Jubilee (30 page)

‘Robert loved my mother,’ Jessamy said evenly. ‘So did Matthew. Both of them loved Evie.’

‘They were taken in by her with her pretty way of doing things and her trim little figure. When I told Robert how things were he saw clearly again.’

I glared at Martha, the kernel of pity inside me fragmenting. I could have twisted every bone in her old body.

‘I told him that this farm was going to pieces,’ she went on. ‘And his niece needed taking care of, Matthew’s girl, his own flesh and blood.’

‘Why?’ asked Jessamy, dangerously quiet now. ‘What was Mum supposed to have done to me?’

‘She’d been beating you.’

I looked at Jessamy. ‘Beating you?’ I couldn’t even remember Evie as much as slapping the backs of Jess’s legs or tapping her on the hand.

She looked puzzled too. ‘Mum never hit me. Not once. Not even a slap.’ She moved closer to Martha. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I found you with bruises on your legs and black eyes and you said it was your mother.’

‘Jess would have been joking,’ I shouted. ‘You know, a joke, when you say something you don’t mean? Children do it all the time.’

‘You knew I didn’t mean it, Martha.’ Jessamy’s face was white. ‘You knew Robert was sick in his mind and he’d believe your stories.’

She shuffled. ‘Maybe he wasn’t himself.’

‘Maybe? He was probably psychotic’ She looked at me blankly. ‘He should have been having psychiatric treatment,’ I went on, ‘not running off with a ten-year-old
child.’

‘I would have done anything to make him happy.’ This I could well believe. ‘He was so lonely, living in foreign parts by himself. I thought that having a youngster with him for
a visit would pull him out of his troubles.’ Even now she sounded so sure of herself. ‘I knew Robert would look after you and it would only be for six months or a year. By then Evie
would have gone.’

‘Gone?’

She looked at me. ‘I didn’t think she’d carry on after Jess left. I thought she’d give up the farm and go back to the city.’

My mouth opened to ask her what she thought would have happened when Evie’s daughter had returned. Surely she knew that the police would have been called. She and Robert would have gone to
prison.

But on Planet Martha Evie would have returned to a city she hadn’t lived in for decades, leaving Martha and Robert in the farmhouse together. Perhaps with Jessamy living with them. My
mouth opened.

‘It was jealousy, plain and simple. You did this to spite Evie.’

‘I thought he’d bring the child back. I didn’t think he’d keep her all those years. It was just to show—’

‘Just to show my mother that she couldn’t have it all: the farm, the status, the child.’ Jessamy folded her arms in front of her chest. Her eyes were like shards of glass.

‘Did you summon Robert over here in 1977 specifically to take Jess?’ I asked.

Martha’s lantern-eyes gazed at me as though I were speaking in a foreign language. ‘Robert wanted to come back for the Silver Jubilee anyway. He always liked the traditions and
he’d been home for the Coronation, though he didn’t show himself to anyone. Just me and old Mrs Winter.’ Her expression was smug. ‘He stayed here with me. But then he went
away again. But I wrote to him from time to time. And when he heard what I had to say about Evie he thought the child should go with him. He wanted her to be safe. I told him I’d help him get
a passport for her so he could take her away with him.’

She’d stolen Jessamy’s birth certificate from the house, I guessed. And used it to apply for the passport.

‘You preyed on his disturbed state,’ Jessamy said. ‘You exploited his broken mind with your lies. You were an accessory. More than that. An accomplice.’

‘An accessory to the abduction of a child,’ I said. ‘That’s a very serious crime. Even though you’re old now you’ll go to court.’ She was old but I
hated her, hated her so much I could have spat at her. ‘You did a terrible thing. You’re responsible for Evie’s death. Her heart stopped working when she saw her daughter again
after all those years, it couldn’t take the strain. You deserve to die in prison.’

She nodded, seeming to shrink into herself, suddenly meek. ‘I see that now. I’m sorry.’

Just that one word, sorry. I thought of my aunt, of her years of waiting to hear what had befallen her daughter, wishing herself in a coma until Jessamy reappeared. I saw her watching the TV
news each time a child’s body was discovered, shaking, wide-eyed. I replayed the telephone conversations I’d had with her each time the police had called her to tell her the body
didn’t belong to her Jessamy. I recalled the mixture of relief and horror and guilt I’d heard in her voice each time that had happened. ‘Some other mother’s child,’
she’d whisper. ‘And I was on my knees, Rachel, thanking God. But now I feel sick with myself because some other mother has lost all hope now. But then a little part of me even wishes it
was Jessamy they’d found so at least I’d know.’

I thought of Jessamy, fed lies about her mother, uncertain what or who to believe, robbed of home, friends, her pony and dog, the morning walk down the lane to the village school. And I thought
of Robert, poor Robert, who’d been damaged beyond repair. I shuddered at the malign conjunction which had placed such a damaged man within Martha’s orbit.

I knew Martha was old, probably senile, but I could have struck her with my fists until she bled in front of me and wept for mercy. What mercy had she shown Evie? The police inquiries,
Evie’s newspaper appeals, all ignored, dismissed because of that corrosive jealousy.

Sorry. Just that, for all she’d done, for the quarter-century of pain.

‘I can’t stand here looking at you any longer.’ I got up and walked out of the cottage. Pilot was waiting on the doorstep and followed me into the lane, his ears pricked into
courteous enquiry. I walked so quickly I was almost jogging, mindless of puddles and potholes, the dog’s paws splashing behind me. My fury drove out any lingering fears I might have possessed
about phantom drovers and their flocks. I saw the white walls of Winter’s Copse in front of me and broke into a run until I reached the gate. For a moment I stood there, the sleety rain
falling gently on me, letting it wash me. I felt calmer just standing in front of the old house. I opened the gate and walked to the kitchen door, heart rate slowing. When I went inside I stood for
a second letting the warmth of the place ooze into my cells, as though it was flushing out the madness I’d witnessed in the cottage.

I stood at the window, staring out towards the front garden where the film of the child Jessamy had once been taken. Bushes swayed in the still-lively breeze. I clenched my fists hard then
forced myself to let out all my breath.

It’s over.
I almost looked round to see if Evie was really standing there in the kitchen with us; her voice seemed as clear as the church bell.

Are you at peace now? I asked her, wordlessly.

I heard nothing, but there was something in the quality of the silence and the deep tock of the clock on the wall which made me believe she was. All is well, my aunt seemed to tell me. Be at
peace too, Rachel.

And I answered her wordlessly. It will continue, what you and Matthew wanted: your child will live in this house again with her children, maybe even get the farm going again. Jessamy
hadn’t said this to me but how could I doubt it? Jessamy’s ease in Winter’s Copse had proved that although she’d been away for twenty-five years she belonged here completely
in a way I never could. Why couldn’t she run a plant nursery here?

This recognition might once have made me feel resentful or sad but not now. My life was elsewhere. Something was pulling me towards the future: unknown and slightly scary, but exciting, too. I
put a hand on my abdomen, just below my navel and remembered the package from the chemist’s. It was still in my handbag.

I plucked the bag from the kitchen chair and went upstairs to the bathroom. When I’d taken the test and it had shown me the result I went to sit at the top of the stairs for a few minutes,
just as I’d once done with Jessamy when we were children. I sat motionless while the disordered atoms of my world rearranged themselves into something new.

It felt as though I’d been up there for hours and hours but it was probably only about fifteen minutes later that I came downstairs again. Through the white noise of my own preoccupations
I heard the garden gate click open. Jessamy was back. She came inside. I tried to read the look of concentration on her face, to work out what had happened.

‘Have you rung the police?’ I asked carefully.

She shook her head. ‘Not yet.’ She looked so pale I rushed to her and steered her to a chair.

‘I shouldn’t have left you alone up there with her.’

‘She’s no danger to me, not any more. Not to anyone.’ She sounded strange.

‘What do you mean, Jess?’

‘Martha’s gone back up the hill. Without a coat. With that old shepherd’s crook of hers, that old crook she used when we went blackberrying.’

I remembered the blackberrying.

‘The rain’s turning to sleet now and the temperature’s dropping.’ She spoke as though she were reading from an autocue. ‘Martha’s tough but she’s old
now. You could ring for an ambulance, Rachel. It would probably take at least half an hour to get here and we don’t know exactly where Martha is. She could be anywhere up on the
down.’

‘Why’s she done this?’

‘She said she wanted to do one last check on everything, to make sure that all was well. She said goodbye to me and apologized for all the sorrow she’d caused.’

She held out her mobile phone. ‘Go on, ring for help, if you want. Or tell me we should go up on that hillside and find her. Tell me that, Rachel. I’ll do it if you say we have
to.’ Her expression was reflective, neither angry nor anxious.

My hand was reaching for the phone but I pulled away. Let Martha take her chances. I thought of the old woman up there, lashed by the wind and sleet from the west, her eyes gazing down the hill
towards the farmhouse, watching over Jessamy, watching over the last of the Winters, finally back where she belonged. I thought of Martha turning her face towards the icy downpour, untroubled by
the chill, standing there on watch, always on watch.

The picture moved me but not as much as I might have expected. I was starting to feel distanced from it all. Other things mattered almost as much. I hardly dared tell myself what was happening
to me.

I took the mobile. ‘I do need to make a call, actually,’ I said. ‘I left my phone at a neighbour’s the day before yesterday and the landline’s disconnected. Do you
mind if I ring my husband Luke?’

‘Be my guest.’ She stood. ‘I’m going to have a shower, if that’s all right. Then I’ll ring my kids and you and I can sit down and talk and you can tell me all
about your husband.’

‘Luke . . .’ Thank God it wasn’t his voicemail I reached.

‘Rachel. I’ve been worried sick, you haven’t been answering my calls to your mobile.’ He sounded frantic. ‘I thought . . . well, I didn’t know what to think,
actually. Are you all right? The weather sounds dreadful there. The forecast says you’re in for snow.’

‘It is dreadful but some very exciting things have been happening.’ I hesitated, not knowing how to start. ‘Are you sitting down? You won’t believe this.’

He didn’t. Not for about ten minutes. ‘Jessamy’s come back?’ he kept saying. ‘She was alive all this time? Where did she go? Why did it take her so long to come
back? I don’t under-stand. Tell me who Robert Winter was, again.’ Finally I managed to persuade him to stop asking questions long enough for me to paste the facts together into some
kind of recognizable narrative. ‘Pyschiatrists would have a field day with this,’ he said when I finished. ‘That sad and crazy man. And that jealous woman. What an appalling thing
to do: take revenge on your love rival by helping to abduct their kid.’

But something else was on my mind now.

‘Martha’s gone up on the hillside,’ I said. ‘It’s snowing here now. She’s over eighty. What should we do?’

There was silence. ‘She’s a shepherd?’

I could almost hear his logical mind working on it.

‘Her family have lived in Craven for centuries, she knows what conditions are like up there.’ I heard his out-breath. ‘Let her go, Rachel.’

‘I think she’s a bit senile. She may not be mentally switched-on enough to know what she’s doing.’

‘Do you know her well?’ he asked sharply.

‘Not really.’

‘Well then, it’s not for you to decide on her frame of mind. Let her stay up there,’ he said. ‘For all you know she might already be back home by now.’

But I knew she wouldn’t be, she’d still be up there with all the ghosts, talking to people who’d died years ago, inhabiting the weird world she’d created from her broken
mind. Dragging her off that hill, taking her to hospital and subjecting her to police questioning, a trial, perhaps, would be a just consequence of what she’d done to Jessamy. Just, but
harsher.

‘The person I’d be more concerned about is Jessamy,’ he went on.

‘I just hope she can stop punishing herself for giving her mother such a shock.’ I relayed what had happened when Evie had seen her daughter again.

‘Probably inevitable that Evie would react violently, no matter how Jessamy’d broken the news. Perhaps she really did have something wrong with her that wasn’t picked
up.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Jess’ll have to see lawyers, of course. Probably the police too. They’ll want her to make statements.’

Somewhere in a filing system there’d be an open file on Jessamy’s disappearance that would need to be taken out, dusted off. And closed.

‘You must feel wrecked, darling,’ Luke went on.

‘I am tired. But apparently that’s not unusual.’

A silence.

‘What are you talking about? It sounds highly unusual to have your long-lost cousin come back—’

‘Luke, I just did a test. It’s a very thin line but . . .’ It was there, as pale a blue as a spring sky. ‘I’m . . . pregnant.’ Finally I let myself say the
word. I was expecting a child. If all went well, I’d hold Evie’s great-niece or nephew in my arms in about nine months.
When? How?
I let the questions buzz between Luke and me,
unspoken, unanswered, because neither of us knew. Perhaps that last despairing night with the takeaway curry and the bottle of Rioja when we’d behaved like a pair of teenagers. For the first
time in months and months I felt myself produce a sound that could only be described as a giggle.