Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“I promised myself,” she whispered in the darkness. “I’d do anything for you. To make it better.”

But Juliet Spence had seen no difference between the baby she’d borne and the one she’d stolen, Deborah told him. Each was her child. She was the mother. There was no difference. To her, mothering wasn’t the initial act and the nine months that followed it. But Robin Sage hadn’t seen that, had he? He offered her money to escape, but he should have known she was Maggie’s mother, she wouldn’t leave her child, it didn’t matter what price she had to pay to stay with her, she would pay it, she loved her, she was her mother.

“That’s how it was for her, wasn’t it?” Deborah whispered.

St. James kissed her forehead and settled the blankets more closely round her. “Yes,” he said. “That’s how it was.”

BRENDAN POWER CRUNCHED along the verge, heading into the village. He would have sunk up to his knees in the snow, but someone had been out earlier than he, and a path was already trodden. It was speckled every thirty yards or so with charred tobacco. Whoever it was out for a walk was smoking a pipe that didn’t draw much better than Brendan’s.

He himself wasn’t smoking this morning. He had his pipe with him in case he found himself in the position of needing to do something with his hands, but so far he hadn’t brought it out of its leather pouch, although he could feel the weight of it tapping securely against his hip.

The day after any storm was generally glorious, and Brendan found this one as splendid as the previous night had been frightful. The air was still. The early sun laid down great blazes of crystal incandescence across the land. Frost rimed the tops of the drystone walls. Slate roofs wore a thick coating of snow. As he passed the first terraced house on his way into the village, he saw that someone had remembered the birds. Three sparrows were picking at a handful of toast crumbs outside a doorway, and while they eyed him warily as he passed by, hunger kept them from scattering into the trees.

He wished he’d thought to bring something with him. Toast, a slice of stale bread, an apple. It didn’t matter. Anything edible to offer the birds would have served as a marginally credible excuse for being out in the fi rst place. And he’d be needing an excuse when he returned home. In fact, it might be wise to start concocting one now as he walked.

He hadn’t thought of that earlier. Standing at the dining-room window, looking out beyond the garden to the vast white pasture that was part of the Townley-Young estate, he’d thought only of getting out, of tramping holes in the snow and driving his feet forward into a forever he could bear to live with.

His father-in-law had come to their bedroom at eight o’clock. Brendan had heard his military footsteps in the passage and had slid out of bed, freeing himself of the anchoring heaviness of his wife’s arm. In sleep, she’d thrown it diagonally across him so that her fingers rested in his groin. Under other circumstances he might have found this somnolent implication of intimacy quite erotic. As it was, he lay flaccid and mildly repelled and at the same time grateful that she was asleep. Her fingers wouldn’t be drifting coyly another inch to the left in the expectation of encountering what she deemed appropriate male morning arousal. She wouldn’t be demanding what he couldn’t give, pumping him furiously and waiting — agitated, anxious, then angry — for his body to respond. Tin-voiced accusations wouldn’t follow. Neither would the tearless weeping that screwed up her face and resounded through the corridors. As long as she slept, his body was his own and his spirit was free, so he slipped to the door at the sound of his father-in-law’s approach, and he cracked it open before Townley-Young could knock and awaken her.

His father-in-law was fully dressed, as usual. Brendan had never seen him otherwise. His tweeds, his shirt, his shoes, and his tie all made a careful statement about good breeding that Brendan knew he was supposed to understand and emulate. Everything he wore was just old enough to indicate the appropriate lack of interest in clothing that was inherent to the landed gentry. More than once Brendan had looked at his father-in-law and wondered idly how he managed the feat of maintaining an entire wardrobe that — from shirt to shoes — always looked at least ten years old, even when new.

Townley-Young gave a glance to Brendan’s woollen dressing gown and pursed his lips in silent disapproval at the messy bow Brendan had made when tying the belt. Manly men use square knots to keep their dressing gowns closed, his expression said, and the two tails falling from the waist are always perfectly even, you twit.

Brendan stepped into the corridor and shut the door behind him. “Still asleep,” he explained.

Townley-Young peered at the door’s panels as if he could see through them and make an evaluation of his daughter’s frame of mind. “Another rough night?” he asked.

That was certainly one way to put it, Brendan thought. He’d got home after eleven with the hope she’d be asleep, only to end up tussling with her beneath the covers in what went for marital relations between them. He’d been able to perform, thank God, because the room was dark and, during their biweekly nighttime encounters, she’d taken to whispering certain Anglo-Saxon pleasantries which he found allowed him to fantasize more freely. He wasn’t in bed with Becky on those nights. He chose his mate freely. He moaned and writhed beneath her and said, Oh God, oh yes, I love it, I love it to the image of Polly Yarkin.

Last night, however, Becky had been more aggressive than usual. Her ministrations possessed an aura of anger. She’d not accused or wept when he came into their bedroom smelling of gin and looking — he knew because he could not hide it — dejected and decidedly lovelorn. Instead, she’d wordlessly demanded retribution in the form she knew he wished least to make.

So it had indeed been a rough night, although not in the manner his father-in-law thought. He said, “A little discomfort,” and hoped Townley-Young would apply the description to his daughter.

“Right,” Townley-Young had said. “Well, at least we’ll be able to set her mind at rest. That should go far to making her more comfortable.”

He’d gone on to explain that the work at Cotes Hall would proceed without interruption at last. He gave the reasons why, but Brendan merely nodded and tried to look filled with anticipation while his life drained away like an ebbing tide.

Now as he approached Crofters Inn along the Lancaster Road he wondered why he had depended so much upon the Hall’s remaining unavailable to them. He was married to Becky, after all. He’d mucked up his life. Why did it seem a more permanent disaster if they had their own home?

He couldn’t have said. It was just that with the announcement of the Hall’s pending completion, he’d heard a door slam somewhere on his dreams of the future, as meaningless as those dreams had been. And with the door’s slamming, he felt claustrophobic. He needed out. If he couldn’t make an escape from the marriage, at least he could from the house. So out he went, into the frosty morning.

“Where you off to, Bren?” Josie Wragg was perched on top of one of the two stone pillars that gave way to the Crofters Inn car park. She had brushed it clear of snow and she was dangling her legs and looking as forlorn as Brendan felt. She was the word droop personified: in her spine, her arms, her legs, and her feet. Even her face looked heavy, with the skin pulled down round her mouth and eyes.

“Just a walk,” he said. And then he added because she looked so down-trodden and he knew exactly how that feeling throws one’s life into shadow, “Would you like to come along?”