The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (36 page)

He knocked self-consciously. A single window was shut but he thought he saw the curtain move. He stepped back, although there was precious little room to do so. As he did so, the door opened. The woman who stood in the doorway, still clutching the door handle, might once have been pretty, but there was little trace of it now. She was very thin. Her skin looked dry and she was lined about the lips. A tiny cross hung on a chain around her neck and a modesty panel filled the V-neck of her print dress. Despite the relative warmth she wore a cardigan. He couldn’t read her expression but it didn’t seem to be hostile.

‘Miss Rivers?’

‘Yes. That’s me.’ Immediately he could hear her west country accent.

‘I’m sorry, it must seem very odd, my turning up like this. Your friend’—he turned to where the large woman was putting linen through a mangle—‘she showed me where you were. I’m sure she’s keeping an eye on me.’ He hoped to put her at her ease.

‘You’ve come from Easton,’ she said.

‘Well, yes. I mean, I don’t live there. I live here, in London. But I have been at Easton, yes. Working on the church.’

The look she gave him was grave and calm. From all accounts of her, he had expected to find an older version of an emotional, defensive girl. But Jane Rivers, although obviously in reduced circumstances, had a dignity of her own.

‘You’ve got the look of Easton,’ she said. ‘And the voice.’

‘May I come in?’

She made no protests but opened the door wider, allowing him to go in before her. The door gave straight on to a sitting room. Behind a curtain he could see a small stone sink and some pots and pans. There was one further closed door, which he assumed was her bedroom. The wall in the alley outside kept out much of the light but the room was tidy and clean, with faded floral curtains at the window. Two prints hung on either side of a small tiled grate. One was of St Francis feeding birds and small animals; it was the sort of image he remembered sticking in his attendance book at Sunday school. The other was of three crosses in silhouette on a hill against a sunset.

A single chair stood by a small, black-leaded fireplace, with pristine white antimacassar trimmed with crochet. Next to it was a round table with a cloth over it, its edge embroidered with cheerful daisies. A pile of what looked like embroidered bookmarks, perhaps twenty or thirty of them, sat in a shallow cardboard box.

He smiled. ‘They said you and your sister were good seamstresses.’

She turned to look at the tablecloth and when she faced him once more, a slight blush made her look younger.

‘I take in sewing,’ she said. ‘Sometimes my ladies let me keep oddments. I make little bits for the church bazaar.’

She spoke quickly and earnestly. He had the impression she wanted him to think well of her, yet she hadn’t asked what on earth had brought him from Easton to her doorstep.

‘I get by,’ she said, to an unasked question.

‘Your sister will be pleased to hear you’re well.’

‘Ellen?’ This time she did smile and her pale-blue eyes opened wider. ‘I miss Ellen. We were never apart as girls. Irish twins, they call it. Born the same year. Went into service at Easton together.’ Her smile faded a little. ‘Would you like tea?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘I don’t have any cake.’

She pulled up a heavy dining chair from the table and disappeared behind the curtain, to return with a tray, a clean cloth neatly laid under the china. They sat solemnly drinking tea, almost like a dumbstruck courting couple. Her knees with the dress drawn tightly over them projected towards him. Her ankles were still shapely in her unfashionable shoes.

‘Is everything all right at Easton?’ she said politely, although he sensed it cost her to ask. ‘I haven’t heard from my sister for a while.’

He found he didn’t want to tell her there’d been a murder at the Hall. No doubt her sister would tell her soon enough.

‘She’s well,’ he said. ‘The children too.’

He knew he had to get to the point and he plunged in.

‘I know you had a hard time of it when Kitty Easton disappeared,’ he said.

Immediately her face closed up. ‘It’s only to be expected,’ she said rather primly, ‘being a servant.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and he was. She seemed an eminently decent woman, whose life would never amount to more than it was now.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she said.

‘Mrs Easton is dying...’ he began.

The effect of his few words caught him by surprise. She gave a small, restrained cry and stifled it almost immediately but her eyes were suddenly full of tears. She blinked a few times but eventually fumbled in her sleeve for a neatly pressed handkerchief. As she unfolded it, he remembered the name of the tiny stitches on its hem: lovers’ knots. His mother used to do them.

‘She was such a lovely lady.’ She gulped and lifted the handkerchief again to her eyes.

‘I’m dreadfully sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’ But then before she could regain her equilibrium, he asked gently, ‘What do you think happened when Kitty went missing?’

She gave him an appalled look.

‘Mrs Easton?’ he said. ‘Might it have been her fault in some way?’

She was shaking her head so violently that she nearly dislodged her cup and saucer from the tiny table by her chair.

‘No, not Mrs Easton. She lived for that little girl. She would have done anything to save her.’

‘Save her?’

‘If she was in danger.’

‘Was she in danger, do you think?’ He kept his voice relaxed.

‘No, of course not. She was in her own home. Everybody loved her.’ But her eyes slid to the bible and for the first time he had a sense she was lying.

‘Yet she vanished.’

Jane Rivers didn’t pick up on the implications of this but went on, ‘She was the dearest little girl—skipping about, singing her little songs. And she had such an imagination, with her picture books, and playing outside, and she had her own little bit of garden where she grew pansies and forget-me-nots and nasturtiums and radishes. Except she’d always pick the flowers as soon as they showed, for her mama.’ She looked up again. ‘She had a kitten, called Polly. She...’

She began wringing the handkerchief and her face was full of pain.

‘She trusted everyone.’

He felt contempt for himself. He had sought out this harmless woman and distressed her immeasurably. Yet he pressed on.

‘Mrs Easton—she always believed Kitty was still alive. Do you believe that?’

She gave him a steady look. ‘Yes,’ she said very quietly. ‘I do. I hope it and I believe it. I pray for her every day.’

They both fell silent. From outside the window he heard the washerwoman brush past.

‘I’m going to leave you in peace,’ he said. ‘But there’s somebody else I want to talk to and I’ve no idea how to track him down.’

He could see alarm creep back into her face.

‘Robert Stone. I think you were engaged to be married once?’

He cringed inwardly at disturbing her further but in fact her face took on a harder look.

‘He was a bad man,’ she said. ‘A liar and a greedy man and a betrayer.’

He didn’t respond to the sudden passion in her voice but simply said, ‘I gather he came to London?’

‘So they say. But if he did, he kept a long way from me.’

‘So you’ve no idea where he is or what might have happened to him? Did he join up, for instance?’

‘I have no feelings left for Mr Stone,’ she said. ‘I wish with all my heart I’d never met him. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. Nor care. Maybe he’s with his sister. He had a sister in London. His only living relative, he said.’

She drew breath, audibly.

‘But I have no idea where she lived, or whether she was married or still called Stone. He didn’t give much away. I don’t think she was a respectable woman.’

Her hand moved towards her cross but fell away without touching it.

‘He might not even have a sister at all. He was all stories. Always trying to shock people.’

Two purplish spots burned in her cheeks. Her level of anger after so long was, he imagined, provoked not so much by the broken engagement, as by Stone’s failure to support her when the world was against her and she faced leaving the only home she knew.

Eventually he decided that his visit and all its alarms deserved some explanation.

‘Actually something bad has happened at Easton Deadall. Apart from Mrs Easton’s decline.’

Her eyes opened wide.

‘Not to anyone you know. But a woman was found dead.’ She looked, if anything, more anxious than either indifferent or intrigued, which surprised him as, although the discovery of the corpse was an atrocious event, she could have no love left for the Easton family.

‘It’s not ... Do they know who it is?’

‘No.’ He wondered who she had thought it might be.

This time her hand went up and held her cross. All of a sudden words came tumbling out.

‘It wasn’t Kitty, was it? It wasn’t Kitty come back? Can they tell? She’d be quite the young lady now. Her birthday’s in March. She’d be eighteen. They might not recognise her. She had lovely silver-gold hair but it probably went darker—they usually do when they grow up.’

‘It wasn’t Kitty,’ he said gently, wanting to take her agitated hands in his. ‘But for a while they thought it was Maggie Petch.’

‘Maggie?’ She was clearly thinking. ‘Oh, Joe Petch’s girl? She was just little when I was there. Didn’t her ma run off with a gypsy?’

Not for the first time, Laurence noticed how there was a single tale of Easton told by everybody connected with it. The same accounts, the same reasons for things, the same phrases.

‘That man was another devil,’ she said.

He didn’t know how to reply. Everyone else had said Joe Petch was a good man. But perhaps they simply spoke well of the dead.

Before he could reply she said, ‘So it’s not a young woman?’

‘No. Older.’

She seemed to relax.

‘Is that what you came to tell me?’ she said, puzzled. ‘Or just, like everybody used to, to ask me about my Kitty?’

He felt embarrassed but decided to tell the truth.

‘Actually, I was worried it just might be you.’

‘Me?’ she said, astonished. ‘The dead person? Why would I go back to Easton Deadall?’ She seemed almost amused.

‘You might have gone to see your sister.’

‘I might.’

She didn’t speak for a while.

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you,’ he said. ‘And sorry about what happened. I think you had a raw deal, back then. From everybody.’

‘They were upset,’ she said calmly. ‘But thank you, sir. Where was she found? The dead lady?’

‘In the church.’ He avoided telling her the woman was probably murdered.

‘I’m glad. Her being in a church. Not in a ditch or some wood where foxes might find her. At least she was in a proper place.’ He got up to go and she let him into the alley. She glanced towards the empty wash-house.

‘You won’t say here, will you? Nobody knows I was part of all that.’

‘No. Of course not.’

He tipped his hat to her and walked through the house into the street once more.

Later, as the train ran deep into the underground tunnels, he thought back on Jane Rivers. In a way he had learned a lot from the conversation, without gaining any obviously useful information.

He was certain she had not been involved in Kitty’s death. It was not so much because she had echoed Lydia’s belief that the child still lived, but because of her almost instant terror that the dead woman might be a grown-up Kitty.

Her religious sensibilities had given him one further insight. Like Walter Petch, she had thought of the church as being a ‘proper’ place to leave a body. He had merely assumed it was the most convenient hiding place for somebody who happened to know of the crypt. The fact that whoever had done it also knew that quicklime was being used to restore the cottages meant it was almost certainly someone connected with Easton Deadall. Now, however, he wondered if the murderer was either possessed of the same sort of sensitivity as Jane Rivers, or whether there was a relationship between murderer and victim that contained, even in anger, some residual respect.

In the end, he was unable to make anything of it. Each scenario was possible, but none suggested a single individual as a perpetrator, nor a single obvious victim.

It was good to get back to his rooms in London. As he walked upstairs, carrying a pile of letters from the hall table, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. His flat was on the top floor of a corner building between Great Ormond Street and Lamb’s Conduit Street. He had moved here from a much larger house in a much smarter area, after Louise’s death a few years earlier. He had wanted somewhere with which he had no connections, where the shadows of a past which had been cut from behind him, could not reach. Of course they came with him; it had been folly to believe otherwise. Sometimes he thought that, when he first got back from France, he was at least partly mad; a quiet sort of madness: of insomnia, inertia, a wish to avoid surviving friends.

It had taken a woman—Mary Emmett—to free him. Certainly he had loved her, even after he realised she could not be wholly his, but he had also come to feel comfortable in his new life. He had come to enjoy the views over London from his eyrie, the small shops and the untidy history that lay all around him. He liked the way the light moved round the rooms. He had had two very happy years teaching at Westminster School. Although the master he had replaced, temporarily, had returned, Laurence thought, if he made it clear he wanted it, that a permanent job there might be found. He might live this easy life, marry a nice young woman like Frances, have children, see generations of boys pass through his classes, see London grow and enjoy all it had to offer.

And yet there was Italy. The less sensible option, wonderfully seductive. Unlike so many of his friends at Marlborough and Oxford, he had never been abroad until fate sent him to France. By the time he had crossed the Channel, the war had been waged for well over a year and whatever beauty he might once have found in the landscape and its treasures had long since been destroyed. He had seen medieval churches—places whose architecture he had once studied and which had taken generations of master craftsmen to build—obliterated in a day’s bombardment. Although he had found leave in Paris exciting, it was a different Paris to the one he might have explored, were he not conspicuous in his uniform, as well as uncertain whether this might be the last week or month of his life. Italy was unknown. Literally unknown: apart from the della Scala boy and his father, he knew not a soul in the country. As he stood on the cusp of middle age, Italy’s unknowns seemed magically alluring.