The Legacy (4 page)

But to his new wife’s dismay, Corin packed and made ready to leave New York the following day.

“We will have our wedding night in
our
home, in the house that I have built for us; not here in a place still sorrowing for my father. I came for a funeral, and I didn’t bank on finding a wife,” he smiled, kissing her hands. “I’ve got to sort a few things out, get the house ready for your arrival. I want it to be perfect.”

“It will be perfect, Corin,” she assured him, still unused to addressing any man by his first name alone. His kisses burned into her skin, made it hard to breathe. “Please let me come with you now.”

“Give me a month, that’s all, my sweetheart. Follow after me four weeks from today and I will have everything ready. You’ll have time to say goodbye to all your friends, and I’ll have time to boast to all of mine that I have married the most beautiful girl in the whole of America,” he said; and so she agreed even though his departure felt like the sky growing dark.

She called upon some of her old classmates to bid them farewell, but generally found them either occupied or not at home. Eventually, she understood herself
persona non grata,
so she spent the four weeks at home, suffering the uncomfortable silence between herself and her aunt, packing and repacking her luggage, writing letter after letter to Corin, and gazing out of the window at a view now dominated by the newly constructed Fuller Building—a wedge-shaped behemoth that towered nearly three hundred feet into the sky. Caroline had never imagined that man could build so high. She gazed at it, felt diminished by it, and the first doubts crept into her mind. With Corin gone, it almost seemed as though he had never been there at all, that she had dreamed the whole event. She turned the wedding ring on her finger and frowned, fighting to keep such thoughts at bay. But what could have been so terrible that he could not have taken her with him straight away? What had he to hide—regret for his hasty marriage to her? Sara sensed that she was troubled.

“It won’t be long now, miss,” she said, as she brought her tea.

“Sara . . . will you stay a moment?”

“Of course, miss.”

“Do you think . . . do you think it will be all right? In Oklahoma Territory?” Caroline asked, quietly.

“Of course, miss! That is . . . I do not rightly know, never having gone there. But . . . Mr. Massey will take good care of you, I do know that. He would not take you anywhere you would not wish to go, I am sure,” Sara assured her.

“Bathilda says I will have to work. Until I come into my money, that is . . . I will be a farmer’s wife,” she said.

“That you will, miss, but hardly the common sort of one.”

“Is the work so very hard? Keeping house and all? You do it so well, Sara—is it so very hard?” she asked, trying to keep her anxiety from sounding. Sara gazed at her with an odd mingling of amusement, pity and resentment.

“It can be hard enough, miss,” she said, somewhat flatly. “But you will be mistress of the house! You will be free to do things as you see fit, and I am sure you will have help. Oh, do not fret, miss! It may take you some while to grow accustomed to such a different kind of life to the one you have had, but you’ll be happy, I am sure of it.”

“Yes. I will be, won’t I?” Caroline smiled.

“Mr. Massey
loves
you. And you love him—how could you not be happy?”

“I do love him,” Caroline said, taking a deep breath and holding Sara’s hand tightly. “I do love him.”

“And I’m
so
happy for you, miss,” Sara said, her voice tightening, tears springing in her eyes.

“Oh, please don’t, Sara! How I wish you were coming with me!” Caroline cried.

“I wish it too, miss,” Sara said quietly, wiping her eyes with the hem of her apron.

When a letter from Corin did finally arrive, speaking words of love and encouragement, urging her to be patient for a little while longer, Caroline read and reread it twenty times a day, until she knew the words by heart and felt galvanized by them. When the four weeks were up, she kissed Bathilda’s florid cheek and tried to see some mark of regret in her aunt’s demeanor. But only Sara went with her to the station, sobbing inconsolably beside her young mistress as the bay horses trotted smartly along busy streets and avenues.

“I don’t know how it will be without you, miss. I don’t know that I’ll care for London!” the girl wept; and Caroline took her hand, winding their fingers tightly together, too full of clamoring feelings to speak. Only when confronted with the locomotive, which spat steam and soot with great vigor and filled her nose with the tang of hot iron and cinders, did she finally feel that she had found some other thing in the world as glad as she was to be making the journey. She shut her eyes as the train eased forward, and with its loud, solemn cough of steam, her old life ended and her new one began.

Chapter 2

M
y mother’s brother, my Uncle Clifford, and his wife, Mary, want the old linen press from the nursery, the round Queen Anne table from the study and the collection of miniatures that live in a glass-topped display case at the foot of the stairs. I’m not sure if this is what Meredith meant when she said her children could take
a keepsake
, but I really don’t care. I dare say a few more things will find their way into Clifford’s lorry at the end of the week, and if Meredith would be outraged, I will not be. It’s a grand house, but it’s not Chatsworth. There are no museum pieces, apart from a couple of the paintings perhaps. Just a big, old house full of big, old things; valuable, perhaps, but also unloved. Our mother has asked only for any family photographs I can find. I love her for her decency, and her heart.

I hope Clifford is sending enough men. The linen press is enormous. It looms against the far wall of the nursery: acres of French mahogany with minarets and cornicing, a scaled-down temple to starch and mothballs. A set of wooden steps live behind it, and they creak and wobble beneath me. I pull stiff, solid piles of linens from the shelves and drop them to the floor. They are flat, weighty; their landings make the pictures shake. Dust flies and my nose prickles, and Beth appears in the doorway, rushing to discover what havoc I am wreaking. There is so much of it. Generations of bed sheets, worn enough to have been replaced, not worn enough to have been thrown out. It could be decades since some of these piles have been disturbed. I remember Meredith’s housekeeper puffing up the stairs with laden arms; her cracked red cheeks and her broad ugly hands.

Once I’ve emptied the press I am not sure what to do with all the piles of linen. It could go to charity, I suppose. But I’m not up to the task of black-bagging it all, heaving it down to the car, taking it in batches into Devizes. I pile it back up against the wall, and as I do my eyes catch on one pattern, one splash of weak color in all the white. Yellow flowers. Three pillowcases with yellow flowers, green stems, embroidered into each corner in silk thread that still catches the light. I run my thumb over the neat stitching, feel how years of use have made the fabric watery soft. There is something in the back of my mind, something I know I recognize but can’t remember. Have I seen them before? The flowers are ragged looking, wild. I can’t put a name to them. And there are only three. Four pillowcases with every other set but this one. I drop them back onto a pile, drop more linen on top. I find I am frowning and consciously unknit my brow.

Clifford and Mary are Henry’s parents. Were Henry’s parents. They were in Saint Tropez when he disappeared, which the press unfairly made a great deal out of. As if they had left him with strangers, as if they had left him home alone. Our parents did it too. We often came here for the whole of the school holidays, and for two weeks or even three, most years, Mum and Dad would go away without us. To Italy, for long walks; to the Caribbean to sail. I liked and feared having them gone. Liked it because Meredith never checked up on us much, never came outside in search of us when we’d been gone for hours. We felt liberated, we tore about like yahoos. But feared it because, inside the house, Meredith had sole charge of us. We had to be with her. Eat our dinner with her, answer her questions, think up lies. It never occurred to me that I didn’t like her, or that she was unpleasant. I was too young to think that way. But when Mum got back I flew to her, gathered clammy handfuls of her skirts.

Beth kept me extra close when our parents were away. If she walked ahead, it was with one hand held slightly behind her, long fingers spread, always waiting for me to take hold of them. And if I didn’t she would pause, glance over her shoulder, make sure that I was following. One year, Dinny built her a tree house in a tall beech on the far side of the wood. We’d hardly seen him for days and he’d forbidden us to spy on him. The weather had been fitful, wind dimpling the surface of the dew pond, too fresh to swim. We’d played dressing up in a spare bedroom; built castles of empty flowerpots in the orangery; made a den in the secret hollow center of the yew topiary globe on the top lawn. Then the sun came out again and we saw Dinny wave from the corner of the garden, and Beth smiled at me, her eyes alight.

“It’s ready,” he said, when we reached him.

“What is it?” I demanded. “Go on—tell us!”

“A surprise,” was all he would say, smiling shyly at Beth. We followed him through the trees, and I was telling him about the den in the topiary when I saw it and was silenced. One of the biggest beech trees, with a silvery smooth trunk and bark that wrinkled where its branches forked, like the crook of your elbow or the back of your knee. I’d seen Dinny climb it before, with a few practiced swings, to sit amidst the pale green leaves far above me. Now, high up where the tree began to spread, Dinny had built a broad platform of sturdy planks. The walls were made from old fertilizer bags, bright blue, nailed to a wooden frame and belling in and out like boat sails. The route up to this fortress was marked by knotted rope loops and chunks of scrap wood, nailed to the tree to form an intermittent ladder. In the hung silence I heard the enticing rush of the breeze, the rustling snap of the tree house walls.

“What do you think?” Dinny asked, folding his arms and squinting at us.

“It’s brilliant! It’s the best tree house ever!” I exclaimed, bouncing urgently from foot to foot.

“It’s great—did you build it all by yourself?” Beth asked, still smiling up at the blue house. Dinny nodded.

“Come up and see—it’s even better inside,” he told her, moving to the foot of the tree, reaching up for the first handhold.

“Come
on
, Beth!” I admonished her, when she hesitated.

“OK!” she laughed. “You go first, Erica—I’ll give you a boost to the first branch.”

“We should give it a name. You should name it, Dinny!” I chattered, hoisting up my skirt, tucking it into my knickers.

“What about the watch tower? Or the crow’s nest?” he said. Beth and I agreed—The Crow’s Nest it would be. Beth hoisted me onto the first branch, my sandals scuffing welts into the powdery green algae, but I could not reach the next handhold. My fingertips crooked over the rung Dinny had nailed into the tree, so close, but too far for me to hang on safely. Dinny joined me on the first branch, let me step on his bent knee until I could reach, but from there my leg would not stretch to the next rung.

“Come down, Erica,” Beth called at length, when I was red and cross and feeling close to tears.

“No! I want to go up!” I protested, but she shook her head.

“You’re too little! Come down!” she insisted. Dinny withdrew his knee, jumped down from the tree, and I had no choice but to obey. I slithered back to the ground and stared in sullen silence at my stupid, too-short legs. I had grazed my knee, but was too disheartened to be excited about the sticky worm of blood oozing down my shin.

“Beth, then? Are you coming up?” Dinny asked, and I sank inside, to be left out, to miss out on the wonderful tree house. But Beth shook her head.

“Not if Erica can’t,” she said. I glanced up at Dinny but looked away again quickly, squirming away from the disappointment in his eyes, the way his smile had vanished. He leant against the tree, folded his arms defensively. Beth hesitated for a while, as if unable to choose her next words. Then her hand reached out for me again. “Come on, Rick. We need to go and wash your leg.”

Two days later Dinny fetched us back again, and this time the trunk of the beech tree was riddled with rungs and ropes. Beth smiled calmly at Dinny and I flew to the bottom of this ramshackle staircase, staring up at the floating house as I started to climb.

“Go carefully!” Beth gasped, sucking the fingertips of one hand as I missed my footing, wobbled. She followed me up, frowning in concentration, careful not to look down. A loose curtain of bags marked the doorway. Inside, Dinny had arranged plastic sacks stuffed with straw. There was a wooden crate table, a bunch of cow parsley in a milk bottle, a pack of cards, some comics. It was quite simply the best place I had ever seen. We painted a sign, to put at the foot of the ladder.
The Crow’s Nest. Trespassers will be Persecuted
. Mum laughed when she read it. We spent hours up there, adrift in whispering green clouds with patches of bright sky sparkling overhead, eating picnics, far away from Meredith and Henry. I worried that Henry would ruin it when he came to stay. I worried that he would crash through our magical place, mock it, make it seem less magnificent. But by happy, happy chance, it turned out that Henry was afraid of heights.

In my head Henry is always bigger than me, older than me. Eleven when I was seven. It seemed an enormous gap at the time. He was a
big boy
. He was loud and bossy. He said I had to do what he told me. He buttered Meredith up—she always preferred boys to girls. He went along with her on the rare occasions she came out to the woods, and more than once helped her make a nasty scheme a reality. Henry: a fleshy neck with a receding chin; dark brown hair; clear blue eyes that he would narrow, make ugly; pale skin that burnt across the nose in summer. One of those children, I see him now, who is a grown-up in miniature rather than a child, who you can look at and know, at once, what they will look like as an adult. His features were already mapped; they would grow, but not develop. He wore himself in his face, I think, charmless, obvious. But this is unfair. He never got the chance to prove me wrong, after all.

E
ddie still has the face of a child, and I love it. A nondescript boy’s face, sharp nose, tufty hair, kneecaps standing proud from skinny shanks in his school shorts. My nephew. He hugs Beth on the platform, a little sheepishly because some of his classmates are on the train behind him, banging on the glass, sticking up their fingers. I wait by the car for them, my hands puckered with cold, grinning as they draw near.

“Hey, Eddie Baby! Edderino! Eddius Maximus!” I call to him, putting my arms around him and squeezing, pulling his feet off the ground.

“Auntie Rick, it’s just Ed now,” he protests, with a hint of exasperation.

“ ’Course. Sorry. And you can’t call me
Auntie
—you make me feel a hundred years old! Sling your bag in the back and let’s get going,” I say, resisting the urge to tease him. He is eleven now. The same age Henry will always be, and old enough for teasing to matter. “How was your train ride?”

“Pretty boring. Except Absolom locked Marcus in the loo. He screamed the place down—quite funny really,” Eddie reports. He smells of school and it starts to fill the car, sharp and vinegary. Unwashed socks, pencil shavings, mud, ink, stale sandwiches.

“Pretty funny, indeed! I had to go in and see the head a fortnight ago because he’d shut his art teacher in her classroom. They pushed a block of lockers against her door!” Beth says, voice loud and bright, startling me.

“It wasn’t
my
idea, Mum!”

“You still helped,” Beth counters. “What if there’d been a fire or something? She was in there for hours!”

“Well . . . they shouldn’t have banned mobile phones then, should they?” Eddie says, smiling. I catch his eye in the rear-view mirror and wink.

“Edward Calcott Walker, I am appalled,” I say lightly. Beth glares at me. I must remember not to conspire with Eddie against her, not even over something tiny. It can’t be him and me against her, even for a second. She resents my help already.

“Is this a new car?”

“New-ish,” I tell him. “The old Beetle finally died on me. Wait until you see the house, Ed. It’s a monster.” But as we pull in and I look at him expectantly, he nods, raises his eyebrows, is not impressed. Then I think the manor might only be the size of one wing of his school—smaller than his friends’ houses, perhaps.

“I’m so glad it’s school holidays again, darling,” Beth says, taking Eddie’s bag from him. He smiles at her sidelong, slightly abashed. He will be taller than her eventually—he reaches her shoulder already.

I tour Eddie around the grounds while Beth settles down with his report card. I take him up to the barrow, skirt the dreary woods, arrive at the dew pond. He has found a long stick somewhere and swishes it, beheading the weeds and dead nettles. It’s warmer today, but damp. Flecks of drizzle in the breeze, and the empty branches knocking overhead.

“Why’s it called a dew pond? Isn’t it just a pond?” he asks, smacking the edge with his stick, crouching on supple, bony legs. Ripples fly out across the surface. The pockets of his jeans bulge with pilfered treasures. He’s like a magpie that way, but they are things nobody would miss. Old safety pins, conkers, bits of blue and white china from the soil.

“This is where the stream starts. It was dug out a long time ago, to make this pond as a kind of reservoir. And
dew
pond because it traps the dew as well, I suppose.”

“Can you swim in it?”

“We used to—Dinny and your mum and I. Actually, I don’t think your mum ever went all the way in. It was always pretty cold.”

“Jamie’s parents have got this wicked lake for swimming in—it’s a swimming pool, except it’s not all chlorine and tiles and all that. It’s got plants and everything. But it’s clean.”

“Sounds great. Not at this time of year, though, eh?”