The Silence (30 page)

I’m writing this because my father has forced me to. At my age it seems ridiculous that he can force me to do anything, but he says he wants everything set down, so there’s a proper record of the truth. He says if I don’t do that, he will tell the police what happened all those years ago – what I did to Isobel Acton.

I want to start by making it clear I did not murder Isobel Acton. That was Anne-Marie’s fault. I can look back now and think that if Anne-Marie had never come to Caudle Moor, and if she had not talked to me after the trial, and if we had not discovered we shared a common hatred of Isobel – well, perhaps my life would have taken a different path.

Anne-Marie was not sane. I can see that now. I hated Isobel because she had spoiled my dream of a perfect sinless lady – I had wanted her to be like the ladies in the stories, threatened with death, rescued by knights and heroes – but she had turned out to be Jezebel in truth. Anne-Marie’s hatred was different. She hated Isobel bitterly for killing Simeon, and that hatred and bitterness was so fierce it had eaten into her and devoured her sanity.

It was Anne-Marie who made the plan. How we’d imprison Isobel, stealing around the house and creeping into the music room as she played the piano.

‘If we’re quiet and careful she’ll never hear us,’ Anne-Marie said. ‘Most evenings she leaves the French windows open while she’s playing. We can go through the gardens and be inside that room before she realizes what’s happening.’

And so that night, at exactly the hour Isobel always sat down at the piano, we stole through the gates of Acton House. This is meant to be a bald statement of fact, but I will say here that to creep through those shadowy gardens, knowing what we were about to do, sent spikes of pain and pleasure deep into my mind.

Isobel didn’t hear us, so absorbed was she in her music. It was the music she had played the afternoon Simeon gasped out his life. I knew hardly anything about music in those days and I don’t know much more now, but I knew that piece all right. I still hear it in my dreams, even after all these years.

Anne-Marie half stunned Isobel using a large paperweight, and then it was easy to tie a gag over her mouth and bundle her in an old potato sack and carry her to my father’s forge. Halfway along Gorsty Lane she began to struggle, fighting and clawing. (Feeling her body struggling against me to get free is another of the secret memories.)

It was Anne-Marie, who worked out how we’d make sure Isobel couldn’t call for help from the stone room. Perhaps that was prompted by the knowledge of my father’s trade. I don’t know about that. I do know I fashioned the muzzle in the forge, and at the time I was proud of my skill.

‘And I’ll stay at Acton House,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘No one will know, and I’ll take food to her. Bread and water – that’s all she’d get if she were thrown into Newgate.’

We judged the length of the chain round Isobel’s ankle so that once in the stone room, she could reach the grille, but that if the door was unbolted and opened she couldn’t reach its edge. So it was not in the least dangerous to open the door a few inches and unfasten the brank for long enough to allow her to eat and drink. Anne-Marie said she would always feed Isobel at night, so that if she shouted for help, no one would be around to hear. There were no houses nearby anyway. Several times I wondered how long Anne-Marie meant the imprisonment to go on, but I never asked her and she never told me. I truly believed she meant it to be a few days at the most.

I couldn’t help with guarding Isobel or taking food to her, because by then I was living with Edgar Gilfillan’s family. It meant my days were tightly ruled and it was known where I was all the time. I had to walk to and from school with Edgar himself. But occasionally, after everyone was in bed, I’d creep out of the house. I had my own room and they were all sound sleepers, and they never heard me. I’d slip through the lanes and go in the gates of Acton House, stealthy and furtive, afraid to be seen, yet strung up with excitement. I’d creep through the gardens and stand outside the row of outbuildings, knowing Isobel was in there. On those nights I could hear Anne-Marie’s music from the house – she’d play Isobel’s piano for hours and there’d be the flicker of the candles she set near the open windows. ‘Lighting the way back for Simeon,’ she called it. In some ways she was very clever, but in others she was stupid – so stupid she actually believed she could call Simeon back. Several of us children had seen her doing that after Isobel was arrested; we stole out to the house, hoping to see ghosts, and we saw Anne-Marie in the music room.

I don’t think anyone knew Anne-Marie was in the house. After the trial she spread a story about Isobel travelling in France, and she wanted everyone to think Acton House was closed up. ‘But,’ she said to me, ‘if anyone hears music or sees candlelight – and if a little legend grows up that the house is haunted as a result, that’s all to the good.’

‘Because really, you’re the ghost,’ I said.

She liked that. Her eyes glowed with sudden life. She said, ‘Yes, I am. I’ll never leave while that bitch is there to be guarded.’ The real madness came into her eyes then, the look that frightened me. ‘And I’ll never leave until I have Simeon back,’ she said.

‘Through the music?’ I said it tentatively, because I was still unsure about that.

But she said eagerly, ‘Yes, through the music. It’s a very ancient belief, but it works.’ Her eyes were suddenly strange as if her sight had blurred, as if she was seeing something I couldn’t. Then, as if she had forgotten I was there – as if she was talking to someone else – she said, ‘I won’t rest until I’ve made it work. I promise I won’t.’

It was Anne-Marie’s music that caused the fire. There was one of those spiteful little winds that whip at tree branches and – if the windows of a house are open – snatch at curtains. The wind would have snatched at the long curtains in the music room that night, and blown them into the candle flames, and Acton House was an old house, its timbers dry and vulnerable. It went up like matchwood and by the time dawn was breaking most of the house was gone.

For a long time – several weeks – I thought the body found in the ruins of Acton House was Isobel’s. It made me feel safe, because even if my father told what he had seen us do, there was nothing to prove his words. There was nothing to suggest to anyone that I had played any part in Isobel’s death. People were slightly surprised to hear she had still been in the house, not travelling abroad as Anne-Marie had said, but no one thought her death was anything other than an accident. I never really thought my father would say anything, but to make sure I occasionally reminded him that what had been done to him once could be done again. I never let him forget that he was a helpless cripple. I didn’t much like doing it, but I had to be sure he wouldn’t talk.

It didn’t occur to me that Anne-Marie wouldn’t have escaped; that she wouldn’t have had sufficient warning to get out. And I thought that with Isobel dead, Anne-Marie would have gone back to her own home.

By the time it became known that the body had been identified as Anne-Marie’s, it was too late to help Isobel. She would be dead of starvation, of thirst, or both. I thought about it for a long time, and I had nightmares about it. I
saw
her, you see, trying to escape, beating her hands on the bars of her prison, unable to cry out because of the muzzle . . . I tried to push it all deep down in my mind, and cover it with a slab of darkness. But I knew I could not cover it up for ever. And I could not risk the body being found.

So on the next moonless night, I crept out of the Gilfillans’ house once again, and went along the lanes. The gates of Acton House were fire-scarred, but they were still in place, although the police had padlocked them to keep people out. Not many people went along Gorsty Lane, but those who did scurried past the house, keeping their heads down and their eyes away from the gates. The legend that had started with the murder of Simeon had taken root.

I had brought a spade, a shovel, and a mallet hammer with me, and also a small bullseye lantern. I slung the lantern around my neck and threw the other things over the gates. Then I climbed over and ran through the gardens, treading carefully through the rubble from the fire. The smoke-stench still clung everywhere.

The outbuildings were sunk in their own darkness, but my hand found the latch of the game larder without hesitation and I stepped inside. The smell of the fire was in here as well, and thick cobwebs brushed my face. The black memories swamped me, and for a moment I thought I would not be able to do what I had come for. But I could not waver now, and what I had to do would take a couple of hours at the most, and then there would be nothing to damn me.

I lit the lantern and set it on the floor. Dust-motes swirled in the yellow light, and the layered cobwebs, like old, grey lace, moved gently. I stared at the inner door with its bolts and padlock, and I think even then I was believing she might still be alive, that I might hear her tapping on the other side of the door. But there was nothing, and I finally managed to draw back the bolts, and knock the padlock off with the hammer.

When I pushed the inner door there was resistance and my heart lurched. But I pushed harder and something scraped across the floor. Then the door was open and the stench of decay – sickeningly sweet – gusted out at me. It was like being hit in the face, and I gasped and recoiled, one hand over my mouth. For a moment I thought I would not be able to go on, but presently the air cleared a little and I stepped inside.

The light fell across the stones, and I saw she had been lying in a huddle against the door – that was what had prevented it from opening smoothly. There were scratches on the inside of the door, long nail gouges in the wood where she must have tried to claw her way out. Her face was still covered by the iron muzzle, but it was upturned as if she had tried to catch any threads of light that might penetrate the darkness. Her eyes were fixed and staring in the last terrible stare of the dead, and one hand was stretched upwards, the nails torn, the fingertips bloodied.

In truth, I had expected to find nothing but a heap of dried-out bones – I could have coped with that – but there had not been enough time for the flesh to dry and shrivel on Isobel Acton’s bones. The image of a piece of rotting fruit was impossible to avoid – her skin was discoloured and parts of the flesh had the appearance of wet bruises. Her hair was like black straw, speckled with grey dust and woven with spiders’ webs. I looked down at her and I thought: so you’ve come to this, Jezebel.

Somehow I picked her up and somehow I detached my mind from the dreadful feel of that pulpy flesh. I carried her to the furthest part of the gardens – where the Acton land crosses into common meadowland, and where no one was likely to find her. I dug as deep as I could in the soft damp earth, and I tumbled the body in. Then I covered over what had once been my perfect sinless lady.

In the years that followed, I’d sometimes stand outside those gates – rusting and tarnished with the years – and think one day I’d re-create the beautiful house that had stood there. I liked thinking that. It helped me ignore that dark blood-tainted undertow – that memory of what lay inside those gates.

My father has said he will keep this statement locked away. He calls it a confession, which is a word that smacks of prison cells and judges with black caps, and a bell tolling the hour of eight.

What he does not understand is that if he hadn’t meddled – if he hadn’t tried to stop us – he would never have lost part of his leg. He would not have had to give up the forge and live in the almshouses. And I would not have been parcelled out to stay with Edgar Gilfillan’s family in that cold house where everyone prayed all day, and the rooms were cold because all kinds of suffering purified the soul. If I hadn’t been there, on the other side of Caudle Moor, I would have known about the fire that same night and I might have been able to get Isobel out of the stone room. Isobel . . .

I never really believed my father would denounce me. Arrogance, you’ll say. Perhaps it might be better to call it hubris – a word I learned while I lived with Edgar Gilfillan’s family. Hubris, meaning excessive pride, usually ending in downfall. But in the years immediately after my father lost his leg he was too sunk in his own misery to think much about me. He was too taken up with the loss of his work and the shame – as he saw it – of having to live in an almshouse. The once-cheerful blacksmith who had pursued a number of liaisons with local ladies (oh yes, I knew all about those) became a near-recluse.

Even so, as the years wheeled by I watched him carefully. I always knew I would deal with him if the need arose. There are things that can happen to a man with such a severe disablement . . . Things that can be made to look like an accident . . . He knew that, and I think he was always a little afraid of me. As the years slipped by he said nothing, and I believed myself safe.

And then a man called Ralph West, an importer of china and porcelain, commissioned me to build an extension to his works in Derby.