seemed so close were part of what kept him going. The rest was the thought of revenge: the need to make those responsible pay for what they had done. He knew what his mother had thought of Greta; Aunt Jane sat with him in the kitchen almost every night and told him all the things that his mother had said. Lady Anne had often used the old housekeeper as a shoulder to cry on, little realizing that all her words of frustration and resentment were being remembered so faithfully by the old friend she had known since her childhood.
Thomas felt ashamed now, remembering his dreams about Greta. He bitterly regretted the declaration of love that he had made to her in the taxi, linking it in his mind with the sadness in his mother’s face as she looked down at him from the first-floor windows of his father’s house in London.
Lying in his bed at night he thought of killing Greta, of plunging a knife into her chest, but then he remembered his mother lying at the top of the staircase with the pool of red sticky blood behind her head and her eyes full of nothing at all. There was another way of making Greta pay — a cleaner way, the way his mother would want. He knew what his father had said about talking to the police, but his father was with Greta just like he always had been. Thomas remembered the sting of his father’s hand on his face and made his decision.
Early the next morning he telephoned the police and made an appointment for Sergeant Hearns to come and take his statement in the afternoon. He needed to have it over and done with before his mother’s funeral the next day.
It rained on the morning of the funeral. A slow Suffolk rain that fell heavily on the heads of the congregation as they stood around the newly dug grave in the corner of the Flyte churchyard.
Thomas had sat between his father and Aunt Jane in the church. He had no more wish than Sir Peter to advertise the divisions in the family, but by the graveside he shrank away from his father’s protective arm and gripped hold of Aunt Jane’s hand instead.
The wet dirt clung to Thomas’s black, polished shoes and the rain plastered his long, fair hair to his head. He wiped it from his eyes and wondered why he wasn’t crying. Aunt Jane wasn’t either. The old lady bit her lip and stared angrily up at the overcast sky, looking like a veteran about to go into battle. Thomas loved the old housekeeper; now that his mother was gone, she was the only person he really trusted in the whole wide world.
Thomas kept his face turned away from his father and tried not to look down into the obscene hole in the ground into which the undertaker’s men had lowered his mother’s body. He could hear the rain pattering on the wooden coffin lid and the vicar’s voice louder than it had been before, straining to be heard above the rumblings of thunder in the sky.
“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower…”
Yes, thought Thomas. The words were right. His mother had never been happy. How could she be when his father had deserted her? And she had not lived long enough. She had been cut down like one of her roses when she was the most beautiful, the most vital, the best of women in the world.
Thomas suddenly began to weep not just for himself but for his mother too. For what had been taken away from her. She would never see another summer; she would never know what he might become.
“O holy and most merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death,” asked the vicar, but the grand words felt hollow to Thomas. His mother’s death was eternal. That was what this funeral meant. She would never be again. He would never again see the smile that lit up her face when he came into the room; never feel her hand as it brushed his long hair back away from his forehead in a gesture of affection that had lived on past his childhood. Thomas did not know why he was still in the world when she was not. How could he live when she didn’t?
“O holy and merciful Savior, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”
Thomas thought of his mother’s last hour, and the memory came to him as it had so often in recent days of their last moment together at the top of the stairs. He’d pushed the books and the hiding place had opened. He’d heard the voices at the bottom of the stairs and sensed the light of the flashlights. He’d stepped forward, stumbling into the darkness of the priest hole, and lost hold of the side of his mother’s white nightgown. He’d replayed it in his mind so many times, but still he couldn’t say whether he had let go or his mother had pulled away. All he knew was that as he turned back to her in the darkness, he felt the bookcase close behind him. She must have stood with her back to the books pushing the shelves back into place until the first shot took her and she fell to the ground. But by then she had succeeded in her purpose. She died knowing that he was hidden.
Her last act was to preserve his life, and suddenly Thomas realized what this meant. He had to continue living because she had saved him. He was not cut off from her because he knew precisely what she wanted. She was not shut up in that dark brown box in the ground on which his father was at that moment throwing his farewell flowers. She lived on in him. It was not “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He would see that it was not.
Thomas looked around him. The graves of generations of Sackvilles and their retainers stretched back toward the old gray stone church, past the trunk of the great chestnut tree that had blown down in the storm of 1989. Some of the moss-covered graves had sunk into the ground so far that it was not now possible to read the name of the Sackville whose bones lay under the turf.
The church and the graveyard had not changed in 350 years. Buried here were the same men and women who had screamed lustily in the font at their baptism and glowed with the promise of life as they signed their names in the leather-bound Register of Marriages that was now gathering dust in the church vestry. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vicars had walked down this same gravel path between the graves and read the same words from the Book of Common Prayer.
Thomas suddenly had a profound sense of the significance of the dead who lay all around him. People who had walked the old narrow streets of Flyte and fought against the same cruel sea. Sackvilles who had inherited the House of the Four Winds and passed it on intact to the next generation. Thomas’s father was alien to all of this, but he, Thomas, was inseparable from what had gone before and what was still to come. He looked up at the friendly, sympathetic faces of his neighbors; men and women whom he had known all his life, and he smiled at them through his tears. He was not alone, and as if in answer to his thought, the rain slowed and then stopped and the sun came out weakly overhead.
Chapter 17
After the funeral, Peter stood beneath the portrait of his father-in-law in the dining room of the House of the Four Winds, talking in turn to each of the friends, neighbors, and distant relatives who had come to pay their respects.
His training in politics had made him skillful at this type of event. He remembered almost everybody’s name and spoke to each of them for just the right amount of time, accepting their sympathy with just the right amount of gratitude.
All the time that he was talking, however, he was also looking for his son. Thomas had disappeared after the funeral, and no one, not even Jane Martin, seemed to know where he had gone. Peter had been very conscious of how the boy had shrunk from his side in the graveyard, and he wanted to try to bridge the gap between them before he had to go back to London.
Not a day passed that Peter did not regret hitting his son, although he knew himself well enough to realize that it was not something that he could have chosen not to do. Thomas had provoked him too far when he said those terrible things.
Most of the guests had gone when Jane Martin told Peter that Greta wanted him on the phone. He extricated himself politely from a conversation with the Flyte harbormaster and took his glass of red wine into the study where he stood looking out through the newly repaired window as he picked up the phone.
“Hullo, Greta,” he said, but there was no response. Just a hubbub of voices above which he could hear a drunken man shouting that he wanted to go home.
“Greta!” he shouted into the phone. He could feel something was wrong, although he didn’t know what it was.
