The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (11 page)

A breeze had got up and there were currents moving over the silver sweep of grass that lay before them. From the field rose the huge and abrupt mound that Laurence knew to be Silbury Hill. Patrick called out to Eleanor as they got closer. She turned her head to reply but Laurence couldn’t catch their words. As they moved into the lee of the hill, Patrick stopped again, looking at the hill almost with pride.

‘Somebody’s done the calculations for how many man hours it took to build this. It’s much the same size as the pyramids of Egypt, the smaller ones anyway. Makes you think.’

He sat down in the grass as if to do so, and the others followed suit.

‘What is it for?’ Frances said.

‘A tomb, presumably,’ Eleanor said.

‘No, apparently not. There are plenty of myths: is it King Sil still on his horse? An ancient reservoir? A ziggurat? A place for human sacrifice?’ Patrick replied.

Frances looked startled. ‘You don’t believe that?’

‘No. I don’t
not
believe it, but I don’t believe we have evidence for it either. That’s not the same.’

‘Perhaps it was the sort of community sacrifice that sent soldiers to their deaths?’ Eleanor said.

If she meant it sarcastically, Patrick still answered her seriously. ‘If you mean a sort of cenotaph, like that of the Greeks, I think we would have found traces. But elsewhere around here,’ he made a broad gesture with his arm, ‘there was certainly conflict. Arrowheads embedded in skeletons. Skulls crushed. That kind of thing.’

‘If we go on sitting here we’ll all have lumbago,’ Frances said, ‘that I do know.’

She jumped up.

They all followed her. Laurence struggled to rise. He had injured his back in 1917, in the same disastrous attack that had wiped out so many of his men and had seen him decorated. He had never even opened the box in which his Military Cross lay, and never consulted a doctor about his back.

‘Give me your hand.’ Frances stood in front of him. ‘Come on, Laurence, we American-born girls are fearfully strong.’ She grinned. ‘Our grandmothers hewed logs and rode bareback.’

She braced herself and pulled him up, although for a second it seemed more likely that she would fall on top of him, than that he would get to his feet. Her beret fell off and her hair was in her eyes. She brushed it back and pushed the woollen hat in her pocket.

‘I thought you were born in New York,’ Laurence said teasingly. ‘Not a lot of hewing there, I imagine.’

‘No, but there’s a hewing culture, you see. America’s still building, growing. There’s a sort of energy.’ She sounded quite earnest, then added, ‘That’s why your aristocratic Englishmen were stealing our womenfolk as brides before the war ... and at least our girls aren’t your cousins.’ Her lips twitched.

Eleanor and Patrick had pulled ahead of them and were climbing the mound. Patrick turned and beckoned to them, then continued to scramble upwards with Eleanor.

Frances seemed disinclined to climb the steep slope.

‘At least they’ve stopped rowing,’ she said. ‘I sometimes think Patrick enjoys it but Eleanor feels genuinely passionate about her ideals. He shouldn’t play with her.’

‘Have you ever been back to America since you were sent here as a child?’ Laurence asked.

She shrugged. ‘I always meant to one day. But then everything happened.’

They had reached a fence and she leaned back against a post.

Laurence said, ‘It must have been hard.’ He meant it but it sounded inadequate.

‘Well, none of our lives are what we thought they’d be.’ She paused. ‘Eleanor said your own wife died?’ When he didn’t answer immediately she seemed embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry—’

‘No. It’s quite all right,’ he answered quickly. ‘It was a long while back. She died having a baby and he didn’t survive her.’

Frances looked at him. ‘I didn’t know you’d had a child. I’m so sorry. Were you there?’

‘No. I was in France. After I embarked I never saw her again and I never saw our son at all.’

They resumed walking.

‘But compared with Lydia—’ he began.

Frances said quietly, ‘Do you know, I still wonder what happened to Kitty almost every day.’

‘Did you ever have a sense of it?’

‘Not then, perhaps. I was almost hysterical. It was all more ghastly than anything you can imagine. Lydia was...’ She blinked quickly. ‘And Digby went from bewilderment to fear to rage and nights of heavy drinking. But later, with time to think, years to think, I’m sure that if she had wandered off we would have found her. A huge mass of people looked for weeks. How far could she have got? Other children who’ve disappeared like that have been found in the end. I kept thinking of the Saville Kent case.’

She glanced at him to see if he knew what she was referring to. He nodded, although he remembered only the name, not anything connected with it.

‘My aunt used to talk of it,’ she said. ‘But then that little boy was killed by his own sister.’ She seemed to be gauging his reaction. ‘And they found the body.’ Eventually she added, And with us there was a kidnap note. Digby did everything he could to pay off the kidnappers but perhaps it was the wrong way to deal with it. I think, being Digby, he wanted to try to catch the kidnapper, rather than simply handing over the money. But he may just have sealed her fate.’ She stopped. ‘No. I’m being awfully unfair. I didn’t always find Digby easy, but Lydia adored him. Perhaps I prefer that scenario to her being taken for any other reason.’

‘Like what?’ It was the first he’d heard of a note.

‘I don’t know.’ Her eye caught Laurence’s and she looked away. ‘Something darker than mere greed.’

He looked up to see Patrick trying to descend Silbury Hill slowly and carefully, but eventually the steep sides forced him to run in order not to lose his balance. He was gasping for air and pale but laughing. He held his hand out to Eleanor who was edging down sideways, using her hazel stick. She was windswept and looked happy.

‘You should have come up,’ she said. ‘You have a sort of aerial view of this whole odd world. You can see Easton and everything.’

‘How old is all this?’ Laurence asked.

Patrick was looking north, where Laurence could just see the standing stones at Avebury. He didn’t answer.

‘Thousands of years, Lydia says,’ said Frances.

‘Three millennia before Christ,’ Patrick finally said. ‘But of course it took hundreds of years to build. It would be like asking how old is London?’

‘I like it here,’ Eleanor said. ‘I like all the layers: people living on top of the past. It makes me feel like an insignificant speck. A rather cosy insignificant speck.’

‘You’re not intimidated by all that lies behind and beneath you?’ Patrick asked. ‘Nor proud to see how far we’ve come—out of our caves, beyond witchcraft and superstition, to all the achievements of the modern age?’

Eleanor stared at him unbelievingly. ‘Achievements? Cutting a swathe through a whole generation? Tanks and aeroplanes and barbed wire and chlorine gas?’

Patrick, half smiling, held up a defensive hand.

Frances said, ‘I’m the sort of American who likes the past in a sort of aesthetic way. I’m probably very superficial. When I got to Cambridge, I could hardly believe the beauty of it. When I first arrived here, Easton was like a picture in a storybook: this strange old house, the avenue, the family and the village sharing a name. It was the England we were brought up on. That was before ... everything, of course.’

Eleanor moved closer to her friend and tucked her arm through hers. Patrick looked slightly embarrassed. Eleanor turned to him. ‘Perhaps Patrick likes unpicking it all, so that he can feel in control of it. Identify, measure, label and prevail.’

‘You might be surprised to know that what I always liked about the ancient past was the mystery,’ Patrick said, his voice a tone higher. ‘I’m not interested in possessing the stuff. I gave up treasure hunting when I was thirteen. And actually I don’t want to have definitive answers. I prefer fragments to reconstructions.’

Instead of biting back, Eleanor said, ‘We ought to be cutting back home, you know. Nicholas will be driving Maggie mad.’

‘Of course.’ Patrick gave a little bow. ‘We’ll go straight back across the fields and be home in time for crumpets.’

They were relatively silent on the way home. Laurence listened to their footsteps, Patrick’s breathing, rooks cawing in a stand of trees and the breeze just catching the hedgerows. Patrick opened a gate, which creaked loudly as it swung back. The smell of hawthorn blossom was quite noticeable as they passed through. When he was in France, Laurence had feared he would never enjoy times like these again. Yet he had never belonged anywhere, as the Easton brothers did. He felt momentarily sorry for Digby, who had known this territory all his life, who had once been, in his own way, a tribal chief like the skeletons in the barrows, but who would never return to his small realm.

Suddenly there was Easton, standing in its slight depression, sheltered from the elements. To the far side he could see the avenue of limes, a part of the church, the lake hidden in its shrubbery and the ha-ha marking off the formal gardens from the fields. From here William’s choice of position for the maze seemed inspired. Even in its rudimentary form its precise geometry was visible from the surrounding land, its design seeming to draw together all the components of the landscape. Lydia’s idea for a living memorial had been simply but perfectly interpreted. And yet William could never have seen it from up here on the downs. From the prison of his chair, William’s vision had created all that now lay below them, just from his imagination, using black marks and contour lines on paper.

By the time they returned, David was waiting for them with Nicholas, who seemed indifferent to whether his mother had come back or not. He was hopping exuberantly on one leg.

‘Daddy let me go in the maze but David says I can’t go in the church because it smells,’ he said. ‘So I’ve been cooking. Susan and me did biscuits. I put on silver balls. Soon I’m going to go on the helter-skelter at Wembley and see the biggest steam engine in the world.’

Julian had complained that David was fretting about taking the car to London for their trip, and plainly thought it was an abuse of a good engine to push it. Patrick had laughed, saying that David’s dislike of the city evidently now extended to objecting at the car he loved being exposed to its dangers. But the David who appeared now seemed completely relaxed, even excited.

‘Mr Bartram, we can see something. The pattern’s coming clear in the church. I’ve told Mr Bolitho and he said you might want to go there as soon as you got back.’

‘Go back to the house with David and help Mrs Hill,’ Eleanor said to Nicholas.

‘I don’t want to see an old church anyway,’ Nicholas said, looking cross but following David across the grass.

Laurence, Patrick and Eleanor walked slowly towards the church. The petrol fumes were still lingering and they waited between the hefty yews until David arrived, pushing William. Inside the church, Laurence dropped back to let William go first.

‘Good heavens,’ William said.

The last veil of floor covering had now been completely removed and what was revealed was unmistakable in white stone on grey.

‘A pattern. It’s a sort of big geometrical knot,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s beautiful. And perfect.’

After a second Patrick said, ‘It’s a maze.’ He looked at Laurence for confirmation. ‘Isn’t it?’

Laurence nodded, thinking that this one small church was rewarding him with so many surprises.

‘Actually in a church it’s usually a labyrinth. And it’s very rare in England,’ he said. ‘There are several in France and Italy. There’s one at Ely but that’s a cathedral, whereas this little church is ... nothing. But I’m almost certain the pattern must be medieval.’

‘There’s a labyrinth in Cambridgeshire,’ William said, ‘an old one. The only other similar thing I’ve heard of is in Lincolnshire but that’s actually a replica of a garden maze near by.’

William was excited despite himself, Laurence thought. In the last few years, boredom, rather than the Germans, must have been William’s worst enemy.

‘What’s it for?’ Frances said. ‘Is it just a decoration?’

‘You either walk along them or meditate upon them,’ Laurence said. ‘Some people think they are just intended to focus the mind on God; others say they represent Christ’s trials on the way to Calvary or the human journey through life.’

Patrick, who had just stood looking intently at the floor, was already turning to leave. ‘I’d like to draw it,’ he said. ‘I’m going to fetch some paper.’

Eleanor said, ‘Bother. I really need to get Nicholas’s tea.’

She made an expression of regret as they all turned to go. David followed them too, but not before he’d stood for a moment, looking down at the pattern. When he realised Laurence had seen him, he gave him a wide smile before turning and walking swiftly after the others.

When the church fell quiet, Laurence lingered, taking it all in. The pattern in front of him was unlike pictures of continental mazes that he had seen and it clearly extended under the font and front pews. What puzzled him was why anyone had chosen to cover it up.

He didn’t bother to put on the electric light, preferring to look at the maze as it would have been seen over the centuries. The monochrome design remained clear even as the light began to fade. After a time, he wasn’t sure how long, he heard the door open and close behind him. It was Patrick, with a pad under his arm. He stood next to the altar and gazed at the maze.

‘I find I don’t want to walk on it,’ he said, ‘although it must be perfectly robust to survive under the bitumen.’ He took out a pencil and gestured towards the light switch. ‘Do you mind?’

Laurence shook his head. ‘Not at all.’

As Patrick drew, they sat in companionable silence. Finally he said, ‘Mind you, it’s not a labyrinth.’ He tipped his drawing towards Laurence. ‘Not a smooth conduit to God nor a final redemption through travail. Nothing like William’s jolly maze either. It’s a mass of dead ends and false junctions. More like the fabled maze of the Minotaur that dear Sir Arthur keeps seeing in every crooked passageway at Knossos. There is only one way out and if it had walls you’d exhaust yourself long before you succeeded. It’s ... a trap, a prison.’ Then he added, more bleakly, ‘It’s a perfect symbol for Easton.’ He took out a cigarette. ‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘It being a church?’