Beggar Bride (26 page)

Petal adores both boys.

But it’s Archie who is the boisterous one, shouting at the top of his lungs, not like a baby wail at all, waving his tough little fists, taking so much food that Tina worries he’s going to burst his guts.

Tina says he knows he will be a lord one day and he’s practising being bossy.

If Fabian comes into the nursery wing (a rare occurrence, he hasn’t the time) he ignores Jacob totally—Tina moves him away as fast as she can—and goes straight to take his son in his arms.

‘Hang on here for me, love, and let me go and get some fags.’

‘Oh, Tina, I wish you’d try and stop, non-smokers can smell it, you know, and Fabian would go barmy if he thought Archie’s nanny was a chain-smoker. And try not to call me love all the time, they’d think it was too familiar if they heard you…’

‘Don’t go on, Ange. You’re always going on—we’re OK.’ Tina does her snooty walk, twisting her wrist in a way she imagines is regal. ‘After this we’ll all have enough dosh to behave how we bloody well like till the day we die.’

‘But only if we are careful!’

‘Sod off, Ange…’

‘Shush!’ Ange thought she heard someone standing outside the door. She opened it quick, the empty tray had gone. ‘See, Tina,’ she hissed, ‘somebody was out there. Somebody could easily have heard you.’

‘So I’m rather a common nanny. A crude person. Most of that lot are bleeding crude if you ask me.’

‘And don’t have your music so loud in the evening, please! Last night Fabian asked me if he should get you a pair of headphones. Don’t look like that, he was being perfectly serious. I laughed it off, but it’s just not on. A trained nanny wouldn’t dream of behaving like that.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Tina. ‘D’you know your problem, Ange? You worry too much. And Billy is right, you’re a nag.’

The closest shave they’ve had so far was when Ange and Billy were walking in Hurleston Woods. They’d left Tina behind in the nursery with Petal and Jacob, and Ange had told Fabian she was taking Archie for a walk in his sling. The path she preferred was strewn with brambles, much too overgrown for comfort, and she wanted Billy to come and scythe a clearer route to the river.

Billy was right. It
was
wonderful to be here together, the only one missing was little Jacob but he wouldn’t have liked the flies.

But Billy, the prat, kept trying to put his arm round her shoulders, or hold her hand, once he tried to back her against a tree…

‘No! No! Why the hell don’t you understand? You’re not simple! Don’t you see that anyone could be down here, any of the servants, any of the villagers, farm workers, gardeners…’

‘Well let’s go out in the Range Rover then. Ange, I just want some time alone with you! Just you.’

‘I know, I know, but we can’t keep going out alone every day. Already it’s bloody odd, I mean, I could have asked one of the gardeners to clear this path, luckily Fabian didn’t turn a hair. How many times do I have to tell you…
get your hands off me, you stupid sod!’

Billy turned red. ‘Please yourself. You know what’s happening to you, don’t you, Ange, with all your airs and graces? You’re getting as bad as them.’

‘And keep your voice down!’

‘Oh, piss off.’

Billy stumbled on ahead in a childish sulk while Ange followed, Archie heavy on her back and her legs scratched to pieces. Oh God, the times she has realised that this move was a bad mistake. OK, in some respects it’s better, she and Billy can see each other, be together for much of the time and she’s not battling her way backwards and forwards to Willington Gardens. Fabian quite understands that she is cutting down on her workload while Archie is so tiny. Naturally she wants to be with her precious baby as much as she can. But there’s a bloody great down side to all this, the extra worry, the fear of somebody taking a good look at Jacob, what about next year when he’s more active? Or if Petal let something slip? But the worst of it is the casual manner in which Tina and Billy are behaving. Don’t they realise that if their crime, and crime it certainly is, were discovered, it would be just about the boldest personal scam ever attempted? The press would go berserk, the whole Ormerod family would be held up to ridicule, the kids would lose everything, even Petal would have to go into care while Tina did her stint in clink…

God. Billy was hiding, waiting for her behind a tree. When Ange, sticky and bad tempered, arrived in the clearing he bounded out and gripped her in his arms, she couldn’t get away, he refused to let her go. She shouted,
‘Sod off, you bastard…
’

They both saw the man at the same time. Billy gasped. Let go. Stood looking gobsmacked. Ange tried to laugh, as if they’d been playing some silly game, nothing odd about it, just the lady of the manor frolicking playfully with the gardener, oh, Jesus Christ, no one in their right mind would accept that.

The stranger stood still as the trees around them, stringy, tall, dark and hairy, like a wild man really or Jesus himself, he could be a tramp who lived in the woods, but much too young for the genuine part. He stared, saying nothing, not even venturing a smile or a greeting as you would if you suddenly met like this. It was Billy who spoke, ‘Hi, mate.’

The man in the brown blanket said nothing. He kept on staring.

Ange heard herself say something silly, there was even a brittle laugh somewhere in the middle of it, ‘We’re trying to clear the path to the river, it’s such a beautiful day.’

Then the man gave what could have been a smile but not quite. It was a mix between a sneer and a snarl. Ange, her guilt making her angry, said, ‘Have you any right to be here? This is private property you know.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’

‘I better fuck off then.’ And his voice was barely above a whisper.

‘Yes,’ said Ange, startled, shivering without knowing why, ‘yes, you had.’

He turned and went, silently, disappearing like a mist disappears over water, or a ghost through a wall.

‘Shit!’ said Billy.

But Ange refused to answer. She would kill him if she could. She just turned round and stalked off in the direction of home.

It was Maudie Doubleday who enlightened her after Ange plucked up the courage to ask. She’d been hoping the stranger was a passer-by, a student, perhaps, walking through, or a hippy type, or an artist even.
But please,
nobody local who might spread his suspicions around.

‘The man you saw, milady, was undoubtedly that devil Callister, you know, the traveller who found Lady Helena in that dreadfully disintegrating condition. You don’t want to go too far in that direction, well, by the sounds of it you almost stumbled on their camp.’

Ange had no idea that the camp, set up in Helena’s day, was still there.

‘Certainly it is,’ Maudie confirmed from inside her shed, mixing a cream of herbs and mud and the evening primrose whose properties, she swore, worked miracles on a person’s face.

Angela stood at the door and waited, not invited to cross the threshold.

Maudie came out. She picked up one of the little earthenware jars she used for her wares. She rinsed it out under the garden tap. ‘Most of them departed, of course, after the tragedy. Lord Ormerod made it quite clear that they weren’t welcome at Hurleston after that. Well, they were under suspicion of course, same as everyone else. But others arrived, as they tend to do, like bad eggs they congregate together. These people, they come and they go. But that Callister’s always been there, calls himself some sort of guru, and it’s not as though he’s got an excuse for going round acting like a savage, he is quite a well-educated young man, or so I’ve been told.’

Maudie seemed to enjoy Angela’s obvious curiosity. She went back inside and filled the little pot with a grey, gritty substance.

Angela had to ask, ‘I know this might sound silly, but I heard you believed that Helena was murdered, even though the police…’

‘I do. Yes, I’m afraid I do.’

Maudie was so tall and stringy Angela had to look up in order to catch her eyes. They glinted full of secrets she wanted to tell. ‘Is there any particular reason?’ asked Ange.

‘I saw blood money being passed over.’

‘Blood money?’

‘Yes.’ Maudie closed her lips round the starkness of her answer. ‘By Honesty. And some say I’m a troublemaker for saying that, the police didn’t ask me and I’m no gossip. But the day after that poor lady’s body was found I saw Honesty passing money over to that brute Callister. And, what is more…’

Angela waited, not wanting to divert Maudie from a subject so close to her heart, but one, you could see, she struggled with. ‘Lady Helena believed herself to be pregnant before she died.’

Angela was amazed. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘No, you wouldn’t, milady, only three of us do, she came to me when first she suspected, asking me to do a pendulum test, but I won’t do those any more, not since I predicted a girl for the farm manager’s wife and she ended up with a boy. Accused me of changing the sex by my meddling. And Lady Helena told me she was going to ask that Murphy O’Connell if he could find somewhere discreet where she could go to have an abortion.’

Angela was fascinated. ‘And did he?’

‘He was making the necessary enquiries, apparently, when she disappeared, and he and I suspected she might have discovered somewhere suitable herself, and that’s where she’d gone. Sadly, that was not the case. We were wrong.’

‘You said three people knew this.’

‘Oh, well naturally I confided in Gwenda, Nanny Barber, but she’s got this foolish idea in her head that my imagination plays me tricks. She doesn’t like facing unpleasant facts, never has done.’

This was unnerving stuff. Why would Helena want an abortion? ‘So you think it was Honesty who did it, because Helena was pregnant?’

‘I’m not saying any more. Only that there’s only one person in this world Honesty would go out of her way to protect…’

‘And that’s Fabian?’

‘Or herself.’ Maudie handed over the jar and padlocked the door behind her. ‘Spread it on thickly at night, and round your neck as well, and be sure you wash it all off in the morning else you’ll look like you’re peeling. And if that doesn’t make your skin feel softer and more beautiful than ever then I’ll eat my hat.’

W
ELL, THEY SAY THAT
a person’s favourite season is the one to which they are most spiritually attuned, and at her age, with her prospects, Honesty’s favourite ought to be spring, or even a hot, juicy summer, but oh, dear, inside her she feels like the bleakest, most iron-hard frosty winter.

In her father’s letter, received almost immediately after Archibald’s birth, he issued an ultimatum—toe the line, or else.

Ffiona said, ‘That man has all the sensitivity of a charging rhino.’

‘Maybe I ought to…’

‘It might be wisest,’ said Ffiona quickly, who greatly appreciates Honesty’s contributions to the household budget although her daughter takes after Fabian in this, she is mean, careful, always whining on about how her income has to stretch as if she is a garage mechanic with four kids to support and a mortgage.

‘Stretch? Why does it have to stretch? You only ever spend your money on luxuries.’

‘Believe me, Mother, it has to stretch. I have more commitments than you know. And if I gave in every time you asked for another so-called “loan” I’d be skint by now.’

She is fed up with living on the breadline in Ffiona’s cold, dark house, the little lawn at the back faces north and never gets the sun. And Ffiona’s friends don’t like her, consider her spoilt, and she’s really no patience with their awful, demanding children who have been brought up to speak their minds rather than be polite. They remind her of the terrible twins. Everything revolves around them, their appalling art covers the walls of Ffiona’s friends’ houses, their heavy metal crashes resoundingly all down the street. From the tender age of eight they assume the rights of spoilt adults.

These women make up a vulnerable minority group, along with gays, blacks, fat people, Muslims, artists, Jews, children, the elderly, poets, the unemployed, part-time workers, smokers, manual workers and calves. The conversation round her is so damn intense. You can’t make a light-hearted comment without being taken up on it, there is much in-depth probing and so much boiling of kidney beans, so much rinsing with henna that the bathroom surfaces are permanently stained.

‘So do you never feel, Honesty, the need to make a contribution to the world which has given you so much?’

‘But I do contribute, Apricot.’

‘In what way?’

‘My family and I pay enormous taxes.’

‘But your life, Honesty, where are you going and where is the deeper meaning?’

The deeper meaning to Honesty’s life exists somewhere in the peaty woods at Hurleston, in the eye of the storm which drives her to a greater and greater frenzy as time goes by. But she’s not about to tell Apricot that.

As a result of Callister’s insistence, and because of Fabian’s letter, Honesty feels impelled to go and visit the dratted child and its mother. The thought of being cut out of Fabian’s will is worse than a thousand tortured deaths. If she loses her money Honesty loses Callister, and her dark gypsy lover has always made that quite clear.

‘I need money for my work, Honesty,’ and he gave his mocking, contemptuous laugh. He looked at her then, so forlorn and perplexed, with detached amusement. ‘For the cause. If there’s no future for me here I must move to where conditions are more favourable. I shall have to move on.

That’s why I lead this nomadic life.’

‘But the plan, Callister, what about the plan?’

Callister has always promised that everything will be all right.

They formed their plan a few days before Helena’s death, but now this new heir to Hurleston threatens everything. Honesty feels comfortless and desolate, burdened by her own desire.

Angela, drat her, is so sickly sweet she makes Honesty’s toes curl and the child, Archie, is just like any other child, snotty, smelly and blotchy, although even Honesty can see he looks exactly like his mother. He will be a heart-breaker some day.

Glad to be back at Cadogan Square, and not just because of Callister’s orders to go and dig the dirt—he was furious when Archie was born and wouldn’t speak to her for days—she went to visit Estelle and Murphy in the basement before going upstairs. If there was any gossip, anything untoward going on then Murphy would know about it and Honesty can report back to Callister as promised. Perhaps Fabian and Angela are beginning to argue, little things starting to irritate, their selfish lifestyles beginning to clash? There is always that hope. As it happened the gossip proved to be juicier than that.