The Misbegotten

1822

By February, the three of them were ready to leave Bath. The weather had set fair, though the air was still freezing; the sun was richer, softer, seemed finally to hold the promise of a spring not too far away. With the furniture sold from the house on Abbeygate Street, Rachel watched her trunk loaded onto a cart that creaked and clattered away, just five months after it had arrived. But how much longer it seems. A lifetime. The cart would go on ahead of them to the new house near Shaftesbury, a market town snug in the rolling, wooded hills of Dorset. It had taken time to find a house to rent, and for Rachel to settle her husband’s affairs. There was little of the business left to sell once the main part had been set against Richard’s debts, left here and there all over Bath. At inns and gambling halls; with his tailor; with their landlord. The remainder of his stock, and his account books, were sold to a rival. Duncan and Richard Weekes lay side by side in the dank little cemetery on the southern edge of the city. Rachel had been there a few times over the winter, to say a prayer and lay flowers on their graves. Would I come to the son if the father did not lie beside him? Perhaps she would, she decided, compelled by the guilty heart of a wife who did not grieve, if nothing else.

Once the cart was out of sight Rachel went upstairs to the kitchen-cum-parlour and listened for a while. Through the walls and ceilings came all the usual muffled sounds, of voices and footsteps, scrapes and thuds, snatches of song. The shutters were closed, but a shaft of sunshine eased between them and cut across the floor. Rachel stood in the light and felt its feeble warmth. Soon there will be nothing of either of us here but the dust we leave. She was glad of it, she could not wait to go; and yet she felt the need to observe the moment, and not let it pass unheeded. She shut her eyes and imagined how different everything would have been if she had not, by pure chance, resembled Alice Beckwith. I would have stayed at Hartford, unwed all my life. Or I would have lived here, married to a man made miserable by his own guilt and failings. And he would have beaten me for it, and ruined us with bad debt. I would never have known Jonathan, or Starling. Or happiness. And the city of Bath would go on just as it ever had, and the troubles and laughter of the lives all around would carry on seeping through the walls, and she would have no part in any of it, from that day. Her boot heels were loud on the wooden boards as she left the house at last, locking it behind her and handing the key to the landlord’s clerk.

At number one, Lansdown Crescent, the carriage and four was waiting in the side alley, and Falmouth was overseeing a pair of boys as they loaded and secured an array of boxes and trunks.

‘I’ll have that one inside with me,’ Starling told Falmouth, as Rachel approached. ‘Oh, never mind. I’ll put it in myself,’ she muttered, taking her own dowdy bag from the frigid butler and climbing up into the carriage.

‘You should let them do it, Starling. You’re not a servant any more,’ said Rachel, smiling. Starling rolled her eyes.

‘I am as I ever was – pitched halfway between gutter and gentry, and owned by neither one,’ she said, climbing down again, putting her hands on her hips. She wore her plain servant’s dress, but the work apron that normally covered it was gone. Her coppery hair was hidden beneath the only good hat she owned, a straw bonnet with a lilac ribbon that had previously been saved for church. ‘Your things have gone on ahead?’ she said.

‘They have. And Mr Alleyn?’

‘Around here somewhere.’ As Starling spoke, Jonathan appeared in the doorway, narrowing his eyes against the light. The cut on his head, from his fall on the common, was a faint red line. A reminder I’ll always have, of how wrong it is possible to be.

‘Mrs Weekes,’ he said, coming carefully down the steps. His lame leg had grown stronger, as he used it more, but stairs were still hazardous. He gripped the railings tightly, but refused to use a cane. He did not smile; there were still shadows under his eyes, and he was as pale as ever. Come the summer that will change.

‘Mr Alleyn, are you well?’

‘Tolerably.’ He took her hand and kissed it.

‘You have not slept,’ she said.

‘No. But tonight I will, I think. In a strange and blameless room.’ He smiled briefly; kept hold of her hand. ‘Are you ready, my dear Mrs Weekes?’ he said quietly.

‘I am, sir. I have been to see Captain and Mrs Sutton, to take my leave.’ At mention of them, Jonathan’s face darkened. Rachel squeezed his arm. ‘I told them we would write to them soon. And I… I would speak with your mother, if I may. Just a word of farewell.’

‘You will not find it a fond one.’

‘No. I do not expect to.’

Rachel found Josephine Alleyn in the grand front parlour, in the exact place she’d been when Rachel first saw her – standing in the window by the now empty canary cage. Why does she not remove it, or get another bird? She was wearing a severe dress of midnight blue, long-sleeved and high at her neck; a swaddling of darkness to show her displeasure.

‘Mrs Alleyn,’ said Rachel, determined not to be cowed by her composure, or the chill that radiated from her.

‘Oh, leave me be, can you not? You come to gloat, I assume.’ The older lady kept her face to the window, as if determined to turn her back to everything that went on that day.

‘No, madam.’

‘No? And how long was your husband in the ground before you became engaged to my son?’ She spoke savagely.

‘Scant weeks indeed, Mrs Alleyn,’ said Rachel, evenly. ‘But I need not answer for it to you, I think, who’d kept Richard Weekes in thrall all his life.’ At this Josephine turned at last, with a wintery smile.

‘Yes. It was I that had his heart, not you. It was never you.’

‘And you are welcome to it, madam.’ Rachel heard her voice shake; she took a slow breath to steady it. ‘To the memory of it, anyway.’

‘What do you want, Mrs Weekes? Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you stolen my son from me – and isn’t that enough?’

‘Can you not be happy, that he wishes to move on? That he starts to forget his pain, and has a chance of happiness now?’

‘I shall never be happy to be separated from him. If that is all you came in to say, then leave me in peace and get you gone. It pleases me no end to know I will never see your face again. That face.’

‘I pray you might,’ Rachel said quietly, and Josephine frowned. ‘What I came to say is this: I know the pain of losing family. I know the loneliness of believing yourself separated from them for ever. I know how you must… suffer, now.’

‘And you delight in it?’ Josephine whispered, shaking with feeling in spite of herself.

‘I do not. Jonathan… your son knows loss and suffering too. You told me he hadn’t the strength for it, and that was why he did not heal, but you were wrong. He only needed some way to set it down, and break from it. He will always remember it, but his anger will burn itself out. I believe he will forgive you, in the end; and I will try my best on your behalf. I will try to remind him of how greatly you have suffered, and how greatly you suffer still.’

For a long time Josephine only stared at her. A tremor passed through her, a shiver of pain, or revulsion, Rachel couldn’t tell.

‘Leave me be,’ Josephine whispered.

‘It will take time – he needs time. But I will not forget, I promise you. Family is too precious a thing to set aside.’

‘I wish you had never come here. I wish that wretch Starling had never convinced me to let you in!’ Josephine spat.

‘But she did, and now all can move on. I hope… I hope one day your anger will also burn itself out, Mrs Alleyn. Or you risk that it consume you utterly. I… I will write to you, if you wish it.’

‘Mrs Weekes, I have never once got any of the things I wished for.’ With that, Josephine turned back to the window, her shoulders rigid above her straight spine, draped in inky darkness. She was a silhouette against the sunlight; a single still figure, like the drawing of a woman, all hollow inside.

‘Farewell, Mrs Alleyn,’ Rachel murmured, dropping into a curtsy that nobody saw.

Outside, Jonathan handed her up into the carriage. He frowned at her serious expression but did not ask what had passed between his betrothed and his mother. Starling sat perched on the edge of the leather bench inside, looking desperately uncomfortable, as though she ought not to have been there at all. When Sol Bradbury appeared on the servants’ stair, she swore and climbed out again, rushing over to the cook and hugging her. Once she was back and seated the coachman stirred up the horses, and Starling turned to look back at the house, craning her head out of the window. Jonathan did not look back, and neither did Rachel. He gripped her hand so tightly it was almost uncomfortable, and kept his eyes set straight ahead. Rachel felt Josephine’s sorrowful scrutiny like a cold shadow behind them.

‘We must stop in Bathampton,’ said Starling, as Lansdown Crescent passed out of view behind them. ‘I must see Bridget.’

The carriage waited at the side of the Batheaston road. Jonathan and Rachel stood on the miller’s bridge, against the parapet; looking west, downstream along the river. The sunlight on the water was blinding, the sky too bright to make out the edge of Bath. Below, along the riverbank, the lovers’ tree stood where it ever had; a little older, a little more gnarled. It trailed its long fingers in the water, and didn’t feel the chill. Rachel had imagined it as a more graceful tree, and further from the road, out of sight of passers-by. Perhaps in some secret dell somewhere. She looped her arm through Jonathan’s, and waited for him to speak.

‘I scratched out our initials. I wish I had not,’ he said, shielding his eyes with one hand. ‘I remember it now.’

‘Your initials?’

‘Mine and Alice’s. An A and a J. We made them when we were ten years old – painstakingly, I might add. It took me hours to do. When I found the note there, after she vanished… I took out my knife there and then and destroyed the carving.’

‘Richard Weekes’s note, it must have been,’ Rachel said softly. Jonathan glanced at her.

‘Would it upset you to see it?’

‘You have it? I thought it lost?’

‘So it was. I found it as I emptied my rooms. It had fallen through a split in one of the drawers of my desk, and was caught beneath it all this time.’ He handed it to her; a small square of paper, yellowed with age. She knew the writing at once, and thought of the letters Richard had written her when they were courting, all full of love and promises. That crabbed hand with each letter drawn separately, laboriously. She’d burnt them all, in one bundle and without feeling, as she’d packed up her own few things. ‘Is it his hand?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Yes.’ Rachel nodded. ‘Of course it is.’ He took the note back and looked down at it, frowning; it fluttered in his fingers.

‘One day, only,’ he said softly. ‘She went to meet him for the last time the morning before my return. I missed her by just a single day.’

He read the note once more and then let the breeze take it. The paper vanished into the sunlight; they glimpsed it further downstream – a yellow fragment, hurrying away. The breeze rattled the winter trees beside the bridge; the river made a quiet slithering sound. Behind them the sluice gates were closed, the race dry, and the mill wheel sat silent and still.

‘Your eyes are sad, love. Tell me your thoughts,’ said Jonathan. ‘Are you sorry to leave Bath behind?’

‘No. How could I be?’ Rachel smiled, tightening her arm around his. ‘I was thinking again, as I have before, how strange it was God gave me this face. Gave it to Abi and me, and also to Alice.’

‘But it is not the same face. Similar, but not the same. When I first set eyes on you, I saw Alice, but I was mad and addled then. I saw what I wanted to see. Now when I look at you, I see only Rachel.’ He reached up, brushed his thumb across her cheek. ‘It is this woman that I love, and she is very different to the girl I loved before. And I like to think it was fate, besides.’

‘Fate?’

‘Your face is the only reason we met in the first place, so it cannot be chance. It cannot be, when you are the one person who could make me… who could help me to be whole again.’

‘I like that idea.’ Rachel smiled, wryly. ‘Then my first marriage was not a catastrophe, but a means to a better end,’ she said. Jonathan grimaced.

‘Speak not of that. Speak not of him,’ he said.

‘Very well,’ Rachel agreed. ‘No more, from this day.’ She stared down in to the brilliant water, until its rushing made her dizzy. ‘We have all three of us lost a sister to this river,’ she murmured.

‘What?’

‘You, and I, and Starling. This river took Alice and Abi both, and vanished them without trace; yet it spat up Richard Weekes within hours of him entering it. Perhaps the river has a spirit that only welcomes the good of heart, and rejects the others.’ She saw Jonathan’s face darken, as it did at any mention of his blood relationship to Alice, or when Richard Weekes was named. ‘Forgive me,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I thought out loud, and should guard my words better.’

‘No, never do that,’ said Jonathan. ‘Never guard your words – promise me. There has already been far too much of that in my life. Always say what you think, and what you feel, and I will do the same. Even if you think I would rather not hear it. Promise me.’

‘Very well. I promise it,’ said Rachel. She looked up at Jonathan’s serious expression; saw the cares that still crowded him. ‘My heart had been half dead since my family died. For years, that part of me slept… but you woke it, Jonathan,’ she murmured. She put her fingertips to his mouth and felt his breath catch; he pulled her hand away and kissed her lips. A soft and silent kiss that made the sky widen and the ground seem deeper; that pushed the world away from them, because only they could know the elation it caused. When they broke apart it was not far. Jonathan curled his hand around the back of Rachel’s neck and leant his forehead to hers, with his eyes closed, serene.

When she heard footsteps, Rachel looked up reluctantly. ‘Look, here she comes,’ she said. Starling was coming along the lane from Bathampton, carrying her hat in one hand, its lilac ribbons trailing out behind her. The sun shone in her red hair, and made her squint. Suddenly, for the first time, Rachel could see how young she still was. Without her anger she seemed less certain, more tentative and anxious. Her diffidence around Jonathan bordered on shyness. She knew how to act when she could hate him. Now, she doesn’t know.

‘Did you see her? Was she well?’ Rachel asked her. Starling nodded, and took a position next to Rachel, leaning over the bridge.

‘Yes. She… wept when I told her of Alice’s fate but she thanked me also. For giving her the truth of it, once and for all. She even… she even said sorry. For not believing me all these years when I said Alice was slain.’ Starling cast a guilty glance at Jonathan.

‘Will she be all right, do you think?’ said Rachel.

‘She will grieve, of course. Her health is not improved, but spring is coming. I told her I would send word when we arrive; I told her I would send money.’

‘She does not wish to travel into Dorsetshire with us? Some lodgings could be found, I am sure…’ said Jonathan, but Starling shook her head.

‘Too old to travel, she claims. Bathampton is her home. She-’ Starling cut herself off, frowning and examining the stonework. She gouged a strip of lichen from a crevice with her thumbnail, so Rachel knew that she didn’t like what she had to say next. ‘It was Bridget that took Alice’s letters. Her rosewood box… On Faukes’s order, after I let slip to him that you and Alice wrote to each other, sir. She took the box and gave it to him, soon after Alice vanished. He did not give her a reason. I suppose they wanted to destroy all evidence of the bond between them. Between you and Alice, sir.’

‘But… she knew all this while you were searching for them!’ said Rachel.

‘She said she feared to tell me,’ said Starling, sounding puzzled. Rachel smiled at her.

‘Yes. In her place, I think I would have feared to tell you too.’

‘I am not so very fierce,’ said Starling.

‘You are.’ Rachel and Jonathan spoke near in unison. Rachel put a hand on Starling’s arm, apologetically. ‘That is, you were.’

For a while they watched the water, each lost in their own thoughts. Then Starling asked, tentatively:

‘Mr Alleyn, did Alice ever tell you anything about where I came from? I often asked if she’d ever found anything out, or if anybody had come looking for me, but she always denied it. I thought, perhaps, she had found out something she did not want me to know…’

‘No.’ Jonathan shook his head. ‘No, she did not. As far as I know, she never tried to find out. She was too afraid that she would uncover some reason to have to give you up.’

‘Then I will never know,’ said Starling.

‘I’m sorry, Starling,’ said Rachel.

‘No, do not be. I… I am quite happy not to know. It was something Alice and I used to share – the mystery of our undisclosed beginnings. Look what sorrow finding hers out brought her. I would rather my story started when she picked me up out of the mud at the farmhouse that day. That is the only history I need; the only family.’

‘There’s wisdom there,’ said Jonathan.

‘And look – look what Bridget gave me.’ Starling took a small, cloth-bound book from her pocket. ‘One of Alice’s poetry books – one that she often read from. Bridget hid it about her when we were removed and the house cleared out. She also wanted a keepsake. When she told me about Alice’s letters, and I said I had so longed to have something of hers… She felt bad about it and gave me this book.’ She handed it to Rachel with due reverence. ‘Look inside the cover.’

‘This book belongs to Alice Beckwith, and it is her favourite – pray do not leave it out in the rain, Starling,’ Rachel read, and smiled. The handwriting was small and precise, slanting forwards elegantly.

‘I did the very thing with another one of hers – a novel she’d been teaching me to read from. It was quite ruined,’ said Starling.

‘So there – you have a letter of hers, of sorts, and one addressed to you,’ said Rachel.

‘And this proves that she lived. This means she can never be forgot.’

‘She never would have been,’ Jonathan said quietly. ‘So, then, I can let this one go. You do not mind?’ He took Alice’s last letter from his coat pocket. ‘I… I do not want to keep it. Her last words to me should not be ones of such sadness and pain.’ Starling stared hungrily at the letter for a moment, but then she shook her head.

‘You are right. It should not be kept to remind us,’ she said. Jonathan smoothed the paper between his fingertips for a moment, as if to remember the feel of it. Then he let it go into the water, without another word. They watched it spin away in silence.

When it was out of sight, Starling hung her arms over the parapet and stared down at the lovers’ tree. Jonathan and Rachel had already taken their leave of the place, and so they waited for some sign that she was ready, and did not hurry her. It went unspoken between them that they would never return to that same spot; that it must stay in the past, and not haunt the future. So they waited, and the breeze fluttered Starling’s lilac ribbons, and the red strands of her hair; and in distant treetops rooks clattered and muttered to one another. Then, with a whistling rush of air, a pair of swans flew low over the bridge and skated down onto the water, sending up dazzling waves from their feet. They were incandescent with light. Calmly, the birds folded back their wings, crooked their necks and moved into the gentler current near the bank. Starling gasped and watched them intently; then she turned to Rachel and Jonathan, smiling unguardedly.

‘Come, let’s not linger here any more,’ she said. Jonathan nodded, and they moved away towards where the carriage waited, and did not look back.