Angel with Two Faces

‘What’s it about?’

‘Good question. I don’t really know yet, but I dare say there’ll be secrets in it.’

‘Have you written many books?’

‘One mystery and two other novels, but I’ve done some plays as well.’

‘My brother was supposed to be in a play tomorrow, but now Nathaniel’s going to be him instead.’

‘Are you going to see it?’

‘Yes, Morwenna’s promised to take me. It’ll be nice to see Nathaniel, but I’m not supposed to talk to him any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘Morwenna says he’s a bad influence because he makes up stories and fills my head with things that aren’t true.’ She thought for a moment and looked again at the notebook. ‘Does that mean you’re a bad influence as well?’

‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Josephine, laughing as they started to walk back towards the estate. ‘But don’t worry – I doubt that anything too terrible will happen to you.’

‘It’s not fair, really, because Morwenna makes things up. She told everyone that she was at home on the morning of Harry’s accident, but that was a lie.’ Josephine tried not to look too interested and let Loveday go on. ‘I went out the night before because they were shouting again, and I fell asleep in the stables. When I woke up, it was just starting to get light and I ran home thinking I’d be in terrible trouble, but there was nobody there. Morwenna didn’t come in until later. She looked in on me and I pretended to be asleep, but I could see she’d been crying. She told people she was in bed all night, so that was a story, wasn’t it? It’s not as interesting as Nathaniel’s stories, but it’s still made up.’

‘I’m sure she had her reasons,’ Josephine said, although she hardly liked to imagine what they could be. Why would Morwenna lie, when she could have easily said that she was worried about Harry and went to look for him? What was she doing that she didn’t want anybody to know about? Was she protecting someone or could it be that she wanted her brother dead? She thought again about the locked door and, for some reason, the image of Beth Jacks’s bruised and beaten face came back to her. Morwenna had told Loveday not to talk about the family, as if there were some source of shame that she didn’t want people to know. Perhaps Harry was violent towards her. Had Morwenna suffered for years and finally snapped? She was trying to think of a harmless way to ask Loveday if her brother ever hit her sister, when the girl tugged at her sleeve and pulled her off the main path and through the lych gate to the church.

‘Thank goodness I remembered,’ she said. ‘I borrowed a candle from the altar last night for Harry, and I’ve got to put it back before the fat man notices it’s missing.’

‘The fat man?’

‘The vicar – Mr Motley’s brother. They’re not at all alike.’

‘I’ll wait here for you,’ said Josephine, who had no desire to start rescuing stolen goods from graves at this hour or any other.

‘No, don’t be silly. Come and look at the flowers.’

Reluctantly, Josephine followed. She had been brought up to despise the conventions of mourning, in a family which preferred to keep its grief private and understated, and she certainly had no wish to intrude upon anyone else’s. She knew it was an attitude which people found hard to understand – when her mother died, her father’s discreet instructions in the newspaper that there were to be no flowers, no cards and no mourners outside the family had been viewed at best as selfish, at worst as cold and unfeeling – but she could not help how she felt. The only time she had ever wavered and had a sense of that need to shout goodbye in public was when Jack had been killed in the war and buried under French soil along with thousands of others. Perversely, the fact that his body was forever lost to her made her crave the physicality of a funeral – the tears and the black and the sound of earth on wood. Back then, she would willingly have ordered the flowers, sung the hymns and wept with strangers, but it was not to be, and she had never since felt the need to mourn in that way.

Nothing that she saw on Harry’s grave changed her mind. She admired the flowers for Loveday’s sake, and praised the workmanship that had gone into the carving of the horseshoe, but was glad when the girl picked up the ivory pillar candle and headed back towards the church. It was cold and dreary inside, and the waves streaming past on either side as the tide came in gave the building an unnerving, claustrophobic feel which was entirely at odds with the expansive beauty of the day outside. Josephine stood by the old rood screen, staring into the Moorish faces of the apostles, and waited while Loveday set about her task, talking all the time as she did so.

‘I’d have been in such bad trouble if I’d forgotten to do this,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘The vicar’s so mean about buying things for the church, but that’s only because he wants to spend the money on himself. Nathaniel says that he’s no better than a common thief.’

Nathaniel would do well to learn some discretion, Josephine thought. He should keep his jackdaw-like chatter for the play if he wanted to make his way in the Church. Once again, she felt a reluctant sympathy for Morwenna and her efforts to look after her sister.

‘Everybody knows he’s got his fingers in the collection,’ continued Loveday, undaunted by Josephine’s lack of encouragement. ‘I told Morveth that, but it didn’t get me a book. But Nathaniel says there’s something more serious going on, as well. He’s trying to find out what it is.’

At last the candle was positioned to Loveday’s satisfaction, and she came back down the aisle. Josephine turned to follow her out, but a movement in the vestry caught her eye. The door was ajar, and she could see a figure – obviously the fat man – standing quietly in the shadows, listening intently. Loveday’s words had rung bright and clear through the empty church, and it would have been impossible for him to miss anything of what she had said. Josephine put a protective arm round the girl’s shoulders and ushered her quickly from the church. It seemed that Nathaniel would be learning his lesson sooner rather than later, and she certainly wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when the Reverend Motley caught up with him.

Morveth Wearne slowed her pace, as she did instinctively each time she approached Helston’s poorhouse. The Union stood imposingly at one end of the main street – hardly a matter of civic pride, but still managing to dominate the buildings nearby. Part home for the elderly, part hospital, part refuge for the lost, its stigma loomed as large in the local psyche as the physical structure did over the townscape, and the solidity of its dark, forbidding walls seemed to mock the more fragile cottages and shops which stood around it. Morveth crossed Meneage Street and knocked at the gatehouse, returning a cheerful greeting from the owner of Poltroon’s Garage as she waited to be admitted. She was a familiar figure in this part of town: her mother had taken a job at the Union shortly after it was built, and Morveth had been coming here for as long as she could remember, reading to the elderly, teaching the younger children as best she could, and – when extra help was needed – assisting at births and in the laying out of the dead. She was one of the few who could come and go at the Union as they pleased, and for that she never ceased to be grateful.

She heard bolts being drawn back on the other side of the gate and a well-known face appeared in the gap, smiling when he saw who it was. Isaac – no one knew any other name for him – had arrived at the Union more than twenty years ago and, in all that time, Morveth had never seen him look any different from the way he did now – cheerful, proud of the duties with which he was entrusted, and dressed in a collarless shirt and waistcoat, trousers which were too big for him and tied at the waist with a piece of cord, and an old tweed jacket. Everyone assumed he was a vagrant but his past was a mystery; the only sure thing was that Isaac was one of the rare people whom this managed and ordered life seemed to suit, and God only knew what that said about his previous existence. He greeted her with a small bunch of bluebells, and, before moving on, she spent several minutes admiring the circular flowerbeds and close-cut lawns which he kept immaculate throughout the year. As she went through the inner archway into the main grounds, passing a toy pram on the cobbles which formed a small playing area for the matron’s young daughter, she could not help but contrast this deceptive scene of happy domesticity with the reputation that the Union had outside its four walls: the luck which brought people here took many forms, but the misery was universal; it was the last resort, a shameful confirmation that you had nothing and no one left – in this world, at least.

A young nurse, dressed in a pale-blue serge dress and starched white cap, met her at the door to the main building. ‘I’ve been looking out for you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming so quickly.’

Morveth brushed her gratitude aside. ‘I promised Jane I’d do the last for her when the time came, and she knew she could rely on that. If it brought her some peace, then I’m glad.’ They walked in silence up two flights of granite steps and along a narrow, gloomy corridor, with wards leading off it. Through each break in the lime-washed