For the next three nights the doll cried until Aunt Kestrel asked Edward why he was white-faced with dark stains beneath his eyes, from lack of sleep. He said nothing to anyone and Leonora had spent little time with him. She had been in disgrace, forbidden to go outside, forbidden to have toys, kept to her room until she gave what Aunt Kestrel called ‘a heartfelt apology’. Edward had crept in a couple of times and found her sitting staring out of the window, or lying on her back on the bed, not reading, not sleeping, just looking up at the ceiling. He had offered to stay, told her he was sorry, that he would ask Aunt Kestrel to let her come outside, suggested this or that he could bring to her. She had either not replied or shaken her head, but once, she had looked at him and said, ‘Mrs Mullen said I was possessed by a demon. I think that may be true.’
He had told her demons did not exist, that she simply had a bad temper and would learn to overcome it, but she said it was not just a bad temper, it was an evil one. Mrs Mullen had brought her boiled fish, peas and a glass of water on a tray and told her she was bringing badness upon the house.
‘I am, I am.’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m very bored. I wish you would apologise and then you could come out and we could do something, walk along the river and watch the lock open or look for herons.’
But she had yawned and turned away.
The doll cried for a fourth night and this time he climbed up to the shelf and took it down. It lay in its box, stiff and still, looking like a body in a coffin.
And realising that, he knew what he should do.
He was sure he should do it by himself. Leonora was likely to scream or have a fright, behave stupidly or tell Aunt Kestrel. The prospect only frightened him a little.
Leonora was allowed downstairs, though because she had stood in front of Aunt Kestrel with a mutinous face and refused to apologise, she was still forbidden the outside world.
It was hot again, the sun blazing out of an enamel blue sky, the fens baked and the channels running dry but when Edward woke at five the air still had a morning damp and freshness. He dressed in shorts and shirt, and put on his plimsolls which made no noise.
He looked in the box. Dolly lay still in her tissue paper shroud, though he had heard the crying as he went to sleep and when he woke once in the night.
Someone would hear him, the stairs would creak, the door key would make a clink, the door would stick, as it did after rain. He waited, holding his breath, for Mrs Mullen to appear and ask what he was doing, or Aunt Kestrel to take the box and order him back to bed.
But he went stealthily, made no sound. No one heard him, no one came.
The road to the church was dusty under the early morning sun. Smoke curled from the chimney of the lock keeper’s cottage beside the water. The dog barked. A heron rose from the river close beside him, a great pale ghost flapping away low over the fen.
He was afraid of the churchyard, afraid of the gnarled trunks of the yew trees and the soft swish of tall grasses against his legs. At the back, against the wall, the gravestones were half sunken into the earth, their stone lettering too worn away or moss-covered to read. No one left flowers here, no one cleared and tidied. No one remembered these ancient dead. He wondered about what was under the soil and inside the coffins, imagined skulls and bones stretched out.
He had brought a tin spade he had found in a cupboard. Its edge was rough and the wooden handle wobbled in its shaft and when he started trying to dig with it into the tussocks of grass he realised it would break before he had broken into the ground. But further along the grass petered out to thin soil and pine needles and using the spade and his hands, he dug out enough. It took a long time. His hands blistered quickly and the blisters split open and his arms tired. A thrush came and pecked at the soil he had uncovered and a wagon went down the road. He ducked behind the broad tree trunk.
When he came to bury the doll in its small cardboard coffin he thought he should say a prayer, as people always did at funerals, but it was not easy to think of suitable words.
‘Oh God, let Dolly lie in peace without crying.’
He bowed his head. The thrush went on pecking at the soil, even after he had dragged it over the coffin and the grave with his tin spade.
When he slipped back into the house, he heard Mrs Mullen from the kitchen, and his aunt moving about her room. It was after seven o’clock.
No one found out. No one took the slightest notice of him, he was of no account. A telegram had arrived saying that Leonora’s mother was in London and waiting for her, she should be put on the train as soon as possible that day.
‘I long for her,’ Aunt Kestrel said, as she finished reading the telegram out.
Mrs Mullen, setting down the silver pot of coffee on its stand, made a derisive sound under her breath.
The morning was a scramble of boxes and trunks and people flying up and down the stairs. Edward went outside, afraid to be told that he was getting underfoot, the image of the silent, buried doll filling his mind. He did not know what he might do if Leonora asked for it.
She did not. She stood in the hall surrounded by her luggage, her hair tied back in a ribbon which made her look unfamiliar, already someone he did not know. He could not picture where she was going to, or imagine her mother and the latest stepfather.
‘I will probably never see you again,’ she said. The station taxi was at the door and Aunt Kestrel was putting on her hat, looking in her bag. She would see Leonora onto the train.
‘You might,’ Edward said. ‘We are cousins.’
‘No. Our mothers hated one another. I think we will be strangers.’
She put out a slender, cool hand and he shook it. He wanted to say something more, remind her of things they had said to one another, what had happened, what they had shared, to hold onto this strange, interesting holiday. But Leonora was already somewhere else and he sensed that she would not welcome such reminders.
He watched her walk, stiff-backed, down the path, her luggage stowed away in the taxi, Aunt Kestrel fussing behind her.
‘Goodbye, Leonora,’ he said quietly.
She did not look round, only climbed in to the taxi and sat staring straight ahead as the car moved off. She did not glance back at him, or at Iyot House, which he understood was for her already part of the past and moving farther and farther away as the taxi wheels turned.
The sound of the motor died away.
‘And good riddance,’ Mrs Mullen said from the hall. ‘That’s a bad one and brought nothing but bad with her, so be glad she’s gone and pray she’s left none of it behind her.’
Edward woke in the middle of the night to a deathly stillness, in the house and outside, and remembered that he was alone in the attics. Aunt Kestrel was two floors below, Mrs Mullen in the basement. Leonora had gone.
He closed his eyes and tried to picture a sea of black velvet, which he had once been told was the way to bring on sleep, and after a time he did fall into drowsiness, but through it, in the distance, he heard the sound of paper rustling and the muffled crying of Dolly, buried beneath the earth.