‘Stand up straight, boy. Carry this case and I’ll get the other one.’ Francis didn’t raise his head. His shoulders were slumped, the delicate line of his brow hidden beneath hair that had fallen across his face. His fists were clenched at his side, and the sleeveless vest Dorothea had knitted clung to him. She saw now that the colours and pattern he had chosen were delicate, almost feminine; his shirt collar protruding over the top, neatly, in two long points across the sloping form of his shoulders. He had chosen this outfit—the slight flare of the corduroy trousers, the jauntily spotted shirt—for fashion she saw now, not for stomping through muddy fields culling the bird population. She should have noticed, because as Edward looked his son up and down, his gaze hardened. Her efforts at mothering the boy, at letting him delight in the choosing of his own clothes, were being judged. And in his small act of defiance, the boy was using all the agency he had to wordlessly scream at his father—No! I am not like you!
‘Carry it,’ said Edward, nudging Francis hard with the end of the long, heavy case. Francis kept his head down, and she willed him to look up, to see the plea in her eyes:Do it, darling!But Francis, like the stable, was eerily still. The smells of hay and manure and animals mixed with her fear, so that forever this smell would conjure the memory. She found herself locked in the gaze of one of the horses—the deep pool of its black and curious eyes—andstillFrancis did nothing. The boy was frozen in his study of what should have been his leather boots, but she noticed now were his new white plimsolls.
Edward noticed them too, and his rage gathered around them like a tempest. And just at the moment Dorothea lifted her hands to take the gun case and urge Francis towards the open stable door—into the Land Rover and the safety of its scratched and ageing interiors—Edward’s storm arrived.
24
PHYLLIDA
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
Phyllida dozes. From outside the hospital comes the sound of a lawnmower. Her eyes peel open. Yellow light falls across the mountain treetops outside her window. Her eyes travel to the sun and an image of David comes to her. It is so stark and vivid she feels the shiver of a breeze. David is patting the nose of the horse across their back fence. It reminds her of the horses in the Bleddesley stables; of Francis bearing his father’s wrath decades earlier as she stood helplessly by. Momentarily her joy dims. Still, she is grateful David has appeared.
In the early days in Brookbank, Phyllida had sometimes attended church. She could never bring herself to fully embrace a Christian god, but she enjoyed the ritual and the song. She liked to pray, because she believed that the universe or the Heavenly Father, or whoever was in charge, had given her a bounty: a wonderful boy, a job she loved, a roof over their heads. She hadso much, when others had so little. So, she would sit, listening with a peculiar sort of fascination to the sermons, wondering how people convinced themselves unreservedly. How didfaithturn up? She thought that perhaps God had slipped up in her case—given he had such an enormous lot on his plate with all those prayers for premature babies and earthquake victims and sponge cake recipe successes. It would be no surprise to Phyllida if she had slipped through the good fortune turnstile without being fully vetted.
But as David became sick, she could no longer bring herself to go inside the village church. Because if there was a god, it became obvious he was doing an inventory, and her past was finally being counted. Dr Patel—Caleb, as he’d insisted on being called since that awful day in his surgery—had done his best to couch the news of David’s prognosis in a way that wouldn’t ruin her. But how was that possible?I’m sorry, Phyllida, stage-four pancreatic cancer is very serious. Many don’t survive beyond a year. Some get less.
As Phyllida lies in her hospital bed now, three decades later, she lets the image of David shimmer in her mind. Back then, she had simply been trying to breathe. It couldn’t be right that her boy might die. Caleb Patel, she’d decided back then, was incompetent. A quack. He probably drank too much.
The only good thing during that awful period was that David had come home. A new modelling contract had come up that was apparently more important to Miriam than David’s care. ‘Louis Vuitton. It’s once in a lifetime, Mum,’ David had parroted Miriam’s words at her. Phyllida had wanted to slap the woman. Miriam flitted back and forth to Sydney doing exactlyas she pleased—but the upside was Phyllida got her treasured boy back for a few weeks. ‘Of course,’ Miriam told Phyllida, ‘I am devastated by the diagnosis and the terrible prognosis—I can hardly eat—and whenever needed, I will be right there for him. You must be devastated too.’
Why, yes, Miriam. Strangely enough, yes!
Phyllida sees the image of David now, as if edged with light—as if celestial. But back then, as she watched her son leave the horses and walk towards the house, she’d had to distract herself from how thin he looked.
When David came inside and saw her stillness, alarm had crossed his face. ‘Mum? You okay?’
Phyllida didn’t generally sit, and so she had felt exposed. She forced herself to look back at him, really look. There he was in his jeans and T-shirt, so masculine and alive. She smiled to curb her nausea then rose from the chair as he hitched up his jeans. There was a gauntness to his face.
She hugged him, her cheek to his chest. She inhaled the scent of her boy, felt the breath moving through him. She’d told herself in the previous months—when her intuition had been ringing alarm bells—that it washealthyto be thin. Except now she could see he had been too thin for months; his skin wasn’t tanned, it was a sickly yellow; his eyes cloudy. The disease had been steadily coming for him.
Now, alone in this clinical room, Phyllida tries to shrug away the physical ache as she sits with the painful memories. Welcomes them. When David began to fade, Phyllida had thought the ledger was being evened up. That the reckoning for her past had finally arrived. She was sent hurtling back to thoseawful scenes: Cricket pale and shaking as she handed over the baby and told her to go; Mrs Wilson at the table by the Aga; blood everywhere.
But she knows now that her task has never been to avoid a life of suffering. It has been to meet her pain with compassion and humility. She has learned, over time, to welcome her destiny with an open heart. Because that is where freedom lies.
Still, the violence of an untimely death can leave a brutal mark. It had been so when the cancer had ravaged her boy with its swift, ugly tentacles in 1995. And it had been so two decades before that, with Edward, when the blast of lead had entered his chest, and they had watched him bleed out.
25
RODDY
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
Sienna finishes reading the newspaper article with a flourish of her hand. Her reading was filled with dramatic tension as promised. Where did today’s teenagers get their confidence? Roddy felt old.
‘That’s wild,’ says Lottie, frowning. ‘An excellent performance, by the way. Can you send that to my email? I’ll print it out.’
The old printer behind the shop counter sputters into life and Lottie hands Roddy a copy of the article. He reads it again.
THE LONDON STANDARD, 30 July 1975
Police Hunt for Nanny; Body of Viscount Discovered in Manor House Grounds
Police investigators are conducting extensive searches across the fields and woodlands around Bleddesley House near thevillage of Little Petersham in Cambridgeshire today, following the discovery of the body of Lord Edward Fitzhenry, Fourteenth Viscount of Bleddesley. Lord Fitzhenry died in what police are calling suspicious circumstances. Preliminary reports suggest he sustained shotgun wounds. His remains were found concealed in an outbuilding on his country estate.
Scotland Yard detectives are keen to interview Miss Dorothea Ann Stewart, a member of staff at Bleddesley House. Miss Stewart is reported to have disappeared from the manor house, at approximately the time Lord Fitzhenry is believed to have been killed.
There are also reports that Lord Fitzhenry’s abandoned Land Rover was found yesterday on the outskirts of Watford.
