‘It’s only parsley,’ I said automatically, then I realised how stupid my words sounded because I had not expected her question and did not know what else to say.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I just thought a woman of your age would remember. A couple of girls went missing around here many years ago, and there was a bit of a to-do about it again in the papers this morning. This was the place where…’
I did not want to hear it, so I nodded politely and tried to listen to the rain battering the leaves or the trickle of the rivulets on the track – anything to block out the sound of her words. As I watched the movement of her lips, I knew that she spoke of the foxholes dug deep under the knotted roots beneath our feet. It was twenty-five years ago in this place that a search party had been alerted by the bark of one of their foxhounds, and discovered the beast dragging itself from one of the holes, Iris Caldwell’s blood-soaked petticoat between its jaws.
The woman spoke at length, but really there was little more to say as it was never known whether the remains of Iris Caldwell had been brought to this place by man or beast.
‘…it did not take the foxes long to return,’ the woman concluded, pointing at the tangle of twisted roots beneath our feet, ‘for they seem to rebuild their lairs no matter how many times they are dug out.’
‘I know what happened here,’ I snapped, but then I noticed a little bouquet of flowers by the twisted roots and I thought that she must have laid it. There were not many flowers that bloomed in mid-April but the bouquet was daffodils and not the gaudy blue garden irises that so many people had laid at the time – Irises for Iris, as if she were the only one who was remembered. Then I realised that this woman had not only spoken of a girl but ‘girls’ – I was sure that I had heard the ‘s’.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for remembering both of them, and for not thinking them both dead.’
She turned to me and I saw her face had a plumpness to it that made it difficult to determine her age, but her cape seemed to billow rather than fall at her sides and I thought it concealed a waist that had become rounded with age. She was certainly old enough to remember what had happened and, when her eyes met mine, I sensed a familiarity, but one I could not place.
‘Oh, you are Mrs Ryland,’ she said. ‘I am sorry if I was insensitive to speak of your daughter. I recognise you now although I think we have never been acquainted.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am Agnes Ryland.’
‘I knew Nell,’ she ventured, ‘but only a little.’
‘Oh!’ I said surprised, for if Nell was alive she would be forty this year. I had thought this woman older and I struggled to think how she could have known my daughter and what trouble Nell might have caused her.
‘Nell was a good girl,’ the woman said quickly, as if reading my thoughts.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I know that not everyone saw her that way.’
‘I did not know there was any other way to see her!’ she said, but there must have been something that she saw in my expression because she added: ‘As I said, I did not know her that well. I met her just the once.’
‘Nell had her flaws…’ I began.
The woman glanced away but I felt that I had to continue. I was sure that Nell’s exploits must have been well gossiped about around the town and I always thought that, if I mentioned them first, then others could not, for I did not want to give anyone the satisfaction of spreading gossip they thought I was not aware of.
‘My daughter was—’
But she reached out and put her hand on my arm. ‘You don’t have to explain anything, Mrs Ryland. I will always think that Nell was—’
‘A drunkard,’ I said, for the woman’s reassurances had come too late and there was so much that I felt I had to explain. ‘When she was fourteen she stole a bottle of wine, which she drank inside the church, with a boy who was quite beneath her.’
‘I’m sure that it was not as bad as you make out, Mrs Ryland,’ she said. ‘For I did not know any of this.’
‘She ended up arrested and in a police cell,’ I continued. ‘My daughter was always bright. She liked reading and was going to stay on at the village school until she was old enough to train as a teacher, but in the end she left without so much as taking her labour exam.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we all make mistakes in our youth.’
‘But she was the daughter of the late vicar,’ I said, ‘and she brought disgrace upon his name!’
‘Still, I hardly think it a disgrace…’
Suddenly I felt the raw humiliation of it all again. There was something about this woman – her age or the fact that her cape looked like some sort of uniform – that made me feel that I could talk to her in a way that I could not with Roy or Sir Howard and I found myself telling a stranger more than I had ever told these two men who I had known for so many years.
I spoke of how Nell had never had any type of regular employment and had been reluctant to learn any trade, of how she never showed any interest in respectable gentlemen or marriage and instead spent her time reading cheap novels and spending all her money at the bookstand in Partridge’s Department Store. I told her of the lack of care that she had for her appearance and of the time she spent alone in her room, the door locked. I wanted this woman to understand all that I had been through with Nell, then only to lose her, but I could not find a way to voice my regret and the words fell from my mouth like a string of petty resentments.
‘…and she cut her hair short,’ I finished, my voice trembling.
‘Short?’ the woman echoed, and from the look on her face I realised how silly the words sounded. ‘Short hair is hardly…’ but she did not understand because she did not share my memory of the day I had found Nell, her chestnut curls fallen in her lap and my sewing box scissors clasped in her hands.
‘You forget this was in 1912,’ I said weakly. ‘It was a disgrace in those days to do such a thing.’
But she offered not so much as a sympathetic nod. ‘She was still your daughter!’ she persisted, and suddenly I felt that I could say no more for, after all, there were things about Nell that I had never spoken of and did not dare to now – secrets that were even more shaming.
We sat in silence, watching the drips of rainwater sliding from the elm leaves, and I fancied that she would have made her excuses and left me had it not been for the bad weather.
I set the little can of parsley down next to where she had laid her flowers to show her that, despite what I had said, I did care for Nell and was not such a heartless person, but she did not seem to notice. Her outline seemed to blur a little and I realised it was not due to the rain or my cataracts. I took off my spectacles and quickly wiped the tears away with my sleeve.
The woman cleared her throat and shook some droplets from her cape and I saw a red sash underneath and a flash of pale blue cotton.
‘Exactly how did you know my daughter?’ I asked.
‘In passing,’ she said. ‘I just knew her in passing.’ But she would not look at me as she said it.
‘You are one of the district nurses,’ I said. ‘You must work out of Missensham Cottage Hospital. You said that you had met her, but only on one occasion, how would that be?’