The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (4 page)

They pushed open the heavy door and came into a space still just lit by daylight. After the external arch, it was a disappointment. The Victorian additions William had mentioned were all too obvious. They dominated the church: a heavy Victorian Gothic pulpit and lectern, some highly varnished pews and, in rich blues, golds and reds, a stained glass window of a penitent Magdalene with her rather masculine jaw and extraordinary waves of luxuriant red hair protecting her modesty. Her rich light threw a crimson wash over the white walls and stone floor.

He gazed around; there were only two other, very simply coloured windows. The west window was just a chequerboard of pale blues and yellows, and to the side, near an octagonal font, was a small glass bearing the Easton coat of arms. A framed painting behind the altar showed another female saint, standing by a tall tower, sparks fizzing between her feet, her face peaceful despite the lightning that crackled in the black clouds above her. It was the church’s patron saint, St Barbara, he realised after a second, and it was the only time he had ever seen her in an English church.

He looked down. The floor had a strange, thick black surface, with patches of decay. A few inches around the edge, the material was in the process of being stripped away, presumably the work William had temporarily interrupted to get Laurence’s opinion. He took out his penknife and stuck the blade in a short distance, then pressed it with his finger. It was some sort of bitumen. Where the surface had been removed, parts of a few slender rectangular tiles in white and black had been exposed in an unusual woven pattern. The tarry application might have been a cheap way of covering damaged paving but it would probably be worth removing; it was not in good condition and to strip it away would be more labour- than cost-intensive. If necessary they could replace the cracked stones beneath. Whatever the result it would look less gloomy than the present surface.

‘Where is the memorial window going?’ he said to Frances.

‘It’s replacing the chequered window at the back.’

Frances indicated the large west window. Afternoon light shone obliquely through it.

‘William’s sketched out an idea,’ said Eleanor. ‘It’s extraordinarily good. Beautiful. Very different. Possibly the best thing he’s ever done. I hope you’ll go and see it.’ Then after a pause she added, ‘He still needs reassurance after not working for so long.’

He remembered visiting the Bolithos in London for the first time and how struck he had been by the startling modern art in the room. He wished William’s own tastes would prevail here, so that hope in the face of immense loss and the terrors of the unknown might be represented in something abstract and mysterious. The window faced west, so the memories embodied in it would always be illuminated by the setting sun.

Chapter Three

When Laurence returned to the house, Eleanor directed him to William’s makeshift office beyond the butler’s pantry. The old brick floor was worn smooth and William seemed able to manoeuvre around it with ease.

William’s delight at Laurence’s reaction to the porch of St Barbara’s was tangible. ‘It’s breathtaking, isn’t it? Gloriously pagan. I was determined to drag you down here without letting on. I’ve found no record of it but I’m limited to the library here of course.’

He spun his chair and pointed to a large plan of the village pinned on the wall.

‘And now to the mundane. These are the cottages we’re working on. No repairs since the last century. No running water. Outdoor wells, earth closets. Even the old vicarage,’ and he waved a snooker cue to indicate a larger property in its own garden standing back from the others, ‘was frozen—and I use the word aptly—in the 1850s. Little wonder they couldn’t find a new incumbent. It’s completely derelict now, though it must have been quite a fine building. Elsewhere, some decaying thatch. We’ve had to wait for a thatcher and his lad from Avebury. Generally: well, glad as I am to be here, nothing really needs an architect—a good foreman could see to it. Severe damp mostly. Rotten timbers. There was one place in one of the cottages where we might have had a lethal accident any minute. We lifted worm-eaten boards at the foot of the stair to find a deep well. Nobody had known about it. The two little boys there were given to jumping from halfway up the stairs to the ground. They could have gone through any minute. We blocked it up. There was a nasty moment when they hauled out some bones. Julian was ashen—and we never told Lydia. But they were identified as the remains of a dog.’

Laurence nodded. ‘The well wasn’t found in the search, then?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘For the child? For Kitty Easton before the war? They didn’t discover the well then?’

‘Evidently not.’ William sat back in his chair and shook his head. ‘You know, everybody talks of what a thorough search it was—with lakes drained, ponds and rivers dragged, every barn and outhouse scoured. Melancholy business. But for all that, they will have overlooked as many places as they explored.’

He appeared to be considering his own words even as he spoke.

‘The child—what’s left of her, if anything—might not be very far away at all. Easton—the house, the village, the surrounding land—is full of forgotten corners. I’ve seen some even without leaving this chair. Disused buildings. Sealed spaces. Water. The well we revealed was just one of them.’

He gestured to the other side of the room where three maps, apparently of different ages, had been pinned up.

‘The plans are pretty rudimentary. I can tell you that any excavation here carries its own grim dramas.’

Laurence said, ‘Is Julian aware of the possibilities?’

‘All too aware, I think, though in some ways I suspect finding her now would be a relief for him.’

Laurence could understand that. He wondered whether the shadow of Kitty Easton would ever lift while the current occupants of Easton were alive. They might have stood a chance if a body had ever been found, but her unknown fate prompted constant speculation. He had been guilty of it himself since he first heard of her disappearance.

Suddenly William leaned forward, eagerly. ‘Enough of that. Now for the symbol of restoration. The maze. A little mystery, a small challenge, a need to engage the mind as well as the eye, is as good a thing in gardens as it is in architecture. Or, indeed, in women.’

His face looked almost boyish. Laurence laughed in contemplation of the challenging but unmysterious Eleanor.

‘I mean, I know you will have seen it but this is the thinking behind it.’

William flung back a baize cover with a magician’s flourish, to reveal two drawings. The largest was a plan of the house and garden. Paths, terraces and kitchen garden were all drawn to scale. Between the rear terrace lawn and the ha-ha was the new maze, geometric and drawn in dark pencil. A second, straight-on view had been done as if the viewer were standing on the far side of the ha-ha in years to come. The maze flourished, with Easton Hall in the background beneath a summer sky with small clouds. Flowering shrubs bloomed along a path leading to the arched maze entrance. Two marble statues, carrying urns, marked the way in.

‘Naiads,’ said William. ‘Water nymphs, given that the power for the house and the beauty of the gardens all come from water. They symbolise the meeting of old and new.’

‘Marvellous,’ Laurence said.

William’s drawings were pretty but he was fascinated by the diagram of the maze itself and found himself wanting to follow its sinuous lines with a finger.

‘Well, none of us here will live to see the maze as mature as I’ve drawn it here. But it’s a bit of encouragement ... for Lydia mostly.’

‘How long...?’

‘Fifty years. Certainly it will take that long until the walls become impenetrable. But if all the plants take, it should look fairly substantial in ten to fifteen. It needs a lot of watering. By the time the fatherless children of Easton are old, they should be looking at a fine memorial. By the start of the next century, it may be a fact of life and nobody will remember the events that inspired its commission. But even now the intention is clear.’

William laughed.

‘Foolish, really. Immortality in a well-pruned hedge.’

He backed his chair away.

‘Before the war I designed buildings. Small buildings mostly. I was, as I believed then, right at the start of my career, which I fully expected to be a triumph.’ He beamed. ‘Or I would be asked to tackle tiny details on some important project. As a student I worked under C.W. Stephens on Harrods—my bit is the skylight over the staff tea room. But this feels different, a collaboration between me and nature.’

He was watching Laurence to see whether he understood.

‘And not just because it is
something,
frankly. It’s come after years of doing nothing, with Eleanor and me both pretending that I would work again, because the second we conceded I might not was the moment we would condemn ourselves to a narrow life in a few tiny rooms—a cripple with no legs and the cripple’s nurse, not the promising architect and his wife the bluestocking fighter for political change.’ He paused, looked away. ‘Now, with this: escape.’

‘This is going to be a long project?’ Laurence said, with an awkwardly overemphasised sweep of his arm to embrace the plans and the lists, knowing he had cut William off. They had been young officers in the same war, the same area of France. They had both survived, which was more than many had done, but, apart from a bad back, all Laurence’s wounds had been to his mind; he could walk into the future when he was ready. William’s life, and Eleanor’s, had been irrevocably changed and diminished by events.

William remained silent, sucking at his pipe. Small sounds seeped into Laurence’s consciousness: the rattle of waterpipes, a dog barking, right at the edge of audible sound. Someone walking about on an upper floor and coming downstairs. Laurence smelled soap and steam near by. Someone, Maggie or the cook Mrs Hill perhaps, was doing the washing. The footsteps drew nearer. William looked up just as Eleanor looked round the door.

‘Hello. Is this strictly a chaps’ conversation or can anyone join?’

William’s face lit up. ‘Gardening, actually, we’re on to gardening.’

As Eleanor came through the door, Frances followed her. Eleanor smiled, ‘I love this room,’ she said. ‘It feels properly old.’

‘It has the original floor, I think,’ Frances said. ‘But I like it much better now it hasn’t got all Digby’s guns.’

Laurence was surprised that he hadn’t noticed that the small part of the room not covered in drawings and maps held empty gun racks. Only two guns were left, high up, both old Purdeys.

‘Julian’s,’ Frances said, following his gaze. ‘He inherited them from Digby. He rarely shoots now and there’s no keeper any more, though David takes the fatherless Kilminster boys out for rooks and rabbits for the pot. He’s an amazing shot, the boys say. Julian never enjoyed shooting. Country sports were Digby’s passion. Patrick’s too when he was young. But Julian says his hands were always a bit stiff from the scars.’

‘His war wounds?’ Laurence said.

Frances looked slightly embarrassed. ‘The scar on his neck was from the war, but not those on his hands. Julian had the so-called Easton fingers. Kitty did too.’

Laurence was lost. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘He was born with an extra finger on each hand. His father removed Julian’s. He said it was no different to docking a puppy’s tail. But apparently it was awful. Digby once told us Julian screamed and screamed and one hand went septic.’

‘Do you mean that he did this with no anaesthetic?’ Eleanor said, looking appalled. ‘On his own child? What a vicious man.’

William made a face. ‘Unbelievably barbaric.’

‘Lydia absolutely refused to have Kitty operated upon,’ Frances said, ‘even by a doctor. She thought the idea of mutilating her child was much more monstrous than two tiny extra fingers.’

Eleanor still looked shocked. ‘Little Tich, the music-hall man, has extra fingers,’ she said. ‘It’s far from unknown. And it often runs in families. It’s possible Patrick’s heart trouble has the same origin,’ she added. ‘They’re sometimes connected.’

‘Then Julian got off best, I suppose,’ Frances said.

Eleanor nodded, but Laurence thought that Julian’s scars had accompanied him to the battlefields of France, whereas Patrick’s problem had seen him honourably kept out of harm’s way.

William cleared his throat and gestured to his plan with his unlit pipe.

‘Laurence wanted to know what we’d planted. Or at least I wanted to tell him.’

‘Yew,’ Frances said. ‘We put in thousands last November. Millions, it seemed like,’ she said, clearly happy to move away from the Eastons’ childhood.

William looked cheerful. ‘We laid out the design with pegs and string, then everybody set to: David, Walter Petch—that’s Maggie’s grandfather, Ellen Kilminster, her lads, Mr Hill and even Maggie helped. And Frances, of course.’

‘Bluestockings, green fingers,’ Eleanor said, tucking her arm in her friend’s.

‘Yew is the right choice here, I think,’ William said. ‘There are the two splendid and ancient ones in the churchyard so we know it can prosper in this soil. It’s the plant of resurrection too, of course, although I’m keen that the maze shouldn’t be a sad place. Entering it should be more in the spirit of hide-and-seek. It’s for children or lovers, with voices heard but not seen.’

‘That seems very jolly,’ Laurence said, in an attempt to cover up his own instinctive aversion to entering any maze, ‘and a link with the druids, or whatever went on in these parts.’

Eleanor gave him a cool look. ‘All Victorian make-believe,’ she said.

‘Actually the early communities here were undoubtedly pagan,’ William said. ‘They may have worshipped the sun, or horses, or mistletoe, but very few societies don’t worship something. Ask Patrick when he comes. He’s bound to know.’

Frances bent over the plan.

‘It’s likely there was an earlier maze at Easton Deadall.’ She looked up at Laurence. ‘There’ve always been stories of the Easton Deadall maze. People getting lost for ever. Digby swore there’d been one originally.’

‘From before the war?’