The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (42 page)

Towards the end of her recitation her voice began to wobble.

‘But just as she was going down, I thought’—she began to cry more heavily—‘she looked like I’d laid her out. Like a dead child ready for the grave.’ Her face twitched with grief and incomprehension. ‘I never saw her again.’

‘Why not?’

‘Robert was there. He did as you thought, or so he said. Told me Kitty was in London before the next day ended.’

‘Tell him about Robert,’ Ellen said, her voice suddenly hard.

‘Robert, it turns out, had his own ideas,’ Jane Rivers said. ‘A week later he sends Mr Digby a ransom note. I tell him it’s stupid but he says, why not make a profit. That even if Mrs Easton gives me money, keeping Kitty will be expensive and we’ve run all the risk. We’d go to prison if they knew. Mr Digby, he’s all over the place. You’d almost feel sorry for him. Robert won’t say exactly where Kitty is to me and Mrs Easton until he thinks it’s safe. Doesn’t trust me or her not to blab to the police. Mrs Easton’s beginning to get afraid—Kitty’s in London and only Robert knows where.

‘And then Mr Digby and Robert between them, they make sure we never see Kitty again.

‘Mr Digby confides in Robert about the note, of course. Just as he always does. You’d wonder who was the master sometimes. He says to drive him to leave the money where the instructions say and where they say Kitty will be exchanged. Robert thinks it’s very funny although it means he can’t pick the money up easy. But on the way Mr Digby tells him, he’s bested the kidnappers as it’s not all money—between is cut-up papers. Robert knows he isn’t going to give Kitty back anyway. He was just trying to get more. He’s furious that Kitty’s pa is trying such a stupid trick on him but pleased because he’s made Mr Digby suffer a bit more for it.’

‘But he still wouldn’t say where Kitty was,’ Ellen said, as if trying to hurry her along.

‘He said she was quite safe,’ Jane said softly. ‘And perhaps she was. Safer than here probably. He knew we wouldn’t say. Not me and not Mrs Easton. If he’d found out, I’d have gone to prison and Mr Digby would either have beaten Mrs Easton to death or divorced her.’

Laurence thought there was something else bothering her but she didn’t continue. Ellen was stroking Jane’s arm.

‘She didn’t mean any harm,’ Ellen said defensively. ‘She risked a lot to try and save Kitty.’

‘I know,’ he said.

He wondered at the strange alliance of a landowner’s wife and her daughter’s nanny. How frantic they must have been. And ever since they had also watched Frances’s and Julian’s lives being overshadowed and circumscribed by uncertainty over Kitty. But were they right about the danger or had they just persuaded themselves that Kitty was unsafe because her father was too boisterous with his timid daughter? Would he really have mutilated his own child? In the claustrophobic world of Easton Deadall, small things might have seemed large. Or had Lydia even wanted to punish a husband who had so punished her?

‘Robert had a sister,’ Jane said. ‘I told you. And I thought Kitty might be with her. I thought she might be the one who’d taken her to London. It had to be someone he could trust. But although he boasted of how he’d pulled it off, he never let on. And I didn’t know who she was from Adam. I was dismissed. Robert wouldn’t talk to me.’

‘He cut her dead,’ Ellen said angrily, ‘Robert. Next thing, he’s given in his notice. We hear he’s gone to London, thinks he can get a better job.’

‘He disappears?’

‘I never even knew if he had kept Kitty with him,’ Jane said, with huge sadness. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I might pass her on some street. I loved her so much but I don’t know if I’d recognise her. I never told a living soul, not even my vicar, not even Ellen until this week.’

Laurence wondered whether the child had lived long after Robert had her in his power. Had she ever gone to London with an unknown woman? She was a liability—not an infant but an intelligent child of five, a child who knew who she was. Why would Robert keep her or give her to another to keep if he was no longer being paid by Mrs Easton? But perhaps he
was
being paid, in a sort of excruciating, protracted blackmail? Any mother could probably be induced to go on paying indefinitely on the faint chance the money would reach her child. But they could never know, now that Lydia was dead.

Jane looked up. ‘I pray all the time that she’s all right. Somewhere.’

He didn’t have the heart to respond that, in the event she was alive, it was unlikely she was in any way all right: a delicate, highly protected five-year-old propelled into a huge city through a mixture of malice and greed.

Ellen said, ‘So now you know and I suppose you’ll tell Mr Julian and he’ll do what he has to do.’ She stood up. ‘It’s a pity because Jane would like to stay. And she’s a good worker. And we’ve got each other.’ There was a weary air of resignation about them both.

‘No,’ he said, getting up.

He’d already made his decision long before the whole story came out.

‘There’s no point. It’s too long ago. There’s been a war. Robert is untraceable. Kitty would be nearly grown up by now.’ He didn’t add, if she ever had that chance. ‘Mr Easton, Mr Julian Easton, needs to look to Easton Deadall’s future.’

Then he touched Jane Rivers on the arm.

‘You too. You made a mistake. But it was trying to save a child. We all might have done the same.’

The two sisters said nothing. He watched as they walked towards the cottage, their heads slightly bowed, Ellen’s arm in Jane’s. When they’d closed the front door behind them, the village seemed momentarily deserted. Then he saw, at a distance, Victor Kilminster and one of his nephews, in a field between the village and the Hall, sawing up the branches of a fallen tree.

Chapter Twenty-Two

His last night at Easton was a quiet affair.

Maggie and Ethel had waited at table. Patrick, Julian and Laurence sat up in the library long after Frances, Eleanor and William had retired.

‘We’ll see the solicitors after the weekend of course,’ Julian said to Patrick. ‘But Vereker sent me a copy of the letter Lydia left with her will.’

He took a folded piece of paper from the mantelpiece and gave it to his brother.

‘She encourages her trustees to have Kitty declared dead, you see.’

‘She’s right,’ Patrick said, when he handed it back. ‘Was right. Easton can’t belong to a ghost.’

Julian seemed surprised by Patrick’s forthright response but there was something else there: gratitude perhaps. He cleared his throat and went on, ‘She says she couldn’t do this in her lifetime because she had always believed Kitty was alive, but if there had been no trace of her at the date of Lydia’s own death, things should be clarified.’ He looked at his brother as if still anxious for his approval. ‘Vereker agrees. He believes this is long overdue. I think he would have suggested it anyway. But I don’t want to act without the consent of you and Frances.’

‘It should have been done years ago. Certainly after Digby’s death,’ Patrick said.

‘Thank you.’ Julian hesitated and his fingers stroked the stem of his wine glass. ‘She left Maggie a sum of money.’ He smiled. ‘Jane Rivers rather more. I have told them both.’

‘The nanny?’ Patrick appeared to be taken aback by this but then said, ‘She was hard done by, I suppose. But still, after all this time.’

After a pause Julian said, ‘There’s a small amount for Susan’s child.’

Patrick looked up. ‘Surely she can only have added that relatively recently?’

‘Two months ago. Her will remained substantially the same after she remade it when Digby died but she had added a codicil. Long before everything happened with David, of course,’ Julian said.

‘Do you think she knew she was dying?’ Laurence asked.

‘Yes,’ Julian replied. ‘Yes. It was I who resisted.’

‘Damn Digby,’ Patrick said. ‘Damn him to hell.’ He pushed his chair away from the table and went to the side table where the decanters stood on a silver tray. ‘I’m getting some port. Laurence? Julian?’

When he sat down again he looked at Julian almost accusingly.

‘You always got him out of scrapes. Why? Why didn’t you let him clear up his own mess?’

Julian seemed about to speak but said nothing. He picked up his glass.

‘You knew what he was like,’ Patrick repeated.

Julian shrugged. ‘Not always,’ he said. ‘Not when we were younger. Not when Lydia first came.’

Patrick looked thoughtful and slightly sad. ‘No. Not always but, by God, at his worst he could be nearly as bad as Father. And you were always blind to it.’

‘And you just went away,’ Julian said.

The words were simple but the intensity of feeling between the brothers was massive.

‘I thought he was so strong then,’ Patrick said. ‘But really it was only because he was older and the favourite. Now, I think he was a weak man and afraid of being found out, first by Father and then by life. Digby shone when things were going well. But when they didn’t, he was lost and frightened. And so he bullied people to keep things his way. I loved him, but you were a much better man.’

Julian looked astonished but Laurence saw his expression change to comprehension and relief. The words tumbled out.

‘I thought it was just drink,’ Julian said. ‘And after Kitty I didn’t even blame him for that. And he could still be old Digby so much of the time.’

It occurred to Laurence that Digby had had the good fortune to possess the gift some people had that made men and women love them, but how dreadfully he had squandered it.

Cautiously, it seemed to Laurence, Patrick spoke again.

‘Eleanor thought—of course she never met him—that it’s possible Digby had symptoms of the disease he handed on to poor Lydia. But it came out as anger and volatility. Apparently that’s common. A bright, intelligent woman like Lydia can become a confused, crippled invalid. An ordinary man can become a monster.’

Julian nodded slowly, looking down. ‘I was never going to be a hero, not with these grotesque hands.’ He spoke with loathing. ‘But Digby could have been. He
was
Easton. I wanted him to be the best possible version of himself.’ He thought a little and added, ‘I just wanted him to deserve Easton and Lydia.’

Although Patrick was silent, he was gazing at his brother with a look of undisguised affection. Laurence recalled Frances saying that Patrick needed to choose what sort of man he would be, but he thought Patrick had always been a decent man, just scarred by believing his brother part of a conspiracy to conceal a child’s murder. It was Digby Easton who had had two sides to his nature. In Digby, cruelty had eventually and disastrously overwhelmed so much that might have been good.

After a while, Julian said, as if it was bothering him, ‘I helped him seem the sort of man they would follow into battle. And in creating that man I killed them all as surely as he did.’

‘No,’ said Patrick.

‘Yes. He was no good as a soldier, you see. And I couldn’t cover for him there. Not away from Easton, not in the end. Rations were short, the weather was lousy, the men were sick. Morale was at an all-time low. And Digby ... you could smell the drink on him. He’d fall asleep in his boots, still clutching a bottle. He looked dreadful.

‘He was making bad decisions.’ Julian hesitated. ‘Stubborn to the point of folly. Bullying the men ... Peter ... the boy was just seventeen. We only took him because he wanted to come—all the other Easton lads were going on this great adventure and the pay would come in useful for his mother.’

Julian ran his hands through his hair. His forehead shone in the light of the fire and the marble scars were ridged on the taut skin of his hand. He sat, staring at the flames. The dog whined uneasily but was stilled by Julian’s touch. He stroked it without really seeming to notice its presence.

Laurence realised Julian was not yet ready to give Patrick the whole truth of what had happened. It was the thing David had hinted at, the thing Joe Petch had half written of in a letter home, the thing, presumably, that Victor Kilminster had known all along.

‘None of it matters,’ Julian said. ‘Our orders were to advance and we did advance. And most of the 6th Wiltshire were killed in the process. Ironically, Digby thought he was going away from the guns, but when I told him he had lost his sense of direction, he wouldn’t listen. We had hardly started to move when they opened up. Cross-fire. It took less than five minutes, I should think. We ended up dead or dying along the Bapaume road. And perhaps it was for the best,’ he said, wonderingly, ‘because everybody hated him by then. He could never have brought them home.’

Julian had an odd sort of smile on his face but Patrick’s expression was one of deep sadness.

‘I should have died. I go over it time and again. A piece of shrapnel caught my jaw and I was on the ground with the others. But they are dead and I am ... here.’

Laurence said quietly, ‘But David was there too, wasn’t he?’

‘He watched it all,’ Julian said. ‘He was a sniper. A crack shot, about to get his sergeant’s stripes. David was hidden in a clump of broken trees overlooking the road. He’d been there all day. He just sat there, camouflaged in his ghillie suit, waiting for the senior German officers to ride up once they’d secured their positions.’ He smiled slightly in recollection. ‘What a sight he was.’

Laurence already knew all about the men who created their own rules and disguise for this warfare of loners. They were usually countrymen, men who had handled guns and stalked prey before the war.

‘They could sit there for hours and hours,’ Julian said. ‘Never moving, never startling so much as a pigeon, becoming part of the landscape, just waiting for their quarry. I’d lost so much blood that I was hallucinating. I was just sitting by Digby’s body when two Germans appeared from nowhere. Perhaps they came to see if we needed finishing off. I watched them get ready to kill me—they could take their time, I was too weak—when David gave up his hiding place and shot them. He saved my life. And that was it, I suppose.’

Julian paused, his eyes on the dog. When he raised them he held Patrick’s for a long time, saying nothing. Was there something more? Laurence wondered.