Angel with Two Faces

‘Because you’ve got a funny accent. My sister said you come from somewhere strange.’

Josephine could not help but laugh at this innocent betrayal of a passing insult. Clearly Morwenna was no more enamoured of her than she was of Morwenna. ‘Your sister’s absolutely right,’ she said. ‘Scotland is a very strange place indeed.’ She held out her hand and Loveday shook it solemnly. ‘I’m Josephine and you must be Loveday. Shall we go and sit somewhere safe while the tide comes in? I’ve left my things up on the cliff, so I must go and get them.’ Loveday said nothing, but followed her back up the beach. ‘I met your sister last night,’ Josephine said. ‘She was out near the Lodge looking for you. That’s why I was so worried when I saw you this morning. You have been home, haven’t you? Morwenna does know you’re all right?’

‘Yes, but she was tired so I didn’t get into too much trouble. Anyway, I only went to the church to see Harry.’ It took Josephine a second or two to realise that Loveday meant Harry’s grave. She remembered what Ronnie had told her about the bluebells, and tried not to show how unsettling she found the girl’s preoccupation with her dead brother. ‘Christopher was in the graveyard, too,’ Loveday added. ‘But he didn’t see me.’

‘Who’s Christopher?’ asked Josephine, who was beginning to think that everybody on the estate must have been roaming around outside last night. Were beds and firesides out of fashion in Cornwall?

‘He’s my friend, but he and Harry don’t get on. They had a fight and Christopher got really angry because Harry told him to leave me alone. I think he must have gone to the grave to say sorry.’

‘Why didn’t Harry like Christopher?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps he thought I’d tell Christopher all our secrets, but I’d never do that.’

‘Did you and Harry have lots of secrets?

Loveday’s face lit up with a smile. ‘Loads. He knows everything. Some of them are better than others, of course, but I’d never tell anyone, not even Christopher. I promised Harry, and he’d be sad if I broke my promise. What about you? Do you have a secret with someone?’

‘People my age are full of secrets,’ Josephine said, ‘but they’re not as much fun when you’re older. They’re usually things you’d rather forget about, and you certainly wouldn’t want anyone else to know about them. It’s not like when you’re young and you can share something with one special person.’

‘Oh, I’ve got secrets with other people, too,’ Loveday explained proudly. ‘Christopher’s shown me things that I mustn’t tell Harry or Morwenna about, and Morwenna tells me that I mustn’t talk about the family to anyone else. It gets complicated, doesn’t it, trying to remember who knows what? Sometimes it’s easier not to say anything at all, just to be sure you don’t make a mistake.’

Loveday had a knack for expressing the complications of life in very simple terms, Josephine thought, and the sense she spoke was a long way from Ronnie’s assessment of her. It sounded as though she’d had to deal with grown-up pressures from a very young age, but she still articulated them as a child, with a directness which was alien to adult ears; she hadn’t yet learned the tricks of evasion and pretence that most people adopted, but that certainly didn’t make her odd or stupid – and it could prove invaluable if there really was a mystery surrounding Harry’s death. ‘When I was your age, the fun was trying to guess other people’s secrets,’ Josephine said. ‘Do you ever do that? I bet you’re good at finding things out.’

The girl smiled again. ‘Morveth always says I’m clever,’ she said. ‘She says I see more than other people because they’re all too busy to notice. We play a game sometimes – I tell her things I’ve seen, and if I find them out before she does, she gives me a book.’

How very enterprising of Morveth, Josephine thought, reluctant to call it exploitation when she was doing exactly the same thing herself. A girl with the face of an angel and a reputation for being fanciful would be the perfect informant. ‘And what sort of things have you found out?’ she asked, hoping that Loveday would not swear her to secrecy as well. She wanted to be able to tell Archie anything that the girl told her, but she could not betray her confidence with a clear conscience.

Loveday thought for a moment, and obviously decided to trust her. ‘I know that Mrs Jacks hides money from her husband,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen where she keeps it, buried in the garden, and she only ever goes there when she knows he’s out in the woods somewhere.’ With a bit of luck, the woman would be saving to leave, Josephine thought; perhaps she should ask Loveday to add something to the pot on her behalf. ‘Mr Caplin steals pheasants from the pens and sells them to the gypsies in Helston,’ Loveday continued, ‘and – you won’t say anything about this one, will you?’ Josephine’s heart sank, but she shook her head. ‘Good. Well, Mr Motley isn’t as happy as he pretends to be. He always cries when he comes to the churchyard with the flowers for his wife.’

The last revelation came as no surprise to Josephine: even without Ronnie’s comments in the car, she would have recognised in William that part-absent quality which was obvious in people who carried their grief with them, even in happier times. It had been there in her own father ever since her mother’s death twelve years earlier. Her promise to Loveday was safe, but she still had not touched on anything that could relate to Harry’s death. She decided to try a more direct approach. ‘When my sisters and I were all living at home, we hated it if one of us had a secret that the others couldn’t guess.’

‘We’re the same,’ Loveday agreed, as Josephine had hoped she would. ‘I used to be so jealous of Harry and Morwenna when I was little. They were always telling me that I was too young to play with them, and it didn’t seem fair that there were two of them and only one of me. I wanted a twin, too. But then they fell out, so Harry tells me his secrets instead. That makes Morwenna really angry.’

She could hardly blame Loveday for the note of satisfaction in her voice: it was difficult to be one of three children, and allegiances could be cruel and short-lived. ‘When did they fall out?’

‘They stopped hanging around together so much before my parents died, but I don’t remember them arguing as much as they have done lately. They’ve been shouting all the time – well, whenever I was in bed and they thought I couldn’t hear them. In the end, Morwenna used to lock herself in her room so that Harry couldn’t get in to talk to her.’

What had happened to sour things between the twins so badly, Josephine wondered? Siblings grew apart all the time, but there was obviously more to this than a straightforward change of heart. Had Morwenna been afraid of Harry for some reason? ‘What were they shouting about?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know – I always put my head under the pillow when it started. People die when they’ve been shouting, and it frightens me.’

‘Loveday, what do you mean?’ Josephine asked gently. ‘Who else has died?’

‘My parents. They shouted a lot before the fire.’

‘At each other?’

‘Yes, and at Morwenna and Harry and me, and even at Morveth when she came round to see us. It was horrible when they died, but at least the shouting stopped for a while. Then it started all over again, and Harry died.’

Loveday was upset now, and Josephine was reluctant to push her any further. ‘Has the shouting stopped again?’ she asked.

‘Yes, most of the time, although Morwenna’s always watching me as if I’m about to do something bad. Sometimes she’s really nice to me and we’re friends, and the next minute she acts as though she hates having to look after me at all.’

Josephine found this easier to understand than the rift between the twins. The plight of the oldest daughter was something that she and Morwenna did have in common, and she knew what it felt like to want to be free of someone, no matter how much you loved them. In her case, the responsibility was for her father. They got along well, and these days it suited her to be able to spend long periods of time at home writing, especially as she had the money to make sure that someone else kept an eye on him whenever she was away, but she had always resented the assumption that it would be she who gave up her first career to return to Inverness. Like Morwenna, she had been just a young woman when – still grieving for her mother and with a very bad grace – she had gone back home to Scotland to run the household, so she sympathised with the other woman’s situation: the difference in age between Morwenna and Loveday meant that a central part of the older sister’s life would have to be sacrificed, and those glorious years of freedom between childhood and marriage would never be hers. ‘Sisters are funny creatures,’ she said to Loveday. ‘I bet Morwenna’s as angry with herself as she is with you, so try not to take it personally and don’t be too hard on her. She’s got a lot to think about.’

They were back on the cliff-top now, and Josephine gathered up her things. Loveday looked intently at her notebook. ‘What are you writing?’ she asked.

Josephine glanced down at the depressing ratio of ink to paper. ‘It’s a mystery story,’ she said, ‘but as you can see, I haven’t got very far with it yet.’