The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (39 page)

‘They only want to ask him questions,’ Frances said.

‘You’re a fool then if you believe that,’ Patrick said, spinning around. ‘He’s as good as arrested. They believe he did it and they just want him to confess.’ His hand shook as he opened the cigarette box on the table.

David was shaking his head so vigorously that his whole body moved with it. Rain dripped off his hair.

‘No. No. No. He never touched her...’

His voice was hoarse. Still speaking, he turned and left as quickly as he’d arrived. They could hear him crash through the back hall door.

‘What on earth was that about? I just don’t understand,’ Frances said. ‘We don’t even know who she was. Why should Julian, Julian of all people, have killed her? Why do they think he did it?’

Laurence felt cold unease. ‘I’m going to see if David’s all right.’

‘He was always thick with Julian,’ Patrick said.

But Laurence knew it was more than that. In the kitchen he could hear raised voices and then shouts more of distress than of anger. As he went down the passage, a door slammed and through the laundry-room window he glimpsed David getting into the Eastons’ car. Someone was screaming. He passed the gun room to see William, looking startled and horribly marooned, by his table.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘I’m trying to find out. The police have taken Julian but David’s going off in a frenzy.’

Then they both heard a terrible, ugly howl of pain. The hairs on his arms prickled.

‘Oh Jesus,’ William said.

Laurence rushed next door. The back door to the kitchen was wide open, banging against the dresser. Rain was already driving in. On the floor by the stone sink lay Susan, curled up, sobbing piteously.

He put one hand on her shoulder and the other on her arm.

‘Is it the baby?’ he said, although he knew instinctively it was nothing as simple as a woman going into labour. He sat beside her on the floor, stroking her back, while she took great gasps of air and continued to cry noisily.

William had hauled his wheelchair to the doorway. Frances appeared behind him.

They lifted Susan to a chair. Pregnant and half fainting, she was heavy. Her hair stuck wetly to her cheek. Suddenly she started to retch. Frances seized a bowl and the woman was copiously sick. When she seemed to be over the worst, Frances wrung out a damp cloth and wiped her swollen face.

‘Try to breathe slowly,’ she said. ‘You’ll feel better.’ Frances sat down next to Susan.

‘His wife. She was his
wife’,
she said.

Frances said nothing.

Susan gasped again, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

‘He had a living wife all the time. She was no good. But she was still his wife. She wasn’t dead. He wasn’t a widower. He said it was an accident. She was drunk.’

‘David?’

Susan nodded, then gave a mad laugh.

‘So the baby’s a bastard because we were never man and wife. Least, I thought we were ... We had such a nice ... But it wasn’t even his name. Eddings.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ she wailed. ‘He was racing off after Mr Julian. He just said she was his wife and when she came she tried to attack him and she fell and he put her in the church and ... the police thought it was Mr Julian.’

She began to sob again and then, lowering her head to the table, to bang it rhythmically against the wood.

‘Don’t, Susan,’ Frances said. ‘It’s not good for you or for the baby.’

Susan howled and the men both jumped. She looked half deranged with grief.

‘And what’s going to happen to the baby and me, now David’s killed that woman? Where shall we go? What can we live on? I’m not going in the workhouse. I was born there. Bastard child of a bastard child. It would be better if we died.’ And then, seemingly exhausted by her own emotion, she whispered, ‘He didn’t love her. He loved me. He did.’

Laurence realised that in some extraordinary way Julian had gone willingly with the police, not because he was guilty but because he knew all along that David was.

As Lydia lay dying, Susan’s child was born in the night in a bedroom at Easton Hall. Ellen Kilminster and Mrs Hill delivered her of her large, bellowing son. Mrs Hill sat with her while Ellen went down to make her some tea. Laurence found her weeping in the kitchen.

‘I don’t care what they say David’s done,’ she said. ‘A better man you couldn’t hope to meet.’

Julian arrived back in the early morning. Laurence heard the sound of an engine and went down. Julian looked stale and tired as he emerged stiffly from the police motor car. He stopped by Laurence and said, ‘Bad business, Bartram. Bad business. We must look after Susan.’

‘Susan says the woman was his wife.’

Julian nodded. ‘Yes. Apparently. Unhappily. He deserted her, let her think he’d been killed in the war. But someone who’d known him before saw him at Wembley. Which was just what he feared and why he was so unwilling to be there.’ His tone was one of resignation. ‘Some wily chap followed the children from the car, bought them ices, then asked Nicholas or Maggie where they and the chauffeur came from. They gave whoever it was my name and the location of the Hall. Unfortunately for me, the dead woman, whom I suppose we should call Mrs Ennals, left it in her handbag, which someone found in the cistern.’

He smiled gently at Laurence.

‘But by then the police had already discovered she had spent some time in a public house near the station, where she asked where the Eastons lived and became loud and obnoxious enough to be remembered. It was nearly enough to put a noose round my neck. It was certainly enough to connect her with us. But her behaviour should help David’s case.’

Julian fell silent, but while he was speaking it had dawned on Laurence that, if David couldn’t prove the death was an accident, he could hang and that hiding the body as well as the bigamy made his actions look worse. He remembered Susan telling him David had helped in the original search for Kitty. Possibly he’d found the vault then.

‘I’m going to lie down,’ Julian said. ‘Need to think.’

‘Susan’s had a son,’ Laurence said, as Julian started up the stairs. All well and currently upstairs, I’m afraid.’

‘Good. Good. Exactly where she should be, poor woman. I don’t think anything will happen very fast,’ he added, taking each stair like an old man. ‘I’ll ring my solicitor. A good brief should save him from the hangman, though not from prison, I fear.’

Chapter Twenty

The cell had a low ceiling. There were bars over the windows, and a worn stone floor. David was lying on a thin mattress on a metal bed, his face to the wall. He must have heard the door being unlocked but he didn’t move.

Laurence stood awkwardly. The position of the sun was such that David lay in darkness, while the light illuminated the thick, battered door. In minutes this brief ray of summer would pass by. Laurence thought that if he were confined, unlikely to be free again, he would lie watching for that sun, absorbing all he could of it. But then perhaps it became too much a marker of time.

‘You didn’t have to come.’ David’s muffled voice caught him by surprise. ‘You don’t owe me anything.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m only here for another day,’ he said. ‘I’ll be moved to the assizes. The barrister thinks I’ll get a long sentence but the injuries and the drink support my story.’

‘I came to give you some news. About Susan.’

Suddenly David was alert and turned around to face him.

‘She’s all right?’

Laurence nodded. ‘Yes. She’s well. Your son was born yesterday.’

David swung his feet to the floor. His face was transformed, all the weariness and hopelessness slipped away.

‘And she’s well, you said? You wouldn’t lie?’

Laurence smiled. ‘She’s very well. And your son. I’ve seen him.’ Frances had been holding the baby in her arms, a large boy, his skin seeming too big for him, damp-haired and furious. Laurence had struggled to contain his emotions. Had his own son looked like this for his short life?

‘She says you wanted him called Stephen?’

‘My father,’ David said. ‘I’ve spent the last six years denying his surname, so it’s right he live again through his grandson. But Susan’s all right, you say?’

‘She’s well. She was delivered at the Hall.’

Laurence didn’t tell him how bitterly Susan had wept as she held her little boy. He was wrapped in a shawl that had once been Kitty’s. Lydia must have kept it secretly for so many years.

David seemed to be fighting to absorb it all.

‘And I thought you should know that the family want Susan to stay,’ Laurence said. ‘She and the baby can live in the lodge until you come back.’

Again David seemed to be struggling. Eventually he said, ‘It was the best place I ever knew. The fields, all that grass and the garden: getting it back to how it used to be. I thought if I had a child it could grow up there, never have to deal with the city and with mean-spirited folk. I know Easton had had its troubles, but not for me and Susan. We didn’t have the history, we just had the days, one by one.’ His voice was slightly hoarse. ‘And all that space—she’d say the Hall was like a tiny doll’s house—made little by the bigness of the downs and the forest and Salisbury Plain. Susan had never seen far outside Reading, you see.’

The shaft of sunlight had already moved on and now just the top corner of the cell was lit. In a few seconds it would be gone.

‘I shall miss it, you see.’ And then he said, ‘Mr Bolitho’s yews will do all right. Mrs Easton will have her maze.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ Laurence said and paused. ‘I’m here instead of Mr Easton to tell you about Susan because Mrs Easton died last night.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear it. She’s been very good to us. But she was a very sad lady.’ He looked up. ‘What will happen to Easton?’ ‘I suppose Mr Easton is the heir, as Mrs Easton’s daughter has never been found.’

When Julian hadn’t been sitting, holding Lydia’s hand, he was out alone around the estate, the small dog at his heels. Heaven knew how he would manage without David over the next few years.

David said, ‘I’m glad. He loves the place like I do, only he grew straight out of it. If anyone can make something of it, Mr Julian can. What he wants, he only wants for Easton.’

Laurence said nothing. He too hoped Julian could finally come into his own.

‘He was brave,’ David said, ‘out in France. Not just once either. He went back under fire for his brother. Was badly hit himself. Mr Easton took both guns and saw off three Germans and then he dragged his brother close to some ruin. It was nothing—no kind of protection. Told the powers that be it was his brother saved
him’.

David looked up.

‘Captain Digby Easton, I never met him, not so as you’d count it, but he was as much a coward as Mr Julian was a hero.’ His face became almost ugly. ‘The lost men of Easton?’ he said, mockingly. ‘Well, it was Captain Easton who lost them and Mr Julian who tried make it all right. His nerve went only right at the end.’

‘In what way?’

David’s face had frozen again. He said, ‘You’ll have to ask him.’

After a while he added, ‘When I’m back, that maze will be full grown.’

‘Susan will walk in it. Your son will.’

They sat in silence, David leaning forward slightly, his eyes lowered, kneading his hands. They were a countryman’s hands, weathered and scarred.

‘In some ways it’s harder to know there’s a child,’ he said after a while, ‘that my boy will grow up knowing his father was ... Well, what I am. I used to think I was good on my own. In the war I was usually alone and I liked that best. But now I’ve got someone to miss.’

The warder knocked twice, briskly, on the door.

‘Time to go, sir.’

Two minutes.

‘What did you really do in France? What happened when you saved Mr Julian’s life?’

He thought the man wasn’t going to reply, but just as the warder knocked again David looked up and said, ‘I was a sniper. Hiding and camouflage was my game. “No one sees me, but I see everything.” In the end you start to fancy you’ve become the bush, the tree, the hidden place you’re blending into. You know it and it knows you.’ He almost smiled. ‘Like me at Easton.’

‘Do you want Susan to come? Do you want her to bring the baby...?’

David shook his head vigorously. ‘I don’t want her to see me like this. And if I saw the baby, well, it would be one more goodbye. Harder to leave, you see, if I’d got to know him.’

Laurence stood up. The door was opened from outside.

He held out his hand. David didn’t see it at first, although when he did, he held out his own without getting up. Laurence pressed the small bit of paper—the note Susan had once sent in a tin to France—into it. David appeared not to notice. Laurence hoped he wouldn’t let it drop on the floor but as he left the cell, David spoke.

‘Tell her ... tell her, that the day I opened her biscuits was the best day of my life, except for the day I first met her, when I thought she was the most beautiful girl I ever saw.’

Chapter Twenty-One

Lydia was laid to rest at Easton. There were few people from outside the village but almost everyone from within it stood around the grave. The melancholy feeling Laurence had that Lydia was being laid to rest among strangers, far from where she had started her life, dispersed.

He did not know all the faces, but clearly, from their proximity, they knew one another. There was the Kilminster cousin, Victor, who could only have arrived in the last day or so, his hair cropped, his face creased from the Australian sun, his wife at his side. Maggie, slightly nearer to the graveside, was supporting her grandfather with her arm. On the far side of her, Susan held her baby son, invisible in a shawl and clutched tightly to her as if someone might take him away too. Laurence could hardly bear to look at her. Her expression was fixed, her face pale. Formerly animated and cheerful, she was now gaunt with purple smudges under her eyes.

David was due for trial the following week. Julian had secured the very best criminal barrister for him. The lawyer, an almostlegendary KC, was confident that the evidence and David’s wartime courage would save his client from the gallows. Nevertheless, he would be gone a long time, although Laurence knew Susan would wait for him at Easton.