The Death of Lucy Kyte (16 page)

The ‘godforsaken field' looked anything but this morning, and Josephine paused at the top of the track, thinking about Red Barn Cottage and its reputation. Everyone grew up knowing a house like that. As children, she and her sisters had played near a derelict building in Daviot, and she could see it now in her mind's eye – a dark silhouette on the lonely bend of a narrow road, shadowed by melancholy elms and surrounded by hemlock and nettles. Encouraged by local stories and by the fertility of a child's imagination, she had filled that house with every conceivable horror, of this world and the next, and she wondered if Polstead's children would think of Red Barn Cottage in a similar way, if – in their memories – one legend would grow and tumble into the next: the house that saw the murder and the fire; the old woman who lived there, obsessed with the past until it drove her mad.

When she got back to the cottage, she found the table in the parlour looking like something from a church jumble sale. ‘You were quick,' Marta said, struggling downstairs with another box and swearing as the bump in the stone floor thwarted all her efforts to force it through the door. ‘I thought I'd be able to get everything out before you got back.'

‘I wondered why you were so keen to get rid of me.' Josephine looked at the growing pile of clutter, touched that Marta had wanted to help her through something she was dreading, but horrified at the Pandora's Box it had unleashed; once started, it would have to be finished, as Marta no doubt knew. ‘But you're leaving tomorrow. We can't spend your last day on this.'

‘It's not as bad as it looks,' Marta insisted, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. ‘It won't take all day. Here – grab some of this to sort through in the garden while I finish the clothes and scrub the floorboards.'

‘You don't have to do this,' Josephine said, although she was more grateful than she would have known how to express. ‘It should be my responsibility, not yours.'

Marta put the box down and held her close. ‘That's why it's easier for me than it is for you. I don't want to leave here with this still hanging over you.' She grinned. ‘Anyway, the sooner that room is cleared, the sooner I get a bathroom. It would be perfect.'

‘No sign of Maria's clothes chest, I don't suppose? That would buy you a bathroom to die for.'

‘I'm afraid not, but look on the bright side – there's no sign of her hand either.'

‘What on earth would Maria Marten think if she knew how valuable her death had made her‚ I wonder.'

‘Probably much the same as I do: that the whole world had gone mad.'

‘Yes, I suppose so. I bet she'd happily have settled for a little more recognition while she was alive.'

‘Quite. I did find this, though.' She showed Josephine a small collection of broken pottery that she had placed carefully on the sideboard. ‘It was under the bed, already broken. I thought it might be one of those figures you mentioned, but it's not Staffordshire. As far as I can tell, it's an actress in character and it looks a bit like Hester. All the pieces are there, in case you ever have enough hours in your life to mend it.'

‘Was this there as well?' Josephine asked, holding up a tiny key.

‘Yes, between the floorboards.'

‘It must be the key to the bureau drawer. I've been looking for that for ages. I thought I was going to have to force it.'

‘Good, but you're not using it now.' She took it from Josephine's hand, laughing at the expression on her face. ‘We're finishing this bloody room if it kills me. You can rummage through the bureau for as long as you like after I've left, but now I want you to go and sit in the sun and throw away as much of Hester's junk as you can bear to. I won't be long.'

Josephine picked up the suitcase nearest to her and did as she was told. It didn't take her long to realise that Hester had packed her entire Inverness life away into one modest piece of luggage, probably the very case that she had left home with. Intrigued, she glanced through a pile of photographs of the town as it was before she was born, recognising buildings and rituals more often than people. They were interesting, but most of them meant nothing to her, so – with the exception of one or two pictures that featured Hester or members of her own family – Josephine put them to one side to give to the Inverness Museum.

The bundles of letters were harder to pass off as someone else's problem. Josephine found herself sifting through the envelopes, instinctively looking for her mother's handwriting, and it did not take her long to find what she was looking for. Hester seemed to have kept even the most inconsequential correspondence from her friend, and, to Josephine's surprise, the suitcase also contained some letters that had passed the other way, parcelled up by Josephine's father and returned to Hester a year or so after his wife's death. It amused her to see that, as young girls, they had written to each other even while living side by side in Crown Street. She read at random – letters about school and other friends, about their families and life in the town, postcards from holidays, notes about books they had read, and, as they got older, thoughts of what they wanted to do with their lives, journeys they longed to take, boys they admired and others who admired them. In the briefest of snatches that Josephine read, their separate personalities shouted from the page: Hester's language, even as a child, was elaborate and dramatic, as though she were continually trying out different personas to see which one suited her best; her mother's tone was far more down to earth, but with a streak of dry humour that cut through Hester's wilder fancies without seeming to cause offence. Josephine picked up another envelope, the first she had found with a non-Inverness address; it had been sent to Hester in Newcastle, and was dated November, 1890.

My dearest Etta,

Well, you've gone, as I always knew you would one day. Restlessness is not something to be grown out of when it has been as carefully nurtured and encouraged as yours has, and I suppose I realised a long time ago that we would not live side by side for ever, watching our children grow up together like we did, growing old in the town we were born in.

You are right to go, no doubt, and you must have the courage of conviction in your decision. You owe it to Walter as well as to yourself not to allow the happiness you have found together to be poisoned by guilt. People love, or they don't love. That is the simplest fact of life, if sometimes the hardest to accept, and you cannot choose where your heart goes. A marriage where you did not love would never have suited you. It would only have brought more pain to everyone in the long run. Ronnie will forgive you eventually, and so will his family. You know how we are in this town, how we have always been – one grudge is soon forgotten for fear of missing the next.

I'm sorry we argued before you left, and for everything I said, but I was angry and sad, and I spoke out of selfishness. We have always had each other, and this town seems very different without you. But Etta, you were wrong, too, to say that I settle for too little. Perhaps there was a time when I dreamed of those adventures – escape and travel and all the things we talked about. But that's all it was for me – a dream. Everything was always possible for you: there was no such thing as fantasy, only lives you hadn't lived yet. Did you never know how much I envied you for that? But please don't blame me now for needing different things. We're not children any more.

Travel safely, my dear, difficult friend, and have the adventures for both of us. I hope in my heart that you will find happiness wherever you are, and that Walter will bring you the joy you deserve. One day, perhaps, I will see your name outside a theatre and think: ‘So she has found herself after all.' That would make me very happy.

Intrigued by what Hester might have left behind in Inverness, Josephine looked for a reply but Marta interrupted her before she could find one. ‘Jesus, you can't move in this garden without tripping over something.' She disentangled herself from a particularly determined bramble and sat down on the bench.

It was true, Josephine thought; the paths were littered with statues and overgrown plants, and she wondered how Hester had coped. ‘What's wrong?' she asked, watching Marta light a cigarette. The cheerful determination of earlier had completely gone; she seemed out of sorts, angry even, and Josephine took her hand, surprised to find it like ice. ‘Why are you so cold?'

‘I don't think that room has been warm in a hundred years.' Marta inhaled deeply, and lifted her face to the sun. ‘There's something you need to see up there. I was going to cover it up but you'll find it sooner or later, so there's no point in my trying to pretend it's not there.'

‘What is it?'

‘Let me finish this and I'll come up with you.'

‘No, I've let you do too much already. Stay here and get warm.'

Josephine climbed the stairs, her mind teeming with possibilities, each less welcome than the last. The door to the room was wide open and, now that Marta had freed it from most of its contents, it looked bigger than she had originally thought. She stepped inside, and noticed that the window was still fastened with the scarf she had used as a temporary fix, but outside the rose had grown back over the glass, more virulent than ever, and the sun struggled to get through. The room was above the scullery, Josephine told herself; of course it would be cold. Even so, the chill in the air was surprising, as noticeable against her face as the difference between sun and shadow, and she felt the same sense of sadness as she had when walking home, accompanied by the season's proof that another summer was lost to her. Marta had stripped the bed and bundled all the clothes into pillowcases, but she had been able to do nothing about the staining on the mattress, and an air of utter desolation hung over the room. As she stood there, Josephine had the curious sensation of intruding on someone's grief, as much a part of the building as the stone and the wood. It was, she thought, a room entirely without hope.

The smell that she had found so claustrophobic was barely noticeable now that the clothes were gone and the floor had been scrubbed with soap and water. Marta had pulled the bed away to get to the boards underneath, and Josephine could see that a wooden window seat had been built into the wall on that side of the room. It did not take her long to realise that it was this, and not the atmosphere in general, that Marta had found so disturbing. Immediately below the window, the word ‘sorry' had been scratched again and again into the wood, the letters running into each other until they were barely legible. Too shocked to think properly, Josephine traced the marks with her fingers, feeling how deeply each had been scored into the oak, sensing the desperation with which they had been made. What in God's name had Hester done to drive her to a penitence like this? The only response to her question was silence, a silence which echoed the death that stood between Josephine and all she wanted to know.

‘Perhaps it wasn't Hester,' Marta said from the doorway. ‘Perhaps someone else did it.'

Josephine looked at the doubtful expression on her face. ‘You don't believe that any more than I do.'

‘No, I don't suppose I do, but it's hard to tell how old they are. What do you think it means?'

‘I have absolutely no idea.'

‘I don't have to go tomorrow, Josephine. I can't just leave you with this.'

‘It's a nice thought, but you must go. You've got a script meeting on Monday, and you told me how important it was.'

‘Then come with me. Spend a few days in London.'

Josephine was tempted, but she shook her head. ‘I can't just run away like that, Marta. Anyway, Lydia will be there, and I don't want things to be more awkward than they are already.'

‘It will be fine.'

Josephine smiled at her. ‘That's what you always say, but one day you'll be wrong. And the worst is over now here, thanks to you. There's nothing left hidden and the room's clean and empty. All I need to do is shut the door on it. The clothes can be burnt and I'll get someone to take the mattress away. As far as I can see, those boxes downstairs are full of knick-knacks. I'll have a quick look through to make sure there's nothing important, and the rest can go to Hilary's next jumble sale. The theatre stuff in the study isn't a problem; it's actually a nice thing to look at when I can't stand Claverhouse any more, particularly if I
am
going to do something about that book, but there's no urgency. It can wait until I'm ready.'

‘So you're not going to worry about Hester's death any more, and all the other questions that you can't answer?' Marta sounded unconvinced.

‘I dare say they'll cross my mind, but I've got to put them in perspective, haven't I? Hester is gone. Whatever demons haunted her at the end of her life, I can't help her with them now, and I can't allow her to hand them down to me like an unwritten clause in her will. She's taken enough of our time already, when every hour we have together is precious. Let's make the most of it.'

She closed the door firmly to bring the conversation to an end. They took some food and a bottle of wine and walked through the woodland until they found a sheltered spot on the edge of a field, away from the cottage and from thoughts of anyone else but each other. Josephine lay back in the grass, her hands behind her head, and Marta ran a forgotten ear of corn playfully over her lips. ‘It makes a change, I suppose – me running out on you. You've got the hasty departure down to such a fine art.'

It wasn't an accusation, but it didn't need to be for Josephine to take it seriously; she had run away from their relationship so often in the past that Marta's continued love was nothing short of a miracle, but it was too important to her now to test again with cowardice or selfishness. ‘I know,' she admitted, ‘and that's why I'm so determined to make this cottage work. I want somewhere that isn't London or Inverness, somewhere just for us. No grand plans and elaborate arrangements – just you and I, whenever we can.'