All the way to Sudbury, Claudine leans forwards at regular intervals to order the driver to increase the pace, then settles back under the leather hood for a short while before tapping the driver on the shoulder again in impatience. It is sweltering under cover; the hood keeps off the blazing sun but traps the hot air, and Odette is sweating copiously between her breasts, along the length of her spine and the backs of her knees. Occasionally, a bead will roll down her forehead and catch on her eyebrow. Surely Claudine must be subject to the same forces of nature, but, if anything, she looks pale and drawn.
‘I have been away from England so long I had forgotten these dowdy little houses,’ says Claudine, assessing the low line of cottages that cling to the side of the road. ‘No wonder English people are all so parochial, closed up in sodden little boxes.’
She speaks with a light yet pointed tone, as though delivering a great witticism, then looks to Odette for a response.
‘I think the stone is pretty. It is like the houses are part of the landscape itself.’ Usually, when she is with either parent, she is meant to smooth matters, to keep alive the light when the world is painted dark.
Claudine laughs archly. ‘I suppose a peasant living in a hovel is as old as the landscape.’
‘I have been visiting with baskets at Christmas, and they dokeep their places very clean, even if they are poor.’
Claudine’s jaw tightens, and she does not speak again.
Odette looks at her knees, heart fast with anxiety. A misstep – a stupid one. She does not know how to read Claudine or what it is her aunt wants from her. Agreement with her judgement, perhaps, but even then, she has the sense that Claudine’s problem is with Odette herself.
The carriage slows as they reach the edge of town; a crowd has gathered in the street with some commotion, some in black, and more wear black armbands. A woman stands at the front of a cottage, hands covering her face. The door opens, and a coffin is carried out to be placed on a wheeled bier that stands waiting. It is a cheap thing, with only an old shawl for a pall cloth.
It is a small coffin, and Odette thinks, unbidden, of the girl that Leo mentioned who drowned in the Stour.
Then, of Cecilia submerged in the bath. Lydia changing the myth to drown Elaine, sunk by her love.
God, please let her mother finish the piece. Please let her be true to her word.
The bier is wheeled into the middle of the road, and a line of mourners forms behind it. It passes one side of their carriage, close enough that she could reach out to touch the ash, and then it is gone, and the procession streams past.
The driver gees the horses into movement.
‘There is a stationer’s on Market Hill,’ Odette explains. ‘They’ll have letter paper, though it’s only plain.’
‘Yes, I do know.’
‘You know Sudbury?’
‘What a question. Of course I know Sudbury. I grew up in Herne House.’
Odette blushes. How stupid of her.
She has a thin grasp on her mother’s lineage; she knows that Lydia – and, she supposes, Claudine – were orphaned at a youngage and raised as wards of an unmarried family friend, whose nephew George was. Neither of her parents speak much of their pasts and she had not pictured them all together at Herne House. But of course they must have been, and it is only her childish myopia that has blinded her to this obvious truth.
‘I didn’t realise.’
‘If you ask no questions of others, you will learn little.’
She is saved from further conversation by their arrival at the stationer’s. Claudine waits for the driver to offer his hand while Odette drops down to the street without thinking. The heat is oppressive, with little breeze finding its way through the streets; the smell of standing water rises from the meadows nearby, and the manure, dried quickly in the sun, is enough to make Odette’s eyes sting.
The stationer’s interior is dark: displays of cards and envelopes, pens, nibs, ink, wax, twine, are arranged behind and in front of a counter placed across the shop. At it sits a woman a little older than Claudine, who fans herself with a sense of futility.
Before either of them can speak, the woman’s expression abruptly changes, and her face opens up in wonder. ‘Miss Hutton? As I live and breathe, it’s like seeing a ghost – pardon my frankness.’
Claudine does not smile. ‘I’m afraid I cannot return the compliment. I do not remember having met you before.’
‘You wouldn’t, but we all knew you up at the house. It has to be – oh, the best part of twenty years since you all but disappeared. Someone said you’d gone into a convent, but my Fred says you were away to the Continent.’
‘Yes. I have been in Germany. It suited me better to be somewhere more cultured.’
It is a close to the conversation; Odette can tell, but the shopkeeper cannot.
‘There – I’ll tell my Fred he had the right of it. Only, we were all so shocked, waiting for the banns to be read at church any day, and then you were up and vanished.’
