by Nicola Upson
Josephine closed the chest, then took a bunch of holly from one of the beams in the bedroom and laid it on the lid, a gesture of remembrance that was nearly a hundred years too late. It was a long time before either of them spoke. ‘What do you think we should do?’ Marta asked eventually.
‘Wait until the morning, I suppose, then go to the rectory. I can telephone Archie from there. Someone will have to take Lucy away, but he’ll know who to call. Then I’d like Stephen to come back and bless her body. I’m not sure I believe in any of that, but it seems the right thing to do.’ Marta shivered, and Josephine took her hand. ‘Come on. You need to get warm.’
She took the blankets off the bed and they went downstairs to the study, both of them glad to be out of the room and as far from it as possible. Josephine poured Marta a drink and built the fire up for her, then left her reading Lucy’s diary while she warmed some soup. When she went back, the journal was put to one side and Marta had obviously been crying. ‘What a wretched fucking life,’ she said quietly. ‘No wonder she needs peace. Do you think Hester knew?’
‘I don’t see how she could have.’ Josephine put the tray down on the floor and sat next to Marta by the fire, pulling the blanket over them both. ‘She would have done something about it, I’m sure. I don’t know whether to wish she could have known the whole story when she felt so drawn to Lucy, or to be glad she was spared the grief.’ She handed Marta a mug of soup. ‘I don’t know how you managed to get here, but I’m so relieved you did.’
‘Well, I wasn’t too worried at first. We didn’t have much snow, but it can change so quickly within a few hundred yards. And anyway, I knew you’d use the slightest flurry as an excuse to miss the party.’ Josephine smiled, but couldn’t argue. ‘Then I started thinking about that bloody Peck woman and what she’d done to Hester. I got it into my head that she might come back here and try to hurt you, so I had to know that you were all right.’
‘You shouldn’t have risked it, though.’
‘Believe me – the bigger risk was to stay. I got out just as everyone else was moving on to Dodie’s for a festive sing-song.’
Josephine laughed, mostly from relief at what she had missed. ‘But what if you’d had an accident?’
‘The snow wasn’t very deep until Stoke, and even after that the main road had been cleared a bit. I got as far as I could, then dumped the car and walked the last mile or so.’
‘Thank you – I mean that, Marta. I thought I was going mad. It must have been exactly how Hester felt.’ Josephine stared into the flames, remembering everything that had happened. ‘How ridiculous of me to think that I could gloss over all that pain with a bit of building work.’ She smiled sadly. ‘It wasn’t quite the way you were supposed to get your Christmas present.’
‘Nice bath, though.’ Marta’s grin faded, and she spoke more seriously. ‘Look, Josephine – I’m not making light of this. God knows, I saw how frightened you were. But don’t underestimate what you’ve done. You haven’t glossed over anything – you wouldn’t let Hester’s death go, and now you’re about to give Lucy the peace she’s never had. This cottage will thank you for that, I know it will. It will make you happy.’
‘Make us happy.’
Marta smiled. ‘It occurred to me while I was reading the diary, though – will they bury Lucy in the churchyard if they know what she did?’
The thought had not crossed Josephine’s mind. ‘Why wouldn’t they? What happened to Molly was an accident, and anyway, Stephen’s not like that. He strikes me as a very compassionate man.’
‘It might not be his decision, though. From what you say, there’s been enough trouble about having Maria Marten in the graveyard, and she’s the victim. Do you honestly think people will turn a blind eye to another murder? Or manslaughter, if we want to be pedantic about it. Perhaps we should make sure.’
‘What are you suggesting?’ She followed Marta’s gaze to the final volume of the journal. ‘Now that we’ve finally got to the truth, you think we should destroy it?’
‘Only the end of it. The rest should stay with her body to help identify her. I’ll do it, if you can’t.’
‘But if the diary’s incomplete, everyone will think that Samuel killed her.’
‘Not necessarily. We can’t say for sure what really happened – how can they?’
‘Even so, shouldn’t we tell the truth and rely on people to understand why she did what she did?’ Marta looked sceptical, and Josephine knew she was right. Lucy had suffered enough for her mistake. Without giving herself time to reconsider she tore the final pages from the diary and put them on the fire, watching as the flames refashioned a history and a justice of their own.
26
Lucy Kyte was laid to rest with her son in February, when the frost made the early spring flowers sparkle on the ground like coloured glass. The church was shrouded in silence, and only the birds in the ivy – sensing the end of a long winter – disturbed the stillness of the air as a band of mourners followed the coffin outside to the grave. Lucy’s story seemed to have touched the village in a way that its more famous history could not, and Josephine was moved to see how many people had come to give her the respect she had waited so long for. Her grave was close to both Samuel’s and Maria’s, but Josephine hoped that she would not be torn between them in death as she had been in life, and that Lucy’s peace – if that’s what it now was – would prove enough for them all. She would bring roses in time, for Lucy and for Maria, but today she put snowdrops on the coffin, remembering what Lucy had written in her diary about their being either the last flower of winter or the first of spring. This time, she hoped they might stand for both an end and a beginning.
When the final prayers had been said, the mourners dispersed to visit their own dead. Josephine was not the only person to have brought flowers for Maria, she noticed, and she laid her snowdrops next to the daffodils that already graced the patch of ground that Stephen had pointed out to her on a foggy October morning. She looked round the churchyard, noticing how the sunlight bled across the sloping fields, touching the lower graves and blessing those who had fallen in the war, but refusing to reach as far as the Corders. The Gospel Oak was in shadow, too, and suddenly Josephine noticed a young woman standing close to its trunk, watching her. She took a few steps forward, but the woman turned and walked away in the direction of the village, disappearing for a moment behind a row of gravestones. Josephine waited for her to emerge again the other side and carry on down the path, but she was nowhere to be seen – and of all the possible explanations, Josephine knew which one she wanted to believe.
Smiling, she rescued Marta from Stephen and Hilary and they walked home along Marten’s Lane, where banks of pink and yellow primroses shone in Maria’s garden. The dead wood of winter already looked out of place, and as she opened her front gate, Josephine found herself looking forward to spring and summer at the cottage, free from all her old reservations about the future. She knew now that she would keep Hester’s gift to her, and that she and Marta could be happy there when it was possible for them to be together, living always with those who had worked and died and made love there before them – but not, any longer, in their shadow. Marta had presented her with a new nameplate for the cottage, something she had had specially made to mark the start of another phase in its history; it stood just inside the door, waiting to be put up, and Josephine could not imagine a better day to say goodbye to the Red Barn once and for all. The old piece of wood came away easily in her hand, as though the house were breathing a sigh of relief. In its place, she proudly hung the sign to Larkspur Cottage.
Author’s Note
I grew up with the story of Maria Marten and William Corder. As a child in Suffolk, I remember summer days out in Polstead with my parents, walking past Maria’s house‚ or William’s, fascinated even then by what had happened there and by the real people behind the legend. I lived a stone’s throw from Moyse’s Hall and its macabre exhibits – so thrilling and so horrifyi
ng to a little girl – and I passed the Gaol where Corder was hanged every weekend on the way to my grandmother’s house. My father sings the ballad to this day. So the Red Barn murder is the first crime story I ever knew, and I realised when I started this book that I’ve always wanted to find a different way to tell it.
The character of Lucy Kyte was inspired by three lines of testimony given at Maria Marten’s inquest and reprised at William Corder’s trial. The witness was Lucy Baalham, a servant in the Corder household, but there the similarity ends: the diary’s account of the Red Barn murder and its aftermath is based on fact, but Lucy Kyte’s personal story, her family, and all the events that take place at Red Barn Cottage are entirely fictional.
After being stripped by souvenir hunters, the Red Barn was burned down on Boxing Day, 1842, during a period of great agricultural unrest. Local newspapers report sightings of a tramp in the area on the day of the fire but, despite the offer of a generous reward, the culprit was never caught. More than a hundred years later, Red Barn Cottage was also destroyed by fire.
The melodrama of Maria Marten was first staged in the summer of 1828, while William Corder was still alive, and has been frequently performed ever since; the story has also been the basis of five films and a BBC drama. Norman Carter ‘Tod’ Slaughter (1885–1956) was the finest Corder – and arguably the finest villain of any sort – on stage or screen; his many fans included Graham Greene, whose Spectator review of the 1939 film The Face at the Window described him as ‘one of our finest living actors’. Slaughter played Corder throughout his life, often opposite his wife, Jenny Lynn, and died in his sleep a few hours after strangling Maria Marten for the last time on stage in Derby.
James Curtis’s 1828 book‚ An Authentic and Faithful History of the Mysterious Murder of Maria Marten‚ remains the most detailed account of the Red Barn murder, and was based on contemporary interviews in Polstead as well as time spent with Corder in Bury Gaol prior to his execution. In fact, Curtis became so synonymous with the case that his image was sometimes printed by mistake as the face of the killer. The murder continues to inspire new books, both fact and fiction, some of which question Corder’s guilt, and the original ballad has been reinterpreted by musicians as diverse as The Albion Country Band and Tom Waits.
Moyse’s Hall Museum still has on display a fascinating collection of artefacts relating to the Red Barn murder and its historical context, including Corder’s death mask, his scalp, and a copy of Curtis’s book bound in Corder’s skin. Other relics have come and gone, including Maria Marten’s hand, but her clothes chest is believed still to exist in private ownership. Corder’s skeleton was put on display first at the West Suffolk Hospital and then at the Royal College of Surgeons, and was removed for cremation in 2004. Maria Marten is buried in St Mary’s Church, Polstead, but her gravestone is no longer visible.
‘Josephine Tey’ is one of two pseudonyms created by Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952) during a distinguished career as playwright and novelist; the name was taken from one of her Suffolk ancestors, and first appeared in 1936. Claverhouse was published a year later and is her only work of non-fiction, although she often used historical themes as the basis for her plays and novels, most notably in The Daughter of Time. In a number of Tey’s letters, she expressed a wish for a cottage of her own; sadly, she died before she was able to do anything about it, but I hope she would have enjoyed the one that I’ve chosen for her.
Acknowledgements
I’m indebted to Chris Mycock of Moyse’s Hall, Bury St. Edmunds, for his generous help with research into the Red Barn murder and the life of the museum in the 1930s. Readers who would like to know more about the case can find images and contemporary sources at www.stedmundsburychronicle.co.uk. Works by Donald McCormick and Gareth Jenkins have also given insights into its different aspects. Victorian Studies in Scarlet by Richard Altick is a fascinating picture of peepshows, relics and the grislier side of collecting.
My thanks to Alan Riddleston for sharing memories of his childhood in William Corder’s house, and for painting an invaluable picture of Polstead life; to Dennis and Paule Pym for a warm welcome at Maria Marten’s cottage; to Miss Beattie Keeble for her recollections of Polstead and Stoke-by-Nayland between the wars, as well as some great ghost stories; and to Michael and Deborah at The Cock Inn.
H. F. Maltby’s memoir Ring Up the Curtain brought colour to the character of Hester Larkspur, and London’s Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror by R. Hand and M. Wilson gave her an interesting later career. Jeffrey Richards’s The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema 1929–1939, Jacqueline Finesilver, and numerous film magazines of the 1930s provided valuable information on Tod Slaughter and Jenny Lynn; Slaughter’s films have been reissued in the Best of British Collection.
Suffolk is a magical place, and I’m for ever grateful to my parents for showing me its beauty as well as its darker history. Two authors in particular brought the county to life for me in the 1930s: Ronald Blythe, in Akenfield and in personal interviews; and Julian Tennyson in Suffolk Scene. Thanks to Jenny and Alan Bradley for information on old Bury, and to everyone else who has contributed to my research, directly or through their books: Anne Fraser of the Highland Council; Dr Peter Fordyce; Sue Lambert of Mrs Simpson’s Café; Susan Williams in The People’s King; and Liz Stanley in The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick. From Lucy’s surname to Hester’s cottage, the late Irene Cranwell has helped more than she will ever know, and I appreciate the continued support of everyone who looks after each book: Véronique Baxter and all at David Higham Associates; and Walter Donohue, Alex Holroyd and Katherine Armstrong at Faber.
And to Mandy, who has brought so much to every stage – the initial ideas and development of the story, the writing of Lucy’s diary and the creation of her voice, even an early Christmas. It’s been lovely to share a story that we came to individually, and you’ve made it a joy to write, as well as a much better book. Thank you.
About the Author
Nicola Upson was born in Suffolk and read English at Downing College, Cambridge. She has worked in theatre and as a freelance journalist, and is the author of two non-fiction works and the recipient of an Escalator Award from the Arts Council England.
Her debut novel, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series of crime novels whose main character is Josephine Tey – one of the leading authors of Britain’s Golden Age of crime writing.
She lives with her partner in Cambridge and spends much of her time in Cornwall, which was the setting for her second novel, Angel with Two Faces. Two for Sorrow, the third book in the Josephine Tey series, was followed by Fear in the Sunlight.
Praise for Nicola Upson and the ‘Josephine Tey’ series:
‘An ingenious concept‚ beautifully realised.’ Reginald Hill
‘Upson writes well‚ giving new life to a classic murder setting. The portrayal of Tey herself is both sympathetic and perceptive . . . Upson is chillingly effective at showing how good intentions may lead to evil consequences . . . a fine addition to a promising series.’ Andrew Taylor‚ Spectator
‘Upson legitimately uses [Tey] as an avatar to meld a golden-age plot with modern frankness‚ and Tey’s creative process mirrors her own concerns about blurring fact and fiction.’ Financial Times
‘The ingredients in this latest “Josephine Tey” detective mystery are almost too delicious . . . Upson’s observations are always intelligent.’ Independent on Sunday
‘Delectable.’ Philip French‚ Observer
‘An absolute delight . . . Upson has created a fine series of cosy but intelligent mysteries.’ Catholic Herald
‘Any crime aficionado whose beach reading usually consists of a bagful of crinkly old paperbacks should make room for Nicola Upson’s novels in which real-life author Josephine Tey‚ one of the grandes dames of the Golden Age of detective fiction‚ investigates murders in the Thirties.’ Daily Telegraph
Also by Nicola Upson
AN EXPERT IN MURD
ER
ANGEL WITH TWO FACES
TWO FOR SORROW
FEAR IN THE SUNLIGHT
First published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2013
All rights reserved
© Nicola Upson, 2013
The right of Nicola Upson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–28774–1
