Kate Morton - The House at Riverton aka The Shifting Fog

He’d lasted four days and nights, Myra said, before the crying finally stopped and the tiny soul found some rest. He was white as a sheet when he went, all the blood having raced to his swollen shoulder, eager for escape. I thought of the nursery book with its pretty spine, inscribed to Timothy Hartford.

‘ His cries were hard enough to listen to,’ Myra said, shifting her foot so that a pocket of cold air escaped. ‘But they were nothing next to hers.’

‘Whose?’ I whispered back.

‘His mother’s. Jemima’s. Started when they carried the little one away and didn’t stop for a week. If you’d only heard the sound. Grief to make your hair turn grey. Wouldn’t eat, nor drink neither; faded away so as she was almost as pale as he, rest his soul.’

I shivered; tried to accord this picture with the plain, plump woman who seemed far too ordinary to suffer so spectacularly. ‘You said “children”? What happened to the others?’

‘Other,’ Myra said. ‘Adam. He made it older than Timmy, and we all thought he’d escaped the curse. Poor lad hadn’t though. He’d just been swaddled tighter than his brother. There wasn’t much his mother would allow him do more active than reading in the library. She wasn’t planning on making the same mistake twice.’ Myra sighed, pulled her knees up higher to her chest for warmth. ‘Ah, but there’s not a mother alive who can stop her boy getting into mischief if mischief’s in his mind.’

‘What mischief did he get up to? What was it killed him, Myra?’

‘In the end all it took was a trip up the stairs,’ Myra said. ‘Happened at the Major’s house in Buckinghamshire. I didn’t see it myself, but Clara, the housemaid there, saw it with her own two eyes, for she was dusting in the hall. She said he was running too fast, lost his footing and slipped. Nothing more. Mustn’t have hurt too bad for he hopped himself up, right as rain, and kept on going. It was that evening, Clara said, that his knee swelled up like a balloon-just like Timmy’s shoulder before-and later in the night he started crying.’

‘Was it days?’ I said. ‘Like the last time?’

‘Not with Adam, no.’ Myra lowered her voice. ‘Clara said the poor lad screamed with agony most of the night, calling for his mother, begging her to take the pain away. There was no one in that house slept a wink that long night, not even Mr Barker, the groomsman, who was all but deaf. They just lay in their beds, listening to the sound of that boy’s pain. The Major stood outside the door all night, brave as anything, never shed a tear.

‘Then, just before the dawn, according to Clara, the crying stopped, sudden as you like, and the house fell to a dead silence. In the morning, when Clara took the lad a breakfast tray, she found Jemima lying across his bed, and in her arms, face as peaceful as one of God’s own angels, her boy, just as if asleep.’

‘Was she crying, like the time before?’

‘Not this time,’ Myra said. ‘Clara said she looked almost as peaceful as him. Glad his suffering was over, I expect. The night was ended and she’d seen him off to a better place, where troubles and sorrows could find him no more.’

I considered this. The sudden cessation of the boy’s crying. His mother’s relief. ‘Myra,’ I said slowly, ‘you don’t think-?’

‘I think it was a mercy that boy went faster than his brother, is what I think,’ Myra snapped.

There was silence then, and I thought for a minute she had fallen to sleep, though her breathing was still light which made me think she had not and was just pretending. I pulled the blanket up around my neck and closed my eyes, tried not to picture screaming boys and desperate mothers.

I was just drifting off when Myra’s whisper cut through the cold air. ‘Now she’s gone and expecting again, isn’t she. Due next August.’ She turned pious then. ‘You’re to pray extra hard, you hear? ’Specially now-He listens closer near Christmas. You’re to pray she’ll be delivered of a healthy babe this time.’ She rolled over and pulled the blanket with her. ‘One that won’t go bleeding itself to an early grave.’

Christmas came and went, Lord Ashbury’s library was declared dust-free, and the morning after Boxing Day I defied the cold and headed into Saffron Green on an errand for Mrs Townsend. Lady Violet was planning a New Year luncheon party with hopes of enlisting support for her Belgian refugee committee. She quite liked the idea, Myra had heard her say, of expanding into French and Portuguese expatriates, should it become necessary.

According to Mrs Townsend there was no surer way to impress at luncheon than with Mr Georgias’s genuine Greek pastries. Not that they were available to all and sundry, she added with an air of self-aggrandisement, particularly not in these testing times. No indeed. I was to visit the grocery counter and ask for Mrs Townsend of Riverton’s special order.

Despite the glacial weather, I was glad to make the trip to town. After weeks of festivity-Christmas, and now New Year-it was a welcome change to get outside, to be alone, to spend a morning beyond the range of Myra’s endless scrutiny. For after months of relative peace, she had taken particular interest in my duties of late: watching, scolding, correcting. I had the uneasy sense of being groomed for a change I was yet to see coming.

Besides, I had my own secret reason for welcoming the village chore. The fourth of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels of Sherlock Holmes had been printed and I’d arranged with the peddler to purchase a copy. It had taken me six months to save the money and would be the first I had ever bought brand new. The Valley of Fear . The title alone made me thrill with anticipation.

The peddler, I knew, lived with his wife and six children in a grey-stone back-to-back that stood to attention in a line of identical others. The street was part of a dreary housing pocket tucked behind the railway station, and the smell of burning coal hung heavy in the air. The cobblestones were black and a film of soot clung to the lampposts. I knocked cautiously on the shabby door, then stood back to wait. A child of about three, with dusty shoes and a threadbare pullover, sat on the step beside me, drumming the downpipe with a stick. His bare knees were covered in scabs made blue by the cold.

I knocked again, harder this time. Finally the door opened to reveal a rake-thin woman with a pregnant belly tight beneath her apron and a red-eyed infant on her hip. She said nothing, looked through me with dead eyes while I found my tongue.

‘Hello,’ I said in a voice I’d learned from Myra. ‘Grace Reeves. I’m looking for Mr Jones.’

Still she said nothing.

‘I’m a customer.’ My voice faltered slightly; an unwanted note of inquiry crept in. ‘I’ve come to buy a book?’

Her eyes flickered, an almost imperceptible sign of recognition. She hoisted the baby higher onto her bony hip and tilted her head toward a room behind. ‘He’s out the back.’

She shifted some and I squeezed past, heading in the only direction the tiny house afforded. Through the doorway was a kitchen, thick with the stench of rancid milk. Two little boys, grubby with poverty, sat at the table, rolling a pair of stones along the scratched pine surface.

The larger of the two rolled his stone into that of his brother then looked up at me, his eyes full moons in his hollowed face. ‘Are you looking for my pappy?’

I nodded.

‘He’s outside, oiling the wagon.’

I must have looked lost, for he pointed a stubby finger at a small timber door next to the stove.

I nodded again; tried to smile.

‘I’ll be starting working with him soon,’ the boy said, turning back to his stone, lining up another shot. ‘When I’m eight.’