On this occasion, it was Mrs. Turner-Bridges, still ensconced in the guest bedroom, who heard Matilda mutter (soon after her brother whooped down the stairs): “I have to go. I’ll see you later,” before returning the receiver to the cradle with a force that made the bell rattle.
Once again, Nora’s hands went to her belly as if to shield the baby from the domestic strife. She was beginning to think there was something going on at the house. Like her mother, Matilda was in an unusually fractious mood. Nora had put it down to hormones at first, and the delicate business of being fifteen years old, but she was starting to wonder whether there might not be something deeper to her niece’s irritation. Matilda had been eating like a bird, moving food around her plate as she glowered at the table, and snapping at whoever had the misfortune to draw her ire.
Nora was still wondering about her niece’s odd behavior when, through the window, she noticed the village girl, Becky Baker, appear in the garden. She glanced at her fine wristwatch, saw that it was too early for Becky to start, and felt a quiver of irritation. The girl was a relatively new addition to the household staff and Nora had been observing her closely in the weeks she’d been at Halcyon. She seemed proficient enough (although there hadbeen the breakage last week of the heirloom gravy boat, a gift from Mrs. Turner-Bridges’s own parents on Thomas and Isabel’s wedding), and she was certainly very confident with the baby.
A littletooconfident, Mrs. Turner-Bridges thought, as Becky disappeared under the eaves. Isabel had ceded all responsibility to the girl; in fact, she appeared to be quite capable of continuing with her journaling, or gardening, or even frowning into space, when the baby cried. If Nora drew attention to the needy child, Isabel would say, almost as an afterthought, “Oh, Becky will see to it.”
It wasn’t that Becky Baker’s treatment of the baby was troubling per se—the girl seemed to be a natural carer—rather that for Nora, whose own baby’s birth was imminent, it seemed unthinkable that a mother might so willingly let her child out of her sight. But then, Thea wasn’t Isabel’s first baby. She was the fourth in a series of regular, easy pregnancies and healthy, bonny babes. Little wonder Isabel was more relaxed than another woman might have been.
Nora put her niggling concerns aside. Only later did she allow herself to voice the observation she had been too loyal then to countenance. Quietly, reluctantly: Isabel did not appear to have bonded with the baby. Not as she had with the others, and not as one might expect a mother to bond with a beautiful little girl like Thea.
***
6
Mrs. Turner was serving eggs when Becky Baker entered the dining room at Halcyon. The longcase grandfather clock that Mr. Wentworth had ordered from Dorset to please the young wife-to-be who would never arrive had just chimed half past seven, and its admonition still lingered in the sunlit air of the domed entrance hall. The atmosphere in the breakfast room, by contrast, was dense with thesmoke of burnt toast and sibling rancor. John and Matilda sat on opposite sides of the large square breakfast table, the former shoveling lumps of scramble into his mouth, the latter watching him with a practiced moue of distaste.
“Where’s Evie?” Mrs. Turner paused as she reached the empty place, a scoop of egg held aloft on a large silver spoon. “Morning, Nora,” she said to Mrs. Turner-Bridges, who had just come into the room via the doorway on the far side. “Would you like some eggs?”
“Oh, dearest, I don’t think I could,” Nora replied. The heat of the day had caught up with her on the walk from bedroom to breakfast. Her head was aching and although she’d tied her hair up on her head, fine strands at the nape of her neck had coiled as tight as springs. Her flushed cheeks were at odds with her pale (but freckled, to her eternal regret) complexion.
Matilda, too, was unexcited by the prospect of scramble, needling curdles of egg with the tines of her fork. John, however, waited for his mother to deposit the pot and began helping himself to a heaped mound of seconds. Mrs. Turner did not serve herself, sitting instead before her empty plate at the head of the table. She lifted her cup of tea and took a sip before frowning at the lukewarm liquid.
Into this scene of domestic activity stepped Becky Baker. Such was the nature of her overwhelming shyness in the face of the good-looking, well-heeled Turner family that she did not announce herself, lingering instead near the wall to the side of the door, where no one—except Nora, as she was later to report to police—noticed her. The Turners were not self-centered people, but as a family they were so complete, their loyalties and grievances so tightly interwoven, that they did not easily admit outsiders. There simply wasn’t room.
“Where are you off to, John?” asked Mrs. Turner, as the boy leapt to his feet, pushing his chair with cheerful approximation toward the table.
“I have to give something to Matthew.”
“Be back in time for lunch.”
“If Matthew asks me to go and eat lunch with them, can I?”
“MayI.”
“Please do,” said Matilda. “In fact, do us all a favor and stay forever.”
“Matilda—”
“Mother?” John pressed.
Upstairs, in the distant nursery, the baby began to cry. Mrs. Turner laid a fine hand against her forehead.
“Mother!”
“No, not today.”
“Why not?”
“It’s Christmas Eve.”
“And?”
“We’re going to do something as a family.”
“Like what?”
Whether or not it did in the moment, Mrs. Turner’s brief pause gained weight in later retellings: “A picnic,” she said. “We’re going to have a picnic.”
