‘I don’t recall exactly,’ she said. ‘After all, the Cottage Hospital is just off the village green, and that is so near the church where your husband worked for all those years and—’
‘Did she come to you?’ I cut in. ‘Was she one of those women who came to you?’
‘I don’t know of the women you speak of,’ she said flatly.
But she did know of those women, and she must have known that I did too. As the vicar’s wife I had been well aware of the wicked things that happened in the nurses’ house behind the cottage hospital. I had heard whispers in the back pews during Sunday services and I had glimpsed little brown parcels in the handbags of parishioners as they left the long driveway that led to the cottage hospital. At best these women were the unmarried ones who wanted relations with men but none of the consequences. At worst, they were the ones for whom such measures had come too late.
When Thomas was alive, these women would sometimes come to me for guidance. They would sit with me in the large parsonage sitting room and tell me of their plans to visit the nurses’ house as I poured tea and offered them fresh handkerchiefs. They would kneel with me on the rug by the fire and we would pray together, calling upon the Lord to banish their sinful thoughts. Then I would call Nell down from her bedroom and she would fetch my sewing box and the bag of offcuts and we would all sit together round the fireplace while we sewed. I would always invite the ladies to work on the same piece: a quilt with panels depicting the life of Eve – a theme that I thought was appropriate for a time of silent reflection.
The nurses’ house was a place that I had long known of, and now I feared that Nell had known of it too.
‘Did she come to you?’ I said slowly. ‘Did you ever see my Nell at the nurses’ house?’
‘Mrs Ryland,’ she began, ‘I could not possibly remember who I have seen at the Cottage Hospital, and in any case I could never discuss—’
‘But you would remember if you had seen Nell,’ I persisted. ‘It would have preyed on your mind because she was so young.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ryland,’ she said, standing up and wrapping her cape around herself. ‘Nell was someone who tried to do the right thing by everyone. It is hard to be that age—’
‘Was she a fornicator?’ I cried, standing up and grabbing her hand. ‘Was that another of her flaws?’
She squinted into the rain, her face grim. ‘She was your daughter,’ she said sternly, pulling her hand from mine. ‘That is all you need to know about Nell, yet it is the one thing you seem to forget!’
She stepped out on to the track and I watched her walk away from me, the wind buffeting the triangle of her cape until her outline dissolved into the rain.
I had said too much. I had failed Nell when I should have been there for her and now I had failed her memory. I sat back down on the twisted elm branch, in silence but for the sound of footsteps growing fainter on the track.
6
It was not until Tuesday that I saw Roy again. He turned up at Oak Cottage unannounced, bearing gifts of rhubarb wrapped in a dishcloth and a well-thumbed book of poetry. I was pleased to see that he carried no newspaper. He had not found Sam but he suspected him to be at large on the common between Missensham and Oxworth. Roy thought that Sam should be easy to find because at some point he would try to recapture the horses he had set loose to graze. Then he told me not to worry – the police had everything in hand, but it would be best if I kept my door locked as there were undesirables about. I thought of what I had seen at Waldley Court – the clothes flung on to the fences, the toppled brazier and the terrified dog – and was inclined to agree.
‘When Sam returns, we have made sure that it will not be to Waldley Court,’ Roy said earnestly. Then, as if sensing my disapproval, added: ‘We did it for Nell.’
I offered him more tea but he waved the raised pot away and leant back in the rocking chair smoothing his moustache, clearing his throat as if he had much more to tell me.
As Roy spoke, I watched his lips move but found that I no longer heard his words. I no longer saw the man who had sat and sympathised with me over the years, nor the one who had invited me to his wedding, who sent me postcards from his holidays in Brighton and looked in on me at Christmas. Now I saw just a uniform – a man who had stood by and watched while his constables wrestled with a man much smaller than themselves.
I thought of the scene I had imagined at the stable yard, though now it was not the straw mattress that I saw thrown to the ground, but Sam, flung from the arms of the constables, his face ground into the mud by the sole of a policeman’s boot. I did not see the clothes strewn on to the fences by frustrated officers once their target had fled, but I saw Sam restrained while they destroyed his home in front of him. I did not see the bucket kicked from under the pump, but an officer’s boot swung into a tethered dog. I no longer imagined Roy as a man who turned a blind eye to what he saw – I saw him as a man who watched and barked orders.
And then I saw this man looking at me, as if waiting for a response. ‘Agnes?’ Now there was a tremor in his voice. ‘I don’t think you heard me,’ he said quietly. ‘I am asking if you would permit me to search Nell’s bedroom again?’
My face must have told him the answer.
He cleared his throat and poured himself some more tea at last, although it must have been quite stewed. Suddenly I saw the young constable again, the one who had sat in the same chair over two decades ago and blushed when he spoke.
‘What would be the point?’ I snapped. ‘You have already searched it twenty-five years ago and nothing has changed. What can you possibly learn from a bedroom where the owner has not been for so long?’
‘Not just the owner,’ he said.
I lowered my spectacles and stared at him over the lenses.
‘I am sorry, Agnes, but the village women say that nobody has been in that room since I was last in there all those years ago, and that you have not even been in yourself. They say that the door has been locked ever since—’
‘You should not listen to such gossip—’ I cut in.
‘It is not for me to judge you,’ he said quickly. ‘I care only that the room has been preserved and that going over it with fresh eyes might remind me of details that have been overlooked or forgotten.’
But Nell’s bedroom was a place that I did not want anyone to return to. I thought of a day back in 1912 – the day after May Day – when I had stood on the landing outside Nell’s room, peering through the gap in the door as I watched the young officer rifle through my daughter’s belongings. I remembered his hands sorting through her books, her bed sheets and the toys that I had kept from her infancy, and I remembered the sound of my voice, the cries and the shouts, telling him to return things, to be gentle, to take care. There was the crucifix that her father had given her on her birthday, the ebony hairbrush matted with dark curls, and the lavender water she had borrowed from my room. There was the quilt of Bible scenes that we had sewn as we sat together in the parsonage and the Bible that we would read together before bedtime.
Then there was the bottom drawer of her dressing table, and I remembered the clunk that it had made as it came off the runner, and the sight of Roy’s large hands feeling through the soft flannel of her underwear and unwrapping her monthly rags. I had watched until I could bear it no more, screaming at him to stop, and this large man had left, blushing and cowed, without further word.