Ambleside, Lake District
November 1957
Hattie came in from the rain. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and hoped yet another day’s tears would blend into the water that dripped from her fringe. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence, the crying. She hated school. And school hated her.
She peeled off her soaked shoes and silently pulled the door to, shutting out the cold air that rolled off Lake Windermere and threatened to chill the house to its bones. Already Ambleside’s streets had heaved that soft sigh that signalled the beginning of winter, and she shivered as she removed her coat and ran a hand through her wet hair. Frowned. Something hard was stuck in her ropy auburn plait. She pulled it out – a Pontefract cake, sticky with someone else’s saliva. The tears threatened to reappear, and she pushed them back with an angry swipe of her little fists.
She set her satchel next to Papa’s briefcase; it was as sodden as her own. Mama’s papers were there on a footstool, scraggly piles of scrawled notes that seemed to grow of their own accord and follow her around the house.
But Albert’s bag was nowhere to be seen; her big brother was late home from school again. And Hattie knew why. The reason – to which her parents remained oblivious – was blonde and beautiful, two years older than him, with eyes as blue as the summer sky.
She stopped. Listened. Heard the clock ticking in the kitchen, the gentle bubble of a pot on the range. The pitter-patter of rain as it washed down the window. The house was quiet. Too quiet. No music, no garbled conversation, no cooking sounds spilling from the kitchen with the promise of the evening ahead.
Something was wrong. She held her breath.
There. A murmur. Just a whisper. Bleeding through the keyhole of the living-room door. The closed door. She heard Papa’s voice in her head: Open doors, open minds, Hattie. The Rathmores’ living room was porous, as a rule.
She approached tentatively, her sodden socks leaving shiny footprints on the oak floor, and pressed an ear to the timber.
‘. . . never really recovered from Bergen-Belsen, that’s my best guess . . . I had no idea he couldn’t cope. How would I?’ That was Papa.
‘I know, Teddy.’ This was Mama; a comforting, breathy statement, the type said with eyes closed, hands gripped.
Papa’s voice was staccato. ‘That isn’t the official line . . . the papers will say it was an aneurysm.’ He stopped. The four bells of the mantel clock drew out the silence. Distractedly, he said, ‘What if it runs in the family, Nancy?’
The gentle creak of the sofa – Mama leaning forward? ‘What do you mean?’
‘Suicide.’ Hattie took a quick breath; she’d heard – overheard – that word before and knew what it was. What it meant. ‘He drowned himself in the lake. Drowned right where Charlotte disappeared.’
Silence.
As Hattie leaned against the door frame, she began to shiver, but she couldn’t turn away, couldn’t leave. The door silently opened a crack and she pulled back her hand.
The sofa sighed as Papa stood. ‘I’ve heard these things can run in the family. This type of . . . malaise.’ His quick footsteps went to the sideboard, crossed Hattie’s view. She rolled back from the door, caught her reflection in the hallway mirror. Hair-iet Rash-more; that was what the girls at school called her, on account of her red hair and freckles.
When Mama spoke again, her voice was softer. ‘I don’t think that’s true, Teddy. It was the war. Before that, well, you know what he was like. It’s been nearly twenty years since you’ve seen him. Since we saw him at Blackwater Hall in 1939. Nobody parted on the best of terms.’
‘No,’ said Papa. ‘But we did write. His letters . . . there weren’t many.’ He cursed. ‘Always so chipper . . . full of bravado. God help him.’
In the silence that followed, Hattie brushed aside her fringe, appraised herself. Then looked away. Mama said that beauty lived within, which Hattie had come to learn was something only beautiful people said.
‘And your father?’
‘He could barely speak . . . distraught.’ The clink of ice, the splash of liquid. Papa was closer to her now. She could hear the gulp as he drained his glass. Then more ice, more liquid. ‘We may have our differences, but . . . his son gone . . . how does it feel to lose a son? What if I lost Albert? I can’t imagine. I can’t.’
‘Your mother . . . how is she?’ Mama’s voice was full of distaste.
‘Confined to her bed.’ He moved to the door, inches from Hattie.
‘Funeral?’
‘Next week.’
A murmur from Mama she couldn’t make out.
‘Yes, perhaps it’s best you stay here. I’ll go alone. It’s a long trip. But then . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘But then in the new year, we must return.’ To where?
‘Yes, of course. The children can meet their grandparents.’ Hattie’s scalp prickled at the prospect. Grandparents. She could barely imagine it. ‘We’ll go for the summer.’
Papa paused as though gathering his thoughts. Or his courage. ‘No, not just for the summer.’
‘I won’t.’ This was Mama’s I’ve made up my mind voice.
‘It’s my duty now.’
‘Oh, tradition, is it?’
‘Don’t say it like that.’ Hattie was lost. What duty? What tradition? If Albert were here he could translate; he always knew what things were and what they meant.
‘Times have changed . . . we don’t have to go back to Ireland.’
Papa said, ‘But it has to go to me. Then it has to go to Albert. We’re the last of the line.’
Mama scoffed. Began to say something. Paused.
‘It’s a peerage, not a raffle prize.’ Papa drained his glass, the final chink of ice signifying the end of the conversation.
But Mama didn’t stop there. ‘Teddy, I won’t go back to that house. After what happened . . . after what happened to Charlotte.’
‘I’m sorry, Nancy. I’m so sorry.’
There was a gentle brush of linen, a slow released sigh; the sound of a warm embrace. Mama’s voice was muffled. ‘I won’t go back, Teddy, I won’t.’ But her resolve had melted away, her fire put out, and although she didn’t understand exactly how or why, in that instant Hattie Rathmore knew her life was about to change for ever.