“Very,” said Eustace, who seemed lost in thought now, tired perhaps after all the exertions of the day.
“You look sleepy, Eustace,” I said, putting a hand to his head and brushing the hair from his eyes. “It’s the sea air, I expect. Not to mention that fish lunch. We shall all sleep well tonight, I daresay.” I glanced at my watch. “Perhaps we should make our way back to the train station,” I suggested. “I told Heckling we’d be back at Thorpe by five.”
“Oh must we?” cried Isabella. “Can’t we stay a little longer?”
“A little longer, if you like,” I said. “But not too long. What shall we do next then? Take a stroll?”
“I want to see the church,” she declared, pointing towards a small steeple in the distance, and I raised an eyebrow, rather surprised by this.
“I thought you didn’t like churches,” I said.
“I don’t like attending them,” she replied. “But I quite like visiting them. If they’re empty, I mean. If there’s no religious instruction going on. And you like them too, don’t you, Eliza Caine? After all, you wanted to visit the cathedral in Norwich.”
“Yes, I do,” I admitted. “All right then, let’s go across and take a look. We won’t stay long though. If we’re to catch the four o’clock train we can’t dawdle.”
Isabella nodded and we wandered down the path in silence, all three of us, happy to be left quietly with our thoughts. It was true that I had always liked churches. Father had been a religious man, after a fashion, and had brought me to Mass every Sunday when I was growing up, but occasionally he would take me outside our parish to a church that he had heard was particularly ornate, or provided excellent acoustics for the choir, or had some extraordinary architecture or wall friezes. I had enjoyed these expeditions enormously as a girl; there was a feeling of peace within the walls of a church, a sense of mystery that appealed greatly to me. The church in Great Yarmouth was no exception. It must have been two hundred years old but was in good repair, a masterful construction of stonework with high ceilings and carefully carved wooden pews. At the nave, I turned and looked up to see a fine representation on the ceiling of the Lord in his heaven, surrounded by angels, each of whom turned to stare at him with awe and wonder. To his side, watching all of this with a curious expression on her face, an expression that suggested dominance rather than love, was his mother Mary. I stared at her, wondering what the artist had been thinking, for this was not how she was typically represented. I didn’t like it; I turned away.
The children were nowhere to be seen but I could hear their voices outside, loud at first but then fading slightly as they walked further from the door, and I made my way down the aisle, imagining myself for a moment as a bride turning on the arm of her handsome new husband, smiling at a congregation of friends and family as I emerged from my solitary state to a union of equals. And, embarrassing even to myself, the face I saw beside me was none other than Alfred Raisin’s. Foolish girl! I smiled at my own simplicity but, in truth, I wondered whether one such as I might ever know a contentment such as that, and thought it unlikely.
Emerging into the bright afternoon sun, I shaded my eyes and looked around me. The streets were mostly empty but Isabella and Eustace had not made their way outside; neither were they to be seen on the road that ran in the direction of the train station. Instead they were some thirty feet away from me, standing in the church graveyard, examining the stones. I smiled; there were times when they reminded me of myself for I, too, on those expeditions with Father, had always enjoyed reading the gravestones, imagining stories in my head of how their occupants had passed from this world to the next. I was particularly intrigued by the graves of children and infants, I suppose because I had been a child myself at the time. They scared me but attracted me at the same time. They reminded me that I was mortal.
“Are we ready, children?” I asked, approaching them now, but neither turned their head to look at me. “Children?” I said again, louder this time, but it was as if they had been turned to statues. “Oh come along, do,” I insisted, and they turned a little, stepping out of the way to allow me to see the grave they were examining with such serious intent. I read the name and dates. They meant nothing to me at first. And then I remembered.
“Ann Williams” was the name inscribed in the stone. Beloved daughter and sister. Born 15th July 1846. Died 7th April 1867. She will be missed.
“She loved Great Yarmouth,” said Isabella in a reflective voice. “I’m sure she’s glad to be back here.”
Later that night, back at Gaudlin Hall, after a light supper the children retired for the night. Eustace was particularly exhausted, poor boy, but I waited until he had been upstairs for about five minutes before going up and entering his bedroom.
He was lying in bed in his nightshirt, his eyes half closed, but he turned to look at me and smiled.
“Are you coming to say goodnight?” he asked and I nodded, smiling at him.
“Did you enjoy today?” I asked, sitting on the side of the bed and stroking his hair a little.
“Yes, thank you,” he said sleepily.
“Such an interesting story you told me about that old man,” I added, hoping to catch him off guard now. “But there was one thing I forgot to ask.”
“Hmm?” he said, already half asleep.
“You said that you’d seen him once before,” I said. “That he’d spoken to you before the day when you fell over and hurt your knee. What did he say, Eustace? Can you remember?”
“He asked me whether I liked my new governess,” he replied, yawning and turning over in the bed, away from me.
“And what did you tell him?” I asked.
“I said that I did. Very much,” said Eustace. “And he said that was good. And that I wasn’t to worry because he wouldn’t let anything happen to her. He said he had come to protect you.”
Chapter Eighteen
IBEGAN TO TAKE long walks around the estate in the afternoons. My daily routine had settled down to classes with the children in the morning followed by a simple lunch shortly after noon, when Isabella and Eustace would chat about whatever was capturing their attention that day while I sat quietly, tense, certain that every sound or movement in the house would lead to some unexpected trauma for me. I was not sleeping well and the exhaustion was mirrored on my face, which had grown pale and drawn. Heavy, dark bags lingered beneath my eyes and by late afternoon I felt great difficulty in keeping them open. And yet by nightfall, exhausted as I was, I could manage no more than a few unsettled hours of sleep, so certain was I that the presence would return to cause me harm. After lunch, I would allow the children time to engage in their own pursuits before we completed our lessons in the late afternoon. During their free hours, I would take my coat and shawl and step into the woods of the Gaudlin estate, the fresh air invigorating my drooping spirits, the closely packed trees offering something approaching security.
It did my soul some good to wander freely, to allow the Hall to disappear between the foliage, and as I stepped out into the clear spaces beyond the wood and towards the lake that sat near the end of the property, I could imagine myself in London again, strolling along the banks of the Serpentine in Hyde Park, with nothing more to worry about than what I would cook Father for his supper that evening or what exercises I might set my small girls the following day.
In truth, much as I had grown to care for Isabella and Eustace, I felt a longing for those I had left behind. My small girls had been an important part of my life. I enjoyed seeing their faces in the mornings, even the ones who were more troublesome than others. I took pride in the lessons and took care to ensure that each girl felt that she had a place in the classroom and that she would not be bullied by the others. And I believe they cared for me too.
There was one girl who came back to my mind more and more often as I walked the grounds of Gaudlin Hall. A girl by the name of Clara Sharpe, who had been five years old when she had first entered my classroom, a bright and mischievous
child, but not a naughty one, given to high levels of energy in the mornings and long periods of sullenness in the afternoons. (I took this to be related to the breakfasts she ate before leaving her house and the lunches she was provided with before the midday session; I suspected they had a negative effect on her mood.)
For all her ways, I liked Clara a great deal and took an interest in her development, particularly when I realized what a gift she had for mathematics. Unlike most of the other girls, for whom numbers seemed to present little more than an endless series of Greek hieroglyphs, Clara had the sort of brain that could organize and rationalize without difficulty and, as young as she was, I rather thought that she might in time follow me into the pedagogical profession. I even spoke to Mrs. Farnsworth about her on several occasions, and she suggested that with her mathematical skills, Clara might someday have a future as a secretary for a bank manager. I recall the incident specifically because I made a remark, intended as a joke, that perhaps she could even be the bank manager one day, whereupon Mrs. Farnsworth removed her glasses and looked at me aghast and accused me of being a revolutionary, a charge I denied.
“You’re not a modern, are you, Eliza?” she asked, standing to her full height and looking down at me, filling me with as much trepidation as she had when I was a small girl and she my teacher. “I won’t stand for moderns at St. Elizabeth’s. And neither will the Board of Governors.”
“No, of course not,” I replied, blushing furiously. “I was being facetious, that’s all.”
“Hmm,” she said, unsatisfied. “I hope so. Clara Sharpe the manager of a bank! The very idea!”
And yet, although I did not consider myself to be a modern at all, I found her level of offence to be, in itself, offensive. Why should the girl not strive for higher things, after all? Why should we all not?
So intent was Mrs. Farnsworth on scolding me that I rather suspected she would have liked to call Father in to discuss the matter with him, and perhaps she might have done so had she not finally realized that there was a distinction to be made between the small girls and their teachers, and that she could call on parental authority to discipline the former but it was entirely her responsibility to control the latter.
I thought of Clara now because she ended up in a rather distressed condition. Her father was a drunkard, while her mother did all she could to keep the family home together, despite the pittance her husband brought in for the upkeep of his wife and daughter. What little money the man earned was more likely to be spent on porter than on food or clothing, and there was more than one morning when Clara arrived in the classroom, her face bruised, and I longed to live in a decent civilized society where I might make enquiries about who had done the bruising and why. Not that I had any doubts as to the answer to that question. On such days, I dreaded to imagine what Clara’s mother looked like, for I suspected her father of mistreating his wife just as badly as he did his daughter. I considered going to the police but of course they would have laughed at me and said that what an Englishman did in the privacy of his own home was his own business.
But the man must have gone too far one night and attacked Mrs. Sharpe when her ire was drawn, for she took a roasting pot from the oven, turned on her heel and hit him so sharply across the head with it that he fell to the ground, dead. The poor woman, a victim of unanswered violence for so long, was immediately arrested—for naturally, an assault upon a husband was a crime, whereas an assault upon a wife fell into the realm of marital privilege. Unlike Santina Westerley, however, who was clearly an unbalanced creature, Mrs. Sharpe was not sentenced to death. The judge, a modern sort—Mrs. Farnsworth would not have approved of him—believed that she deserved some leniency and commuted her sentence to life imprisonment without any possibility of parole, a sentence which, in the same position, I would have liked infinitely less than a week of nervous anticipation, a few seconds of extraordinary pain, and an eternity of peace ever after, the reward offered by the rope. Clara, having no other family to take her in, ended up in the workhouse, after which I rather lost touch with her. But she returned to my thoughts on one of those mornings as I considered the murder of Miss Tomlin by Santina Westerley and her violent assault upon her husband, which had left him in such a horrendous condition. And I wondered about the minds of women who committed these acts. Mrs. Sharpe, after all, had been abused and beaten; Santina Westerley, I had no doubt of it, had been loved and offered the security of a home, wealth, position and a family. Placed alongside each other, I found that motivation was a curious thing.
It was while thinking this that I turned the corner of the estate and found myself back in front of Heckling’s cottage, only to discover that difficult man standing outside, a pile of logs on the ground beside him, which he was cleaving in two with an axe. Upon seeing me, he put the axe down and wiped his brow with his handkerchief, offering me a nod as the dog, Pepper, ran towards me and scampered about my feet.
“Governess,” said Heckling, licking his lips in a repellent fashion.
“Mr. Heckling,” I replied. “No rest for the wicked, is there?”
“Aye, well, if I don’t do it there’s no one else as will,” he muttered. The man was nothing if not a burst of sunshine on a gloomy day.
I glanced round and noticed the door at the side of the house, almost hidden, through which Mrs. Livermore made her daily journeys up and down the staircase to Mr. Westerley’s rooms. I hadn’t noticed it at all until the day she pointed it out to me, but now that I saw it I wondered why the original builders had sought to make it such a secret.
“Have you always worked alone, Mr. Heckling?” I asked, turning back to look at him, and he raised an eyebrow at the question.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“I wondered whether it had always been just you on the estate. Fixing things, chopping logs, driving the carriage and whatnot. I would imagine, in past days, there was a lot more to do.”
“Aye, there was that,” he said, apparently reluctant to say too much about the past. “There were others, under me that is, but there’s no need for them now so they were let go. I were kept on account of the grounds needing one caretaker at least. And I were born here, of course.”
“You were born here?” I asked, surprised.
“In yon cottage,” he replied, nodding at his dwelling. “My father were the caretaker before me, you see. And his before him. I’m the last of them though.” He gave a sigh and looked away and for the first time I could see that beneath all his bluster there lay a rather lonely figure.
“You’ve no children of your own then?”
He chewed something at the side of his mouth. “None as are still living.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Of course; we all had stories.
“Aye.”
He reached down and gripped the handle of the axe in his hands before settling it against the stump and reaching into his pocket for a rolled cigarette.
“You watch everything, I expect, Mr. Heckling?” I said after a pause.
“How’s that?”
“You keep your eyes open.”
“ ’Cept when I’m sleeping.”
“Have you ever noticed any intruders?”
He narrowed his eyes and took a long drag on the cigarette as he stared at me. “Intruders?” he said. “Now why would you ask such a thing, Governess? Has there been someone about?”
I shook my head. “Eustace mentioned something,” I replied. “About an elderly gentleman who has been spotted on the grounds. They’ve been in conversation.”
“Ain’t no elderly gentleman around here,” said Heckling, shaking his head. “Else I would have noticed him. Or Pepper here would, and that would have gone worse for him.”
“Perhaps he was mistaken,” I said.
“Happen he were. Boys invent things. You must know that as well as anyone.”
“Eustace doesn’t tell lies,” I replied, surprising myself by how defensive I sounded.
“Then he’d be the first lad
of his age who didn’t. When I were a lad, lying came second nature to me. My father used to beat me for it regular-like.”
“I’m very sorry to hear it.”
His expression changed to one of confusion. “Why?” he asked.
“Well … that must have been unpleasant for you.”
He shrugged. “I daresay I deserved it,” he said. “That boy might need a beating if he lies about things he’s seen and things he hasn’t.”
“I won’t be beating Eustace,” I said in a firm tone.
“Well, it’s a father’s job, I expect,” he said, looking away with a sigh. “And Mr. Westerley ain’t exactly in a position to do anything about the lad, is he?”
I didn’t know whether he was being deliberately offensive or simply stating the facts as they were; he was right, after all. It was a father’s job to discipline his son and Eustace’s father could certainly never do so again. I shook my head; all of this was neither here nor there, for I did not believe that Eustace was being deceitful.
“If you did see such a gentleman,” I said finally, “an elderly gentleman, or any stranger who does not belong in these grounds, perhaps you’d be good enough to let me know.”
“Or I might just shoot him,” said Heckling. “On account of his being a trespasser and that.”
“Yes, well,” I said, turning away, “that would be another option, I suppose.”
A sound made me turn back round and to my amazement I saw none other than Mr. Raisin, the solicitor, emerging from behind Heckling’s cottage. He broke into a delighted smile before coughing and allowing his features to return to normal, whereupon he offered me a polite bow. “Miss Caine,” he said. “How nice to see you.”
“And you, Mr. Raisin,” I said, reddening slightly for I know not what reason. “Quite a surprise.”
“Yes, well, I had some business with Heckling here and was caught rather short, if you’ll excuse me. Thank you, Heckling,” he added, nodding in the man’s direction. “Our business is concluded for today, I think?”