The Death of Lucy Kyte (28 page)

The night was over, and Josephine felt Lucy drifting away from her, vanishing irretrievably now that the diary had been read and a new day grasped greedily at the horizon. A sense of loss and desolation descended like a veil over her, inexplicable and yet impossible to ignore. She hesitated before going back inside, unsure of what she had just seen and reluctant to allow the cottage to close in on her again before she had had a chance to clear her head. She was tired now, exhausted, but the last thing she wanted to do was to go upstairs and sleep. If the long night had taught her anything, it was that she would only ever be a lodger here. The past was stronger than she was; how could it not be after all that had happened? It lived on in the cottage, regardless of whose present it was intruding upon – and if she was to stay here and be happy, she would have to accept that in the way that Hester had done for so many years. To Josephine's surprise, the idea held no fear for her.

She thought about Hester's bequest, to her and to Lucy, and wondered how to reconcile the two. What could she do to give Lucy the peace she needed? Was it as simple as publishing the diary and telling Maria's story at last, or was that only part of Lucy's sadness? It was hard enough to make things right with your own past, let alone someone else's, but Josephine knew she had to try – for Lucy's sake, as well as for Hester's. She made some coffee and changed quickly, then set out down Marten's Lane with a new sense of purpose. She had spent the night with the dead; perhaps it was time to see what more they could tell her.

16

The path to the church was lined with autumn crocuses. Their purple flowers looked oddly out of joint with the bleak, colourless dawn – too early or too late for the season to which they truly belonged, the butt of one of nature's jokes. Josephine walked up the wooded slope, pulling her coat close around her against the chill. The year seemed to have turned overnight, and her breath made patterns in front of her face. Above her head, the rustle of branches sounded like distant rain, although the day's only achievement so far was a damp, depressing mist that showed little sign of lifting. The trees closed in around her, refusing her a view of the church until she was almost upon it, and she noticed how each tree trunk bore the marks of a lifetime's experience. She hoped that Lucy's grave – if she could find it – would be equally revealing of a long life, well lived.

There was no lychgate to the churchyard, no ceremonial entrance through which to welcome the living or the dead. Only a crooked redbrick wall and a simple five-bar gate enclosed the sacred ground, as if the church were proud to serve a rural community. A few branches overhung the wall, scattering beech nuts onto the outer graves, but otherwise the churchyard was open and exposed to the weather. Never had Josephine seen a landscape so devoid of colour. The mist had conspired with the stone to drain the life from everything, leaving behind a blanket of grey, broken only by the shock of a single red rose on a nearby grave. In the stillness and the silence, she could almost believe that she was looking at an old photograph.

She left the path and struck out across the grass to the oldest part of the graveyard. Her shoes were soaked in seconds, and she wished she had thought to change into Hester's old galoshes, but her mind had been on other things. There was no way of knowing from the diary how long Lucy and Samuel had lived, or whether Lucy had gone on to have children of her own, but if she started with their contemporaries, she would be sure not to miss anything. She passed the Corder graves, and made her way along the back wall to the famous Gospel Oak that she had read so much about. It was easy to see why the tree was so revered. There was an ancient dignity about it that made the church feel like a young pretender, and its vast trunk – spectacularly split now, and streaked with the rain of ages – held a quiet strength. Some of the larger boughs sagged to ground level, others were angled and twisted, giving the tree a craggy and eccentric individuality, and Josephine thought of Lucy, watching her friend's exhumation from its shelter. Maria must be buried somewhere very near here. It made sense to hope that the Kytes were not too far away.

The gravestones leaned wearily in this part of the churchyard, hankering after the rest they signified for others. Josephine wandered between the rows, looking at the names on each stone or, where the letters were worn or covered in moss, tracing them with her fingers to find out whose death was marked there. Eventually, she found what she was looking for. Her heart leapt when she saw the Kyte name; she had not for a moment doubted the diary, but the letters carved in stone stood as confirmation of something almost too precious to be true. It did not take her long to realise that the story was still incomplete, though. Samuel was buried at her feet, a few yards from the boundary wall. He had died in 1843, and he shared his stone with two women: Ruth, whose dates suggested that she had been his first wife, and Molly, whom Josephine was shocked to discover had died a few months before her father, when she was just nineteen. Samuel's sister Hannah was buried nearby, but there was no sign of Lucy, nothing even to suggest that she might have had a place here, and Josephine wondered if the marriage had actually gone ahead. The plans had seemed so certain in the diary, but the only proof she had was Hester's use of the name, and she could have jumped to the wrong conclusion about that. Or perhaps Lucy had married again when Samuel died – she would have been in her early forties then and of an age to do so, or even to take another job in service and move away from the village. With Molly dying so young, there would have been nothing left here for Lucy but yet more grief.

The parish records might solve the mystery, but that was no comfort to Josephine's impatience. Frustrated, she walked through the rest of the churchyard looking for Baalham graves on the off-chance that Lucy had been buried with her birth family, but – although it was obviously a common Suffolk name – the only Lucy Baalham she could find was far too young to be the one she wanted, and she soon found herself at the bottom of the hill, near the church's war memorial. Polstead had not lost any of its men until 1916, she noticed, but perhaps that was because they had not been spared from the land for the first two years of the war; after that, the parish seemed to have made its fair share of sacrifices – enough, as Hilary had suggested, to put the death of a whore into perspective, although Josephine hoped that if more people had read what she had read, Maria might be remembered with a little more compassion. Nearby, under bare mounds of earth, lay the recent dead. She looked back towards the village, watched curiously by the sheep in the adjacent field; very few houses were visible from here, but she caught her breath when she saw how magnificent the Corder house looked on the horizon. It seemed both ironic and fitting that the finest view of it should be found in the graveyard.

‘Miss Tey?'

Surprised, Josephine turned to see Stephen Lampton standing at the edge of the path. It was not unreasonable of him to frequent his own church at this time of the morning – there should be no such thing as an ungodly hour for a vicar – but she had not expected to have to explain herself to anyone, and she struggled to find something to say beyond an initial greeting. Either he found nothing strange in her visit or was too polite to say so, because he put her at her ease immediately. ‘It's nice to see you again. I'm sorry we couldn't speak for longer the other night.' There was a twinkle in his eye as he added: ‘I looked for you after the service, but you must have beaten me to the door.'

Josephine blushed, remembering how quickly she and Marta had left the church. ‘I had an early start,' she lied, ‘and I could see you were busy. It was a very good turnout.'

Her tone implied better than expected, but Stephen seemed to take the comment in good heart. ‘Not bad, I suppose. Even some of the chapel folk will slum it with us for a harvest festival or a Christmas Day service, and it's standing room only for Armistice Day.' He smiled. ‘You seem to have caught me out, though.'

‘Have I?'

‘Yes. I probably shouldn't admit it, but I feel most at home in St Mary's at times like this, when the church is peaceful and I don't have to worry about who's doing the flower arranging. I've never really thought that God cared much about that sort of thing, but it seems I'm in the minority on that here. Rotas must be adhered to. It's a sort of unspoken eleventh commandment, and it rather eclipses the other ten.'

Josephine laughed. ‘Hilary did mention that you had a keen band of volunteers.'

‘Oh, there's never a shortage of people to decorate the altar and polish the brasses. I've got more bakers than I can find fêtes for, and they're queuing down the street with embroidered kneelers – but ask anyone to come and worship here, and that's a very different story.'

It was hard to tell from Stephen's tone if he was bitter about his lot, or resigned to it. ‘I imagine that's frustrating,' Josephine said, curious either way to know why he would stay.

‘Sometimes, but I can see their point. When we first got here, men were quite literally being worked to death on the land. Things are a little better now, but it's still a hard life and who am I to criticise people for not finding a moment to call their own, or for choosing to spend it somewhere else if they do? Questions of who they are, to each other and to God, take second place – and probably rightly so.' His words echoed what Bill Fallowfield had said about his own youth. ‘They bring their flowers and look after their dead, but I sometimes feel that the church is simply the building next to the graves.' There was sadness rather than arrogance in the way he spoke of his parishioners as a race apart, and Josephine realised that his efforts to belong here and to live up to the expectations of his role were as uncertain as his wife's. ‘And how about you? What brings you here at this time of the morning?'

‘I was looking for a grave,' she said, wondering how much else to tell him. ‘I've been sorting through some of my godmother's papers, and I'm afraid I've rather got caught up in the history of the place. She mentions a family who used to live in Red Barn Cottage, and I wondered what had happened to them.'

‘And did you find out?'

‘Yes and no. The husband and daughter are buried over there, but there's no sign of the woman I was looking for.'

‘What was her name?'

‘Kyte. Lucy Kyte. Her maiden name was Baalham. I wondered if I might have a look at the parish registers to see if she married again?'

‘Yes, of course. What period are we talking about?'

‘She was a contemporary of Maria.'

‘Ah, they're back at the rectory. I've been looking at them myself re cently. Call in any time – I know Hilary would love to see you.'

‘Thank you, I will.' She turned to go, then asked as an afterthought: ‘Do you know exactly where Maria was buried?'

‘I know what I've been told. Let me show you.' He followed the path round to the south porch, then struck out in a diagonal line towards the boundary wall, stopping about ten yards from Samuel's grave. ‘She's here, as far as I can remember. That's what Hester told me, anyway. She said she'd tried to get the stone reinstated, but popular opinion was very much against her.'

Josephine recalled Lucy's description of Maria's funeral, and pictured the crowds of strangers packed into the quiet churchyard. ‘It's hard to believe that something which happened so long ago can still rouse such strong resentment, isn't it?'

‘Do you think so?' Stephen looked at her, genuinely interested in what she had to say, and it occurred to Josephine that his voice was by no means the only attractive thing about him. Suddenly, she felt very conscious of her lack of make-up and the tiredness around her eyes, and she understood perfectly why Hilary never had to bake her own cakes. ‘I'm afraid I find it depressingly easy. We live in a world that loves children, except the ones born out of wedlock: it's never forgiven, and certainly never forgotten, and I don't just mean here. The last parish I worked in was just as bad, and it destroys people – the mother and the child.'

He spoke with a passion that seemed personal, and Josephine wondered if someone he cared for had felt the sting of illegitimacy. ‘It must have been quite a shock for both of you, coming here from London.'

‘Things never turn out quite as you expect, do they?' The comment had a wistful quality that reminded Josephine of something Hilary had said about her life, and it occurred to her that there was a lot of making the best of things involved in the Lamptons' marriage. ‘I remember my predecessor telling me that I'd have to take things gently with people here, but I didn't realise that he meant for the indefinite future. I've been doing that for sixteen years now, and I still don't know them.'

‘That's not a very encouraging thing for a newcomer to hear.'

‘Ah – it only matters if you
want
to be accepted, and I'm afraid I do.' Not many people in his position would have admitted that to a stranger, and Josephine admired him for it. ‘If you're anything like your godmother, though, you won't let that bother you.'

Josephine smiled. ‘You knew Hester well, didn't you?'

Stephen thought carefully before answering. ‘I knew the person Hester wanted me to know, if that makes any sense. I don't mean that there was anything false about her, or that she was pretending to be something she wasn't, but I always felt that it was . . .'

He tailed off, wondering how to explain what he meant. ‘Thus far and no further?' Josephine suggested, quoting John MacDonald.

‘Yes. That's exactly it. I suspect very few people got beyond that – perhaps only Walter. But the person I did know I liked very much. She was warm and compassionate and very funny, and she had a particular view of the world that was never dull. And we both missed London – that was why we enjoyed each other's company, I think. It's certainly what we talked about – the city and the theatre and the people. We were like Englishmen abroad, gravitating towards someone else who remembered the same things.' It was the first time that Josephine had heard anything to suggest that her godmother was not entirely settled in Suffolk, and it interested her that Hester could so naturally be different things to different people: a woman of the world to Stephen Lampton, a countrywoman at heart to Bert Willis. She sympathised with the apparent contradictions because she was like that herself: if someone from Inverness met one of her London friends, they would probably fail to recognise her as the same person; the only difference was that she tried to run the two lives concurrently, while Hester had left one behind. ‘I know what you're thinking,' Stephen added, ‘and you're right. It
is
an extreme reaction for somewhere that's only two hours away on a train.'