The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (8 page)

‘We burned the rose arches because we were cold,’ Frances said fiercely.

Patrick shook himself. ‘I’m sorry, Lydia. I was being abominably ill mannered. It was meant to be a tribute to you. I could never have imagined how hard it had been for everybody at home until I saw Easton. It was my yardstick, all the years I was away.’

Eleanor seemed about to say something but she bit her lip. Frances stayed silent.

‘I really should go and unpack,’ Patrick said, when the silence had dragged on too long.

‘Of course,’ Lydia said. ‘We’ve put you in the blue room. Your old room. I hope you’ll find it comfortable.’ Some spirit returned to her eyes as she added, ‘And pleasingly unchanged.’

Patrick stood up and looked around at the others. ‘I’ll see you all at dinner,’ he said. ‘And, Laurence, I hope you’ll tell me about our church.’

‘I’d forgotten how rude Patrick can be, ‘ Frances said when the door was hardly shut. ‘Where was he in the war when we were desperate for help? Not thousands of miles from home, reading “Home Thoughts from Abroad” in Greece. He was just thirty miles away, cataloguing broken pots in Oxford.’

Chapter Five

Laurence had agreed to meet Patrick the next morning at the church. He went the back way, intending to have some time there alone, and passed a pretty woman sitting at a table in the butler’s pantry, cleaning silver. As he paused in the doorway she started to rise. On seeing that she was very pregnant, he said, ‘No, don’t get up,’ but she was already on her feet.

‘Susan Eddings, sir. David’s wife,’ she said, and gave him a smile.

He went out into the stable yard and crossed to the church. He paused at the carved arch and marvelled. There was such life and mischief in it. Once inside, with the door thudded shut behind him, he felt he was in his own territory. He ran his hand over the stones by the door and found a switch. It was by no means dark but when the light came on, although he could see clearly within its circle of illumination, it seemed to cast the corners into deeper shadow.

He stood just inside the door, getting the feel of the place. He could mentally remove the accretions of the last half-century and see the simple barn-like stone building this had once been. There were no tombs visible and, more unusually, no wall plaques. He walked towards the altar and lifted up the corner of the linen cloth covering it, revealing a faded green damask one underneath. Below that the altar stone was battered but there were remains of carving on the corners. He let the cloth drop and as he did so wondered who had put the simple vase of flowers on it, given that the church was rarely used now. He pushed a faded carpet aside with his foot, then checked his watch. When he had seen the church before, he had noticed the setting sun had not shone directly through the west window. Now he got out his compass. As he did so, he heard a noise behind him and went to open the door. Patrick stood in the porch, putting out his cigarette before entering. Once inside, he stood still and looked around.

‘It’s a pity we lost our rector. There was something about this place when I was a boy: Mama, Papa, the village, every Sunday, week in, week out, with Morning Prayers by rote and the schoolmistress on the organ, a beat behind in the hymns. Yet my father believed only in himself and my mother remained a secret Roman Catholic all her life, with her missal hidden in her dressing table. I once found her rosary on the floor under the bell here. It was very old—I’d never seen it before: ebony, I think it must have been. She was horrified when I asked her if it was hers. Poor old Mama. Always so frightened of Father, when really he was just a bit of a bully, but something in her meekness, or perhaps his resentment of her money, used to spur him on to goad her. And he was a bit of a one for pinching servant girls’ bottoms. He would probably have thought the rosary was a necklace. He wasn’t terribly up on theology, apart from insisting that Catholicism was somehow treasonably foreign, like most other loyal English gentlemen at the time.’

He looked around him.

‘Are they going to restore the organ?’

It stood almost out of sight to one side of the nave, a small instrument, probably dating back to the restoration of the church. Pipes filled the arch around it. The dark lid was scratched and dusty. Patrick opened it and made a face, then sat at the organ stool, turned on an electric switch and pulled out a couple of stops. As he did so the church door opened again and a woman’s figure was silhouetted in the doorway. As she walked forward Laurence could see it was Eleanor. She came and stood next to him. Patrick played a chord; the sound was thin but not unpleasant. He followed this with a few bars of what Laurence thought was Bach but the organ seemed too small for the piece and some keys were sticking. Patrick, an unlit cigarette now clamped in his mouth, turned to look at Eleanor and then, with his eyes half shut, launched into some dance music. She laughed. Laurence could see that he’d be a good performer, given a piano. His face was animated and he tossed his floppy fringe out of his eyes. Then, almost as soon as he had got going, he stopped with a burst of ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank in Monte Carlo’. Eleanor clapped. ‘Bravo,’ she said. ‘Encore.’

‘No. Laurence wants to give the church a once-over and I promised I would be as silent as an Easton revenant.’

Laurence’s heart sank at the thought that he would now have an audience of two, but in fact Eleanor moved away and sat facing the altar, while Patrick leafed through a hymnal. When Laurence walked to the base of the bell tower, Patrick turned to watch him, but Eleanor, apparently deep in thought, did not. A single rope was fastened to the wall and the solitary bell hung not far above him. At the west window he opened his compass again. He tapped it twice and it was as he thought. The orientation was not east-west as churches usually were, but north-east-south-west. The floor at this end was stone-flagged, with the marks of earlier dividing walls.

Patrick, who had moved closer, asked him, ‘What were those, do you think?’

‘Probably a tiny chapel, a Lady Chapel, I imagine. Removed at the Reformation, probably.’

Patrick said, ‘I like to think of Mama worshipping in a church which had been Roman Catholic for centuries before we Protestants got hold of it.’

Most of the interior walls had been whitewashed but one retained a painted design in a dark madder. Stylised flowers filled a pattern of squares over an area perhaps three feet by four.

‘Quaint,’ Patrick said.

‘Old,’ Laurence replied. ‘Very old, I think.’

‘Lucky to survive my mother’s improvements,’ Patrick said. ‘How old?’

‘Medieval, I would imagine. The same sort of age as all this.’

He switched on his torch and shone it upwards. The ceiling was formed from simple wooden trusses, but the stone corbels that supported the beams were as elaborate as the entrance archway, with clusters of leaves, flowers and small animals, including a hedgehog, a field mouse and a slow-worm. Deep among them was an impish face sprouting leaves. It was easy to see what had inspired the man who much more recently had sculpted the creatures on the garden steps.

Laurence shone the beam into the corner near the long table under the window. To the right was what appeared to be the top of a rudimentary arch with a column, about four feet high, incorporated into the wall. Above it was a carving, about a foot square. It looked hacked at, rather than eroded by time; either way, its original subject was lost but could possibly have been some kind of head and body.

After a minute, he said, ‘I think there might have been an earlier building here.’

‘Before the church? Or part of it?’

‘Hard to tell.’

With anyone else, he would have expected them to push him but Patrick just nodded.

Eleanor joined them. ‘Interesting,’ she said.

‘Interesting, but probably not significant. People did use the foundations of old buildings to raise new ones from time to time, or areas that had some sacred connotation would acquire various structures over the centuries.’

Patrick was thoughtful. ‘My father used to say that the altar had been a standing stone. Perhaps it was true and some doughty Christian hauled it here to purge it of its heathenness.’

‘It’s just as likely they built the whole church round it,’ Laurence said. ‘Churches are enclosures for altars—the altar’s not furniture for the church.’

Patrick said nothing but he looked at Laurence with respect.

Dinner that evening was more formal than the night before. It was not completely dark outside when they sat down; from the nearest windows it was possible to see beyond the terrace but the maze was hardly discernible. A clear violet sky tinged with green promised a cold night, although the day had been beautifully warm for late April.

The tarnished silver, which had appeared at every other meal, was now clean and bright; crystal glasses stood on a newly laundered tablecloth. The women had dressed up too. Lydia looked serenely beautiful in what he thought must be a pre-war dress, which fell to her ankles and sparkled with thousands of tiny beads. She was walking with a silver-topped cane and was evidently finding it hard to put her weight on one leg. Frances was watching her. She wore an equally old-fashioned long crimson dress, with her hair caught back in a small jewelled clip.

From everything Eleanor had told him about Frances, Laurence doubted she ever left Easton much or had any call for fashionable evening dress. He thought that at least Lydia had known marriage, even if followed by tragedy, where Frances had only escaped briefly to Cambridge. Eleanor alone wore a modern evening dress, with a low waist and a silk fringe bouncing on her knees. A long pearl necklace was knotted on her chest. She had obviously seized any old cardigan to throw on over it but the effect nonetheless made her look young.

William was already at the table. Julian pulled back Lydia’s chair for her. Lydia handed him her stick and laid her hand on the table edge to steady herself as she lowered herself into the chair. Laurence ran a finger under his dress collar. It felt a great deal tighter than when he’d last worn it in London a few months ago. Patrick gave him a rueful smile. He had failed to bring evening dress altogether and, the last Laurence had heard, was going through the wardrobes, looking for Digby’s clothes, which Lydia had told him had been put away in one of the spare bedrooms. Digby had been, Laurence thought, looking at Patrick now, shorter and wider than his younger brother, as well as smaller than he looked in his fine portrait. The jacket gaped slightly at the front and Patrick kept pulling down his cuffs. There was something defeated in the limpness of his bow tie.

Susan brought in the soup, followed by Maggie carrying a jug of water, her face set in concentration. Maggie served Lydia and then went straight to Patrick. He made some pleasantry that Laurence didn’t catch and patted her on the arm. Susan indicated the two other women with a nod of her head and Maggie blushed but, as she poured out a glass for Frances, she was still gazing at Patrick. Laurence was amused. The girl was obviously sweet on Patrick. He could see Eleanor was trying not to smile as Maggie allowed water to run down the side of Frances’s glass.

When Maggie and Susan had left, Julian filled their glasses with wine.

‘Some of the last bottles of Easton’s cellar at its finest,’ he said. ‘I think my father must have put this down.’

Laurence was in no haste to drink. He was warm, comfortable and glad to be among friends. The mock-turtle soup was excellent.

Eleanor said, ‘This must be Susan’s cooking?’

Lydia gave a quick, small smile. ‘Our main challenge is how to persuade Mrs Hill to let that aspect of her duties be taken over by Susan. I don’t think Mrs Hill really enjoys cooking—’

‘And those who eat it certainly don’t,’ Patrick chipped in. Eleanor made a small sound, which she covered by dabbing her mouth with her napkin. Julian frowned at Patrick.

‘She does her best.’

‘That’s the worry. What would happen if she took against us?’

Lydia said, quite firmly for once, ‘Susan, however, is a very good cook and I know she’d like to continue after her confinement. Maggie’s longing to look after the baby.’

There was a warmth in her voice that was usually absent. Laurence thought that the prospect of a child around the house again, far from distressing her, seemed to animate her.

‘Was Susan a cook before her marriage?’ Laurence asked.

Frances put her spoon down. ‘No. Well, only vaguely. She made biscuits. She worked in a factory during the war. Near Reading.’

‘How did she meet David?’ Laurence had sensed a great closeness between the couple. David’s reserve fell away when his wife was around and she fussed over him as if he were an invalid, rather than a strong man.

Frances looked at Lydia, who just shook her head. ‘She told me but ... I can’t quite—’

‘She’s got no family,’ William said. ‘David told me that neither of them had. His widowed mother died years ago and Susan spent most of her life in an orphanage, then a couple of years in service, after which she went into a factory.’

‘I think she was a kitchen maid,’ Eleanor said, ‘in a big household, because she told me she shared a room with two other girls, and she talked about the shooting parties they used to have. Presumably that’s where she learned her cooking.’

‘Lord,’ Patrick said. ‘Must be a bit of a comedown, being at Easton. Only the obsequious shades of butlers and footmen, tweenies and still-room maids in our servants’ hall. In fact, only the ghost of the Hall itself.’

‘She wasn’t happy there,’ Lydia said. Her voice dropped as the door opened. Maggie stood on the threshold.

‘Shall I take the plates, ma’am?’

Maggie piled them up carefully, with Lydia’s bowl, which had hardly been touched, on top, walked towards the door and then looked perplexed to find that it had shut again. She gazed around, her arms full, biting her lip. Julian had to jump up and open it for her.

Patrick, his eyes sparkling with amusement, then said more seriously, ‘I feel sorry for her.’

‘Susan?’ Frances said in surprise.