The Death of Lucy Kyte (46 page)

‘What are you suggesting?' She followed Marta's gaze to the final volume of the journal. ‘Now that we've finally got to the truth, you think we should destroy it?'

‘Only the end of it. The rest should stay with her body to help identify her. I'll do it, if you can't.'

‘But if the diary's incomplete, everyone will think that Samuel killed her.'

‘Not necessarily. We can't say for sure what really happened – how can they?'

‘Even so, shouldn't we tell the truth and rely on people to understand why she did what she did?' Marta looked sceptical, and Josephine knew she was right. Lucy had suffered enough for her mistake. Without giving herself time to reconsider she tore the final pages from the diary and put them on the fire, watching as the flames refashioned a history and a justice of their own.

26

Lucy Kyte was laid to rest with her son in February, when the frost made the early spring flowers sparkle on the ground like coloured glass. The church was shrouded in silence, and only the birds in the ivy – sensing the end of a long winter – disturbed the stillness of the air as a band of mourners followed the coffin outside to the grave. Lucy's story seemed to have touched the village in a way that its more famous history could not, and Josephine was moved to see how many people had come to give her the respect she had waited so long for. Her grave was close to both Samuel's and Maria's, but Josephine hoped that she would not be torn between them in death as she had been in life, and that Lucy's peace – if that's what it now was – would prove enough for them all. She would bring roses in time, for Lucy and for Maria, but today she put snowdrops on the coffin, remembering what Lucy had written in her diary about their being either the last flower of winter or the first of spring. This time, she hoped they might stand for both an end and a beginning.

When the final prayers had been said, the mourners dispersed to visit their own dead. Josephine was not the only person to have brought flowers for Maria, she noticed, and she laid her snowdrops next to the daffodils that already graced the patch of ground that Stephen had pointed out to her on a foggy October morning. She looked round the churchyard, noticing how the sunlight bled across the sloping fields, touching the lower graves and blessing those who had fallen in the war, but refusing to reach as far as the Corders. The Gospel Oak was in shadow, too, and suddenly Josephine noticed a young woman standing close to its trunk, watching her. She took a few steps forward, but the woman turned and walked away in the direction of the village, disappearing for a moment behind a row of gravestones. Josephine waited for her to emerge again the other side and carry on down the path, but she was nowhere to be seen – and of all the possible explanations, Josephine knew which one she wanted to believe.

Smiling, she rescued Marta from Stephen and Hilary and they walked home along Marten's Lane, where banks of pink and yellow primroses shone in Maria's garden. The dead wood of winter already looked out of place, and as she opened her front gate, Josephine found herself looking forward to spring and summer at the cottage, free from all her old reservations about the future. She knew now that she would keep Hester's gift to her, and that she and Marta could be happy there when it was possible for them to be together, living always with those who had worked and died and made love there before them – but not, any longer, in their shadow. Marta had presented her with a new nameplate for the cottage, something she had had specially made to mark the start of another phase in its history; it stood just inside the door, waiting to be put up, and Josephine could not imagine a better day to say goodbye to the Red Barn once and for all. The old piece of wood came away easily in her hand, as though the house were breathing a sigh of relief. In its place, she proudly hung the sign to Larkspur Cottage.

Author's Note

I grew up with the story of Maria Marten and William Corder. As a child in Suffolk, I remember summer days out in Polstead with my parents, walking past Maria's house, or William's, fascinated even then by what had happened there and by the real people behind the legend. I lived a stone's throw from Moyse's Hall and its macabre exhibits – so thrilling and so horrifying to a little girl – and I passed the Gaol where Corder was hanged every weekend on the way to my grandmother's house. My father sings the ballad to this day. So the Red Barn murder is the first crime story I ever knew, and I realised when I started this book that I've always wanted to find a different way to tell it.

The character of Lucy Kyte was inspired by three lines of testimony given at Maria Marten's inquest and reprised at William Corder's trial. The witness was Lucy Baalham, a servant in the Corder household, but there the similarity ends: the diary's account of the Red Barn murder and its aftermath is based on fact, but Lucy Kyte's personal story, her family, and all the events that take place at Red Barn Cottage are entirely fictional.

After being stripped by souvenir hunters, the Red Barn was burned down on Boxing Day, 1842, during a period of great agricultural unrest. Local newspapers report sightings of a tramp in the area on the day of the fire but, despite the offer of a generous reward, the culprit was never caught. More than a hundred years later, Red Barn Cottage was also destroyed by fire.

The melodrama of Maria Marten was first staged in the summer of 1828, while William Corder was still alive, and has been frequently performed ever since; the story has also been the basis of five films and a BBC drama. Norman Carter ‘Tod' Slaughter (1885–1956) was the finest Corder – and arguably the finest villain of any sort – on stage or screen; his many fans included Graham Greene, whose
Spectator
review of the 1939 film
The Face at the Window
, described him as ‘one of our finest living actors'. Slaughter played Corder throughout his life, often opposite his wife, Jenny Lynn, and died in his sleep a few hours after strangling Maria Marten for the last time on stage in Derby.

James Curtis's 1828 book,
An Authentic and Faithful History of th eMysterious Murder of Maria Marten
, remains the most detailed account of the Red Barn murder, and was based on contemporary interviews in Polstead as well as time spent with Corder in Bury Gaol prior to his execution. In fact, Curtis became so synonymous with the case that his image was sometimes printed by mistake as the face of the killer. The murder continues to inspire new books, both fact and fiction, some of which question Corder's guilt, and the original ballad has been reinterpreted by musicians as diverse as The Albion Country Band and Tom Waits.

Moyse's Hall Museum still has on display a fascinating collection of artefacts relating to the Red Barn murder and its historical context, including Corder's death mask, his scalp, and a copy of Curtis's book bound in Corder's skin. Other relics have come and gone, including Maria Marten's hand, but her clothes chest is believed still to exist in private ownership. Corder's skeleton was put on display first at the West Suffolk Hospital and then at the Royal College of Surgeons, and was removed for cremation in 2004. Maria Marten is buried in St Mary's Church, Polstead, but her gravestone is no longer visible.

 

‘Josephine Tey' is one of two pseudonyms created by Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952) during a distinguished career as playwright and novelist; the name was taken from one of her Suffolk ancestors, and first appeared in 1936.
Claverhouse
was published a year later and is her only work of non-fiction, although she often used historical themes as the basis for her plays and novels, most notably in
The Daughter of Time
. In a number of Tey's letters, she expressed a wish for a cottage of her own; sadly, she died before she was able to do anything about it, but I hope she would have enjoyed the one that I've chosen for her.

Acknowledgements

I'm indebted to Chris Mycock of Moyse's Hall, Bury St. Edmunds, for his generous help with research into the Red Barn murder and the life of the museum in the 1930s. Readers who would like to know more about the case can find images and contemporary sources at www.stedmundsburychronicle.co.uk. Works by Donald McCormick and Gareth Jenkins have also given insights into its different aspects.
Victorian Studies in Scarlet
by Richard Altick is a fascinating picture of peepshows, relics and the grislier side of collecting.

My thanks to Alan Riddleston for sharing memories of his childhood in William Corder's house, and for painting an invaluable picture of Polstead life; to Dennis and Paule Pym for a warm welcome at Maria Marten's cottage; to Miss Beattie Keeble for her recollections of Polstead and Stoke-by-Nayland between the wars, as well as some great ghost stories; and to Michael and Deborah at The Cock Inn.

H. F. Maltby's memoir
Ring Up the Curtain
brought colour to the character of Hester Larkspur, and
London's Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror
by R. Hand and M. Wilson gave her an interesting later career. Jeffrey Richards's
The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema 1929–1939
, Jacqueline Finesilver, and numerous film magazines of the 1930s provided valuable information on Tod Slaughter and Jenny Lynn; Slaughter's films have been reissued in the Best of British Collection.

Suffolk is a magical place, and I'm for ever grateful to my parents for showing me its beauty as well as its darker history. Two authors in particular brought the county to life for me in the 1930s: Ronald Blythe, in
Akenfield
and in personal interviews; and Julian Tennyson in
Suffolk Scene
. Thanks to Jenny and Alan Bradley for information on old Bury, and to everyone else who has contributed to my research, directly or through their books: Anne Fraser of the Highland Council; Dr Peter Fordyce; Sue Lambert of Mrs Simpson's Café; Susan Williams in
The People's King
; and Liz Stanley in
The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick
. From Lucy's surname to Hester's cottage, the late Irene Cranwell has helped more than she will ever know, and I appreciate the continued support of everyone who looks after each book: Véronique Baxter and all at David Higham Associates; and Walter Donohue, Alex Holroyd and Katherine Armstrong at Faber.

And to Mandy, who has brought so much to every stage – the initial ideas and development of the story, the writing of Lucy's diary and the creation of her voice, even an early Christmas. It's been lovely to share a story that we came to individually, and you've made it a joy to write, as well as a much better book. Thank you.

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About the Author

Nicola Upson is the author of four previous Josephine Tey mysteries, including
An Expert in Murder
, and two works of nonfiction. She has worked in theater and as a freelance journalist. A recipient of an Escalator Award from the Arts Council England, she splits her time between Cambridge and Cornwall.

 

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Books by Nicola Upson

The Death of Lucy Kyte

Fear in the Sunlight

Angel with Two Faces

Two for Sorrow

An Expert in Murder

Credits

Original cover design by Faber

Cover illustration by Mick Wiggins

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Faber and Faber, Ltd.

THE DEATH OF LUCY KYTE.
Copyright © 2014 by Nicola Upson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST U.S. EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-219545-6

EPUB Edition MAY 2014 ISBN 9780062195463

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