Imogen Robertson - Island of Bones

‘It is safe enough near the door, Mrs Westerman. Only avoid the western corner.’

She edged out. The world seemed to sway somewhat around her, and she put a hand behind her back to steady herself. From either side of the door through which she had emerged extended a lower crenellated wall. At intervals along each was set the sculpted seal of Lord Greta’s house: a pair of arms raised as if growing from the stone, the elbows crooked outwards, and the hands holding between them a fat-faced sun with a bloom of carved, petal-like rays and a beatific smile. The effect was rather disturbing. It looked as if the stone wardens had lifted their beaming heads free from their shoulders. At the western corner of the tower their regular pattern became broken and unsure, and the gap told the story of one watcher fallen, crashing down through the flags. Felix was observing her.

‘It fell all the way to the bottom of the tower. I found it there on my first exploration of this place. The arms are broken, but the sun face is still there.’

Harriet nodded.

‘You are nervous of heights, Mrs Westerman?’ He had come through the doorway and was now leaning casually on one of the merlons.

‘It varies, Felix. Sometimes I am bold, at others my balance appears to fail me.’

He stared down gloomily over the wall. Harriet gripped the stone behind her.

‘You don’t feel the temptation to throw yourself into the void then?’ he said, without looking at her.

‘No, I do not,’ she said as firmly as she could. ‘Only a little weakness.’ With great effort she turned herself to look at the view. A falling run of trees, a glimmer of lake and the crags beyond. She felt her knees shake and her hands were white on the stonework.

‘A little weakness. .’ His voice was soft. ‘What do you conclude from the snuffbox, Mrs Westerman? Do you think my grandfather was involved in the disposal of the body? What do you think you will learn from that poor mangled corpse?’

She looked round quickly and the world lurched a little. He was gazing directly at her.

‘It is impossible to say. I think that is a matter best discussed with Crowther, Felix. When he is ready to tell you something, he shall. Or he will inform your mother and you shall hear of it through her.’ He crossed easily towards her and stood rather close; she felt him examining her and the effect the height was having on her. ‘The view is charming,’ she said, ‘but this weakness has me today. Will you give me your arm, and help me down, Felix?’

His eyes were resting on her white fingers. ‘Do you think you have found new mysteries, Mrs Westerman? Are you and my uncle going to bring some new scandal to light, to taint our family name still further? It seems hardly fair that you should know so much of our business before my mother and I. One day I shall be Lord Keswick, you know.’ He was very close to her now, and his gaze moved slowly over her face and form. ‘Unless my uncle marries a woman who could bear him a son. Then I should be lost. It would be dreadful to be lost.’

Harriet gritted her teeth, released her grip on the stonework and forced herself to take a step forward, making him move out of her way.

‘If you shall not give me your arm, I shall walk unaided.’ She stepped towards the doorway, hoping the trembling that seemed to run up and down her limbs was invisible to him. As her hand touched the stone doorframe she heard him laugh. He took hold of her elbow again and spoke in his usual easy tone.

‘No, I shall certainly be your staff and rod, Mrs Westerman. I am sure my uncle will tell us all in due course.’

She hesitated, but looking into the gloom of the staircase allowed him to take her arm, and with one hand on the central column began to walk down at his side. Going down was far more uncomfortable than climbing, but Felix began to chatter happily about his hunting in a boastful, boyish manner. The memory of his closeness on the roof began to seem less threatening as they descended, but she kept the memory of his words, and turned them over like coloured stones in her mind as he rattled on.

Breakfast at Silverside was an informal meal. The household helped themselves from the warming platters to local bacon and good coffee from the tall silver pot. Mrs Briggs did no more than greet her guests before disappearing into the house to review the arrangements for her garden party. The Vizegrafin took her breakfast in her rooms, and Crowther retreated into his newspaper. Stephen and Mr Quince competed in their enthusiasm to be off and exploring. Harriet ate with an appetite that surprised her, and by the time the household had gone their separate ways, the crows and her feeling of weakness on the rooftop seemed more part of her dreams than her reality.

Hetty Briggs was writing at the desk in her bedroom when she heard the door below her open and close, and looked out to see Mrs Westerman and Crowther step into the morning air. She liked Mrs Westerman for herself, but also had a sense of fellow-feeling with her. It had taken many years for Mrs Briggs to lose the notion of being an impostor in her own home. She looked at the comfortable and elegant establishment of which she was mistress, and would think of the bare and cold cottage in which she had been raised. People saw her as a curiosity too. She knew the polish she had acquired over the years sometimes came as a shock to those who knew her background and were meeting her for the first time. It made them uneasy, as if their own maid had just married a duke. They expected her to sound like her cook and have the manners of a street-hawker. They would watch her suspiciously, waiting for some sign of her birth to make itself apparent — just as, she supposed, they were always examining Harriet’s cuffs for old bloodstains.

Knowing Mrs Westerman and Crowther were about to begin their examination of the body, she sighed and wished luck to their retreating backs. When the body was found in the tomb on St Herbert’s Island it seemed only right to Mrs Briggs that it should be brought to Silverside Hall, and that when Mr Sturgess and the Vizegrafin had been returned to the shore, she should remain to accompany the bones back across the lake herself. Her boatman returned with linens to lift the fragile remains clear of the tomb, and as she watched her workmen shift the body onto the cloth from its cold dry home, she had felt herself start like an anxious mother. She tried to remember if she had heard the snuffbox fall. It must have been worked loose in the tomb itself as the sheet was passed under the body. She thought of it, the flesh of a man returning to earth under the steady gaze of Falcon Crag, becoming less and less a man, more and more at one with the rotting leaves that lapped about the stone flags, the broken reeds.

There had been a peace to their return across the water. Her boatman at the oars, herself in the prow, the body decently wrapped and laid on a plank in the middle of the boat. She watched Catbells rear up to greet them in the dusk, the haze above it touched blood-red and purple, the lake gathering and shifting the colours into slate and gold as the boat glided away from the Island of Bones. The boatman had asked her what was to be done further, and she thought at once of the old brewery. Her house had no chapel of its own, but this outhouse had the calm and high windows she felt somehow the corpse must have become accustomed to on St Herbert’s Island. She had closed the door and locked it with her own hands, and promised the body a place in Crosthwaite Church in due course, and wondered what words she would ask to be carved, to mark where it lay. They came to her out of the silence as if spoken by the hills themselves.

‘“For the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost”,’ she said aloud, and the curlew cried out in reply on the fell above her.