The Legacy (48 page)

“She’s not the same person now.” He looks down, frowns.

“And me? Am I the same?”

“Pretty much,” Dinny smiles. “As tenacious as ever.”

“I don’t mean to be,” I say. “I just want to do the right thing. I just want . . . I want everything to be all right.”

“You always did. But life’s not that simple.”

“No.”

“Are you going back to London?”

“I don’t think so. No, I’m not. I’m not sure where I’m going.” I look at him when I say this and I can’t keep the question from my eyes. He looks at me, steadily but without an answer.

“Clifford will make trouble,” I say at length. “If we tell them. I know he will. But I’m not sure if I could live with myself, knowing what I know and letting him and Mary think Henry’s dead,” I say.

“They wouldn’t know him now, Erica,” Dinny says seriously. “He’s not their son any more.”

“Of course he’s their son! What else is he?”

“He’s been with me for so long now. I’ve grown up with him. I’ve seen myself change . . . but Harry just stayed the same. Like he was frozen in time the day that rock hit him. If anything, he’s my brother. He’s part of
my
family now.”

“We’re all one family, remember? In more ways than one, it seems. They could help you look after him . . . or I could. Help support him . . . financially, or . . . He’s their
son
, Dinny. And he didn’t die!”

“But he did. Their son did. Harry is not Henry. They’d take him away from everything he knows.”

“They have a right to know about him.” I shake my head, I cannot let this lie.

“So, what—you’re picturing Harry living with them, cooped up in a conventional life, or in some kind of institution, where they can visit him whenever they like and he’d be plonked in front of the TV the rest of the time?”

“It wouldn’t be like that!”

“How do you know?”

“I just . . . I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for them, all this time.” We are quiet for a long time. “I’m not going to decide anything without you,” I tell him.

“I’ve told you what I think,” Dinny says. “It would do them no good to see him now. And we don’t need any help.”

He shakes his head and looks sad. I cannot bear this thought, that I am making Dinny sad. I put my hand across the table, mesh my fingers into his.

“What you did for us—for Beth—taking the blame like that . . . it’s huge, Dinny. That was a huge thing that you did,” I say quietly. “Thank you.”

“W
ill you stay?” I ask him, late in the evening. He doesn’t answer, but he stands up, waits for me to lead. I won’t take him into Meredith’s room. I choose a guest room on the top floor, in the attics of the house, where the sheets are chilly with the long absence of warm bodies and the floorboards creak as we cross them. The silence makes us quiet, and the night outside the bare window sketches us in silvery grays as we undress. My skin rises where he touches me, the tiny hairs on me reaching out. He is so dark in this monochrome light, his face a depth of shadow I can’t fathom. I kiss his mouth, bruise my lips against his, drink him in. I want there to be no space between us, no part of my body not touching his. I want to wind myself around him like ivy, like a rope, binding us together. He has no tattoos, no piercings, no scars. He is whole, perfect. The palms of his hands are rough on my back. He coils one through my hair, tips my head back.

I close my eyes and watch with my body—each sure move of his hands, the warm brush of his breath, his weight over me. I pull his elbows out from under him. I want him to cover me, to crush me. Nothing guarded about him now, no hesitation, no thinking. A frown of a different kind as he puts his hands under my hips, lifts me, fits me to his body, pushes hard. I want to ink my mind with this, always keep him in this room with me; keep the taste of him on my tongue, make the beat between each second last, unending. Salt sweat on his top lip, ragged words mumbled into my hair. I want nothing else.

“I could stay with you,” I say afterwards. My eyes are shut, trusting. “I could stay and help you with Harry. I can get work anywhere. You shouldn’t have to support him alone. I could help. I could stay with you.”

“And travel all the time, and live like we do?”

“Well, why not? I’m homeless now, after all.”

“You’re a long way from being homeless. You don’t know what you’re saying.” His fingers are curled around my shoulder, and they smell of me. I lean myself against him. His skin is hot and dry beneath my cheek.

“I do know. I don’t want to go back to London, and I can’t stay here. I’m at your disposal,” I say, and the absurdity of this statement makes me chuckle. But Dinny does not laugh. There’s a growing tension in his frame that makes me uneasy. “I don’t mean . . . I’m not trying to foist myself on you, or anything,” I add hurriedly. No grip of mine could hold him, if he wanted to go. He sighs, turns his head to press a kiss onto my hair.

“It wouldn’t be so bad having you foisted on me, Pup,” he smiles. “Let’s sleep on it. We can sort it out tomorrow.” He says it so softly, so quietly that I decipher the words from the rumble in his chest beneath my ear. Deep and resolute. I am awake long enough to hear his breathing deepen, slow down, grow even. Then I sleep.

When I wake up I’m alone. The sky is flat, matt white, and a fine drizzle sifts down through the trees. A rook perches on a bare branch outside the window, feathers fluffed against the weather. Suddenly, I long for summer. For warmth, and dry ground, and a mile-wide sky. I run my hand across the side of the bed where Dinny was when I fell asleep. The sheets aren’t warm. There’s no indent in the pillow, no echo of his head. I could have imagined him here with me, but I didn’t. I didn’t. I won’t race down there. I won’t be alarmed. I make myself get dressed, eat breakfast cereal with the last of the milk. Today I will either have to shop or leave. I wonder which it will be.

I slip across the sodden lawn, wellies slick with water, papered with dead leaves. I feel clear-headed today, purposeful. It’s misplaced, perhaps, when I have not yet made the decisions that need making, but perhaps I am finally ready to make them, perhaps that’s what this feeling is. I’ve got a box of things for Harry. I found them in some drawers in the cellar, had earmarked them for the bin when I realized he might like them. A broken Sony radio, some old torches and batteries and bulbs and small metal objects of unknown provenance. They rattle against the cardboard under my arm. My back aches from the strain of Dinny’s weight, pushing against my pelvis. I shiver, cradle this physical memory close to me.

I stand for quite some time in the center of the camp clearing, while the rain begins to soften the box I carry. No vans here now, no dogs, no columns of smoke. It is deserted and I am left behind—alone in an empty clearing churned muddy by feet and wheels; and me, churned muddy by him. By the getting of him, and now the losing. My long-lost cousin, my childhood hero. My Dinny. Perfect calm, and stillness. No breath of a breeze today. I can hear a car, speeding along the lane from the village, tires crackling in the standing rainwater. I have no phone number for him, no email address, no clue in which direction he has gone. I turn in a slow circle, in case there is something behind me, something that waited for me, or someone.

Legacy

1911–

C
aroline’s last child was born in 1911, long after the occupants of Storton Manor had given up hope of there being a Calcott heir. There had been other pregnancies, two of them, both a long time in the conceiving, but Caroline’s body had rejected the children and they had been lost before they even really began. The little girl was born in August. It was a long, hot summer the likes of which no one could remember, and Caroline sweltered, shuffling into the garden to lie swollen and prone in the shade, drowsing. The heat was such that sometimes, as she hovered on the edges of sleep, she imagined herself back in Woodward County, sitting on the porch and gazing out at the yard, waiting for Corin to ride home; so that when she was approached by a servant or her husband, she stared at them in no little confusion for a while, before remembering who they were and where she was.

The gardens were scorched and brown. A village boy, Tommy Westenfell, drowned in the dew pond. His feet got tangled in weeds at the bottom and he was found hours later by his distraught father; pale, still, and sleepy-eyed. Mrs. Priddy took a bad turn walking back from the butcher with a whole leg of lamb and was consigned to her bed for three days, her skin mottled and puce. Estelle and Liz, Cass’s plump replacement, worked hard to cover for her, with perspiration soaking their uniforms. The smell everywhere was of parched earth, sweat and hot, dry air. The stone flags of the terrace burnt Caroline’s feet through the soles of her slippers. Henry Calcott, who was by then uncomfortable around his own wife, remained at home long enough to see the child safely born, and then quit Wiltshire to stay with friends by the sea in Bournemouth.

The labor was long and arduous, and Caroline was delirious by the end. The doctor forced fluids into her through a tube pushed down her throat, and she gazed at him from the bed with uncomprehending terror. Liz and Estelle kept the baby those first few days, taking turns to lay cold cloths onto their mistress’s skin to cool her. Caroline recovered, at length, but when they brought the child to her, her gaze swept over it impassively, and then she turned her face away and would not nurse it. A wet nurse was found in the village and Caroline, who wanted to be sure that the girl would live before she dared to love her, found, as months and then years passed, that she had left it too late. The little girl did not seem to belong to her, and she could not love her. The child was two years old before she was given a name. Estelle, Liz and the wet nurse had been calling her Augusta all that time, but one day Caroline looked dispassionately into her cradle and announced that she would be named Meredith, after her grandmother.

M
eredith was a lonely child. She had no siblings to play with and was forbidden to play with any of the village children that she saw roaming the fields and lanes around the manor house. The household was in decline by then, and the village of Barrow Storton was a sad, quiet place with most of the young men gone off to fight and die on the continent. Henry Calcott kept mainly to town, where his gambling consumed so much money that several of the staff, including Liz and the scullery maid, were laid off, leaving Mrs. Priddy to keep the house as best she could with only Estelle to help her. Mrs. Priddy was kind to Meredith, letting her eat the leftover pastry scraps and keep a pet rabbit in a pen outside the kitchen door, where she fed it carrot tops and ragged outer lettuce leaves. A tutor came, five mornings a week, to teach Meredith her letters, music, needlework and deportment. Meredith hated the lessons and the tutor both; and escaped into the garden as soon as she could.

But Meredith longed for her mother. Caroline was an otherworldly creature by then, who sat for hours in a white gown, either at a window or out on the lawn, staring into the distance and seeing who knew what. When Meredith tried to hug her, she tolerated it for a moment and then disentangled the child’s arms with a mild smile, telling her vaguely to run along and play. Mrs. Priddy admonished her not to tire her mother out, and Meredith took this instruction to heart, fearing that she was somehow responsible for her mother’s persistent lethargy. So she kept away, thinking that if she did her mother would not be so tired, and would get up and smile and love her more. She played alone, watching pigeons on the rooftops courting and bowing to one another. She watched the frog spawn in the ornamental pond slowly grow tails and hatch into tadpoles. She watched the kitchen cats as they chased down hapless mice and then devoured them with swift, perfunctory crunches. And she watched the Dinsdales in the clearing through the woods. She watched them whenever she could, but she was too shy to ever let them see her.

The Dinsdales had three children: a tiny baby who went around in a sling on his mother’s back, a little girl with yellow hair like her mother’s, who was a few years older than Meredith herself, and a boy, a dark, strange-looking boy whose age Meredith was unable to guess at, who went everywhere with his father and played with his little sister, grinning as he teased her. Their mother was pretty and she smiled all the time, laughing at their antics and hugging them. Their father was more serious, as Meredith understood fathers should be, but he smiled often too, and put his arm around the boy, or lifted the little girl high into the air to sit astride his shoulders. Meredith could not imagine her own father ever doing such a thing with her—the very thought made her uneasy. So Meredith watched this family, fascinated, and even though they were happy and bright she came away from her clandestine visits feeling tearful and dark, unaware that she watched them because she envied them and was filled with yearning for her own mother to hug her that way.

One day she made a mistake. Her mother was on the lawn in her wicker chair, an untouched jug of lemonade on the table beside her with thirsty flies settling unafraid on the beaded lace cover. Meredith emerged from the woods and was startled to see her there, immediately brushing down her skirts and tucking her hair behind her ears. Her mother did not look up as she approached, but managed a wan smile once her daughter was standing right in front of her.

“Well, child, and where have you been today?” her mother asked her in a voice that was soft and dry and seemed to come from far away. Meredith went right up to her and tentatively took hold of her hand.

“I was in the woods. Exploring,” she said. “Shall I pour you some lemonade?”

“And what did you find in the woods?” her mother asked, ignoring the offer of lemonade.

“I saw the Dinsdales—” Meredith said, and then put her hand over her mouth. Mrs. Priddy had warned her never to mention the Dinsdales to her mother, although she had no idea why not.

“You did what?” her mother snapped. “You know that’s not allowed! I hope you have not been talking to those people?”

“No, Mama,” Meredith said quietly. Her mother settled back into her chair, pressing her mouth into a bloodless line. Meredith steeled herself. “But, Mama,
why
can I not play with them?” Her heart beat fast at her own temerity.

“Because they are filth! Gypsy, tinker villains! They are thieves and liars and they are not welcome here—and you are
not
to go near them! Not
ever
! Do you understand?” Her mother leant forward in her chair like a whip cracking, and grasped Meredith’s wrist so that it hurt. Meredith nodded fearfully.

“Yes, Mama,” she whispered.

They are not welcome here
. Meredith took these words to heart. When she watched them next her envy became jealousy, and instead of wanting to play with them, and share their happy existence, she began to wish instead that they did not
have
their happy existence. She watched them every day, and every day she grew crosser with them, and sadder inside, so that it came to seem to her that it was the Dinsdales who were
making
her sad. Her and her mother both. If she could make them go away, she thought, her mother would be pleased. Surely, she would
have
to be pleased.

On a hot summer’s day in 1918, Meredith heard the Dinsdale children playing at the dew pond. She edged closer, through the dappled light beneath the trees, then stood behind the smooth trunk of a beech and watched them jumping in and out of the water. It looked like tremendous fun, although Meredith had never been swimming so she could not know for sure. She wished she could try, though. Her skin was itchy with the heat, and the thought of all that clear, cold water washing over it was so tempting it made her weak. The Dinsdales were splashing up arcs of crystalline droplets, and Meredith noticed how dry her mouth felt. The boy’s skin was so much darker than his sister’s. It was a kind of nut color, and his raggedy hair was inky black. He teased the girl and dunked her under the water, but Meredith saw that he secretly watched her and made sure she was still laughing before he dunked her again.

She leant out for a better view, and then froze to the spot. The Dinsdales had seen her. First the boy, who had climbed out and was standing on the bank, water streaming from the hems of his short breeches, then the girl, who paddled in a circle to see what her brother was looking at.

“Hello,” the boy said to her, so casual and friendly, when Meredith felt like her heart might explode in her chest. “Who are you?”

Meredith was amazed that he didn’t know, when she herself felt that she knew
them
so well. It outraged her that they did not know who she was. She stood, stock still and breathless, not knowing whether to stay or to run.

“Meredith,” she whispered, after a long, uneasy silence.

“I’m Maria!” the girl called from the water, her arms windmilling madly beneath the surface.

“And I’m Flag. Do you want to come in for a swim? It’s quite safe,” the boy told her. He put his hands on his hips and examined her, head tipped to one side. His wet skin shone over the curves of his arms and legs, and liquid light from the water danced in his eyes. Meredith felt almost too shy to answer him. She thought him beautiful, and was not sure what to say.

“What kind of name is
Flag
?” she asked, haughtily, in spite of herself.

“My name,” he shrugged. “Do you live at the big house, then?”

“Yes,” she replied, her words still reluctant to come.

“Well,” Flag continued, after a pause, “do you want to swim with us or not?”

Meredith felt her face burn and she tipped her chin down to hide. She was not allowed to swim. She never had been—but the temptation was so strong and, she reasoned, who would ever find out?

“I . . . I don’t know how to swim,” she was forced to admit.

“Paddle then. I’ll fetch you out if you fall in,” Flag shrugged. Meredith had never heard the word
paddle
before, but she thought she understood. Fingers trembling with the illicit thrill of disobedience, she sat down on the cracked earth and pulled off her boots, then crept carefully to the water’s edge. It wasn’t
really
disobeying, she told herself. Nobody had ever said anything to her about not paddling.

She slithered the last few inches down the steep bank and gasped nervously as her feet stumbled into the water.

“It’s so cold!” she squeaked, hastily scrambling backwards. Maria giggled.

“It’s only cold when you first jump in. Then it’s perfect!” she said.

Meredith edged forward again and let the water rise to her ankles. The bite of it made her bones ache and scattered silvery shivers all over her. With a yell, Flag took a short run up and leapt into the middle of the pool, bending his knees and wrapping his arms around them. The splash caused a wave to engulf Maria and soak the bottom six inches of Meredith’s dress.

“Now look what you’ve done!” she cried, afraid that Mrs. Priddy or her mother would see and she would be found out.

“Flag! Don’t,” Maria told him gaily as he surfaced, spluttering.

“It’ll soon dry out,” Flag told her carelessly. His hair was plastered to his neck, as slick as otter fur. Meredith climbed out crossly, sat down on the bank and studied her feet, which had gone from pink to bright white after their wetting.

“Flag—say you’re sorry!” Maria commanded.

“Sorry for getting your dress wet, Meredith,” Flag said, rolling his eyes at his sister. But Meredith didn’t reply. She sat and watched them swim for a while longer, but her sullen presence seemed to spoil their fun and they soon climbed out and pulled on the rest of their clothes.

“Do you want to come and have tea?” Maria asked her, her smile a little less ready than before. Flag stood half turned to go. Water ran from his hair and wet his shirt, slicking it to his skin. Meredith wanted to look at him but her eyes slid away infuriatingly when she tried.

She shook her head. “I’m not allowed,” she said.

“Come on then, Maria,” Flag said, a touch impatiently.

“Goodbye, then,” Maria shrugged, and gave Meredith a little wave.

It took nearly two hours for the thick cotton of her dress to dry out completely, and during that time Meredith kept to the outer edges of the garden where only the gardener might see her. He was ancient and didn’t pay much attention to anything except his marrows. She thought about her paddle, and about Maria inviting her to tea, and about Flag’s wet hair shining, and each of these things gave her a fizzing feeling quite at odds with the resentment she had felt before. It made her skip a little and smile excitedly. She imagined how it might be to go to tea, to see the inside of the covered wagon that she had watched so many times from the trees, to meet their blonde and affectionate mother, who put her arms around them and smiled all the time.
How do you do, Mrs. Dinsdale?
She practiced the phrase under her breath in the safe, silent confines of the greenhouse. But there could be no arguing that this would be a huge disobedience. And that talking to Flag and Maria had been one as well, even if she could argue her way around the paddling. Just thinking about what would happen if Mama found out about it brought her spirits low again, and when she was called in for tea she made sure that she was quiet and dull and gave nothing away.