Rose Cottage (10 page)

‘It’s not very likely. This was a secure, locked cupboard, built into the wall, and papered over, and she’d hidden the key away somewhere. She
had
forgotten where that was, and I haven’t had time yet to look for it, but when I saw the cupboard last night it had been uncovered. Someone had cut back the wallpaper and the plaster to clear the door, and the cupboard was empty.’

‘Dear me. This is bad, very bad. Does it mean – do you think that the thieves had found the key?’

‘They must have done. They had certainly used a key. They’d taken everything, and locked the cupboard again.’

‘It was locked? But if you yourself had no key –?’

‘I broke it open. At least Davey did. Davey Pascoe. He was with me. Finding the wall stripped like that, we had to see if Gran’s goods were still there, and it was the only way.’

‘Yes. Yes, I see. Well, I really am sorry to hear this, Mrs Herrick.’ A pause, while he swivelled his chair to face the window, then swung back to me. ‘The missing items. How valuable are they?’

‘Intrinsically, not very. Things like medals and a ring or two and a brooch, small value, but the sort of thing you don’t want to lose. I suppose the most valuable item was five gold sovereigns. Apart from that it was mostly family papers, you know, birth certificates, marriage lines, all the things one keeps.’

‘I see. Yes, I see. How very upsetting. Have you any – well, suspicions as to what may have happened?’

‘None. The only people with any right of access to the cottage are the Pascoes, and they’re hardly suspects. The family, too, of course – the Brandons, I mean – but you could say the same for them, and anyway they’re not here.’

‘Hm.’ He stubbed his cigarette out, frowned down at the ash for a moment, then turned back to me. ‘I take it there’s something you want me to do? If I can help you, of course I will, though I don’t quite see how.’

‘I was going to ask you if you’d heard of anyone who’d been seen hanging around the cottage, a tramp, perhaps, or some other stranger. But you’d have told me already if you had. So all I can do for the moment is ask if you would – oh, there is one thing, have the gipsies ever been back? They used to camp in the lonnen not far from the house, but for years before I left they’d never been there. Has there been any sign of them?’

‘None. I know the lane, and it’s been overgrown ever since I came here. But you were going to let me know what I can do for you?’

‘Yes, please. I wondered if you would let me look at the parish registers? All the family records must be there in the church, mustn’t they?’

‘Some of them, certainly. Not the records of birth, of course. Those – and the deaths – would be at Somerset House. They would supply copies of the certificates if you wanted them. I can give you the address to write to.’

‘Thank you, I already have it. But you’ll have records of the baptisms and funerals and marriages – one does get a certificate of baptism, doesn’t one?’

‘Why, certainly,’ he said, and from the gentleness of his tone it was apparent that he, like his wife, had heard all there was to hear about the dreadful Welland family. But his reaction was different, and not, I thought, a purely professional one. ‘Of course you may look at the books. But we can do more than that. I can make copies for you of all the entries relating to your family. Those losses need not worry you. I’ll do it with pleasure.’

‘Can you really? I didn’t know. Thank you very much.’

‘I wish I could do more. Regarding the other items, the brooches and so on – your neighbours, I would have thought, would be the ones to talk to. The Misses Pope’ – the suspicion of a smile ‘– don’t miss many of the village comings and goings. They may have seen something.’

‘Yes, I’d thought of them. I’ll call in today.’ I returned the smile. ‘And perhaps Miss Linsey may be guided for me.’

‘Indeed, indeed.’ His favourite exclamation was obviously a cover for thought. Once more he swivelled the chair half round and back again to face me. ‘What I might suggest, under the circumstances … Would you like me to have a word with Bob Crawley?’

‘Bob Crawley? I don’t think – who’s he?’

‘Since your time. Our policeman. Old Mr Bainbridge retired two years ago. He went to live with his daughter at Ferryhill. Bob Crawley has his house now, you’ll know the one, the police house up at Lane
Ends. If it would make it easier for you –?’ He paused on a question mark.

‘Oh, yes, thank you. Thank you very much. If you would? Now I’ve taken up enough of your time, and I know how busy you are – I gather that you still have a service on Wednesday evenings – you do? Then thank you again for seeing me. About the copies of the certificates – when would it be convenient for me to come back?’

He got to his feet as I rose. ‘The easiest thing would be if you could make a list, with dates, of the papers you think have disappeared. Can you ask your grandmother? No, I can see that you don’t want to have to trouble her before you’ve had time to find out more about this business. Well, then, just the records that you know would be held here in the church, weddings and funerals and yes, we do record baptisms. If you can let me have the dates of those, it will save a lot of searching. Where do you suppose they start?’

‘I’m not sure. I suppose with Gran’s wedding, and I can’t remember just what year – oh, I’ve had an idea. If it’s still there, she had an old photo album, and the dates might be in that. If I look tonight – is there a time tomorrow when I could let you have them?’

‘If you send the list up with the milk cart, then I can have the pages found if you come to see me later on. I’ve a christening at’ – he glanced down at a diary on the desk – ‘yes, at four o’clock. So, half past three, say, at the church?’

‘Thank you, that’ll be great. I’ll see you get the list first thing.’

As I crossed to the door I glanced out of the window just in time to see the front gate open, and Mrs Winton Smith, back from the church with her empty trug, letting herself into the garden. I braced myself to meet her, but she managed, with perfect dignity, to vanish round the side of the house just as her husband ushered me out of the front door.

Two faces saved. But I wondered, as I let myself out through the gate into the sunny roadway, why I cared, and for whom I was doing the caring. Lilias? Aunt Betsy? Gran? Myself?

Lilias, from all I knew or had heard of her, would not have cared a rap. Besides, she was dead. Aunt Betsy had certainly cared, quite terribly, but she was dead, too. Gran had lived with the slur of ‘shame’ all too long, and was now a long way away. Which left me. I had cared as a child, when people had let slip in my hearing remarks about my mother, or had too openly pitied my fatherless state. At school I had had to bear the thoughtless questions of the other children, and sometimes teasing, but this had come to an end on the day when Billy Comstock, the ten-year-old bully from Lane Ends, had found a new word, ‘bastard’, and tried it out in school playtime, until Davey, aged nine, had flown at him and fought him till he yelled for help, and the two of them, streaming with blood, had to be pulled apart by the teacher. I was never teased again.

But that was a long time ago, and I had, perforce, worked out my own philosophy of living. It had to be what you were, not who you were, that mattered. I had taken life as it was dealt me, loved my home, and been
happy. Would be happy again. So the person to be sorry for here was Mrs Winton Smith, a snob who had dropped a social brick, and who, being what she was, would obviously care very much about that.

Muffin was sitting by the pond again, but I doubted if he would be there for very long. The geese were on their way back from Scurr’s yard, and the gander did not suffer dogs or children gladly. I would have liked to linger to watch the confrontation, but there was a lot to do. I turned for home.

The younger Miss Pope, Miss Mildred, was busy in her garden when I got to Witches’ Corner. She was almost always busy in her garden, which was immaculately kept and extremely pretty, though Miss Mildred knew little or nothing about gardening methods, or even about plants. I had heard my grandfather talking often enough about her – ‘a real green thumb, that one has, and not knowing what on earth to do with it.’ The comment had stemmed from the time when he had stopped at her gate to ask her about some plant, a rareish species, which was growing rampant on her garden wall, and her reply, full of enthusiasm, had been, ‘That pink thing? What did you say it was? I’ve always called it my dear little rockery plant.’

‘She never prunes her roses, either,’ Granddad had said, ‘and look at them! Real beauties, all of them, and flowering two full weeks before mine at the Hall. Where’s the justice?’ Then he had laughed, starting to fill his awful old pipe, and said indulgently, ‘But
there, it’s a matter of love. Beats manure any day, that does.’

But by whatever method or lack of it, Miss Mildred’s garden was enchanting, a real cottage garden full of all the things it should have held, delphiniums, lupins, pinks and violas, with roses and honeysuckle on the rampage on every surface they could find. The house and garden were purely Miss Mildred’s territory; her elder sister Agatha was the man of the house, the breadwinner, travelling by train daily to Sunderland to her work.

When I paused at the garden gate Miss Mildred was visible only as a flowered cotton rump sticking up among the lupins. I opened the gate and called her name, and she up-ended to her full five feet three inches, peered out between the lupins (which were taller than she was), and then broke out into delighted exclamations.

‘It’s Kathy! Well, my goodness, if it isn’t little Kathy Welland!’ She was a dumpy little creature, with the pink cheeks and blue eyes of a long-faded prettiness, and wispy grey hair that was rather the worse for its morning among the lupins. ‘Come in, my dear, come in! How lovely to see you! Annie Pascoe said you were coming, and here you are! It’s like a miracle!’

Briefly wondering if this made Mrs Pascoe a liar or a prophet, I accepted Miss Mildred’s fervent double hand-clasp and feather-light kiss and let myself be drawn into the garden, to answer as best I could all her eager questions about Gran, the family at the Strathbeg house, and then myself, my war work and
marriage, and my life in London since my husband’s death. It was a demonstration of what the village said, that ‘the Miss Popes knew the inside of everything.’ One could see how, but the eager questions were so full of real interest, with a total lack of criticism or any shade of unkindness, that one found oneself answering readily and in detail. As Granddad had said of her garden, with Miss Mildred it was a matter of love. There was about her a rare and genuine innocence – in the most literal meaning of the word – that made it impossible to take offence, however personal her questions and comments.

‘So you were left nicely off, well, that’s a mercy, isn’t it? I mean, that’s
something
… And what a lovely job you’ve got, working with flowers. I suppose’ – with an absent eye on the lily-buds shouldering their way up through carnations and roses – ‘they get all sorts of special flowers in those big London places? Flown in from Africa and India and the South Sea Islands and such like?’

‘Yes, they do. Some of them are lovely, but not a patch on yours, Miss Mildred! Your garden’s gorgeous, it really is, just as I remember it.’

‘Well, we’re having such a beautiful summer.’ Having so to speak passed the credit on, she turned back to me. ‘Are you here for long? You must come and have supper with us when my sister’s home. She won’t want to miss you.’

‘I’d love it, if I can, but I don’t quite know yet how long I’ll be here. Mrs Pascoe would surely tell you why I’d come?’

It was a very mild shaft, and it went wide. ‘Oh yes, she told me all about it. And she says that Jim and Davey will help you, and I suppose they’ll get Caslaw’s to do the move. Which bits does she want, your grandmother? She’ll want the old sideboard, I’m sure, and the rocking chair, and is the table hers, and the other chairs? It’ll be nice for her to have all her own things around her again.’ A pause and a quick intake of breath. ‘Oh, goodness, of course—’

‘What is it?’ I asked, as she stopped.

‘So stupid of me to forget, but seeing you suddenly like this, and then the garden, always so much to be done … I meant to come and tell you, but now you’re here … Come over here and we’ll sit down.’ She led the way to a seat set back under a rustic arch predictably laden with pink rambling roses laced through with purple clematis. We sat.

‘It was talking about your grandmother’s furniture and things that reminded me, though how I could have forgotten I don’t know. Sister said I must tell you if I saw you, but I did wonder if it would scare you, staying down there alone at the cottage.’

She paused, looking a little anxious. I said quickly, ‘Being alone doesn’t scare me. Really it doesn’t. Do go on.’

‘Well, if you’re sure … It was Monday, just the day before you got here. Sister had told me she would get home late, because there’d been a muddle at the office, with someone being ill the week before, so she would get the later train, and she would bring the papers home to do in the evening. And she goes to the market
on a Monday as a rule and gets what we need for the week, things you can’t get in the village or from Barlow’s van. So I knew she’d have a lot to carry, and there isn’t usually anyone else getting off here from that train, so I thought I’d walk down to the station to meet her. Well, I was a bit late starting, so when I got to the Rose Cottage lane-end I thought I might take the short cut by Gipsy Lonnen. It was getting dark by then – just dusk, really – but I know the way so well, and it does save a lot of time.’