The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (31 page)

He had found her attractive from the first time he saw her but not with the sort of physical hunger he had once felt for Mary Emmett. He had not wanted to kiss her when she held him; he was more anxious in case, even weary and cold, he would become aroused and she would notice. With Mary he had felt a consuming abandon, but he knew in part it had been driven by the knowledge that he was not her first lover. There was no sense in which she had been merely tolerating him, as his wife Louise had, bewildered and even repelled by his desire. Mary had wanted him just as urgently as he wanted her. He feared that if she came into the room now, he would still desire her as much as he had three years ago.

Frances was cooler, less easily known. He had sensed something about her that was untouched and perhaps untouchable. Her sudden emotional response had taken him completely by surprise. He knew Eleanor had seen two lonely people who would suit each other well, but could he settle for a companion rather than a lover? Would it be fair?

He drifted, his mind still veering away from the narrow passages underground in which he had believed he would die, and the extraordinary cavern with its unknown artists. Was what they depicted a truth of what had happened to them or something symbolic? One thing he was sure about. Although at some point in the last century someone had made the hatch that led to the cavern, once water was running through the sluices to the generator there was no way that Julian and Patrick’s mother could have entered her chapel by that route. Neither could Kitty’s body have been brought that way, across the flowing water, and the link to the vault in the church had undoubtedly been walled up long before her birth.

He must have slept because he found himself in cooling water. He pulled himself out of the bath and on to the cork mat. Even on a summer’s afternoon the north-facing bathroom was chilly. Instead of the glorious views of gardens and downs from the other side of the corridor, it looked over the stable yard, the workshop and the garages. Beyond lay the low roofs of the village. It wasn’t surprising that this side of the house had been laid out so that the kitchens were below, with only dressing rooms, cupboards and bathrooms on the upper floor.

He dried himself quickly, standing by the window, holding back the thin linen curtain, though the black-and-white tiles were cold beneath his feet. Outside, only Patrick’s car was parked across the yard. Laurence eased himself into his dressing gown and walked slowly back to his room.

Somebody—Frances, he had assumed—had turned back his bedspread. Although he couldn’t bring himself to get right under the covers, he lay down and pulled the bedspread over him. He fell into tumbled dreams: his father clipping his moustache, while his mother looked on, her face anxious, seeing every act of grooming as a sign of potential philandering. Then Mary was astride him, flushed and soft, but she turned into Louise. Suddenly he was climbing a rise but ahead of him were a band of Uhlan lancers. As he turned to retreat, they saw him and, with great whoops of joy, bore down on him, levelling their lances and bending low over their saddles. He knew these were dreams when Pollock appeared, grinning affably beside him, failing to see the danger, as Laurence struggled to escape the horsemen. As the first weapon whistled towards him, he stopped running and threw his arms wide.

His eyes opened and Frances was sitting by his bed. She smiled.

‘You’re restless,’ she said. ‘I brought you another cup of tea, but it’s almost cold. It seemed best to let you sleep.’

‘Thank you.’

He pulled himself up on to an elbow. He felt uncomfortable at the thought that she had been watching him as he dreamed of violence and lust.

‘Eleanor says you need a powder. It will relieve the pain in your back.’ Picking up a glass, she added water from his night jug and stirred it. The liquid turned cloudy. He drank it down, its taste bitter-sweet. ‘It’s aspirin,’ she said. ‘Lydia used to take it for her joints.’

‘Has the doctor been?’ he said. ‘How is she?’

‘David’s just taking him back,’ she said. ‘He saw Lydia—’ She stopped, as if overcome with weariness. ‘We’ve telephoned for Lydia’s London specialist who will be here by train tomorrow. We should have done it before.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Dr Smallwood thinks she may not have very long.’

‘Oh, Frances, I’m sorry.’

‘But you’re not surprised,’ she said. ‘None of us is in our hearts.’

‘Is Patrick all right?’

She smiled. ‘Yes. Smallwood says he must stay in bed for three days and have plenty of nourishing food. He doesn’t at all approve of Patrick’s adventures this afternoon and Eleanor clearly believes you led him on.’

Her face became more animated.

‘Dr Smallwood says that if Patrick looks after himself he could have a perfectly normal life. However, if he goes abroad and is exposed to heat and foreign germs and—especially, I think he felt—foreign doctors, he would be taking grave risks with his health. The same goes if he makes a habit of swimming in cisterns.’

She paused.

‘I don’t think Dr Smallwood holds with electricity. He was very relieved it was off. He told Julian studies had shown the deleterious effect of invisible electric discharges.’ She smiled a little. ‘The thing is that Patrick’s idea of a normal life is all the things the doctor advises against.’

‘Patrick’s impulsive,’ Laurence said. ‘That’s his charm. He’s a risk taker. But he knows he can’t work abroad any more.’

‘He does love Eleanor, though,’ she said. ‘He loves her enough that he’ll give her up. Go away somewhere, despite his health.’ Laurence wondered whether Patrick might feel differently, now he had found the extraordinary painted cave.

‘Well, anyway, William and Eleanor would always have gone back to London soon,’ he said. ‘They’ve got Nicholas to look after.’

‘And you’ll go to Italy?’ Her face was inscrutable.

‘Probably. I have another week to make up my mind.’ More and more he knew he
would
go. He would live with the della Scalas and see for himself how things were changing in Rome. The eternal city. The words excited him. Perhaps he would stay only a year. Perhaps Eleanor was right and Signor Mussolini was a tyrant—the British press didn’t seem to know what to make of him. Perhaps the country was becoming less safe, not better organised as Patrick believed. But he could see Italy, its great churches, its ruins, its art, its piazzas and fountains. Maybe travel to the lakes and the mountains.

She nodded. And Julian and I will stay with Lydia until...’ She didn’t sound unhappy, just matter-of-fact.

‘It must seem unfair,’ he said, ‘that she was born to ill health, when you are so strong.’

‘She wasn’t
born
to ill health,’ Frances said and stood up abruptly. ‘She was born healthy, and healthy she stayed until she came to Easton.’ Her expression was fierce. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not cross with
you’.

‘I misunderstood,’ he said. ‘Losing her child ... that might make anybody ill.’

‘Digby Easton made her ill,’ she said quietly and determinedly.

‘I imagine he was quite a difficult husband.’

He had known men who were courageous, full of life, popular, but who he knew would have made perfectly deplorable husbands. They were men’s men, happiest in the mess or their club or planning some kind of lark. He suspected his own father was such a man.

‘When I say made her ill, I mean it specifically. He made her perfectly happy, at least at first. But he gave Lydia...’ She stopped and turned her face towards the window. ‘A disease.’ She turned around, challenging him to look away.

He took a few seconds to process what she was saying. He thought back to scared soldiers and the MO’s stern lectures, the padre’s moralising, so wrapped up in metaphor that he doubted any man grasped that they were being advised not to prejudice the day of final judgment by consorting with French women. His first CO used to insist that magic-lantern slides of the Lake District or talks on Anthony Trollope would keep the men out of the brothels and free from venereal infection. Yet towards the end of the war, small boys in ruined towns would sidle up to straggling soldiers and offer them their sisters. Where there were soldiers there was disease. It had been so for hundreds of years. He found himself hesitating in case he’d misunderstood.

‘In France, in the army ... lots of men...’

‘Not in France. Not in the army. Not lots of men,’ she said. ‘This was years before. He infected her. And so for Lydia, after Kitty, no babies, or only sickly ones that died. And so her steadily deteriorating health and happiness. And as she became frailer, Digby became angrier—more desperate, maybe more guilty, who knows?—at his lack of a male heir. And he was really horrid to her sometimes.’

‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I never realised.’

She moved back to the chair by his bed. ‘It’s all right. Even Lydia never realised for years. Or if she did she wasn’t admitting it to herself. Or to anybody else. Julian still tries not to know.’

‘When did you find out?’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose only after her Harley Street doctor saw her last: eighteen months or so ago. I’d wondered if she’d got a cancer or some kind of consumption. I insisted on going with her; she was already too weak to go alone. The consultant veiled his comments but Eleanor explained it to me later—she’d suspected it from when she first arrived here last autumn. I wrote to him again two weeks ago, said I was the one who was caring for her. He said it appears she now has the terminal form of the illness. Her heart and other organs are damaged as well as the joints that have bothered her for years. Dr Smallwood says there’s slow bleeding into her brain.’

‘How long does she have?’

‘He wouldn’t commit himself. Maybe weeks, maybe a month or two, Eleanor says. She’s being a brick. When she leaves, we shall have to employ nurses.’ She looked more weary than distressed. ‘I had hoped we could avoid Lydia being looked after by strangers.’ Then she said quickly, ‘I suppose you think I’m surprisingly sanguine?’

She had almost read his mind. He did not reply.

‘Well, my heart breaks for her tragic, wasted life and it rails against the fact that she wouldn’t stop loving Digby. That very love was a disease.’ She shook her head. ‘All the excuses she made for him. That his father had bullied him. That mostly he was a good man. That it was only drink that turned him into a maniac. And of course she had nowhere else to go. So I’m glad she knows nothing now and that she’ll soon be at peace. And when she is, then I’ll be sad.’ Her voice wobbled.

He said nothing. Her hand had taken his early on but she seemed to have forgotten she had it. She gazed out of the window.

‘I don’t know whether it would have been better or worse if we’d found Kitty’s body,’ she said. ‘That’s what you and Patrick were doing, wasn’t it? Looking, still looking?’

He was surprised Patrick had obviously said nothing much about their ordeal, the cavern or what they’d found.

‘May I ask you something?’ he said.

She nodded. ‘About Kitty?’

‘I’m not sure.’

She raised an eyebrow.

‘Can you tell me how long it was until any help was sent for, after Kitty was found to be missing?’

She screwed up her eyes. ‘It’s a long time ago. I could be wrong. Everything was such chaos. Her nanny was half asleep, and her sister, Ellen Rivers, as she was then—one of the maids—was trying to comfort her, and Jane—that’s the nanny—kept wailing that she loved Kitty more than anything in the world. Digby was in Jane’s room, raging at her. But that’s when he suddenly said it. “Send for the police.” It was to frighten Jane, I think, as much as anything.’

Laurence let her think.

‘Half an hour?’ she said, hesitantly. ‘A bit longer? They’d already checked she wasn’t in obvious places in the house or in the immediate garden.’

‘And who went?’

‘Robert, Digby’s driver.’

He tried not to look over-interested.

‘Did you ever think the driver had something to do with it?’

‘No.’ She was too quick.

‘Yes. You obviously do. Is it possible?’

She sighed. ‘Would I like it to have been him? Because if it had to be an Easton person I liked him least? Yes, probably. But he almost never came into the house. He lived over the garages. Outdoor staff were never seen upstairs. I don’t think he was suspected any more than the rest of us. Less, probably.’

‘Right. But when it happened nobody was about that night anyway?’

He meant it as a statement but she looked away. He thought she had taken it as a question and one she didn’t want to answer.

But then she turned around and said, ‘Patrick was up—I saw him on the back stairs.’ She gave a small smile. ‘Looking more scared than murderous. And the corridor lights had been turned on.’

‘And Digby?’

‘He certainly wasn’t up. He was dead drunk.’ She looked uneasy. ‘Once he was in bed.’

‘What about Lydia?’

‘Digby had been perfectly foul to her all evening. Beastly. Teasing with a nasty edge. So Lydia went to bed early. She was pregnant again, although she hadn’t told Digby. He went up after her. Heaven knows what happened. There were odd movements in and out of rooms but then there often were. I went to see if Lydia was all right. Sometimes if Digby was very drunk, she’d sleep in her dressing room; occasionally she’d get in with Kitty. As long as he wasn’t likely to wake up and find her gone from his bed.’

Her look was one of resignation.

‘But Lydia wasn’t there. That’s when I saw the back of Patrick’s head at the top of the back stairs. He wasn’t looking my way, but along the servants’ corridor, so I tiptoed back to bed.’

‘You never thought that Patrick—’

‘Heavens, no. I thought Patrick was probably sneaking off to Jane Rivers’ room. She was a very pretty girl and she clearly liked Patrick, though I don’t think she would have welcomed him in her bedroom. Julian, who had rooms at the end down there, would have been furious. But I imagined that’s where he was off to.’

‘Furious?’

‘Well, jolly cross. He hated that kind of thing. His father...’ She waved her hand vaguely. ‘However hard his mother tried to employ plain girls, older women, Colonel Easton always treated them as if they were his property.’