Born of Woman (39 page)

As he read, horror poured between the lines. Hester appeared to have sold her son for cash. Lyn raced through the other London letters, tried to piece the story together from Alice Fraser's ramblings. She had obviously had time and leisure enough to pour out all her hopes and fears, writing to Hester almost every day in those two tense weeks in March, often confirming conversations the two had had in person. Lyn had only her side of the story, but he could read between the lines, pad the details out.

Edward and Alice Fraser appeared to be a wealthy childless couple, connected with the Colonial Office, who were stationed in London during the hostilities, and planned to return to Warkworth once the war was over and the ships resumed their sailings. Hester had met Alice in some Southwark hostel where the
grande dame
played at Good Works on Wednesday afternoons. Her other days she passed more salubriously in a Georgian house in Knightsbridge, surrounded by her poodles. The dogs were simply a substitute. Alice Fraser was desperate for a child. Hester had a child and was desperate generally. Thus they made a deal. The Frasers got their baby, Hester got her cash. She also resumed her former virgin status. A child could be negated, once safely despatched to the other side of the globe. Only Alice seemed to fear the distance.

‘We should like the child baptised', she wrote, ‘before we take him on so long a voyage.' Perhaps the ships were old and creaking from the war, or Alice was keen to ensure that if she lost her son at sea, at least they would meet again in heaven. Hence the Christian rituals. Hester appeared to have agreed to them only with some reluctance and after a fairly heated argument over names. First-born Fraser sons were always christened Edward Arthur James, so Alice wrote. There had been Edward Arthur James Frasers going back more than a hundred years, and she was loath to break so strong and established a tradition. Yes, but this wasn't their first-born son, Hester must have objected, because Alice's next letter picked up on this point and was obviously distressed by it.

Time was getting short and tempers slightly frayed, judging by the tone of Alice's next two letters. Hester had at last agreed to the Christian names, but produced her own trump card. The child must retain her own surname and be Edward Arthur James
Ainsley
. Was this merely tit-for-tat, Lyn wondered, or genuine concern that the Ainsley name would otherwise die out, since both Hester's father and grandfather had been only children, and all her brothers killed? Or just a simple wish that something of herself should remain with a child she was about to lose for ever? Whatever the reason, Alice was disquieted.
No
, she begged in copperplate, a different surname from their own would only confuse the child and prove a burden and embarrassment. That was the last letter on the subject. It was Edward Arthur James Ainsley whom Mrs E.A.J. Fraser carried from the font.

Lyn laid the letters down. Even at nineteen, Hester had displayed that obstinacy and independence which had typified her later. She had also resisted any formal adoption procedures and refused to register the baby's birth. As for the baptism itself, it was clearly a major concession on her part, and she must have expressed her fears about its official and public nature, since one of the letters assured her of total secrecy. ‘Leave it in our hands,' wrote Alice. ‘My husband has much influence with churchmen, and if you insist on the utmost privacy and confidentiality—which of course I understand—he will see that the child exists in the eyes of God alone.'

Edward Arthur James had suddenly diminished—become a secret and a subterfuge, a bundle in a shawl with no official identity, a piece of extra luggage smuggled on a boat, a burden to his mother. But if such a burden, then why had she left him all her property and a letter to go with it, why revived a correspondence which had been allowed to lapse since 1921? As far as letters went, precious little Edward had remained stunted at age two. Yet here was Hester making him her heir.

Lyn glanced around the kitchen—the blackened beams, the solid walls. This grim entrapping house was no longer his to resent and run away from; no longer his to refuse to Jennifer, to curse and criticise. Yet now he craved it. It had never belonged to anyone but him. His whole life was chiselled into it, even his height recorded on that kitchen wall, where, every six months, Hester had made a pencil mark level with the top of his head. The marks seemed to rise so grudgingly, until suddenly, at seventeen, the pencil had surprised them all and the last swaggering mark was higher than the mantelshelf. He went and stood against it. He was even taller now, but, for all it meant, he might be baby Edward's size, a child so paltry, he had been simply overlooked.

He stared out through the window, glimpsed a speck of a dog, circling in the distance. A dog could mean an owner. He must get out before he was found. Anyone could come there—forestry official, shepherd, hiker, Mick or Molly Bertram. He no longer had any right to be in the house at all He was a trespasser, a thief—a true criminal, now, who had defrauded a man of his rightful property for fifteen months or more. The papers seemed to scorch and blister his hands. He rummaged in the drawer, found a plastic bag, bundled them inside his shirt, then sprinted through the hall and locked the front door behind him.

He stumbled across the mocking tidy garden. Molly had cleared the weeds for Edward's sake, nannied the house for Edward, and before that, his wife had scrubbed and laboured for that bastard. He himself had lived there thirty years, ministering to his mother, shoring up the house, protecting it from wind and time and weather, so that an alien, a peasant-born and rapist-fathered trickster could take it over with the minimum of work.

Lyn was running up the hill, panting towards the dark and sullen forest. He feared those trees. They had only grown as tall because they were feeding off his father. The farm had been lost and now the house was lost. He stared at the ruin of another, smaller house—one which had been sold to the Forestry the same year as their land, and had been allowed to fall apart. Its windows were gaping wounds now, nettles choked its blackened boarded door. Hernhope had survived, despite bankruptcy and hardship, had stood for three proud centuries, outsmarting man and nature. And now a stranger could simply tear it down, lift his little finger and turn it into scrap.

He faced towards the east, the whole flaunt and grandeur of the Cheviots swaggering around him, still white with morning mist as if they had been wrapped in tissue paper like a precious gift. A flap of rooks cawed towards the sun, dipped their wings in gold, then wheeled down and back again. The sky dazzled with the ardour of the sunrise. It was Edward's now—Edward's sun and sky.

‘No!' he whispered, and turned his back on it, slunk towards the prison of the trees.

No sun, now. Only shreds and freckles of light piercing the tangled canopy of branches. Lyn threaded his way between the serried rows of trunks, twigs catching in his hair, sudden flutters and rustlings startling the dark green pool of silence. He had never cared for conifers. They weren't England's native trees like oak or beech, but intruders from an alien continent, as Edward Ainsley was. He remembered as a lad, one burly labourer boasting that he had planted forty-eight thousand sitka spruce by hand in five short weeks. They'd been spindly then, little more than thin and ragged urchins, but had soon grown faster than he had, darkening the whole sky. Now they were so dense, they had squeezed out all the flowers and vegetation. Only creeping things like shrews and snakes had room to live there, only birds which thrived in darkness.

Even those had made themselves invisible. Everything seemed lifeless—the dry brown ruff of branches which fringed the trunks before they soared to green, the dusty ground without a blade of grass, the shrouding silence. As a boy, he had seen squirrels in the forest, roe deer, sparrowhawks. He had picked fern and heather, even foxgloves. The Book was crammed with all that bounty.

The
book!
Lyn grabbed at a trunk to steady him. How in God's name would this news of Edward square with it? Hester had been depicted as a virtuous woman of high old-fashioned principle, not an unmarried mother auctioning off her baby. The media would go mad about it, pounce on Edward in triumph and derision. Jennifer would be hunted down as well, dragged back into the limelight. And Matthew? He hardly knew whether Matthew would be furious and fretful, or thrilled by the floodtide of publicity, but in either case, he would start bossing and dictating once again, barking out his orders for this new contingency.

Lyn flung himself on the ground, pine needles prickling against his neck, fir cones thrown like tiny bombs waiting to blow his life apart. He had
two
half-brothers now—both elder, wealthier brothers, expecting service and salaams. Lyn hurled a stone against a scaly trunk. He could see the whole world throwing stones—contemptuous of him and Hester, angry with him for hiding the Will at all.

Why not hide it again—leave it hidden this time? It might be fairer on them all, in fact, even the legatee. What would Edward want with a grim old pile in the middle of a wilderness? He already had a house—Woodlawns. How elegant it sounded. Edward would have no wish to tear himself away from it, involve himself in journeys and decisions for the sake of some dilapidated property he didn't even need. The Frasers must have died by now, left him their own inheritance. First and elder son again—first and only. He could well have sons himself, or grandsons—more Edward Arthurs carrying on the line. Why scare them all with skeletons in cupboards, dig up a past which might embarrass them? That past had hardly happened. Nine months blushing in a womb, a few days howling in a hostel, were nothing compared with sixty settled years in a kinder, milder clime.

Edward might even be
dead
, for heaven's sake, or have moved away, or changed his name to Fraser, in deference to his foster parents and that hundred years' tradition. Hester's letter might never find him, be returned to England marked ‘unknown at this address'. When she wrote it, she was already old and failing, had hardly known what …

No. Hester had never failed—or only hours before her death. The day she wrote the Will, her mind and pen had been as sharp as ever. So how could he disobey her, refuse to be executor? Except things were different now. There was a book to take account of, a whole greedy pointing world to keep at bay. Hester had entrusted her secret to him alone, not to every media man in Britain. Yet if he protected Hester, then he defrauded her elder son, could even risk a jail sentence.

His head ached with all the ‘ifs', his stomach kicked with hunger. He had eaten nothing since the picnic with Susie yesterday. He thought he had problems then, but Susie was simply a shrug and a parenthesis compared with this tumult of new fears. He almost longed for her, for Jennifer, for someone with soft hands who could wipe his eyes and take it all away.

Sissy! He was the executor, the one who must act and organise, read documents, post letters. He rifled through the plastic bag, snatched the letter out. Why had Hester sealed it so securely? Didn't she trust him? It could only be some dry official thing, couched in formal legal language like the Will, some second footling contract. She couldn't have much of consequence to say to a son she had sold like a piece of furniture. He scratched at the Sellotape with his thumb-nail, trying to coax the letter open as carefully as possible, so that no one would suspect he had ever tampered with it. The paper wasn't white and formal like the Will, but Hester's own cheap and flimsy airmail folded into three. There was no address, no date. The letter plunged straight in.

‘My beloved son', it said.

Lyn had thought the wood was silent, but the noise had turned almost to a roar—rustlings in the undergrowth, twitterings in the trees, branches sighing and shifting against each other, flutterings of trapped and frightened birds.

He had rarely had a letter from his mother, but when he did, it always began ‘Dear Lyn'. Never ‘dearest', never even ‘darling'—those words were not in her vocabulary, ‘Beloved' was almost criminal. There was passion in it, idolatry. It was a dangerous word, especially in a forest. It could set the trees alight, run wildfire through the undergrowth. He could feel it burning already against his eyes. He must quench it, prevent a conflagration.

He slung the letter back into its envelope, stuffed it at the bottom of the plastic bag, stowed all the other documents on top. ‘
Fresh Foods From Sainsbury
‘ said the bag. Wrong. It wasn't food, wasn't even fresh. There was a corpse in there, the body of a baby. The child had perished—not in the Southwark hostel, or in a storm at sea, as Alice Fraser had feared, but just now just here, in this dark funereal forest. There were no Frasers, noletters, no Woodlawns, River Road. Just a tiny corpse it was his duty to dispose of, before it could taint his mother or his brother. His only brother, Matthew.

He knew how to plan a funeral—had seen Jennifer do it a year or so ago. She had been solemn and meticulous, made death a thing of dignity. He would do the same. His mother trusted him, had only made him executor so that he could deal with things like this.

He stood up, pushed his way through the crowded hampering trees, paused a moment to listen to a skylark singing matins on the hillside. He could barely see the hills, only a tease and snatch of green beyond the darker green of forest. Perfect spot for a grave—secret and secluded, yet so high up, it was only a hand's span from the floor of heaven. The golden glint of morning was knifing through the spaces between the trunks. Edward would be safe here. No one would ever disturb him. The trees would grow taller and taller year by year, hemming in the coffin, rooting down the grave.

Lyn struggled on, plunging into the thickest part of the forest, kicking out at branches in his way, trampling through the undergrowth. The light grew dimmer, colder. He could smell the scented needles of a Douglas fir—a smell like incense, fitting for a funeral. He stopped, knelt. The tree was so huge, it would mark the spot, provide a monument. He fell on his knees in front of it, scrabbled with his hands, tried to break the soil up, snapped off a branch and jabbed and thrust with it. The hole was still too small. He dragged off his shoe and used it as a scraper, burrowed like a dog, broke his nails, chafed his hands. Still not deep enough. Sweat was seeping down his back, despite the chill and dankness of the trees. He used the other shoe with the foot still in it—kicked with the toe, pounded with the heel. The hole was getting deeper. More like a proper grave now. He shaped it with his hands, smoothed the earth, collected the softest pine needles he could find and made a bed of them. He searched around for moss, scraped soft green fuzz from stones and laid it in the grave like treasure. Must observe the decencies, make things beautiful. This was a brilliant babe, a prodigy, who deserved the proper rites.