The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (44 page)

Bert Kilminster challenged Digby. He was the NCO. And he’d promised the boy’s mother he’d look after him. And it was a stupid decision to send Peter. One stupid decision after another. He’d be a sitting duck in the early light.

As Kilminster turned away without waiting to be dismissed, Digby said, ‘The boy’s a blubbering nancy. We don’t need him.’

Kilminster had hit him then and knocked him flat in one smooth movement, Digby lay on the ground, rubbing his bleeding nose and looking amused. He’d drawn his pistol.

‘Striking a superior officer,’ he said, mockingly. ‘You’re a dead man, Kilminster.’

He was pointing it very carefully. The men had stood, frozen, as if frightened Digby would point it at them next, their eyes all averted from Kilminster.

Digby was on his feet, brushing off the dirt.

‘So off you both go. Take the lad with you if his mama wants him tucked under your wing.’

‘Please.’ Now Digby’s head had turned minutely towards him. ‘Water,’ he mouthed.

Eventually Julian felt clumsily for his canteen, unscrewed it and shook it gently. It was part full. He held it towards Digby, let the water trickle into his brother’s mouth, down his chin and into the earth. Digby’s dark tongue moved across rough lips. He seemed to be trying to focus.

‘You killed Kilminster,’ Julian said.

Silence. Then, ‘Jerry killed him.’

‘And Peter. He was only a boy. He shouldn’t even have been here.’

Digby’s lips moved but at first no sound came out.

‘Not a dame school.’

The body was trembling.

‘Shoot,’ he pleaded.

‘I can’t.’ Julian looked away into the mist.

‘I had Petch’s wife,’ Digby said. ‘So bored by Easton. The girl—plain one—mine. Turned Mrs Petch into a whore. But ... punished.’

There must have been silence because Julian could hear distant firing and the next time he thought much about Digby it had got much colder and Julian’s neck was sticky with blood as he lifted his head.

‘And Lydia. Father said ... must show them ... who rules the roost.’ Digby coughed. ‘You—now you would have cherished her, wouldn’t you? Soft old thing?’ He choked on something and panted a few times, his face screwed up in pain. ‘Always so ... good. Lydia always so damn ... good. Forgave ... everything. I wanted ... to love.’

The eye steadied.

‘Not going to do it? Jules?’ Digby paused between each word. ‘Never quite able to take the shot—not with the ladies, not in the field. But never ... a bastard.’

His voice faded.

‘The nanny ... just ... bit of fun. Got out of hand.’

He coughed again and seemed to be struggling. His head moved from side to side.

‘Prim little thing.’ A strange vibrating noise in Digby’s chest. ‘I’m fucking, she’s praying.’

Now Digby was having trouble drawing breath at all. He could see a small wince of pain punctuating each tiny, shallow inhalation.

‘God hated me. Why Kitty? ... Such terrible ... punish
—’

The eye was fixed on him. Such beautiful blue eyes, the one pupil tiny
now. A tremor passed through Digby’s body—and the thing sticking out of the mess of blood and slime quivered like a flag on a child’s sandcastle in the wind.

Digby was scarcely more than mouthing words and at first Julian thought they had become meaningless but as he bent closer he heard it.
‘Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata ...’

It was decades since they had heard those words as they brought their mother, demented and muttering and filthy, out of the vault.

Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

He picked up Digby’s remaining hand and held it, icy, in his own, trying to see beyond the mess of Digby’s body and mind. He remembered Digby diving into the lake, white and strong. Digby teaching Julian to shoot crows or lying next to him at dusk to watch badgers. Digby and Patrick, dirty and excited as they dug for treasure. And then, pushed away for so long, Digby’s face, full of surprise and joy as he turned to see Lydia come up the aisle. He remembered Digby before it all went wrong and the madness seemed to take hold of him.

‘I can’t do it,’ Julian intended to say but his jaw wouldn’t work. ‘Don’t ask.’ But still the words were there in his head.

He thought he heard something move behind him; he smelled something fusty and damp. The iced fingers moved minutely in his. Digby’s face contorted and then he realised it was meant to be a smile.

Julian had not even picked up his gun but a great red eye had opened in Digby’s forehead. Digby’s mouth was ajar.

He gazed down at the ruin of a man. His ears were still ringing with the shot: one great explosion ricocheting around his brain. He felt lightheaded and chilly. He blinked two or three times, swallowed a thick bolus of blood.

From beyond Digby’s body, two soldiers appeared, drawn by the shot, perhaps. It took Julian a minute to see that they were Germans. One sighted down his rifle while Julian was still considering how easily Digby
had been silenced in the end. There was a crack and the first soldier’s arms went up and he collapsed almost soundlessly. The second clutched his chest and fell backwards. Julian blinked. A voice from behind him said, ‘You’re bleeding. We need to get in the cover of the trees.’

‘He was my brother,’ he tried to say. ‘I couldn’t do it.’

‘Yes.’ The voice was odd, slightly muffled. ‘But it’s all right now.’

The green man stood behind him in his cloak. As a boy Julian had looked for him all over Savernake Forest: on horseback, on foot, at dawn and at dusk, and he had never found him. Sometimes he had caught a movement out of the corner of his eye; sometimes he had heard something moving purposefully in the deepest undergrowth, but the green man never showed himself. He just waited, season after season, year after year, century after century. And yet now he had found Julian and was taking him away from danger, from Digby who had been so terribly changed, from death, who would be returning for him soon.

‘Did you kill Digby for me?’

There was a singing in his ears and blurred circles broke up the landscape of the dead. He thought the green man nodded but it might have been a breeze in his leaves.

‘You’ve come a long way,’ he thought he said to the creature whose black eyes shone in a face of brown bark. He wanted to reach up like a child and touch the greenery that sprouted from his gigantic head and shoulders, feel the folds of his cape. The green man was like a young woodland oak tree or a willow from the river; in his hand he carried a leafy staff. He wanted to go with him but his knees gave way and the green man enfolded him, lifting him to his feet and supporting him round the waist. The day roared and went dark.

He was being handed some cloth. ‘Press your hand against your face,’ said the man, ‘to stop the bleeding.’

Then the man said, ‘Come on, sir. No good staying here. There’s more where those two came from and you need to get to an aid post.’

He could smell that strange fustiness about his saviour as well as human sweat. He stumbled and the man held him closer.

‘My brother wasn’t always like this,’ he told the green man.

‘If you say so, sir. It’s all the same to me.’

His mouth formed the words, ‘Who are you?’

‘Corporal Ennals, sir,’ the man said as Julian fell and was lifted up into the branches.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Easton seemed to remove itself from Laurence rather than the other way round. Eleanor and William left before him but he knew he would soon see them in London. As he stood, packed and waiting to go, he looked round his room, thinking how he had idealised Easton when he first arrived. Before leaving, he took down the small wooden frame from the wall and removed the picture of Digby and Lydia. He would return it in due course but in the meantime its loss would not be noticed.

On the doorstep he shook hands with Julian, who seemed to have grown in stature almost overnight. Although it was so soon after the funeral, an optimism appeared to have replaced his previous somewhat resigned doggedness. Maggie was nowhere to be seen, nor Susan, the one terrible casualty of the summer. Presumably she was with her baby.

The drive to the station was terrifying. Patrick obviously enjoyed hurling the decrepit motor car along the narrow lanes, while Laurence sat there willing there not to be a herd of sheep in the way. The train was slightly late. Patrick came with him on to the small platform and they sat together on a bench, Patrick slumped, his legs stuck out in front of him like a boy, and Laurence very upright. When he got back to London he would do as Eleanor suggested and get treatment. He had endured the discomfort for too many years as if it were his punishment for surviving.

Since seeing Jane Rivers, he had been wondering what he might safely tell Patrick. He had promised not to tell Julian what she had revealed, but could he trust Patrick not to pass on any information? In the end he decided to hold back, to let things be. It seemed to him that Patrick had come to terms with the past, whereas Jane Rivers could only be put in jeopardy by any further revelations. Instead he asked the one question to which he still needed to know the answer.

‘Robert, the chauffeur? You told me he had a sister who ran an establishment in London.’

Patrick looked puzzled. ‘Robert again? Establishment?’ And then with an amused smile, he said, ‘Ah, the family outing to a bordello.’ He assumed a look of mock horror. ‘Not wanting a recommendation, are you? Because on the whole I doubt they’d be to your taste. Young girls were her speciality, which suited Digby. Not little girls—but slender, sweet-looking ones. Not that they
were
sweet at all.’

He pulled out his cigarette case.

‘I went only the once. Different man then, I hope. Wanted to impress Digby. But Julian hated it. Terribly respectable at heart, our Julian, even then.’

‘Do you remember the address?’

‘Why? You can’t ask for all this intriguing information without giving me some satisfying reason, old chap.’

‘But do you?’

Patrick exhaled smoke and then inhaled it up his nose.

‘Inexorable Bartram. Can’t give you an address. Doubt even Digby knew it. Robert was organising it all. Not sure the Madame was Robert’s
sister,
or whether that was a euphemism for some other relationship. Robert was an ideal pimp. We’d been to some show, clever stuff, and we were half seas over by then. But I recognised the street. Tite Street, appropriately. The “establishment”, as you so decorously call it, was on a corner. Nothing to indicate what sort of place it was. Damned pricey place for a start.’

He tapped the ash off his cigarette.

‘But as we were waiting for the door to open I was looking at two identical statues on the posts at the bottom of the steps. Sphinxes. I imagine they’ll still be there.’

He regarded Laurence through a haze of smoke.

‘Who knows the profession of the occupants these days, though? Might be a dentist or a member of parliament for all I know. The girls they had—we had—will be dead or stout or married to marquesses by now. Robert’s sister? Well, she was a professional. It was a well-run house.’

‘Thank you.’

And the reason? Our quid pro quo?’

‘Jane Rivers wants to know what happened to her fiancé. If he’s alive or dead.’

He thought Patrick knew he was lying but he just gave him an odd half-smile and turned away. The tracks were vibrating and they could hear the train approaching.

As Laurence opened the carriage door, Patrick said, ‘You must tell me what you find out. Unless it’s to be a secret between you and the nanny.’

As the train drew away, he watched Patrick standing on the platform, one hand raised in a frozen wave. Laurence wondered if he would ever see him again.

There was nothing much in the post waiting for him at his flat, although it felt stuffy. He flung open all the windows and papers shifted in the almost imperceptible breeze.

He wondered what he should wear for the evening’s expedition, while knowing it was a ludicrous situation that the most suitable outfit seemed to be either the suit he had worn to teach at Westminster School or full evening dress. He didn’t want to go all the way to Tite Street and be refused entry. Thinking back to the Swindon police inspector, whom he had come to respect, he nevertheless took him as a model of how not to look for the best chance of success. He opted for his dinner jacket and searched for his father’s gold cufflinks.

As he had an hour before he needed to leave, he sat down to write a letter to Filippo della Scala, confirming his acceptance of position of tutor to his son Guido. Then he stood at a window, his forearms on the sill, gazing out over the slate roofs that stretched before him above the tops of the plane trees. The single pale spire of St George’s, Queen Square, rose behind the houses. He had come, finally, to think of this as home. It was what he had believed he was looking for, and yet in a few weeks he would be looking out over a foreign city. What would he do with this place when he left for Rome? He had once taken it for granted that if he accepted the tutor’s job, his rooms would go, but now that his departure had become a reality he knew he wanted to be able to return.

He could feel the sun on his face. Pigeons strutted along a balustrade a few yards away and he could hear a motor car down in the street below. He had grown used to this corner of London. He could sit in Coram’s Fields on a sunny day, or he could walk to the British Library.