‘Well, Harriet got sick, didn’t she? The very same day she received a letter telling her she’d been bequeathed the sum of twenty pounds. Of course, Molly didn’t help her cause by becoming a recluse who lived, by all accounts, in squalor. The local folk liked to talk of poppets and bottles of liquid hanging in her windows.’
‘What’s a poppet?’
‘It’s a little doll, int it.’
Constance was picturing it all in her mind, but Elsie wasn’t finished yet.
‘Then there were the rumours of her being thick as thieves with the smugglers who used to roam our shores, but I’m not sure about all that. There were those who wanted to try her as a witch, but the trials had recently stopped. When she was found dead, it’s said the villagers stripped her body, and after finding no mark of a witch, they ransacked her cottage before burning it to the ground.’
Constance exclaimed at the cruelty of it all.
‘There’s nout so cruel as folk,’ Elsie said, nodding sagely. ‘Now take that book and do what you will with it. It's yours by rights.’
Constance was unsure as to whether she should thank the woman or not, but Elsie had done what she’d come to do. She’d already turned away and begun to holler at the youngest of her grandchildren who’d dropped her knickers to go for a wee on the grass verge of the Esplanade path, uncaring that several couples taking in the sea air were tutting their disapproval at such carry-on.
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Now, on this seemingly normal Tuesday morning, the shard of light sneaking into her room was gaining strength, and there were sounds of life in the corridor outside her room. Constance realized she was unsure of how much time had passed, she’d been so lost in her thoughts. She wasn’t ready to clear them away for the day though, not just yet and her eyes flitted to the drawer in the bedside cabinet where she kept her old blue memory box. She retrieved it now, lifting the lid, her fingers touching the items hidden within it. She’d never told a soul about the book, waving Norma’s nosy questions away at the folly that day with a vague reply that it was an old recipe book she was to pass on to her mother, that was all. It was Mrs Parker’s way of making amends for her tardy bill paying, she’d fibbed. She’d taken the book home and hidden it under the loose floorboard beneath her bed. It was safe from Evelyn’s all-seeing gaze there.
The hidey-hole was Constance’s secret and home to her most special things. She kept the rose her childhood friend Jonathan had given her, hidden between the pages of a notebook, dried and pressed. There were ticket stubs too, from films she’d seen with glamorous women hinting at life beyond what she knew on Wight. A programme for the circus dad had taken her to see as a special treat in Portsmouth one Christmas was secreted away too.
Oh, what a wonderful treat that day at the circus was, she recalled even now so many years later. She’d been mesmerized by the beautiful tightrope artist and had spent weeks afterward unsuccessfully attempting to cross her skipping rope. Mum was not best pleased to find it tethered to the washing line and a drain pipe with her broom repurposed as a balancing pole. Then, as the girl, she’d been reached the cusp of womanhood the shells had been added to the box. Her pretty shells, whose watercolour patterns time had not seen fit to fade. One for each day of the week.
These saved trinkets and scraps of paper would mean nothing to a stranger, but Constance treasured them. Somehow during wartime, it had become vitally important to hold onto those things she held dear lest she blink and they were gone.
As a girl, she'd take the book out from time to time when the coast was clear. There she’d sit cross-legged on her bed, carefully turning the brittle, tannin pages hoping this time she’d find something to hold her interest. She was always left feeling disappointed by the time she’d turned to the last page. It was like biting into an apple that promised to be crisp and sweet only to find it floury. For all Mrs Parker’s drama when she’d handed it to her, she’d have thought it would contain at least one recipe for eye of newt and toe of frog. A proper witch’s brew.
Instead, the elaborately inked swirls were no more than wordy entries for simple herbal remedies. These were of little interest to Constance, and so she’d put the book back, unwilling for whatever reason she couldn’t put her finger on, to share it with the rest of the family. She’d asked her mother once about Molly, but her tart expression brooked no further badgering on the subject, and she’d let it lie. Molly, she’d concluded was a skeleton in the Downer family cupboard. Sometimes she’d wondered as she prepared her tinctures, teas, and poultices what her mother would say if she’d known what trade her only surviving child had wound up plying on the ground floor of Pier View House thanks to Molly’s journal. It would have had her turning in her grave for sure, Constance thought.
Her fingers touched on the rippled surface of a shell. She took it from the box turning it over in her hand and admiring its deep pink tones. As she waited for Jill’s soft knock to tell her it was time to get up she held it to her ear and listening to the echo of the sea her mind once more wandered through the door that seemed to be opening wider each day into the past.
Chapter 13
1944
Constance sat down on the stone bench off to the side of Appley Tower. It was the start of the working
