The Misbegotten (29 page)

‘There, then. Go on and take it to him, and mind you hurry back. Good girl.’ She gave Starling a nod and a purse of her lips, which was as close as Bridget generally came to smiling. On light feet, Starling carried on alone.

The bridge marched across the wide span of the River Avon on hefty stone arches. The water was deep and clear; its bed was cloaked with vibrant green weeds which wafted in the current, sheltering trout and perch and other fish. On the far side, coming from Batheaston, there was a toll house where a man with a face full of grog-blossoms sat and sipped brandy all day long, collecting coins from those who wished to cross. Starling hung over the parapet and watched the mill’s huge wheel turning, throwing up jewels of sunlit water and a sodden, river-bottom smell of wood and minerals and muddy life. The slap and splash of it was hypnotic. Starling stared, the sun hot on the back of her head, until Miller Harris popped his head out and shouted at her. She paid him Bridget’s coins and sauntered back over the bridge, stopping on the home side, facing west, to look for fish and throw in a few pebbles from the dusty lane. She almost didn’t see Alice against the blinding brilliance of the sunlit water. Starling shaded her eyes with one hand, and looked again.

The figure was perhaps three hundred feet from the bridge, by the water’s edge where the bank dropped steeply from the meadow. In the dappled shade along the bank it was hard to see her, but Starling was sure it was Alice. Nobody else was so lathy slim, had hair so arrestingly pale, or wore a dress the colour of lavender. Alice was picking her way gingerly along the water line, using the gnarled tree roots as stepping stones and the low branches as handholds. She stopped when she reached one tree, a weeping willow which snagged the shining water with its silvery tendrils. As she stepped beneath its branches, Starling lost sight of her. She moved a little further along the bridge to find a better vantage point, but from no angle could she see through the willow’s draping leaves. Then, a moment later, she saw Alice emerge again, going back along the bank to the spot where she could climb up to the meadow. As she reached open ground, Alice looked around, as if to check for observers. Starling thought about waving to her but something stopped her, and instead she sank a little lower behind the stone parapet.

Starling knew she ought to go back to the farmhouse. Bridget would know she was dawdling, and would want help with the cleaning and their lunch. Alice had been heading that way; Starling could ask her what she’d been doing on the river-bank. A farm wagon pulled by heavy horses came rumbling over the bridge just then, so Starling had to move. But she didn’t go straight home; she climbed over the fence and picked her way down through the trees to the meadow-marsh. The bank dropped four feet straight down to the water’s edge but Starling was bolder and more nimble than Alice. She clambered down through the roots of the weeping willow, grasping at handfuls of snaking, whip-like branches, until her feet landed with a squelch in the mud where the water was lapping.

The tree’s trunk had split into two early in its life; the partition began just a foot or so above the ground. The two parts of it had wrapped around one another, twisting tight together. Its bark was rough but looked as supple as skin; the trunks locked like mighty arms in a perpetual, sinuous embrace. The drooping branches shielded Starling all around, and turned the light a fresh green; it felt private, magical, like a fairy dell. Just above her head, Starling saw a dark crack between the two trunks. Some animal or disease had caused a narrow opening to form, a slight gape between the loving arms. Then Starling saw the carving, just beneath the opening. It was not new; the bark had healed and swollen around the cuts, so that they sat deep in the wood. Six or seven years’ growth at least, Starling estimated, since the cuts were made.
Before I was even here. When I was still . . . wherever I was before.
It was a simple carving: two initials,
J & A.
The middle symbol had been carved with curving flourishes, so that it touched on both of the letters, joining them up. Starling’s heart quickened with some strange emotion. She reached up, and slid her hand into the hollow.

She groped around inside, flinching as she felt an insect hurry away from her intruding fingers. There was a square of folded paper inside, and with her heart bumping even harder, Starling drew it out and opened it. There, in Alice’s neat script, were the words:
Sunday, after church, before noon. My love.
Starling felt a jolt in her stomach, and there seemed to be a little hitch in the world, a little moment in which it stopped turning. She tried to swallow but her throat was dry. She folded the note back up, with fingers that shook, and then hesitated. She’d been about to put it back, but the same impulse that had stopped her waving to Alice now stopped her again. There were times, not many, when Jonathan came to visit the farmhouse with his grandfather; other times when he came to meet Alice and Starling somewhere, and Starling had always known that those meetings were to be kept secret from Bridget and Lord Faukes. Now it seemed that there were other visits, other meetings, of an even more secret kind. So secret that not even Starling could know of them. She sat down on a huge root protruding from the bank, noticing as she did so that the root had been worn smooth and clean by being sat upon many times before. Starling bit her lip in dismay, and with an angry little sound she started to cry.

She hated to cry; she almost never did. There was some latent memory in her, some buried knowledge of pain and fear so great that there had seemed nothing in the world worth crying over since then. But this betrayal cut with a poisoned blade. She wiped at her face and gulped and forced herself to stop. She had been included in their affair in so many ways – in their friendship, even in their letters, though Alice knew nothing of that; to find herself excluded from so much more was intolerable. Little cracks appeared in the very foundations of Starling’s world, and she was suddenly afraid, horribly afraid; as though the cracks might gape open, swallow her down and cast her back to that time before the farmhouse, before Alice. Fear, anger, hurt; they swelled to a crescendo in the few short minutes Starling sat on the root beneath the willow tree. When they receded she felt calmer, and had a strange new hardness in her heart. She stood, and cast the note into the river. The water carried it swiftly away, twirling it, spinning it about. Starling watched until it slid out of sight, then she climbed back out into the sunshine and walked home with no one thought coming clearly to her mind.

Back at the farmhouse, Bridget was putting stuffed apples into the oven, and hardly bothered to scold Starling for taking so long. A look was enough, weary and long-suffering.

‘I’ll fetch some angelica for the custard,’ said Starling.

Alice was in the kitchen garden, sitting on a metal bench surrounded by rosemary and lavender, thyme and bay. She had her legs tucked underneath her and was reading a cloth-bound book of poems. She looked up and smiled as Starling came out to sit with her.

‘And how are you, little sister?’ she said with a smile. The sun made her eyes shine like the river. Starling nodded, and stayed mute. She couldn’t seem to find any words to say. She sat on her hands on the edge of the bench, and kicked her legs back and forth, and could not look at Alice. ‘Starling, what is it? What’s wrong?’ Alice laid down her book and reached out one hand to touch Starling’s arm. For a second, Starling wavered, and felt treacherous tears prickling the top of her nose again. She wanted to demand to know why she had been excluded, not trusted, lied to. But then that new hardness seemed to get in the way. It sat at the top of her chest, like a plug, and stopped the words, the tears, from bubbling out. She glanced over and saw that Alice had kept one finger on the page she’d been reading. Marking it, ready to flip the book open and pick up again, as soon as Starling had stopped bothering her.

‘Nothing,’ she snapped, getting up from the bench. She bent, swiped up a handful of angelica flowers, and turned back to the kitchen door. ‘Bridget needs me.’

Come Sunday the weather turned, bringing a warm, grey drizzle, solid from heaven to horizon as though the clouds had simply lowered themselves to ground level. The three residents of the farmhouse joined the villagers of Bathampton for the Sunday service in the ancient church of St Nicolas, and as they walked back along the canal, Starling watched Alice carefully. There were pink spots in her cheeks, and her eyes were restless; she looked more animated than a person coming from an hour and a half in church should, but there was nothing else to give her away. Had Starling not known otherwise, she would never have guessed her sister had a secret, and this was another betrayal. This Alice seemed an entirely different person to the one in whom secrets fizzed uncontrollably, like the bubbles in beer.

‘Did you hear Mrs Littlewood, calling us
the three birds from the hen house
?’ she asked.

‘Pay her no mind, Starling. She’s a common scold, that one,’ said Bridget.

‘What does it mean, though?’ Starling pressed.

‘It means we haven’t a man about the place, and it means she envies us, for she has Mr Littlewood to deal with and we all know what type of man
he
is,’ Bridget muttered. Alice made no comment. The wet day made their hair and clothes hang limply. Alice had chosen a time when Starling and Bridget would be busy, preparing the Sunday meal. A time when she could slip away unnoticed, to walk or read, as she almost always did. How many of those times in the past, Starling thought now, had Alice in fact been keeping trysts with Jonathan?

As they returned to the house, unbuttoning coats and untying their hats, Alice paused.

‘I might keep mine on, and walk on for a little while,’ she said casually.

‘Oh, can I come? I need to stretch my legs after sitting through that boring service,’ said Starling.

‘For shame, show more respect,’ Bridget admonished her. ‘I think the vicar gave an admirable sermon today . . . mind how you speak on the Lord’s day.’

‘Yes, Bridget. So, can I go with you, Alice? Please?’ Starling looked her straight in the eye, until Alice had to look away.

‘Oh, but you hate the rain, dearest,’ she said vaguely. ‘And Bridget should not be all alone with so much work to be done.’

‘It’s not really raining . . . and you’re only going a little way, you said.’

‘I think . . .’ Alice paused, fiddled with the front of her coat. ‘I think you should be kind, and stay to help Bridget. I shan’t be long.’ She smiled sweetly enough at them, and then turned and wandered away without another word, pausing to wave from the gate.

‘Mind you don’t get soaked through, if the rain gets worse,’ Bridget called after her.

‘Or if it does, be sure to shelter under a tree!’ Starling added, and had the unhappy satisfaction of seeing Alice’s smile flicker.

Alice came back an hour later, damp, bedraggled and forlorn. Her hem was muddied and her face wore open disappointment, and at once Starling felt guilty to have made her sad. She thought of the little note, sailing heedlessly downstream towards Bath. ‘Didn’t you enjoy your walk?’ she asked, and though she tried to sound easy, her voice was tight and wobbled slightly. Alice looked at her strangely.

‘I enjoyed it well enough. The weather is perhaps . . . not the best,’ Alice replied. Bridget grunted.

‘Well, it weren’t the best when you set out, so there’s no shock in that,’ she said, with a slight roll of her eyes.

‘Indeed,’ said Alice, with a small, strained laugh.

‘Did you have to shelter under a tree?’ Starling asked, and again that tightness was in her voice. Alice walked to the far side of the room and beckoned Starling over while Bridget’s eyes were on the stove.

‘You left your footprints in the mud, dearest,’ she whispered, and Starling’s guilty heart jumped into her throat.

‘What do you mean? What mud? I never—’ She broke off under Alice’s steady, sad scrutiny.

‘He did not come. I shan’t see him now for weeks; he will be going to war soon and must stay with his company,’ she said. Starling squirmed away from her blue eyes, from the hurt look in them. ‘Starling, did you take my note?’ she whispered. Starling said nothing; she only hung her head, shamefaced. Alice took a deep, unsteady breath. ‘I know . . . I know why you might be angry with me,’ she went on. ‘I can explain why we had to keep everything secret, but not here, and not right now . . .’

‘I . . . I don’t know anything about a note.’

‘Starling, please. Don’t lie.’ Alice spoke so softly, so sweetly, that Starling could hardly bear it. She thought of the lies Alice had told to her – lies of omission, lies of secrecy; all the years that had passed since she and Jonathan had carved their initials into the tree; all the times they had met, and kept it from her. Had kept their love – a special, better love – only for each other. She was so angry, so ashamed, it caused a pressure to build in the hard place inside her, as if the plug would not hold, and something would force its way out.

‘It’s not me who’s the liar!’ she cried, and Alice blinked in shock. Bridget looked up from the far end of the room.

‘What’s that? What are you two conspiring over, eh?’ she called. Starling wheeled to face her, feeling off balance, almost frantic. She felt Alice’s hand on her arm.

‘Please, don’t say anything!’ Alice hissed. Her eyes were full of fear, and though Starling quailed, she could not stop herself.

‘Alice has been meeting with Jonathan in secret! They’re lovers! But he is engaged to Beatrice Fallonbrooke!’ she blurted out. In the corner of her eye she saw Alice’s hands fly to her mouth, her eyes going wide in horror. Bridget dropped her wooden spoon with a clatter, and stared at Alice with a terrible expression. Silence fell in the kitchen, and in it Starling was sure she could hear the cracks at her feet, the cracks in the world, opening even wider.

Rachel was ushered in to her next appointment with Jonathan Alleyn so quickly that she was still out of breath from the long climb up to Lansdown Crescent. The grassy slope in front of the buildings was still crisp and grey with frost where it sank into a shaded hollow; the sky was flat white with cloud, giving no clue as to where the sun might be. There was no breath of a breeze. Mrs Alleyn greeted Rachel at the foot of the stairs, as the butler took her hat, gloves and pelisse from her, and she smoothed the front of her dress. There was that same awkwardness between them, which Rachel was sure they both felt – of her being not quite a guest, not quite a servant. Neither one knew quite how to behave, nor was Rachel ever sure of the reception she would be given. The older woman was by turns warm then cold, stiff then easy, sharp then distant. Impossible to know.