by Nicola Upson
Josephine looked at the doubtful expression on her face. ‘You don’t believe that any more than I do.’
‘No, I don’t suppose I do, but it’s hard to tell how old they are. What do you think it means?’
‘I have absolutely no idea.’
‘I don’t have to go tomorrow, Josephine. I can’t just leave you with this.’
‘It’s a nice thought, but you must go. You’ve got a script meeting on Monday, and you told me how important it was.’
‘Then come with me. Spend a few days in London.’
Josephine was tempted, but she shook her head. ‘I can’t just run away like that, Marta. Anyway, Lydia will be there, and I don’t want things to be more awkward than they are already.’
‘It will be fine.’
Josephine smiled at her. ‘That’s what you always say, but one day you’ll be wrong. And the worst is over now here, thanks to you. There’s nothing left hidden and the room’s clean and empty. All I need to do is shut the door on it. The clothes can be burnt and I’ll get someone to take the mattress away. As far as I can see, those boxes downstairs are full of knick-knacks. I’ll have a quick look through to make sure there’s nothing important, and the rest can go to Hilary’s next jumble sale. The theatre stuff in the study isn’t a problem; it’s actually a nice thing to look at when I can’t stand Claverhouse any more, particularly if I am going to do something about that book, but there’s no urgency. It can wait until I’m ready.’
‘So you’re not going to worry about Hester’s death any more, and all the other questions that you can’t answer?’ Marta sounded unconvinced.
‘I dare say they’ll cross my mind, but I’ve got to put them in perspective, haven’t I? Hester is gone. Whatever demons haunted her at the end of her life, I can’t help her with them now, and I can’t allow her to hand them down to me like an unwritten clause in her will. She’s taken enough of our time already, when every hour we have together is precious. Let’s make the most of it.’
She closed the door firmly to bring the conversation to an end. They took some food and a bottle of wine and walked through the woodland until they found a sheltered spot on the edge of a field, away from the cottage and from thoughts of anyone else but each other. Josephine lay back in the grass, her hands behind her head, and Marta ran a forgotten ear of corn playfully over her lips. ‘It makes a change, I suppose – me running out on you. You’ve got the hasty departure down to such a fine art.’
It wasn’t an accusation, but it didn’t need to be for Josephine to take it seriously; she had run away from their relationship so often in the past that Marta’s continued love was nothing short of a miracle, but it was too important to her now to test again with cowardice or selfishness. ‘I know,’ she admitted, ‘and that’s why I’m so determined to make this cottage work. I want somewhere that isn’t London or Inverness, somewhere just for us. No grand plans and elaborate arrangements – just you and I, whenever we can.’
She closed her eyes against the fierceness of the sun, and felt Marta’s hand, still cool, brush her cheek. ‘Are you sure you want to stay here tomorrow?’ Marta asked.
For a moment, Josephine questioned her decision, but she knew her original instinct was the right one: she could not keep running away, and – although she had not admitted as much – she was determined to find at least some of those answers, if only to make sure that she and Marta could be truly at peace in the cottage. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m positive. As long as you’re sure you want to come back.’
12
Marta left late on Sunday afternoon, and Josephine was glad to have plenty to distract her from the emptiness she felt as soon as the car was out of sight. She went through the remaining boxes on the kitchen table and found what she had expected to find: shoes, scarves and handbags in varying degrees of use; souvenirs from the towns Hester and Walter had toured to; and ornaments that Hester had grown tired of but could not bring herself to discard. Josephine, free of any sentimental doubts when it came to bric-a-brac, took them all out to the garage, ready to give to Hilary or to another local charity. There was no sign of anything more precious.
The clothes and bedding from the boxroom filled three large bags, and she dragged them outside to the furthest corner of the garden, safely away from the thatch. Here and there, the field at the back of the house was dotted with a scarlet crown as pheasants picked about in the stubble, their vibrant beauty no longer so out of place now that the reds and yellows of autumn had begun to make their mark. The birds were her only audience as she poured petrol over the sheets and threw a match into the middle of the pile, then stood back to watch, surprised by how quickly the fire took hold. Gradually, she fed the rest of the clothes into the flames, hoping somehow to cleanse the pain of the room by burning it out of existence. The fire was ruthless in its work, and Josephine understood why the razing of the Red Barn had been so symbolic for people living through those times, no matter what its true origins were: it was a way to heal the shame and the sorrow of a whole community, and she could not imagine that there had been much of an effort to save it, even from farmers whose livelihood the fire threatened. For the first time, she thought seriously about Hester’s final wishes for the cottage: Josephine, or complete oblivion. Clearly, there was something that she had only intended Josephine to see, perhaps something that only she would understand, and the most meaningful communication she had yet found was on the window seat in that room. Except, of course, Josephine had no idea what it meant. She thought about what she and Hester had in common – her family, Inverness, the theatre – and wondered if the explanation lay there rather than in the village and its tragic past.
The church bell rang clear across the fields, announcing the beginning of evensong. The air was chilly and the fire had lost its heat long ago, but still Josephine stayed outside, knowing that the atmosphere in the cottage would deaden her thoughts. She felt more strongly now than ever that at least some of the answers lay in Hester’s bequest to Lucy Kyte; at first she had assumed it was a thank you, but the gift could just as easily have been an act of reparation, made out of remorse rather than gratitude. If so, who was she, and what had Hester done to her? Were those terrible words, scratched into the window seat, the thing she was to take from the cottage? Was that what would bring Lucy Kyte peace – the knowledge that Hester had suffered before her death, that she was sorry?
The sound of birds at roost grew louder in the half-light, their calls ricocheting against each other and gradually fading away, the very essence of an English autumn at dusk. Reluctantly, Josephine left the fire to burn itself out and went back into the cottage, the smell of smoke on her clothes. She lifted the lid on the gramophone for company, but – distracted by the sight of the key still on the sideboard – went through to the study to try the bureau instead. If Hester had left anything particular for her to discover, then surely this was where it would be. The drawer opened easily. Nervously, Josephine looked inside, suddenly aware of how desperately she wanted to find Hester’s memoir, to hear about her life – confession or celebration – in her own words. Her godmother did not disappoint her. The locked compartment of the desk contained items of more obvious value – jewellery, a cash box – but the most precious thing by far to Josephine’s eyes was a manuscript, page after page of purple ink in the extravagant handwriting that was now familiar to her. She took it out eagerly and saw instantly that it was written in diary form, but the dates bewildered her and the life it described was certainly not Hester’s.
Sunday 1 January, 1826
This is the sixth New Year’s Day that I have spent in service with the Corders, and the first since the Master died. We have had no Christmas to speak of, and the house in all its mournin’ stood apart from the village celebrations. Everyone is wonderin’ how life will be with Thomas over us instead of his father, but there is still a good deal o’ work to do in a house with four young men and I hope my Missis will keep me on. I am used to the place now and want
no other, and I suppose that means I am happy.
Lit the fires and made breakfast, then chang’d into my best clothes and went with the Missis to church. Usual sermon from the Reverend Whitmore and not much of it to do with God as far as I could see, but the Missis seem’d to find comfort in it. Waited while she put holly on the Master’s grave, but she sent me on without her. Met Maria by the pond on the way back to the house and she took me to task for not comin’ out with her last night as I had promised. She thinks I can come and go as I please, and has no idea how my time belongs to the Missis. We squabbled but I was in too much of a hurry to stand in the cold and argue over a trifle. I knew she w’d forgive me. Maria’s temper blows itself out like the fiercest of storms. Ever since we were children she has never been able to stay vex’d with me for long, nor I with her.
Sure enough, she came to the back door later with a scarlet ribbon for me, even though she is not suppos’d to come to the house. The Missis had gone out again so I made Maria tea and play’d with Thomas Henry for a while but William came into the kitchen while they were there. I told Maria to go but she gave him the prettiest of smiles and it was he who went in the end. That smile will get her into trouble again one day and I told her so, but she only laugh’d and said she w’d take her chances.
Clear’d away the supper and warm’d the Missis’s bed. Went to her for evenin’ prayers then lock’d up and to bed at 11.
So that was what Hester had been working on: not a true account of her own life, but a fictional interpretation of Maria’s. Josephine could not decide whether to be elated or heartbroken. Once again, Hester had slipped through her fingers, but she could not deny that the idea was a splendid one, and the novelist in her could only admire Hester’s choice of narrator: a woman who was both friend to Maria and servant to the Corders was uniquely placed to know the intimate life of both families, and to express the divided loyalties that must have torn the village apart. It was, she thought, exactly what she had longed for when she first stood outside the Corder house: an ordinary view of the crime that looked beyond its infamy to lives for ever stained by horror, grief and shame. Admittedly it was fiction, but Hester’s knowledge of the case and her empathy with the woman she had played so often on stage were likely to make it as refreshingly different an account as it was possible to get, one that asked history to look again at Maria as something other than victim or whore.
She flicked through the manuscript, saddened to see that the handwriting had begun to deteriorate by the final pages, as Hester battled with failing eyesight to get the book finished. The victory had been hers, though; the last entry was barely legible, but the date told Josephine that Hester’s story of her heroine’s life and death was complete. Instinctively, she knew that this was what Hester had wanted her to find and had hoped she would value: it was a simple request for approval from one writer to another, and one with which Josephine was more than happy to comply. Not once did it occur to her to doubt the book’s quality; somehow, she knew it would be good and the excitement of its discovery drove all other thoughts from her mind. More than anything, she wished that Marta had been there to share it.
It was tempting to stay up all night and devour the manuscript in a single sitting, but she resisted. The fascination of reading it for the first time would only come once, and she wanted to make the most of it. Now, she was too tired to think straight and too restless to sleep. She made herself an easy supper and settled down by the range with the gift that Marta had been so pleased to find in Bury – a recording of the Maria Marten melodrama, with Hester and Walter in the leading roles. It was the first time that Josephine had felt truly comfortable in this room, certainly the first time that she had dared to sit in Hester’s chair, but she did not attempt to analyse whether her contentment came from a new sense of purpose or from the time she had spent with Marta: she was simply happy to embrace it. As Hester spoke her opening lines and Josephine heard her voice again, it was easy to believe that the cottage, too, was pleased to have something more tangible than a half-formed memory, to feel that something lost had returned. She felt the house’s ghosts very strongly that night, but they were the ghosts we all know and can do nothing about – the times we want again, and can’t have.
13
She dreamed again that night, the images vivid and disturbing. In that twisted nocturnal world, fire tore through the cottage, destroying every trace of Hester but leaving the building itself miraculously untouched. She looked on helplessly while someone – the dream would not reveal who – walked about inside, adding the manuscript to the flames page by precious page. When she finally awoke, her relief was tempered by the smell of burning. It was just light enough for her to look at her watch without the help of a torch: half past five, neither night nor morning. She grabbed her dressing gown and hurried downstairs to check the fires, but the grate in the study was as grey and lifeless as the dawn, and the range would need a lot of coaxing before breakfast. The smell was less detectable downstairs. She opened the back door and went a little way out into the garden, shivering as her bare feet touched the paving stones, but the bonfire had died quietly with no stray embers to find their way into the thatch as she had feared. The air was damp and still, the fields half-veiled in a lingering, delicate ground mist, and she was struck by the dark bulk of trees behind the cottage. Stripped by the hour of all the individual colours that softened and tamed it, the wood seemed alien and forbidding, a melancholy hint of the dark days to come and a reminder that the month had borrowed beyond its limits from another season.
Upstairs, the smell still lingered and she could only assume that it came from the pile of outdoor clothes that she had been too tired to do anything with the night before except leave in a heap on the floor. The door to the boxroom was open again, and it exasperated her to think that the only latch in the cottage to prove unreliable should be that one. She went to close it but found herself drawn in again, and discovered that the scent of smoke was strongest here, although she could see no reason for it. This morning, in the half-light, the scratches by the window seemed to have faded and it was much easier to believe in Marta’s suggestion that their sorrow belonged to a different age. It mattered little, though; someone had suffered enough to make them, and the atmosphere of the room remained the same.
It took her a while to fall asleep again, and when she did, she slept heavily and woke later than usual. The sun shone nonchalantly through the window, and she felt a stab of excitement when she remembered the reading that awaited her downstairs. The manuscript was piled on the desk – smugly, she would have said, as if it knew that it had no competition for Josephine’s attention among the more pressing research books and half-finished notes that flanked it. It was something of a slap in the face for Claverhouse to be eclipsed by an unmarried mother from an obscure English village, she thought; he would not have taken kindly to her early defection from his story in favour of a girl whose life had not even begun when his ended in a blaze of glory on the battlefields of Killiecrankie.
Hester’s book – it had no title, Josephine noticed – was divided into three sections: the months of Maria’s courtship with William; the year of the murder itself; and the aftermath of trial and execution, delayed but somehow inevitable – the most interesting part of the story, according to Hilary Lampton, although Josephine guessed that Hester’s imagination would have relished the opportunity to recreate a living, breathing Maria. It was the warmest time of day, so she isolated the pages devoted to 1826 and took them outside to read with a cup of coffee. Just for a change, she chose the other end of the garden, which found the sun earlier in the day, and threw a rug down on the ground, welcoming the warmth of the red-brick wall against her back. She sipped her coffee, a strong dark blend from Marta’s hamper, and started to read, skimming through the first entry to remind herself of how the book began, then moving on.
5 January
Slept too well and it was past six when I got up. Wash’d up in the scullery and clean
’d all the knives, but the Missis found fault with them so I clean’d them all again. She is hard to please these days, when she has always been kind, but the Master’s death has knock’d the life out of her and she is not herself. People in the village say she is lucky to have sons to take the worries of the farm from her shoulders, but havin’ her children is not the same as havin’ her husband and the worries of the farm are not the same as the worries of the heart. And they have all given her pain. William is her favourite and she will not admit it when he disappoints her, which he does often. He is kind enough, but weak, and that is worse, I think, than ill-tempered and strong. So I hold my tongue when she scolds me and try to please her by waitin’ on her well.
7 January
Went for a walk with Maria up by Flaggy Pond after dinner was clear’d away. She has quarrelled again with her stepmother, who wants her to ask Thomas Henry’s father for more money. Sometimes I do not know how she stays in that cottage with no room to breathe, and I am more grateful than ever for my tiny room, small and cold as it is, because it is mine and private for the few hours I am in it.
Samuel was busy carryin’ straw from the barn for threshin’, and he came over when he saw us and I wish’d I hadn’t been so keen to leave the house and come out in my workin’ clothes with my face all dirty. I am a drudge next to Maria, my hands black with lead from the grates so that scrubbin’ will not clean them, and in frosty weather I dare not scrub them anyway for fear of makin’ them more red and raw than they are already. W’d have liked to talk to him longer but had to get back to make supper and did not want him lookin’ at me in my dirt. Wash’d up, wound the clocks and put a saucer of beer down for the slugs, then to bed at 11 with my diary.
