The Widow's Confession (23 page)

‘Allow me,’ said Edmund, nodding to the doctor.

‘And the constable?’ said Benedict, standing with his hands on his hips.

‘There’s no need for that, sir,’ said the father, in a tone that indicated he had endured quite enough orders for that day. ‘We’re respectable people. Bessie, get
up. Show the man you can walk.’

Delphine had been calling Julia for some time, with no response, when she went into the front parlour. Julia was seated not in her normal attitude, with every limb positioned
as though she had considered its aesthetic effect, but was bent over, her elbows resting on her lap, her head in her hands. There was something so full of hurt about that position, so like a
beautiful flower, bent and crushed, that Delphine went cold for a moment, and – so alive to trauma as she was – wondered whether her cousin had collapsed, or was in some kind of fit
brought on by the horror of what had happened on the beach that afternoon. At the idea of there being no law involved, Mr Benedict had begun shouting, and had sworn so harshly that Edmund had seen
fit to escort Julia and Delphine home. They had been back an hour now.

‘Julia?’ she said sharply. There was no response. ‘Are you well?’ Delphine asked. ‘Look at me.’

Julia moved her hands away, and her face was wet with tears. Delphine sat down beside her, staring at her dress, its crumpled black material, good quality, just catching the little light in the
room. She waited.

‘The children, today,’ Julia said, and her voice twisted. The sound of it was terrible – that low, soft voice suddenly discordant. ‘It was not just what had happened. It
was that they had been left so alone. Their parents seemed hardly to trouble themselves.’

‘They will live, at least,’ said Delphine. ‘It is a shock to think that a woman could do that.’

Julia shook her head. ‘It is not just that,’ she said. Her tears were still flowing. ‘It is the old pain. No children.’

Delphine closed her eyes for a moment. She had prepared the usual arguments – the words she had spoken again and again over the years. Marriage was a prison, and who would wish, wantonly,
for the pain and ruin of childbirth? Had she ever met a man she would risk that for, to bear his child? Delphine never had. Julia had said, ‘Once, when I was young,’ but Delphine had
dismissed it, imagining a too-smart young swell with a thick cigar and a handlebar moustache.

‘I thought we were past this,’ she said. But as she spoke, she wished she could have breathed the words back in again, knowing that she had no right to question her cousin’s
feelings, and all the things she thought she had left behind. For she, too, felt the pull of the past, of New York, that emptiness in the pit of her stomach akin to homesickness. She felt like an
instrument with its strings wound too tight. Mr Benedict’s mention of the art dealer had drawn the walls in close to her again; she had no idea how much he knew, and raked her memory for the
details she had given the dealer in London. She had given her family name; what else he had discovered, she did not know. Mr Benedict was the type to make something from nothing, and yet, if the
dealer had contacts in New York society, who knew what he could have learned.

Thinking of the past made her feel trapped, and feeling trapped made her angry; it woke violence in her. Somehow, knowing that a woman had been behind an attempted murder on the beach made it
worse, for it seemed that Mr Steele was right, and there
was
a pattern in the deaths. The authorities might not be interested – ‘for who cared,’ Mr Steele had muttered,
‘for working-class children?’ But now there was a woman, moving like vengeance through the brightness of a summer’s day, seeking out something. But seeking out what? And Delphine
could not help but identify with the darkness, the bitterness, and the capability to wound.

She rubbed her face and held Julia’s hand in the evening light, hearing the sea breeze stir through the cracks of the house like a lament. She remembered a friend of her
grandfather’s coming to stay in New York when she was a child. He liked telling Delphine stories, for she was his most appreciative listener. He came from the South, and when the others
weren’t listening he would tell her the stranger, darker stories he thought she could take. Where he came from, he said, the sun could burn so hard as to kill you, and the rain fall so hard
as to raise you again. What did he mean? she asked. He had been to a funeral, he said, one day, when it had rained hard the night before: he had seen the coffin lowered into water. Delphine
imagined it as he described it: the hot, humid air, the thick green of the moss in the trees, the sloshing as the casket hit the water. ‘We were real hopeful,’ he said, ‘that the
creek wouldn’t burst its banks, and the water drive up the dead again.’

Could that happen? the little Delphine thought, and he saw the question in her eyes and nodded. ‘The moral of the story is, little lady: bodies do not stay buried.’

And as she looked at Julia, she thought, Nothing does. Not the past, not the children we never had. Their ghosts follow us every step of the way.

After all that had happened, Edmund thought there would be no more excursions, or attempts at outings. After Bessie Dalton, Theo locked himself in the study and only came out
the next day for church services and to lead prayers at the local school. That evening, Martha, her eyes full of concern, placed a tray outside the study on the black and white tiled floor. Edmund
passed it, and saw the steam rising from the soup as it cooled. He stood outside the door, his hand poised to knock, as Martha had knocked when she had placed it there, but there was something in
the quality of that velvet silence, thick, impenetrable, which made him step back and return to the drawing room. Martha, he supposed, knew Theo’s ways.

The next day, Theo appeared at breakfast, and as Edmund took his place and tucked in his napkin, he said: ‘Do you remember that place we spoke of – Reculver? The ruined church, with
a history going back to Roman times?’

Edmund speared the yolk of his egg with the tip of his knife, and watched the yellow seep over his plate. ‘I believe so,’ he replied. ‘You said there was a new book on the
archaeology of it?’

Theo smiled. ‘I have been reading it, this last day or so. It is most comprehensive and – in truth – I almost envy the writer of it. Strange, when one glimpses the other lives
one might have lived, if one were not called by God.’

Edmund opened his mouth to speak, but immediately realized there was little he could say without offending his host. He had thought that Theo was someone who did not care to dig too deep into
anything, and he understood it – for surely faith was a matter of grace, not to be examined too closely, a glorious mystery. He knew that Theo collected sea grasses, and some butterflies, and
he wondered at his contradictory desire to categorize and describe things, and how he could rejoice in finding something beautiful, and then cause its death. Though Theo often spoke of the glory of
God’s creation, Edmund somewhere deep inside could not reconcile this with the pinning of dead things to boards, for he viewed faith and love as things to be lived, rather than set down and
described.

‘I would like to go there,’ said Theo. ‘I am feeling weary, unwell. I could prevail upon the curate at St Peter’s to take my services for two days. I believe the trip
would do me good.’

Edmund’s first mistake was to mention the possible journey to Mrs Quillian. He had felt sure that, as the trip was arduous in comparison to their other, short excursions,
necessitating an overnight stay in Reculver, she would not feel any interest in it, but he was mistaken. She flew at the idea with even more enthusiasm than she had shown for the earlier trips.
Soon a note was received: Miss Waring and Alba were eager, and Mrs Beck and Miss Mardell too, though Mr Benedict had gone to be with his family – understandable in the circumstances, it was
agreed. Still, there were many more people now planning to visit Reculver than Theo had anticipated, and Edmund felt a little guilty about involving them. Although Theo was polite about it, Edmund
had seen his face fall at the mention of others joining them.

On the morning of the trip a note was received; Mrs Quillian was unwell. So it was with a disconsolate Miss Waring at its head that the group set out.

Reculver sat on the coast. It had once been inland, but as the sea persuaded its way in on the soft cliffs of the coast, so it neared the place, which had first been a Roman outpost, then a
monastery, then, at last, a decaying parish church, too grand for its purpose, its air struck through with echoes of the past – the cries of babies, the local people said – until being
abandoned at the turn of the century. So it contained disparate elements; there were tombstones from its time as a parish church, and still the remains of what had once been a great abbey
church.

There had been discussions about travelling to the ruins by sea, but these had been eschewed by Miss Waring, who resolutely refused to be in the water; she had seen the lights blinking on the
Goodwin Sands, she said, and the hazard of it all was high in her mind. Therefore, the journey was undertaken by carriage for the ladies, and horseback for the men. As they approached the coast,
they travelled through farmland, passing a mill and a cottage here and there, until they were in narrow lanes bordered by high hedgerows.

Alba read to the ladies as they travelled, heedless of her travel sickness. She told them the story of the two sisters – Frances and Isabella – and of how they were shipwrecked. The
elder, an Abbess, was saved. The younger was brought ashore and died, and so the towers were restored by the elder, with the purpose of warning shipping. She was buried in the shadow of them with
her sister. Ever since, mariners had referred to the towers as the Twin Sisters, or the Two Sisters. As Alba read this, slowly and languorously, Delphine felt a shiver run the length of her
spine.

‘It is all nonsense, of course,’ said Miss Waring, not unkindly.

‘I do feel a little unwell, Aunt,’ said Alba.

‘Of course you do,’ said Miss Waring. ‘Another good reason why I refused the idea of travelling in a boat – imagine, my delicate Alba in a boat!’

‘Have you travelled much, Miss Waring?’ asked Julia.

‘A little, here and there,’ said Miss Waring vaguely. ‘But I spent much of my youth caring for my stepfather and stepbrother, so my time was ordered by them.’

Delphine looked out of the window to see Theo, looking forwards, his face impassive as he rode.

They disembarked at the King Ethelbert Inn, which stood near to the towers, and made their way up the slope to the promontory where the towers loomed over them. The Isle of Thanet was visible
just along the coast, but to Delphine it seemed as distant as the sight of heaven from the damned in a medieval church fresco; this was an entirely different place. The two square towers were not
built of the black flint of Broadstairs, but of a solid, densely packed grey flint, set with high spires to warn shipping. The pointed stone section between them had a high circular aperture and
two curved arched windows either side of it, all empty of glass so that, standing there below it, looking up, the clouds moved where the stained glass had once been. On that exposed spot, only the
toughest grasses remained, thick and bushy and windswept; the pathway spotted with hard unyielding lichen, pale grey. Beneath them, the sea beat at the shore.

Delphine stood at the edge of the ruins and watched the choppy water; it was a hard blue, the colour of a bad sapphire. Its rise and fall, its network of small, sharp waves, the sheer violence
of it as it drew against the cliff, all of these things made it seem entirely different from Broadstairs, even though the cliffs of Thanet could be seen from where she stood. The sea, and the hard
cold air which blustered against this foremost point, seemed to be attacking the land, as though it had taken against the church and was eroding the ruins day by day, hour by hour, with the harsh
sea winds shot through with salt. She drew her cloak around her, and imagined what it must have been like to live here, as a monk, with the wind and sea raging outside, trusting to God’s
providence; and even when Alba told her, reading from her guidebook, that the sea had been half a mile from the church at that time, she could not stave off the sense of isolation and fear that had
settled over her.

The two steeples of the towers had come down, and been raised again, and now bore beacons to warn shipping, and as Alba wandered away, Delphine thought of the Goodwin Sands, of which the group
had often spoken, and of the fear and misery of mariners caught in the violence of those seas.

‘It is blowing a fearsome gale.’ Theo’s voice startled her. She had last seen him some yards away, as he pointed out aspects of the landscape and the Roman settlement to
Edmund. He stood beside her on the edge of the cliff looking out to sea, his notebook and pencil clasped tightly in one hand, and she saw in his face some of the same haunted aspect that she had
felt as she looked out there. She wanted to be able to laugh at him, this clergyman with his wide-brimmed hat and his neat black coat billowing in the strong wind, who always watched her so
solemnly, but she could not. She realized that he had spent much of his time not wishing to be looked at; constantly in movement, or masked by politeness and discharging his duty as a priest. There
were times when his face truly seemed to be carved in stone like the face on a crucifix. Now, he was just a man, and she observed the disturbing blue of his eyes, and the scarred texture of his
face, as though she had never seen him before. He was a man, she thought, not the icon he perhaps wished to be.

‘Have you recovered from the other day on the beach?’ he said. ‘I had no time to speak to you before you left.’

‘As much as one can,’ she said. ‘It is a disgrace that Dr Crisp does not wish to look into the deaths further.’

Theo nodded. ‘He is jaded, I am afraid. He is no stranger to the deaths of children. He told me that he has often seen parents refuse treatment for a child because they are enrolled in a
burial club, and will receive money if the child dies. And he is encouraged – nay, pressed – into not pursuing expensive inquests, which the coroner has to cover from his own pocket,
and which the magistrates will not pay back. He wishes to have his own life; he wishes to marry. He has seen many young children die in suspicious circumstances; he cannot pursue them all under his
own purse.’