Life after life

December 1923

JIMMY HAD A cold so Pammy said she would stay at home with him and make decorations from silver milk-bottle tops while Ursula and Teddy tramped along the lane in search of holly. Holly was abundant in the copse but the copse was further away and the weather was so wretched that they wanted to be outside for as little time as possible. Mrs Glover, Bridget and Sylvie were confined to the kitchen, caught up in the afternoon drama of Christmas cooking.

‘Don’t pick any branches without berries,’ Pamela instructed as they left the house. ‘And don’t forget to look for some mistletoe as well.’

They went prepared with pruning shears and a pair of Sylvie’s leather gardening gloves, having learned the painful lesson of previous Christmas foraging expeditions. They had their sights set on the big holly tree in the field at the far end of the lane, having been deprived of the handy holly hedge in the garden, which had been replaced by a more biddable privet after the war. The whole neighbourhood was tamer and more suburban. Sylvie said it would not be long before the village had spread so much that they would be surrounded by houses. ‘People must live somewhere,’ Hugh said reasonably. ‘But not here,’ Sylvie said.

It was unpleasantly windy and spitting with rain and Ursula would have much preferred to stay by the fire in the morning room with the festive promise of Mrs Glover’s mince pies scenting the whole house. Even Teddy, usually the one to find a silver lining, trudged disconsolately along beside her, hunched against the weather, a small, stalwart Knight Templar in his knitted grey balaclava. ‘This is beastly,’ he said. Only Trixie relished the outing, ferreting in the hedgerows and delving in the ditch as if she had been sent on a mission to unearth treasure. She was a noisy dog, much given to barking for reasons apparent only to herself, so when, way ahead of them in the lane, she began to yap deliriously they took little notice.

Trixie had quietened down a bit by the time they caught up with her. She was standing sentinel over her prize, and Teddy said, ‘Something dead, I expect.’ Trixie was particularly skilled at truffling out half-rotted birds and the desiccated corpses of larger mammals. ‘A rat or a vole, probably,’ Teddy said. And then an eloquent ‘Oh,’ when he saw the true nature of the trove in the ditch.

‘I’ll stay here,’ Ursula said to Teddy, ‘and you run back to the house and fetch someone,’ but then as she watched his vulnerable little figure setting off, running alone along the deserted lane, the early winter dark already closing in around him, she had shouted at him to wait for her. Who knew what terror lay in wait? For Teddy, for all of them.

There was confusion as to what to do with the body over the holiday and eventually it was decided to keep it in the ice house at Ettringham Hall until after Christmas.

Dr Fellowes, who had arrived along with a police constable, said the child had died of unnatural causes. A girl, eight or nine years old; her second set of front teeth had grown in although they had been knocked out before death. There were no little girls reported missing, the police said, certainly not locally. They speculated she might be a gypsy, although Ursula thought that gypsies took children, rather than left them behind.

It was almost New Year before a reluctant Lady Daunt was willing to give her up. When they removed her from the ice house they found her decorated like a relic – flowers and little tokens on her body, her skin bathed and her hair brushed and beribboned. As well as their three sons sacrificed to the Great War, the Daunts had also once had a girl, dead in infancy, and her custody of the little corpse had caused Lady Daunt to revisit her old grief and she had gone out of her mind for a while. She wanted to bury the girl in the grounds of the Hall but there was a rebellious murmuring from the villagers who insisted that she be buried in the churchyard, ‘Not hidden away as Lady Daunt’s pet,’ someone said. A strange kind of pet, Ursula thought.

Neither her identity nor that of her murderer was ever discovered. The police questioned everyone in the neighbourhood. They had come to Fox Corner one evening and Pamela and Ursula had almost hung themselves from the banisters in an attempt to hear what was said. From this eavesdropping they learned that no one in the village was a suspect and that ‘terrible things’ had been done to the child.

In the end she was buried on the last day of the old year but not before the vicar had christened her, as the general feeling was that although the girl was determined to remain an enigma she should not be buried without a name. No one seemed to know how ‘Angela’ was arrived at but it seemed appropriate. Nearly the whole village turned out for the funeral and many wept more heartily for Angela than they had ever done for their own flesh and blood. There was sadness rather than fear and Pamela and Ursula often discussed why it was, exactly, that everyone they knew was regarded as innocent.

Lady Daunt was not the only one to be strangely affected by the murder. Sylvie was particularly disturbed, more by anger, it seemed, than sadness. ‘It’s not,’ she fumed, ‘that she was killed, although heaven knows that’s terrible enough, it’s that no one missed her.’

Teddy had nightmares for weeks afterwards, creeping into bed beside Ursula in the dead of night. They would for ever be the ones who found her, the ones who had seen the little shoeless, sockless foot – bruised and grubby, poking out from the dead branches of an elm, her body shrouded with a cold coverlet of leaves.