The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (26 page)

‘But she and Julian watched Digby go frantic as the days passed,’ Patrick said, ‘and there was no sign of Kitty. At first he was just cross, sure that she’d wandered off, furious at the nanny whom he accused of dereliction and sacked on the spot. Then, slowly, the enormity of her disappearance began to dawn on him. Within the hour he sent the chauffeur to fetch the police. Then in the weeks to come he railed and raged and wept drunkenly and went out hunting for her night and day until he collapsed with exhaustion. He had been powerless to protect his own daughter in his own house.

‘And Frances. Poor Frances, still young herself, trying to be strong for her sister, shut indoors with her day after day as Lydia refused to leave the house. Frances never looked out of the windows. She told me once she was frightened of seeing them coming across the grass, carrying something in their arms. They let her endure that.’

First with his expression of his love for Eleanor and now, even more, in his thoughts of Frances, all pretence was gone. Patrick’s slender fingers fumbled at his lighter.

And what a house it was. Everybody was searching: the indoor staff were banging through cupboards, calling, looking in pantries, storerooms, wardrobes: anywhere a small scared child might hide. Moving through the attics, looking up chimneys, checking the wash-houses. Outside, the hunt started in chaos and became more methodical as more men joined the search. At first we just ran here and there, wasting our time by looking in places other people had already searched, and,’ he looked bitter, ‘of course I ran with them. In many ways it was easier than thinking about what I’d seen and what I knew. But by the time a day or two had passed, I was part of their lie. I never spoke up. I chose Julian over Digby. By default, perhaps, but that’s how it worked out.’

He drew deeply on his cigarette and it made him cough. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

‘The police went door to door in the village and West Overton and Lockeridge. Nobody had seen hide nor hair of her. Nor have they ever.’

Laurence had started the day at least trying to hate Patrick, but now he felt only compassion, as much for the boy he had been before the war as for the man now, who still held this secret.

‘Have you told Eleanor?’

‘I think Eleanor has enough troubles of her own to deal with, without handing her a few of mine, don’t you?’

Laurence wondered for a second if Eleanor had told Patrick of any of her own sad mistakes or of the compromises she had made. On balance, he thought Patrick knew little of Eleanor beyond what she offered to the world.

‘So where was she?’

Patrick looked puzzled. ‘Kitty?’

‘What happened to her body? If it was still night when you saw all this and the nanny didn’t discover she was missing until morning, what did they do with her body in those hours and how did they do it?’

Patrick shrugged. ‘They put her in the laundry chute. After that, heaven knows. Julian must have retrieved her body downstairs before any servants came in to set the breakfast trays. Perhaps he went down as soon as Lydia was back in her bedroom and things were quiet.’

‘There’s something that bothers me,’ Laurence said. ‘The nanny. Why didn’t she wake up until morning? You’re implying some brutal and bloody murder. Even a small child would cry out, surely? The nanny slept in the next room. She was there to listen out for her charge.’

Patrick tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair.

‘I don’t know. I can’t account for it. I felt sorry for her because clearly she adored Kitty. She was local, she’d been with the family since Kitty was a baby, she was forever cuddling her and singing to her. Everyone felt sorry for Lydia but nobody gave a thought to the nanny, Jane. She can’t have been part of it. Nothing would have persuaded her to keep quiet.’

‘Not even sympathy for Lydia?’

‘No, not if Lydia had hurt Kitty. Digby dismissed her, but of course she couldn’t go at once, because the police wanted to talk to her. Eventually she moved down to the village to stay with her sister. The police went hard on her. She was obviously a suspect, for all the reasons you’ve just suggested. God knows what became of her. It’s unlikely she would have worked as a nursemaid again. She was unofficially engaged to the chauffeur but even he seemed to take against her. She disappeared eventually, to London, I think.’

They sat in silence. Laurence was unconvinced but Patrick seemed oddly calm after this outburst. For the second time they heard footsteps in the corridor but this time they were coming towards them. Before the inevitable intrusion, Patrick said hurriedly, ‘I want you to do one thing for me.’ He looked urgently at Laurence. ‘Well,
with
me. I need you to come down into the vault. I want to see what’s down there.’

Laurence felt a wave of nausea at the thought of descending right down into the place where he had found the dead woman. But instead of refusing outright, he said, ‘Why?’

‘Two reasons: one, I think I know where Kitty might be, and two, if you do I’ll leave Easton Hall within the week. You have my word I’ll never contact Eleanor again.’

Chapter Fourteen

As Laurence crossed the churchyard he looked up at the metal image of the lightning flash of St Barbara on the squat church tower. It was dripping. Since the day-long sunshine of St Swithin’s Day it had rained almost continuously. Julian had said he intended to have the generator switched on again on the next day.

Patrick was already in the church, sitting near the pulpit. He held up an oil lamp.

‘See, it’s the archaeological training.’

Laurence pulled out his torch. ‘See, it’s the modern age. Brand-new batteries too.’

Patrick got to his feet as Laurence said, ‘Come on, let’s get this ghastly job over with. If you’re still determined to look.’

Neither of them moved, then both started forward at once. They both paused by the table and when Laurence held Patrick’s gaze, Patrick appeared as apprehensive as he felt himself.

‘Given my behaviour and what I know you must think of me, and that revisiting this place must be the last thing you want to do, well, I just want to say thank you,’ Patrick said. ‘It means a great deal to me.’

He didn’t look at Laurence.

‘The place is cursed,’ he said. ‘Barren. Nothing good ever happened here.’ The strength of his bitterness surprised Laurence. ‘Each time I come back, I think things might change. But nothing ever does. It’s a rotten place, Easton Deadall, although mostly for the Eastons. I shan’t return again.’

‘But what do you expect—or is it hope—to find?’

Patrick didn’t answer, just gave him a complicit smile.

‘Or not to find?’ Laurence said. ‘Kitty’s bones?’

But Patrick still didn’t answer. He was standing at one end of the table, his hands under the top, ready to lift it. Laurence went to the other end, braced himself and heaved. Pins and needles raced down his leg. David had been stronger than Patrick when they had moved it before. Patrick obviously noticed.

‘Your back,’ he said.

Laurence shook his head. ‘It’s fine when I straighten up.’

Patrick nodded and they shuffled sideways with the table. When they’d rolled the carpet up, he examined the damaged hatch beneath.

‘No wonder no one suspected,’ he said. ‘It’s been beautifully done: set into the floor absolutely smoothly. Even the rings are cut smooth. If you didn’t know it was here, you wouldn’t suspect it.’

Laurence remained standing, massaging his leg. ‘My guess is that originally there were flagstones here and that the wooden door was a eighteenth-century or later replacement,’ he said. ‘It was probably a crypt originally, rather than a chantry, being right at the back of the church like this.’

Patrick looked at him. ‘Will you be able to tell, inside?’

‘Perhaps. If it is a chantry, there might still be a lavabo—where the priest rinses the chalice, or a stoop—’

‘I know what a stoop is,’ Patrick said. ‘My mother...’

‘Of course. Well, they often remain.’ Talking about architecture made him feel calmer.

Patrick nodded, took hold of one ring and lifted it clear of its shallow niche.

‘It’s too heavy,’ Laurence said.

Patrick appeared not to hear him but he let go and stood back. His voice became tighter.

‘My niece is the reason I come back as little as possible. I don’t want to think about her. I don’t want to think about Julian or Digby or Lydia. I don’t want to think about my bully of a father or my poor compliant mother. Yet here I am, back at Easton, hovering over the entrance to what I assume may be my niece’s grave.’

Laurence was not particularly surprised by Patrick’s words. He was about to point out that Julian, too, whom Patrick assumed to be implicated in her death, had almost encouraged them to search for anything that threw light on Kitty’s fate, when Patrick suddenly took hold of one of the rings again.

‘But at the very least I can see the evidence of my mother’s one small rebellion. Quite a big rebellion really: making herself a Catholic shrine at the heart of Easton.’

Holding his breath and with his head slightly averted, Laurence took hold of the other and pulled hard. The door rose painfully slowly and at last fell back. Patrick didn’t hesitate; his jaw was set but without pausing he let himself backwards down the steps.

‘It’ll be fine,’ he said, as much to himself as Laurence as he disappeared from view. The lantern light jerked about. ‘Bigger than I expected.’

Trying not to hesitate, Laurence descended the steps. The smell was primarily earthy, mildewy and organic, but with no gagging sweetness of decay. As swiftly as possible, he moved off the bottom step and away from the place he remembered the body lying. The floor was scuffed. He rubbed at it with his foot. It appeared to be stone with a fine covering of earth probably deposited over a long period of time. He bent down to pick something up, afraid, even as he did so, that he would come across some small evidence the police had missed, but it was simply a tiny metal ornament, curved and smooth, with a short spike. He buffed it on his sleeve. It was brass he thought. Looked around again. The whitewashed walls were grimy with cobwebs but reflected back some light. The sense of horror and contamination he’d expected had faded away.

Patrick had placed his lamp on a low stone altar. He made a whistling noise as he looked around him. Laurence was focusing on clues in the structure of the room. The ceiling was vaulted. He looked up and down both sides of the room but there was no sign of a ritual basin carved into the rock or anything that made it feel like a chapel. It was obviously a man-made space but too crude even for a early chantry. No priest had prayed for souls here, he was sure.

Two shelves ran for a few feet along the side of the chamber opposite the altar, which was itself just a hard-edged slab of rock. Some greenish brocade had collapsed to the foot of the altar, bundled up like some unnatural vegetation. He nudged it with his foot but there was nothing beneath it. In front of the altar lay large fragments of broken candle and a heavy metal candlestick. He set it back next to its fellow already on the altar. He guessed it had been thrown down with some force as its base was deformed, making it stand crooked. He picked up a broken picture frame, with shards of glass still clinging to it. It enclosed the remains of a mouldering print of the Virgin Mary. It was possible to see the crown of stars around her head but not her face; that, and the face of the child she was holding, had been crudely punctured.

Had the police caused all this damage? He held the picture out to Patrick.

‘Deliberate?’ he said.

‘My father,’ Patrick said. ‘This has all the signs of his handiwork.’

‘Really?’

‘My mother finds this little place where she can continue with her popish practices and my father finds out and follows her or simply explores for himself. He would have been furious at her betraying him.’

‘Betraying him?’

‘You think it’s too strong a word? Believe me, he flew into mighty rages for far slighter acts of disobedience. This is him, all right.’ He looked sad. ‘My poor mother. On her knees in some frowsty cellar and then even this was destroyed.’

He took out his cigarettes.

‘She’d think this terrible blasphemy, no doubt.’

He made two efforts to strike a match, before removing the glass and lighting it from the flame of the oil lamp.

‘I think this is simply a crypt,’ Laurence said. ‘A surprisingly small one but that’s what it is. The stone recesses and, indeed, the altar, they’re just mortuary niches. Coffins would have rested on them long, long ago. This,’ he held out the small brass object he’d found on the floor, ‘is a stud, an ornamental one, which fastened a cloth covering on a coffin. We could probably find others, two, three hundred years old. The only thing left.’

He put it on the makeshift altar.

‘Your mother probably turned this place into a small shrine because there was no sign of its original use and because it looked as if it had an altar and it was directly below what I’m certain was originally a Lady Chapel. Probably it was incorporated into the church at the time of the Reformation, but she may well have seen the statue in the church and recognised some Roman Catholic remains.’

Patrick looked excited. He was letting the ash drop from his cigarette to the floor.

‘And, for what it’s worth,’ Laurence said, ‘the floor under here, although it’s got loose dirt on the surface, is solid stone, not earth. It would be almost impossible to dig a grave through it. Kitty isn’t buried here.’ He could tell from Patrick’s face and his uncharacteristic silence that he had gauged his suspicions correctly.

He ran his hands over the wall and the one at right angles to it. Eventually he said, ‘I think this,’ he touched the wall next to him, ‘is much more recent than the rest of this structure.’

He switched on his torch, held it in one hand and traced the lines between the stones with two fingers.

‘It’s less solid. This mortar is relatively modern and clumsily done. The stones are a different size from those over there.’

He waved vaguely at the opposite wall, then stood back, picked up a candlestick and tapped the wall with it. He repeated the action, glanced at Patrick and said, ‘There’s space behind here. It’s resonating.’