Bridesmaids Revisited (27 page)

It wasn’t an easy task, even accustomed as I was to moving around furniture at Merlin’s Court, but I had just finished the job and was standing panting in the archway between the bathroom and the bedroom when I heard a tap at the door. Before I could squeeze out enough breath to ask who was there, Rosemary came in.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” she said without preamble.

“All right.” I looked around for something to cosh her with if she got too close.

“I’m sure that when you saw Richard Barttle this morning he gave you Sophia’s diary.” She stood with her arms at her sides. And it struck me that she looked like a headmistress immune to understanding how anyone could hate gym while at the same time resembling a defensive schoolgirl. “He’ll have given you the details of when I took it to him.”

I waited for her to demand that I fetch it and hand it to her, but instead she sat down on the edge of the bed and looked up at me through those rimless octagonal glasses of hers, with bleary eyes. Then she said something that I found puzzling: “I’d hoped that in taking it to Mina I’d be making some small reparation for destroying her mother’s life.” She continued, “I didn’t know what was in the diary. Jane and Thora agreed with me that we had no right to pry into Sophia’s private thoughts even at that late date.”

“Really?” I continued standing in the archway.

“We didn’t know that she’d ever kept a diary. She’d never seemed much of a girl for writing. Except when it came to her letters to Hawthorn. And she once told me laughingly that he complained they were too short. She said she could put her thoughts down far better in her drawing and painting than she ever could in words.”

“So you telephoned my mother at our flat to ask her to meet you at Kings Cross?”

“She suggested the place. I don’t think she wanted to spend much time with me. Not because she disliked me, at least I don’t think so. It was more, I think, that she didn’t want to be reminded of the Old Rectory. But she did say that she would like the diary. And in addition to giving it to her I wanted to tell her the whole story. But I didn’t say anything about that to Thora and Jane. They were against my taking the diary in the first place. They thought it might contain information that would be upsetting to Mina. Things about the way her father had treated her mother. But my belief was that she already knew what sort of a man he was and it couldn’t make too much difference under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

Rosemary didn’t appear to hear me. “Looking back I realize it was a mistake and that I was acting out of my own selfish compulsion to lift the burden that had haunted me through the years and still does. That’s why I was of two minds about having you here. Part of me dreaded the idea, the rest hoped that at long last I could make some sort of amends.”

“How?” I asked, while telling myself that I mustn’t allow myself to be taken in by her pitiful demeanor.

“By telling you what I intended to tell Mina. That she wasn’t William Fitzsimons’s daughter. She was Hawthorn Lane’s child. Sophia didn’t tell me, and I’m sure she didn’t know she was pregnant when she married William. If she’d had even a suspicion she would never have gone through with it. And I never heard from her after she left for the Belgian Congo. I told you she wasn’t one to write, but I don’t think she would have kept in touch anyway, not with me. It was William who told me Mina wasn’t his daughter, she’d been born barely seven months after the wedding, and that was the reason he did not intend to leave her the house.”

“You never said a word about this to my mother when she brought me here that day?”

Rosemary shook her head. “I’d lived so long trying to block out all memories of Sophia, which is undoubtedly why I suffered a severe nervous breakdown that forced me to give up my job. But when I found the diary it seemed like a sign from Sophia, as if she were reaching out to me from beyond the grave. And I had the same sort of feeling when this business with Hawthorn—Sir Clifford—came up. I would have sold out to him if it hadn’t been that I would have been letting down the other villagers, when here was my opportunity to try and do something decent. There was also the fact that I’d have had to explain to Thora and Jane why I was willing to give in without a fight. They never knew, you see, about the role I’d played in persuading Sophia that she had killed her father.”

“And what role was that?” I no longer felt chilled. I was numb.

“Thora was right.” Rosemary hadn’t shifted her position. “At first Sophia wasn’t convinced he had died because she’d put those sleeping tablets in his tea. Even though she had doubled the dose. But she was in a very agitated state of mind. She had been through so much in recent weeks and had such conflicting feelings about her father. He wasn’t an ogre. He could be very kind, as he and Aunt Agatha both were in allowing me to live here while I was in training at the chemist’s. Sophia wanted to put her mind at rest by talking to the doctor and telling him what she had done. Just so she wouldn’t always wonder about it. She told me what she was going to do. With our being cousins she was closer to me than she was to Thora or Jane. Until that moment I hadn’t known anything about what she had been up to. Not even that she had been slipping out on Sunday afternoons to meet Hawthorn. I was usually away from the house at those times playing tennis, sometimes with Thora and Jane if they were down for the weekend but more often with Richard Barttle. I had rather a crush on him. No, that’s not strong enough—I was in love with him, or thought I was, not realizing he couldn’t reciprocate. When Sophia confided in me on the evening of her father’s death, it came as a dreadful shock—the part about her planning to talk to Dr. Gibson. Because she also told me that he hadn’t refilled her mother’s prescription. And, as she had known I also occasionally took a sleeping tablet, she had taken the tablets for her father the last couple of times from the bottle in my room.

“What she didn’t know was that I didn’t have a prescription for them. I’d been feeling depressed for months over Richard’s not showing any romantic interest, so I’d gone to see Dr. Gibson and told him I wasn’t sleeping. But he said that all I needed was to get plenty of exercise and drink a cup of hot milk at bedtime. So I took some from work. Just a few at a time, so I wouldn’t get caught, at least that’s what I told myself. I couldn’t have got away with it for very long.”

“And you were afraid that if Sophia told Dr. Gibson she had used your tablets you would find yourself in terrible trouble,” I said.

“At the very least”—Rosemary sat rubbing her arms—“I would never have been allowed to work as a dispenser again. My parents would have to be told, but it was worse than that. At that moment when I was talking with Sophia I really thought I would be sent to prison. I was afraid that if I asked her not to go to Dr. Gibson’s on my account she might refuse, saying that I was exaggerating the possible consequences to myself. And wasn’t it every bit as important that she not have to go through life wondering if she had contributed to her father’s death? I felt I couldn’t risk telling her the truth, so I said that my sleeping tablets weren’t the same as her mother’s. They couldn’t be taken by anyone with the least possibility of a bad heart, so were only prescribed for young people. And seeing that Dr. Gibson hadn’t even suggested a postmortem, he must have believed from examining her father on prior occasions that there was a heart problem.”

“How did Sophia react?”

“She became hysterical. She said she would never forgive herself. That there was nothing she could ever do to make up for his death. And if what she had done were to come out and she were charged with his murder, it would kill her mother. So I told her that the only way that was likely to happen was if people began talking about how his dying so suddenly had solved the problem of her being forced to marry William. And how very convenient that was. Making it highly possible that in a matter of time someone would be suggesting his body be exhumed.”

“Which you didn’t want to happen for your own sake.” I wasn’t allowing myself to think. I couldn’t let myself feel sorry for her or to blame the doctor for not providing her with the help that would have averted the tragedy.

“So now I’ve told you.” Rosemary stood up. “I should feel better, but I don’t. Sophia’s dead and Mina’s dead. And I killed them both. Because if your mother hadn’t been on her way to meet me she wouldn’t have fallen down those steps. I heard someone who had been on the scene right after the accident talking about how she’d heard your mother—she called her ‘that poor woman who broke her leg’—say that somebody pushed her just as she reached the top of the underground steps. And for a while I had an awful feeling that someone had done it on purpose. I don’t know why I felt so sure about that. Or felt compelled to take the diary to Richard and ask him to keep it hidden. It must have been my illness. I had another breakdown. That’s why Thora and Jane didn’t go to the funeral. They were afraid to leave me. I’m so sorry for it all, Ellie, and I don’t ask you to forgive me.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I said. I believed her. I couldn’t at that moment think of any reason for her to make up such a harrowing story. I might even have gone back to believing that my mother’s death had been accidental and that Reverend McNair had really died from heart problems, if it hadn’t been for the frightening events of the past two days.

“What are you going to do, Ellie?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. But I did. I was going to see my grandfather, Sir Clifford Heath, and give him Sophia’s diary. Because if Richard Barttle, who had been her dear friend, hadn’t been able to find anything revealing within its pages, it was unlikely I would either. But the man who had loved her might.

When Rosemary left without either of us saying another word, I locked the door and leaned against it for several moments until my thoughts stopped whirling and settled in a ball in the middle of my stomach. I should leave this madhouse right now. All I had to do was throw everything back into my suitcase. I didn’t even have to take the staircase down to the hall and risk being heard by someone lying awake and alert in her bedroom. I could use the one that descended from the blanket chest.

This meant heaving the trunk back onto the floor. But five minutes later I had my raincoat on over the green dress that now looked and felt as though I had slept in it for days, its having creased every bit as successfully as the saleswoman had promised me it would. And with handbag and case in hand was making my cautious way down those rough-hewn steps. All I needed was to trip and be found helpless and just waiting to be finished off at the bottom. When I looked down, my eyes had spots in front of them. Tiny, pastel-colored ... confetti-sized ones. I hadn’t noticed them on my previous venture into the cellar. I had been thinking only that I had discovered how the nocturnal visitor had got into my room. My earlier fright had been blocked from my mind.

Now I shivered and with each step remembered the scent of orange blossom while my heart thudded out the tune to “Here Comes the Bride.” I pictured, in the black and white of the photographs hanging on the walls of Richard Barttle and Arthur Henshaw’s studio, my ill-wisher squinting through the partially raised lid of the blanket chest to make sure no one was in the room, before tiptoeing to the door, opening it a crack, and chanting that twisted version of the song.

But what if one or more of the bridesmaids had come upstairs with me and seen the confetti sprinkled in that trail across the landing? The orange blossom could have been explained away as air freshener. Hadn’t Jane said she had smelled it on several occasions? The rest wouldn’t have been so easy to dismiss. Had someone deliberately created her emanations, as she called them? So that if need be it would be thought that Jane was so determined to believe in her fantasies for the sake of the drama it added to her life that she was prepared to bring them to life?

I had reached the bottom steps. If Jane along with Rosemary was in the clear, that left Thora. The woman who might not have needed to come up with a supply of powdered sleeping tablets to dose Reverend McNair’s cherry brandy because she already knew her plants and herbs so well.

I was now in the dank-smelling cellar. In addition to the electric light coming down from my bedroom there was some of the natural sort sifting in through the narrow window set in the front wall of the house. But even though it was a large space and empty, with not so much as a broom handle to hide behind, I kept glancing over my shoulder, expecting a figure to rise up larger than life and prevent my reaching the door. Or that I would find it locked this time and the key still gone. Neither of these terrors came to pass and I sped along the path that led through the vine-covered archway into the front garden and out through the gate to where my car was parked at the curb.

I set the suitcase down and was wondering, between panting breaths, if Tom and his wife would be particularly chuffed when I knocked on their door at this late hour. To ask for the return of the box containing the diary and the photograph of the Old Mill. I had to fish deep in my handbag for my keys, and the moment I had them in my hand I dropped them. When bending to pick them up, I saw that both the front and the back tires were completely flat. It was a pointless exercise, but I went round to check the other side. Those two were fine. But I knew I wasn’t going anywhere tonight unless I walked to the closest railway station, which was undoubtedly miles from Knells. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was going on ten—no buses would be running at this hour. Not in such a small village. It didn’t make sense, I thought as I picked up my suitcase and crept back around the house and reentered the cellar. Why would the person who was so anxious to get rid of me make it impossible for me to drive away in my car? Standing in the doorway I stared back over my shoulder towards the garden shed and the tree that overhung it, and remembered the shadowy figure of a man who might have been Leonard that I had glimpsed when I closed the curtains last night. I went back up the stone steps.

When I had returned the trunk, hardly aware of its weight this time, onto the lid of the blanket chest and locked the bedroom door, I lay down, still in my raincoat, on top of the patchwork quilt. I didn’t want to risk getting too warm and comfortable in case I fell into a deep sleep. I couldn’t banish the fear that even with the precautions I had taken my fiendish aggressor would find some Houdini-like means of gaining entry and I would wake up dead, as Mrs. Malloy might have put it.