Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

‘I hope you’ll just slide out of life gently,’ he said very softly, taking Julius’s hand again after the doctor had gone out. ‘I don’t know if you’re even aware I’m here and you probably can’t hear me. But if you do know and if you can hear, I want to tell you I’ll miss you because I love you and I always did.’ A memory of his father’s robust character made him add, wryly, ‘Even when you were at your most difficult and cantankerous.’

Incredibly there was a flicker of movement in the withdrawn features on the pillow. Crispian’s heart jumped, and he glanced towards the door, wondering if he should summon the doctor again. He felt an unmistakable pressure from his father’s hand and Julius’s head turned slightly on the pillow, as if searching for something – for the light?

Very softly, in a whisper so fragile it sounded as if it could dissolve into nothing at any minute, Julius said, ‘Crispian?’

Sight and hearing had failed Julius before they had come to Edirne, but Crispian said, ‘I’m here,’ and pressed his father’s hand firmly.

‘Good son, Crispian,’ said Julius faintly. ‘So proud.’ He turned his head again, as if trying to see. ‘Always so proud of both my sons,’ he said.

Both my sons? Crispian stared at his father, not understanding.

The fragile whispering came again. ‘Don’t think Colm ever knew,’ Julius said. ‘Hope not. Fay wouldn’t have told him – she promised she never would.’

Fay. The lady of the faded photograph on the desk at Cadence Manor. The lady who had been Jamie’s mother and whose name had always seemed to Crispian to belong to a rose romance. Horrified comprehension was unfolding. The long-ago, long-dead Fay – the woman Crispian’s own mother had thought frivolous and unsuitable – had been his father’s mistress, that was what his father was meaning. It was the only thing he could mean. And he had said ‘both my sons’. Did he mean Jamie had been his own son and that Jamie was Crispian’s brother? Crispian’s mind was reeling.

‘Tragic the way Fay died, though – never forgotten it,’ whispered the frail voice. And then a dry gasping came from Julius’s lips, and his head fell to one side.

Jamie Cadence’s Journal

When my memories of those weeks inside the fort at Edirne come back to me, they do so in crimson and black images, streaked with clawing agony and filled with the deepest, bitterest anger and despair any man ever knew.

At first I thought I was going to die. For a long while I wanted to die. I believe I tried to do so. I remember that Raif and the nurses tried to feed me cold liquids. I have no idea if they were a form of anaesthesia or simply for sustenance, but whatever they were I turned my head away from them.

‘It will heal,’ Raif said to me. ‘Jamie, the wounds will heal – they’re healing already. Your face is dreadfully bruised and swollen still, but that will get better in time. As for the other aspect – well, the human race is remarkably adaptable. Remember you can still see and hear, both huge blessings. Speech can be made in other ways. You’ll find a way to talk to your friends, your family.’

Family.

Julius died shortly after my punishment by the extremists. Crispian came to tell me. He hated coming to visit me, I saw that at once. He found me repulsive. I knew if I looked in a mirror I would find myself repulsive, as well. But they kept mirrors away from me and I was glad of it. I was afraid I might recognize the reflection that looked at me from a mirror. I had the deep conviction that what had been done to me would have brought that other deformity to the surface – that the darkness would be stamped on my face for ever and the world would finally see it.

Crispian said they had buried his father in the courtyard and after he went I lay thinking about Julius, wondering what his will would contain. Would he have left everything to Crispian, perhaps with some kind of trust fund for Crispian’s mother? Or would he have left something to me – the son he had never acknowledged – the son born of a long-ago affair that my mother tried to surround with moonlight and roses and a noble forswearing of true love?

Which is utter and complete rot, of course. By the time I was seventeen and had sorted the pieces of the past into their right order, I guessed the truth about my mother and Julius Cadence. A case of simple lust, probably in more or less equal measures on both sides. I may as well be honest and say she was a bit of a slut, my mamma, although to look at her photographs you’d never know it because she looks like the Lily Maid of Astolat or an unawakened Victorian heroine. As an aside, I always suspected that in his early teens Crispian had a romantic admiration for her. Several times I caught him gazing at the photograph, looking moonstruck. He was inclined to be a touch mawkish when it came to the emotions; I often wondered how Gil Martlet dealt with that. Assuming he did deal with it, of course, for I never knew the truth about those two.

One truth I do know is that Julius and Fay gave their affair a spurious air of morality by wrapping it up in protestations of love and devotion and implausible rubbish about being soul mates. Julius’s thoughts were more likely on the lines of: let me have a few nights in your bed, my dear, and we’ll preserve the decencies by telling each other we’re wildly in love. Fay probably thought, I’m married to somebody who’s the next best thing to impotent, I’m going mad with frustration, and you’ll do as well as anyone.

They wouldn’t have used those exact phrases, but I’m fairly sure that was the burden of the song. Over the years I’ve tried to see my mother in a favourable light, but when I remember what she did to me, it’s impossible.

Jamie Cadence’s Journal

If I were fanciful I might say I’ve felt my mother’s presence near to me while I’ve been writing this journal. I’ve even thought she might have guided me to make that search earlier when I found the cupboard with its apparently flimsy back section. She would certainly have told me to see if I could use it to get out. She believed in sweeping aside obstacles if they were barring the way to something you wanted. She said as much to me on the day she died.

‘Never let anything get in the way of a thing you want, Jamie.’ That’s what she said that day, her voice blurry with pain. ‘Never let anything get in the way…’

I was seven years old and it was the end of a long hot summer. I had been at Cadence Manor with Crispian since our school holidays started; I always spent almost the entire summer there – everyone thought it so kind of Sir Julius and Lady Cadence to include me in Crispian’s life, to ensure we were at the same school and that I was so often at Cadence Manor. I was a poor motherless child, they all said, and shook their heads over the tragic death of Fay Cadence when I was little more than a toddler.

I thought I was a poor motherless child, as well. It’s what I was told by everyone, including the man I thought was my father, Colm Cadence. If I could get a sneer into the writing of that name I would, because I despised him for years. He was a man who never swept aside an obstacle, a man who, instead of making a living for himself and his wife, was content to live on his cousin’s charity. He was weak, impractical and gutless. When I was younger I used to wonder how someone like my mother ever married such a milksop. When I was older I realized it was the Cadence money she was after. It was a pity she hardly got any of it. It was more of a pity that I got even less.

Colm lived at the manor, in one wing that he had made his own, and received an income in return for work so light it was virtually non-existent. He was said to look after the place and act as his cousin Julius’s agent, but it was simply another example of the Cadence arrogance, of Julius playing lord of the manor. Colm never had any pride, though. People said he had buried himself in the country, among his books and manuscripts, and told one another that he had never got over the death of his beautiful young wife.