The Misbegotten (43 page)

Rachel shut her eyes.
Three years old. Abi . . . was it you?
She struggled to keep her composure.

‘Do you . . . do you think Alice is dead?’ Bridget looked up sharply at her strangled tone, then shook her head.

‘She ran away. She had enough cause to, if she’d come to accept that she could not marry Mr Alleyn. I never heard from her again after that morning she went out. She loved to walk . . . it wasn’t strange that she went. I heard the door swing just after dawn, before the sky was proper lit. I thought to myself, “I do not need to rise just yet. Alice has gone out, she will bring the eggs on her way back in. Starling will light the fires.” That’s what I thought, as I lay there all lazy and warm. And that was the last sound I ever heard from my Alice. She should . . . she should have sent us word! She must have known how we’d worry, and that we would have kept any secrets she wanted us to. She should have sent us a word.’ Bridget settled her chin as she spoke, but there was more pain than rebuke in her voice.

‘It surprises you that she did not?’

‘Yes. But then,’ Bridget shrugged. ‘Letters get lost.’

‘The Alleyns are sure she eloped with another, but Starling insists that Alice had no sweetheart other than Jonathan. That she would never have been untrue to him . . .’

‘She deceives herself,’ said Bridget, abruptly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t like it any more than she does, but I know what I saw with my own eyes. I saw Alice, with another man.’

‘What other man?’ Rachel asked, her heart beating harder.
Let her be alive.

‘Don’t you think I’d have sought him out if I knew? I was . . . pleased. I saw him only once, from the back. They’d been talking on the bridge by the inn, and then he went off towards the toll bridge. Their talk was lengthy and . . . impassioned. A quarrel, almost. I saw him from far away as he went, and only from behind, but I was glad. Surprised, to be sure, but glad. She couldn’t have Jonathan, you see. They must have told you? Josephine Alleyn must have told you? Jonathan was forbidden to marry her; she was nobody. She might even have been his own kin . . . but even if that weren’t so, she was too far below him. I daresay they made plans to run away, or to wed in secret, but they’d been in love since they were bairns. He’d have done it already, if he was going to. Wouldn’t he? That’s what I tried to tell her, though she wouldn’t hear me. If he truly meant to wed her, he’d have done it long before. Loving him was only ever going to break her heart. So when I saw her talking to this other one, I was glad.’

‘Who was he? What did he look like?’

‘He was
nobody
! He was a stranger who asked her for the time of day, nothing more!’ Starling’s voice was tight. She stood in the doorway with the full kettle in one hand and a sloshing pail in the other, knuckles crimson from the cold and eyes glittering with anger.

‘I know what I saw, Starling! There was more to it than that!’

‘You know no such thing! What would you know?’

‘What would I know, who raised her up and knew everything she did – even the things you thought you kept secret?’

‘They were planning to run away! She and Jonathan! And they were going to take me with them . . . If you saw her speak to some man, then perhaps he was helping them, somehow. Perhaps he was a friend of Jonathan’s come to bring her news of a plan he didn’t dare write down.’

‘If you believe that you’re naught but an idiot, girl!’ Bridget snapped, and then coughed, and spoke more softly. ‘Why go searching for a complicated answer, when there is a simple one right in front of you?’

‘Because,’ said Starling, and then stopped, swallowing. ‘Because Alice
loved
me. She called me her sister. She wouldn’t have just left me here – left me to Lord Faukes. She
promised
.’

‘She loved you, for sure. And she loved me, in her own way. But we all thought she loved Jonathan Alleyn more, Starling, and yet she betrayed him. I
saw
her, and I know what I saw.’

The two of them stared at one another. Their argument had the weary, scarred sound of one that had been had many times before, and hurt them both every time. Starling turned away to put down the pail and set the kettle on the stove. Rachel sat in silence, huddling into the shadows by the bed, still electrified by the news that Alice had come into their lives aged three, not newborn. Her heart thumped so hard that it seemed to shake her all over; Bridget turned a beady eye on her, and seemed to see it.

‘But you have not answered my question, Mrs Weekes,’ she said. Rachel looked up at her, feeling absurdly guilty. ‘Why have you come here?’ In the silence that followed the question, Rachel sensed Starling’s listening ears. Suddenly, she wanted to tell them. She wanted to tell somebody what she dared to hope, but that hope was such a fragile little thing – a house of cards that could tumble down if someone trod too heavily close to it. But if she spoke it out loud, it might also coalesce. It might also make it true. Rachel swallowed, licked her lips, and spoke.

‘I had a sister. Her name was Abigail. A twin sister, identical to me,’ she said. In the other room, the silence grew even more acute.

‘Her favourite colour was blue; I remember that quite clearly. Lavender blue; and mine was yellow. On our last day together, Mama tied back our hair with ribbons to match our favourite dresses – lavender for Abi, primrose for me . . .’ That warm and sunny day; a day of light and air as soft as a gentle caress on your skin; a day of whispers and secretive giggles, caught behind small hands. Their brother Christopher was not yet born; the two girls were their own whole world, and their parents were the stars around which they spun. They had two languages – one for each other, and one for other people. A language of intuition and odd, fluting syllables; in truth they barely needed to speak at all, since the one knew instantly what the other wished to say. They were old enough to walk and run, to climb onto chairs and down steps. They were old enough to loves stories and songs, and to play games with their dolls and toy horses. They were old enough to have a favourite colour, and a favourite food, but they were no older than that. That day they were going to visit their grandparents, a destination not quite as exciting as the carriage ride that would take them there.

The girls loved to ride in the carriage. They could never sit still and straight on the leather seats, as they were instructed to. They fidgeted and bounced here and there, and craned to watch from the window; they knelt on the seats, and played on the floor as it rocked and rattled. Their mother, Anne, just smiled and took pleasure in their delight; she told their nurse not to reprimand their antics too firmly. The girls loved the horses, too. Before setting off, they each took a turn in their father’s arms; he held them near the animals’ blinkered heads and let them stroke the coarse whorls of hair between their eyes.

‘Take care to keep your fingers far from his mouth, Abi,’ warned their father, John Crofton. They loved the pungent smell of the horses, particularly when they’d been running awhile and had sweat foaming on their powerful shoulders. The horses had bright chestnut coats with white legs and cream-coloured manes and tails. Their father had got them for a good price because red horses with four white legs were said to be unlucky.
Tosh and palaver
, said John Crofton. The little girls dreamed of being allowed to ride outside, on the box, sitting next to the whip. Then they could watch the manes fly and hear the hooves strike and the wheels clatter; they would feel the wind streaming in their hair and see the world rushing by, like flying.

But even their libertarian mother was adamant – they could not ride on the box, and they weren’t allowed to lean out of the window unless the carriage had halted or was moving very slowly, with no trees or hedges nearby to snag them or lash at their eyes. At the ford was one good place, since the crossing was always made cautiously. The road slipped into the By Brook and vanished along the rocky bottom to emerge the other side, muddy and rutted, some thirty feet away. It was early in the summer and spring had been full of downpours; there were still days of torrential rain, after which the landscape gently seethed when the sun returned, steaming as it warmed and dried. So the By Brook was running high; it was deeper than usual at the ford, and faster. The water shone; a green, unbroken skin undulating over the rocky bed, reflecting the vibrant colour of young beech boughs overhead. They heard the coachman, Lenton, holler to the horses, an elongated
ea-sy
that slowed the carriage. They heard the first great splashes as the horses started into the water.

‘Me!’ the girls shouted at once, each desperate to be the first to look out. Their father smiled indulgently.

‘Rachel first, since you were first to pet the horses before we left, Abi.’

John Crofton dropped the window as low as it would go, and held Rachel’s small body on his knee so that she could curl her fingers over the sill and stick her head out. Droplets of water landed on her face like rain, kicked up by the horses. She gazed down at the white plumes where their legs churned the river, and smelled their sweat and the clean river scent; the sticky leather of the harness. The water came well above the horses’ knees, covering their white socks. Their tails trailed in it, tugged downstream. The carriage slowed right down, and wobbled side to side over unseen rocks. Rachel looked up at the back of Lenton’s grey head. He was sitting straight, knees wide; tweaking at the reins, keeping them slow. Then the carriage tipped slowly, the left wheel riding up high onto some obstacle on the riverbed. It inched up to a high point and then stopped altogether. Rachel gripped the sill tighter as she was pulled towards the other side of the carriage. She felt her father’s hands tighten around her middle. She felt thrilled, and yet safe.

‘Hup now. Easy on, easy on.’ The coachman’s voice stayed low and calm; the horses leaned into their collars, but the carriage stayed stuck.

‘The wheel must be wedged in some crevice,’ said Anne Crofton. ‘Can you see anything?’

‘Hop down, little girl, and let me look,’ said their father. But Rachel didn’t want to relinquish her vantage point, and hung on.

‘I want to see! My turn!’ Abi cried suddenly. She reached up and grabbed the window’s edge. She jumped, pulling on her arms to lift herself up. All of her weight was against the door. At that moment the carriage jerked forwards, and righted itself abruptly, and in the next instant the latch popped open, the door flew wide, and Abi was gone.

‘
Abigail
!’ Their mother’s voice was a piercing, incredulous shriek. For a sickening moment Rachel was also airborne; her father’s hands tightened convulsively, gripping her ribs so hard that it hurt. There was water and the wet, black side of the carriage beneath and behind her, then she was inside again, thrust far back into a seat and left.

‘Abigail – catch her! Lenton, catch her, man,
catch her
!’ John Crofton was in the river, over his knees and struggling against the current. He lurched, could not find safe footing; had to keep one hand back to grip the wheel for support. The horses tossed their heads and plunged at the sudden noise and movement; Lenton was caught up with them, wrestling with the reins.

‘Abigail! Oh, my baby! My baby!’ Anne Crofton was hysterical; Rachel hardly recognised the sounds coming out of her mouth. Her mother was leaning out of the carriage with her arm flung out and her fingers splayed as though she might somehow reach Abi and pull her back to safety. But the river was fast, and deep enough, and the girls were only just old enough to climb onto chairs and down steps, not out of heedless rivers. Rachel stood behind her mother in the unsteady carriage, and looked out. Far down the river, where it curved out of sight beneath dappled green trees, a fragment of lavender blue was racing out of sight.

‘She drowned?’ Starling’s voice made Rachel jump; all the grim inevitability of the story was in it.

‘We had to think so. We grieved as if she had . . . but we never found her, you see. We never found her . . . body. My father and our man went the whole length of the By Brook, to where it joined the Avon – here, at Bathampton – asking in every village and cot along the way. But nobody had found a little girl, alive or dead, in the water. We were so young; I remember that day only as snatches of colour and sound and scent. I don’t remember her falling, not exactly, but I remember the colour of her dress, and how pretty it looked in the water. And I have always had the feeling . . .’ Rachel paused, and took an uneven breath. ‘I have always had the feeling that she wasn’t gone.’

‘So when you were told about Alice Beckwith, who you looked so similar to, you thought it could be her? Your sister?’ said Bridget.

‘The accident happened not ten miles from here in the By Brook valley, and that river runs here, to join the Avon! And now you tell me that Alice was brought to you aged three years or so . . . don’t you see? It has to be her!’

‘Poor girl.’ Bridget was shaking her head. ‘I can see why you would want to believe it. But you have a similar look to her, not an identical one, and Alice was some issue of Lord Faukes’s, I’m convinced of it.’

‘But you don’t
know
it!’

‘No, I do not know for sure. But don’t agitate yourself over it so, Mrs Weekes!’

‘Don’t agitate myself, when I may have found my sister, lost to me these twenty-six years?’ Rachel felt panicked, desperate; she felt Abi fading, slipping away from her.
Stay, dearest
.

‘But you have not found her,’ said Starling, a grim silhouette in the doorway. Her voice was hard, and even. ‘Alice is long dead. You have not found her.’

Rachel sat in silence for the rest of the visit. She rose from the bedside and went to sit by the stove, which was finally giving out a little heat, as Starling made a soup of the dried fish and some barley she found in the cupboard, and took a bowl of it to Bridget. She watched as Starling put a smooth lump of stone on to heat as she swept the floors, then wrapped the stone in rags and slid it under the blankets near the old woman’s feet; then she brewed a pot of tea and sweetened a cup with honey for each of them. All the while, she and Bridget exchanged comments about her work and the Alleyn household, and what provisions and charity might come in before Starling next visited, and who had been caught with whom, canoodling behind the church. There was no more talk of Alice or Jonathan, or the other man in Alice’s life; as if a truce had been called until the next time. There was no more talk of Abigail, and Rachel sensed them parting around the subject like a stream around a fallen branch; as though she had brought something shameful, embarrassing, to the cottage. She said nothing, feeling cowed and angry, and foolish too.
What if it is not folly to believe it? Jonathan found a note . . . and Bridget saw another man. What if she ran away, and is alive somewhere?
The thought was so sweet it was almost unbearable, and Rachel swallowed hard.
Even if she didn’t remember me, she would know me as soon as she saw me
.