Daughter of Dark River Farm (20 page)

When I awoke again Lawrence had gone. I found Evie sitting alone in the library, a note crumpled on the table beside her. ‘He left in the middle of the night. I convinced him to get a few hours’ sleep, and he promised he would, just so I would go to bed. Then he…just left.’

‘He probably hates goodbyes,’ I said, feeling an emptiness that surprised me; we got along well, but after all we’d only known each other a week. ‘I would have liked the chance to see him away.’

She nodded. ‘Well, he writes often, so I’m sure we’ll hear from him soon, and then we can give him a sound telling-off for sneaking away like that.’

‘Your mother must be beside herself. And how is Will today?’

‘He’s awfully fed up. I keep nagging at him to lie still, and he’s just not used to it. She swallowed hard, and in her face I saw the battle she fought day after day. ‘I sometimes feel like forcing him to take that blessed morphine,’ she admitted. ‘But at the same time I know why he doesn’t, and it… Oh, Kitty, if it were possible to love him more, I would now.’

‘He’ll never turn into what Colonel Drewe became,’ I said softly. ‘It’s just not in him.’

‘But he sees my fear of it,’ Evie said. ‘And he won’t risk it.’

‘He’s a very courageous man,’ I said, and she gave me a distracted smile, her mind on her husband, and his struggle towards recovery without pain relief.

I couldn’t bear to see her distraught, and shifted the subject slightly. ‘Has he got something to read?’

‘One or two things.’ Her smile became more natural then. ‘I daren’t give him any of our really valuable books. He’s more likely to rip the pages out and re-create the Taj Mahal. Oh!’ She remembered something, and went to a bureau in the corner of the room. ‘Remember I showed you that stall, where I bought my wedding gown material?’

‘Yes. I’d love to see the dress itself, if you have time?’

‘It’s packed away, but this is what I was going to show you,’ she pulled out a book of photographs, and flicked through the heavy pages for a moment. ‘Here. Our wedding day.’

There were only three photographs. One wasn’t fixed properly, and slid out as I lifted the tissue paper away, and Evie caught it before it fell to the floor. She passed it to me, and I caught my breath.

‘Evie, it’s beautiful!’

‘
He’s
beautiful,’ she pointed out softly, and I looked again. Although I’d seen him every day for two months, I’d never seen him completely free of pain. In this picture, taken the very day before he’d left England in 1914, he was standing tall and straight beside his new wife, lit with pride, his hair ruffled by the wind and his face unmarked by the experiences that would so soon change him for ever. He was, as she said, beautiful. I looked up in time to see her wipe her eye with the back of her hand.

I looked more closely, trying to pick out the design of her dress, and noticed a rather grey, shabby-looking something, scrunched up at her belt. ‘What’s that?’

She took the picture to see what I was talking about, and smiled. ‘That, young Skittles, is the rose Will made me out of newspaper before the war. The rose I took to Flanders, and the rose that led me to your brother when he was hiding out in Number Twelve and probably saved his life.’ I fought back a familiar pang at the thought of what Oli had gone through, and she saw it.

She touched my hand gently. ‘Do give him my love when you write to him. And let me know how he is when you hear back.’

I nodded, and there was a quiet moment—I don’t know whether Evie’s thoughts were with Will or Oli at that moment, but mine had taken an unexpected turn towards Frank Markham and his daughter. With that turn came a sudden idea that made me sit up very straight, and I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything the door opened and Lily came in, an odd look on her face.

I assumed it was sorrow at the way Lawrence had left, but Evie read the look, accurately, as shock rather than sadness. She led her mother to the biggest of the armchairs and made her sit down, then sat down herself, on the arm. ‘What is it?’ Her voice shook; there were so many things that could put that look on someone’s face nowadays.

‘It’s Samuel Wingfield,’ Lily said, sounding as if her lips were too numb to speak properly. ‘They’ve found his body. In Germany.’

The name rang a faint bell with me, but neither Evie nor her mother wore any hint of grief as their eyes met. Lily still looked stunned, but Evie’s face was carefully expressionless, although I saw her hands wrap around each other on her lap.

‘How did he die?’

Lily blinked and looked away. ‘I, uh, I don’t know. It was a telegram. Matthew is coming to explain.’ She cleared her throat, and stood up, fussily smoothing down her skirt. ‘He’ll be here this afternoon. Evie, call Mrs Cavendish if you would, please? Tell her we’ll be one more for dinner.’

‘Mother,’ Evie rose and stopped Lily as she reached the door. ‘Has this upset you?’

Lily opened and shut her mouth once or twice, then shook her head. ‘You know I have never taken to Samuel,’ she said finally. ‘I despise the man, and always have.’

‘Then why…’ Evie made a vague gesture with her hand, to encompass Lily’s arrival, and her stunned inability to think straight.

‘It’s…I… Evie, he was going to give it back!’

‘What?’ Evie froze, and now her face too was white and shocked-looking.

‘The Kalt…the… He sent me a letter. I agreed to pay him. He was going to give it back,’ she repeated, ‘and now it’s gone for ever.’ I looked from one to the other in slowly dawning realisation. No wonder she had still been so keen to see Lawrence and me together.

‘The diamond?’ I said, just to be sure. They both turned to me with identical looks of surprise that just as quickly melted as they faced one another again. I was effectively shut out, which suited me well for now, but they didn’t ask me to leave.

‘Mother, tell me everything, and then I’ll tell you what I know,’ Evie said, and I could hear her struggling to stay calm.

Lily frowned slightly at that, but returned to her chair, smoothing her dress down almost obsessively as she explained, ‘He wrote to me last year. I’m surprised you didn’t find the letter. It arrived when you were home on leave. I had only just opened it when you came into the morning room.’

A glance at Evie showed startled recollection. ‘I saw you push something away under your blotter. But then the telegram came to say Will had been exonerated, and it completely went out of my mind.’

‘The letter said…it said…’ Lily stopped, her lip trembling too much to continue. I’d never seen her so unsure of herself, and now there were tears at the corners of her eyes too, and Evie was moved to crouch at her knee and take her hand.

‘Just let me read the letter, Mother. We’ll talk later.’

Lily nodded. ‘It’s in my room, in a box at the top of the wardrobe.’ As Evie rose to leave, Lily caught at her arm. ‘I’ll be in the garden, I need some fresh air.’

Evie gestured to me to follow, and together we almost ran upstairs to Lily’s room. I had a moment to appreciate the clean, plain beauty of it, so huge, white and ruffle-free, but with heavy red velvet curtains and a deeply plush carpet of the same colour, and then Evie had pulled down the box from the wardrobe. Together we sat on the bed, and she pulled out an envelope, with Lily’s name printed on it in extremely neat handwriting. She read the letter aloud.

‘ “My dear Lily,

‘ “I find myself in possession of something you misplaced in the first few hours of 1913. I would very much like to return it to you but cannot possibly offer it gratis, and the cost of such a thing might, I understand, be seen as prohibitive. However, I am prepared to wait one full year, in order to allow you time to gather the necessary funds. The return of your lost item will, over time, more than enable you to recoup your losses.

‘ “To assist you in your decision I must tell you I have certain knowledge of your late husband that would, should it be revealed, cause deep concern. Naturally I would hate for anything to come to light that would absolutely and without doubt ruin the Creswells as a family of note, and I trust that you and I will come to some arrangement regarding the aforementioned item, in order to re-establish cordial relations.

‘ “Do not trouble yourself to try and reply. I have not supplied a return address and instead will write to you again in one year with suggested arrangements. Should I receive any unwanted attention in the meantime you must consider this mutually beneficial offer withdrawn, and all my personal goodwill towards the family with it.

‘ “SW” ’

‘What knowledge was he talking about?’ I asked, in a kind of awed horror. If I had hoped for excitement at Oaklands, this was certainly above and beyond my expectations, and far more than I might have wished for. At the same time, fascination had me in its cool, impersonal grip, and I wanted to know everything.

But Evie shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s dead now, and Father’s secret with him. But I suspect we haven’t seen the last of that damnable stone after all, more’s the pity.’

I looked at her for a moment, suspicion dawning at the way she kept her eyes averted. ‘What do you know about this, Evie?’ I kept my voice even, but I heard a firmness in it that surprised us both. She looked at me briefly, then back down at the letter.

‘I know what Samuel’s talking about, and I know who killed him. At least I think I do.’

‘Who?’

‘Uncle Jack.’ For a moment I thought I’d misheard, but a look at her face told me I hadn’t. She looked sickly pale, almost green, and I knew my face would be the same.
Jack?

I cleared my throat, barely trusting myself to speak. ‘But he’s not that… I mean, he’s…’

‘Kind? Dependable?’ Evie said. ‘Honest?’

‘Yes! Like Archie.’

‘He’s all those things, darling, but he’s not like Archie. Not all the way through.’ She closed her eyes and swallowed hard, and her voice trembled when she said, ‘I’ve learned a lot about him in the past year, Kitty.’

‘What things?’

But she shook her head. ‘Not now. The important thing is I trust him, and I love him. Probably more than ever. But I truly believe he killed Samuel Wingfield, and I believe he now has the Kalteng Star.’

I couldn’t take it in. It was too big, too horrific to consider. I concentrated, instead, on what I knew. ‘He went to Germany, right after the trial. Was this the reason?’

She nodded. ‘I overheard him and Lizzy talking about it one night. He’d seen Samuel when he was there last. Lizzy was frightened. She didn’t want him to go, but he insisted. For me. And most of all, I think, for my father. He’d promised to protect our family, and this was his way of doing it.’

‘I saw the tree he planted for your father,’ I ventured, after a little silence. Then I had to ask, ‘Will you tell your mother Samuel’s secret, whatever it is?’

She shook her head. ‘Uncle Jack risked everything to protect it, and my mother.’

‘But don’t you think she has a right to know whatever it is Wingfield was hiding?’ Lawrence’s anguished expression as he’d looked at Will came to mind, and I pressed on. ‘If you know something, surely you ought to tell the person it affects the most?’

‘Not if it’s not going to change anything,’ Evie said, ‘and especially not if it’s just going to cause hurt. There’s enough of that in the world just at the moment, don’t you agree? What would be the use?’

I thought about it; my knowledge of Lawrence’s feelings for Will had not changed them, nor would Will’s or Evie’s. I looked up at her, but she was staring across the room, seeing only she knew what. She was right; what good would it do?

I touched her hand and she came back with a jump. ‘Evie, your mother will be in the garden, waiting for you. Do you want me to come too?’

‘No, I’d like to be alone with her. Perhaps you might go and check on Will? Tell him I won’t be long.’

I knocked at Will’s door, and he sounded alert and cheerful as he called for me to come in. It felt as if I hadn’t smiled for days, but I did so now, at the sight of him propped up against his pillows, looking rested and comfortable.

‘You really are a dreadful layabout,’ I said, sitting down on the bed. ‘Evie just asked me to pop in and let you know she’s talking to her mother, but she won’t be long.’

‘Thank you.’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘A lot better. I’ve been threatened with all sorts of things I shouldn’t trouble a young lady with, if I try and get out of bed without help.’

I laughed. ‘Good!’

‘I gather Lawrence has already left,’ he said. Something about his voice made me look at him sharply, but his face gave nothing away.

‘He went in the middle of the night,’ I said. ‘You’ve been friends quite a while, haven’t you?’

‘Since the day the van went over, I suppose.’

‘He probably thought you were quite worldly. To a young boy, you would be.’

His blue eyes narrowed slightly as he met my deliberately steady gaze. Then he sighed, and I could hear the relief in it. ‘Just don’t say anything to Evie. Please.’

‘So you know then?’

‘I might not be a special kind of genius, but I’m not daft. I’ve seen the way he looks at me sometimes, although I pretend not to.’ Then he added softly, ‘It’s the same way Archie Buchanan looks at you.’

My head jerked as if someone had tugged my hair, and when I looked at Will I saw the gentlest of smiles on his face. ‘We’re not talking about Archie,’ I muttered.

‘Why not? I don’t want to talk about Lawrence. I want to know why you’ve turned Archie down when you clearly love him every bit as deeply as he loves you.’

‘It’s because I do love him.’ I remembered my conversation with Lawrence, and how it had lifted me to be able to speak of my feelings, and I wanted that feeling of relief again, as temporary as it was. So I told Will everything that had weighed my heart down for so long, but this time there was no relief in the words I spoke; each one was a spike in my throat.

‘It matters to me that he has the life he deserves,’ I finished. ‘And he deserves someone he can be proud of.’

‘And it doesn’t matter to you whether he’s happy?’

‘Of course it does!’

‘
You
make him happy, Skittles. I could see it at the farm. We all could.’ He squeezed my hand and made me look at him. ‘Take it from one who knows… You have to grab every chance you can.’