by Erica Brown
Conrad explained. ‘Miss Horatia Strong has bought herself into a very lucrative venture indeed. Not only has she acquired a number of properties at a very reasonable price, but their location is directly on the line of the new sewer. The city council will be anxious to buy. No doubt she will make a very handsome profit.’
From his description, Tom immediately recognized the place as the one surrounded by homeless people, which he had seen the night before his arrest.
‘I see.’
He also realized then that there would be a part of Horatia she would never share with him. She had an astute mind and an incisive business sense. The will to achieve, to overcome all the odds in the pursuit of wealth and success, would always be with her. Much as he admired her, there were things about her – deeply hidden traits in her character – that were not entirely palatable. Delectable and deadly – those were the best words to describe Horatia Strong.
But why should you be surprised? he asked himself. Horatia is hard-headed. Stop thinking of her beauty; she is a younger version of Sir Emmanuel Strong. There is little to choose between them.
Chapter Twenty Four
Edith leaned towards Blanche in her living room at Little Paradise. ‘What the bloody hell’s she brought me… madam?’ she muttered and winked wickedly.
Blanche bit her bottom lip to stop herself from laughing out loud. Horatia was outside, overseeing the unloading of furniture from a country wagon with big wheels and pulled by a pair of plough horses. The horses were tossing their heads and snorting steam, petulant to be brought into stony streets rather than the soft mud they were used to.
Some of the items Horatia had brought were enough to set their eyes out on stalks.
‘I don’t think Edith is going to have much use for this,’ said Blanche as tactfully as she could about the suit of armour one of the men had just unloaded. ‘It’s a little large for a cottage,’ she added. It was the best excuse she could muster to avoid giving offence. Horatia had tried to be generous but was far from being practical. She didn’t need to be. She had servants to do that.
‘You could put it in the garden,’ Horatia said helpfully.
Edith opened the visor on the helmet and peered in. ‘I s’pose I could use it to force the rhubarb.’
The children were running in and out, all except Freddie who had other plans for the sword that had come with the armour. ‘Is this real?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Edith, ‘And you ain’t ’aving it. You’ll cut yer bloody ’ands off!’
Horatia was on her way back in, backwards this time and barking out orders to the two men carrying a rosewood settee with cabriole legs and honey-coloured upholstery.
Edith looked flabbergasted. ‘Blimey!’
‘In here… careful… mind you don’t damage it.’
The men carefully manoeuvred the elegant piece through the door.
Blanche had already brought things round from her own house in Somerset Parade, items that she judged would suit the house without looking too grandly out of place. Horatia had done the opposite. The things she’d brought would have been perfect in a Clifton drawing room – or against the grey stone of Berkeley Castle. They were intimidating and opulent in the simple rooms of Little Paradise.
Horatia hovered. Blanche sensed she wanted to speak to her in private even before she asked her to walk with her to the carriage.
Blanche followed her down the garden path. It was only big enough to walk single file. From behind she studied Horatia’s square shoulders and stiff back. Horatia obviously had something on her mind. Blanche felt an ominous churning in her stomach.
They stopped out in the lane. A chili wind whipped at their skirts, sending them billowing out like giant bells. Horatia held her hat and seemed disinclined to look Blanche in the eyes.
Blanche had heard that Tom was spending more time in Horatia’s company. It pained her to think it, but she wondered how far it was likely to go. She decided to be forthright. ‘Do you have something to tell me about Tom?’
The distractedness disappeared. ‘No,’ snapped Horatia, as if Blanche had stepped over some imaginary line. ‘I wanted to ask you whether Conrad had told you about Uncle Otis. You haven’t mentioned it.’
Blanche looked down at her hands. Her fingers were long, their nails dusky pink like rosebuds. ‘Yes. He told me last night directly after leaving you and Tom.’ She frowned so she wouldn’t cry. Enough tears had been spent the night before. News of his death had resurrected thoughts of her beautiful, outrageous mother, mistress of one man and mother to the child of his brother. She remembered Barbados, running along a beach, the blue waters tumbling against blindingly white sand. It was all in the past, just like Otis was now. There was only one thing she still wanted to know. ‘How did he die?’
Horatia hesitated and took a sharp intake of breath. ‘He wasn’t well. He had problems, worries…’
Blanche looked at her in a way that conveyed she wouldn’t be satisfied until she knew the truth. She never uttered a word – she didn’t need to.
Reeling beneath the intensity of Blanche’s gaze, Horatia stumbled over her words. ‘He… um… killed himself… Apparently he walked into the sea and drowned. He couldn’t swim, you see.’
Blanche shook her head. Her look was just as intense, but tinged with a question. Why?
Horatia looked down at her purse, fiddling with the strings that she’d wound around her wrist. ‘I think…’ she began then raised her eyes to the apple trees as she fought to explain. ‘The plantation manager said…’ She stopped. An odd look crossed her face as though she’d just realized something. ‘He was lonely! He killed himself because he was lonely.’
Blanche stood open-mouthed. ‘Poor Otis.’
The two women looked at each other. Blanche didn’t know what it was, but suddenly they had become closer.
‘He was good to me – and to my mother,’ she said.
Horatia fixed her eyes on her hands as she nodded in agreement. ‘I suppose he was. I understand your mother was very special.’
‘I think so.’
‘It must be quite wonderful to have a mother who is special. I don’t know whether mine was or not. I don’t remember her very well. I was very young when she died.’
Until this moment, Blanche had never felt the slightest sympathy for Horatia, simply because there didn’t seem to be any point. After all, Horatia had everything, yet suddenly she seemed more bereft than Blanche could ever have imagined. She also seemed smaller.
It occurred to her that she was the one who’d had the better life with a warm family on a tropical island. Horatia’s childhood must have been cold. She’d been looked after by an army of nurses and governesses who’d been far more familiar than parents.
Eventually, when the silence had run its course, she said, ‘Loneliness is a terrible thing.’
‘Very terrible.’
‘Don’t be lonely, Horatia. And don’t allow Tom to be lonely.’
Horatia’s eyes flashed indignantly. ‘I am not lonely!’ With a swish of velvet-trimmed skirt, she turned to leave. ‘I have to go now. The men will finish unloading the rest of the furniture.’
Blanche almost laughed. Horatia had sounded as if she’d been doing most of the shifting and lifting herself. But this was not the time for flippancy. She’d hit a raw nerve. She’d heard it in Horatia’s voice.
Horatia climbed quickly into the coach. Once the door was closed and the coachman up in his box, she leaned out of the window and called, ‘Please do as you wish with the furniture. If there is anything you do not want, please dispose of it as you see fit.’
‘Remember to give my condolences to your father,’ said Blanche. Who is also my father, she thought as she watched the carriage disappear from the end of the lane.
Although she knew beyond a shadow of doubt that Sir Emmanuel Strong was her father, she still thought of Otis Strong as the main man in her life before she’d left Barbados. His affection for her mother had bee
n obvious. If only they’d been able to marry, if only they’d been allowed to…
All gone, she thought. Like the wind and the summer and the bodies beneath the tombstones in the churchyards, the people and the years had passed away.
The chilly wind made her rub at her arms. Summer was fading. The apple trees were heavy with fruit, the fallen harvest scattered in the grass, much to the delight of wasps, bees and birds.
The men unloading the farm wagon finally finished their task – they had been paid for their trouble by Horatia – and were soon heading home.
The lane fell to silence. The common was empty except for the sheep nibbling among the grass and gorse on the common. Blanche wasn’t really seeing them. She was thinking about Tom. He was usually a taboo subject, but today she’d fancied there had been a triumphant look in Horatia’s eyes. Blanche was convinced that something had developed between her and Tom. She tried not to feel jealous. She had no reason to. Mrs Conrad Heinkel was a respectable woman. Blanche Bianca, the girl from Barbados who had loved Tom Strong, was long gone.
Someone tugged at the wide skirt of the pale blue dress she was wearing.
‘Look,’ said Freddie, holding out his jersey in which he’d packed about three pounds of early windfalls. ‘Enough for an apple pie, do you think?’
‘Plenty,’ laughed Blanche. She followed him back to the house.
Examining the curved ends of a bed fashioned in the French style, Blanche shook Horatia from her mind. ‘What about if we take this upstairs?’ she said to Edith.
Edith’s eyes shone with pleasure. ‘It’s very grand. I’ve never ’ad a bed like this before.’
Blanche held one end of what seemed to be the headboard. ‘Well, you’re going to have one now. Help me get it upstairs.’
Edith laughed. ‘I thought I was supposed to be working for you. It seems more like you’re working for me, helping me get this place sorted.’
‘I could hardly leave you and the children lying on bare boards. What sort of an employer would that make me?’
‘And what would that make me?’ Edith retorted, pulling in her chin and puffing out her cheeks. ‘Useless,’ she said, laughing as she hunched her shoulders and rubbed at her back.
They laughed and the sound of their laughter lifted Blanche’s spirits. She and Edith were old friends and no matter that their lives had gone in different directions they couldn’t stop being friends.
The bed pieces were finally all in place, complete with a mattress and clean white sheets, blankets and a cotton counterpane in the same pale mauve as the flowers on the wallpaper. _
Downstairs a fire was lit in the grate in an effort to dry things out, and a stew of mutton and vegetables was beginning to bubble in a cast-iron pot set on the hob.
Bit by bit, the cottage was becoming a home and although they’d all been up since early that morning, everyone worked hard, determined that furniture, curtains, carpets and cooking equipment would all be in its proper place by the end of the day.
‘Well!’ Blanche exclaimed finally, wiping her brow with the back of her hand. ‘That’s that done.’ She looked around the first of the two bedrooms, certain that Edith and her family would be happy here, and far healthier than they’d been in Lewins Mead.
Freddie looked out of the front window and she stood with her hands on her hips, gazing at the shaft of sunlight that slanted through the back window, the pretty patchwork coverlet on the children’s bed, the chairs, the chest of drawers and the picture of a group of dogs given by Horatia and already hanging from a nail on the wall. The latter had probably belonged to Lady Verity, Sir Emmanuel’s second wife and Horatia’s much-despised stepmother.
Blanche smiled to herself. No doubt Horatia had taken great pleasure in disposing of her stepmother’s things.
And why shouldn’t they like it here? she thought, listening to the children playing in the garden below.
Freddie’s back suddenly arched with tension. The laughter from the garden ceased. The shaft of sunlight faded to grey as the sun hid behind a cloud and she thought she heard footsteps.
She looked over his head at the apple trees that were bending before a sudden gust. She rested her hands on his strained shoulders. ‘What’s the matter, Freddie?’
He twisted round, his eyes like saucers. ‘He’s back,’ he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Suddenly there was shouting, a man’s voice raised in anger, then Edith shouting back and the sound of children scrambling up the stairs.
‘You slut! You dirty slut, you bin living with a bloke behind me back.’
A piercing scream sounded from below, as the children spilled into the bedroom, throwing themselves at Blanche and hiding their faces in her skirt.
At the sound of a slap, Freddie clenched his fists and dashed off down the stairs.
‘Stay here,’ Blanche ordered the girls, and followed, wishing her skirt wasn’t so wide, a distinct impediment in a stairwell only a few inches wider than her shoulders.
She guessed that Edith’s husband was home.
Deke Beasley did not fit her ideal of a merchant seaman. At no more than five feet tall, the top of his head barely reached his wife’s eyebrows. He was dressed in a blue Guernsey of well-oiled wool, patched corduroys and a black peaked cap. Judging by the redness of his face and his foul language, he made up for his lack of height with an over active temper.
Freddie launched himself at his father’s legs, pummelling his groin with his fists just as he had the ruffians they’d met at St John’s Arch. ‘Leave her alone!’
‘Get off, you little sod!’ A stiff cuff of the ear, and Freddie went flying, but he sprang back up and resumed his defence of his mother.
Deke Beasley raised his hand again, his other gripping Edith’s throat. Suddenly he saw Blanche. His arm remained raised. He looked shocked, unsure what to do next.
Blanche adopted her most superior stance. ‘What are you doing in my house?’
His mouth dropped open. One flash of her eyes was enough to make the oldest hearts leap with desires they’d long thought dead, and when she looked angry they wished they were dead.
Deke Beasley was no exception. He let Edith go, pulled his cap from his head and wrung it as though he were strangling the neck of a chicken. In an effort to ingratiate himself, he tried smiling, but only served to look shifty.
‘Beggin’ yer pardon, ma’am. Didn’t know we ’ad visitors. ’Er,’ he said, pointing at Edith, ‘should ’ave let me know. But there, that’s the way she is. Didn’t even wait till I got in on the Lizzie Brady to move ’ouse.’
‘Really?’ Blanche was angry. If she’d been a man like Tom Strong, she might have hit him. He was detestable, the way he apportioned blame to his wife and hit her and his son. Even the way he continued to wring his cap, class deference written all over his face, made her angry. No wonder Edith had moved with lightning speed out of Lewins Mead at the mention of the Lizzie Brady having docked. And now she knew why. Deke Beasley was hardly the best of husbands, but there was something more worrying about his return home.
He was presently pouring words as if they were tea. ‘Well, imagine ’ow I felt, yur ladyship, ’ome from the sea and finding nobody at ’ome. No welcome. No food nor drink no howdy doo—’
‘I’m not interested in your feelings,’ Blanche snapped. ‘I believe the Lizzie Brady docked three days ago and that she was quarantined.’
Deke looked shifty and immediately searched for an excuse. ‘A man’s throat’s tarred with salt after all that time at sea… Couldn’t stay aboard, could I?’
‘So you went drinking,’ Blanche interrupted sharply. ‘You went drinking knowing that the ship was quarantined because of cholera. Have you any idea how many people you’ve put at risk? You stupid, stupid little man!’
Deke licked his lips and blinked nervously as he worked out how best to handle this uppity upper crust female. He could hardly deny it. The stink of cheap porter was on his clothes and his breath.
His efforts were wasted. Blanche was livid. ‘And a bully!’
Deke Beasley’s big blue eyes and moon-shaped face gave him a deceptively innocent look. Poor Edith. Fingers of redness around her neck and a bruise rising beneath her left eye. Who could blame her for moving out before her husband got home?
Deke stopped wringing his cap and his face turned scarlet as he looked questioningly from one woman to the other. ‘A man’s got rights! Doesn’t a man ’ave rights in ’is own ’ouse? Well, dun ’e? He don’t expect to come to what ’e thought was ’is house and find people sick and dead there, does ’e?’
Blanche turned cold. ‘What people? What are you talking about?’
Edith looked horrified. ‘Molly? Do you mean Molly?’
Deke pulled his cap over his head, the peak lopsided over his eyes. ‘The hunchback was dead as a dodo when I saw her. So was two of ’er kids, and t’other was on its way out.’
Blanche tried to swallow the sudden dryness of her mouth, but it wouldn’t budge. When she managed to find her voice, her words seemed scratched and disjointed.
‘What did you do about it?’
Even before the words were out of her mouth, she knew what answer Deke Beasley was going to give.
‘Nothing. It weren’t my concern.’
‘You left a child with her dead family? What about her husband?’ It was a slim hope. Edith had told her Molly’s man was a shadowy figure who disappeared at regular intervals and only returned when he had nowhere else to go.
He shrugged. ‘That’s a bloke who ain’t never been around very much.’
Blanche could hardly believe her ears. ‘And you have, I suppose!’
Edith sank onto the settee with the cabriole legs, her face hidden in her hands. ‘It’s my fault! It’s my fault!’
Blanche knelt down in front of her, grasped her shoulders and shook her. ‘It was not your fault.’ She turned an icy glare on Edith’s husband then sprang to her feet. ‘But you,’ she cried, pointing her finger so close to his face that he took two steps back. ‘You knew you had cholera aboard your ship, but you had to have a drink, never mind how many people you might have killed from your selfishness.’
