Consider the Lily (57 page)

‘I won’t see you again, Rose.’ Matty had to force her lips to move. ‘I’m probably leaving here. But I would so like to think you are at peace.’

The child looked up, and Matty made out the letters R O S and a half-formed E outlined in pink silk against the canvas. Oh, Rose, she thought with an aching heart, you never had a chance to finish it. She closed her eyes, feeling Hesther’s grief and madness well inside her, and understood why the knife was the easy option.

Did ghosts remain in their time? Or operate in a different time-scale, immune from past, present and future? Was the child in front of Matty suffering in an endless cycle of knowledge, seeking her mother, unable to free herself of the burden?

Matty’s eyes flicked open. Rose was staring at her, one hand poised with the needle and thread, but Matty sensed that the child was looking through her and beyond. And as Rose stared into that long ago, the black irises in the blue eyes dwindled, the lips drew back over the teeth and she flung up her hand in a gesture of terror.

‘Rose, it’s all right...’ Matty tried to get up out of the chair, but her legs refused to obey her. ‘Please, Rose.’

The cold intensified. Matty’s confusion thickened. Panic followed, and with it a desperate feeling that she was trapped in something overwhelming. ‘Why are you here, Rose?’ she called out. ‘What do you want from me? How can I help?’

A watery fog swirled in front of Matty’s eyes, blanking out the room. She felt its wet spume crawl over her face, moisture trickle down the plane between nose and lip. ‘What is it, Rose? Tell me.’ She could hear her voice rising.

There was no answer, only the sound of running feet, stumbling away from the sight of flesh sucked into flesh below the dying lilies. Pounding over dry earth with the cracking of twig and leaf skeleton, and the sound of painfully drawn breath. There was darkness, the flash of the child running ahead, the feral smell of fox, hot night, and festering decay, the crack of the wooden jetty – and Matty was circling on the weed-filled river. Going down. Down. Drowning in anguish. Her black Dove dress billowing like a parachute, lungs filling. A pain flowered in her chest, sprouted through her body like a monstrous climbing rose, anchored with thorns fastened deep into her flesh.

It was you, Rose, she screamed. It was you who led me.

Down Matty went. And with her whirled the blue-frocked body of a child, whose thin, tender arms were thrown out for help – and for life.

Matty took a breath. Water flooded into her lungs. Petal by petal, the rose unfolded its bloom, filling her vision with shifting, smothering layers and the starbright, unfathomable stamen heart. No, she said into the weight pressing down on her body. No, into the blackness. I can’t give in yet. Not yet.

Beside her, Rose whirled... and screamed her scream of pain and death.

Not yet. Matty began to fight her way back to the top.

*

When Matty woke up the fire had almost gone out and Mrs Dawes was coming through the door to clear away the tea. She peered at Matty.

‘You look a bit pale, ma’am.’

Matty hid her hands under her tweed skirt and shook her head. ‘I’m fine, thank you, Mrs Dawes. You’d better let Minerva out.’

Mrs Dawes closed the drawing-room door with a click that indicated she did not believe a word that Matty had said. Matty held out her hands over her lap. They were shaking badly. She felt cold, empty and nauseous.

Using the chair as a lever, she got up and crossed to the desk where she retrieved a bunch of keys from the right-hand drawer. She left the room.

The wind was louder up on the attic storey, savage yet more intimate with the house. Matty switched on the light and the passage flooded with a yellow glare. Picking her way through the boxes, now neatly labelled, and the stack of crutches that Matty was donating to Fleet hospital, she unlocked the smallest attic.

White Surrey was reared up on his iron cradle. The doll’s house sat on the table, blind-windowed. The nursery clock on the wall was silent and the baize cloth thrown over the birdcage hid emptiness. Despite the clutter, it was barren, full of objects that had outlived their usefulness. There was no peace, no sense of tranquillity.

Still trembling, Matty pushed past the clutter from that other life – a tapestried firescreen, hunting prints, a boot jack, a large china jug — over to Hesther’s trunk.

With the taste of the choking water in her mouth, Matty sank down on her knees. On her instructions, the lock on the trunk had been oiled, and the key slid home with a tiny click. She knelt with her hands poised on the lid and told herself that she owed Rose this much.

Then she lifted up the lid.

‘Shocking, ma’am,’ Mrs Dawes had said when she tackled the trunk on instructions from Matty. ‘It’s not right. I don’t know who could have left it like this.’ Mrs Dawes had smoothed over the chaos, and brought tissue-papered tidiness to Hesther’s things, tucking gloves into glove boxes and feathers into satin cases.

Matty lifted out the top tray and laid it on the floor. Then she sifted through the objects underneath. The journal was easy to find. ‘Lovely, lovely’, went the writing underneath the ‘General Kléber’, the words of a woman enraptured by a rose and in love with her brother.

It wasn’t Hesther’s fault, Matty thought. You don’t choose whom you love. No one can. You didn’t choose to be loved either. Had Rupert suspected where Hesther’s affections lay before he scrawled ‘Bitch’ across the letter, and went on to ignore his children? Was he innocent of complicity?

Probably not. From her own experience, Matty was increasingly surprised by the human capacity to ignore, to suffer, to tolerate the intolerable. Not to acknowledge the truth.

The past seemed to rise from the trunk. A woman’s life – and death – was contained in it, and Matty was an intruder. She closed the journal and laid it aside. One day she might tell Kit, but she was not sure.

Under the place where the journal had rested was a package wrapped in tissue which Matty hadn’t noticed before. The letter ‘R’ was written on a label in black ink faded to sepia, and tied on with string. Matty fumbled to open it. She smoothed the paper over her knee and revealed a lock of flaxen hair: shiny, baby soft and fine, with a hint of curl at its ends. There was a note with it. ‘My darling’s hair’, it read.

Oh, God, said Matty to the painted blankness of White Surrey’s face, and smelt the reedy water and felt it slap at her body. Rose’s drowning face flashed across her vision, lashes fanned into points over the closed and dying eyes.

‘Rose,’ said Matty desperately into the dead air. ‘Don’t be angry or frightened.’

She folded the paper back over the hair and laid it beside the journal. There was a box beside it and this time the label read ‘Things from the nursery’. Inside was a thimble made of cherry-wood, a sewing kit wrapped up in felt, a marble full of wonderful whorls, a piece of string, at the end of which was a very old, dried conker. Matty stared down at the remains of Rose’s life, so childish, so important, and cradled them in her hands.

At the bottom of the box was a folded piece of canvas. Without being told, Matty knew what it was. Splotched and discoloured, frayed at the edges, R O S and half an E stared up at her from Rose’s sampler.

Had it been finished the sampler would have been pretty, with its design of roses climbing through the letters. Those of the roses which had been sewn were worked in different-coloured pink silks with a knot in their middle to represent the stamens. Some were buds, some in bloom, some about to fall. Whoever had drawn it possessed skill and taste. Matty imagined Hesther bending above her best-loved daughter as they worked at it together.

Below the unfinished letters on the canvas was a suggestion of a tracing in pencil. Matty got to her feet and carried the sampler to the light in the passage. As far as she could make out, the tracing was of a castle with a moat and high hedge.

‘Once upon a time, there lived a king and a queen with a daughter named Briar Rose...’ she remembered the old story well. Matty fingered the silks, a child’s story with an unchildish meaning locked into it. She went back into the attic, looking up at the suspended clock on the wall as she did so. No one would ever kiss Rose into life.

The paradox of the rose. A symbol of division during medieval wars, a symbol of unity for the Tudors. A flower associated with the heart, with supreme spiritual ecstasy, with beauty, with eroticism, with wounds and with healing, with sweetness, with danger – a paradox of innocence and corruption.

Rose’s death, Hesther’s suicide, the discovery of a pink rose growing in Hesther’s garden, Kit’s betrayal, his bringing home of a rose for Matty to plant. The secret locked into the garden.

Outside, the wind continued to shriek around the garden and the house. Matty listened for a minute or two and grew anxious. Carefully, she returned all the objects to the trunk where they belonged. ‘Goodbye, Hesther,’ she said. ‘You have lost your power to disturb me. Goodbye, Rose. I understand now. I shall think of you, but you must go and leave me in peace.’

The lid slid out of her grasp and banged down displacing dust. Startled, Matty swung round, her shadow licking up the wall, and encountered the painted snarl of White Surrey. On impulse she put out a hand and pushed at him. With a creak, the rocking horse subsided, and White Surrey was no longer frightening, only a toy.

Matty swallowed. ‘I lived, Rose. I wish... I wish that you had too.’

She left the attic, and the dust settled after her.

By dusk, Hurricane Betsy had thrown herself at the west coast of England, and was tearing her way through a swathe of felled trees, wrecked buildings and flattened vegetation. A man died as he walked from his farmhouse to the cattlesheds when a tile struck him on the head. Another was hurled against a stone wall and fractured his skull.

Trees toppled like a child’s ninepins: they lay across roads, brought down electricity lines and telephone wires.

As it passed over the Bristol Channel, Hurricane Betsy drew up more energy and gathered force.

Matty called a conference with Tyson, Robbie and Mrs Dawes. Each of them, she said, was responsible for securing various parts of the house: doors, windows, shutters. Also, she asked Tyson, would it be a good idea to get Ned in for the night to help with the horses? Tell him not to worry about Ellen, she said. We can put her up for the night in Mrs Dawes’s wing.

Half an hour later, Tyson rang through on the house telephone from the stables to say that he had Ned, and Ellen was settled. He also said that Ivy Prosser had insisted on coming up to the house for the night, in case ‘madam needs me’.

‘How nice of Ivy,’ said Matty, and wondered with a bitter little
moue
if Ivy would show Daisy the same loyalty. She hoped not.

She lay in bed in a new lace-trimmed nightdress, getting used to its filminess, and listened to the orchestra of sound made by the wind. The creak of wood, the snap of twigs and the rustle of old leaves. The house withstood the force – after all, it had been through it before.

Matty dozed and then slipped into a deep sleep.

She awoke with an unfamiliar light filtering through the curtains, its quality acrid, fluid and ominous. A yellow, flaring light. Matty threw back the covers, and half hopped, half ran to the window.

In the garden the wind was beating the trees into witch-like shapes, and sent a stream of cloud across the black sky. Matty looked over towards the stables, and her hand flew to her mouth in shock. Fire.

She whirled, ripping off her nightdress as she did so. Her hand hovered by the light switch on the wall, and then she remembered in time: don’t touch electricity. She pulled open the wardrobe, fought frantically with the clothes on the hangers, found and dragged on her breeches. Please, God, she breathed as she rammed a navy wool jersey over her bare breasts. Please, God.

Summer was sliding over Antibes, and the evening was warm and restless. A wind had sprung up – scion of the gale that was battering Grande Bretagne, they said in the bars. Gouts of dust swirled in from the
maquis
countryside lapping the town, bringing with them the scent of herbs and pine. Windows rattled, shutters banged and the debris in the gutters lifted.

The Dion slid to a halt in front of the convent. Kit got out and went round to the passenger door.

‘
Je ne vous fais pas attendre très longtemps,
’ he said to the nursemaid sitting in the passenger seat. Young, and more than a little nervous in a wilting starched collar, old-fashioned hat and linen coat designed expressly to conceal the female form, the girl nodded and fiddled with the buttons on her gloves.

This time when Kit knocked at the wooden door it swung open at once to reveal the hushed corridor beyond.

‘Monsieur Dysart. If you would step inside.’

Ushered firmly, but politely, into the portress’s room, and no further, where there was a table and a chair, Kit understood he had sinned too greatly to be shown into the Mother Superior’s cell. On the table, papers had been arranged in front of an inkstand. A nun, face sculpted by time and prayer, was waiting under the window. As Kit entered, she stepped forward.

‘Monsieur Dysart. I am deputed by the Mother Superior to act for her in this matter. If you would read the papers before signing them, please. They are to witness that you consent to take the child, that the mother also consents...’ The nun paused, and Kit imagined that she was forcing the words over her tongue. ‘That you do so in the capacity of the father of the child.’ She spoke good, fluent English.

Kit smiled his uneven smile at the face which had retreated so far into holiness that it did not belong in the living world. ‘I’m sorry, Sister. You must find this difficult.’ For a second the nun’s expression almost yielded to Kit’s charm and to his entreaty, and then it hardened.

‘You are wrong, Monsieur. I do not find it difficult, only sad for the child.’

‘I understand, Sister,’ he said gently. ‘This must be distasteful for you, but could I ask you to do something for me?’ He waited until the nun gave an infinitesimal nod. ‘This concerns Miss Chudleigh’s future plans. She will be staying in France for a little while and I have bought a small villa at the Cap for her use. The papers are being finalized at the moment in her name. Would you please tell her that the
notaires
will call on her as soon as it is considered wise, and that she may move in at the first opportunity. Tell her also that I have contacted Miss Annabel Morely who is travelling over with Mrs Chudleigh, her mother. I thought she would like to know. Miss Morely is a very close friend.’