Secrets (16 page)

He made her believe it would be paradise, that the interest on the capital from the sale of the shop building would keep them. He would sell his paintings, and they’d raise a few chickens and grow their own vegetables. Everything would be fine.

Honour sighed deeply. Back then she was as naive as Frank. She didn’t stop to think what living on the marsh in winter would be like, or that Rose would resent leaving her old school and friends behind. It didn’t cross her mind that her own parents would see their only child’s sudden departure from Tunbridge Wells as abandonment. She didn’t know what real poverty meant then either, not until their capital was depleted.

Nor did she know then that just two years later England would go to war with Germany and Frank would enlist. If anyone had told her on the day the shop closed for the last time that within six years she’d be wishing for death to release her from the struggle to survive another day, she would have laughed at them.

The candle had burned right down to a mere stub while Honour had been reliving the past. It hurt to dredge it all up, to look at what a good life they could have had if only they hadn’t chased dreams. If Frank had kept the shop going he could have avoided joining up, and perhaps he’d still be alive today. If they’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells maybe Rose would have turned out differently too.

But the past was past, and there was nothing to gain by wishing they’d done things differently. It was the present that mattered to Honour now, and until this evening her life, though often hard, had been tranquil and agreeable. She made just enough to live on with the sale of her eggs, preserves and rabbits, and she loved the marshes and her little home. She didn’t want change, heartache or further responsibilities.

Especially not a child to take care of. She would be a constant reminder of Rose and all that grief she caused. She couldn’t and wouldn’t keep her here.

Adele woke suddenly at the sound of a cockerel crowing and for a second or two she thought she was still at The Firs and had dreamt the long walk to Rye.

But her feet were throbbing, her face felt as if it was on fire, and when she tried to sit up, a sharp pain in her back prevented her, and she soon realized this was no dream.

It was very early, for the light coming through the thin gingham curtains was still grey, and above the sound of birdsong, she could hear her grandmother snoring in the next room.

She was relieved to see that her imagination hadn’t been playing tricks with her, and that her grandmother’s living room was every bit as cluttered and odd as the brief impression she’d formed when she arrived.

The couch she lay on was in front of the stove, one of those old-fashioned ones with a fire inside it. It had gone out now, and she supposed her grandmother had to light it each morning. From her position on the couch, the front door was in front of her, the scullery behind, and her grandmother’s bedroom door to her right beside the stove. To her left at the back of the couch were a table and chairs and all the clutter. It even blocked the light from the window back there.

She’d never seen anything like it: piles of cardboard boxes, a chest of drawers perched on an old sideboard. There was a stuffed russet-coloured bird with a long tail in a glass case, a big carved wooden bear which looked as if it could be a coat and hat stand, and a mattress stacked against the wall. She wondered what was in all the boxes. Could her grandmother be preparing to move somewhere new?

The bird, the bear and the table and chairs all looked as though they came from a rich person’s house; even the couch she lay on was dark red velvet. It didn’t seem to go with a woman who wore men’s clothes and had no electricity.

Adele wanted to go to the lavatory, but when she tried to get up again, she found she still couldn’t. She felt awful too, and very scared when she remembered how nasty her grandmother had been last night. She didn’t dare call out, so she closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

She must have dozed off again, coming to with a jolt as a door creaked. Bright sunshine was coming through the windows now and the sound was her grandmother coming out of her bedroom. She had a shawl around the shoulders of her flannel night-gown.

‘I need to go to the lav,’ Adele said hesitantly. ‘I tried to get up, but I can’t.’

‘Why not?’ her grandmother asked, peering down at her suspiciously.

‘I hurt all over,’ Adele said.

‘You’re just stiff I expect. I’ll help you.’

Her help was merely to catch hold of Adele’s two arms and jerk her upwards. Adele bit back a scream of pain and wavered on her sore feet.

Her grandmother offered her arm to hang on to and Adele edged towards the scullery, wincing with every step.

‘Slip your feet into those,’ Honour ordered, nudging a pair of old slippers towards Adele with her foot. ‘It’s not far to the privy.’

When the back door opened, the view in front of her beyond the fence of the large garden was so beautiful and unexpected that Adele momentarily forgot the pain she was in.

Waving grass studded with wild flowers stretched all the way to Rye. To her right was the ruined castle she’d seen on her way here, and a river like a slick of silver ribbon winding its way through the lush grass.

A honking noise made her look up. A flock of large birds with long necks were flying over, and as she watched they swooped down on to the river, landing gracefully without even making a ripple.

‘Wild geese,’ her grandmother said. ‘We get dozens of different kinds here.’

Adele suddenly became aware again of how much she hurt and hobbled on to the privy which her grandmother had pointed out, almost hidden beneath a bush covered in large purple flowers. When she came out again a few minutes later she saw her grandmother opening a rabbit hutch to let the occupants out into their run.

‘I like rabbits,’ Adele said as two very large brown and white rabbits came out and sniffed the air expectantly.

‘They aren’t pets,’ her grandmother said coldly. ‘I breed them for their fur and the meat.’

By the afternoon Adele was in despair, and convinced her grandmother really was a witch, for she had to be the nastiest person she’d ever met. All she wanted to do was lie down, close her eyes and go to sleep, but her grandmother said she must sit in the chair.

She had made her put on an old dress of hers while she washed Adele’s, and she kept firing questions at her that mostly she felt too ill to answer. One moment she was cold, the next so hot she was sweating, but her grandmother didn’t appear to notice for she kept going outside to do jobs.

She was cross when Adele ate only a few spoonfuls of soup for dinner, and then she plonked a jigsaw on a tray and ordered her to do it instead of staring into space.

Adele had always loved jigsaws, but her head spun as she looked at the pieces. She wanted to cry and say how ill she felt, but she was sure that if she did, it would only make the woman nastier.

She wished she hadn’t come here now. It would have been better to have taken her chances going to Mrs Patterson.

‘Drink this up!’

Adele started nervously at her grandmother’s voice so close to her. She was holding out a cup of tea in one hand and a plate with a slice of fruit cake in the other. ‘Come on, sit up straight, and don’t mind the flecks of cream on the tea, it won’t do you any harm. But I’d better go and buy some more milk, it goes off so quickly in this warm weather.’

Fruit cake was Adele’s favourite, and at home it had been a rare treat. ‘Did you make it yourself?’ she asked.

‘No, my cook made it,’ her grandmother retorted. Even though Adele’s mind seemed very fuddled she recognized the sarcasm. ‘Now, behave yourself while I’m gone. Don’t go poking around.’

Adele could only stare stupidly at the woman, not understanding what she meant.

Honour rode her bicycle to the shop in Winchelsea, glad to be away from the cottage and the girl for a while. She seemed so dim, hardly able to answer the simplest question. Halfway up the hill into Winchelsea she had to get off and walk because it was so steep, and by the time she got to the top she was perspiring heavily because the sun was so hot.

It was only then that it occurred to her the girl might be suffering from sunstroke. She remembered she’d had it once after a day on the beach at Camber Sands with Frank and Rose. In fact she’d been poorly for days.

All at once she felt ashamed she hadn’t considered this before – after all, the girl had been out in the sun for two whole days. If that was the case, no wonder she couldn’t eat the soup for lunch!

Honour considered asking the chemist for some advice on how to treat sunburn, but when she looked in the shop there were several women queuing, and she didn’t want them to hear what she had to say. So she bought a pint of milk, put it in the basket on the handlebars, and rode home quickly.

She had left her front door propped open for the breeze, and the first thing that she saw as she stepped inside was the girl’s legs sticking out from behind the couch.

Rushing in, Honour found her face down in a pool of vomit. She lifted her away from it, turned her on her side and quickly checked her airway wasn’t obstructed. The girl was unconscious, her pulse weak, and when Honour touched her forehead she found it red-hot.

Glancing round, Honour saw the empty tea cup, the half-eaten slice of cake on the small table beside the chair, and guessed it was that which had made her sick and she’d tried to make her way to the privy.

For the first time in many years Honour felt scared. The girl had said she was in pain first thing this morning, but she’d taken no notice. She hadn’t even put her to bed. Now it was obvious she was seriously ill. A doctor was needed, but how could she go to find one and leave the child alone?

It was terribly hot in the living room, so she picked the child up in her arms and carried her into her own bedroom and laid her down there. ‘Adele!’ she called, tapping the child’s cheek sharply. ‘Can you hear me?’

There was no response. Adele was as floppy as a rag doll, burning up, and Honour felt sick herself with terror that she was going to die. How would she explain that away? People already talked about her, she knew they were suspicious about Rose disappearing. What if they thought she had killed this child, or just left her to die?

‘Cool water!’ she said aloud, trying to calm herself. ‘You’ve got to cool her down and get some fluid into her.’

When she stripped the child naked and laid her on some towels Honour saw the tell-tale purple bruising of fingermarks on her skinny thighs. She began to cry then, mortified that she’d been so obsessed with getting Adele to tell her about her mother that she had ignored that plaintive explanation of why she’d run away from the children’s home.

‘He did dirty things to me.’ She should have picked up on that. But it hadn’t registered because she was only thinking of herself and trying to safeguard her peaceful, reclusive life.

Adele’s eyelids began to flicker as Honour sponged her down with the cold water, and she paused to hold her head up and make her sip some water. ‘You must drink,’ she pleaded. ‘Just a few sips for now.’

Honour had always prided herself on being capable. She had nursed Rose through scarlet fever, Frank through his mental trauma and the pneumonia which ultimately killed him. She could mend a bird’s broken wing, wring a chicken’s neck and skin a rabbit. If a tile came off the roof she climbed up there and fixed it. But she felt weak and helpless as she sponged Adele, made her drink, then held the bowl as she vomited it back up.

On and on it went. She would get her cool enough to shiver, then cover her again, but within minutes her temperature shot up again and she was back to where she started.

It grew dark, and she lit a lamp. She listened and soothed Adele when she became delirious, calling out for her little sister and someone called Mrs Patterson. Hot one minute, cold the next, vomiting until there was nothing further to come up but bile. And all the time Honour kept seeing those purple fingermarks on her thighs, and felt rage that a man could do that to a child.

Midnight came and went, and Honour had already changed the bed sheets twice because they were soaked with sweat. She wanted to open the window to let in fresh air, but the moment she did so moths flew in, and the sound of them fluttering against the lamp was too distracting. Eventually she lay down beside the child, but although she was exhausted she was afraid to close her eyes even for a minute. Each time she looked at the girl’s face, swollen and red with sunburn, she felt a sense of outrage that both Rose and that man Makepeace had treated her so badly.

It was four in the morning when Adele called out for a drink. Honour woke with a start and felt ashamed she had fallen asleep for a little while.

She was off the bed in a trice, rushing round to the other side to lift the girl’s head and offer water. This time Adele drank half the glass before sinking back on the pillow. Honour sat by the bed waiting with the bowl, expecting her to vomit again, but the minutes crept by and this time she didn’t. Honour felt her forehead. It was still extremely hot, and she laid a wet cloth on it to cool it. Yet instinct told her the danger period was past.

Honour blew out the lamp as the first light of dawn was beginning to creep into the room. Then, going over to the back window, she opened it to let some fresh air in. The sky was a pinkish grey, suggesting it would rain later, and that pleased her, not just because her vegetables needed rain, but because it would cool the air and help the child to get better.

‘Her name is Adele,’ she murmured to herself reprovingly.

She leaned her elbows on the window-sill, staring out across the marsh, and wondered why Rose gave her that name. Could the father have been French?

‘Does it matter?’ she asked herself. ‘After all, you’ll be packing her off once she’s better.’

Chapter Eight

‘You’ll strain your eyes trying to read that book in this light,’ Honour said sharply. It was early evening but raining hard outside, which made the room dark.

Adele put
Little Women
down reluctantly, wishing she dared ask if she could light the oil lamp. But she knew her grandmother never lit it until dusk, and that was a couple of hours away.