The Death of Lucy Kyte (15 page)

‘Isn't that the best possible reason
not
to go?'

‘I'm dying to see them.'

‘Yes, and I'm sure they're dying to have a look at us. Did you say we'd
definitely
be there?'

‘I'm afraid so, although I did decline the communal supper afterwards. She was thrilled, Josephine – you can't possibly let her down. I rather got the impression you're the most exciting thing to have arrived here for some time.' She grinned, and held up the beetroot. ‘One generous contribution to the harvest table, and the invitation to open next year's fête is yours for the asking.'

The evening in prospect had not grown on Josephine by the time the bells rang out over the fields to call the congregation to worship, and she followed Marta reluctantly to the car. Polstead church was set apart from the village, as if even St Mary wanted to distance herself from what had gone on there. It stood at the top of a hill leading up from the village pond, and was distinguished by an unusual medieval spire and by commanding views over the surrounding countryside – gentle, sloping fields on one side, and a deer park on the other, fronting an eighteenth-century manor house which Josephine assumed was Polstead Hall. ‘Is Maria Marten buried here?' Marta asked, looking round the churchyard.

‘Yes, but I don't know where. Hilary told me that the gravestone was chipped away over the years. It doesn't seem right that she should go unmarked, does it?'

‘At least she gets some peace and quiet.'

‘Lucky her,' Josephine muttered, already feeling the eyes of the village upon them from a stream of people filing into the church by the south door. ‘Shall we have a look round out here first? Let the queue die down and slip quietly into the nearest pew? With a bit of luck, Hilary will be too busy to make a fuss of us.'

Marta smiled at her cowardice, but humoured her by breaking away from the path and heading off into the oldest part of the churchyard. It did not take them long to find the Corder graves: the family made its presence felt in six substantial stones, standing side by side and facing defiantly back towards Polstead Hall, as if daring anyone to mention the son whose body was elsewhere. None of the Marten graves seemed to be marked, and again Josephine found it strange that it was the victim's family who had been shamed out of history.

‘Perhaps they're not buried here,' Marta suggested. ‘They might have left the village – you'd be tempted, wouldn't you?'

‘Yes, I suppose you would.' She looked back at the church, and added reluctantly: ‘We should go in.' The flaws in her plan to remain inconspicuous became obvious as soon as they crossed the threshold. ‘Ah, visitors,' announced the verger in a tone designed to discourage such an aberration, and everyone turned to look at them. Elsie Gladding whispered in his ear and Josephine caught the words ‘cottage' and ‘theatre', neither of which seemed to improve her standing in the community; if anything, the verger's frown deepened.

Undaunted, Marta beamed at him and held up the basket of vegetables. ‘Where would you like us to put these?' she asked, and was directed grudgingly over to the harvest table. As they put their offering down with the rest, Josephine could feel the entire congregation's eyes on her and felt somehow as though she were stealing from the poor rather than making a donation. She looked at the impressive array of produce, and wondered if it was uncharitable of her to think that its outward message of generosity stemmed from a rather less Christian competitive streak among the givers.

‘Josephine! You made it – how lovely.'

Hilary kissed her on both cheeks and shook Marta's hand warmly.

‘You two met this morning, I believe,' Josephine said. ‘I'm sorry I missed you. I was on a wild goose chase in the garage.'

‘Don't worry – I felt much the same in the village, but it seems to have paid off. Not a bad turnout at all. Are you in the theatre, too, Miss Fox?'

‘No, I work in film. I'm a scriptwriter.'

‘Oh, even better.' Hilary clapped her hands together at the prospect of two interesting women for the price of one, and Josephine saw Marta stifle a smile. ‘I must introduce you to Stephen.'

She went to great pains to point him out – somewhat redundantly, Josephine thought, bearing in mind the occasion and what he was wearing, but she looked with interest at the Reverend Stephen Lampton. He was older than his wife by several years, and had a thoughtful, kind face and an air of unworldliness that must have made him easy prey to the more assertive of his female parishioners. He excused himself from two of them now in response to his wife's frantic gesturing, and came over to welcome them. ‘Miss Tey – I'm delighted to meet you. Your godmother was a remarkable woman, and we miss her dearly.'

The words were a cliché, but the warmth with which they were delivered made anything more elaborate unnecessary, and Josephine had no doubt that he was speaking as a friend rather than a vicar. ‘I hope we'll have a chance to talk about Hester,' she said, shaking his hand. ‘When you're less busy, of course. I'm still finding out about her, and I get the impression there's a lot to learn.'

‘Of course. You must come for dinner, both of you. But in the mean time, just let me say how much I enjoyed
Richard of Bordeaux
. I was thrilled when Hilary told me that you were taking on the cottage. It's nice to think that the theatrical tradition will continue.'

Josephine thanked him and led Marta firmly towards the back of the church, choosing a pew from which they could watch the congregation without themselves being the subject of too much attention. ‘They haven't exactly gone to town on the decorations, have they?' Marta muttered, nodding to the five cooking apples and a tiny pot of corn that stood near the altar. ‘Has it been a particularly bad year?'

Josephine smiled. ‘At least it won't take long to be thankful for it,' she said, standing for the first hymn. After a somewhat flowery preamble, the organ launched unexpectedly into ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter', catching the congregation by surprise. It took everyone a few lines to catch up, and Josephine leaned over to Marta. ‘Trust us to get stuck with a warbler,' she whispered, as the woman in the pew behind found her stride. Marta's snort earned them a glare from a couple on the other side of the aisle and a nervous smile from Hilary, and as they reached each chorus, Josephine marvelled at the number of syllables that the word ‘love' could have in the wrong hands. The singer built to a crescendo and the hymn struggled to keep up, and Josephine could feel the muscles in her own throat straining in sympathy. She tried to control her laughter by imagining a face to go with the voice, but the tears ran helplessly down onto her hymn book, smudging the words that she did not trust herself to sing. Next to her, she could feel Marta's shoulders heaving but she dared not meet her eye.

After the brief respite of a psalm, Stephen Lampton took to the pulpit and Josephine smiled when she remembered what Hilary had said about his sermons. The words were certainly well considered, thought-provoking without being pompous, but what really stood out was the beauty of his voice; as far as Josephine was concerned, he could have spoken gibberish for the whole ten minutes and she would still have been riveted. When he had finished, she noticed several people passing a private verdict on his address and wondered how long the Reverend Lampton would have to preach in the parish before his performance went unjudged; sixteen years seemed an unnecessarily long trial period.

There followed a series of readings from parishioners, and Josephine could only imagine the amount of feathers that had been ruffled in the selection of readers. Some lines from Corinthians drifted out to her but she could see no one; only when she craned her neck did she realise that the man was too short to see over the lectern. It was an impressive effect, the words seeming to come genuinely from on high, and she wondered if Stephen had judged it carefully or simply struck lucky. As a choir of four began a surprisingly rousing rendition of ‘Oh Lord, My God, When I in Awesome Wonder', Marta leaned over to her. ‘That's the woman from the pub,' she said. ‘I think her name's Marion.'

‘Margaret.' The whisper came sharply from behind, and Josephine stifled another laugh. She recognised Margaret as one of the women who had been in the village shop on her first visit, and she looked at her now in admiration as she delivered the line ‘when Christ shall come with shout of acclamation and take me home what joy shall fill my heart' with real conviction – although the longer the service went on, the more attractive the sentiment became. At last, the Lord's Prayer signalled that the end was in sight. Josephine looked round at the bowed heads and thought about the words and how easily they were spoken. She thought of Maria Marten, lying close by in an unmarked grave, and remembered the look of hatred on the faces when she had asked about descendants of the families: there had been no forgiveness there, even after a hundred years, and she doubted that things had been different in any past congregation.

Two of Stephen's women stood for the collection, and Josephine wondered if either of them had been responsible for the Madeira cake. There was a mass exodus during the final hymn, as people left to prepare the harvest supper, and Josephine took the opportunity to turn round casually and see how accurately she had pictured the warbler. She was too late: the pew was empty and the woman had gone, her identity for ever a mystery. As soon as it was decent, Josephine and Marta slipped from their own seats and headed for the door before Hilary could renew her exhortations to come to supper. The hollow church clock struck eight as they walked through the graveyard to the gate, choosing their steps carefully in the darkness. Marta took her hand and Josephine looked round anxiously. ‘Don't worry,' Marta said. ‘It's pitch-black out here. No one can see what we're doing and even if they could, I'm not sure we could disgrace ourselves any more tonight than we already have.'

‘That's true. Thank God I'm not a churchgoer, if that makes any sense. I'll never be able to show my face in there again.'

‘I told you it would be fun.'

‘Yes, I suppose it was – in a twisted sort of way.'

They headed for the green to collect the car, guided only by the stars. As they rounded the pond, the flap of swans' wings against the water sounded unnaturally loud in the darkness, and Josephine held Marta back. ‘Look – that's the Corder house.' The lamps were lit in every room, the curtains drawn back, as if the house were trying to prove to the rest of the village that it had nothing left to hide. As Josephine watched, a shadow passed the window upstairs – so fleeting, and in rooms so unchanged, that it was easy to believe it had nothing to do with the current occupants; that the house, too, was trapped in its own history, scarred by the past, and still living with a shame for which it had not yet been forgiven.

11

It was a morning of soft, thin cloud which – if the pattern of the last few days was to be followed – would clear by lunchtime into a warm, sunny afternoon. Josephine walked down Polstead Hill, sorry that Marta had chosen to stay at the cottage but glad of some time to think quietly about what she had learned over the last few days. In her heart, she did not think that the treasures Henry Andrews had described were still in the cottage, and she wondered what might have persuaded Hester to sell them. An operation, perhaps? Bert had said that nothing could be done for her eyes, but maybe she had learned something to the contrary; that, surely, would have been worth the sacrifice. It was odd, too, that Hester had not thought to mention such precious items by name in her will if their value was indeed greater than the cottage. Josephine wished now that she had looked at Hester's financial papers before handing them all over to her solicitor; they might at least have told her if Hester had received any large sums of money recently, and laid to rest her own fears that something more sinister lay behind the disappearance of those artefacts. Hester had obviously not made any secret of what she owned and that would have made her vulnerable, either to an opportunist from the village – she tried to keep this hypothetical and not picture Bert when the phrase came to mind – or to one of the more ruthless dealers in relics. From there, it was only a short step to imagining a darker scenario around Hester's death, and, for now, Josephine pushed the thought to the back of her mind.

The shop was busy with deliveries, and Elsie Gladding offered nothing more combative than a raised eyebrow at the idea that she might stock tinned asparagus. Outside, the clouds had cleared on cue, and the sun-touched houses looked as inviting now as they had on the day she first arrived, a subtle collage of white, pale ochre and chalky green. More striking still, though, was the gilding that no one had chosen: trees laden with burnished apples; rosehips, pyracantha and Virginia creeper, and it seemed appropriate to Josephine that red should be the predominant colour of nature in the village. She reached the bottom of the hill and turned left past the post office, towards Marten's Lane. As soon as she was out of the sun, the cold air against her face reminded her that it was autumn, and she felt the brittle crunch of acorns underfoot. Passing Maria's cottage, she wondered if the arrangement of its rooms reflected her own and tried again to work out what it was that unnerved her so about Hester's boxroom. Not a squeamishness about death, certainly; she had cared for the sick herself, and no one with her training in nursing was superstitious about the body's physical humiliations. No, her fear – and fear was what it was – stemmed almost entirely from a growing conviction that the room had known a sadness too great to be contained within a single generation. Judging by its uncared-for state, Hester had felt exactly the same way herself – which raised the question, why would she choose to die there?