail again. I vowed that if that happened, God would be telling me something and I would return to London and forget the past. Begin afresh. But then I saw him. I stood on the corner, hiding behind my newspaper. He walked right past me. And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t admit to my shame, not even to this man I had wronged. Because he had done me the greater wrong. So I followed him and discovered where he lives when he is in port. I will go back there tomorrow and observe him, and perhaps God will give me the strength.

  ‘Lily, are you all right?’ Wendy’s voice cut through my concentration. ‘You’ve gone as white as a sheet.’

  I put up my hand. I felt as if I was drowning in some deluge of compulsion. Something momentous was about to be revealed to me, I was sure. I was being rent asunder. Part of me wanted to turn my back on the whole affair, follow that instinct that had made me hesitate for so long. And yet the other part of me was being drawn helplessly into some swirling vortex. There was no going back now. I had to know, and turned the page.

  I went back today, in the car this time. I parked at the end of the road and watched. No one came or went, so I gather he lives alone. Eventually he came out at lunchtime. I followed on foot. He went to a pub, had a beer and a sandwich and then did some shopping at a grocer’s before going home. I, too, came home to decide what to do. He lives a normal, carefree life. He has a career. While I have nothing but bitterness. Because of him, I don’t even have my own dignity. It isn’t right! He ruined my life and he is the one who should suffer and pay for it, not me. I…

  The sentence was unfinished and there was a line left blank. When the handwriting started again, it was totally different, shaky, wild and uncontrolled as if Sidney had been in the grip of some fevered dementia. As my eyes tried to decipher the scribbled letters, I felt a coldness invade the very core of my being.

  Dear God, what have I done? It was the Demon Drink! I should not have opened that bottle of whisky, but it lured me like the Spirit of Satan and I could not resist. The more I drank, the more my wrath took hold of me. It grew inside until the Devil Himself appeared to me, urging me on. I took the car and waited in his street. It was dark and raining and my soul fought with Beelzebub. He placed a curse on me, invoking all that is evil against me, and I was powerless. And when he stepped out into the silent street, the Devil took the wheel from my hands. Oh, dear Lord, why did You not come to me in my moment of need and save me from this terrible thing that I have done? Do anything You like with me now, make me suffer every day of my life so that I shall have achieved atonement when I come to you on the Day of Judgement.

  I heard myself cry out, a thin squeal of appalled disbelief. Wendy gasped beside me but I didn’t catch what she said as I snatched up the newspaper cuttings. But I couldn’t read them my hands were trembling so violently and my vision blurred as the room spun around me.

  ‘Was…was he…a sailor?’ I spluttered in despair.

  ‘Who? The man who was knocked down, do you mean?’ Wendy answered incredulously. ‘Well, yes. Some sort of naval officer, anyway. How did you know?’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ My throat had closed so that I was struggling to breathe and my voice had come out in a shrill squeak. ‘He was…my father, and Sidney ran him over! Deliberately!’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Yes, it’s all here! Look!’

  ‘What on earth’s the matter? We could hear you two from downstairs!’

  ‘Oh, Mum, Lily’s had a dreadful shock! It really is awful!’

  A few minutes later, I was sitting on the sofa downstairs in the lounge, Wendy on one side, Deborah on the other, each with one arm around me. William had pressed a small glass of brandy into my hands, telling me to sip it very slowly, and Edwin squatted on his haunches in front of me, his face anxious.

  ‘I just can’t believe it,’ I stammered, swinging my head from side to side. I was calmer now, surrounded by these good people who had become my family. How ever could I have thought of leaving them? ‘Sidney killed my real father,’ I told them.

  ‘No, he wasn’t killed, it says here,’ William said as he looked up from studying the cuttings. ‘Badly injured and expected to remain crippled. But alive.’

  I lifted my head. ‘Are…are you sure?’

  ‘It’s what it says here.’

  ‘So…so…’

  Thoughts were spiralling frenziedly in my brain, snatches of things Sidney had said, his religious verve, his condemnation of alcohol. It began to make sense now. I felt giddy, just couldn’t take in the enormity of what I had discovered. I had lived with Sidney all that time. Had my life been in danger, too? It was a vile, sickening thought.

  ‘I think you should wash that down with some nice hot cocoa,’ William advised solemnly. ‘And perhaps a light sedative when you go to bed to help you sleep.’

  But it wasn’t a pill I wanted that night. Despite everyone’s kindness and understanding, through the fog of horror, what I really craved was the comfort of the one person who wasn’t there.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I still had a key to the back door of Fencott Pla
ce but when I drove up on Saturday afternoon, I didn’t feel it was right to use it. I wasn’t staying there any more and Daniel was mobile again and perfectly able to open the front door to me. So I knocked loudly and waited under the portico while Trojan barked his welcome from inside.

  As I had driven up onto the moor, that sense of timelessness, of the insignificance of my own problems in the scheme of the universe, invaded and soothed my troubled spirit as it always did. It was an amazingly still and balmy day for the third week of October, the sun smiling down warmly from an almost cloudless powder-blue sky. My nerves had been jangling on edge ever since I had started to read the diary on Tuesday evening, but Dartmoor was working its healing magic on me.

  Daniel knew about the shocking revelation. I had rung him on Wednesday with the excuse of asking how he was getting on and that I had typed up another chunk of his book and would bring it up on Saturday. And then I had told him the bare bones of what Wendy and I had discovered the previous evening. There was silence at the other end of the phone when I finished, so I had to ask if he was still there.

  ‘I was just thinking what a dreadful shock for you,’ he replied ponderingly. ‘You might have been looking for answers, but you weren’t expecting that.’

  He hadn’t gushed over with words of comfort, and I was grateful. It wasn’t sympathy I wanted. I needed someone to share my feelings with. Daniel had been through so much himself and I instinctively knew he would understand.

  When he opened the door, he was smiling in that enigmatic way of his that had once unnerved me but was now strangely reassuring. He was looking particularly attractive in a blue shirt unfastened at the collar and tucked into some old cords at his slender waist. I had to pull myself back. He didn’t feel the same way about me as I did about him. At least it diverted my thoughts away from my other problems for a few seconds.

  ‘Come on in, Carrots,’ he said, raising a cautious eyebrow. He was testing my mood, but I no longer minded being called by the nickname I had once hated. Now it felt familiar and secure. ‘Come through to the kitchen. Kettle’s on the go.’

  ‘You managing all right?’ I asked as I crossed the hall. ‘How’s the leg?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. The muscles ached a bit at first but I’ve been taking Trojan for long walks without any trouble.’ He chuckled as the dog pushed his snout into my hand demanding some attention. ‘He misses you.’

  ‘I miss him, too,’ I answered, ruffling my hand in the thick fur underneath Trojan’s ear, a spot he loved. He pushed against me, tipping his head endearingly while I wondered if Daniel had missed me as well.

  ‘You can come whenever you like,’ he said quietly, throwing me a sideways look as he poured coffee into two mugs. ‘You’re always welcome.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I smiled in response, setting the manuscript on the table. ‘Here’s the next consignment of the book.’ I paused, feeling I should say something about it but not sure what. ‘You…you had a pretty hard time of it, didn’t you?’ I said lamely in the end. ‘No wonder you still have nightmares about it.’

  ‘It’s certainly not something I’m ever likely to forget. But it does seem to be helping me to come to terms with it, writing it down. And I really appreciate you typing it up for me. You don’t have to go on with it, though, you know. You sound as if you’ve enough problems of your own. I was sitting in the drawing room. It’s really warm in there with the sun. Shall we?’

  ‘Mmm, yes.’

  I followed him back through the hall, noticing that he was indeed walking normally again. The sun was blazing into the drawing room through the French doors, one of which was wide open. It felt like summer. Daniel put both mugs on the coffee table in front of one of the sofas and so I sat down next to him.

  ‘You’d better tell me all about it,’ he invited, sitting back as if he was preparing to listen for hours.

  I drew in a great long breath through my nostrils and released it in a sharp sigh. ‘I still can’t believe it,’ I began with a shake of my head. ‘Sidney tracked down my real father to admit to him that he’d lied about my being dead. He came to do the right thing, and then in a jealous rage—’

  ‘A drunken rage, didn’t you say?’

  ‘Well, both really. But certainly in a moment of madness, he totally lost his reason and deliberately ran my father over. He could so easily have killed him!’

  ‘He survived then, your father?’

  ‘I think so, yes. Although it suggested in the paper that he was likely to be permanently crippled. I’ve no idea what happened to him afterwards.’

  I watched as Daniel reached forward for his drink, lips pursed thoughtfully. ‘And all this was in the diary?’

  ‘Yes. It was weird. Like a sort of confession. Sidney was deeply religious. His father was a Methodist preacher, strict, almost fanatical, I think, and it rubbed off on Sidney. In the diary, it’s sometimes really as if he’s talking to God.’

  ‘Religion can have a lot to answer for.’

  ‘But without the diary, I’d never have known the truth. It explains so much. Why Sidney was so angry when I suggested he got a car. I suppose he never trusted himself to drive again. And why he was teetotal. He nearly killed me once when he smelt alcohol on my breath. I’d only had a mouthful and it was beer. It was horrible.’

  Daniel laughed softly and I realised I was pulling a face. It was a brief diversion before Daniel’s expression became serious again.

  ‘It was an explanation you could have done without, though.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose so. But I understand even more now why he hated me so much at first. But it’s all, I don’t know…’ I paused, trying to think of how to express the turmoil of my feelings while Daniel waited patiently. ‘I’d come to accept that I wasn’t Sidney’s daughter after all,’ I began again after a few moments. ‘But I lived with him for over a year, never knowing that because of me, he nearly killed my real father. It’s pretty hard to take.’

  ‘And even though it wasn’t your fault, you feel that it was. You feel as if you’re treading water and your feet are trying to find the bottom, only they can’t.’

  His voice was low, intense, his eyes trained on the mug in his hand, and I knew he understood in a way nobody else did. Everyone had been so kind, supporting me and saying that it didn’t matter what had happened in the past, I was still the same person they loved. They meant it, of course, but the fact was that, inside, I could never be the same. And only Daniel knew exactly how that felt.

  ‘I feel lost,’ I croaked, the words scraping in my throat. ‘Incomplete.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  It was a simple statement of fact. Yes, he did know. And suddenly the surge of locked up emotion broke open and there was no stopping it. I knew I was going to cry. Through my tear-blurred vision, I saw Daniel swiftly put down his coffee and for the second time in a few months, I found myself sobbing against his chest. He felt warm and strong and safe, and I didn’t hold back. I think I cried for everything that had happened to me over the past few years, from Ellen’s death to the devastating revelation in the diary. Daniel held me, not saying a word, not uttering any soothing inanities, but knowing the hurt would only pass in its own good time. And when my tears finally dried, I still lay against him on the sofa, quietly and calmly, and talking into his shirt.

  ‘I’ve read the rest of the diary since,’ I said in a small but steady voice. ‘He couldn’t find the courage to give himself up or to face the world again. He was riddled with guilt. So he cut himself off, living a life as close to being a recluse as he could. He got the job at Merrivale and living in the isolated cottage at Foggintor was ideal. It was a sort of self-imposed penance. I think he only wrote to Ellen again then as a kind of self-torture. To increase his fear of being discovered. And the real reason he agreed that I could go and live with him wasn’t that he felt it was his duty, like he said. Although, of course, at that point he hadn’t told me I wasn’t his daughter. No. The real reason was that he believed
it was his punishment sent by God. Every time he looked at me, he was reminded of what he’d done. I was his hair shirt. His purgatory. The way to pay for his sin and purify his soul. It was no wonder he despised me so much. You know, when I read the first part of the diary, I was really scared. If he could have done that to my father, I wondered if my own life had been in danger. But when I read on, I don’t think it was. But to think that I befriended him in the end. Even felt sorry for him in an odd sort of way. And all along, I didn’t know that he’d tried to kill my father and all because of me.’

  There. I’d said it. What had been pressing on me like a huge, dark cloud. Now it was out in the open.

  Daniel had been listening in silence and without moving except for the steady rise and fall of his chest which felt solid and comforting. His left arm was around me and now it merely tightened slightly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, does it, what anyone says? What you tell yourself? You still feel guilty. I tried to stop them shooting Tommy, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t my fault, but I still blame myself.’

  I considered for a moment, and then sat up, meeting Daniel’s brooding eyes that had turned almost cobalt with emotion.

  ‘We’re two of a kind, really, aren’t we?’ I suggested in a near whisper.

  It made him smile. ‘If you mean we’ve both let our coffee get cold, then, yes. I’ll make some more. You stay here. I won’t be a minute.’

  I waited in the silent room that was now so familiar to me. My eyes took in its elegance again, the huge fire place, the worn upholstery, the fine wooden furniture chosen by the beautiful woman in the portrait. And Daniel owned it all. It was part of him, what he was, and I loved it the more for it.

  ‘What are you going to do about it then?’ he asked when we were sipping at some fresh hot coffee.

  ‘Do?’ I questioned him in surprise. ‘There’s nothing to do, is there?’