Rebecca's Tale (23 page)

I walked on rapidly, and took the lane that led up to the higher ground where St. Winnow’s was situated. I walked up to the house through the well-kept gardens. As I had expected on such a warm day, Frith was outside on the sheltered terrace in his wheelchair; from there, he had a perfect view down the river and out to sea. In the far distance, as he had reminded me at regular intervals during my last visit, was Manderley.

I checked that I’d brought the copy of Lionel de Winter’s death certificate with me, though I knew I had, and then joined him on the terrace. I was sure he had very little idea of who I was, but that didn’t appear to bother him at all. He remembered me from my previous visit and seemed pleased to see me.

F
OURTEEN

B
EFORE
I
MET
F
RITH, HE HAD BEEN DESCRIBED TO ME BY
the Colonel in unflattering terms: He was ninety-five at least; he was senile; he was a martinet, a nosy-parker, a fusspot, a terrorizer of maids, an old fool, and a wily operator with an eye for the main chance. “One minute he was the boot boy, the next he was butler,” said the Colonel. “Draw your own conclusions.”

Frith was never a boot boy, and the rest of the Colonel’s description was similarly inaccurate—with the possible exception of that eye to the main chance. Frith was very far from senile; he was born in 1867 (I checked) and was now eighty-four, though he claimed ninety. His father had been in service elsewhere in the West Country, and Frith had gone to Manderley as a boy; before becoming butler in 1915, he had worked his way up the chain of command, serving time as a footman, and as Lionel de Winter’s valet. He was exceedingly well informed about the de Winter family, and prided himself on his unique knowledge of their history. As he liked to hint to me, his was the
inside
story.

He was a shrewd, small man, much shrunken, I think, from his former stature. He had a head of neat white hair, and poorly fitting false teeth that were a constant source of distress to him. In the very distant past he might once have had a keen eye for pretty girls—
certainly he was very jealous of the nurses’ attentions, preferring the younger ones. I had the impression that this taste had been kept firmly in check. Frith had never courted or married, had no children. Why would he have wanted to marry, he’d said to me scornfully. Why would he have wanted a family of his own? He
had
a family: the de Winter family.

His de Winter pension pays his bills here, but he receives no visitors, or so the young red-haired nurse who was Frith’s favorite had told me. And he is mindful of his status, even now. This afternoon—and I gather this is his usual practice—he had seated himself at a distance from the other nursing home patients. At one end of the terrace was a group of women, several of whom were knitting; toward the other end was a group of male patients, clustered around a wireless set, listening to a concert. Frith had segregated himself from both groups, and was occupying pride of place on the terrace, shaded by a canvas awning. From there he could watch the boats on the river below, and look out beyond Kerrith to the hazy shape of the Manderley headland. He has cataracts on both eyes, however, so his vision is dimmed, and I feel sure he cannot see it.

He had had a good lunch, and a little sleep after lunch, and now he was ready to talk about old times again, which he liked to do. “It brings it all back,” he said, clasping my hands in his, and urging me into the chair next to him. “Things I haven’t thought of, not in years, I see them again, as sharp as I see you now, sir. Mr. Lionel as a young man—and his wife, poor Mrs. Lionel—a Grenville, she was, Virginia Grenville, sister to Miss Evangeline and Miss Isolda, God rest them. Ah, things were different in those days. One afternoon off a month I had. And work! These nurses complain about the work—I tell them, you don’t know you’re born. You should try cleaning the plate at Manderley, I say. I’d be down in the silver room for days at a time, knives, forks, spoons, place settings for fifty. And then all the big pieces, and if you left so much as a smidgen of the silver powder in one tiny little crevice—well, you knew you were in trouble then.”

He gave a wheezing sigh. “And when I got to waiting on table—one tiny mark on my gloves and I was for it. Mrs. de Winter the elder—Mr. Lionel’s mother, that was—she had eyes in the back of her head, she had. Nothing went on in that house that she didn’t know about. Mr. Lionel, he’d be up to his tricks, and he’d take me on
one side, and slip me the wink, and say, ‘Just between you and me, eh, Frith? Make sure the old girl doesn’t get to hear about it.’…But she always did. And sometimes she minded, and sometimes she didn’t. You never knew with her. And if Mr. Lionel went too far—
which
he did, and many a time, too—he’d go to her. And she’d take care of all the arrangements….”

I was listening intently—particularly to those last remarks. This was the difficulty. With Frith, as with the Briggs sisters, it was hopeless to chivy or overdirect. I had to wait. I had to listen to a million details about his methods of polishing silver or cleaning livery or storing claret, until Frith finally meandered in a direction that interested me.

On my last visit, I’d tried to direct Frith toward more recent events at Manderley, but had met with little success. He had virtually no memory of the second Mrs. de Winter—he seemed to have erased her brief time at the house almost completely. On the subject of Rebecca de Winter he refused to be drawn, telling me only that she had taken both Maxim and his grandmother by storm, which had surprised him because he’d expected resistance on the grandmother’s part to any bride selected by Maxim.

“Beauty, brains, and breeding,” he said, giving me a sidelong look. “That’s what she had, according to the old lady. She was set on the match from the day she met Miss Rebecca. Mr. Maxim was in love, bowled over—but, even so, his grandmother influenced him, I’ll wager. He was that much in awe of her; she’d raised him, sir, you see, his poor mother dying as she did when he was just three years old, poor mite.”

Beyond this, Frith had refused to go. He had nothing more to say on the subject of Maxim’s first wife, he insisted. He couldn’t remember; he wouldn’t be prompted. He preferred to go back to a much earlier period. As with many elderly people, his most vivid memories were those of his own youth; Frith was at his happiest, and most voluble, when discussing Lionel de Winter.

Today, I, too, wanted to discuss Maxim’s father—and I wanted to do so even more since that suggestive conversation over lunch at the Briggs sisters. Why had Rebecca selected that costume for the last fancy-dress ball she gave, and why had her husband reacted to it with such anger? This was an avenue I wanted to explore—and Frith had
just given me an opening. I was extremely interested in the occasions when Lionel de Winter had “gone too far”; I was equally interested in the “arrangements” his mother had then made on his behalf. I allowed Frith to meander a little more around the subject of Lionel’s amatory exploits (and they’re still famous in this neighborhood); then I tried roping him in.

“Frith,” I said, “why don’t you tell me about the Carminowes?”

To my relief, Frith didn’t balk or divert; he was off and away at once. “Well, John Carminowe, he was one of the keepers, sir,” he began. “And his father before him. A nice little cottage, they had, off the Four Turnings road. I had my eye on that for a time, for my retirement. Would have suited me down to the ground, that place would.”

“And Mrs. Carminowe, Frith?”

“Came as a maid, first. I remember her well. A lovely girl, she was—tall, strong, a good worker, I’ll say that for her. She had beautiful hair, and a way with her…. John Carminowe took one look, and he was smitten. So they started walking out, and then they married—she wasn’t more than sixteen. And then there were babies, three strapping boys to begin with, and then a gap, and then two more. And the two youngest, they were a sore trial, they were. There was a little girl, and there was Ben Carminowe and he was born a half-wit. Broke his mother’s heart, he did. All his brothers came to work at the house, in the stables or the gardens—there was work for all in those days. And Ben, he’d follow them and hang around. And the family, they didn’t like that. He wasn’t a pretty sight, poor child, and he was a peeper. He’d creep up to the doors, or they’d catch him listening at windows, and he
wouldn’t
stay away from the old boathouse down on the shore. Mr. Lionel couldn’t abide the sight of him. He’d fly into a rage—he said if he saw him there one more time, he’d take a horsewhip to him. And he might have done, too. Mr. Lionel had a temper you wouldn’t believe.”

I would believe. I thought I could understand Lionel de Winter’s mood swings and tempers. I had evidence concerning them in my pocket.

“Why couldn’t Lionel abide Ben?” I said. “Was it just his appearance, Frith—or was it more than that?”

“Might have been more….” To my surprise, the old man began to chuckle, then wheeze. “I told you—turned heads, Mrs. Carminowe
did. Even after she was widowed. Black hair, black eyes, black dress—she wasn’t thirty when John died. Could have married again, I always reckoned. Could have taken her pick in Kerrith, but she never did. And the de Winters looked after her like one of their own. She kept that cottage until the day she died, Mr. Lionel saw to that, and his mother did, too, after he’d gone…. Sarah, her name was. Sarah Carminowe. Buried over in the churchyard by Manderley, she is.”

I already knew that. I’d been to Sarah Carminowe’s grave, and her husband’s. I’d seen, in the estate papers, just how well the de Winter family had looked after her. After the death of her husband, and then of her three older boys in the first world war, she remained in that cottage, with her only daughter and her simple-minded son. Other tenants in her situation were moved out to make way for more productive workers. Not Sarah Carminowe. She was still housed and still being paid a “pension” during Maxim de Winter’s day, by which time she was in her fifties and her husband had been dead two decades. The de Winters protected her and her two last children: Ben was sent to the county asylum only after her death, and that was several years after Maxim de Winter left the country. Ben was now also dead. I didn’t know what had happened to the daughter.

I looked at Frith, who was regarding me in a somewhat sly sidelong way; he fumbled with the rug around his knees, and I tucked it in for him. I had taken a close interest in Sarah Carminowe and the exceptional charity shown her; I’d found it was useful to compare the important dates in her life to the key dates in that of the de Winter family. She had married at age sixteen in 1893, three years after Maxim de Winter was born. Her first three children—those strapping boys—were born over the next five years. There was then a gap; her last two children, the little girl and Ben, were born in 1905 and 1906 respectively. The surname they bore, Carminowe, was presumably discretionary, since her husband died in 1904. Someone had consoled the pretty widow.

“Tell me about Sarah’s two youngest children, Frith,” I said. “Who was their father? It wasn’t John Carminowe, was it?”

There was a silence. Frith continued to look at me under his brows; I knew he knew the answer, I could sense it—but it was impossible to predict which would win, the desire to talk or the habit of discretion.

“Sickly,” Frith said, after that long pause. “They were both sickly, the boy and the girl. He had fits—an idiot from birth, he was—and the girl, she had her wits all right, but she wasn’t right—never. Couldn’t keep her food down, people said. Never grew, never thrived like normal children. She was this thin little scrap of a thing, with these dark blue eyes. Ben had blue eyes too, but lighter….”

“Frith.” I decided to risk pushing much harder. “Both Ben and the girl were born after John Carminowe died. The little girl ten months after he died, and Ben two years after. John Carminowe couldn’t have fathered them. So who did? Was it Lionel? Is that why the de Winter family looked after them?” I paused. “Is that why the children were sickly, Frith?”

“By-blows,” said Frith, so suddenly he startled me. “By-blows, that’s what they were. That’s what Mrs. de Winter the elder used to say. We take care of them, Frith, she’d say to me. And we don’t talk about it. Mr. Lionel had a way with him. He was a handsome man. Women liked him—not just down here, oh, no. Up in London, too, abroad even; he had a string of them. And he was always generous. We kept a little book—when I was his manservant, this was. I’d write down their birthdays in it, and when there was one coming up, I’d remind him. And we’d send to one of the London stores, and get something sent round. A trinket. A nice pair of gloves. He was thoughtful that way. Liked actresses.” Frith began to chuckle again. “A terrible weakness, he had, for actresses. Bold, I expect. He liked that. And his wife, poor Mrs. Lionel…well, you wouldn’t describe her as bold. Not by a long chalk. A lady, she was.”

I looked away. In the distance, the sea crested and turned. The red-haired nurse was moving along the terrace, pushing a trolley with a tea urn and little sandwiches and cakes. Once the tea reached Frith, I knew my chances with him were over. I tried another line of questioning, and I tried to keep it gentle.

“Frith,” I said, “Lionel de Winter was ill, wasn’t he? Ill for a long time, years before he died. Will you tell me about that?”

“His legs.” Frith gave a wheezy sigh. “His legs, he had this trouble with his legs. On his thighs first, these dark red marks. Then ulcers. And they wouldn’t heal, no matter what we tried, they wouldn’t. We bathed them and we bandaged them—but no, they got worse. Mrs. Lionel was dead by then, and Mr. Maxim, he was only a little boy and
he couldn’t understand. He missed his mother—she was always hugging him and sitting him on her lap, she doted on that boy, poor creature—and, once she was gone, he was starved of all that. Well, he had to learn—boys do—but even when he was six or seven, if he saw his father, he’d run to him, see, and clasp him round the legs, and beg to be lifted up—and that made his father angry. He’d say the boy was soft, and he’d been spoiled. He’d shout at him, and it got so Mr. Maxim was afraid of his father. But Mr. Lionel didn’t mean to be hard on him, sir. He wasn’t a bad man. It’s just he was in all that pain and it was so bad some days he could scarcely walk. He didn’t like anyone to know that, and he wouldn’t have it talked about, and he couldn’t get up to London….”