by Nicola Upson
The church clock struck midday, and Josephine made her way back to the Black Horse – a long, timber-framed building, dating back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and originally made up of two separate cottages. The sign rose up from an old boundary stone at the front, which declared that the pub was technically in the parish of Polstead; apart from that, it looked more like a house than a commercial enterprise, and the only other clue to what happened inside was a faint smell of beer from the pavement. The north-facing rooms at the front were cool and dark, but they had an austere homeliness about them, with polished brick floors and scrubbed tables. The Borehams obviously kept a popular house: she was by no means the first person across the threshold that day and, as she waited her turn at the bar, she noticed that a table in the room next door was laid out with pies, hams and cheeses, ready for a luncheon party.
‘What can I get you?’
The woman behind the bar was dressed entirely in black, and Josephine wondered if the food was actually for a funeral. She ordered a glass of beer and handed over the money. ‘Mrs Boreham?’ she asked, relying on the fact that the woman was the right age to be Rose’s mother.
‘That’s right. Who wants to know?’
‘My name is Josephine Tey. I’ve come over from Polstead today, from Red Barn Cottage. Hester Larkspur was my godmother, and I’ve taken the place on.’ Mrs Boreham’s expression made a subtle shift from suspicious to downright hostile, and Josephine knew that she had found someone else whom Hester had managed to alienate. ‘I was hoping to have a word with your daughter,’ she added, less confidently now.
‘Why? What are you going to tell me she’s done now?’
Josephine was taken aback by the aggressiveness of the question. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you she’s done anything. That’s certainly not why I’m here.’ Mrs Boreham’s eyes hardened still further, and Josephine guessed that her accent wasn’t helping; it placed her in the same camp as Hester the minute she opened her mouth.
‘Forgive the lack of hospitality, Miss Tey, but the last time I heard a voice like yours it was telling me a load of lies about my own daughter.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry,’ she bluffed, not having the faintest clue what the woman was talking about, but ready to play along if it got her what she wanted. She couldn’t help thinking that it would be easier to get an audience with the Pope than to snatch five minutes with Rose Boreham, but she bit her tongue and used the scant information she had gleaned from Hilary to weave what she hoped would be a placatory story. ‘I understand there was some unpleasantness between your daughter and my godmother which led to Rose losing not one position, but two,’ she said, relying on ‘unpleasantness’ to be suitably vague. ‘I’m here to apologise, and to try to make it right with her if I can.’
God only knew how that was to be achieved, but her conciliatory tone seemed to have set her on the right track. ‘Rose is busy at the moment,’ her mother said, still difficult, but less hostile. ‘We’ve got the men from the shoot in for lunch any minute.’
‘That’s fine. I’m happy to wait. Do you serve food?’
Mrs Boreham gave her a look that explained very eloquently what she thought of women who had all the time in the world, but the victory was Josephine’s. ‘I can do you a sandwich,’ the landlady admitted grudgingly, ‘and I’ll send Rose over when the men are settled.’
Josephine took her drink over to a table in the corner and busied herself with making a list of questions for Archie. After a few minutes, the beaters filed into the next room and the noise in the pub went up a level. Through the open door, she watched the sought-after Rose pass hot toddies round amongst the men, giving as good as she got with the banter and innuendo that came her way. She was a pretty girl, with wavy dark hair, a heart-shaped face and full lips, but her appeal was less in the features themselves than in what Rose did with them – how easily she laughed or feigned surprise, the blend of innocence and worldliness that she could persuade them to convey. She had a natural spirit that a village pub – even at its most raucous – seemed to struggle to contain, and Josephine understood immediately why Hester would be charmed by her. The message had obviously got through: every now and again she stole a curious glance at her visitor, whilst somehow making it clear that she would come over when she was ready and not a minute sooner. She disappeared into the back and Josephine – her list finished – was just about to give Virginia Woolf another chance when a plate of cheese and pickle sandwiches was banged down in front of her. Rose took the chair opposite without waiting to be asked. ‘Mum said you were after me,’ she began, establishing from the outset that she was there under sufferance. ‘What do you want?’
Josephine realised – a little late, admittedly – that she had no real answer to that question, and certainly nothing as direct to offer in return. ‘Look, Rose,’ she said, deciding to see where honesty got her, ‘I have no idea what went on between you and my godmother. I didn’t know Hester Larkspur, and we only met properly when I was a very small child, far too young to remember anything about her. Until she died, I didn’t even know that she was an actress. I certainly wasn’t expecting her to leave me anything in her will. All that should have gone to my mother, who was Hester’s closest friend, but my mother is dead and now I find myself in a strange cottage, hundreds of miles away from my family, where nothing makes sense to me. Quite frankly . . . well, quite frankly I need some help. Can we start again?’
Rose wasn’t going to forgive and forget that easily, but she softened a little and a smile played on her lips. ‘You’ve met her, then?’
‘Met whom?’
‘Lucy.’
Josephine had never had any intention of discussing Lucy with Rose – either the diary, or the unexplained presence in the cottage – and she was shocked to have the rug pulled from under her. ‘What do you know about Lucy?’ she asked cautiously.
‘Only what Miss Larkspur told me,’ Rose said, and the fact that Hester had told her anything indicated to Josephine how well the two of them had got along. ‘Who she was and when she lived in the cottage, that sort of thing. I never saw her myself, though, except in the photograph. I always hoped I would one day, if she got to know me and trust me, but it never happened.’ She shrugged. ‘Some people are more open to that sort of thing, aren’t they? I must be about as psychic as a plank, because I could never see anything at the vicarage, either. You obviously take after Miss Larkspur. You’re lucky. What’s Lucy been up to?’
Josephine could not quite believe that they were discussing a dead woman as if she were just another girl from down the road who might turn up at any moment. It was hard to decide if Rose’s calm acceptance of the situation was reassuring or disturbing, and she sidestepped the question with one of her own. ‘What did you mean about seeing Lucy in a photograph?’
‘It was the one of Mr Paget that Miss Larkspur kept on her desk. There’s a woman in the background with Maria’s rose, and that’s her.’ Josephine brought the picture to mind, and realised that the face she had seen at the window was indeed the same as the face in the photograph; that was why it had seemed familiar. She tried to recall how often she had looked at the image, and whether it was planted firmly enough in her mind for her to imprint it elsewhere, but in hindsight it was impossible to be sure. ‘I always thought it was another daily woman,’ Rose said, ‘but Miss Larkspur told me I was the first help she’d had.’ She glared at Josephine, misinterpreting her confusion. ‘If you’re not going to believe me, I’m wasting my time sitting here.’
She got up to leave, but Josephine grabbed her arm, conscious that Mrs Boreham was watching intently from the bar. ‘No, Rose – please stay. It’s not that I don’t believe you. I’m just having trouble coming to terms with what’s been going on.’ She smiled. ‘Until now, I thought I was cut from the same plank as you. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.’
The girl took her seat again. ‘That’s what Miss Larkspur told me. She said it was the cottage that d
id it.’
‘I’m sure she was right. Did she talk to you about what happened, the things she saw?’
‘She said that Lucy was always around – she’d hear her coming up and downstairs sometimes, or things would move about the cottage for no reason. It always sounded a bit creepy to me, but Miss Larkspur liked having her there, said Lucy kept her company and it was better than being on her own. I’d hear her talking to her sometimes, to her and to Walter.’
‘But nothing more sinister than that? Did she ever mention that room off her bedroom?’
‘She hated that room. Filled it with junk, and never let me clean it. She said it had always been sad, even when they first moved in. You could smell the pain, she said.’
So the boxroom had been desolate even before Hester’s death, Josephine thought. That answered one question, but it did not solve the mystery of why she had chosen to die in a room she hated. ‘Did Hester ever see Lucy?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Rose said, as if it were the most natural question in the world. ‘Often in the garden, apparently, or standing by her bed. Sometimes she’d see her out in the field where the barn used to be. Once she told me that she would occasionally hear the sound of a fire and people shouting and screaming, said it was like being there when the barn burned down.’
‘And you believed her, even though you never saw Lucy yourself?’
‘Of course. It stands to reason that the poor cow wasn’t going to rest in peace after everything that happened.’
Josephine felt as though the reins of the conversation had slipped her grasp some time ago, and she decided just to let Rose have her head. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, picking up her sandwich.
For the first time, Rose hesitated. ‘Miss Larkspur swore me to secrecy, but I don’t suppose it matters now, and you’ll know about it anyway now you’re living there. I mean all the stuff that Lucy wrote in her diary. I don’t know how she did it, moving into that cottage so close to where her best friend was butchered. I couldn’t have done it, but I don’t suppose she had any choice. What else was she going to do, on her own with no job and tainted by working for the Corders?’
There was no doubt that Rose had read the diary, Josephine thought, and if Hester had talked about it all the time, Rose would also know its value. Would she be stupid enough to admit all this, though, if it was she who had stolen it and sold it to John Moore? ‘When did Hester tell you about the diary?’ she asked.
‘When I’d been with her about six months. I was moaning about cleaning the fires one day, and she laughed and told me that girls had never had it so good. She’d often tease me like that.’ She smiled, and Josephine could tell that whatever happened later, she had loved working for Hester. ‘That’s when she read me some of the diary – and she was right, too. I don’t know how many hours Lucy had in her day with all the work she had to do. After that, she’d read bits to me all the time. I couldn’t wait.’
‘Did she say where she got the diary?’
‘She found it in the cottage when they were having some work done. The house was a wreck when they bought it. It was empty for years – there were sheep in the kitchen when they moved in – and Mr Paget got the farmer to sell it to them because of its history. Miss Larkspur said he must have seen them coming but they didn’t care. It was part of the story for them, and worth every penny. She said that Lucy was there from the start, and it was as if she wanted the diary to be found. Miss Larkspur had worked on it for years. She said it was what got her through losing her Walter, and she felt that Lucy had saved her somehow. Stopped her from going mad with grief and doing something stupid.’ So that was the kindness mentioned in the will, Josephine thought. ‘She wanted to pay Lucy back by telling her story. Then a couple of months before she died, she asked me to help her with it. She made it out to be a treat for me – and it was a treat – but I knew it was really because she couldn’t read it herself any more.’
‘She told you she was losing her eyesight?’
‘Not as such, but it was obvious. She was a lot less fussy about the dust, for a start, and she looked different. Small things – her jewellery didn’t quite match or her hair was wrong at the front, but you notice those when you’re a woman, don’t you? Especially when someone’s always been so particular. She knew I’d guessed, but neither of us ever mentioned it. We just went on as normal, and I helped her as much as I could without her knowing I was doing it. We’re all entitled to a bit of pride.’ It sounded as though Hester had come to rely heavily on Rose; like Bert, she had been in a position of trust, and like Bert she could easily have abused it. Josephine looked at the girl in front of her: she was wilful, cheeky and no doubt wily enough to have twisted a vulnerable old woman round her little finger, but Hester had obviously seen something special in her, and Josephine – without any good cause – trusted her godmother’s judgement. ‘So we had a system – I’d read the diary out loud, and Miss Larkspur would write down what she wanted to use. She said that Lucy would turn in her grave if she knew.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m on the wrong side. We’re related to the Corders,’ Rose explained when she saw Josephine’s blank expression. ‘William’s sister married a Boreham – great-great-great-uncle Jeremiah to be precise. He was a miller. Miss Larkspur used to tease me about that as well, but you can’t help who you’re born to.’
‘Did Hester know what happened to Lucy later, after the diary finishes?’
‘No. It was enough for her to have Maria’s story, I think.’
‘What was she going to do when she’d finished transcribing it?’
‘She wanted to get it published. Will you do that now for her?’
Rose’s assumption was obviously that the diary had passed straight to Josephine without ever leaving the cottage; unless she was an exceptionally accomplished liar, that was another mark in favour of her innocence. ‘Yes, if I can. When was the last time you saw the diary?’
The strangeness of the question didn’t go unnoticed. ‘The last day I worked at Red Barn Cottage,’ Rose said warily. ‘Why? Has something happened to it?’ She looked at Josephine, suddenly unsure of who she was talking to and worried that she might have been tricked into saying too much.
‘No, it’s safely where it’s always been,’ Josephine said, choosing to miss out the interlude in Leather Lane. ‘But have you told anyone else about it? Anyone at all?’
Rose shook her head. ‘No. I haven’t even told my mum and dad. Like I said, Miss Larkspur swore me to secrecy.’
‘I know, but you could be forgiven for reneging on that sort of loyalty when you and Hester fell out.’ Rose said nothing, but the way she shook her head told Josephine what she thought of that sort of pettiness. ‘So what happened?’ she asked gently. ‘What went so wrong that you had to stop working there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You must have some idea.’
The girl’s face clouded over, but she remained adamant that her dismissal was a mystery to her. ‘All I know is that things were never the same after that woman came to see her.’
‘Hester had a visitor?’
‘Yes. She didn’t see many people once her eyesight started going. She couldn’t travel to London any more, and even going to the vicarage or doing her own shopping about the village got too much for her. It made her bad-tempered sometimes, and the thought of people knowing and feeling sorry for her was the last thing she wanted, so she stopped encouraging people to call. There was a bloke from the village who’d do things for her like I did, without making a big deal of it, but that was about it.’
‘Bert Willis, you mean?’
‘That’s right. But one morning I got there and she told me that she’d had an unexpected visitor the day before. She made light of it, like it had been a nice surprise, but I could tell it had bothered her. She was distracted all day.’
‘So you didn’t meet this person?’
‘No.’
‘Did Hester tell you who
it was?’
‘Only that she’d come up from London – from her old life, she said. They hadn’t seen each other for years.’ Josephine thought about the woman whom Miss Peck had met at Hester’s funeral, the one who had been asking what would happen to the cottage; was it the same person, she wondered, and if so, who could it be? The only woman from Hester’s old life whom she knew about was the theatrical dresser who had been mentioned in her will. Nichols – that was it. Dilys Nichols. She tried the name out on Rose, but the girl just shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think she told me the woman’s name. Like I said – she didn’t make a big fuss about it.’
‘Did the woman ever come back?’
‘If she did, Miss Larkspur didn’t tell me about it. But she was never herself again after that. She seemed agitated all the time, as if she had something on her mind. We’d always had such fun. Even after her eyes started to go, she was still interested in things, still full of life, but all that stopped. She lost weight, too, as though she wasn’t bothering to look after herself any more.’
‘Did you ask her what was wrong?’
‘Yes, eventually. It took me a while to pluck up the courage, because she hated any fuss, but one day she said something very odd – she said that even Lucy had turned against her, and I asked her then if there was anything I could do. She didn’t answer for ages, then she took my hand and told me that everything beautiful had a cost. That’s all she said.’ The rowdiness was building next door, and Josephine saw Mrs Boreham trying to catch her daughter’s eye, but Rose was intent on her story. ‘Then the following Monday I got there at the usual time and she wouldn’t let me in. She told me I’d let her down, and she wouldn’t be needing me any more. I tried to get her to come out and explain what I’d done to upset her, but she wouldn’t. My mum went up there the next day. Furious, she was – she still hadn’t forgiven me for chucking in the vicarage to go there, but it didn’t do any good. Miss Larkspur said the same things to her, and worse besides. I never did find out what I’d done wrong.’
