Chapter Thirty Six

Eccleshall, 1917

A dam … Aaron …’ Miss Parry twists her fingers on her lap. ‘I promise I will call him Aaron, it’s the least …’ She glances down, up.

Hester keeps her silence. Unease stirs in her gut. Whatever is coming, her instinct is to shy from it. An ugly truth pirouettes on the tip of Miss Parry’s tongue. This truth strains to fly from her open lips to worm its destructive way into Hester’s head. And heart. She clenches her jaw and offers no encouragement for Miss Parry to continue.

‘The letter I sent, after you came here …’ Miss Parry tightens her clasped hands until the knuckles show white. She swallows and her green eyes shift from remorse to defiance. ‘Aaron has been happy here. He has had a good life at Castle Farm, doing what he loves. Using his talents, his true gifts.’

Hester’s unease squirms. Her gut roils. What is this justification about? She doesn’t acknowledge the statement. She has only Miss Parry’s word this is true. And Dr Cooper’s, ten years ago.

Miss Parry starts over. ‘I lied,’ she says baldly. ‘For his sake, I lied.’

‘Lied?’ Hester is jerked into speech. She draws back, coiling her courage tightly around her. She will need it all.

‘I lied when I wrote to you it was his choice not to pursue the opportunity to rediscover his old life.’ The defiance lifts Miss Parry’s chin. ‘He found a contentment here which he judged had been denied him before. I feared what re-awakened horrors revelation might bring.’

Shock seeps into Hester’s disquiet. ‘It was your decision my husband –’ she places a slight emphasis on the two words ‘– would not meet with me? Your fear of the truth?’ Disbelief at this treachery pummels her overtired mind.

‘In the early years, he would occasionally suffer nightmares.’ Miss Parry unclasps her hands, raises and spreads them. ‘Fire on water, ghouls shrieking, restless spirits goading him to hurl himself into the flames …’

Marianne. Anger bolsters Hester’s shock. The ever-present shade, never done with her lover. Or – a shard of truth pierces her with the anguish of a sword run through her chest – Aaron has never been done with Marianne.

‘That’s why …’ Miss Parry is matter-of-fact. How could Hester disagree with her logic? ‘It’s why I couldn’t allow him to return to the past, to torture.’ Her glare intimates it is Hester who has wronged her. ‘I never gave him your message, never showed him the photograph you left for him.’ Her voice rises. ‘I loved him. I still do. I couldn’t risk him being hurt, risk his mind in torment, his suffering.’

Hurt, torment, suffering. Each word thrusts its bladed edge into Hester’s soul. The same reasons she told herself she would not pursue Aaron’s refusal to see her. Her own sorrowful, futile rationale for letting Aaron go, forcing herself to be content with his contentment.

The girls had been too young to understand, and, later, Rose berated Hester for her inaction.

‘Why didn’t you barge in there, Mama? Demand to ask Papa yourself? To tell him, here I am, your wife whom you love. And at home …’ Rose’s voice had trembled. ‘At home you have daughters who need you.’

Hester’s heart had broken all over again. Every day she questioned her decision, fought her guilt. And today, too late, she discovers the deception played on both her and Aaron. A deception which had left him choiceless and herself bereft.

Pain, anger, regret swirl in a toxic draught which fills her body.

‘Your love, as you put it …’ she says tightly. ‘You who have no idea of the selflessness of love … this so-called love had no desire to risk my husband ’ – Hester emphasises the words more strongly – ‘returning to the comfort he had found in his family?’ The air in the room thickens. Hester breathes deeply, keeps her voice taut. ‘Did it never occur to you what torment your greedy, selfish decision brought upon us? His wife and, far worse, his small innocent daughters made fatherless?’

Miss Parry drops her entwined hands into her lap and stares at Hester for the same eternity she has kept Aaron from his family. At last, a breath which must come from the pit of her stomach expels her attempt at justification. Her shoulders slump. Her fingers unclasp to worry at a button on her cardigan.

Hester stands, drops her clenched fists to her sides. ‘Is Aaron aware of this trickery?’ She is surprised at the steadiness of her voice.

Miss Parry winces. ‘Yes. When I had him brought to the house from his cottage, when he fell gravely ill, to make the nursing easier …’ She presses her lips together, blurts. ‘I told him then.’

‘Why?’ Hester fights to comprehend. Why now, when it’s too late? Does the woman hate Aaron’s family to the extent she will pile suffering on suffering?

‘He murmurs your name in his sleep, calls for you.’ Miss Parry’s fingers resume their twisting. ‘I believed his soul would be eased by seeing you, as I said in my letter.’

‘You showed him the photo?’

‘Yes.’ It’s a whisper.

‘And?’

The defiance briefly reappears in the pout of Miss Parry’s mouth. ‘He said he didn’t recognise the woman, or the girls.’ She deflates again. ‘He has the photo, insisted on keeping it, saying there was something ...’

Hester finds a grain of hope among the muck-soiled straw she wades through.

***

Sweat beads his forehead from the effort expended dragging himself to a sitting position. His head and back rest against a mound of pillows, their starched white covers and the linen sheets coolly resistant to the unwell heat of his body. The counterpane is tucked tightly beneath the wool-stuffed mattress, and he frets at it with his bony fingers to loosen the constriction across his legs. He wishes he had fought Judith’s insistence he be brought to the house from his cottage by the stables.

‘It’s not completely for your benefit,’ she told him, giving him her teasing smile. ‘It’s for Mrs Bennett and myself, to make nursing you easier.’

He acknowledges how much she enjoys having him close, and in the past few days he can no longer care for himself. He is dying, despite Judith’s attentive ministrations and Dr Cooper’s repeated ‘We shall see.’

Confirmation of his pending death came three nights ago, when Judith brought him the photograph of a dark-haired woman, a serious girl who matched his own looks, and a younger child with wild pale hair and round mischievous eyes.

And a confession which gutted him to the core and incinerated the trust of twenty years.

The photograph was not where the conversation had started. The beginning had been the evening before, after a day of constant pain, sliding in and out of unrefreshing, shallow sleep. He was weary of it all, wanting this futile invalid life over.

‘Your sleep is restless, dreams, talking out loud,’ Judith had said after Mrs Bennett removed an untouched dinner tray.

He grimaced. ‘Nightmares. The fever, it must be the fever.’ He picked at the counterpane, seeing his fleshless fingers, dispassionate, as if they belonged to another.

‘More nightmares? Poor Adam.’ Judith laid a cool palm on his shoulder. ‘This war, the horrors …’

He shook his head. ‘Those nightmares I would expect, having lived them.’ He paused, thrusting the images deep, although never deep enough. ‘These are the old nightmares. Those with fire, and a river in tempest. Death too. A different death.’ He dared not close his heavy eyes.

Storm-driven waves, angry, red-tinged spindrift, a flame-scorched moon. The visions are garish, frightening. He had believed those nightmares tamed years ago, shovelled into a cave with the stone of his new life rolled across the opening. Their return is more vivid. The emotions they rain on him shred him with a horror, a grief which is different from the trenches of Flanders and far worse than the occasional dreams of his early days, nights, at Castle Farm. In these nightmares, he is to blame for the death, for the fires, for the shrieking which pierces his mind like the screeches of flayed witches.

The terror and destruction in these nightmares can be laid directly at his feet.

Judith did not ask how death was different. She said, conversationally, ‘There is a name you call out in your sleep, a cry for help. Afterwards you are calmer.’

‘Yes?’ He has no memory of a name in his frenzied nights.

Judith pressed her lips together and let the name come like an implosion. ‘Hester.’

Hester. He mouthed the name, sensing consolation on his tongue. He had said he was tired, he needed sleep, and she had left him to his tormented night.

She brought the photograph the next day, startling him to see a much younger likeness of himself with the woman and two little girls.

He had studied their faces. The images of the three figures rippled in his mind, pebbles tossed into a cold, black lake.

‘Who are they?’

Judith had handed him the photograph, turned it over to where a tidy feminine hand had written:

Aaron Appleby, his wife Hester and their daughters, Ellen and Rose. 1895

1895. Two years before the accident which brought him here.

He flipped the picture over, peered at the three faces. The ripples coalesced, scattered, remembrance frustratingly eluding his desperate grasp. ‘I know, or knew, these people?’

Judith’s confession had been made in tears, with pleas for forgiveness and how Aaron’s interests had constantly been her first and most precious demands.

He had listened, astonished and dismayed. At the end, when her sobbing quieted, he asked her to leave, they would talk tomorrow.

They did not talk the next day. He had relapsed into pain from which only morphine could release him. Judith has not come since, sending Mrs Bennett in her stead.

Propped against the stiff pillows, he reaches to the bedside table, cluttered with Dr Cooper’s medications which Aaron pretends to take. Fumbling for the photograph, he recalls the woman leaving in the pony trap years ago, how Judith had asked, ‘You didn’t recognise her?’ And when he hesitated, finally said no, she had said, ‘It’s no matter. A woman who’s been here before seeking employment. I sent her away, and expect she won’t return.’

Hester. The woman was Hester.

He believes he remembers a stirring in his mind, or his heart, at the sight of her. If such a stirring had occurred, the moment passed. He searches for it, digging deep, beyond the depths where he keeps the horrors of war, willing the sensation, the knowledge, to rise.

Moonlight, white, not flame-tinged, flickers at the edges of his consciousness like a moth to a candle. He is flying, a star-speckled river serene below him. Joy beats at his ribs. He is not alone. Dark hair swirls about his chest in the silvered darkness.

Judith’s deliberate tread on the stairs cuts into his imaginings. Another tread follows, lighter, hesitant. Not Dr Cooper, nor Mrs Bennett. The pounding in his heart squeezes his broken lung tight with pain. He stares at the open door.

Judith walks in, steps aside for another woman – the woman in the photograph, the woman he sighted leaving the house years ago, his wife, whose name is Hester – to pass through the doorway.

She is not so tall as Judith or dressed as fashionably, yet holds her slim body with the same purposeful straightness. Her black hair, pulled back in a thick bun from which curls escape to frame her long neck, is streaked with silver.

When she rests her vivid blue eyes on him, he crumples under the depth of her anxious heartache. His mind tumbles, images clashing – a one room cottage, wildflowers in a meadow, a flirtatious girl with wild curls lifting in a summer breeze, poised on a stone stile asking, Will you teach me? Clifftops and whispering rivers, rubbing her work-calloused hands with ointments they have made, a night when the All Hallows fires flamed on the far bank and they drank together, a potion scented with the grassiness of Lady’s Mantle, the citrus tang of lemon balm. A potion of love and courage.

‘Hello, Hester.’ He falters over her name, terrified that saying it out loud will cause her to vanish like the spirits which once gathered about him. Terrified she will fade into a mist he cannot see, or follow.

She takes a step forward, sits on the bed and leans into him like a gull wheeling into its nest. She is gentle, aware of his fractured body.

‘Hello, Aaron, my love,’ she says.

***

My darling Ellen ,

Hester rests her fountain pen on the blotting paper. She has accepted Miss Parry’s offer of a bed, as a call to the Royal Oak yielded a grudgingly given apology that no rooms are available due to lack of staff to cook, clean and make up beds, and, yes, it would be the same anywhere else Madam tried. She has also taken up the offer of a light meal in her room. Her own and Miss Parry’s sensitivities on eating together are apparently shared.

The anger which boiled in the parlour has cooled, quenched to grey embers in Aaron’s skeletal, consoling embrace. Her tears for this diminished, white-haired Aaron with grey crumpled skin, her tears for herself and their daughters, have been shed alone. What remains is a steady resolution to use this unexpected gifted time easing her husband’s passing from this world.

Her decision holds a selfish motive. Her and Aaron’s life is a palimpsest, her time with him sketched over the never fully erased script of Marianne, her own time overwritten by Judith Parry and her selfish desire. Hester determines she herself will be the last and strongest layer, it will be her sustaining love which Aaron carries with him when he dies. As she, too, will take precious memories with her when she leaves this house. The bitterness of twenty years will be banished in the certainty of his love.

She takes up her pen.

My journey today has been long and tiring, but I am glad to have come as it has brought twenty years of journeying to its conclusion. My dear sweet daughter, your Papa’s knowledge of his family, of me, you and Rose, has returned. When he saw me, face to face, he recognised me instantly. He does not have a full grasp of his life before the dreadful accident. We must hope that will come quickly, for I fear Papa has not much time left. His injuries are indeed bad, as the letter said.

If you can bear the travel, Papa would be overjoyed to see his Ellen grown up. Can you come, dear? It would be too much to bring Kitty. The trains are crowded, there are delays, and a fretful three year old would be a misery. I’m sure Catherine would have her for a few days. Send a telegram to this address.

Please also write a short note to our darling Rose. She will want this news, despite everything, and she should be told Papa never did abandon us willingly. I will explain when you are here, but send this message to Rose before anything. You understand my haste.

Your loving Mama.

Hester blots the paper, addresses the envelope and fixes the stamp she brought with her, anticipating a letter to Ellen whatever the outcome of this visit. Mrs Bennett has assured her it will go with the first morning post. The housekeeper has thawed, and Hester suspects she may have overheard her mistress’s confession.

Hester will need to pass on this part of the story to Ellen and Rose, crucial as it is to their forgiveness of their father. They must make their own peace, or not, with Judith Parry’s wickedness. As for Hester, it would be easy to transfer to the woman the bitterness towards Aaron she kept tight rein on for ten years.

Hester touches the envelope. She is done with bitterness, with anger, with grief. She has her husband, the one man she will ever love, and she will revel in the joy of reunion for as long as they have together.

Taking up the envelope, she goes down to the hall, places it in the basket Mrs Bennett indicated earlier, and walks upstairs to be with Aaron. She has asked for a mattress to be made up on the floor.

She will not leave Aaron’s side until this is over.