Wakenhyrst

by Michelle Paver

  Maud took the paper in silence.

  ‘See that you follow my instructions to the letter,’ he added, rising ponderously to his feet. ‘Otherwise I fear we shall have to arrange a rest cure in a sanatorium. I take it you’re aware of what that would entail?’

  Sullenly, she shook her head.

  ‘Eight weeks’ total seclusion and bedrest. No sitting up, no using the hands in any way, no stimuli of any kind. And most certainly no books.’

  New Year’s Eve is not a Christian festival. That was why it was never observed at Wake’s End.

  Or rather, Father never observed it. The servants did. They knew that New Year’s Eve is of the utmost importance because what happens then determines what will happen in the forthcoming year. They also knew that you must be especially careful around midnight, because whatever you’re doing at that time is what you’ll be doing for the next twelve months. This is why you have to keep all the fires blazing, and you mustn’t break anything, or lend money, or cry. You mustn’t wear black, as black betokens mourning. Nor must you fall asleep before the turn of the year, because sleep is akin to death.

  It’s also vital not to take anything out of the house on New Year’s Eve; that includes rubbish, ashes from the grate, and even potato peelings. You have to wait until you’ve let out the Old Year by opening the back door, and then let in the New by opening the front. Only in this way can you be assured of a good year. Only in this way can you know that the luck of the house has been retained.

  Maud knew all this as well as any housemaid, and although she was sure it was nonsense, she saw no harm in observing the rules. Thus while the servants grew merry on kitchel cakes and spiced elderberry wine, she tried to ensure a good year for herself by doing her favourite things.

  It was too dark to go for a walk in the fen, but she ordered her supper on a tray in the library, which was her favourite room, and she had her favourite foods: venison pie and apple cheesecake with ginger beer. Then she settled down by the fire and read her favourite bits in Robinson Crusoe.

  The servants were particularly nice to her because she was giving them no trouble. Daisy even brought her a glass of sherry when she rang for one. It made Maud pleasantly giddy, and she thought how wonderful it would be to live like this always: alone at Wake’s End (except for a servant or two). She might even buy a dog.

  On the chimney-piece the hands of the carriage clock inched towards midnight, and she drank a toast to Chatterpie and Maman.

  Suddenly, her spirits plummeted. Her appeal to Dr Grayson had failed. She was appalled at the risk she had run. What if he told Father? What if she was sent away on a rest cure? It wasn’t the thought of eight weeks without books that she found unbearable. It was what she might find when she returned: the fen gone and the house surrounded by a bleak wilderness of mud.

  It was nearly midnight. From St Guthlaf’s came a muffled peal as the bell-ringers began to toll the death of the Old Year. A burst of laughter at the end of the passage; then Maud heard Ivy running to the front door, ready to let in the New Year.

  The clock on the chimney-piece began to chime. As the last stroke of midnight died away, the bells of St Guthlaf’s broke into joyous peals – which grew suddenly louder as Ivy flung open the front door.

  ‘You!’ exclaimed the housemaid in a startled voice.

  Throwing down her book, Maud ran out into the passage – and came face to face with Father.

  ‘But – you were staying in Ely,’ she faltered.

  ‘Happy New Year!’ he cried, tossing his hat to a gaping Ivy. At the other end of the passage the servants stared with open mouths. Father’s face was flushed with cold and he was grinning.

  Maud stammered an apology about letting the servants make merry, but he brushed that aside. ‘I rather think that I too would like a glass of the traditional elderberry wine,’ he chuckled, throwing his coat on the ground and striding to the library fire, where he stood beaming and rubbing his hands.

  Maud picked up his coat. It felt damp and it smelled of the fen. She handed it to Ivy. ‘See that it’s dried and bring the Master a glass of elderberry wine.’

  ‘Yes, Miss.’

  In the library Father had flung up a window sash, letting in the loud, jangling harmonies of the bells. His hair was tousled and there was a hectic brightness in his eyes. Maud wondered if he was ill.

  Then she noticed water dripping from his cuffs. It was making little dark spots on the rug. ‘Oughtn’t you to change into dry things?’ she said carefully.

  ‘Not till I’ve had my wine,’ he replied with that strange fixed grin.

  ‘Father, do you think you might have caught a chill?’

  He threw back his head and laughed. ‘What makes you say that? I’ve never felt better! Oh look, it’s snowing, isn’t that splendid? I do love snow! It’s so pure, it makes everything clean!’

  Maud was right. Father had fallen ill. Shortly after one o’clock in the morning he collapsed, and Jessop and Steers carried him upstairs. By then he was delirious, laughing and mumbling. Maud could make out nothing of what he said.

  She sent Jessop for Dr Grayson, but two hours later Jessop returned without the doctor, who’d been detained in Carrbridge at a difficult confinement; he had sent a message that he would come as soon as he could. Daisy diagnosed pond fever and gave Father a mixture of calomel and spirits of hartshorn, which he promptly brought up. Maud took turns with Ivy and Daisy to sit with him. The doctor still didn’t come.

  At eight in the morning, after a few hours’ broken sleep, Maud dressed, went downstairs and rang for tea.

  The breakfast-room was cold, for the fire had only just been lit. As Maud sat yawning at the table, the bells of St Guthlaf’s began to toll. Unlike the joyous peals of midnight, they sounded slow and subdued. Someone must have died in the night. Maud counted nine peals. That meant it was a man. Had it been a woman, there would only have been six.

  A death on New Year’s Day, she thought blearily. That didn’t bode well for the coming year; the servants would be discussing this for weeks.

  Daisy rustled in with the tea. She looked grim but not grief-stricken; clearly the death hadn’t affected her personally. No doubt she already knew all about it, but she wouldn’t say a word unless Maud asked.

  There was silence while Maud sipped her tea and Daisy tended the fire.

  Finally, Maud relented. ‘So who died?’ she asked.

  With an air of importance, Daisy straightened up. ‘I allus said it’d happen sooner or later. Not to speak ill of the dead, but what’s he expect when he was allus drunk?’

  ‘Who was it?’

  Daisy replaced the poker in the stand and got to work with the bellows. ‘Jubal Rede,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘He went and fell in the Lode and drownded.’

  DR Grayson diagnosed a dangerous case of enteric fever and called in a special nurse from Cambridge. For the first eight weeks, Maud barely saw her father. When she did he was delirious.

  She told herself that he couldn’t have had anything to do with the drowning. It had to be coincidence that his coat-sleeves had been wet and that he’d smelled of the fen. Or perhaps he had found Jubal in the Lode and had tried to save him.

  But even if – even if one entertained the possibility that he had played some part in Jubal’s death – that still left the question of why? Jubal posed no threat to him. If Jubal had shouted Lily’s story from the rooftops, no one would have believed him. He wasn’t worth killing.

  All this churned endlessly in Maud’s head. One moment she was convinced it was impossible. The next, she circled back to her first appalling thought when Daisy had told her the news on New Year’s Day: Father did it. Father killed Jubal.

  Father was out of danger by the beginning of March, although still fearfully weak. Dr Grayson ordered two months’ bedrest at least.

  Surprisingly, Father seemed to enjoy this. He proved a model patient, and Nurse Lawson fell in love with him. She was a pretty, capable redhead who seeme
d not to care that within days she had antagonised the whole staff. Daisy hated her for fumigating Father’s rooms with burning pastilles. Cook hated her constant orders for milk pudding and mutton broth. Ivy hated her because she wouldn’t let her near Father. Nurse hated her for pointing out that as Quieting Syrup is a mixture of black treacle and opium, it is hardly advisable to give it to a four-year-old.

  Somehow, Maud kept the peace. She had been running the household before Father fell ill and she went on running it now. The only difference was that these days when she ran short of money, she asked the rector to help her obtain more from Father’s bank.

  This gave her an idea. For years she had typed Father’s business correspondence, so it was easy to imitate his style and signature. Now she typed two letters in his name: one to his attorney Mr Whittaker and one to Mr Davies the engineer. In them she ordered both to cease all activities concerned with draining the fen.

  To her delight they replied by return, acknowledging their client’s instructions with varying degrees of polite surprise. They also enclosed their notes of charges, which Maud hid at the back of her handkerchief drawer to deal with later.

  For now, she had saved the fen. If Father recovered, she would think up something else. If he died, then well and good. The fen would be safe for ever.

  March gave way to April. In a few weeks, Maud would be sixteen: the same age Maman had been when she’d married Father.

  Maud now felt that she was living two separate existences. The first was as mistress of Wake’s End, supervising the yearly spring-cleaning: the beating of rugs, the sweeping of chimneys, the replacing of sooty winter curtains with muslin ones for summer. In her second and parallel existence, her suspicions about Father were true and she was living with a killer.

  The gulf between these two existences was vast. There was no in-between. Either he was a murderer, or he was not.

  As Father remained in bed, Maud now spent part of her day in his room, reading The Times to him out loud.

  One afternoon she was reading a report about a boy who had drowned in the Thames. At the end she glanced up. ‘Did anyone ever tell you, Father, that the night you were taken ill, Jubal Rede fell in the Lode and drowned?’

  Without opening his eyes, he turned his head on the pillow. ‘Who?’

  ‘Jubal Rede.’

  He frowned. ‘Do I know him?’

  ‘He lived in the fen.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said without interest. ‘Well. No doubt he was inebriated.’

  ‘Yes. I daresay he was.’

  Soon afterwards, Maud muttered an excuse and left the room. She ran to the end of the passage and stood with her hands on the sill and her forehead against the windowpane. She was shaking. Jubal’s death had been an accident. Father had had nothing to do with it.

  In early April he was allowed downstairs for two hours a day on the drawing-room sofa.

  By now he had ceased to be a model patient. He was silent and morose, prone to savage outbursts if his egg was overcooked or his tea lukewarm. Sometimes he wanted Maud to read The Times from cover to cover, sometimes he said it was bosh and waved her away. Often he complained that Felix made too much noise in the grounds. Maud took to accompanying the child on his walks and bribed him to silence by letting him hold her dragonfly pendant.

  Throughout all this, Nurse Lawson remained her usual imperturbable self. She was pleased with Father’s progress; she said ill temper was a sign of recovery. Dr Grayson patted her cheek and agreed.

  With Father downstairs for a few hours a day, Maud finally had a chance to check his notebook in the dressing-room. She knew that he would have had little opportunity to write during his illness, so she wasn’t surprised to find that the last entry was still the one at Christmas, when he’d had ‘the most appalling idea’.

  She found that she no longer cared very much what that idea might have been. Father’s bizarre behaviour over Christmas – the stuffed bats, the salt – now seemed as unreal as a fairytale. Maud decided that at the time, he must already have been coming down with enteric fever.

  By the 1st of May, Father was strong enough to spend an hour a day in his study, on the strict understanding that he did no actual work, merely light reading. He was still morose and bad-tempered, and Maud continued to check his notebook. It remained untouched.

  One afternoon when she was pouring his tea, he said abruptly, ‘What did they do with the body?’

  She was so startled that she nearly dropped the teapot. ‘Whose body?’ she faltered.

  ‘That fellow who drowned. What did they do with him?’

  ‘He’s in the churchyard, Father. I believe the parish paid for the grave.’

  ‘Yes but where?’ he said brusquely.

  ‘The north side. I believe that’s where they buried him.’

  Maud had paid for Jubal’s funeral out of the housekeeping money. She had attended it too. Unlike Maman’s funeral, there was no one to tell her that she couldn’t because she was a girl. A distant cousin from Brandon had also been present, and Maud had paid him two guineas to find Jubal’s dog Nellie and take her home with him. The only other mourners had been Clem and his younger brother Ned. Maud had nodded to the lad and pretended to ignore Clem. It was the end of January. A year ago almost to the day, she had slipped on the church path and he had steadied her. Only a year.

  A week after the funeral, Maud had paid her respects to Jubal in her own way. Crossing the foot-bridge into the fen, she’d gone to his hut and set it on fire.

  She had said no words of farewell; he would have hated them. ‘Moonshine,’ she told the vast, empty sky.

  Father was making such good progress that Dr Grayson allowed him to look over his correspondence. Inevitably, the subject of draining the fen came up.

  ‘I wonder that Davies hasn’t yet begun,’ he said tetchily.

  ‘Do you, Father?’ replied Maud, who had prepared herself for this. ‘But you wrote and cancelled. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I? What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘I took dictation from you. Your instructions were very clear, and they both wrote acknowledging receipt. Shall I fetch their letters?’

  Irritably, he waved that away. ‘But how extraordinary. I have no recollection of that whatsoever.’

  A few days later, he dictated letters instructing Davies and Mr Whittaker to resume their work. Maud duly typed them and promised to have them posted, then burned them in her room. When next the matter arose, she would blame the postal service.

  It was very far from being a permanent solution, but it would keep the fen safe for now.

  One night in the middle of May there was a violent lightning storm. It brought down one of the elms in the avenue, and next morning the grounds were littered with fallen branches.

  Nurse Lawson told Maud that the patient had passed an exceedingly bad night. Despite that, Father insisted on getting up and spending his permitted hour alone in his study – where he promptly fainted.

  Ivy heard him fall, and she and Steers helped him upstairs. Lawson took charge while Maud observed from the doorway.

  ‘I’m perfectly fine,’ snapped Father. ‘A fit of giddiness, nothing more. Leave me alone!’

  Maud noticed an inkstain on his right thumb. Something clicked in her brain and suddenly she knew why he’d written nothing in his notebook since Christmas.

  Rushing downstairs on the pretext of sending for the doctor, she searched Father’s desk. Everything was in order. Whatever he’d been writing in before his collapse, he’d had time to put it away.

  Ivy had found him on the rug by the window that overlooked the church. Maud could find nothing there.

  Nothing except that ledger on top of the bookshelf. Stupid, stupid, she berated herself. Why didn’t you think of it before?

  The spine of the ledger was embossed with the word Accounts, exactly like all the other ledgers in the top shelf of the bookcase. Father bought them by the dozen and used them for recording his financ
ial affairs. It was the perfect hiding place: hidden in plain sight and safe from prying housemaids, because neither Daisy nor Ivy could read. Presumably Father didn’t think that Maud would dare intrude on his privacy. Or perhaps he thought she lacked the imagination.

  The first entry in the ledger was dated 24th December 1912, the week before Father fell ill. It began: ‘At last I know the truth. It is as I feared.’

  This was why he hadn’t anything written in his notebook. Because he’d started a new one.

  From the Private Notebook of Edmund Stearne – Vol. II

  Christmas Eve 1912, 8 p.m.

  At last I know the truth. It is as I feared.

  I realise now that it is not by chance that I have come by this knowledge on Christmas Eve. There is much of the infernal in this terrible affair, yet I also perceive the Hand of God. Years ago, He sparked my desire to find The Book of Alice Pyett. In June He caused Hibble to send me The Life of St Guthlaf ‘in error’. Now Pyett and The Life have led me to the truth in all its naked horror.

  This is why I’ve begun a new notebook: because, though I am assailed by terrors such as few men would have the strength to endure, I am also granted insights not vouchsafed to any but the chosen few. It is my duty to keep this record. I must set down the truth. My sufferings shall not be in vain.

  First, to relate how the idea came to me.

  It began with that passage in Pyett which states that her husband ‘paid twelvepence for a new candlebeam in Wakenhyrst Church, and threepence to the priest for certain prayers to be said over the carter who was possessed.’

  With female impulsiveness, Maud suggested that the candlebeam might have been the Doom; a conclusion I would soon have reached myself by more logical means. The timing fits. Jacobs dates the Doom to the 1490s, and though I despise the fellow, I can’t fault his scholarship. In the 1490s Pyett would have been in her forties, and her parish – this parish – was afflicted by the Devil.