The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (40 page)

Ellen Kilminster stood next to Susan, a black ribbon around her straw hat and clutching a handkerchief in her hand. The two Kilminster boys, one now nearly at manhood, stood with their heads bowed, with Ethel, in an old-fashioned grey dress, slightly too small for her, between them.

The one surprise, when Laurence entered the church earlier, was another familiar face. It was Jane Rivers, out of place in her city shabbiness, but with a strong resemblance to her sister, now that he saw them both together. Catching his eye as the coffin was carried out to the churchyard, she held his gaze for a second before glancing away.

Eleanor, her face almost hidden by the deep brim of her hat, had pushed William’s chair down the stone path, and they remained there, a little distance from the grave. Laurence had talked very little to either of them since Eleanor had returned from London for the funeral but he thought William looked better, although he had already lost the colour he had acquired over the summer spent outside. There had been few on hand to push him out into the grounds over the last two weeks. It was hard not to see Eleanor’s brief affair as a further demonstration of how few options William had; how weakened he was by his injuries in a way that all his wit and good humour could never disguise. As well as having to cope with the pain of losing Patrick, Eleanor had to live with the knowledge that she had also struck William a hefty blow.

In the church, the scaffolding for the new window was in place, ready for work to start. As the sun blazed through the Magdalene’s draperies, the vicar said prayers not just for Lydia but for Digby Easton, then for the lost men of Easton and, finally, for Kitty. If there was an irony in Digby being mourned alongside the wife he had, in effect, doomed, no member of the family seemed to register it. As the vicar spoke of the repose of Lydia’s soul, Laurence thought that, at last, a generation, their secrets and their troubles were being laid to rest.

Lydia’s coffin was lowered into the ground beside those of her parents-in-law. The untidy churchyard grass had been roughly cut two days earlier and there was a smell of hay. The early afternoon was warm and completely still. A thrush sang from somewhere just behind them.

Frances stepped forward, her face pale, taking a small handful of Easton earth from the pile by the graveside. Almost before he heard it patter on the coffin below, she had thrown in a musk rose, one of the blooms that had grown so densely this summer below Lydia’s window. She quickly stepped away.

Julian, looking calm, followed Frances’s handful of earth with his own. Brushing the last dust from his hand, he stood at the grave and gazed down for a moment, head bowed. But as he walked away he seemed to draw breath and stand straight and he looked towards the twenty or so villagers who were now his tenants. Laurence wondered what the years of bearing Lydia’s pain had been like for him. He was glad Julian was now the rightful heir to Easton and that there were now young men, young families, who might help him make the small estate viable. Perhaps in time he would even marry. When the short ceremony was over, Julian talked quietly to Susan as she held her child.

It was Patrick who had surprised him. His decision to stay at Easton, to restore the old vicarage, was perhaps the biggest change in any of them. He hoped to take up a position at an Oxford college, where he could catalogue and publish the extraordinary finds at Easton. The awkwardness between him and his brother was still there—but so, it was clear, was affection. At the point at which Julian had been arrested, Patrick’s shock had been visible. He might remain angry while he believed Julian had been implicated in concealing Kitty’s death, but when he thought his brother might be taken from him, he had looked bereft.

Frances too, though often red-eyed over the last week, had seemed relieved when Lydia eventually slipped away peacefully on the first really fine morning since the heat of St Swithin’s Day. Laurence had had a single exchange alone with her and he thought they had both found it painful.

‘What are you going to do?’ he said.

‘What, now I have no purpose here?’

He felt clumsy. ‘I meant, what would you like to do?’

‘Julian’s asked me to stay,’ she said, ‘to set up the schoolhouse again.’

‘And are you going to?’

‘I might, later. But I’m going home first.’

He must have looked puzzled because she said, with a halfsmile, America. New York. It’s the only home I ever had. I left it when I was three. I can remember only shadows—vague impressions—but it is the only place I ever lived where I had a right to be. And it’s the new world. I want to be part of it, for a bit at least.’

‘But where will you live?’

‘I have distant cousins,’ she said. ‘I never knew them. Some of them weren’t born by the time I left, but they’ve invited me to stay.’

I see.

She took his hand. ‘Laurence, you think I was falling in love with you. Perhaps I was. Perhaps you thought you could fall in love with me if you concentrated. But it would never have worked, not really. I was an antidote to loneliness. And I have compromised for far too long to be second-best now.’

He looked at her without speaking. If he had been coming to love her, and he had never really known whether he was, or whether he simply saw the potential for love, the feeling had never been stronger than at that moment. He knew that, for a split second, they had the chance to retrieve whatever lay between them, for him to retrieve her, but neither seized that opportunity.

Eventually he just managed, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Silly ass,’ she said. ‘You’ve been quite marvellous. You
are
quite marvellous.’

‘You’ll be crossing the sea to your city of skyscrapers and I’ll be going south by train through Europe to my city of ruins,’ he said, ‘which probably tells you a lot about us both.’ Then he added, ‘Thank you,’ although he didn’t quite know why.

Now she stood there talking to Eleanor and William. She was leaving from Liverpool in ten days, while Eleanor and William were off to London the next morning. Julian was driving them there and then seeing the family lawyers. Laurence would be travelling by train. He had two further tasks to complete and then, he thought, his life at Easton was over.

He moved to intercept Jane Rivers as she walked a few steps behind her family.

‘May I come and see you later?’ he said.

Her eyes on her sister’s retreating back, she simply said, ‘All right.’ There was something resigned in her tone.

When he turned to follow the family back to the house, Patrick was waiting for him. He raised his eyebrows as Laurence caught up but said nothing.

After a quiet lunch Laurence walked up to the village. Victor Kilminster’s wife was carrying a basket of apples, which she said she was taking to the Petches. She beamed at him.

‘Good send-off,’ she said, with a strong Australian accent.

‘Indeed. She deserved it.’

She pointed towards the Hall. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, ‘just like the schoolbooks. Just like Victor said it was.’

‘Your family must miss you.’

‘My older brother was at Gallipoli. Didn’t make it. But my younger brother—looks like he’s coming to join us.’

She grinned again, the gap between her front teeth giving her a schoolgirlish charm.

‘He’s a great man with sheep. Mind you, this little place will seem like a garden to Bill. He’s been working on a farm a thousand times as big as what’s here.’

He raised his hat to her. ‘I’m glad. Mr Easton must be delighted.’

He walked on to Ellen Kilminster’s cottage. The front door was open and he could hear children and adult voices. He knocked on the doorpost. It was Jane Rivers who came to the door.

‘Would you walk a little with me?’ he said. ‘I just wanted to ask you a few things.’

‘I’ll fetch my cardigan.’

He could hear her exchange a few words with her sister, then she came out again. She walked beside him silently, as they headed for the small pond and the bench.

‘Mrs Easton left me something in her will,’ she said. ‘Mr Julian told me.’

He nodded. ‘I think she felt you’d been hard done by.’

She reverted to silence for a few moments. ‘She didn’t have to,’ she said, but it was obvious she wasn’t going to be any more forthcoming.

After a while, still not looking at her, Laurence said, ‘The last time we spoke you said that Maggie’s mother’s man was a devil. I thought you meant Joe Petch. But you didn’t mean him, did you?’

She didn’t answer, but he could sense her breathing faster. ‘You meant the mother’s lover. Not the gypsy everybody said she’d run off with. Because there never was such a man.’

When she still didn’t answer, he decided to put it in a way that he calculated might make such a religious woman uncomfortable.

‘It was a lie. I think you knew it and perhaps your sister did. Perhaps even Walter did?’

This time he looked at her. Her head drooped.

‘I think it was one of the Easton brothers.’

It was a statement, not a question.

She raised her head again and looked straight ahead. ‘He
was
the devil,’ she said. ‘Handsome and funny and a tempter. And in the end he became cruel and wicked.’ In her forthrightness he could hear her Wiltshire accent more clearly.

Laurence still wanted her to give him the name.

‘He started good but became like his father,’ Jane said. ‘None of us were safe. But some of us women were stupid. And some loved him. He was easy to love when he wanted you to love him.’ Are you talking about Mr Patrick?’ he said.

She looked at him with incredulity. ‘Of course not. Mr Patrick wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was a lovely young man. A bit hot-headed but well meaning. And Mr Julian would do anything for Easton folk. It was Mr Digby could be a devil. Not always, but when he was in his cups he thought Easton was his plaything and all of us with it.’

‘Including you?’

Her nod was imperceptible.

‘I was engaged. I did like him ... but I didn’t want ... Mr Digby said he just wanted a kiss but then he didn’t take no for an answer. He always got what he wanted.’ Her voice was bitter. ‘Said I’d been making sheep’s eyes at him. It was in the room next to his own child. I was asleep. He smelled that bad of brandy. Put his hand over my mouth and he ... did it. But I wouldn’t of called out anyway because of little Kitty.’

She paused and looked embarrassed.

‘After, he cried, said he hadn’t meant it.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He was so much more than sorry that he couldn’t express it.

‘And stupidly I told Robert. He could see I was upset, and he and I, we’d never ... I wanted to save myself and he was angry, but as much with me, as he’d thought I was soft on Mr Digby, and although he seemed to be going to help, in the end he was a worse man than Mr Digby.’ She screwed her face up in pain.

‘And Maggie’s mother?’

‘Mr Digby played the same trick on her. She told me Maggie was his. Yet she was really sweet on him. Believed it all. Stupid woman.’

But she said it sympathetically, shaking her head.

‘Mr Digby said he’d set her up in London. She told our Ellen. He made promises. But none of us ever heard from her again. She left Maggie behind because Mr Digby didn’t want her along. But it was Joe as really loved that little girl. I don’t think he ever dreamed she wasn’t his. And me and Ellen, well, we weren’t going to tell anyone. Joe Petch was a good man and didn’t deserve it. And...’ she faltered.

‘Nor did Mrs Easton.’

Jane Rivers cleared her throat.

‘Do you think she knew? About all of this?’ Laurence asked.

‘She loved him. For her dream of him—how he was. Sometimes I wondered how rotten does he have to get for her to see it, but in the end she did see it and yet she still loved him.’

She seemed to be going to say more so he remained silent.

‘She was a proper Christian lady like that,’ Jane said after a few minutes, but he had the feeling she’d been about to say something else. ‘Always forgiving.’

‘Can you keep a secret?’ he asked and was surprised when she flashed him a look of contempt.

‘Mr Patrick...’

He hesitated, considering how best to put it. Could he trust her not to gossip?

‘Mr Patrick believes—he saw something that made him think—he has
always
thought Mrs Easton and Mr Julian...’

She was staring at him, obviously astounded, and he realised she thought he was going to say that Patrick believed his brother and sister-in-law were having an affair.

‘He thought that they were somehow involved in Kitty’s death.’

He knew immediately he should have said ‘disappearance’, not ‘death’, but she leaped in.

‘No.’ It was almost a cry of pain. ‘Mr Julian just wanted things to be right. Always. And Mrs Easton would have given everything she had to keep her little girl.’

‘But sometimes strange things happen—accidents. Mr Patrick has spent years with the awful thought that his own brother, now his only living relative, did this. It’s why he left Easton—to avoid them.’

When she didn’t answer, he turned to face her. Tears were running slowly down her cheeks. She sniffed twice, felt in her sleeve and brought out a neatly ironed, finely stitched handkerchief. As she unfolded it and wiped her eyes, he thought of all the flowers she embroidered in her cheerless rooms in south London.

She was shaking her head. More tears fell.

‘But he was wrong,’ she said. ‘He got it wrong.’

‘Mr Patrick?’

She nodded. ‘Mr Julian never did anything except to help.’

‘But what about Mrs Easton?’

‘Mr Easton hurt her. Not at first. Not deliberately then. At first it was things—things she had from her dead mother he broke. But as it went on, he hurt her too. Usually in ways you couldn’t tell.’

‘Digby Easton?’

‘If he’d been drinking.’ Her voice was hoarse and she blew her nose.

Laurence gazed across the cottages to the hills. The trees were darkest green in late summer, the grass of the downs worn almost through to the chalk. All this had been Digby’s and still he had become a man of violence. He had good health, good looks, a rich and beautiful wife, a healthy child, and yet he had become a monster.