Thirty-Four

From the window of his study, Matthew Aubrete watched the visitors in the gardens.

It was late in the afternoon, two hours before closing. A family had sat down on one of the benches by the knot garden. Their daughter, no more than three, was pushing her own buggy up and down the path in the warm, slanting sunshine. Every now and then she stopped to scoop gravel into the seat. He watched the little blonde head, the striped dungarees, the surprisingly fat little legs on their purposeful journey. He was fond of children. He had not given up hope of having them, although Laura was adamant that she had no desire to give birth, and Anna …

Well, what future did he have with Anna? He couldn’t say. He had never known. He knew even less now.

Laura was right when she said that he knew nothing about her. When he had first met Anna, he had been so struck with her—a feeling of having known her before, of resuming something left unfinished—that he had allowed himself fantasies. Loose and wayward threads of enthusiasm and desire. The fantasy of being with her, and not with Laura. The fantasy of a quiet divorce. The fantasy of a family. They were all things that he wanted, but he had never known—and he understood this now—he had never known if it was what she wanted.

He had supposed—well, such suppositions hardly bore the light of day. They seemed so naïve now. He had supposed, lying with her in his arms, having taken her to bed, having possessed her—oh God, all those afternoons, all those mornings—he had supposed that he had really been allowed to see her. To know her. Yet, in brutal fact, he had seen and shared only what she wanted him to see and share. He had travelled for months in what now turned out to be a totally foreign country, whose borders he had never really explored at all, whose secrets remained secrets, even though he had no secrets from her.

He had been open and honest with her, as he had never been with any other woman. And he had assumed … assumptions and suppositions. That was what it was all about. That was his downfall. They were all, truthfully, that his affair with Anna Miles was built upon. His assumptions. His suppositions. His nakedness, in every respect, in front of a woman who kept her secrets to herself.

And then there was another, less appealing fantasy. A more fragile hope. If he were honest, he supposed that he thought the lure of Aubrete would be enough. If she only loved him a little, she would surely love the house, the gardens. Which she had, of course. She had.

He turned away from the window, making a small grimace of despair.

You bloody fool, boy.

His father’s voice. An echo of Laura.

He sat down at the table and smoothed his hands over the maps. Yesterday, he had made a decision to clear the room, to box all the records he had so carefully compiled over the last twenty years, and seal them so that they would be ready for transport. He had started to fill the boxes with this overpowering feeling of shame. He had been set up by Anna Miles and never understood. He had been a target. He might as well have stood out in the fields with a bulls-eye over his heart. He had been so transparent, so innocent. And it was not as if he could plead youth, either. He was thirty-six—and he had fallen lock, stock and barrel for a woman with some sort of secondary agenda.

Even now, as he sorted through the records with a keenly aching heart, he could not get over how helpless she had seemed. Every now and then, the thought overwhelmed him … surely she had been helpless? Surely she had been. That first morning, her expression of desperation. Had that been manufactured, even then? She had never told him what she was running from, only that she was running, and had reached the end of her tether. Almost, literally, the end of the road. He had pitied her so very much. And felt this curious déjà vu.

He thought he knew her.

More fool him.

Mid-morning yesterday, Laura had come upstairs and knocked at the door.

‘What are you doing?’ she had demanded. ‘Open this door.’

He had done so, dejected and heavily preoccupied. Laura had stood on the threshold, hands on hips, looking past him.

‘I’m packing,’ he had told her.

She didn’t come into the room. ‘Packing?’ she repeated. ‘Just like that?’

‘It will take some time.’

She had slapped him. Her move had taken him so much by surprise that he didn’t have a chance to put a hand up to protect himself. ‘What is the matter with you!’ she had cried. ‘We’re not going anywhere. Nowhere! What the hell is the matter with you?’

She had gone downstairs cursing him. At the bottom of the flight, he had heard her say, ‘I’m married to an idiot, God help me.’

He picked up the nearest book, now, from a pile that he had sorted last night. Although he had read it many times, he opened it again, tracing his finger down the worn red leather spine. The pages inside were flimsy, fragile as threadbare silk, covered in an equally frail web of handwriting.

Vestry meeting 20 August 1799.

He folded his arms, and read carefully, slowly, with the old feeling of responsibility and guilt slowly settling on him with every sentence.

The lessees of Poor Heart are agreeable to the payment of £30 per annum in lieu of all parochial rates, read the first entry. The Parish determined upon a catalogue to be taken of all goods in the houses of paupers receiving Parish relief … Upon setting the poor relief rate, the Parish lowers the weekly pay of the paupers in every instance where possible, and no pauper shall receive more than two shillings …

Wearily, Matthew turned the page.

The notes of the meetings were economically worded. He imagined the vicar, sitting with his back to the cold wall of the church, the notebook held in his lap, listening to the church wardens, the two overseers, and the magistrate. Each vestry meeting rarely commanded more than half a dozen terse lines of script. In 1802, there was a scribbled note, almost like an afterthought, that children of those who received the Poor Rate—the Income Support of its day, but given with appalling grace and under a cloud of disgrace—should be apprenticed out. Just before Christmas, on 16 December 1802, a boy of nine and a girl of seven were apprenticed out of the parish, to a farm twelve miles away.

God knows what they had faced when they got there, Matthew thought. Two little beggars on a doorstep. Free labour. The depths of winter, a winter recorded with a heavy January snowfall that would not free the roads.

He turned another page.

It was the record of the pit workings and the amounts owed to the Parish by the mine. Every time he read them, Matthew’s blood froze. He imagined dropping slowly through a thousand feet into the dark. A thousand-foot mine shaft lit with candles. January, 1800. The juddering and groaning of the rope as it shuddered around the wheel above ground. The thickening air.

Many times in the past, that image had woken him at night, with an overpowering sensation of claustrophobia. He would sit up, straining for air, as the nightmare fought the darkness, and he saw each guttering candle slowly snuffed out. He would be left in pitch blackness, where even the throaty and distant sound of the horse gin receded, and then eventually evaporated as neatly as the candles. And then he would know that there was no more air, no more air at all in the narrow thousand-foot drop—and his lungs, cramped, agonizing, tried to pinch oxygen and failed. He would stagger out of bed, and only then really wake, grasping the window sill, flinging open the window itself, breathing in the salt air of the coast with blissful gratitude.

He closed his eyes now and tried to banish the image.

They were still there, whispered an accusing little voice in his head.

Can’t you hear those last gasps for air?

They drowned underneath you.

Right under this house …

He started gathering the papers together, his fingers labouring clumsily over the task. Heaping them into a box, he walked to the door with the box in his arms, balanced it on one hip, and unlocked the door with his free hand.

A man stood in the doorway.

Matthew almost dropped the box.

‘I’m so sorry,’ the man said. ‘I was about to knock.’

Matthew looked behind him on to the landing, for signs of Laura or one of the stewards. The man was tall, dark-haired, handsome. Immaculate in a dark suit, and carrying a briefcase.

The stranger held out his hand. ‘Mrs Aubrete suggested I come up,’ he said. ‘My name is Ben McGovern.’

Matthew took him into his study. After shaking his hand, it seemed absurd to have him stand on the doorstep. Ben McGovern entered with an air of hesitation. He stood in the centre of the room looking, Matthew thought, like some sort of advertisement—for cologne, perhaps, or clothes. The kind of tailoring that carried a label and cost a fortune. He was incredibly neat. The suit was uncreased, the shirt and silk tie were pristine, the shoes highly polished. The man looked as if he had been scrubbed hard, like a wood cutting board that is scrubbed to a satin-white finish over the years. His face was so smooth that it was hard to believe he might shave. Even the parting of his hair was terribly clean, a white line in a blue-black palette.

Action Man, Matthew thought, amused and bemused at the same time. And he tried to immediately quash the childish comparison. The next thought came straight on its heels. He’s a lawyer. He looks like a London lawyer.

‘Has Laura employed you?’ he asked.

Ben McGovern was looking slowly over the room. He returned his languid and friendly gaze to Matthew. ‘Employed?’ he repeated.

‘Are you working on the will?’

McGovern smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually, I’m an architect.’

‘An …?’

‘I’m working just up the road, in town. On a suite of offices for Brindley and Machen.’

Matthew stared at him blankly. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t understand why you’re here.’

McGovern inclined his head towards the desk. ‘Packing this is a lengthy task,’ he observed.

‘Yes, it is. Look …’

‘Mrs Aubrete tells me that the estate was once a mine. A coal mine.’

‘It was,’ Matthew said. ‘The mine closed in 1800. My great great-grandfather was a shareholder. He bought the land and built this house.’

‘Fascinating,’ McGovern said. ‘It seems so unlikely now. In such a beautiful setting. I see that it’s an interest of yours, history. Where was the pit head?’

‘On top of the hill.’

‘The hill I’ve just driven down, the avenue of trees? Quite amazing. One would never guess. And the house is built over the mine?’

‘Over two of the seams. They went under the sea,’ Matthew said. ‘Two hundred years ago. Look, Mr …’

McGovern opened his briefcase. ‘McGovern,’ he repeated. ‘Here’s my card. Just to show you that I am who I say I am.’

Matthew read it. ‘I don’t doubt you,’ he said.

‘Good,’ McGovern replied. ‘I rather think that’s important just now.’

Matthew frowned. He wasn’t following this conversation. He felt absurdly at a disadvantage, while, conversely, Ben McGovern looked remarkably at ease.

‘Mrs Aubrete and I met two weeks ago,’ McGovern was saying. ‘She’s on the Museum Committee. I’m a freelance. I work all over the country. I was drafted in for an opinion. A professional opinion, on the stresses in the roof?’

Matthew was still staring at him. ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ he said, at last. ‘Laura doesn’t tell me what she does on all her committees.’

McGovern nodded as if he knew this already. ‘I saw her again the other day,’ he said. ‘Two days ago, in fact. And that is when we realized the extraordinary coincidence.’

‘Coincidence?’ Matthew said.

‘Yes. Extraordinary,’ McGovern repeated. ‘Anna Miles.’

Matthew sat down. McGovern inclined his head towards a chair. ‘May I?’

‘Yes … please.’

McGovern put his briefcase on the floor next to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This is a bit awkward, isn’t it? It does sound as if I’ve intruded on your affairs.’

‘I don’t know what you’ve done yet,’ Matthew said.

Another smile. ‘Other than to offer an opinion, nothing,’ McGovern remarked.

‘An opinion on what?’

‘Anna.’

Matthew bit the inside of his lip, to force himself not to echo McGovern like a parrot. Anna’s name, trapped inside his mouth, felt too large to contain. It was as if he could taste her, feel her smooth round shoulder under his tongue.

‘I’ve known Anna for several years,’ McGovern said. ‘Until the day she disappeared, in fact.’ He crossed his hands, one on top of the other, loosely in his lap. ‘We were … well, it doesn’t matter, any more, what our relationship was. I had supported her … I had supported her through several crises.’ The smile was not quite so bright now. McGovern wore an expression of genuine regret. In fact, he turned away from Matthew and glanced at the maps and papers, taking a deep breath. ‘I suppose I thought that we had an understanding,’ he said quietly. ‘But I was evidently wrong.’

It was such a perfect echo of Matthew’s own thoughts not three or four minutes ago, that it was almost tempting to believe that this stranger had read his mind.

‘You and Anna?’ Matthew said. ‘Where?’

‘Where she came from. Manningham.’

There was a momentary silence while Matthew tried to assimilate this information. ‘Manningham,’ he said. ‘I see.’

‘She never told you where she was from?’

‘No.’

‘She didn’t mention anything at all? About her house, her job?’

‘No.’

McGovern gave a short, breathy laugh. ‘But surely you asked her?’

‘Yes, I did. She said she wanted to forget her past.’

McGovern said nothing. Then, he began to drum his fingers on the back of one hand. ‘You see, this is what I find so very surprising,’ he remarked. ‘Mrs Aubrete has told me a little of what has happened with Anna, and … well, I find it so surprising.’

Matthew bridled. ‘I find it surprising that she should confide in you,’ he said. ‘My wife is not the confiding kind.’

McGovern shrugged. ‘I don’t think of myself as the sort of person that people do confide in, normally,’ he admitted. ‘But Mrs Aubrete was so obviously distressed the other day. We were both early for the meeting, and I bought her a coffee … she told me about this woman who had usurped her position. In … well, in every respect, it seems.’

Matthew felt himself colour. ‘That’s none of your business,’ he said.

‘No,’ McGovern agreed readily. ‘No, indeed it isn’t,’ he said. ‘Yet when she mentioned the woman’s name, when she described her, when she showed me her photograph …’

‘Laura had a photograph of Anna?’

‘A staff photograph. Taken here at Christmas.’

Matthew held up his hand. ‘Just a minute,’ he said. He was trying to get his bearings. ‘Anna has a house in Manningham.’

‘Oh yes. A very nice little terraced house.’

‘And she had a job.’

‘Year head, no less.’

‘Year head? What is that?’

‘She was a teacher.’

Matthew dropped his gaze from McGovern, and stared at the floor.

‘And you knew nothing about it?’ McGovern said. ‘She was a music teacher.’

‘I know she plays the violin,’ Matthew murmured.

‘Not just played. Taught,’ McGovern said. ‘And you really had no idea?’

‘I didn’t want to press her,’ Matthew told him. ‘When she arrived here, she was very upset. Very upset.’ He was still staring at the floor, remembering Anna on that first morning. The terror in her face. The panic. ‘I never wanted to pressurize her,’ he murmured. ‘I thought … I thought, in the weeks afterwards, that perhaps she had had some sort of breakdown.’

He looked up. McGovern did not seem surprised.

‘Anna is a very confused person,’ McGovern agreed. ‘She has been in hospital. She was—what do the medics call it?—delusional. Depressed. She thought that people close to her were hell bent on cheating her, attacking her. Whatever. It was very sad. It happened twice. She recovered. The school put her on a kind of extended notice. She was given every kindness, every opportunity, to recover, to get back on her feet.’ He leaned forward. ‘But I wouldn’t be here to interfere,’ he said, ‘if that were all.’

Matthew felt a prickle of unease. It ran down inside him like a draught of ice water. ‘All?’ he said. ‘If that were all …? What do you mean?’

McGovern closed his eyes briefly, as if seeing something unpleasant in Matthew’s face. When he opened them again, he gave a replica of the first bright smile. ‘I can see myself in you,’ he said. ‘I do sympathize.’

Matthew gritted his teeth. ‘Don’t sympathize,’ he said. ‘Just tell me.’

McGovern returned his look calmly. ‘Mr Aubrete,’ he said. ‘I loved Anna. I loved her very much. We were going to be married.’ He paused. When he carried on, his voice broke slightly. ‘But I have to tell you, that if you think that Anna is a proper beneficiary, an honest beneficiary, of your money—of this estate, in fact—then I’d ask you to reconsider the kind of person you’re dealing with. The person,’ he said, ‘that, to be frank, you do not know.’

Matthew felt a deadly calm, a calm composed of rising horror, settle on him like a shroud. ‘Tell me,’ he repeated.

‘Just over a year ago,’ McGovern said, ‘Anna Miles stole a great deal of money from me. And then, she disappeared.’