‘Don’t you dare let down that rope,’ she said to Ivy as she flung the pail in the grass.
She was dimly aware of Billy bursting round the corner with two labourers.
As she walked past them towards the house, Father started to scream.
DEATH freezes everything. Whatever you did or didn’t do, whatever you said or left unsaid: none of that is ever going to change. You have no more chances to say sorry or make things right. No more chances for anything except regret.
If Maud had called Clem’s name a little louder when she was running towards the house, or if she’d searched the orchard instead of rushing inside, he would have been awake when Father came looking for him and he wouldn’t have died.
Maud taught herself to believe that he couldn’t have felt the ice-pick going in: that he’d simply fallen asleep under the apple tree and never woken up. But was that true? Or had the last thing he’d felt been a blaze of unimaginable pain?
She paid for his funeral out of the housekeeping. She attended it with Cole and put flowers on the grave. She never visited it again. Clem wasn’t there. He was out in the fen. That was where she’d been closest to him.
People were disconcerted by her silent, unblinking stare. They took it for lack of feeling and they were right. Inside, she was frozen. She couldn’t feel anything. She couldn’t understand that Clem was never coming back. She kept expecting to see him pushing his wheelbarrow about the grounds. She kept having to remind herself that he was gone.
The evening of the murder, the weather broke and Miss Broadstairs moved into Wake’s End. She stayed for three weeks, by which time a housekeeper and a governess had been retained.
Great-Uncle Bertrand had arrived two days after the killing. Maud liked him because he left her alone; unlike Miss Broadstairs, who expected her to be devastated and was shocked when she was not.
Great-Uncle Bertrand became trustee of the estate and guardian of ‘the children’. It struck Maud as bizarre that this term included herself, as her childhood felt impossibly remote. But Great-Uncle Bertrand was affable and worldly, and he readily agreed to cancel Father’s plans to drain the fen, which he considered a waste of money. So in that Maud succeeded. She couldn’t save Clem, but she saved the fen.
Great-Uncle Bertrand also protected Maud from the newspaper men and the day-trippers who came in char-à-bancs to peer over the hedge. But he couldn’t protect her from the police.
She answered their questions with as much truth as she thought appropriate, which meant that she made no mention of the demon or the Doom. Neither Dr Grayson nor the rector had believed her, so why should the police? They would think she was mad, and lock her up.
For days she lived in dread that Dr Grayson would reveal what she’d told him when she’d sought his help, but before they could question him, he had a stroke from which he never recovered. That was a weight off her mind.
She also worried that Mr Broadstairs might tell the police about the notebooks; but apparently he’d decided that that would be ungentlemanly. At any rate, he didn’t mention them at the trial; nor did anyone refer to Father’s odd behaviour in the months before the murder. Presumably no one cared to admit that they’d done nothing about it.
Father himself hardly spoke. He’d abruptly ceased his dreadful screaming on being hauled out of the well. ‘I did it,’ he declared. ‘But I did nothing wrong.’ That was all he ever said.
The notebooks were never found because, within minutes of the murder, Maud hid them. While Billy was going for the police and Ivy and the labourers were guarding Father, Maud slipped quietly into the house. There she wrapped both notebooks in oil-cloth and concealed them in her room, behind the wainscot where she’d hidden her viper skin when she was little.
She left Father’s translation of Alice Pyett on his desk. If it had gone missing it might have aroused suspicion; and Maud guessed (correctly, as it turned out) that the police would regard the life of a medieval mystic as irrelevant to their enquiries.
They would probably have thought the same thing about The Life of St Guthlaf, but Maud decided not to risk it. So The Life joined the notebooks behind the wainscot.
The governess, Miss Birch, was a brisk Scotswoman who to Maud’s intense relief was more interested in remedying the gaps in her education than in interrogating her feelings.
Miss Birch liked Maud because she knew her Bible, while Maud took pains to make herself agreeable, being well aware that she would be under the governess’s thumb until she was twenty-one. She also reasoned that if Miss Birch approved of her, she would tolerate the occasional instance of odd behaviour.
One such occurred on the day Father began his life sentence in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. While Miss Birch was talking to the housekeeper, Maud crossed the foot-bridge into the fen. On reaching the Mere, she took out her scissors and chopped off her hair, stuffed it in a pillowslip with a stone, and threw it into the water.
And that was the start of her long atonement for Clem.
Thereafter, Maud’s sole aim was to hide. She never visited Wakenhyrst again, and it was only to propitiate Miss Birch that she attended church once a week.
Great-Uncle Bertrand sensibly abandoned his idea of taking her to Brussels. He took Richard and Felix and left Maud with Miss Birch and a small staff comprising Mrs Entwhistle the new housekeeper, Cook, Ivy, Jessop, and Jessop’s brother Daniel, who saw to the grounds now that Cole had retired. At Maud’s request, Daisy, who since the murder had had fits of hysteria, was pensioned off. Maud also arranged for Clem’s brother Ned to fulfil his desire of joining the Navy. And she had Daniel plant ivy all around the house.
The Great War went almost unnoticed, except that Miss Birch saw that Wake’s End did its duty by allowing Jessop and his brother to enlist and be slaughtered at Ypres. Ivy had married Daniel Jessop a few months before. She was pleased with her war widow’s pension, and black suited her, although she was beginning to grow rather stout.
Maud’s one complaint about Miss Birch was that she conceived it her duty to keep her informed about Father. He had a private room in Broadmoor’s Block Two, which housed the better sort of patient (Miss Birch never called them prisoners). His doctors had diagnosed ‘homicidal monomania with delusions’, and treated him with ice-baths and rhubarb laxatives. To these Father objected violently; but a year into his sentence he asked for painting materials and a magnifying glass, and once he was given them he became a model patient, so the doctors left him alone.
Public interest in the art of the insane had been aroused by Bethlehem Hospital’s exhibition of Work by Mad Artists, which featured paintings by, among others, Richard Dadd; but Father only started painting in 1915, and by that time interest had waned. He spent the rest of his life working on his canvases, which his physicians viewed as clinically irrelevant. His only other expenses were claret and sweets, his favourites being barley sugar and acid drops. Miss Birch told Maud all this until she perceived how much her charge hated it, whereupon she stopped.
Her attempts to educate her charge met with more success. Maud liked history, literature and nature studies, which she used as a pretext for daily walks in the fen; a habit she continued all her life. For the sake of good relations, she tolerated Scripture and never revealed her lack of belief. She loathed geography. All those countries. All those people who knew about the murder. It confirmed her conviction that she must never leave Wake’s End.
Her education proved a welcome distraction, but the most vital lesson was the one she taught herself on the day the trial ended. She taught herself never to think about Father.
She put him in a corner of her mind and slammed the door.
On Maud’s twenty-first birthday, she came into a small annuity from Maman. She parted with Miss Birch on good terms, grateful to the governess for not having tried to be her friend.
Three years later, Richard attained majority and inherited the estate. Having taken rooms in London, he’d contrived to live down Father’s notoriety
. He never returned to Wake’s End, and agreed to let Maud live there if she did so at her own expense. She dismissed Mrs Entwhistle and Cook and retained a skeleton staff comprising Billy, a girl from the village, and Ivy.
She would have loved to have dismissed Ivy too, but that was impossible. They were bound together by lies.
Ivy had been outraged by Clem’s murder. ‘Now I got nothing!’ she spat. ‘Well not if I can help it, I’ll tell em you pushed the Master down the well. I’ll tell about the eels.’
‘I’ll tell them you left Felix on his own to go to the Fair,’ retorted Maud.
‘I’ll tell about you and Clem.’
‘I’ll tell them myself.’
‘Not about Clem you wun’t, you’re too ashamed!’
She was right. Maud couldn’t transcend her class. People of her sort did not fall in love with under-gardeners. So in the end, Ivy told the police that Maud had volunteered to watch Felix, while Maud corroborated this in return for Ivy’s silence.
Maud never discovered how Ivy had found out about her and Clem. All she knew was that Ivy was enraged that he’d preferred Maud. And since Ivy believed that the Master had killed him to stop him ‘carrying on’ with his daughter, she blamed Maud for everything. In Ivy’s mind, Maud had deprived her of the husband who would have made her respectable and of the Master who would have kept her in luxury. ‘You owe me a living,’ she said succinctly.
Maud found it hard to disagree.
During Maud’s thirties, she thawed a little. She had Billy drive her to Ely, and wore a thick veil as a disguise. She ventured further afield to Peterborough and Cambridge.
Then in 1939 Father ended years of impeccable conduct by strangling an orderly. No one ever found out why. Maud retreated into her shell. She reduced her book-buying sorties to once a year. She barely noticed the outbreak of war.
The doctors tried in vain to control Father’s increasingly erratic moods, and in 1941 they sought the family’s consent to a new treatment. Transorbital leucotomy, or lobotomy, involved introducing an ice-pick under the eyelid, breaking the eye-socket with a hammer, and severing parts of the frontal lobes. In 1941 there was no more reason to believe that this would work than there had been in the fifteenth century, but all three of Father’s progeny gave their consent: Richard and Felix after some hesitation, Maud with none at all. The lobotomy was a failure, and Father died six months later. He was sixty-nine.
The asylum wrote to Maud enquiring what should be done with the paintings at which he had laboured for twenty-six years. It was the first she’d heard of them. By this time Felix was dead, so with Richard’s agreement she told the asylum to sell them, which it did for a nominal sum to the Stanhope Institute of Psychiatric History.
As with the Great War, so the Second World War passed almost unnoticed at Wake’s End – except when Felix was shot down over Crete. He died without ever knowing that Maud had saved his life. It would only have embarrassed him, and they’d never been close. Richard died of oesophageal cancer in 1953, and as he had no children, Maud inherited Wake’s End.
Richard and his wife Tabby had squandered most of the Trust, but Maud didn’t care. The pattern of her life had been set. She had no need for gas or electricity, and she grew her own fruit and vegetables. Apart from her yearly visit to Hibble’s, she ordered her books via the post from a shop in the Charing Cross Road.
Like the magic thicket in the fairytale, the hedge that protected Wake’s End grew ever higher, and behind it, Maud continued to hide.
For decades the world forgot about the murder. Then in 1965 an art historian named Dr Robin Hunter found three dusty paintings in a tea chest, and an unscrupulous journalist named Patrick Rippon concocted a story about witches.
And suddenly everyone wanted to solve the mystery of Edmund Stearne.
1967
‘AND the rest you know,’ said Maud Stearne in her cut-glass accent. ‘Now, Dr Hunter. D’you think this will raise enough money for my new roof?’
Robin held her breath. ‘Does that mean you’ve decided to publish?’
‘I’ve no idea what I shall do. I find the thought of everyone knowing quite intolerable. However, I need money. I don’t intend to let this house fall down around my ears and I won’t see the fen given over to pigs.’
Her narrative lay on the footstool between them, on top of her father’s notebooks. Despite Robin’s entreaties not to entrust anything to the Royal Mail, Maud – as Robin privately thought of her – had insisted on posting the typescript to her in instalments, along with the notebooks at judicious intervals. Robin had sat up until three in the morning, reading the final pages. Today she’d brought everything back to Wake’s End.
To keep the typescript together, she’d put it in a lever-arch file. As she watched Maud lean forwards and turn the file face down, she realised her blunder. The file’s cover bore the famous detail from Painting No. 2. The face that had been leering up at them was that of the devil in the Doom.
Robin was mortified. ‘Miss Stearne, I am so sorry.’
‘It’s of no consequence,’ Maud replied stiffly.
They were sitting in armchairs on either side of the library fire. Robin had dressed with care, swapping the infamous white vinyl boots for sober brown ones, and her mini-skirt for a midi. Maud wore the same shapeless slacks and twin-set as before.
Today was only the second time that Robin had seen her. At their first meeting back in November, Maud had been icily defensive. Four months later, she was worse: brusque, suspicious, haughty and frightened. Her fists were clenched in her lap and her deep-set eyes avoided Robin’s, gazing into the distance and moving restlessly from side to side.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. The silence lengthened.
Robin cleared her throat. ‘There may be a way for you not to publish at all – but still make enough money for your new roof. You could sell Wake’s End to the National Trust. On condition, of course, that you’d go on living here for the rest of your life. That way, your house and the fen would be safe for ever.’
Maud blinked. ‘What is the National Trust?’
‘Um – it’s a charity that looks after places for the nation. Stately homes, nature reserves, that kind of thing.’
Maud grabbed a poker and attacked the coals. ‘Good Heavens. But would they – it – really pay that much?’
‘For the ancestral home of Edmund Stearne and one of the last stretches of undrained fen? Oh, yes, I think they would.’
‘Good Heavens. Then I wouldn’t have to “sell my story” to anyone.’
‘Quite. You could do what you like with the typescript. You could tell Hollywood to get lost.’
Maud barked a mirthless laugh. ‘My sister-in-law would be incandescent. It would be worth it simply for that.’
Robin nodded unhappily. ‘Naturally, I’d much prefer it if you did publish. I’d love to work with you, Miss Stearne. I mean, on the editing and so on.’
‘Naturally,’ Maud said drily. ‘So why did you suggest this – National Trust? Surely enabling me not to publish goes against your own interests as an historian?’
‘You can say that again,’ said Robin. ‘It’s just – well. I can see how much the idea of publishing upsets you.’
Maud looked startled.
‘So what do you want to do?’ said Robin.
‘I don’t know,’ snapped Maud.
Cook lumbered in and they waited while she gathered the tea things. Watching her waddle out again, Robin tried and failed to see traces of Ivy the beautiful housemaid under all that fat.
There was another silence after she’d gone. Robin wondered how she was going to persuade Maud to answer her questions, and admit what she’d left out of her narrative, and agree to publish.
‘At the end of your account,’ she began carefully, ‘you mention “atonement”. But I don’t understand why you blame yourself. Surely what happened was mostly just chance?’
‘Ah yes, chance,’ Maud said acidly. ‘If it ha
dn’t rained that night in 1911, Father wouldn’t have seen the eye in the grass and the Doom would have gone up in smoke. Oddly enough, that has occurred to me over the last fifty-four years.’
Robin felt herself flush. ‘And if Hibble’s assistant hadn’t made a mistake – if he hadn’t included The Life of St Guthlaf in that parcel of books – your father would never have got the idea that there’d been an exorcism in Pyett’s time.’
Maud turned her head and stared out of the window. ‘One could go back a good deal further than that. If my grandmamma hadn’t given Father a book of Greek myths when he was a boy, he wouldn’t have taken it into his head to play Perseus and Andromeda with Lily. All this I know, Dr Hunter. What happened was still my fault.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I didn’t prevent it.’
‘Is that the only reason?’
Maud’s gaze remained fixed on the window. ‘Dr Hunter, you are living up to your name. You’re making me feel like a cornered beast.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Robin studied Maud’s profile. A harsh, bony face; but age had brought out its resilience and strength. ‘There’s something else I don’t understand,’ Robin ventured. ‘You didn’t show the notebooks to the police. But then why keep them at all?’
‘Because of Lily,’ Maud said impatiently. ‘And Jubal. Surely you’ve grasped that without the notebooks, there’d be no proof of what really happened to them?’ She shifted in her chair. ‘Lily died a dreadful, lonely death. She doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.’
‘Is she the figure at the heart of the paintings?’
‘She was ten years old and he painted her as a grown woman. That was unforgivable.’
‘Why do you think he did that?’
‘To make her easier to blame, I should imagine. Somewhere in the ledger he says it was her fault. That’s what he did all his life: it was Lily’s fault, or the demon’s. Never his own.’
Wakenhyrst Page 24
