‘Perhaps he couldn’t bear the truth.’
Maud twisted her hands in her lap. ‘He was the devil in the corner. He left Lily to drown. That was what he could never bring himself to face.’
‘So he ended up painting devils.’
‘“My name is Legion”,’ quoted Maud.
Robin thought about that. ‘That bit in his medical records: “He is terrified of the tiny beings he feels compelled to paint, and yet he seems quite unable to desist.”’ She paused. ‘He went on doing that for twenty-six years.’
They were silent. Robin wondered if Maud was thinking of the paintings. That swirling vortex of demons with the diminutive woman at its heart: a grown-up Lily in a long black dress, her fair hair hanging loose.
‘Which reminds me,’ Maud said abruptly. She rose and fetched an envelope from her desk. ‘I’d forgotten this. It’s from the physician in Broadmoor. He wrote to me after Father died, but I never read it attentively until this morning. I thought you might care to hear what he says towards the end.’
Putting on her spectacles, she read aloud in her clipped accent: ‘“One day I overheard him” – he means Father – “muttering to himself while he was painting. ‘You must paint them down fast,’ he kept repeating under his breath. ‘Fast, before they get away. Paint them down thick, thick, so they can never get out.’”’
Taking off her spectacles, Maud pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘The doctor never thought to mention that in his case notes. Which is why the odious Mr Rippon never came across it.’
Robin’s mind was racing. ‘That’s why your father filled his canvases with devils. They were all around him. Always.’
‘Yes,’ said Maud. ‘He was trying to trap them. One might almost say that he was creating his own Doom.’
‘So the typescript,’ said Robin in her quiet, inexorable way. ‘What would you like to do with it?’
‘I told you, I’ve no idea!’ Maud scowled at the file on the footstool. She had turned it over again, for she was finding ‘The Three Familiars’ oddly fascinating. The creature known as ‘Air’ had a nebulous beauty, marred by a scar that twisted one eye savagely out of shape. ‘Water’ was androgynous, its features impossibly slanted, as if distorted by unseen forces emanating from the grown-up Lily at the painting’s heart. And then there was ‘Earth’, with his grin and his lascivious wink.
Sitting back, Maud squared her shoulders. That file contained her life. Well, more or less. She wondered if Dr Hunter – Robin, as she was beginning to think of her – had any notion of what had been left out.
Beneath the file lay Father’s notebooks. Robin had carefully re-inserted the page which Maud had torn from Father’s notebook and sent to her last year. It was the sketch of a magpie: crouching, its head lowered as if it was just about to fly off. Father had caught the bird’s wariness with breath-taking skill. He’d even drawn the scar down one leg which Chatterpie had acquired on the day when she’d rescued him from the well.
It still hurt to remember. I am nearly seventy years old, thought Maud. And yet inside I’m only sixteen.
Suddenly she couldn’t breathe. ‘Come along, let’s walk. Can’t stay cooped up inside all day.’
It was a bright, freezing February afternoon and the fen was at its wintry best, glittering with frost beneath a limitless sky of dazzling blue. Maud took the path at her usual lope, leaving Robin to keep up. No birds. The geese were off foraging in the fields, and Maud had seen no sign of the starlings for days.
She realised that she was twisting her hands. She’d been doing that a lot, and her eczema was worse. Writing her account had forced her to re-live everything: the grief, the guilt. Especially the guilt.
‘You know,’ panted Robin behind her, ‘I do understand why you blame yourself.’
‘No you don’t,’ snapped Maud over her shoulder.
‘Actually, I do.’ Robin halted. When she didn’t move, Maud felt compelled to halt too.
Dr Hunter wasn’t pretty, but she had the cast of features that Maud would have wanted for herself: narrow and vulpine, like a female Voltaire. It was an agreeable face, and Maud admired the girl’s red hair against the frost-spangled reeds. She envied Dr Hunter, who was clever and self-possessed, and who – while belonging to a class decidedly below Maud’s own – had achieved everything she had not: a university degree, an occupation. Freedom.
‘You told me you didn’t show the notebooks to the police because they wouldn’t have believed you,’ said Robin with gentle persistence. ‘But there was more to it than that. If they’d seen the notebooks, they would have found out about The Life of St Guthlaf.’
Maud looked at her.
‘They would have known that it was The Life which sparked your father’s ideas about exorcism and made him think there was a devil behind the Doom. They might also have found out the truth about why Hibble’s sent it. You see,’ Robin added apologetically, ‘Hibble’s still have all their records. It didn’t take long to find the entry for the twenty-fourth of June 1912. That’s the day when you and Clem went to Ely—’
‘I remember the date,’ cut in Maud.
‘And you’ll be aware that Hibble’s assistant didn’t include The Life in your father’s parcel by mistake.’ She paused. ‘They showed me the record. I had them photostat the page. “The Life of St Guthlaf, 2 shillings and sixpence: to Miss Maud Stearne.”’ She bit her lip. ‘You bought it. You planted it among your father’s books for him to find.’
Maud turned and stared at the ice on the Lode. ‘I didn’t even read it,’ she said. ‘I flicked through and saw something about demons and a magpie. Good, I thought. That’ll scare him. I wanted vengeance for Chatterpie.’ She paused. ‘I never even saw that passage about trapping the demon in the flask. I never imagined it would make him think there was a real devil trapped behind the Doom.’
‘No one could have foreseen that. And even if you hadn’t planted that book, he’d probably have got the idea from somewhere else.’
‘You don’t know that. All you know is what happened. And that was my fault.’
‘You were a child. You can’t go on blaming yourself for what you did then. Besides, you saved Felix. You saved the fen.’
Maud nodded wearily. ‘Yes. But I couldn’t save Clem.’
They reached the Mere. It had snowed in the night and the ice was netted with the tracks of wild creatures. Maud felt tired, but oddly at peace. ‘I’m glad that you know,’ she told Robin. ‘It’s a relief.’
The younger woman stood hunched in her duffle coat with her chin buried in her scarf. ‘Did your father never suspect that you planted The Life?’
Maud snorted a laugh. ‘Heavens no, it never occurred to him. I am devoid of imagination, remember?’
‘Ah.’ Robin frowned. ‘Forgive me for asking, but do you still hate him?’
Maud considered that. ‘Writing it all down has been a trial. At times I’ve hated it. But I no longer hate him. I think I feel sorry for him.’ With her eyes she followed the trail of a fox. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘on quiet nights, I fancy I can hear her crying.’
‘You mean Lily?’
Raising her head, Maud squinted at the sky. ‘I’ve decided to publish.’
Robin audibly gasped. ‘Do you mean that?’
‘I said it, didn’t I?’
‘What made you decide?’
‘Lily. I want people to know the truth.’
THE following year, on a misty October evening, Maud apologised to Schubert and turned off the wireless in her bedroom.
Picking up Robin’s postcard with its picture of dancing cranes, she re-read the message on the back, which made her smile. Then she replaced it on the windowsill between the lump of bog oak propping up the sash and the porcelain wing she’d stolen from a Brussels graveyard sixty-two years before.
In the sky above the Mere she made out a wavering blur, and her spirits rose as they always did when she saw the starlings. Cold air drifted in from the fen, dispelling the lin
gering smell of paint. Despite Robin’s best efforts, Maud had insisted on keeping her old mahogany furniture, but she had consented to have her room re-painted. The brown stains on the ceiling were gone. In the morning as she lay in bed, she enjoyed gazing up at the pristine white distemper.
The sale of Wake’s End to the National Trust had finally gone through and the estate’s future (and hers) was secure. Every day when she set off for her walk, she admired her new roof. It looked a trifle stark without the softening effect of lichen and houseleek, but that would come in time.
‘All in good time,’ she would tell Robin as she batted away the young woman’s latest suggestion: central heating, learning to drive, a telephone, a dog. ‘I’m enjoying the peace now that the roofers have gone.’
They both knew that what she really meant was Ivy. Maud’s book had been published at the end of last year, but she had sent Ivy packing months before. Once the truth was known, Ivy’s hold on her was over. With indescribable relief, Maud had watched that great smouldering lump of resentment clamber into a taxi and disappear.
And yet it wasn’t only relief that Maud had felt. It was shame. How was it Ivy’s fault that she was what she was? In all her life she’d never been out of Suffolk. She would have said that she didn’t want to thank you very much; but she’d never been taught any different. From childhood she’d had to fight to get enough food, while fending off the groping attentions of men. Later she had used her good looks to get what she wanted. She and Maud had both had to fight to survive. Ivy had used sex, Maud had used her brain. Why could they not have found some common ground?
Too late for that now. According to Robin, Ivy was in Bury, blighting the existence of one of her many relations. She was also ‘in talks’ with Patrick Rippon about a memoir of her life at Wake’s End.
Well, let her do her worst. Astonishing how the truth really did set one free.
Besides, not even Ivy knew the whole truth.
‘Why don’t you change your mind and come with me to Tokyo?’ Robin had said on her last visit. ‘They wouldn’t expect you to speak at the conference, but they’d be over the moon if you came.’
‘All in good time, Professor,’ Maud had said, and Robin had laughed.
That had been one of their most agreeable evenings. Maria the new cook-housekeeper had surpassed herself for supper, and the weather had been warm enough for them to eat on the library terrace.
Robin had been amusing about her tribulations as ‘historical adviser’ on the forthcoming film. ‘Be warned, they’ve ignored everything I said. It won’t bear any relation to the truth.’
‘I should hope not,’ Maud had replied.
Apparently, the cinematic version of herself was to be played by a stunningly beautiful actress rendered ‘Hollywood plain’ by a plastic nose; already there was talk of an Oscar. To appeal to the American market, Maman had become an heiress from New York, and there was some kind of ancillary plot about witches, with ‘flash-backs’ to Salem. The writers had added a happy ending in which Maud married Mr Broadstairs’ handsome nephew. They’d also given the whole story an unequivocally Christian message. ‘You may be sure,’ intoned the rector in his rousing final speech, ‘that it was not by chance that Edmund Stearne discovered the Doom in the churchyard – it was by the Hand of God. For God shows us devils in order to make us believe in angels.’
Robin thought this was hilarious. Maud didn’t find it quite so amusing. This she did her best to conceal, but the ever-observant Robin noticed and was contrite. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, touching Maud’s shoulder. ‘I shouldn’t have made light of it.’
‘Why ever not? I shan’t go and see the wretched thing. Now make yourself useful and pour some more wine.’
It was a beautiful evening. The last of the sun gilded the long grass in the orchard, where blue tits squabbled at the bird-feeders hanging from the well. A magpie swooped from the roof and strutted about the lawn. Maud thought of Clem’s slow, shy smile when she’d questioned him about Chatterpie’s perch.
‘One thing still bothers me,’ Robin said quietly.
Maud sighed. ‘I thought I’d heard the last of remarks like that.’
Robin smiled, but her face wore her determined look. ‘Waterweed,’ she said.
‘What about it?’
‘The waterweed on your father’s windowsill. And on his pillow. You’ve always said that’s the one thing you can’t explain.’
‘Well, I can’t,’ Maud said evenly.
Robin turned her wine glass in her fingers. ‘Your father believed there was something in the fen. Do you?’
‘My dear Robin. I was frightened and alone and I’d lived for months with a monomaniac. It would have been odd if I hadn’t believed there was something in the fen. That doesn’t make it real.’
‘So how do you explain the waterweed?’
Maud paused. ‘I don’t.’
Robin nodded slowly. ‘It’s just that I’ve often wondered… Why do you always keep your bedroom window open?’
Maud took another sip of wine, then calmly met her eyes. ‘I like fresh air. Let’s leave it at that.’
‘They don’t need to know everything,’ Maud told herself as she ran her hand over the lump of bog oak propping open the sash. She had found it by the Mere on that dead, windless afternoon in October 1912, just after Father had decided to drain the fen.
In her typescript and in her book, Maud had written that as her courses had come unexpectedly that day, she had squatted by the Mere and rinsed the blood off her hands. That wasn’t true. Her courses hadn’t come for the past three months. It wasn’t menstrual blood she had washed off her fingers. It was from the pathetic lump of flesh which had been her child and Clem’s.
Their daughter, as she liked to think of it; although thanks to Biddy Thrussel’s herbs, one couldn’t really tell. Maud had wrapped it in a pillowslip and committed it to the Mere. Shortly afterwards, Jubal had found her there and told her about Lily.
‘Of course I keep my window open,’ said Maud, giving the bog oak a little pat. ‘How could I ever shut her out?’
Above the Mere, the starlings were gathering. From her window, Maud watched more birds flying up from the reeds to join the great dark cloud that swept and wavered over the fen.
‘Dear Maud,’ Robin had written on her postcard. ‘The conference is fun & despite appalling jet-lag I’m enjoying the enthusiasm for your father’s work – but I wish you were here! I thought you’d like this picture of cranes. As you probably know, in Japan the crane is a symbol of love & fidelity because they mate for life & dance in pairs. But I’m told – & this made me think of you – that sometimes, for reasons no one understands, a single crane dances alone.’
With a last glance at her postcard, Maud headed downstairs to begin her walk. It was time to be out in the fen with the starlings, and to feel the rush of their wings, as if she were flying.
Author’s Note
Like Maud, I saw my first murmuration of starlings when I was alone in a Suffolk marsh one autumn evening. It began with a few birds skimming the reeds as they rushed past, and I stood transfixed as the murmuration grew and grew.
That was in early November 2015, and I was in Westwood Marshes near the coastal village of Walberswick, on the other side of Suffolk from where I eventually sited Wake’s End. I’d been thinking about writing a gothic story set in the fens for some time, but I’d never had a strong enough idea – until a few weeks before I saw those starlings, when three had come along in a matter of days.
One idea came when I’d picked up a battered copy of The Book of Margery Kempe in Oxfam. I’d never heard of the fifteenth-century mystic, and her writing struck me as bizarre, narcissistic and oddly pitiable. Her voice brought the times she lived in vividly to life.
Another idea was sparked by Carl Watkins’ marvellous book The Undiscovered Country about beliefs on death in the Middle Ages. In it I read the astonishing story of the Wenhaston Doom, a medieval painting of the Last Judgem
ent which was whitewashed by the Puritans, then nearly chucked on a bonfire by the Victorians when they were renovating the church in 1892.
Finally and also by chance, my mother and I visited an exhibition of the paintings of Richard Dadd at the Watts Gallery near Guildford. As you may know, Dadd was a Victorian artist who murdered his father with an axe, and spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor, where he devoted years to painting obsessively detailed canvases of tiny, otherworldly creatures. As my mother and I stood before one particularly seething painting, we speculated about the feelings that might have prompted Dadd to create it. ‘Fear,’ suggested my mother. That interested me: the idea of a man being terrified of what he created, but unable to stop. On the train home I jotted a few notes: ‘He’s scared of what he paints… Does he believe they’re real … Any link with Wenhaston Doom?’
I made up Wakenhyrst and its Doom, as well as Wake’s End, Guthlaf’s Fen, St Guthlaf’s Church and the family of Edmund Stearne. But all of them are anchored in reality.
Guthlaf’s Fen is based on my visits to marshes and fens over the years both before and during the writing of Wakenhyrst, including Wicken Fen, Dunwich and Walberswick Marshes, Rainham Marshes and others. Similarly, the hamlet of Wakenhyrst and St Guthlaf’s Church are based on the many English villages and medieval churches I’ve visited over the years. One of the great pleasures of an English country walk is diving into the nearest old church, and deciphering the tombstones in the graveyard. You never know what you’re going to find.
The Wakenhyrst Doom is of course based on the Wenhaston Doom, which I visited during the same trip when I saw the starlings. The church was open but empty at the time, and I spent a peaceful hour sitting unnervingly close to the Doom’s giant green Satan with his enormous bat wings and ragged knee-breeches.
The Life of St Guthlaf is based on the life of the Anglo-Saxon saint Guthlac of Crowland, who was either a saint, or merely a delusional young man afflicted by malaria, home-made opium and loneliness. It depends on what you choose to believe.
Wakenhyrst Page 25
