The Death of Mrs. Westaway

“I’m Lizzie, yes,” the woman said. She folded her arms. “What can I do for you, my love?”

Hal felt her heart quicken, hopefully.

“I . . .” She licked her lips again, tasting the salt that seemed to permeate everything around here. “I—I think you knew my mother.”

• • •

ON THE WAY DOWN TO Cornwall, Hal had gone back and forth over the problem of what to say, and how to phrase her questions. She had thought of imaginary cousins . . . fake names . . . even of resurrecting Lil Smith as an alias.

But when the door opened, and Lizzie had been there in person, with her plump kindly face, and her Cornish accent soft and rich as clotted cream, somehow all of that had fled, and she had found herself saying the last thing she had intended. The truth.

Now she was sitting in Lizzie’s living room, and the story was tumbling out, so fast that Hal barely had time to consider it.

Her mother’s death, the lack of money. The letter from Mr. Treswick, and the improbable hope that this mistake might actually be real—followed by the growing conviction that it was not. The disquieting discovery of the photograph, and the bolts on the attic door, and the midnight flight back to Brighton. And then, finally, the diary in her mother’s papers, and the letters, and the care-of address that had led her here.

“Oh, my lover.” Lizzie’s round, red face was full of concern as Hal came to a halt, and she sat back against a cushion, and fanned herself. “Oh my days, what a right old pickle you’ve got yourself into. And you ent told them?”

Hal shook her head. “But I will. I know that. I have to. I just— I don’t . . .” She stopped. “I wanted to find out all I could before I burned my bridges.”

“Well, I’ll tell you all I can, but ’tain’t much. It’s so long ago, and I never saw neither of ’em after they left, so I can’t tell you much beyond what happened here. Your ma, she arrived . . . when must it have been . . . 1994, I suppose it was. Late spring or early summer, I remember her arrived in the taxi from Penzance station and it was a right cold day, and those bloody magpies were wheeling and circling and making a nuisance of ’emselves as usual. She was a lovely girl, your ma. Pretty, and kind, and always happy for a chat. Whereas her cousins . . . I don’t know. They always kept themselves to themselves. It was always very them-and-us, with the villagers. I suppose for so long it had been all of ’em up there in the big house and all of us down here, they was used to it. But your ma being brought up somewhere else, she saw it different. We were always talking when I was supposed to be cleaning, and Mrs. Warren—my, she had a sharp tongue, she’d come along and snap at me with her tea cloth. Fair hurt, it did! And she’d say, ‘Back to work, Lizzie, they don’t pay you to stand there gabbing.’

“But I always felt . . . well, I suppose the truth of it was, your ma was lonely. She’d lost her mother and father, and she’d come here expecting to find family, and what did she get? The old maid’s room in the rafters, and the cold shoulder from her aunt and cousins.”

“But . . . but not from Maud?” Hal said. “In the diary, it reads as if Maud is her friend?”

“Later, yes. But Maud . . . oh, she was a funny one, right from a little girl. I started cleaning up there when I was fifteen, you know, and she must have been about five or six when I started. And I remember her standing there watching me with her hands on her hips, and I say to her, wanting to make friends, like, ‘I like your dress, Maud, it’s very pretty.’ And she tosses her head, and says, ‘I’d rather be complimented for my mind than my clothes.’ And I couldn’t help it—I just burst out laughing. Mortal offended she was. She didn’t speak to me for weeks after. But when you got to know her, underneath that prickly surface, she was a kind little thing, and fierce when she felt something was wrong. I’d been there a few years when there was trouble over some missing money and Mrs. Warren was interrogating all the staff, and I was the last one to have cleaned the room where it was supposed to have been. And I was all prepared for the sack, but Maud she comes marching into the kitchen, like an avenging angel, ignoring Mrs. Warren telling her to get out, and she says, ‘God damn it, Mrs. Warren, it was Abel took that money and you know it. We all know he steals from Mother’s purse. So leave Lizzie alone.’ And then she stormed out. She couldn’t have been more than ten. But listen to me, rattling on. This isn’t what you want to know.”

“No . . .” Hal said slowly. “No, it’s fine. To be honest . . . my mother never talked about her time here. It’s sort of . . . fascinating to find out all this. I never knew she had a cousin with the same name, let alone about Abel and Ezra and Harding and all the others. I wish she’d told me. I don’t know why she didn’t.”

“I don’t think it was a very happy time for her,” Lizzie said, and the light went out of her kind eyes, her face suddenly sad. “She came here after her parents died, and then it wasn’t more than a few months before she got into trouble—with you, I suppose it must have been. Of course, we didn’t know anything about it at first, at least I didn’t. But by December there was starting to be talk. She’d been sick all through the autumn, and tongues started wagging, and by the time Advent came around, she was beginning to show. She was only a slip of a thing, and for all the baggy clothes she’d begun to wear, you could see something wasn’t right. And she had that look to her—I can’t explain it, but you’ll know it. Something a little bit puffy around the face, a way of holding herself when she thought no one was looking. I’d seen it before, and I knew. I think the only person who didn’t suspect anything was Mrs. Westaway, and when she found out—oh, it was like the plagues of Egypt descended on that house. Doors slamming, and poor little Maggie confined to her room for weeks on end. She couldn’t stand to look at her, Mrs. Westaway said, and there were trays sent up and down, and she was barely allowed out. Maud took her meals up whenever she was allowed, and I used to see her coming back down and it looked as if she’d been crying. We all tiptoed around for weeks in the run-up to Christmas, wondering what was going to happen, and who the father was. Someone at her school, we reckoned, though if she knew, she never did say.”

“But it wasn’t,” Hal broke in urgently. “She did know, and that’s partly why I came here. I was hoping you could help me work it out. It was someone who came to stay at Trepassen House that summer, it must have been in August. A blue-eyed man, or a boy maybe. Do you know who it could be?”

“Came to stay?” Lizzie was frowning. “I don’t know about that. I can’t remember more than two or three times the children had friends to stay. Ezra, he had a school friend back once, I think, though I can’t remember if it was that summer or the summer before. I don’t remember his eyes. And Abel, he had some friends from university who lived in Cornwall and North Devon, sometimes one of them would come for the day, especially when Mrs. Westaway was out. The house was a different place when she wasn’t around. I’m sorry,” she added, seeing Hal’s expression. “I wish I could help you more, but I’d be lying if I said I remembered. And I only came up a couple of times a week, as the children got older. Mrs. Westaway just didn’t have the money for daily help, by then, and I had my own kids anyway.”

“Don’t worry,” Hal said, though she felt her heart deflate like a pricked balloon, a great reservoir of hope that she didn’t know she’d been holding on to leaching away. “Tell me about . . . tell me about what happened after. With the letters.”

“Well. That was the real scandal then. So Maud was invited to interview at an Oxford college in December, and while she was away things got very bad between Mrs. Westaway and your mother. I’m ashamed to say it, but I was glad to get out of the house when I left each day. I’d hear Mrs. Westaway screaming at her, though they were up in the attics, threatening her with all sorts if she didn’t give up the name of the father, and your mother crying and pleading. Once I saw her on the way to the bathroom and she had a black eye and a split lip. I wish now I’d done something but . . .” She trailed off, and Hal saw her blink and rub at the corner of her eye. “Well, Maud came back and it was like she’d seen the light or something. She told me she had an unconditional offer from wherever it was, some women’s college, I think, so that she didn’t need to study anymore, near enough. But she told me not to tell her mother, and in January she got invited back for another interview—or said she did. Afterwards, I wondered if there really was another interview, or if it was just an excuse to get away. And that was when the letters began. Maggie was here, writing to Maud—sometimes in Oxford, and sometimes in Brighton. And Maud was there, writing back, and I felt like a ruddy postman I can tell you, shipping the letters up and down. But by then I was really afraid for your ma, afraid that Mrs. Westaway would go too far, and hit her hard enough to give her a miscarriage or summat. So I was glad to do what I could to help.”