The Death of Lucy Kyte (45 page)

Lucy's desperate plea marked the end of any coherence in the diary. There was nothing dated or ordered on the pages that followed, only single words or very short phrases, barely legible and obviously written while she was in great distress, physically and emotionally. Slowly, Josephine deciphered the scrawled, violent letters.
Samuel. He will not come to us. My beautiful boy. Cannot feed him. Too weak . . . There is no hope. Who will help us? Beg him . . . No one comes. Forgive for his sake.
The last thing that Lucy wrote was
please
. The ink was faint, a sign of how weak she had become, but to Josephine the word screamed from the page. It was all the narrative she needed to piece the story together image by dreadful image: she saw that bleak, desolate room in the depths of winter; Lucy terrified and in pain, struggling to bring a child into the world on her own, then watching him fade as her husband abandoned them both, unable or unwilling to forgive what she had done. For the most fleeting of moments, Josephine felt Lucy's grief – her wretchedness – in her own heart, not as a gesture of sympathy but as something that truly belonged to her, something that she had experienced for herself – and she knew, even before she turned to the last page of the journal, that the house had yet to reveal its final, dreadful secret.

Lucy's diary, her solace and her sanctuary for so many years, was completed by another hand, and that in itself seemed to Josephine a desecration. The words were poured onto the page with no sense of reason or control, and she could feel their anger, even after so many years.
You will rot in this room for what you have taken from me. I will not let you lie with Molly. You are not fit to share her earth. May your soul never rest, and God forgive me for the death of my son.
The desperate, raw emotion in the letters echoed the request for forgiveness on the window seat, and Josephine understood now that Samuel – not Lucy or Hester – had carved those words; she imagined his remorse when the red film of rage lifted and he faced what he had done to the wife he had loved. By Lucy's own testimony, he was a sweet and gentle man, and – although she could not be certain – Josephine found it easy to believe that he had punished himself in the way he had punished his wife, by simply allowing himself to die. She looked down at the journal in her hands, and wondered if Lucy had used it as her vehicle of confession, if she had found it easier to show Samuel her diary rather than speak the words herself. It was impossible to know now if Lucy had read her husband's response; if she had, Josephine could only begin to imagine the horror and fear that must have clawed at her heart in those final days, and she cried for her as she would have cried for a friend.

The cottage taunted her with its silence, goading her to open the chest again and prove herself right. She knew she had no choice – there was nowhere to turn for help on a night like this – but it took her a long time to find the courage to go back upstairs, and the only thing that forced her to her feet in the end was a dread of what might happen if she stayed where she was. Back in October, when she had felt Lucy's presence so strongly in the cottage, there had been no sense of anything to fear – but that was before she knew what had happened; now, as hard as she tried to picture that harmless face at the window, the Lucy that filled her mind was a malevolent force, the restless spirit of stories and nightmares, and her ghost frightened Josephine even more than the thought of her physical remains. She took another lamp, glad that she had left the candles burning upstairs, and returned to the room whose horrors she thought she had banished. Her courage left her completely the moment she stepped through the door. The chest, which she was sure she had closed, stood wide open now, its lid thrown back against the wall. The contents were in shadow, and Josephine made no attempt to illuminate them; without thinking, she stepped forward and slammed the lid shut again, feeling the tremor of her fear in the floorboards as she backed away. She stood rooted to the spot, reluctant to take her eyes off the trunk but unable to find the strength to face her fear and open it.

And then she smelt the smoke again. It was faint, but not so faint that she could blame it on her imagination, and she realised that it must be after midnight. Boxing Day – the anniversary of the fire at the Red Barn, the day on which those terrible events would be played out again in some other life or time that she didn't understand. Outside, she heard footsteps. She backed further into the corner of the room, doubting now her own sense of reality, but there it was again: the soft but unmistakable crunch of snow underfoot. Instinctively, she looked to the window that was no longer there, but now she did not need a view of the field where the barn had stood: she could see the silhouetted figure so clearly in her mind, hurrying back to the cottage in the darkness, oblivious still to the damage she had done. When it came, the thundering on the door was louder than anything she could have imagined. Josephine crouched to the floor, her hands over her ears, but still the pounding continued. Then suddenly it stopped, and the silence was worse. She heard Lucy moving about in the rooms below, heard her footsteps on the stairs, and wept tears of frustration and despair because she knew at any moment she would be brought face to face with the darkness that had lain dormant in the cottage for so long. Lost to everything but her own fear, she did not stop to question why the voice calling her name was somehow comforting.

‘Jesus, Josephine, what on earth is going on? Didn't you hear me? Are you all right?'

Marta was beside her, holding her close, before Josephine's mind could catch up with her imagination; somehow, she seemed less real than the ghost Josephine had feared and it took her a moment to trust in what she saw. Then she clung to Marta as if her life depended on it, scarcely able to tell if the trembling that shook them both was the terror from her own body or the deathly cold from Marta's. There was snow on her coat and in her hair, and the shock of its chill brought Josephine to her senses a little. ‘I thought you were Lucy,' she stammered, neither knowing nor caring how ridiculous she sounded.

‘Why would she be knocking? God, a girl could freeze to death waiting for you to come to the door.' She spoke gently, trying to ease Josephine out of her panic with humour.

‘But I thought it was the barn. I could smell smoke.'

‘The room's full of smoke downstairs. When was the last time you had your chimneys swept?' Marta took Josephine's face in her hands. ‘There's only one person stupid enough to come looking for you on a night like this. I might be as cold as the dead, but I'm not a ghost. What's happened, Josephine? Why were you so frightened?'

‘It's Lucy Kyte. I think her body is in that chest. Her child, too, probably.'

‘What?' Marta looked back over her shoulder. ‘Good God, you're serious, aren't you?'

‘Yes.' Marta listened while Josephine explained where the chest had come from and what she had read in the diary. ‘She's been here all this time. I'm wandering round with Christmas decorations and she's up here in a box.'

The true horror of what she had been living with was only now beginning to dawn on Josephine, and Marta tried to calm her down. ‘Hang on – we don't know that for sure. You haven't looked, have you?'

‘No. I was going to, but then I came back up here and the lid was open. I know I closed it.'

‘It can't just have opened by itself.'

‘Who said anything about opening by itself?' Josephine snapped. ‘You weren't here.' It wasn't meant to sound like an accusation; she still had no idea what miracle had brought Marta to her door – she was just happy that it had. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bite your head off. But I'm sure I closed it.'

‘All right.' Marta reached inside her coat and took out a hip flask. ‘Thank God I brought this for the snow. Your festive hospitality leaves a lot to be desired so far.' She smiled and offered the flask to Josephine, then swallowed the rest of the whisky herself. ‘Right. I'll look.'

‘No you won't. I'll do it.'

Marta caught Josephine's arm. ‘I'm not going to stand here and argue about who gets to see the bones first. We'll do it together.'

Marta moved some candles over to the corner to give more light, and Josephine took a deep breath and lifted the lid. The layers of material were faded and frayed, but one of them was still recognisable as a bedspread. Gently, Marta lifted the fabric and pulled it to one side. Lucy lay wrapped in the quilt that she had sewn with such love for her husband. Her body was doubled up, her head turned to the side, and Josephine stared down at the pathetic collection of bones, the strands of hair still matted to the skull, remembering how Lucy had felt when she saw Maria's remains in court. Lucy had never been flesh and blood to Josephine, only a voice speaking out from the past, but still she felt some of that pain and that anger at a life so easily cut short. The chest had been lined with sheets, stained dark with blood from the birth or discoloured later as her body rotted away, and some of Lucy's possessions – an inkstand and the trinket box Samuel had made for her – had been put in with her, a parody of a much grander burial. If they looked further, Josephine was sure that they would find the tiny body of Lucy's son, but she had seen all that she could bear and it had told them enough. She looked away, and Marta carefully covered Lucy's face.

Josephine closed the chest, then took a bunch of holly from one of the beams in the bedroom and laid it on the lid, a gesture of remembrance that was nearly a hundred years too late. It was a long time before either of them spoke. ‘What do you think we should do?' Marta asked eventually.

‘Wait until the morning, I suppose, then go to the rectory. I can telephoneArchiefromthere.SomeonewillhavetotakeLucyaway,but he'll know who to call. Then I'd like Stephen to come back and bless her body. I'm not sure I believe in any of that, but it seems the right thing to do.' Marta shivered, and Josephine took her hand. ‘Come on. You need to get warm.'

She took the blankets off the bed and they went downstairs to the study, both of them glad to be out of the room and as far from it as possible. Josephine poured Marta a drink and built the fire up for her, then left her reading Lucy's diary while she warmed some soup. When she went back, the journal was put to one side and Marta had obviously been crying. ‘What a wretched fucking life,' she said quietly. ‘No wonder she needs peace. Do you think Hester knew?'

‘I don't see how she could have.' Josephine put the tray down on the floor and sat next to Marta by the fire, pulling the blanket over them both. ‘She would have done something about it, I'm sure. I don't know whether to wish she could have known the whole story when she felt so drawn to Lucy, or to be glad she was spared the grief.' She handed Marta a mug of soup. ‘I don't know how you managed to get here, but I'm so relieved you did.'

‘Well, I wasn't too worried at first. We didn't have much snow, but it can change so quickly within a few hundred yards. And anyway, I knew you'd use the slightest flurry as an excuse to miss the party.' Josephine smiled, but couldn't argue. ‘Then I started thinking about that bloody Peck woman and what she'd done to Hester. I got it into my head that she might come back here and try to hurt you, so I had to know that you were all right.'

‘You shouldn't have risked it, though.'

‘Believe me – the bigger risk was to stay. I got out just as everyone else was moving on to Dodie's for a festive sing-song.'

Josephine laughed, mostly from relief at what she had missed. ‘But what if you'd had an accident?'

‘The snow wasn't very deep until Stoke, and even after that the main road had been cleared a bit. I got as far as I could, then dumped the car and walked the last mile or so.'

‘Thank you – I mean that, Marta. I thought I was going mad. It must have been exactly how Hester felt.' Josephine stared into the flames, remembering everything that had happened. ‘How ridiculous of me to think that I could gloss over all that pain with a bit of building work.' She smiled sadly. ‘It wasn't quite the way you were supposed to get your Christmas present.'

‘Nice bath, though.' Marta's grin faded, and she spoke more seriously. ‘Look, Josephine – I'm not making light of this. God knows, I saw how frightened you were. But don't underestimate what you've done. You haven't glossed over anything – you wouldn't let Hester's death go, and now you're about to give Lucy the peace she's never had. This cottage will thank you for that, I know it will. It will make you happy.'

‘Make
us
happy.'

Marta smiled. ‘It occurred to me while I was reading the diary, though – will they bury Lucy in the churchyard if they know what she did?'

The thought had not crossed Josephine's mind. ‘Why wouldn't they? What happened to Molly was an accident, and anyway, Stephen's not like that. He strikes me as a very compassionate man.'

‘It might not be his decision, though. From what you say, there's been enough trouble about having Maria Marten in the graveyard, and she's the victim. Do you honestly think people will turn a blind eye to another murder? Or manslaughter, if we want to be pedantic about it. Perhaps we should make sure.'