In Pale Battalions (39 page)

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We had returned to the Bishop’s Palace and were standing by the low wall skirting the moat, gazing at the mottled reflections in the water of the palace walls and the trees beyond. Willis had finished his story, yet my thoughts remained trapped within it. Should I have been happy that my parents had been shown to be the faithful, loving people I had always wanted to believe?—or sad that fate and its sundry human instruments had laid waste their lives and for so long crippled my own? I could not tell. There was no answer in the face of the grim, surviving witness who stood beside me, nor consolation in the placid, slowly rippling water.

Willis had answered all the questions that had dogged my childhood: the identity of the pretty lady, the whereabouts of my mother’s grave, the full story of the Meongate murder. He had given me back a real father and a loyal mother. He had exposed Olivia’s lies. Yet it wasn’t enough.

I felt disabled by his story, somehow paralysed, incapable of an ordered response. I had always wanted to believe that Captain the Honourable John Hallows was my father and Willis had assured me that he was. Yet the image of him as the unstained, incorruptible war hero was gone in return. To discover the real man behind a carved, respected name is, as I should have known, to view a flawed soul. And my mother? Acquitted at last of every one of Olivia’s accusations, she had deserved and rewarded my love. Yet she was not the pretty lady I had waved goodbye to at Droxford railway station.

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“Payne told me you’d grown up at Meongate,” Willis said at last. “I don’t understand why. I can’t believe Grace Fotheringham would have abandoned you. So why did the Powerstocks take you back?”

It was true: the stone never stopped rolling. In dispelling one mystery, Willis had created another. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I have no certain memory of Miss Fotheringham at all. I have no memory of a time when I wasn’t at Meongate.” “She was never mentioned?”

“Never. Nor was I ever told where my mother was buried.

Olivia saw to it that the disgrace of my supposed illegitimacy was never forgotten.”

“She would have seen to it that nobody’s sins were forgotten—except her own.”

“You hated her?”

“Oh yes. But my hatred rewarded her. She preferred it to indifference—even to worship, I suspect. She was . . .”

“An evil woman?”

“Perhaps. But you are better placed to judge her than I am.”

“I have no fond memories of her, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yet she took you in. She cared for you even after your grandfather’s death.”

“Technically, yes. But if you knew the kind of life I endured at her hands, you wouldn’t think taking me in was anything other than an act of cruelty.”

He swung round to look at me, suddenly disturbed; moved, it seemed, by my last remark more than he had been by his own story.

“I would like to hear of it, Leonora.” He pulled himself up and looked back towards the moat. “If I may call you Leonora.”

“Of course.”

“Well then, if you can bear to speak of it, I would like to hear your story.”

Only the extent and candour of his own account can explain my willingness, indeed my desire, to tell him of my life. I had previously told nobody other than Tony as much as I told John Willis, the passing stranger, that afternoon in Wells. One secret, of course, I withheld from him as I had from my husband: my part in Sidney Payne’s death. Otherwise, all the griefs and traumas of my years at Meongate tumbled into words as we walked and talked together.

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By the time I’d finished, we were at Priory Road railway station; Willis was about to take his leave. He’d collected his bag from the Red Lion and walked with me through the crowded streets. The station itself was full of schoolchildren, capering and calling in the afternoon sunshine. We went to the far end of the platform, sat on a bench, and waited for the next train to Witham. There, I knew, he would join a main-line train, but, incredibly, I’d not thought to ask where his journey would end.

Willis himself was strangely silent. My story seemed to leave him as uncertain of response as his own had me. I looked at him, sitting erect beside me on the slatted bench, and struggled to see him for the two men he was: the young, sensitive, courageously confused officer plunged into the treacherous currents of life at wartime Meongate—and the old, lean, anonymous man in gabar-dine and battered trilby, struggling against the habits of ingrained solitude to pay his due to a dead friend’s only daughter.

“My parents have always been strangers to me, Mr. Willis,” I said at length. “It is the penalty of being an orphan. I never thought I would come to know them. Yet now, in a sense, you have brought them to me.”

“Only their story,” he said in a voice husky from long silence.

“Only the truth their daughter had a right to know.”

“Why did you wait so long?”

His reply seemed strangely defensive. “Without that notice of Lady Powerstock’s death, I wouldn’t have known how to contact you.”

“Yet surely you assumed Miss Fotheringham had adopted me.”

“Then let’s just say the notice pricked my conscience. The more so when Payne told me you were Olivia’s ward. It made no sense. It still makes none. For that I’m truly sorry.”

“It’s hardly your fault.”

“Your father died for me, Leonora. I could have tried to ensure his daughter was properly cared for. I simply assumed it could be left to Grace.” He smiled grimly. “No pun intended.”

“I don’t think you need feel guilty. I don’t resent your acceptance of my father’s offer. I believe he owed it to you. I’m glad he honoured the debt. It was a noble act.”

Willis swallowed hard. “We owed each other . . . more than I can say.”

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“Did you believe what he said about not killing Mompesson?” I was giving voice to a secret hope. I wanted to believe my father really had slain his enemy.

Willis’s reply was uncompromising. “Yes. I do.”

“He may have said it to make it easier for you to accept his offer.”

“I’m sorry, Leonora. He was telling the truth.”

“But if he didn’t do it, who did? Who could have?”

“That’s one question I can’t answer.” He looked up. “Here’s my train.”

I hadn’t noticed the train approach and, now, as it drew in, I realized for the first time that Willis really was about to leave me.

My messenger from nowhere was about to return to his element.

“You’ve told me nothing about the life you’ve led since 1917,” I said in a rush, sensing it was already too late to hope that he would.

“There’s nothing to say,” he replied. The train drew to a halt.

He rose and picked up his bag.

“Where will you go now?”

“Home. If you can call it that. You won’t hear from me again.”

“Why not? I’d like to.”

“Now you know the truth, it’s best forgotten. And so am I.” He held out his hand. My own felt lost when clasped in his large palm.

He shook it once, then nodded and turned to climb aboard the train.

I stepped forward and held the door open behind him.

“There’s so much more I’d like to ask you.”

“And there’s more I’d like to tell you,” he replied, looking back,

“but I’ve said enough. You have a husband and two children waiting at home for you. Their happiness is more important than my tired recollections of sadder times.”

“I wish you could meet them.”

“It’s better that I shouldn’t. If I were you, I wouldn’t burden them with my story. Goodbye, Leonora. Go home. Be happy. Forget me.”

“How can I?”

“You will.”

I released the door and he slammed it shut. A whistle sounded behind me. I raised my hand and he touched his hat. Then the train began to move. He didn’t lean out the window, so the last I saw of

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him was a thin, refracted shape obscured by sunlight on dirty glass and the lurching, narrowing angle of the train. I followed it as far as the end of the platform, watched it fade rapidly from view, recalled that other train—that other parting—more than thirty years before, and when the dwindling shape had become a smoking speck and finally vanished, I realized how, for all he had confided in me, he had, at the last, still succeeded in eluding me.

What had he done, where and who had he been since walking away from my father that April morning in 1917? Why had he waited till now to see me? Was it that he could not do so till Olivia was dead? If so, was the reason connected with her decision to take me away from Grace Fotheringham? What had she hoped to gain by it? If John Willis knew the answers, it was too late to glean them from him.

I remember speaking to the man on the ticket barrier as I left, asking him what train the Witham service connected with.

“Anything on the main line, missus. One way as far as Penzance.

The other to London and beyond.”

“The man I came on with earlier: you clipped his return ticket.

Did you happen to notice where he was going?”

But he couldn’t remember Willis, far less his destination.

“Don’t
you
know?” he said. And, of course, I didn’t.

As I walked slowly home, I realized how absurd it would sound if I related Willis’s story to Tony, then admitted that I’d not only kept his first visit secret but also had no way of contacting him again: no proof, if it came to it, that he was not a figment of my imagination.

When I turned into Ash Lane, I suddenly thought how acute Willis’s advice had been. In a sense, I did just want to go home and forget him. Had he come to me ten years before, it would have been different, but the truth he’d brought now seemed somehow redun-dant in my ordered, settled life, far as it was from Meongate and all that had happened there. If I told Tony that I wasn’t illegitimate after all, he might try to re-open the whole question of my claim on Olivia’s estate, whereas I still wanted nothing of Meongate, no inheritance, however meagre, to suggest that I was beholden to the woman who’d tried to take my father from me. It was enough for me to know now that I truly was Captain Hallows’s daughter. Yet I 266

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had no way of proving it. Indeed, to convince others, I would have had to expose him as a deserter. That was a secret I was happy, even proud, to keep.

So it was simpler to tell Tony nothing, safer to trust no one but myself with my new-found knowledge. Eight years of marriage had not entirely dispelled the secrecy of my youth. When I did act, it was cautiously.

The following weekend, I told Tony I was thinking of spending a day in London; shopping trips to town were a periodic treat in which he was happy to indulge me. Early on Wednesday morning, the tenth of June, I set off.

But I didn’t go to London. I got off the train at Westbury and boarded one for Portsmouth. There I took the ferry to the Isle of Wight and another train, across the island, to Ventnor, retracing Franklin’s journey of thirty-seven years before.

At Bonchurch, I found what I was looking for: a small, plain, white gravestone simply inscribed. LEONORA MAY HALLOWS, 1891–1917. The question Olivia had forbidden me to ask was answered at last. I filled the vase with water and left the flowers that I’d brought.

I sat in the churchyard for nearly an hour, wondering whether, one day, I would take you to see your grandmother’s grave. Yet how could I? To reveal one part of Willis’s story was to reveal all.

And I already knew I wasn’t equal to that. So I mourned my mother alone. I suppose, in my heart, I also wanted, now that I had something of her at last, to keep it to myself, to preserve her memory as my personal secret. I placed a standing order with a florist in Ventnor to replenish the vase regularly and have renewed it annu-ally ever since. If we went to Bonchurch now, we would find fresh flowers on her grave. And we will go there—for now we can.

I left the churchyard reluctantly, knowing I had other business in Bonchurch.

Sea Thrift was much as it had been described to me. I entered nervously, wondering if, by any chance, Grace Fotheringham still lived there, if this was the moment when I would see again my pretty lady of long ago.

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But it was not to be. A querulous, liver-spotted little man answered the door. He assured me that the name Fotheringham meant nothing to him. My inquiry seemed to irritate him.

“She lived here during the First World War,” I said.

“I can’t help you. My wife and I bought this house seven years ago—from a Mr. Buller.”

“She was a schoolteacher.”

“Mr. Buller was a dentist.”

“At East Dene College.”

“Never heard of it.”

I asked at the post office. There too the name Fotheringham rang no bells. But when I mentioned the college, it was a different matter.

“Closed in ’39,” the man behind the counter said, scooping ice cream from a pail for the cornet I’d felt obliged to order.

“Then nobody would remember somebody who taught there?”

“You could try Miss Gill. She was on the staff. Still lives in the village.”

He gave me the address: a crooked-roofed cottage perched on the wooded slope above the church. Miss Gill, a stout, panting, bustling lady, received me in her musty conservatory, where she was dispensing seed to a caged colony of song-birds.

“East Dene? Yes, I taught there for more than thirty years.” She peered at me round the end of a cage. “Are you an old girl? What did you say your name was?”

“Galloway. And no, I never went there. I’m trying to trace somebody who taught there. A Miss Fotheringham—during the First World War.”

“Fotheringham?” She rattled the bars of a cage. “Don’t squabble! There’s plenty for everyone. Fotheringham, you say? Ah yes—