Rose Cottage by Mary Stewart

  ‘Well don’t bother, then. It’s a sweet rose, and they must have been pretty fond of it. They’re all the same in this corner, even the one that’s been dug up. There’s the label, look, under those weeds.’ She picked it up and handed it to me.

  I took it. A small metal label, embossed with a name, CHINA: OLD BLUSH. A label that had presumably fallen from the bush when it was dug up, and which had been flung aside among the weeds when I, in my turn, had dug in the same spot.

  I stood there, staring down at the thing in my hand. So that was it, the solution of Miss Mildred’s mystery, the light in the cottage garden, the man digging. That laborious job, done with the clumsy coal shovel, was not a grave, for buried treasure or anything else. He had simply been digging up a rose bush.

  Why?

  I knew the answer, of course, even if I could give no reason for it. To take it to the cemetery and replant it on the grave.

  ‘And if he shifted it at this time of the year, no wonder it looked as if it was dying for lack of water.’

  ‘What was?’ asked Prissy curiously. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was thinking aloud. It’s nothing, just a sort of mystery that keeps cropping up, but probably doesn’t mean a thing.’

  ‘Well, if it doesn’t, it seems to worry you just the same. You looked for a minute there as if you were sleepwalking. Want to tell me?’

  So I told her, standing there by the toolshed, and turning the little label over and over in my hand.

  She only interrupted once, to say, ‘Huh! Witches’ Corner! Doesn’t change, does it?’ when I got to Miss Linsey and the sisters, but when I had finished she was vehement.

  ‘Well, of all the silly old cuckoos! What do they think they were doing, coming down with you here on your own, to chew it all over again? Were you frightened? I’d be scared witless, anyway, sleeping down here by myself.’

  ‘No, I’m not scared, I like it here. Confused certainly, and maybe a bit nervous, but I don’t honestly think there’s anything to be scared about. All it comes to is that this man, presumably, must be the one who broke in and took the things from the wall-safe. Heaven knows who, or why. And if he really did dig up one of these roses and take a whole lot of flowers over for Aunt Betsy—’ I dropped the label back on the weeds, and dusted my hands together. ‘Well, it’s another piece in the puzzle, and no doubt they’ll all fit in in the end.’

  ‘I hope so, I must say!’ said Prissy. ‘It’s all a bit weird, but I think you’re right, it sounds pretty harmless to me, and so do old Linsey-woolsey’s fancies. So forget them. Anyway, you’ll soon be away and out of it all.’ A shrewd look. ‘Am I right in detecting a bit of nostalgia, a bit of the Old Toddler, about you? Well, it’s been fun, but forget it, chum. Get back to London, and central heating and telephones, and get on with your real life. There’s nothing for you here.’

  ‘You may be right. But I’m here for a day or two anyway. And I’m sure there’s nothing really to worry about. Mysteries don’t go well with Todhall and Granddad’s roses.’

  ‘If you’re sure you’re all right—’

  ‘I’m sure. If I do get scared I can always go to the Pascoes. You’ve got my addresses – London and Strathbeg? Great. It’s been lovely, Prissy, and don’t let’s lose touch again, especially with your interesting news coming up! Take care, and thanks again for everything. ’Bye.’

  21

  Davey came down soon after Prissy had gone, with the information that the removers had telephoned to his mother to say they would come next day.

  ‘Saturday?’ I exclaimed. ‘I didn’t think they could possibly come before Monday!’

  ‘Seems they have an urgent delivery at Sedgefield, so Mr Caslaw told them to save a journey and do the pick-up here on the way home. Costs him no more, and they don’t mind, getting time and a half. So they’ll be here tomorrow morning, and we’d better get going.’

  He had brought a packet of coloured stick-on labels, and while I made tea he toured the kitchen and back-places with Gran’s list in his hand, affixing the labels to the things that were to be removed. It was left to me to finish sorting out the. small objects that were not on the list, but which I thought she might want, so, after clearing away and washing up our tea cups, I did a final rummage through drawers and cupboards, and then turned my attention to the contents of the cupboard under the stairs.

  ‘Not much to go from upstairs,’ said Davey, scanning the list. ‘You’ll still have somewhere to sleep. And not much from your Gran’s room either. I suppose she took her best stuff up when she left?’

  ‘I don’t think so. No furniture, at any rate. She was sleeping at the Lodge to begin with. Anyway, the beds and things aren’t worth taking. They’ve been here since the Flood. Aunt Betsy had the best of the bedroom furniture.’

  ‘She would.’

  I laughed. ‘To be fair, Gran did her room up before she came. There are one or two things there that came from the Hall, and they’re good. They’re on the list.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He was studying Gran’s rather uncertain writing. ‘Here we are. “B’s room. Wee table with gate leg by the bed. Chest of drawers. Chair with green velvet. Glass vase. Pic of the Hall. Mat beside bed. Landing clock.” What on earth’s a landing clock?’

  ‘The clock on the landing, what else?’

  ‘As you say, what else? Well, I’ll go and mark them, shall I? Which was her room?’

  ‘Second left at the top of the stairs. The clock’s beside the door.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I finished with the stair-cupboard, then turned to emptying out what was left in the sideboard drawers, with a view to repacking in them as many as possible of the small things that Gran had not thought to list, but which I knew she would like to have. The candlesticks from the mantelpiece, the rose vases, the china ducks; all these, carefully wrapped in newspapers and old tea towels, went to join the tea set, the ‘best’ cloths, the half dozen silver teaspoons that had been a wedding present from the Pascoes. I was tipping the contents of the bottom drawer out on the table when I became, gradually as it were, conscious of complete silence from upstairs.

  I stopped work and listened. No movement, nothing. I had just taken breath to call out when his voice came:

  ‘Kathy.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Come here a minute.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just come up here.’

  I went with some reluctance. I had not been into the big front bedroom since I had been back at Rose Cottage. But I need not have worried that anything of Aunt Betsy’s presence would be left there. The room was stripped and clean, and smelling of the polish Mrs Pascoe had used. The bed was bare, covered only by the mattress, the only soft furnishings being the cotton curtains and the ‘mat beside bed’, which was, in fact, a worn but still lovely Oriental rug, that had been a gift from Lady Brandon. This was lying, folded as small as it would go, on the bare mattress, and beside it was one of the drawers from the chest. This was empty. Davey was sitting on the bed, with a paper in his hand. Not the list; this had floated to the floor by his feet. It was a ragged slip of paper, yellow with age.

  ‘Davey? What on earth is it? You look queer.’

  He got to his feet, lifting the empty drawer, and sliding it back into its place. ‘I feel queer. Sit down. I’ve found something you’ll want to see.’

  I sat down on the bed. I knew already what was in his hand. It could only be a newspaper cutting, the paper whose absence from the family chronicle was so remarkable. I put out a hand and he gave it to me, then turned and went over to the window, where he stood with his back to me, looking out.

  It was indeed a cutting, from a West of Ireland newspaper. The date, 12 January 1931. The heading, Two Die In Bus Crash, then, told in the bare local news style, the story of a country bus trundling home late on a dark night, empty of all but its last two passengers as it neared the end of its journey, and colliding with a bullock that was straying, blac
k and invisible in that black night, across the unfenced road. The bus had swerved, skidded, then plunged down the steep roadside bank, where it had overturned, and burned. It was (said the report) no fault of the driver’s; he was new to the route, and in spite of a broken arm and multiple bruises he had done his best to drag his passengers from the burning bus, but they were beyond help. Mr and Mrs Smith, said the Sligo Advertiser, had only recently arrived in Ireland, where Mr Smith was employed at the stables of the well-known Flaherty brothers. Mr P. Flaherty himself had identified the remains, and the relatives in England had been informed of the tragedy.

  And that was it.

  ‘Smith’s a gipsy name, isn’t it?’ I said at length. ‘And no address for them except the stables. Maybe they’d settled down to live there, after they left the travelling people. Yes. It happened two years after she left home.’ I took a breath, with something like relief. ‘So they were still together, and he did marry her. That’s something, isn’t it? And it tells us something else, too. The “foreign gentleman” at the vicarage wasn’t my mother’s gipsy after all. So we’ll still have to wait to find who he was. Well, I’m glad to have this, Davey. Where did you find it?’

  ‘At the back of the drawer. The chest’s empty, so I thought I’d pack the small stuff into the drawers. The linen and stuff that she wanted from her own room, and—’ he turned from the window towards me. I couldn’t see his face properly, but his voice sounded flat and strained – ‘it was in an envelope, and stuck to the back of the drawer. Deliberately stuck, I mean. Meant to be hidden.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you found it. I’ve wondered why there was nothing about the accident in Gran’s album. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded. If that’s the case I won’t tell her about it, but I’ll keep it anyway.’ I tried for a light tone. ‘Have you ever read Northanger Abbey, Davey?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The heroine in that thinks she’s in the middle of a “horrid mystery”, and she finds a paper in a cabinet in her bedroom, but it’s only a laundry list. At least this paper’s part of our mystery, even if it doesn’t tell us—’

  ‘There’s other papers.’

  His tone, as much as the words, struck the breath from me, and the words from my mouth. He took two strides across from window to bed and was standing over me.

  ‘Here,’ he said, and laid a torn, dirty envelope in my lap, then went quickly from the room, and I heard him go downstairs two at a time. The front door opened and shut.

  I sat there in the silence for what seemed like half an hour or so, but was probably only a minute. Was this, at last, the fact I had tried to search out? Something known to Aunt Betsy, but kept from Gran, and used to drive my mother, the despised sinner, out of the Christian home, and prevent her from corrupting her child? I found that my hands were shaking as I drew out the contents of the envelope.

  They were letters, one of them still in its envelope, held together by a twist of what I recognised as Aunt Betsy’s embroidery wool. It was rotten, and snapped easily, and I dealt the papers out onto the mattress in order, as one might deal Patience cards.

  The first letter was in a flimsy envelope with an American stamp. The addresss on the back was, one could guess, a boarding house. The letter was not dated, but the postmark was clear. July 1932.

  More than a year after the bus crash.

  So here at last were the first lines of the story that was later to come clear, a story of spite and bigotry, too mean and petty to be called tragedy, but tragic for all that.

  He had married her, the gipsy boy, and they had had a couple of years together, living any way they could, until there had come the chance of the job in Ireland, and they had left the travelling folk and Jamie had landed the job at the Flaherty stables. Until that move, as I knew, she had tried to keep in touch, cards at Christmas and birthdays, then, after the date of the bus crash, silence.

  The letters told why.

  In the first of these she told of their journey to Ireland, along with another young couple from ‘Jamie’s folk’, their friends. The friends had not been so lucky with a job as Jamie, but Jamie stayed with the Flahertys for less than two months. A visiting American racehorse owner had liked his way with horses, and had offered him a good job ‘back home’, fare provided. Jamie, gipsy that he was, had not troubled to see out his notice. He and Lilias had faded into the night and taken the next ship across, telling no one of their plans except Jamie’s friend, who was still looking for a job.

  So much for the facts that could be gleaned from the letter. The rest could be guessed at. The couple in the burned-out bus must have been the other gipsy pair, perhaps hoping to pick up Jamie’s job. Unknown in the district, unrecognisable anyway, the burned bodies were, probably naturally, assumed to be Jamie and Lilias, taking that last bus home.

  There were four more letters. In the first of these she told of her marriage, not long after Jamie’s death in 1934 from a virus pneumonia, to an American businessman – ‘very respectable from Ioa’. It was his third marriage, and there were two children at home. From the brief sentence at the end – ‘Ive not told him nothing’ – it could be gathered that the very respectable gentleman from Iowa did not yet know of his pretty wife’s previous slip-up. Me.

  The next letter was the shocking one.

  ‘Dear Mum,

  I got your letter aunt B wrote for you and I wish I hadnt. I know you think I am wicked and not fit to be near Kathy but it is hard to be told never to see you again. I wish you had writen me after Jamie died. He wasnt much but he was good to me and now Im married again to Larry a good man and he does not know what I did and you dont have to worry as I am living in America and rich. Please give Kathy a kiss from me and tell her to grow up a good girl and not like her mum and take care. I wish I could see you again but I know you are right that I musnt show my face in Todhall ever again as Kathy has to grow up respectable.

  Your loving Lil.’

  The next was very brief, just to ask why her mother had not replied, and the last was the same, a sad little missive with a ring of farewell about it. She understood, and just wanted her mother to know that she was happy, and got on well with her husband’s family, and to forget her. She did understand, and it was for Kathy’s sake, and please give Kathy a kiss …

  I sat or a long time with the letters in my lap, thinking about it, and how it could have happened. Aunt Betsy, obviously, had intercepted the letters. Keeping house here at Rose Cottage, with Gran working daily up at the Hall, she could easily have done so. Even the postman could not have guessed that the American letters, labelled as they would be with Lilias’s married name, were from Gran’s ‘dead’ daughter.

  That first letter from America must (I thought) have come like a bomb. The sender’s name on the back – Mrs L Smith – would be enough to set Aunt Betsy guessing, and must have led her to open the letter, to find that against all reason Lilias was still alive and well. What to do? Pass on the glad news and then wait for the prodigal’s welcome home? Or keep quiet for the moment, and wait?

  To start with, she might only have been concerned to keep Lilias the sinner away from Gran and me, but it was also possible that she was afraid – with reason – that if Lilias ever should come home, she herself would be turned out. So she had kept quiet, and waited.

  Then the second letter came, and with it, no doubt, relief. Jamie was dead, but Lilias was still in America – in those days a safe enough distance away – and had remarried and was settled there. Aunt Betsy must have thought that there was no longer any risk of her ‘coming back to life’, and perhaps returning to Todhall to usurp her, Betsy’s, place. She had made sure of it; she had written, as she sometimes did for Gran, to tell Lilias that she would never be welcome at home again; that Todhall wanted none of her; that as far as her home was concerned, she was dead. And through it all, Gran had been allowed to believe that her daughter had in fact died years ago.

  I got up from the bed slowly, moving like an old woman, and wen
t downstairs. Davey must have been watching for me. He came in, and without word or pause, walked right up to me and put his arms round me tightly, patting my shoulder. It was a brotherly sort of comfort, and I assured myself that it was exactly what I wanted.

  ‘It’s all right, love,’ he was saying, ‘it’s all right.’

  ‘Davey, you read the letters.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s – I haven’t taken it in yet. But did you see what’s written on the back of the envelope?’

  ‘No.’

  He let me go, and I showed it to him. Aunt Betsy’s writing. The Wages of Sin Is Death.

  ‘But it isn’t,’ said Davey, robustly. His hands came out again to take me by the arms and shake me gently. ‘That’s just what it isn’t! It’s all good news, couldn’t be better, so never you mind what that wicked old woman got herself up to! What all this really means is that your Mum is still alive! I know you’ve been having thoughts about it, with all these queer happenings lately, and so have I! And now it’s true. D’you get it? Alive! Alive and kicking and somewhere near Todhall! Come on, Kathy love, dry your eyes! You got a hanky?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I know. I know. That’s twice you called me love,’ I said, into the hanky.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, rubbing my eyes dry, and smiling at him.

  ‘Listen, then! Work it out, now that we know. She’s been here, back to Todhall, with the American husband, the foreigner. They come here – this is Sunday night – find the cottage empty, and your Gran gone. So they make for the village, and on the way they stop at the cemetery to visit your granddad’s grave, and there’s another grave, and no name yet on the stone. What d’you bet she thinks it’s her Mum, and then that girl at the vicarage puts the lid on it—’

  ‘That’s it!’ I exclaimed. ‘If she said what she said to me – “The old lady died and the sister went back home to Scotland” – then they might easily take it that it was Gran who’d died and Aunt Betsy who’d gone back north. I noticed myself the way she put it, because Jinnie at the shop, Lil’s friend, used the same turn of phrase, and it sounded odd to me.’