The Silence (28 page)

I suppose I always knew my son was infatuated with Isobel Acton. He wasn’t alone, of course – plenty of men had felt the same. It was not so much that she was beautiful – although she was – it was that she had a quality that attracted men. In the privacy of these pages I’ll admit that I would have welcomed a night with Madame Acton myself. But when I was whole and hale, there were quite a lot of ladies with whom I shared agreeable, if illicit, hours, so I’m not complaining.

But my son’s infatuation with Isobel was a different matter. I always felt it began when he was very young, for he was an impressionable boy. I did my best to guide him onto the right paths, but I was aware that my own reputation was at odds with any moral principles or rules I might want to instil in him. When you’re known to have bedded most of the ladies in Caudle Moor and Caudle Magna – well, all right, Abbots Caudle and maybe Lower Caudle too – you aren’t in any position to preach.

I left the preaching to the boy’s mother, but I did my best. And until he was twelve years old I thought I had done a fair job.

That was when Isobel Acton was charged with the murder of her husband, Simeon, and my life was ruined.

We all knew Isobel was guilty, but the word was that the jury had been threatened or bribed to give a verdict of Not Guilty. None of those twelve men ever spoke of it, but there were some shamefaced expressions in the village for a long time after the trial.

Isobel went back to Acton House afterwards. ‘Brazen as a church bell,’ said the ladies of the village. They always liked to disapprove of her, although I’d have to say she gave them a good deal to disapprove of, and if the stories could be believed she’d had more men than you can shake a stick at. But then who am I to judge? Still, I’ll always regret that she and I never had that night together.

For a time after the trial it seemed as if life might sink back into its normal pattern, which is to say it would return to being quiet and – let’s be honest – a bit smug. The world hasn’t really touched Caudle Moor, at least not so far. They say they’ll be war with Germany in the next ten years, and it’ll be the war to end all wars, and if that’s so Caudle Moor might find itself shaken out of its placid complacency.

Mr West used to visit the almshouses every two or three months. Those of us living here knew he had taken on some of old Simeon Acton’s charity work. Philanthropy, they call it, and we’re supposed to be properly grateful, although I never tugged a forelock to any man in my life, and I’m not likely to do so now, never mind my affliction or how well I’ve been looked after by the Acton Trust. I have been looked after well, I’ll admit that, but it’s a difficult thing for a proud man to accept this kind of charity. When I was a boy we called it going on the Parish, and it was as shameful then as it is now. The Acton Trust and the almshouses aren’t handed out by the parish, but it’s still charity as far as I’m concerned. I hate it.
Hate
it. That’s one of the reasons I make these entries in my book. I reckon if I can pour out my anger and bitterness onto paper, I shan’t need to be angry or bitter with the folk around me. I shan’t need to rail against the stupid rules that say almshouse folk have to be in their houses by nine o’clock each night, for instance. Nine o’clock! That’s a harsh curfew for one used to roaming around of an evening, without noticing the hour. Still, my roaming days are behind me now. That’s another cause for anger and bitterness.

I wasn’t bitter against Mr West, though. When he visited I was polite. We all were. There’d be tea made for him, properly set out in one of the parlours, for we might have been poor, us almshouse folk, we might have been brought low by ill-fortune or sickness, but we knew the correct way to behave. We took it in turns to offer him hospitality, and the matron always helped. There’d be a fine old flurry of preparation, baking and suchlike, so you’d think it was royalty coming, instead of a man who bought and sold cups and saucers and bits of pottery from foreign parts.

Usually Mr West came on his own, but this afternoon he brought his boy with him. Esmond, his name is, and a nice-looking boy. He’s what Dr Brodworthy calls a mute – not able to speak. But he’s intelligent, you can see that from his eyes and the tilt of his head. I’d say there’s not much that Master Esmond misses.

I took a bit of a fancy to him. The damaged attracting the damaged, people probably said if they noticed. But I never cared overmuch what people said, and I liked the way Esmond West didn’t let his own affliction get in his way, just as I’ve tried not to let mine. I told him to sit by me and I talked to him about the village and the people. He listened, and nodded, and after a while he drew out a writing slate and chalk. He wrote, ‘I like living here,’ and I asked if he had lessons, and what he liked to do, trying to word the questions so it wouldn’t make it too difficult for him to reply.

He wrote, ‘I play my piano. I draw pictures.’

I said, ‘I’d surely like to see those pictures,’ and his little face lit up so much you’d have thought I’d promised him fifty pounds.

He wrote, ‘If I come back I will bring them,’ and I said that would be grand and I’d look forward to it.

Later, my wife said who did I think I was, inviting the son of Mr West to visit, and did I expect her to wait on him hand and foot. I said, peaceably, that I liked the child, and she could please herself about waiting, for I wasn’t so maimed I couldn’t make a pot of tea or pour a glass of milk for a child.

She said, ‘He won’t come, of course. Not to see the likes of us.’

I didn’t think he would either, but we were both wrong, for one week later, Esmond, accompanied by a young man I had never seen, knocked at the door.

The young man introduced himself very politely as Mr Bundy, Esmond’s tutor. Esmond, he said, had asked if he could be brought to visit us again; he had promised to bring some of his drawings for me to see – this was right, was it? And was this a convenient time to call?

‘Indeed it is right, and a very convenient time as well,’ I said, pleased the boy had remembered and pleased that Mr Ralph West had consented.

‘Then, if it suits, I’ll come back for him in about an hour,’ said Mr Bundy.

‘That would suit very nicely. Come along in, Esmond.’

And if only I had known that with those words, the nightmare woke and flexed its bloodied talons.

He came several times, young Master Esmond. I liked seeing him. I liked telling him my memories of Caudle Moor and the work I had done here, and he seemed to find it all interesting. One day, I took him to see the forge. We walked well together, his small legs suiting my halting gait. I showed him everything and explained how it had all worked, and he nodded vigorously in the way he always did when he was interested. Then he wrote that he would make a drawing of it for me.

‘That’d be very good,’ I said. ‘I’d put that on my mantelpiece – just over there, you see it? – for folk to see, and I’d tell them, “Master Esmond West drew that especially for me”.’

I told my own son all about it when he came to visit.

‘A clever young man, that Esmond,’ I said. ‘He could go very far if he works hard and keeps to his studies. They seem to have schooled him well before he came here.’

‘Derby,’ he said.

‘Yes, that’s right. I was forgetting you’d know. Sad for a boy to have lost his mother like that, isn’t it?’

I remember thinking my son suddenly became very still, like a watchful animal that knows it’s being hunted. When it’s your own, you
know
.

Then he said, in a voice I’d never heard him use before, ‘Does he talk about it? That’s to say – does he write down anything about it?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t think though,’ he said, ‘that you should let him come to see you again.’

‘Why not? I like the boy. He likes coming here.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Samuel, in a soft voice that sent an icy prickle across the back of my neck, ‘I’d like you to stop.’

He was staring into the fire, and it might have been the firelight that reflected redly in his eyes . . . But I knew it was not. I knew I was seeing the madness I had seen in him all those years ago. When Isobel Acton was tried for the murder of her husband.

Samuel was twelve years old when Simeon Acton died, but he was not your usual twelve year old. Not how I ever thought a son of mine would be. I never understood him, not then and not now, although I hope I tried.

He used to come into the forge after school, or of a weekend – when his mother would let him, that is, for she was one who believed children should be given plenty to do, and she was always finding tasks and errands for Samuel. He’d have to help her if she was called up to Acton House to help with one of the house parties they had, or to Bondley Manor, old Sir Beecham’s place for the shooting. Samuel always did what was asked of him and as far as I can remember he never had to be punished for anything. And that’s a bit strange – you’ll admit that, you who might one day read this. What child doesn’t occasionally need a brisk smack on the bottom, or sending to bed without pudding after its supper?

But Samuel never did. I used to think back to my own childhood, and I’d hear tales of other children in the village who got into trouble and childhood scrapes – even that preaching old nuisance Edgar Gilfillan was caught stealing apples one autumn. So Samuel’s goodness worried me. Children need to be naughty. They need to find out what the rules are and where the boundaries are. Young people need to rebel a bit. (Old ones too, but that’s another story.) But Samuel never stepped over any boundaries or broke any rules.

He liked coming to the forge, though. He liked it when the forge was fired and the fierce heat would belch out in huge glowing waves. And he enjoyed watching the making or repairing of carriage wheels – the way I fired them, then cooled them, and hammered them into shape. And the forging of shoes for horses, of course. I let him try his hand at the simpler tasks and showed him how to work the bellows to control the forge’s fires. He picked it all up wonderfully well. But I didn’t want him to become a blacksmith.

Don’t mistake that statement. The craft of the blacksmith is an ancient and honourable one. Blacksmiths are the only men who work with the four elemental substances: fire, earth, air and water. My father, who taught me my trade, told me the ancients believed those four things were put together to create the world. I used to remember that when I was working.

But it’s a dying trade nowadays, and I believed Samuel, with his clever mind and his interest in houses, would do better in the building trade. I’d get him properly apprenticed, I thought. I had a little money laid by, and we’d manage it.

But in those days he was content to help me and I was content to let him do so.

Until, shortly after his twelfth birthday, the contentment ended.

Samuel had been almost bewitched by Isobel Acton. It’s a strong word to use about a twelve-year-old boy, but that was what it was. And perhaps children are more open to bewitchment than adults. They’re still fresh from God in their early years, still wrapped about in the celestial light and the dreams and stars. Still trailing clouds of glory, as the poem says. And if that sounds a strange, fanciful thing for a blacksmith to write, I’ll add that since my affliction I’ve found time for reading and studying poetry and suchlike.

So I saw and accepted that Samuel was spellbound by the Acton woman – mostly by what he didn’t say, rather than what he did. I saw that he listened to all the accounts of her trial, and I knew he sometimes hid himself and eavesdropped on conversations discussing it. I didn’t like to see such a thing in my own son, and I tried to give his thoughts a different direction. But I believed he would grow out of it. We all become bewitched at various times in our lives – usually by a woman.

When the verdict of Not Guilty was given and Isobel returned to Acton House, I thought Samuel would return to normal. I didn’t realize that the spell had turned inside out for him – that where once he had almost worshipped, he now hated. But he did. He hated Isobel for having feet of clay, he hated her for not being the beautiful sinless creature he had believed. He hated her because she was Jezebel of the Old Testament – a murderess and an adulteress. I almost wonder if, at that stage, he was entirely normal.

But I also believe he would have returned to normality if he had not fallen in with another who hated Isobel in the same way, and who, also, was no longer sane. Anne-Marie Acton.

Anne-Marie Acton came to Caudle Moor after Simeon died. She was a thin woman with a face that made you think she might have some hungry disease inside her, although that might have been the effects of grief. Rumour said she had a powerful affection for her brother.

Anne-Marie was convinced of Isobel’s guilt, and when the verdict of Not Guilty was given, she vowed that if the law would not punish Isobel, she would do it herself. That’s not repeating idle gossip. Miss Acton said this in full view of upwards of a dozen people, not once, but many times. Nehemiah Goodbody, who never missed a thing that happened in Caudle, said she went stravaging about the place like the wrath of God, but Nehemiah was always very strong about the wrath of God, especially since he had taken to repenting of his misspent youth, so nobody paid this much heed.

What was true, though, was that Anne-Marie took to prowling out to Acton House, and watching Isobel through its windows after dark. I know that to be true, for Eliza Stump, who had been housekeeper at Acton House for several years, told my wife. A lively, spirited girl, Miss Stump. Later, she married young George Poulson at The Pheasant, and it was generally thought it was Eliza who made The Pheasant so profitable. I suspect she led George a fine old dance at times, but he always looked well on it, and they had several sturdy children.