The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (41 page)

‘He bruised her. Tore her ear, pulling an earring out,’ Jane Rivers said. ‘By mistake, Mrs Easton said. There were worse things...’

She looked embarrassed. The handkerchief by now was a sodden rag.

‘Why didn’t she stop loving him? She even lost her baby.’ Her voice held a note of wonder. ‘She wouldn’t see nice Dr Maurice because the doctor would of known.’

Then she said, very quietly, ‘We all knew. Not that she said, though once or twice she’d say that she’d made Mr Easton angry, or that he hadn’t meant to do this or that. Excuses. But we all knew. Her lady’s maid left and she never employed another one. Didn’t want anybody to see her, I reckon. Used to dress herself, despite who she was.’

There was a note of censoriousness in her voice.

‘Did away with living-in staff. Mr Julian moved rooms. Mr Patrick—well, it may of been like you said, him going away, but I bet he couldn’t face her any more. Miss Frances, I think she didn’t know for a while, not when she was young because Mr Easton, back then, he seemed charm itself, not a bad man most of the time. But he got worse and she grew up and even she saw in the end.’

He was ashamed by the revelations, despite never knowing Digby Easton, ashamed that a man, ostensibly just like him, could do such things.

‘Did you ever see Mrs Easton hurt? Bleeding?’

‘Once or twice. She was ever so ashamed. But she sent me down to ask Cook for ice. I didn’t say anything below stairs.’

‘So is it possible that what Mr Patrick saw was nothing to do with what happened to Kitty that same night, but an injury?’

‘Of course it was. Mr Julian was always dealing with his brother’s mess. And all the time, the men here, they loved Mr Digby. He had the cricket team and was its star; he had them beating for his London shooting pals and they spoke about what a good shot he was, as proud as if it was them that held the gun; how he and his horse were like one when he was hunting. How he’d tell jokes when he’d had a few, man to man. How visiting ladies or women serving beer found him attractive. It was...’ She struggled as if trying to understand it herself. ‘It was as if he was the man they all wanted to be. A hero.

‘And if Mr Patrick saw blood on her, if that’s what you’re coming to,’ she said, ‘it was her own husband who’d put it there.’

‘Do you think—I know it sounds incredible—that Kitty’s father had killed her and the family knew?’

It was a new idea but it seemed to fit the circumstances.

‘He didn’t kill her,’ she said without a moment’s hesitation. She’d stopped crying, but Laurence could see out of the corner of his eye that her cheeks were blotchy.

‘He was like to do anything if he was drunk but he didn’t do that.’

He looked up and saw Ellen Kilminster coming through her cottage gate and walking towards them. Jane Rivers hadn’t yet noticed.

He said hurriedly, ‘Like to—?’

This time when she turned towards him he thought she must catch sight of her sister but she appeared to see nothing at all. Her look was one of absolute misery.

‘He’d started on Kitty. She was little, gentle, not a strapping lad who needs a bit of discipline.’

‘Dear God,’ he said and then, ‘I’m sorry. I just—’

‘It’s all right,’ she said bleakly. ‘God was just watching, letting Mr Digby do what he liked and doing nothing about it. Just like the rest of us. I don’t know why. I prayed and prayed. Then when I heard he’d died, I thought God had his chance in France and made sure he never came back. But why all the lads with him? All our lovely boys? And Kitty was gone by then.’

As her sister reached her side, looking at Laurence accusingly, the tears started again. Ellen sat down and put her arm around her sister. Jane sat rigidly, continuing to stare straight ahead of her.

‘What did he do to Kitty?’ Laurence asked. ‘Help me to understand.’

Jane nodded and he noticed Ellen’s expression change. He thought, she knows; whatever Jane knows, she knows too.

‘He was harsh,’ Jane said.

‘She broke her arm,’ Ellen said.

‘He
broke her arm,’ Jane said, forcefully. ‘He didn’t mean to—he never meant to. He wanted her to get on a pony—she was trying to edge away from him to me, and he dragged her by her arm and swung her on to the pony. The arm broke, although we didn’t know it straight away. She was screaming and it seemed to make him angrier. He called her a freak.’

Suddenly she stood up and started pacing back and forth, her arms wrapped around herself. It was hard to remember the composure she had displayed the first time he had met her.

‘He said he was cutting her fingers off—she had extra fingers—’

‘I know.’

Jane appeared relieved that she didn’t have to explain. Perhaps she too had some residual discomfort about what country people had once regarded as a sign of being a witch.

‘He didn’t want a circus freak for a child, that’s what he said before—that they were disgusting and he should have done it years ago. He’d give her brandy and it’d be done in five minutes. But this time poor Mrs Easton, she was crying and begging him not to. She took hold of his arm and he shook her off. She fell against the door and cut her face.’

Her hand went up and touched her own.

‘Mrs Easton told Mr Julian and the two brothers had a fearful row that evening. We could all hear it. Cook was frightened to send the girl up with their dinner. Petch was in the kitchen—he’d been fixing something and Mrs Hill gave him his tea. He said she should put rat poison in Mr Digby’s brown Windsor if he were going to do Miss Kitty’s fingers. Mrs Hill said perhaps it was like puppy dogs’ tails but Petch said no, he remembered when poor Mr Julian had it done when he were a lad. Awful, he said it was. What you wouldn’t do to an animal.’

She seemed to be speaking more to Ellen than to Laurence.

‘But Mr Julian going on, that’s what made him really set on it. And that’s when she knew what had to be done. Perhaps she still loved him, but what could she do? Mrs Easton? If she went away he’d have the child and then what? There would be nobody to defend her.’ And I was going anyway in the autumn so there’d be nobody for Kitty.’

He felt uneasy. Was she about to tell him something that confirmed Patrick’s story, at least in outline?

‘She could have divorced him, surely?’

Jane looked at him as if he were an idiot.

‘She wasn’t English, despite seeming it. Kitty was the heir. Do you think he was going to admit what he did? He’d say Mrs Easton was a mad one. Do you think some judge in a wig would think Kitty should be brought up away from Easton Deadall? He’d probably be Mr Easton’s best pal.’

Ellen put her hand out but Jane ignored it.

‘You don’t have to say any more,’ Ellen said.

He thought afterwards that for a few minutes Jane was wrestling with her conscience. He wondered whether he should give her assurances that, whatever she told him—and he was certain now that she would tell him something—he would keep it to himself, but he wasn’t sure that was true. He wanted to be able to tell Patrick that Julian and Lydia had done no harm to Kitty.

‘What’s done is done,’ Ellen said to him as much as to her sister. ‘Mrs Easton’s dead now. No one can hurt her again. Mr Easton too. He’s where he can never hurt anyone any more.’ She was looking anxiously from one to the other. ‘Bad blood,’ Ellen said. ‘Like father, like son.’

‘We made a plan,’ Jane said very quietly. ‘He’d been going for Kitty for a while. She made him angry, her being so shy of him. But I think it was also to pain Mrs Easton. The first time I was worried, it was because he was trying to get Kitty to drink wine and she didn’t like it. When she wouldn’t, he forced some of it down her and she was scared and bit the glass and it cut her. Later, it was like the more harsh he was to her, the more timid and frightened of him she became, the more he went at her...’

‘And then the kitten,’ Ellen said.

He felt Jane shudder. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. It was a bad time. It was like something in him was poisoning him.’

The shock of it was still with her, Laurence thought.

‘Drink,’ Ellen said wearily. ‘Our dad was another one for the bottle.’

‘So after that,’ Jane said, ‘when he’d said he was going to take her extra fingers off, Mrs Easton says to me—she was that afraid—what if we arranged for Kitty to disappear? As long as Mrs Easton was at home and no one saw anything, they couldn’t suspect her; it would be like a kidnapping or that she’d got lost.’

The nanny faced him, her emotions increasingly under control.

‘It was how much she loved Kitty. She would never be her mother again. I would leave service—they wouldn’t need a nanny, I’d just wait for them to let me go—and keep an eye on the child. I’d place her with a nice family. Look after her. I’d take her in, once the hue and cry died down. Tell her mother how she went on. Then one day, maybe long ahead, Mrs Easton could slip away from Easton and him, and start again. Change their names. Maybe take Kitty to America.’

Now she squeezed her sister’s hand.

‘We thought we were saving her. He was getting worse. We didn’t know he’d die not so long after.’

Laurence could see the reasoning behind it, but at the same time the absolute folly of their decision. It was naive through and through, but then they were desperate. Whatever had happened, it was clear the plan had gone horribly wrong.

Jane started and stopped several times, once looking at her sister.

‘It was my fault,’ she said. ‘My fault for trusting Robert.’

Slowly her story reached the one point Laurence had already guessed.

‘I thought he’d be all for it, he was that angry with Mr Digby after. After what he did. To me. Before, he wouldn’t hear a word against him. He thought he was Mr Digby’s confidant. That’s what he called it,’ she said mockingly. ‘And he thought Mrs Easton was a trial to her poor husband. “A sensitive blossom”, he called her. Said it was hard for a man in Mr Digby’s position to put up with a wife who had the money. Said it was humiliating. And for a country gentleman to have a city girl, a foreigner, for a wife. As if you could ever tell Mrs Easton and Miss Frances weren’t English through and through.’

She sounded more indignant at this than at whatever betrayal Robert might have inflicted on her personally.

‘Robert said he couldn’t call him on it because we’d be out without characters and never get another job as good.’ She looked bewildered.

‘It wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault,’ Ellen said angrily. And even Mr Julian was weak. It shouldn’t have been you and Mrs Easton. They should have dealt with their own.’

Jane didn’t appear to have heard her.

‘Your former fiancé—he took Kitty from the house and then away by car, didn’t he?’

This time he had both sisters’ attention. Ellen’s eyes were on her sister but Jane looked only at him.

‘How did you know?’ Ellen said after a few seconds.

‘I didn’t know. I guessed. I glanced out of the bathroom window not long ago and saw how few other windows looked over the stable yard. The old servants’ bedrooms had views half blocked by the balustrade. Unless he was very unlucky, a man could take the child out the back, a few feet across the yard and into the car in a minute or so, and never be seen.’

Ellen Rivers kept her eyes averted as he continued.

‘No one but Robert left the house until after the police had been. He took her out in the night—presumably she’d had a powder to keep her asleep—and he went off with her when he was sent to get help. He’d counted on it being him who’d be sent.’

In speaking of Robert’s scheme, Laurence had a sudden insight into Julian’s motives in sending David off, also to get help, after the body had been found in the vault, but he said nothing now.

Jane was wet-faced with misery, her head bowed, as she took up the story.

‘Robert left her with a woman who’d come up to Marlborough from London, special. We hadn’t known how to arrange that bit. A safe place for her to go to straight off, until I could be there. There was a woman that he’d paid. She’d have another child with her already so it would look natural. And we were so relieved. They were going to cut her hair off, put her in boy’s clothes and leave before the alarm had even been passed to the railway station.’

‘Did he fetch her from her room?’

For a second Jane Rivers seemed surprised rather than sad. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘If he’d been seen upstairs he’d have been in big trouble. Mrs Easton gave me one of her sleeping powders. I gave a quarter to Kitty.’

She shot him an almost defiant look.

‘Mrs Easton put one in her husband’s Madeira. His brothers always took port.’

‘And then?’

She made another of the odd twitching expressions he’d noticed before.

‘But things went wrong?’ he said, watching her face intently.

They killed her, he thought with sudden insight. They gave her too big a dose in their need to make her sleep and they killed her. Everything made sense: Lydia’s behaviour, Jane Rivers’ and Robert Stone’s speedy departures. The rupture of all those relationships. Guilt.

‘First, Mr Digby’d had a big dinner,’ Jane said quite calmly. A lot of wine, even for him. He didn’t drink all the Madeira. The powder took too long and with the wine it seemed to set him off on one of his fits. He laid into Mrs Easton. He was furious with her going up early or something. Later she told me he’d shook her, she was expecting, but ... she was already ... losing the baby. He said she was disloyal, telling Mr Julian he was going to cut Kitty’s fingers off. It had been a joke, he said. But now she had told about it, he’d no option, not to look a fool. He’d do it in the morning and it would be her fault.

‘So we had to go on, despite she was taken unwell, it was the night we’d planned to take Kitty, and Robert was ready downstairs, and the woman he’d got to take Kitty to London—thered be no way of stopping her from coming. Mrs Easton struggles down to get me to help her, I turn the lights on—she’s bleeding—but Mr Julian hears, he’s only four doors away. She needs him to go back in his room, so she goes with him and lets him comfort her. He keeps brandy up there and he gives her some. My door’s ajar and I don’t know what to do but she hasn’t said to stop. I lift Kitty out of bed. Open the laundry chute, which we’ve oiled two days before and tested to see that it’s quiet. All the time I can hear Mrs Easton crying. I don’t know if it’s partly to cover but mostly it’s because she’s reached the end. I tuck Kitty up with her little doll, wrapped in a blanket, and down she goes. Peaceful as an angel.’