A Set of Lies

by Carolyn McCrae

  “There is some, but none are heirlooms, they are all personal items of mine.”

  “I think not.”

  “You think not what?”

  “I do not think that they belong to you. They are Lacey items and now are mine, as the principal lady of the household.”

  “The what?”

  “You are now the dowager.”

  “We have no title so I’m not sure that is the correct form.”

  “Bernard is the head of the family and he is my husband. You have nothing, everything is his and I, as his wife, must have the jewellery.”

  In her younger days Josephine would have argued that everything was hers until she died, when it would, obviously, pass to Catherine, but her daughter-in-law’s attitude shocked her and she could think of nothing adequate to the situation to say in response.

  Josephine thought of the box held at the bank in Newport that contained the necklaces and earrings that William had bought her when he returned from Australia and which she had rarely worn. She thought of her father’s heavy gold signet rings with carefully worked coats of arms that she had never been able to decipher that she kept in her own jewellery box. She put her hand to her throat and rubbed the locket he had given her to mark her attachment to William when they were a family full of hope and promise.

  “It is all very old-fashioned, my dear.” She tried to sound conciliatory though she knew she could not hide her distaste at her daughter-in-law’s greed from her voice.

  “I do not need your condescension. The jewellery is mine and if I do not find it to my liking it will be melted down and reset.”

  “Am I at least to be allowed to keep these? At least until I die?” Josephine looked down at the cluster of diamonds set in gold and the simple gold band on her left hand and put her hand over the locket. Not waiting for a reply, she stood up. “I will instruct the bank to allow you to see our box.”

  “There is no need for your permission. Bernard has the right to do that. Also I will be changing the staff. They have shown no respect for me as the new mistress of the household so they will be replaced.”

  “I beg your pardon?” The staff had been in line outside the front door that morning to welcome Bernard and his wife to their home. Josephine had noticed nothing that could be considered disrespectful, though the butler had looked to her, rather than to the new Mrs Lacey, to indicate when they might return to their duties.

  “We need a new butler and housekeeper and they must be instructed to staff the house properly. No impressionable local flibbertigibbets.” Josephine wondered whether Catherine knew of her husband’s use for the young female staff or simply suspected it.

  “But I cannot dismiss them. Many have been with my family for many years.”

  “It is not up to you dismiss them. I shall do it. Bernard has agreed that I will make a fresh start. Now it is my household and I intend to have the running of it. And I am removing all the family portraits from the walls. I abhor portraits.”

  “What shall you do with them?”

  “That is of no concern to you.”

  “I do not wish to argue, but—”

  “Then don’t.”

  “There is one of me. It hangs in the drawing room. I would like that, if I may, to have in my room.”

  “Who is it by?” Catherine asked. “Is it a renowned artist?”

  “No, just someone local,” Josephine lied. “But it is valuable to me.”

  “Then keep it.” Catherine waved her hand dismissively.

  *

  Catherine was an organiser and immediately after her marriage she set to arranging good matches for her younger sisters.

  She found satisfactory husbands in men of business, men with manufactories who would buy the coal her mines produced, men with mills who would buy the wool from their sheep farms and men with connections who would invest in their banking ventures. All the men who married ‘the de Burgh girls’ had the sense to understand that it was Mrs Bernard Lacey of The Lodge on the Isle of Wight they dealt with. And so it was with all the Lacey lawyers and advisors. No longer were they allowed to communicate with Mrs William Lacey, it was Mrs Bernard Lacey to whom all advice and correspondence was to be addressed.

  Bernard found himself as uncomfortable at The Lodge as he had always been.

  He held no affection for the house or for his mother or his wife and, after the early weeks of marriage, he spent as much time as he could in South Wales with his father-in-law who, he soon discovered, shared his tastes for less refined amusements.

  *

  “I am without friends,” Josephine confided in her doctor three months after her son’s marriage.

  “The headaches get worse?” He did not want to get involved in discussing his patient’s feelings, concentrating, rather, on her physical symptoms.

  “They are incessant.”

  “It is not uncommon at this time of year,” he said as he prescribed laudanum.

  “I know my new maid is spying on me,” she said when her physician visited a month later, but he still had no thought of looking at anything but physical symptoms.

  “The headaches are still with you?”

  “Yes, and the sickness.”

  So the dosage was increased.

  “I believe my daughter-in-law is expecting a child,” she said in early March.

  “She has not asked me to attend to her,” the doctor said in what Josephine thought was a rather brusque manner, though his voice was softer when he inquired, “Are you still suffering with your headaches?”

  “They get no better. And I find such difficulty in sleeping. I cannot rid my head of painful thoughts. Memories, missed opportunities, mistakes, everything in my life that I have done wrong, they fill my head and I cannot rid myself of them.”

  The doctor offered no words of comfort, even though he had known Mrs William Lacey for many years and had seen her through many crises in her life.

  He simply suggested an increase in the nightly dose of laudanum.

  *

  A week after his final visit the doctor signed a death certificate confirming that Josephine Marie Lacey, widow of William Lacey of The Lodge, had died of heart failure in her sleep at the age of sixty-eight.

  He had known that, one night, she would get up from her bed and walk to her window and look out at the moonlit garden she had known so well but which was no longer hers. He had known she would remember the happy years she had had with her father and with her husband and he had known, sooner or later, she would decide that enough was enough. He had known the time would come when she would see no point in carrying on.

  He had known all these things, but he had not had it in his heart to stop her. Nor would he taint her memory, and that of her husband, by reporting that there had been an overdose of laudanum, or that that overdose was more than likely to have been deliberately taken.

  He recorded her death simply as ‘heart failure’, knowing that in that phrase lay the truth.

  Chapter 15

  1888 to 1914

  Six months after the death of her mother-in-law Catherine Lacey gave birth to a son.

  “He will be called William. It was my father’s name,” Bernard had said simply. He always felt cowed by his wife’s confidence and forcefulness but he felt empowered by the fact that he had fathered a legitimate son. He knew girls in the town who claimed he was the sire of their bastards but he knew better, they went with many men, he was just the one with the most money so they always claimed he was the culprit.

  “We will have Llewellyn in the name,” Catherine had insisted.

  “But we must also have Bernard. I am the father. My name must be there.”

  So Catherine’s first son was christened William Bernard Llewellyn Lacey.

  Her second son, Henry Oliver Llewellyn Lacey, was born two years later by which time Catherine and Bernard had grown to loathe each other and spent as little time as possible in each other’s company.

  *

  When Wil
liam and Henry were children they were friends, allies against the tempers and the animosity of their parents.

  Their father was rarely at home, preferring to spend his time in Wales where he enjoyed the benefits of being a member of the most important family in the valley. In Wales there were no constant reminders that he had let his parents and his wife down by not being the person they had wanted him to be.

  On the occasions when he visited The Lodge he enjoyed wielding power over his sons, as he did the men, women and children in the company’s villages when he was in Wales.

  He made it clear to William and Henry that he would brook no argument, nor allow any ‘stepping out of line’. For the smallest misdemeanour by either boy he would call both to his bedroom where they would be instructed to drop their trousers to be given a beating on their naked backsides with a riding crop or a buckled belt.

  It was no good either boy arguing that they had done nothing that they weren’t normally allowed to do; run on the lawn, sit on the big chair by the fire or head to the kitchen for a cake at teatime.

  “You… will… do… as… I… say…” their father would growl as he hit them with all his strength.

  “Mater knows what he does to us,” Henry cried to his elder brother after one particularly vicious beating. “Why doesn’t she stop him?”

  “He probably hits her too. Or worse.”

  “What could be worse?”

  “Men put their stick between a girl’s legs and whip her from the inside.”

  William saw Henry feeling his stick and looking doubtful.

  “They’re bigger when you’re a man.”

  “Why do they do it?”

  “To show them who’s the boss. And it’s not like whipping a dog where it doesn’t matter if it shows. If you whip them on the inside only they know. I’ve seen them.

  “Who?”

  “Johnny at Oakridge Court.”

  “But he’s only just older than us.”

  “He gets on top of Becky.”

  “Our maid Becky?”

  “Yes. He gets on tops of her and puts his stick between her legs and whips her with it.”

  “Why doesn’t she say anything?”

  “She seems to like it.”

  “Johnny’s done it more than once?”

  “Oh yes. I’ve seen them lots of times.”

  “And she lets him?”

  “Oh yes. She has to. And though she cries out a lot she seems to like it. Next time I see them I’ll come and get you shall I?”

  “Oh yes! Is that what Pater does to Mater?”

  “Probably.”

  On their father’s next visit to The Lodge they climbed onto the balcony outside the window of their mother’s bedroom and watched between the heavy curtains as their father’s bare buttocks rose and fell with increasing intensity and their mother lay unmoving beneath him.

  “I told you,” William whispered.

  “She doesn’t seem to want him to do that,” Henry whispered back. “Why doesn’t she stop him?”

  “It seems to hurt him too. He’s crying out as much as she is.”

  “I won’t ever do that to someone however much they deserve a whipping. I wonder why Pater hits us on the outside where it shows rather than doing that.”

  “It’s probably because we’re still just boys. Maybe when we’re grown up he’ll do it that way. Maybe you just have to be grown up.”

  *

  In late August 1898, when William was nine years old and Henry seven, their mother warned them that they were to keep out of the way during their father’s next visit to The Lodge as he would have their aunts and uncles from Wales with him. She impressed on them that they were to do nothing to disturb the very important meeting in the library where very important decisions were to be made. “Or else,” she had said.

  They thought they understood what ‘or else’ meant.

  It was raining on the day a number of motor cars drove up to the front door of The Lodge and what seemed like a crowd of people gathered in the library, and both boys were bored.

  “We’re barred from the attics.” William spoke as if he had just remembered the rule that had been in place for as long as each boy could remember.

  “I know we are.”

  “Haven’t you ever wondered why?”

  “No.”

  “Haven’t you ever wondered what’s up there?”

  “No. Never.” Henry was concentrating on watching a raindrop roll down the window pane, trying to guess how many drops it would absorb before it reached the bottom.

  “You’re a cissy.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Yes you are. You’re a useless cissy.”

  “I am not! I just don’t know why you always want to break the rules.”

  “Why not when the rule is stupid?”

  “Who says it’s stupid?”

  “I do.”

  “You can’t know it’s stupid.”

  “Well we won’t know unless we find out what’s behind that door will we?”

  So Henry reluctantly left the drips to run unobserved down the window pane and followed his brother up the stairs to the top floor of the house.

  “We’re out of bounds,” Henry whispered.

  “It’s only the staff floor.”

  “But Mater says it’s theirs and we mustn’t come up here. The maids’ bedrooms are here. And—”

  “I know the maids’ bedrooms are up here. They won’t be around at this time of day. Come on. Don’t be such a baby.”

  “We shouldn’t be doing this.” Henry held on to the top banister nervously. He wanted to go back downstairs to the safety of their playroom and the drops of water on the window.

  “Come on. We’re here now.”

  Henry, who had hoped that a locked door would end their adventure, was disappointed when William pulled a key from his pocket.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I took it.”

  “Where from?”

  “The pantry.”

  “Won’t anyone miss it?”

  “They probably don’t even know it’s there. It was too easy.”

  Henry had no answer so he watched in silence with a sense of dread rising from his stomach to his throat as his brother put the key in the lock and turned it. He realised he had his fingers crossed, hoping that it would be the wrong key or it wouldn’t work, anything to stop them having to go up into the attic.

  But the key worked and William pulled the door open with a sharp scraping sound that Henry felt must have reverberated around the house.

  “Shhh. Everyone’ll have heard that. Close the door, let’s go back downstairs.”

  “Shut up and follow me.”

  So Henry followed his brother through the door.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing? I’m locking the door behind us.”

  “Why?”

  “In case someone comes up, stupid.”

  “But you said—”

  “Oh, stop being such a baby.”

  “It’s dark! I can’t see anything.” His rising panic made Henry’s voice more highly pitched than usual.

  “Stop whining. Here, take this candle.”

  “You brought candles?” Henry realised that William had planned everything.

  “Of course. Here.” William lit a match and held it to the two candles. The wicks caught and gradually the circle of light spread.

  “Ugh!” William hunched his shoulders and screwed up his face for all around them were cobwebs, cobwebs so thick they could not be seen through.

  “Come on Henry.” William was already halfway up a flight of stairs, pushing aside the shimmering mass as he climbed each step.

  “I’m coming.”

  Henry felt his way gingerly up the steep, uneven steps. It wasn’t like any staircase he had ever known, all the other staircases in the house were evenly spaced with the treads flat and wide, and the steps were not at all steep. It s
eemed to Henry that on this staircase every step was different. Some were wide enough for his foot but others were so narrow he had to be almost on tiptoe. Every one creaked as if about to give way and some flexed as he put his weight on them.

  “Come on.” His brother was nagging him to hurry but Henry couldn’t climb the stairs any more quickly.

  He wasn’t sure what he had expected when he reached the top of the thirteen steps. He held the candle out in front of him and looked through the cobwebs at the small landing and two closed doors.

  “Blast!” William used the words he heard their footman use when he didn’t think anyone was listening. “Damn and blast it.”

  “What?”

  “More doors.”

  “Won’t the key work?”

  “Not on these doors, stupid.” This was something Henry realised William hadn’t thought of. “We’ll just have to push.” William leant against the nearer door and tried the handle. “Come on, we’ll just have to push it open.”

  The two boys put their shoulders to the old door. “On the count of three.” William gave the orders as he always did. “One… two… three… push!”

  And the door opened.

  “I don’t think it was locked,” Henry said accusingly.

  “It must be a very old lock to have broken so easily.” William pushed past his brother into the room.

  “A rat!” Henry uttered a cry as in the small circle of the room that his candle allowed him to inspect there was the skeleton of a rat, the bones and whiskers perfectly intact, its mummified skin showing that it had been almost as large as the kittens in the stables.

  “Wow! Here’s another.” William seemed impressed with the skeleton and tried to pick it up but it fell apart in his hands. “No one could have been up here for ages.”

  They looked about them at piles of chests and trunks. To Henry there seemed no order, it was just as if the boxes had been piled higgledy-piggledy against each other.

  “What’s that, under that cloth?” William asked.

  Henry tentatively picked up the corner of dark cloth to see what was underneath. “Just pictures, portraits,” he reported to his brother. “I suppose these are our ancestors. This one looks like it’s a lady.” He caught sight of a delicate young lady, her hand at a piece of jewellery around her throat and the nameplate on the frame saying Josephine.