Rebecca's Tale (24 page)

Frith fell into one of the musing, muttering states that punctuated his stories. Eventually, when he seemed to have forgotten I was there, I prompted again.

“But the ulcers on the legs—they healed eventually, Frith, am I right?”

“You are, sir.” He brightened. “After a year or two—they cleared up, just like that. And then Mr. Lionel was back to his old ways, up to London every month or so, cock of the walk—you forget pain, sir, that’s the thing. You can’t remember it. When my arthritis plays up…”

“So, when did he next become ill, Frith—can you remember?” I looked over at the red-haired nurse in her cap and starched white uniform; she was serving tea to the female patients at the other end of the terrace. At best, I had five minutes.

“Oh, a long while after. When Mr. Maxim was about twelve, it would have been, sir. The boy was slow at his lessons, and it was the summer the old rector used to tutor him, Colonel Julyan’s grandfather, that was—a fine man. Mr. Maxim was very fond of him. That’s when Mr. Lionel’s headaches started. And his teeth, he had terrible trouble with his teeth, sir. They’d given him this ointment to rub on his gums, and there was mercury in it. It made his teeth go black—and it got so bad, it made him difficult. Very difficult. After that…well, he went from bad to worse. Even with me—some days, he’d be quiet as a lamb, and others he’d start up, fly off the handle, for no reason at all.”

Frith fumbled with his rug, and turned his faded eyes back toward
the sea. If his cataracts obscured his view of Manderley, he saw it with his mind’s eye, I was sure of that—and what he was now watching was beginning to distress him.

“Sometimes he’d improve,” he went on. “Months at a time. ‘I’m right as rain, Frith,’ he used to say to me. But the headaches always came back—and there were other symptoms, too—and I think they frightened him. As time went by he got very unpredictable, sir. It got so you’d never know what he might do. His mother wasn’t having that. She didn’t want talk. There’d be ladies to tea—and in he’d come, quite normal, and then he’d
say
something….”

Frith gave a shake of the head. “Something had to be done, sir—so Mrs. de Winter called a doctor in from London, and we gave him the injections after that, and they kept him quiet. It was morphine, sir, for the pain, and it eased him at first—but then it gave him nightmares, such terrible dreams, he’d scream with fear, sometimes. He never left his room, sir, not for the last four years. I had the key—and I wouldn’t allow talk below stairs. Never. Mrs. de Winter depended on me, she knew she could. She had a will of iron, she did. It came near to breaking her, but you’d never have known it. She never gave way, not for a second, not even in front of me—and then it got to the end, and she took me on one side, and she said there was one last thing I could do for Mr. Lionel. So I witnessed his will, sir, the day he died. I witnessed it along with Colonel Julyan—Captain, he was, then. And I was butler after that, which was all I’d ever wanted.”

The last of the female patients had been served. The red-haired nurse and her trolley were now coming toward us. I could hear the clatter of cups—and so could Frith. There were a few last questions I had to ask; I was interested in this will, made in 1915. I leaned forward.

“Frith, why was that will made so late? Lionel was seriously ill, and had been for years. Surely he must have made a will before that?”

“He had, sir. That was the problem. He’d made it…oh, nine or ten years before, in one of his good periods. Went to a lot of trouble about it, too, swore me to secrecy. His mother didn’t know about it. And when she finally found out, not long before he died, oh, there was trouble then! She wouldn’t rest till he changed it. I never did discover who told her about that will. I never said a word about it, so it was a mystery, that was…. Is that the tea coming now, sir?”

“No—not yet. It’ll be here soon,” I said. The red-haired nurse had
paused to speak to an older woman, wearing a Sister’s uniform. I leaned forward again and lowered my voice. “Frith, why didn’t Lionel’s mother approve of that will? Had he made bequests she disapproved of? Why was a new one necessary?”

“I don’t remember.” Frith was suddenly becoming fretful. He fumbled with his rug. “It was a long time ago. It was during the war—the Great War—Mr. Maxim was serving in France, and he might have been killed any day. Captain Julyan was in uniform, on leave…. I didn’t like to look at Mr. Lionel—not then. ‘He’s being eaten away’—that’s what the nurse said. And the nurses wouldn’t stay, they couldn’t stomach it. Where’s the tea? I want my tea. It’s Sunday today. They always make sponge cake on Sundays—it’s my favorite.”

The Sister was departing. The red-haired nurse turned in our direction. One last effort—and it seemed wise not to mention Lionel de Winter directly.

“Frith, you remember you were telling me about Sarah Carminowe’s two last children? What became of the daughter? Ben lived on, didn’t he—but what happened to the little girl? Lucy, that was her name. I found her baptism entry in the church register. What happened to Lucy Carminowe?”

“She died. They
all
died. They’re all dead now.” Frith’s voice rose on a querulous note, and I knew I’d gone too far and pushed too hard and I’d frightened him. “They’re all dead. They’re all gone. I’m the only one left. And I want my tea now—nurse, nurse, I want some sponge cake.” He tried to turn in his chair and look for her; then he looked at me, angry and flushed and confused. “Who are you?” he said, his voice rising on a high thin note. “Why am I talking to you? I don’t know you. I’ve never seen you before…. Nurse, nurse, tell him to leave me alone….”

“Now, now, Mr. Frith…” The little nurse arrived and bent over his chair. She patted his hand, and then, straightening up, made faces at me. They meant I should leave—but I’d known I’d have to leave anyway. I stood up and said good-bye to Frith, though I don’t think he was even aware of me by then.

“What a state you do get yourself into,” the nurse was saying as I walked away. “Look at you, working yourself up over nothing, when the nice gentleman’s come to see you specially! Now, Mr. Frith, here’s your sponge cake….”

I walked down from the covered terrace into the grounds, and when I was out of sight beyond the great banks of shrub roses for which St. Winnow’s is famous, I took Lionel de Winter’s death certificate out of my pocket and re-examined it.

When Frith spoke, I could see Manderley as it had been. It rose up before my eyes with a vividness I knew could be deceptive. I felt I could see Lionel and his mother—but could I? No, I couldn’t rely on such images; I preferred to rely on documents—especially documents like the one I was holding. This was evidence, and it was incontrovertible.

Lionel de Winter had died in June 1915; cause of death was General Paralysis of the Insane. Or, to give it its modern name: syphilis.

Whether or not he was aware of it, Frith had just given me a description of that disease’s stages—primary, secondary, and tertiary. And the implications of Lionel’s illness were considerable. Syphilis is a cruel and virulent disease: If it affects a man, it can infect a wife or a mistress—and children.

I
T WAS TOO EARLY TO CALL IN AT
T
HE
P
INES YET, AND
, besides, I needed to be alone, and I needed to think. Not for the first time since I came here, I cursed my lack of transport. I’d felt Terence Gray wouldn’t own a car, so did not bring mine, and now I regretted that. If I’d had a car, I could have gone over to the Manderley church now, and looked again at the Carminowe gravestones. Not that I really needed to do so—I could remember them perfectly well: John Carminowe and his wife Sarah lay in a quiet section of the churchyard, under the branches of a yew, overlooking the sea. Their three elder sons did not lie next to them. Those strapping boys had been buried in some corner of a foreign field, and their names, along with those of some thirty of their contemporaries, were on the war memorial in Kerrith. They had died aged seventeen, eighteen, and twenty. I pitied their mother, living on at that cottage with her two last children. Sarah Carminowe must have looked ahead and made provision for her son, for Ben, frequenter of Manderley, had been laid beside her. I had found no gravestone for Lucy Carminowe—and no record of her death, either.

I began to walk slowly down the lane to the riverside; instead of
turning toward Kerrith, I gave in to impulse and turned the other way, toward Pelynt and the fisherman’s cottage May and Edwin rented the year we came here. It is set apart from the rest of the tiny village, right next to the water. It is still let, rather than lived in all year, I think; I found it empty, the interior shutters closed, and the small garden neglected. I sat on the steps by the house for a while in the late afternoon sun, throwing stones idly at the water and trying to make them skip, as I did as a boy. I was angry with myself. I was falling into the most obvious of traps, the trap any apprentice historian learns to avoid: In the absence of sufficient facts, I was trying to make those facts I did have fit my own hypothesis.

It was possible, but not certain, that Lionel de Winter had fathered Sarah Carminowe’s last two children—and the way in which Frith had spoken certainly encouraged that view. That would have meant that Maxim de Winter had at least one half-brother and-sister, possibly more, given his father’s philandering. Had Maxim known, or at any point suspected, that a boy treated as a village idiot might be a blood relation? That would have been a terrible realization for any young man—especially since there was the possibility that Ben Carminowe’s mental defects might be a result of Lionel de Winter’s illness. Maxim himself had almost certainly been born before the onset of his father’s disease, or so I calculated. But if he knew what killed his father, and I could see no way in which he could have escaped that knowledge, he might not have felt certain of that himself. Even if he were perfectly healthy, would it not cast a shadow over him, would he not feel tainted?

And Ben Carminowe’s sister—why was I so haunted by this sister, especially these last few days? I knew the answer to that: It was because of that notebook sent to the Colonel, with the postcard of Manderley inside it. It was because it suggested a link between Rebecca as a child and the de Winter family—and I had gone chasing after that tenuous suggestion with the desperation born of months of fruitless inquiries into Rebecca’s background and antecedents.

It was utterly stupid. It was equally stupid to be influenced by the conversation at lunch concerning costumes and legendary eigh-teenth-century incest. I was looking for a connection that didn’t exist; the dates, the ages—none of it corresponded. According to her death certificate, Rebecca de Winter died in 1931, at the age of
thirty. She must then have been born in either 1900 or 1901, on the cusp of this blighted century. Lucy Carminowe was born in 1905. There was not the least resemblance between the poor sick child Frith had spoken of and Rebecca as a woman. Lucy Carminowe, sad little ghost that she was, had probably died in infancy—and if I went back through the records and the church registers one more time, no doubt I would eventually find her. If I didn’t, then possibly, like me, she had been adopted. In which case, as I know only too well, any tracing procedures would be very difficult, if not impossible.

Not only was I losing my capacity to be objective; I was losing my capacity to think rationally. I was being affected by the half-truths, the quarter-truths, the endless rumors, legends, and fabrications that pass for history in a place like Kerrith. What I needed was a rest from the place, and a dose of London, I told myself. Well, I would get it tomorrow. I hurled the last of my stones as far as it would go out into the river, and watched the ripples circle.

I turned to look at the cottage where May, Edwin, and I stayed that first summer. I minded desperately about my birth in those days: A boy at the orphanage had told me my father could be any man with five shillings in his pocket, that my mother only had me after the gin and the knitting needle failed her. I believed him—and there’s probably one part of me, even to this day, that still does, even though he had no more knowledge of my parentage than his own, as I can see now. “That is a wicked lie,” May said, one night when I confessed this story, in the little room under the eaves that was my bedroom when we stayed here. “A
wicked
lie. Why, she wept when she had to give you up, the matron told me. Whoever your poor mother was, she loved you—just as I do.”

I now know this was not true, either. May had had no such conversation with the matron at the home, and the matron concerned had never met my mother. Even so, there’s a part of me that believes that story of May’s, too. I stood looking up at the small window under the eaves; I thought that with this legacy, peculiar to children in my situation, I was ill suited to this particular investigation. No wonder I ran after the story of Ben and Lucy Carminowe; no wonder I started to leap to conclusions and chase shadows: It’s in my blood. I have made myself an historian, but on my birth certificate there is a blank and the word “unknown” in the space where a father’s name and a
mother’s should be written. “A blank, my lord”: I have the illegitimate child’s fatal weakness—a longing to discover identity and lineage, in myself and in others.

I turned away from the cottage, and walked at a swift pace back to Kerrith. I called in at The Pines, as Ellie had suggested. Colonel Julyan, much restored from his restful day, was in good spirits, but I was not; I think he sensed something was wrong, for his manner was kind, and he did not cross-examine me.

I sat in his study for a while with him and his gentle dog. Barker, so sensitive to his master’s moods, now seems to be attuning himself to mine. He sat his great rump down on my foot, and licked my hand occasionally. He is not the most sweet smelling of dogs, but I felt consoled by him. We talked about Jack Favell for a while—Colonel Julyan said he wanted to prepare me. Then he listened to my edited account of my day; I wasn’t ready to discuss what Frith had told me, but I did tell him about the boathouse and the azalea wreath I had found there.