walls, Morveth caught a glimpse of what passed for life in the Union: in some rooms, the elderly were lying in bed, too feeble to move; in others, children crawled across the floor and found what amusement they could in each other’s company. Metal gratings ran along either side of the walkway, allowing her to see the pattern replicated on the floors below. It was a necessary precaution – only a handful of staff oversaw the welfare of nearly three hundred people, many of them physically weak or mentally fragile – but it added to the feeling of incarceration. Everywhere was spotlessly clean, but Morveth could never decide if that was reassuring or simply another rebuke to the messiness of the lives inside; certainly, the building had no empathy with the untidy, tainted circumstances which brought people continually to its door.
The Union’s mortuary was at the back, tucked away from the main public areas, and the nurse showed her into the familiar room where the body of Jane Swithers was waiting for her. ‘She wanted these with her,’ the woman said, handing Morveth a small box. ‘Make sure that Mr Snipe takes them when he comes to collect her, will you?’ She left quickly, closing the door softly behind her, and Morveth put her bag down on the floor. She removed her hat, and walked quietly over to the slab.
Jane Swithers could only have been in her early forties, but she was old before her time and even death had not been able to return any sort of youthful lack of care to a face transformed by misery and pain. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, and the sunken cheeks and pronounced line of her jaw testified to the self-neglect of recent years, when neither the anxiety of friends nor the more managed concern of an institution could make her care whether she lived or died. Sadly Morveth remembered how many times the young Jane had come to her for advice, and wished now that she had offered something more tangible than words which always went unheeded.
A bowl of water, some soap and a towel stood ready on the bench which ran the length of one wall. She brought them over to the middle of the room and rolled her sleeves back, glad to feel the warmth of the water on her hands. Gently, she unbuttoned the well-worn nightdress and began to wash the body, tenderly lifting Jane’s breasts and trying not to be shocked by how visible her ribs were beneath the fragile skin. Morveth was used to people looking to her for guidance and she had always given it willingly, confident of her own judgement, but now, past the threshold of her three score years and ten, she was growing weary and beginning to doubt the wisdom which others took for granted in her. Perhaps it was the shock of Harry’s accident and the memories of that terrible fire which it reawakened, but it seemed to her now that she had sometimes been too ready to manage other people’s lives. Her own past was comparatively free of emotional complications: she had never felt the need to marry or have children but, in preferring to remain detached, perhaps she had been blind to the internal conflicts that most people experienced, and had overestimated the ability of good common sense to wage war against the power of love and hate.
Her intentions had always been good – that was true enough, but how must she appear to an outsider? Just a do-gooder, with no life of her own, meddling in other people’s relationships to compensate for her own solitariness. Remembering what she’d said to Archie yesterday about interference leading to unhappiness, she was brave enough to face the unintentional hypocrisy of her words: how easily wisdom could lead to vanity and a foolish belief in your own infallibility. She crossed Jane’s thin arms over her chest, then went to her bag again and removed a stretch of bandage, but paused with it in her hand, forgetting her task for a moment as she thought back to the night before Harry had ridden his horse into the Loe. He had come to her in despair and the advice she offered was meant to protect those he loved, but it had only served to bring more sadness to the family. It had seemed the only way out at the time, but was that really true? The look on Harry’s face came back to her as she washed Jane’s legs and wound the bandage around the toes to keep her feet together. How could she ever have believed that his death would bring comfort to anyone? Morwenna was inconsolable, and Morveth’s heart was full of dread when she considered Loveday’s future.
She picked up a comb and began to tidy Jane’s auburn hair, which felt dry and brittle between her fingers. There was a big difference between strength and a need to be in control, she thought, as she arranged the collar of the nightdress to hide a stain on the material, and her situation – which was increasingly the latter – was beginning to get out of hand; one decision was forcing another, and she was losing sight of the kindness that had motivated her behaviour in the beginning. Just look at the way she had behaved towards Archie, whom she had loved since he was a boy. He was her best friend’s son and she had promised his mother to look out for him, and here she was treating him like a stranger, keeping him at arm’s length from his own community and playing people off against each other to protect their secrets and mask her own involvement in their lives. Sadly, Morveth took one last, long look at Jane’s face and stroked her cheek gently before tearing off four small pieces of cotton wool to plug her ears and nostrils. She wound another stretch of bandage around her head and tied it securely under the chin, then took two pennies out of her own pocket and placed one reverently on each eye. This final part of the ritual had always struck her as particularly poignant, but today it seemed more relevant than ever, and carried a silent accusation: if only she had kept her eyes closed and her mouth shut all these years, might she and those around her know the meaning of true peace?
She looked in the box that the nurse had given her and found the pathetic remnants of a life which had come to an end long ago: a photograph of Jane as she had once been; a tiny bunch of dried primroses, washed-out and fragile; an old pair of spectacles; and a well-thumbed prayer book, similar to the one Morveth used to have before she gave it to Nathaniel. The reminder of the young curate was unwelcome here, where she was feeling so vulnerable; his well-intentioned involvement in the lives of their community was so much like her own, and, judging by what Morwenna had said, he was set on making the same mistakes. Unlike Morveth, though, Nathaniel had youth on his side and all the optimism which that entailed; he still thought he could help everyone, and that made him dangerous. With a heavy sigh, she remembered the panic in Morwenna’s eyes when she realised what Nathaniel had found out and naively repeated, and she knew that something would have to be done about it. Would this burden of responsibility that she had brought upon herself never end?
By the time she heard the undertaker’s van draw up below the window, Morveth had fulfilled her promise to Jane and was nearly ready to go. That, at least, was a relief; she hated seeing Jago here in this building, where the memory of another secret hung so tangibly in the air between them. His debt to her could never really be repaid, but it meant that he would always do as she asked, even if, in his heart, he knew it to be wrong. She wrapped Jane’s fingers lovingly around the prayer book and placed the primroses and Isaac’s bluebells on her chest, surprised at how insignificant the fresher flowers suddenly looked next to those that had been picked so many years before. Then Morveth left the room, bowed by a grief which she would have found impossible to put into words.
Chapter Seven
‘How he expects these poor people to fight Satan on an empty stomach, I’ll never know,’ said Lettice, tossing the book aside in disgust. ‘Apparently, eating weakens your resistance to the devil. If that’s true, I welcome him with open arms at least four times a day. I hope your book’s going to be a little more believable, darling.’
Josephine looked at the cover and was amused to see that Lettice was reading the new Dennis Wheatley. ‘I didn’t have you down as a follower of the occult,’ she said, leaning back and closing her eyes again. The May sun was a shadow of its August self, but it was glorious to feel the promise of summer on her face.
‘I’m not usually,’ Lettice admitted, ‘but I found this in the Snipe’s room and, after what Pa said last night about Morveth and her conjuring trick, I thought I ought to give it a try. I’d hate to think I was missing something on my own doorstep and I thought Dennis might tell me what to look out for. I’m not impressed so far, but I’ll keep going until we get to the Devil’s Mass.’
‘Where exactly did all that business with Harry happen?’ Josephine asked, sitting up and looking back towards the lake.
‘The body or the accident?’
‘Both.’
Lettice refilled their glasses with lemonade. ‘Well, you can’t see the place where the body came in from here – it’s just round that bend. But this is where he went in.’ She pointed to the nearest shore of the Loe, where it bordered the beach. ‘It looks harmless enough, but it shelves so steeply that you’re soon out of your depth.’
‘And the horse? Where did he swim to?’
