The Death of Mrs. Westaway

And that was the problem. She was telling herself this, not because it was possible, but because she wanted it to be so. It could not be true, however much she might want to persuade herself of that fact. Her mother’s birth certificate contradicted it absolutely. However Hal twisted the possibilities in her mind, there was no way she could make the connection work. Her mother might possibly be related to this family in some distant way—Westaway wasn’t that common a name. But unless Hal ignored the evidence not just of her own birth certificate, but of her mother’s too, there was no way she could be Hester Westaway’s granddaughter.

Which meant . . . Hal tried to think back to what Mr. Treswick had said in the graveyard. Was it possible that the mistake had occurred not after the will was written, but before? Had Hester Westaway hired someone to track down her daughter, and somehow they had got their wires catastrophically crossed?

Hal pressed her fingers into her eyes, feeling the fever flush on her cheeks, and her head throbbed as if it would burst.

“Here we are.” The voice came from the doorway, and Hal opened her eyes to see Mitzi walking briskly across the library, a white packet in her hand. “Take two. They should help your temperature as well. Ah, Abel,” she said, as one of the bookcases swung back, and her brother-in-law appeared in the opening with something in his hand. “Just in time. Is that the thermometer?”

“Yes.” He held it out, the bulb glinting silver in the lamplight. “Somewhat to my own astonishment, I was right. It is mercury, so for heaven’s sake don’t chew on it, Harriet. I don’t want to be responsible for poisoning my own niece.”

My own niece. Hal felt her cheeks flush involuntarily as he slipped the glass tube beneath her tongue, cool against the heat of her mouth, but she couldn’t answer, only close her lips around it and watch as Abel turned to Mitzi.

“Edward rang from a garage near Bodmin. He won’t be long now. He was sorry not to come to the service you know, but he was on duty at the hospital, and he never met Mother, so it seemed a little hypocritical to ask him to take a day off.”

“Still,” Mitzi said, “he is your husband.”

“Partner, dear Mitzi, partner. There’s a difference, at least in the eyes of human resources. Parents-in-law, you get an automatic entitlement to compassionate leave. Estranged mother of your live-in boyfriend, not so much. Edward is my partner,” he added to Hal. “He’s a doctor, and I think we’ll all feel much happier when he’s given you the once-over.”

Hal nodded, feeling the glass thermometer chink against her teeth. Mitzi and Abel lapsed into silence, and they all sat, listening to the voices rise and fall from the next room, Abel meditatively stroking his mustache with one finger.

“Has Harding calmed down?” he asked. Mitzi rolled her eyes and shrugged.

“Not a great deal. I’m sorry about my husband,” she said, turning to Hal. “It wasn’t a very edifying little display, I realize, but you have to appreciate it was a terrible shock. As eldest, I think Harding had naturally assumed . . .”

“It’s understandable,” Abel said. “Harding spent all his life trying to prove himself to Mother, and now he gets this, from beyond the grave. Poor man.”

“Oh, Abel, stop being such a saint!” Mitzi said. “You have an equal right to be upset.”

Abel sighed. He shifted his position on the threadbare armchair, tugging at the knees of his trousers to avoid stretching the fabric.

“Well, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t admit to a bit of chagrin. But the difference is, Mitzi darling, I’ve had twenty years to get used to the situation. I resigned myself years ago to Mother’s disapproval.”

“My mother-in-law cut Abel off without a penny,” Mitzi explained to Hal, a touch of righteous disbelief in her voice.

“It was quite a shock at the time,” Abel said rather wearily, “but there we go, it was a different era.”

“It was 1995!” Mitzi snapped. “Your mother’s views were dated even then, Abel. Don’t excuse what she did. Personally, in your shoes, I don’t think I would have even attended the funeral. There’s such a thing as being too nice, you—”

“Well, regardless,” Abel said, raising his voice and cutting through her, “I didn’t expect to get a penny in the will, so it’s no shock to me.”

“Well, I applaud your levelheadedness. But aren’t you surprised for Ezra? Harding always said he was your mother’s favorite.”

Abel shrugged.

“As a little boy, yes. But you know, as an adult, he cut himself off from all of us, Mother included. I think it was just too . . . after my sister, our sister, after she . . .”

He stopped, trailing off as though the words that followed were too painful to be spoken out loud. When he blinked, Hal saw there were tears on his lashes. She felt a sudden stabbing pain in her side, a physical manifestation of a consuming guilt.

“I’m sorry—” The words were muffled by the thermometer, but they came out almost without her meaning to say them, falling into the silence Abel had left, and his head jerked up.

“Don’t be sorry, my dear. Whosever fault it was, it certainly wasn’t yours.” He dashed at his eyes and looked away from her, towards the shadows of the empty fireplace. “But I will say this, much as I loved Maud, much as I understood why she had to do what she did, she did all of us a bad turn when she ran away, especially Ezra. Twenty years spent wondering if she was alive or dead, and whether she would make contact one day. And now this—this bombshell. What happened to her, Harriet?”

Hal felt her heart flutter as if a hand had clenched around it, constricting her blood, and for a moment she thought about feigning another faint, but there was no way she could dodge this long-term. She had felt it nudging at the edge of the conversation in the drawing room the entire time the brothers were interrogating her, felt them skirting around the topic, trying to get her to address their half-spoken questions, and she had been saved only by their very English reluctance to bring up something so personal and emotive on first acquaintance. How did your mother die? It was a hard thing to ask—and Hal had banked on them finding it so.

But now, in this intimate circle of light cast from the lamp, marooned on the couch, pinned there by the blanket, now there was no escape. Clearly, whatever the truth was, Abel at least didn’t know what had happened to his sister. She would have to tell her own truth—and if it didn’t chime with what Mr. Treswick had found out, then that would be that, and the game would be over.

What she was about to do was crossing a line—not just in terms of the risk she was taking, but also in the way she was about to use her own small tragedy in the service of something mean and dishonest. But there was no way around it.

Once, a long time ago, a teacher at school had called Hal “a little mouse,” and the description had offended her, though she hadn’t really known why. But now she knew why. Whatever she looked like on the surface, inside, deep in the core of her, she was not a mouse, but something quite different: a rat—small, dark, tenacious, and dogged. And now she felt like a cornered rat, fighting to survive.

She took the thermometer out of her mouth, holding it in her hand, and drew a breath.

“She died,” she said quietly. “Just over three years ago, a few days before my eighteenth birthday. There was a car crash. She was killed instantly—a hit-and-run. I was at school. I got a call—”

She stopped, unable to finish, but it was done.

“Oh God,” Abel said. His voice was a whisper, and he put his hand up to his face. It was the first time that Hal had seen real grief since she had come here—in spite of Mrs. Westaway’s funeral—and she felt her stomach turn at the sudden realization of what she had just done. Abel’s pain was real and palpable. It wasn’t just the exploitation of her mother’s death that sickened her, for with that she was hurting no one but herself. But how casually she had just inflicted her own small tragedy on Abel.

These are real people. She watched Abel’s face in the lamplight, with a kind of numbness. These aren’t the imaginary rich yahoos you created on the train. These are real people. This is real grief. These are lives you are playing with here.