Island of Bones (11 page)

‘It fell all the way to the bottom of the tower. I found it there on my first exploration of this place. The arms are broken, but the sun face is still there.’

Harriet nodded.

‘You are nervous of heights, Mrs Westerman?’ He had come through the doorway and was now leaning casually on one of the merlons.

‘It varies, Felix. Sometimes I am bold, at others my balance appears to fail me.’

He stared down gloomily over the wall. Harriet gripped the stone behind her.

‘You don’t feel the temptation to throw yourself into the void then?’ he said, without looking at her.

‘No, I do not,’ she said as firmly as she could. ‘Only a little weakness.’ With great effort she turned herself to look at the view. A falling run of trees, a glimmer of lake and the crags beyond. She felt her knees shake and her hands were white on the stonework.

‘A little weakness . . .’ His voice was soft. ‘What do you conclude from the snuffbox, Mrs Westerman? Do you think my grandfather was involved in the disposal of the body? What do you think you will learn from that poor mangled corpse?’

She looked round quickly and the world lurched a little. He was gazing directly at her.

‘It is impossible to say. I think that is a matter best discussed with Crowther, Felix. When he is ready to tell you something, he shall. Or he will inform your mother and you shall hear of it through her.’ He crossed easily towards her and stood rather close; she felt him examining her and the effect the height was having on her. ‘The view is charming,’ she said, ‘but this weakness has me today. Will you give me your arm, and help me down, Felix?’

His eyes were resting on her white fingers. ‘Do you think you have found new mysteries, Mrs Westerman? Are you and my uncle going to
bring some new scandal to light, to taint our family name still further? It seems hardly fair that you should know so much of our business before my mother and I. One day I shall be Lord Keswick, you know.’ He was very close to her now, and his gaze moved slowly over her face and form. ‘Unless my uncle marries a woman who could bear him a son. Then I should be lost. It would be dreadful to be lost.’

Harriet gritted her teeth, released her grip on the stonework and forced herself to take a step forward, making him move out of her way.

‘If you shall not give me your arm, I shall walk unaided.’ She stepped towards the doorway, hoping the trembling that seemed to run up and down her limbs was invisible to him. As her hand touched the stone doorframe she heard him laugh. He took hold of her elbow again and spoke in his usual easy tone.

‘No, I shall certainly be your staff and rod, Mrs Westerman. I am sure my uncle will tell us all in due course.’

She hesitated, but looking into the gloom of the staircase allowed him to take her arm, and with one hand on the central column began to walk down at his side. Going down was far more uncomfortable than climbing, but Felix began to chatter happily about his hunting in a boastful, boyish manner. The memory of his closeness on the roof began to seem less threatening as they descended, but she kept the memory of his words, and turned them over like coloured stones in her mind as he rattled on.

Breakfast at Silverside was an informal meal. The household helped themselves from the warming platters to local bacon and good coffee from the tall silver pot. Mrs Briggs did no more than greet her guests before disappearing into the house to review the arrangements for her garden party. The Vizegräfin took her breakfast in her rooms, and Crowther retreated into his newspaper. Stephen and Mr Quince competed in their enthusiasm to be off and exploring. Harriet ate with an appetite that surprised her, and by the time the household had gone their separate ways, the crows and her feeling of weakness on the rooftop seemed more part of her dreams than her reality.

Hetty Briggs was writing at the desk in her bedroom when she heard the door below her open and close, and looked out to see Mrs Westerman and Crowther step into the morning air. She liked Mrs Westerman for herself, but also had a sense of fellow-feeling with her. It had taken many years for Mrs Briggs to lose the notion of being an impostor in her own home. She looked at the comfortable and elegant establishment of which she was mistress, and would think of the bare and cold cottage in which she had been raised. People saw her as a curiosity too. She knew the polish she had acquired over the years sometimes came as a shock to those who knew her background and were meeting her for the first time. It made them uneasy, as if their own maid had just married a duke. They expected her to sound like her cook and have the manners of a street-hawker. They would watch her suspiciously, waiting for some sign of her birth to make itself apparent – just as, she supposed, they were always examining Harriet’s cuffs for old bloodstains.

Knowing Mrs Westerman and Crowther were about to begin their examination of the body, she sighed and wished luck to their retreating backs. When the body was found in the tomb on St Herbert’s Island it seemed only right to Mrs Briggs that it should be brought to Silverside Hall, and that when Mr Sturgess and the Vizegräfin had been returned to the shore, she should remain to accompany the bones back across the lake herself. Her boatman returned with linens to lift the fragile remains clear of the tomb, and as she watched her workmen shift the body onto the cloth from its cold dry home, she had felt herself start like an anxious mother. She tried to remember if she had heard the snuffbox fall. It must have been worked loose in the tomb itself as the sheet was passed under the body. She thought of it, the flesh of a man returning to earth under the steady gaze of Falcon Crag, becoming less and less a man, more and more at one with the rotting leaves that lapped about the stone flags, the broken reeds.

There had been a peace to their return across the water. Her boatman at the oars, herself in the prow, the body decently wrapped and laid on a plank in the middle of the boat. She watched Catbells rear up to
greet them in the dusk, the haze above it touched blood-red and purple, the lake gathering and shifting the colours into slate and gold as the boat glided away from the Island of Bones. The boatman had asked her what was to be done further, and she thought at once of the old brewery. Her house had no chapel of its own, but this outhouse had the calm and high windows she felt somehow the corpse must have become accustomed to on St Herbert’s Island. She had closed the door and locked it with her own hands, and promised the body a place in Crosthwaite Church in due course, and wondered what words she would ask to be carved, to mark where it lay. They came to her out of the silence as if spoken by the hills themselves.

‘“For the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost”,’ she said aloud, and the curlew cried out in reply on the fell above her.

She had returned to her house, and as she entered the hall, she smiled at the familiar furnishings, the bright grin of her maid as she took her shawl. She shook the sadness off her shoulders like rainwater, and went to her library to begin her express to Mr Crowther. Let him and his friend see if they could bring this lost man home.

Now she continued her letter to her husband who would be fussing over his vines in the heat of the Portuguese summer. To her description of her new guests, and their thoughts on the snuffbox, she added a description of Harriet’s fan.

My love, the image made me think of nothing so much as dear Casper Grace, though he is no musician, of course. And if Casper wanted he could sleep in a warm bed every night and feast all day. He has the Black Pig, and I know he is well paid for the services he gives to the people, yet he wanders the hills in plain cloth and takes Mr Askew’s pennies for his carvings. I mention it because I have heard rumours that our good Mr Sturgess has had some piece of bad business and that his housekeeper hardly dares ask for further credit from the butcher. Mr Postlethwaite told me even this morning that he has sent both housekeeper and maid away to save on their wages. Do you think we might be able to offer him some assistance without causing him
embarrassment? He has been a good neighbour to us since he arrived. How strange to think a smart gentleman like him rides about on his own horses without the money to buy good meat, while a man who might buy his own house and furnish it sleeps in the old charcoalburners’ lean-tos like a beggar. Do tell me what you think, my dear, in your next. For the moment I shall continue to invite him to our table as often as I can. Now there is Mr Gribben coming up the path to ask me any number of questions on the arrangement of the tables, and Miriam I know has a dozen questions from Cook
.

T
HEY HAD LEFT THE
breakfast room together, and as they stepped out of the house, Harriet thought she felt Crowther flinch at her side. She could see nothing to alarm them, only the broad sweep of the landscape rearing up on the far side of the lake, and the lawn being prepared for the party. A number of trestle tables were being set out, and the large man Harriet recognised as the coachman of Silverside was setting up an archery target by the lake. ‘What is it, Crowther?’

‘Nothing,’ he said with a frown, but then lifted his cane to point towards a place on the flank of the far hills. ‘Only, when I was a boy there were woods there. Great oaks. There were more at the head of the lake in Crow Park. When I was very young the village boys could cross from one side to the other without touching the ground. My father sold the timber shortly after he purchased it. It was strange, but for a moment I expected the woods to be there again.’

‘Did you play there with your brother?’

He lowered the cane to the gravel path in front of them with a snort. ‘No, madam. I do not remember ever playing with Addie. Though once or twice he forced me to act in some nonsense play. I refused once, and he tore up some drawings of mine of which I had been very proud. Luckily I was no actor, so he did not ask again. We did not ever have a close bond, even at that time.’

‘You were a solitary child.’

‘I cannot believe that surprises you, Mrs Westerman. The events of 1750 did not change me. They simply confirmed in me what I was.’ He looked down at her with a slight smile. ‘I hope you have not been imagining all this time I was the sort of creature my nephew appears to be, until my father’s murder and my brother’s execution drove me into my current reclusive character. You are not so foolishly romantic.’

Harriet almost blushed. ‘No. But having heard you say that . . . Crowther, was there a sense of freedom when you sold the estate and sent off your sister to Ireland? Were you relieved? Did you ever have any love of this place at all?’

The haze in the atmosphere seemed to soften the light, though the heat of the day was already building. It gave even Crowther’s face a glow, and he closed his eyes for a moment as if to drink it into himself.

‘Addie was always the favourite with my parents. Then they doted on Margaret as the youngest child. I had some friends of a sort here, and there are places of which I was once fond, but my wish was always to escape. I became myself when I could leave Cumberland, so perhaps yes, I sold the estate in both anger and relief. There was even a certain pleasure at throwing it all to the winds. I never thought I would return.’

He began to walk towards the old brewery again, and Harriet followed him, deep in thought. Crowther might believe that returning to this house, meeting his nephew for the first time, and his sister after thirty years meant little to him, but he had never said so much to her before about his upbringing and the relations within his family.

They were met at the entrance to the old brew house by Miriam, the fair-haired and cheerful-looking maid Harriet had met the previous day. She dropped them a quick curtsey and a broad smile. Her face was rather red.

‘The range in there is well built up now, Mr Crowther, as you asked, and the coppers bubbling away. They took some finding today!’ She began to flap a breeze into her face with the corner of her apron. ‘My, but that is warm work on a day like today. It’s like Hell itself up by
the fire. Though of course they say that is coming to us all now, the sun being all shorn and the meat spoiling on the day it’s butchered, my lord.’ Here she covered her mouth with her hand. ‘I’m sorry, I mean to say, Mr Crowther, sir.’

Harriet looked down and smiled. Crowther said, ‘I prefer the name Crowther, if you would be so kind, Miriam. What was that you said of the sun?’

‘Shorn, sir. Does it not look to you as if its beams have been cut off?’ They all three turned towards the east. Harriet found she could stare straight at the sun without pain. It was dull red, like the last embers of wood in a winter fire.

‘It does,’ Crowther agreed. ‘But the world will not end today, Miriam.’

‘I am glad to hear you say that, sir. For it would be a shame to spoil Mrs Briggs’s party. Nor tomorrow?’

‘Not for at least a hundred years. I have it on the best authority.’

Miriam looked considerably cheered and there was a skip in her step as she headed back to her duties in the main house.

‘You were kind to that girl, Crowther.’

‘I am practising better manners with my servants. I cannot stand firm under Mrs Heathcote’s stern stares any longer. Who can say? Perhaps I shall become a civilised old man after all.’

Harriet cast a look at the heavens and pushed open the door to the old brew house.

It was a large structure with few signs as to the business that used to be done there, other than its name. She supposed that Mrs Briggs had her beer brought in from the village now. She did the same, and at Caveley too there was an outbuilding that had once been full of the yeasty smells of the weekly brewing for the table. The interior walls were roughly plastered and the earthen floor was beaten into an uneven but solid surface by years of use. At the back of the room, a simple stone fireplace had been well stacked with fuel, and there was a healthy fire under it. Harriet was about to ask why Crowther had requested it on such an oppressive day when, as her eyes adjusted to the relative
gloom, she noticed an open coffin on the long table on the westerly wall. It was made of unpolished planks. A utilitarian object. The sight of it chilled her. She was at once back in the house where her husband had died, watching him being laid into his own coffin and the lid nailed down. The hammers had seemed unnaturally loud.