Nicola Upson - Angel with Two Faces

‘You make it sound so easy, Archie,’ Morveth said sadly. ‘I wish I still had your certainty. I only ever wanted to protect them.’

‘Morwenna and Loveday?’

‘Yes – and Harry, too, I suppose, even after everything he’s done. I’ve looked out for them all their lives – it’s hard to break the habit. But you’re right – that other family’s grief is on my conscience, and more besides, and I don’t trust myself to do the right thing like I used to.’

‘Then I’ll appeal to your conscience now,’ Archie said, more gently this time. Morveth was one of the proudest women he had ever met and, whilst he recognised the truth in Josephine’s opinion of her, he sympathised with how difficult it must be for Morveth to acknowledge her own fallibility – to him but more especially to herself. ‘I’m here to investigate Nathaniel’s death but things have been going wrong in this community for much longer. Please tell me anything you can that might help me piece it together.’

‘All right, but you have to understand – I don’t know anything for sure. I can only tell you what I think – although it’s actually what I’ve been trying not to think.’

‘Go on,’ Penrose urged.

‘It’s going to sound ridiculous, but the longer all this goes on, the more certain I am that Harry didn’t die after all.’

For the first time in many years, Morwenna was afraid. It was an emotion which she always associated with the early days of her relationship with Harry; back then, the fear that someone would discover their secret had been mixed with excitement; now, she felt it in its purest form – paralysing rather than exhilarating, and stripped of all the heroic illusions that had fooled her when she was young. ‘What else have you done, Harry?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice level. ‘Not Nathaniel – please, tell me that wasn’t you?’ As he continued to say nothing, refusing even to look at her, her plea became a scream. ‘Tell me it wasn’t you, Harry.’

‘I had no choice,’ he said, his words barely audible. ‘I’d already killed – what difference could it make?’

Morwenna stared at him in disbelief. ‘How can you say that? There’s no comparison. The other man was a stranger – and anyway, he provoked you. Nathaniel’s death was cold-blooded murder, something you must have planned – why would you do that?’

‘I don’t know – nothing made sense any more. I did it for us – so we could be together.’

She slapped him, hard, and tried to focus on the stinging in her hand to keep herself from losing all reason. ‘No, Harry – you got away with that when you killed our parents but it’s not good enough any more. Don’t pin this on us – you owe me more than that, and you certainly owe Nathaniel something more. He was your friend, for God’s sake – he loved you. And you’ve just exchanged his life for a fantasy – wiped him out because he got in your way. What’s happened to you? If you can do that, you can do anything. Where’s this going to end?’

‘Oh stop pretending, Morwenna. You’ve known what I’m capable of since we were eighteen. It didn’t bother you then, when it was our parents, so why all this grief now? You didn’t even particularly like Nathaniel, so why choose his life over mine?’

‘It’s not a choice. Why is everything so black and white with you? What you did to our parents was an act of despair, Harry – you wanted oblivion for yourself, and you didn’t care who you took with you. I understood that, and I can understand the type of rage that led you to go too far with a stranger who was stupid enough to push you. But Nathaniel wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time – what you did to him was pure hatred. Can’t you see there’s a difference?’

‘All I can see is that I couldn’t be parted from you, and Nathaniel was in the way. He knew too much – we could never have been happy.’

‘Like we are now, you mean?’

‘Don’t mock me, Morwenna,’ he said angrily. ‘I did hate Nathaniel – and with good reason. I hated him just like I hated that man when he hurt Shilling, only this didn’t pass.’

‘But why? Nothing that’s gone wrong between us was Nathaniel’s fault. He didn’t ask to be told about the fire, and we’ve been perfectly capable of tearing each other apart without any help from him.’

‘How can you say that ? I’ve been watching you, Morwenna…’

‘What do you mean? How could you have been watching me? How long have you been back here?’

‘A few days. I read the announcement in the paper, and I could hardly miss my own funeral, could I?’

The sarcasm sounded strange coming from Harry, and the realisation that he was capable of shocking her hurt Morwenna far more than anything he had to say. ‘Where have you been hiding?’ she asked.

‘There’s a tunnel under the church that no one knows about. I’ve been there most of the time, but I had to see you, even if it wasn’t safe to let you know. So yes, I watched you and I saw what it had done to you – the belief that I could forget you and turn to Loveday, and everything else that had happened. All the life in you had gone.’

‘But what’s that got to do with Nathaniel?’

‘No matter what you say, you’d never have believed that of me if he hadn’t put it in your head. You know, I stood under that church, listening while he stumbled his way through that pathetic eulogy, and all I could think about was how none of this would have happened if it weren’t for him – we could still be together. You talk about love, but he was a coward and a hypocrite. Yes, he loved me, but not in the way you think; he wanted me just like I want you, and he couldn’t deal with it. I went out of my way to be friendly to him, to show him that it made no difference, and it really didn’t – not until he had the nerve to preach to you about forbidden love and tell you that I was fucking my little sister.’

‘Harry, he…’

‘Don’t try to defend him, Morwenna. Why would he make up those lies about me? Was it some sort of spiteful revenge for everything he couldn’t have or was he just worried about my soul? If that was it, he should have saved his counsel for himself, because I showed him what damnation really means. I showed him that dead men do come back – and they get what they’re owed.’

‘Listen to me, Harry. He didn’t put anything in my head. I told you why I jumped to the wrong conclusions about you and Loveday, and it had nothing to do with Nathaniel.’

‘But that night, when we were arguing – you accused me of turning to her and never really loving you. Then when I was leaving – when I’d hit you and I couldn’t bear to stay – you called after me. You said that Nathaniel knew everything anyway and it was only a matter of time before he said something to someone else.’

‘I was talking about the fire.’

‘What? You mean he hadn’t talked to you about Loveday and me?’

‘No, of course not, and I would never have said anything to him about it – I was too ashamed.’ The horror of Harry’s misunderstanding hit Morwenna like a physical blow. She got to the stable door just in time and, as the sour smell of vomit rose from the hard earth, she retched again, as if she could somehow empty herself of her grief and her guilt. She felt Harry’s hand on her shoulder. ‘What have we done?’ she asked eventually, turning to look at him. ‘What have I done?’

Her devastation was reflected in Harry’s face. ‘I thought he’d lied to you to spite me,’ he said. ‘I was so sure.’

‘He’d never have done that – not to you, no matter what he felt. He would never have talked about you behind your back.’

‘But he came to you about the fire.’