by Nicola Upson
As I was leavin’, Mrs Martin put some of Maria’s books into my hand, remindin’ me of how we had always lov’d a story. It is nice to have them, with her notes inside, and a flower or letter tuck’d between the pages. I smil’d when I saw The Old English Baron. I c’d hear her voice, readin’ it aloud to me as we sat on the grass over Thistley Lay. The taller a tale, the more Maria lov’d it. Then I remember’d the part where a woman guides her husband to their daughter’s body through a dream, and now I cannot sleep for wonderin’.
In her excitement over the diary, Josephine had completely forgotten about the book she had bought with it, and made a mental note to look through it later, when she had finished Lucy’s story. The thought of seeing Maria Marten’s handwriting, and gleaning what she could of her personality from it, almost made up for the lack of an accurate drawing.
8 September
The Missis is goin’. I have known since the day he died that she w’d not be able to bear another winter here, and she will be away by the end of the year. She is to stay with family, and the house and farm will be relet. I will not be sorry to leave it. I long to shake off its shadows and be a proper wife to Samuel and lovin’ mother to Molly. I only wish that we c’d make our home somewhere far from here, not in the cottage so close to where Maria died, and where I will always be haunted by what happen’d to her.
12 September
One of the Suffolk papers has open’d a fund for the other Mary Corder. She is broken, it says, ruin’d in mind and body. Her school lost its pupils and she sold everythin’ she had for his defence. Now she is poor, reduc’d to the very last shillin’, with no hope of feedin’ and clothin’ her child when it is born. I thought she w’d come back here, but she has not spoken with the Missis, or look’d to her for money.
The harvest is in. It has been a poor year, Samuel says, and the barn is barely two thirds full. There has been no music, no dancin’, no reason to be thankful. The last grain has been taken from Corder land. When it has gone, there will be nothin’ left of them here but dust.
25 October
The Missis call’d me after breakfast and told me to get a room ready for William’s widow. She is to come here to have the child. A birth under this roof after so many deaths, but I cannot be happy for it. Maria was sent away from all who lov’d her to bring his first child into the world, and now, after all that has happen’d, his second will breathe its first under his mother’s roof. I am not to speak of it in the village.
3 November
She came after dark in a coach from Lavenham, where she has been stayin’. The child will not be long in comin’ and I put her straight to bed. The Missis has told me to give her every care, but she w’d not see her tonight. She is doin’ what she thinks is right, but there is no joy for her in the new life to come, and I think she fears that she will see her son in his child, and be reminded of more than she can bear.
16 November
William has a son. The Missis w’d not see the child and wanted only to know if he was well. He is a sickly little creature, and his mother prays for him. She has called him John, but he is not to take the Corder name for fear that it will go against him. As soon as they are strong enough, they are to leave the village, and the Missis soon after them.
21 November
The child is thrivin’ now, and his mother sees only William in him. She cries with joy and grief, and I am sad for her. Everythin’ that William has touch’d he has destroy’d.
2 December
The Missis left Polstead for the last time yesterday. It has been a busy week, and if it was not for the sadness of the work, I w’d have been glad. But packin’ away a life of such loneliness all but broke my heart, and I am glad it is done. She wanted company on the journey and we took the mornin’ coach. It was a bright winter’s day and the village look’d its finest, but as the carriage rattled down the Hadleigh road, she did not once look back. She has ask’d me to tend the graves of her husband and children if I feel able to, and if it will not cause me grief wi’ the village, but I think the churchyard is the only thing she regrets leavin’ behind. It holds so much of her.
We rested overnight in Lavenham – the Missis will not set foot in Bury – and she talk’d to me as she has never talk’d before. She told me of the happiness of her marriage, and ask’d me about Samuel. She said he is a good man and we must cherish each other. She said she c’d have borne her sorrow better if she had still had her husband’s love.
4 December
It is just before midnight, and I have wound the clocks and lock’d the doors for the last time. The house is silent, holdin’ its ghosts, and I feel as though I am a stranger in these rooms now that my reason for bein’ here has gone. The new tenant comes in a few days. His name is Tabor, and he has a family – daughters, they say. I hope he will be happier here than those who have made way for him.
Tomorrow, I go to stay with Hannah until Samuel and I are wed. There is so much to do. Molly is to be maid and I have promis’d her the prettiest dress a girl can wear – or the best my needlework will allow. She grows more excited by the hour, and my heart is full of joy when I see what my life with Samuel will be. I have forgotten what it is to wake and think only of ordinary things.
Samuel came to the house this evenin’ and ask’d me to go to Red Barn Cottage with him. I had not been for weeks, but it is to be my home and I must grow to love it. At the end that looks to the barn, he has planted an orchard. Half a dozen cherry trees, with flowers in between. It is his weddin’ present to me, and against the cottage itself he has set a climbin’ rose. The trees are young at the moment, he says, but they will grow, and the rose has come from Maria’s garden. He wants me to have somethin’ that will remind me of her, somethin’ beautiful. One day, he says, I will look out of the window and see only joy.
It was the end of the manuscript. Josephine looked through the diaries on the floor to see if its finishing there was Hester’s choice or Lucy’s, but there was nothing later than 1828 and she was bitterly disappointed: she longed to know what had happened to Lucy as she moved out from the shadow of Maria’s death and took charge of her own life, but the pages had served their purpose and what happened later could only ever be guesswork.
She walked out into the dawn while the world of the diary still shrouded her from the present, and smelt the rose that had been Maria’s, touched the ageing wood of cherry trees that had been planted out of love. Samuel’s efforts to stem his wife’s grief struck a chord with her, and she wondered how successful they had been, and if Lucy had ever managed to live here happily. In her mind’s eye, which had been so dominant throughout the night, particularly as she grew more tired, Josephine saw Lucy Kyte as she tended the flowers. The image – and she had no idea how it could be so definite or so familiar – was of a young woman, dark-haired and ordinary-looking, but with a pleasant face. She watched as Lucy walked round the garden, stopping here and there to pull a weed or pick some herbs; after a few minutes, she went into the house and Josephine waited for her face to appear at the window upstairs. Lucy did not disappoint her. She stood looking out over the fields, and Josephine longed to know what she saw. Eventually, the woman turned and disappeared back into the room.
The night was over, and Josephine felt Lucy drifting away from her, vanishing irretrievably now that the diary had been read and a new day grasped greedily at the horizon. A sense of loss and desolation descended like a veil over her, inexplicable and yet impossible to ignore. She hesitated before going back inside, unsure of what she had just seen and reluctant to allow the cottage to close in on her again before she had had a chance to clear her head. She was tired now, exhausted, but the last thing she wanted to do was to go upstairs and sleep. If the long night had taught her anything, it was that she would only ever be a lodger here. The past was stronger than she was; how could it not be after all that had happened? It lived on in the cottage, regardless of whose present it was intruding upon – and if she was to stay here and be h
appy, she would have to accept that in the way that Hester had done for so many years. To Josephine’s surprise, the idea held no fear for her.
She thought about Hester’s bequest, to her and to Lucy, and wondered how to reconcile the two. What could she do to give Lucy the peace she needed? Was it as simple as publishing the diary and telling Maria’s story at last, or was that only part of Lucy’s sadness? It was hard enough to make things right with your own past, let alone someone else’s, but Josephine knew she had to try – for Lucy’s sake, as well as for Hester’s. She made some coffee and changed quickly, then set out down Marten’s Lane with a new sense of purpose. She had spent the night with the dead; perhaps it was time to see what more they could tell her.
16
The path to the church was lined with autumn crocuses. Their purple flowers looked oddly out of joint with the bleak, colourless dawn – too early or too late for the season to which they truly belonged, the butt of one of nature’s jokes. Josephine walked up the wooded slope, pulling her coat close around her against the chill. The year seemed to have turned overnight, and her breath made patterns in front of her face. Above her head, the rustle of branches sounded like distant rain, although the day’s only achievement so far was a damp, depressing mist that showed little sign of lifting. The trees closed in around her, refusing her a view of the church until she was almost upon it, and she noticed how each tree trunk bore the marks of a lifetime’s experience. She hoped that Lucy’s grave – if she could find it – would be equally revealing of a long life, well lived.
There was no lychgate to the churchyard, no ceremonial entrance through which to welcome the living or the dead. Only a crooked red-brick wall and a simple five-bar gate enclosed the sacred ground, as if the church were proud to serve a rural community. A few branches overhung the wall, scattering beech nuts onto the outer graves, but otherwise the churchyard was open and exposed to the weather. Never had Josephine seen a landscape so devoid of colour. The mist had conspired with the stone to drain the life from everything, leaving behind a blanket of grey, broken only by the shock of a single red rose on a nearby grave. In the stillness and the silence, she could almost believe that she was looking at an old photograph.
She left the path and struck out across the grass to the oldest part of the graveyard. Her shoes were soaked in seconds, and she wished she had thought to change into Hester’s old galoshes, but her mind had been on other things. There was no way of knowing from the diary how long Lucy and Samuel had lived, or whether Lucy had gone on to have children of her own, but if she started with their contemporaries, she would be sure not to miss anything. She passed the Corder graves, and made her way along the back wall to the famous Gospel Oak that she had read so much about. It was easy to see why the tree was so revered. There was an ancient dignity about it that made the church feel like a young pretender, and its vast trunk – spectacularly split now, and streaked with the rain of ages – held a quiet strength. Some of the larger boughs sagged to ground level, others were angled and twisted, giving the tree a craggy and eccentric individuality, and Josephine thought of Lucy, watching her friend’s exhumation from its shelter. Maria must be buried somewhere very near here. It made sense to hope that the Kytes were not too far away.
The gravestones leaned wearily in this part of the churchyard, hankering after the rest they signified for others. Josephine wandered between the rows, looking at the names on each stone or, where the letters were worn or covered in moss, tracing them with her fingers to find out whose death was marked there. Eventually, she found what she was looking for. Her heart leapt when she saw the Kyte name; she had not for a moment doubted the diary, but the letters carved in stone stood as confirmation of something almost too precious to be true. It did not take her long to realise that the story was still incomplete, though. Samuel was buried at her feet, a few yards from the boundary wall. He had died in 1843, and he shared his stone with two women: Ruth, whose dates suggested that she had been his first wife, and Molly, whom Josephine was shocked to discover had died a few months before her father, when she was just nineteen. Samuel’s sister Hannah was buried nearby, but there was no sign of Lucy, nothing even to suggest that she might have had a place here, and Josephine wondered if the marriage had actually gone ahead. The plans had seemed so certain in the diary, but the only proof she had was Hester’s use of the name, and she could have jumped to the wrong conclusion about that. Or perhaps Lucy had married again when Samuel died – she would have been in her early forties then and of an age to do so, or even to take another job in service and move away from the village. With Molly dying so young, there would have been nothing left here for Lucy but yet more grief.
The parish records might solve the mystery, but that was no comfort to Josephine’s impatience. Frustrated, she walked through the rest of the churchyard looking for Baalham graves on the off-chance that Lucy had been buried with her birth family, but – although it was obviously a common Suffolk name – the only Lucy Baalham she could find was far too young to be the one she wanted, and she soon found herself at the bottom of the hill, near the church’s war memorial. Polstead had not lost any of its men until 1916, she noticed, but perhaps that was because they had not been spared from the land for the first two years of the war; after that, the parish seemed to have made its fair share of sacrifices – enough, as Hilary had suggested, to put the death of a whore into perspective, although Josephine hoped that if more people had read what she had read, Maria might be remembered with a little more compassion. Nearby, under bare mounds of earth, lay the recent dead. She looked back towards the village, watched curiously by the sheep in the adjacent field; very few houses were visible from here, but she caught her breath when she saw how magnificent the Corder house looked on the horizon. It seemed both ironic and fitting that the finest view of it should be found in the graveyard.
‘Miss Tey?’
Surprised, Josephine turned to see Stephen Lampton standing at the edge of the path. It was not unreasonable of him to frequent his own church at this time of the morning – there should be no such thing as an ungodly hour for a vicar – but she had not expected to have to explain herself to anyone, and she struggled to find something to say beyond an initial greeting. Either he found nothing strange in her visit or was too polite to say so, because he put her at her ease immediately. ‘It’s nice to see you again. I’m sorry we couldn’t speak for longer the other night.’ There was a twinkle in his eye as he added: ‘I looked for you after the service, but you must have beaten me to the door.’
Josephine blushed, remembering how quickly she and Marta had left the church. ‘I had an early start,’ she lied, ‘and I could see you were busy. It was a very good turnout.’
Her tone implied better than expected, but Stephen seemed to take the comment in good heart. ‘Not bad, I suppose. Even some of the chapel folk will slum it with us for a harvest festival or a Christmas Day service, and it’s standing room only for Armistice Day.’ He smiled. ‘You seem to have caught me out, though.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes. I probably shouldn’t admit it, but I feel most at home in St Mary’s at times like this, when the church is peaceful and I don’t have to worry about who’s doing the flower arranging. I’ve never really thought that God cared much about that sort of thing, but it seems I’m in the minority on that here. Rotas must be adhered to. It’s a sort of unspoken eleventh commandment, and it rather eclipses the other ten.’
Josephine laughed. ‘Hilary did mention that you had a keen band of volunteers.’
‘Oh, there’s never a shortage of people to decorate the altar and polish the brasses. I’ve got more bakers than I can find fêtes for, and they’re queuing down the street with embroidered kneelers – but ask anyone to come and worship here, and that’s a very different story.’
It was hard to tell from Stephen’s tone if he was bitter about his lot, or resigned to it. ‘I imagine that’s frustrating,’ Josephine said, curious either wa
y to know why he would stay.
‘Sometimes, but I can see their point. When we first got here, men were quite literally being worked to death on the land. Things are a little better now, but it’s still a hard life and who am I to criticise people for not finding a moment to call their own, or for choosing to spend it somewhere else if they do? Questions of who they are, to each other and to God, take second place – and probably rightly so.’ His words echoed what Bill Fallowfield had said about his own youth. ‘They bring their flowers and look after their dead, but I sometimes feel that the church is simply the building next to the graves.’ There was sadness rather than arrogance in the way he spoke of his parishioners as a race apart, and Josephine realised that his efforts to belong here and to live up to the expectations of his role were as uncertain as his wife’s. ‘And how about you? What brings you here at this time of the morning?’
‘I was looking for a grave,’ she said, wondering how much else to tell him. ‘I’ve been sorting through some of my godmother’s papers, and I’m afraid I’ve rather got caught up in the history of the place. She mentions a family who used to live in Red Barn Cottage, and I wondered what had happened to them.’
