The Hiding Places

by Katherine Webb

  Rose sat down beside her, and began, laboriously, to write out the alphabet, as she had done a hundred times before; sounding out each letter as she wrote it. She glanced at Clemmie, to see if she would echo the sounds, but Clemmie wasn’t going to start trying to talk – it would only confuse things, and make it harder. She stared hard at the shapes her mother drew, and tried to learn them, tried to keep all their lines and curves in order in her mind, but her eyes seemed to dodge away from them, without her bidding, and when she looked again she could not recall which one she had been looking at, and they all seemed subtly different. She pointed to the sky outside, and then gestured for her mother to write it down. The three letters Rose chose were not at all what Clemmie had expected. She got up and pointed to other things around the room – the door, a pan, a dish, a spoon, a knife. Niffe, Rose wrote, obediently, carefully.

  Try as she might, Clemmie couldn’t spot a pattern between the sounds and the symbols. She dropped her chin, ground the heels of her hands into her eyes in exasperation. ‘Oh, don’t cry, my Clem! Whatever it is, it can’t be as bad as all that, can it?’ said Rose. ‘Are you in trouble? Are you in any danger? Or one of your sisters?’ she asked, and Clemmie shook her head. ‘Well then, whatever it is will work itself out, I’m sure of it. Only don’t get yourself in such a stew over it, it won’t help.’ Rose held her at arm’s length and thought for a moment. ‘Are you still upset over what happened at the mill? That’s it, isn’t it?’ Cautiously, Clemmie nodded. ‘I know it was terrible, but you’re in no danger, I’m certain of it. I heard it today from Libby Hancock that the police have arrested someone, and they’re sure they’ve got their man. He’s locked away fast, so that’s that. He’s not at large no more; he can’t hurt you.’ Clemmie stared at her mother as this news sank in. ‘I can get Josie to make the milk run instead, if you want? So you don’t even need to go over to Slaughterford. There’ll be no more of your lessons with Mr Hadleigh gone, in any case,’ she said, but Clemmie shook her head to that.

  In the evening, after supper, she sneaked away and went to Thatch Cottage. Hopes had bloomed like flowers inside her – the hope that Isaac Tanner was locked away for good, and Eli was free of him; free to be happy. The hope that she was free of her terrible dilemma. She made her way closer, tree to tree, and then to the back of the privy, trying to be cautious but too eager to know, too eager to have her hopes confirmed. She was just crossing the patch of ground between the privy and the wall of the cottage when the privy door banged open. Clemmie gasped and turned around as Isaac Tanner emerged, fastening his flies. She froze. He hadn’t looked up or seen her yet, but it would be a matter of seconds. She had seconds. She knew she should run but couldn’t decide which way; her feet faltered, pulled in all directions at once. Tanner looked up, and stopped; his face registered surprise, and then suspicion. He had such heavy brows, such a cruel mouth, such stony eyes. He moved like a fighter, always ready to react.

  ‘Well? Who are you?’ he said, flatly. ‘What you doing back here? What do you want?’ He didn’t sound drunk, or angry – yet. Clemmie’s breath whistled out of her and she couldn’t seem to get more in. ‘Well?’ he said again, louder, harder. He started walking directly towards her, and with a stifled sound Clemmie darted away, towards the front of the cottage and the gate out to the lane. ‘Oi!’ Tanner shouted behind her, and now he sounded angry. ‘I asked you a question, girl! You come back here and answer it!’

  Clemmie ran until her heart was bursting and a stitch had stuck a knife into her left side. Then she walked, gasping, her fingers burrowing into the pain, trying to stifle it. When she had the breath for it, she cried for a while. Whoever the police had locked away, it wasn’t Isaac Tanner. She didn’t understand how they could have got it so wrong; she thought that surely they must know, surely there must be some evidence, pointing to Tanner’s guilt. Clemmie found a safe place to sit – on the raised roots of a massive elm by Cold Tump, high above the village – and thought. If Isaac Tanner had not been arrested for the crime, then she could only suppose that either John or Eli Tanner had. All her hopes were replaced by fear; a dry-mouthed, queasy kind of fear. They’ve got their man, her mother had said. So just one of them, not both. She hated the idea of Eli hurting anybody; hated the thought of that anger boiling out of him as violence. She knew it was not who he really was – it was something that had been done to him. And whoever the police had taken, that person might hang. Eli might be hanged. Clemmie put her face into her hands and moaned, wordlessly. She longed for the power of speech. She longed to be able to walk up to the police and say that, however it was Tanner had managed to escape suspicion, he was the architect of it all. He was the source of all the pain. However he had managed to escape the blame. Clemmie thought about that. She wondered if her Eli could possibly have done such a terrible thing. Beaten a man down like that. The thought brought more tears, more sickness.

  Later, she went to a place on the river where she and Eli had once lain down together. She tried to find the exact spot – tried to see the grass still crushed – but the summer growth was too vigorous for that. With her knees drawn up and her chin resting on them, she sat and watched gnats dipping and careering over the water, and realised that without Eli she was lonely for the first time in her life. Horribly so. It had only been days since she’d seen him but it felt like weeks. If he was taken away from her, if he was hanged, she didn’t know how she would carry on living. She shut her eyes to the gloaming and wished for Eli to find her there – wished for it so hard that it came true.

  When she heard his footsteps, swishing through the long grass, she got to her feet with her heart speeding, weak with relief. She knew the rhythm of his walk exactly, she didn’t need to open her eyes to know it was him but she was hungry for the sight of him. Tall, angular, hunched; he had shadows under his eyes and his clothes were dirty and creased. He looked exhausted but restlessly alert. He radiated his hostility for the world, so much so that as he reached for Clemmie she almost flinched. However she longed for him, she still knew he’d been a part of it, and she still didn’t know who had struck the blows. But the police didn’t have him; the police weren’t blaming him. She realised there and then that nothing else mattered. Whoever had been arrested, whoever might hang, it was not Eli. She reached out her arms to him. A moment before he kissed her, Eli noticed her split lip, and she noticed that some of the shadows and smudges on his face were bruises. He turned her chin to the last light in the western sky. His mouth was slightly open; eyes harried.

  ‘Who hit you, Clem?’ he said, his voice so hard the words seemed to take shape in the air between them. She shook her head minutely to say it didn’t matter. ‘Who? Your father?’ he pressed, and she stayed still. ‘I’ll knock his bloody head off,’ Eli whispered, and Clemmie shook her head, urgently. His hand on her jaw tightened painfully, and she whimpered. At once, he softened; his fingers loosened but stayed on her skin, resting gently. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he whispered. She put up her own hands and felt the knots at the corners of his jaw, shifting as he ground his teeth together. ‘What gives them the right?’ he said. ‘What in bloody hell gives them the right?’

  Eli let go of her and stepped away, putting his hands over his face for a moment, pacing here and there. There was no stillness inside him. He stifled a loud cry, and Clemmie murmured her anxiety. ‘God, I hate him,’ he said, the words muffled through his hands. She tipped her head at him, tried to take his hands. Who? she asked, without a word. ‘I hate him so much. Isaac. My father … I want to kill him. I’d happily kill him, Clem!’ There was something wild in his eyes as he said it, and she believed him. His pain and anger broke the quiet night apart, and suddenly Clemmie saw that part of him was broken, and might never be mended. She might never be able to mend it. She couldn’t help but start to cry. She wasn’t afraid, just awash with sadness – drowning in sadness – that the world had done such a thing to him. ‘The things he does; the things he makes us do …’ Eli was just talking now – not
to her, not to anyone, just talking because he had to. He shook his head wildly. ‘Perhaps I will kill him. He wouldn’t expect that, would he? Won’t make much difference to me now, but it might to the others …’ Clemmie watched him and wept, filled with ill-defined longing. Perhaps it was the longing to take his pain from him. In the silence her stifled sobs were loud, and so was Eli’s breathing, and the nervous cough of a moorhen they’d woken, and the gentle push of the breeze in a willow tree. There was no way she could reject him; no way she could turn away from him – he had filled her heart to brimming.

  But when he finally looked up at her again, and then walked towards her, quickly, decisively, she took a step backwards. She couldn’t help it. She’d been pushed and shouted at by Nancy Hadleigh; she had been hit by her father, chased away by Isaac Tanner. She’d been tormented by her own thoughts, and by the terrible stain of violence at the mill; she was weak and bewildered from lack of sleep, and desperate. He had perhaps only meant to kiss her, or gather her into his arms, but when she took a step backwards Eli froze. The disbelieving shock on his face was terrible to her. ‘Are you frightened of me, now, Clemmie?’ he said quietly. She shook her head and stepped towards him, and put out her hands, but he held her back. ‘Why would you be scared of me? When I’ve never made any move to hurt you – me, who loves the very bones of you?’ He grabbed her wrists, gave her a shake. ‘I haven’t slept with a roof over me head in three nights, Clem, did you know that?’ Clemmie took a huge breath. She shut her eyes to concentrate, and tried, as Mr Hadleigh had taught her, to think of the parts of the word as stepping stones – not reaching for the next one too soon, but going steadily, one at a time.

  ‘Eee … l …’ she managed, before stopping to recover.

  ‘What? What do you know, Clem?’ he said, not recognising the beginnings of his own name. But with his breath hot on her face, and the grip of his hands on her wrists, and the anger burning in him like a fire, she could not concentrate, or be calm. She could only weep. ‘Why would you be frightened?’ he said again. ‘Look at me, Clem.’ She did, and could no longer tell if he were cross with her, or hurt, or confused. His eyes were strange to her. ‘Why would you be frightened? What do you know?’ And what she wished for then, as she saw his anger ignite, right before her eyes, was that she could simply open her head, and her heart, and let him see inside. But she couldn’t.

  Irene got up when she heard the farmhouse door thud shut. She’d been lying on the bed upstairs, hiding from Nancy. After the rain the woods and fields had exploded with renewed growth when the sun returned, a frenzy you could almost see happening, and which seemed menacing to Irene – as though the human world might soon be smothered by swathes of foliage and writhing roots. And then she couldn’t help but think of those roots going down into Alistair after his burial the following day, which would be nine days since his death. His eye sockets, and the soft gap between his knuckles; his ears and nose and mouth; all the cavities not protected by bone. Her stomach swooped in protest at this, but she couldn’t keep the thoughts away. To Irene, the worst travesty of Alistair’s death was not that he was now absent, but that his body would be violated in such a way. It was the only tangible way she could comprehend his death – she could not miss him, yet, could not mourn him properly, honestly. Not the way Nancy could, and was. The gulf between the two of them seemed unbridgeable now; perhaps, eventually, Alistair would have bridged it. Irene felt adrift again, she felt homeless. Even though she hadn’t had a chance to fall in love with Alistair, he had become a place of safety. In vulnerable moments deep in the night, between islands of fitful sleep, the feel of his dead hand appeared, like a ghost, in her own hand, and she sometimes sat bolt upright with a gasp, and ran her fingers through her hair, certain that it would be matted, stiff with blood.

  Clara and Florence responded to the shocking death of their master by working with a kind of silent expectation that only served to keep the house on edge. They watched Nancy and Irene constantly, as if seeking validation, or expecting some extraordinary instruction or announcement. Perhaps they, like Irene, questioned the point of doing any of the things they had done before. There was no point cooking meals for a household that wouldn’t eat. There was no point cleaning rooms that nobody cared about, or was using. Their aimlessness was too much for Nancy, who was like a raw nerve – impossible to touch. She snapped at them frequently, when she wasn’t so closed off that she didn’t even see them. She veered from businesslike stoicism, as impenetrable as stone, to an excess of emotion so alien to those who knew her that it sent them scattering like hens. She’d sent Pudding away more than once, damp and red-faced, when she’d tried to come inside and talk. Jem Welch had caused an explosion by asking if he should cut white roses or red for Alistair’s wreath. The old man had gone away as steadily as he’d come, but his face had shown his distress, and Irene gathered it was as much down to Donald Cartwright being arrested as it was to Alistair being dead. Nobody was talking about Alistair’s killer much; people seemed in the uneasy position of wanting to condemn the sin but not the sinner – that it had been Donald, it seemed, was as big a tragedy as that it had happened at all. He’d been damaged fighting for king and country, after all; nobody was in any doubt that the Donald who went off to war would never have done such a thing. Irene peered out of the window at the top of the stairs on her way down and saw a figure in poor clothing walking away across the field towards the church with a crabbed, uncertain gait – head down, arms clasped around herself, pursued by a mad mess of pale, frizzy hair.

  Nancy was in the hallway, going through the letters and cards that had come that morning. She was crisply dressed, with a black cotton cardigan buttoned over her shirt; her pose would have been entirely normal had it not been for the tears on her cheeks and her hollowed-out eyes.

  ‘Did somebody come to call?’ said Irene.

  ‘No. It was just that odd creature from Weavern, hovering around, as she’s always done,’ said Nancy, curtly. ‘I sent her on her way. Not the full ticket, that one.’

  ‘Oh. And how are you this morning, Nancy?’ Irene hadn’t once tried to hug the older woman; hadn’t once tried to take her hands. She’d been watching, as closely as she could, for any sign whatsoever that Nancy would welcome the gesture. Even at the inquest, which had opened the day after Alistair’s death and returned a verdict of unlawful killing almost immediately, Nancy’s hands had remained in her lap, fingers laced. Now she looked up at Irene with an expression so flatly hostile that Irene’s mouth went dry.

  ‘This morning? It’s half past three in the afternoon, Irene. Most of the day is over, and as usual you have contributed nothing to it whatsoever. As to how I am, I …’ Here her rancour failed her, and for a moment she looked so lost it was painful to see. She glanced down at the white envelopes in her hands, some of which were edged in black. ‘So very Victorian, some of our acquaintances,’ she murmured. ‘Most of these condolences are addressed to you. I suggest you get on and answer some of them before they pile up too much. You have such a lovely new writing room, after all, as well as all these others.’ She thrust the envelopes at Irene and moved away.

  ‘All which others? Nancy, wait,’ said Irene. ‘Please. Look, I … I know we’ve not seen eye to eye over much since I got here. I know you don’t think I deserved Alistair. I don’t know if it matters now, but I really didn’t think I deserved him either. I know I didn’t. He offered to rescue me from a horrible situation, but perhaps I wouldn’t have married him, even so, if my mother hadn’t made it my only option. And I know I didn’t … love him the way you did. But I just wanted to say … I just wanted to say …’ She realised only then that she didn’t know what she wanted to say.

  ‘What?’ said Nancy, with a wintry smile. ‘That you share my pain? That we are united in our grief? That we are in this together?’

  ‘No. No, not that. I’m sorry. Perhaps that’s it – I’m sorry you’ve lost him, and … however hard this might be for you to believe, I’m
sorry I’ve lost him, too. I just … I just don’t know what to do next.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Nancy stopped smiling. She slipped her hands into her pockets and lifted her chin. ‘I should rather think the world is your oyster now, Irene.’

  Irene did as she was told and took the cards into her writing room, slitting each one open with a knife and trying to place the names of the senders. Some she knew, most she did not; none at all were from any of her own friends or family. She smoked until the air was hazy, and answered each one as best she could, noticing the un-summery chill in the air and the draught from the chimney that Nancy had foreseen. She stared at the hearth, with its new marble surround, and thought again of the strange broken doll that had been found there. She thought, with a shiver, of Ma Tanner’s pronouncement of change, and the odd feeling of prescience she’d had herself. She felt as though she’d been at Manor Farm for years, decades – like her unhappiness had trapped time, and slowed it down. And then she realised, with a jolt, that she was free to leave now. There was nothing to keep her there – that was what Nancy had meant about the world being her oyster. The desire to be gone was a sudden, irresistible craving, even if it came with an ill-defined taint of failure. She could go back to London; she could go home, as soon as the funeral was out of the way. No doubt the residents of Slaughterford would denounce her for abandoning the home Alistair had intended for her, but she could hardly start caring about what the residents of Slaughterford thought of her now. There was no good opinion to risk losing. Finally, one of the cards she opened was from her parents, who’d probably read about the murder in the papers. Irene quickly wrote a reply, asking to come home to them in London as soon as possible after the funeral. She wrote so fast that she smudged the ink, which her father would hate, sealed the envelope and got up to walk it down to the post box in the shop wall herself, not caring if it was decent or not for her to be out and about; not caring if the scarf she draped around her neck was emerald, rather than black.