Katherine Webb
The Legacy
© 2010
To Mum and Dad
Prologue
1905
Gradually, Caroline returned to her senses. The numbness inside her head receded and she became aware of myriad thoughts, darting like caged birds, too fast for her to grasp. Unsteadily, she got to her feet. The child was still there, on the bed. A slick of fear washed down her spine. Part of her had been hoping that it would not be so; that somehow he would have gone, or better still never have been there at all. He had pulled himself to the far side of the bed, struggling to crawl properly on the slippery-soft counterpane. His strong fists grasped handfuls of it and he moved as if swimming very slowly across the expanse of teal-green silk. He had grown so big and strong. In another place, in another life, he would have been a warrior. His hair was midnight black. The baby peered over the bed and then turned his head to look at Caroline. He made a single sound, like dah; and although it was nonsense Caroline could tell it was a question. Her eyes swam with tears, and her legs threatened to fold again. He was real; he was here, in her bed chamber at Storton Manor, and he had grown strong enough to question her.
Her shame was a cloud she could not see through. It was like smoke in the air-it obscured everything, made it impossible to think. She had no idea what to do. Long minutes passed, until she thought she heard a footstep in the hallway outside the door. It sent her heart lurching, so all she knew, in the end, was that the baby couldn’t stay there. Not on the bed, not in her room, not in the manor house. He just could not; and neither must any of the servants, or her husband, know that he ever had been. Perhaps the staff had discovered him already, had seen or heard something while she had been slumped, insensible, on the floor. She could only pray that it wasn’t so. She had no idea how long she had waited, her mind scrambled by terror and grief. Not long enough for the child to grow bored with its explorations of the bed, so perhaps not too long after all. There was still time to act, and she had no choice.
Wiping her face, Caroline went around the bed and picked the boy up, too ashamed to look into his eyes. They were black too, she knew. As black and inscrutable as ink spots. He was so much heavier than she remembered. She lay him down and took off all his clothes, including his napkin, even though they were coarsely made, in case they could somehow lead back to her. She cast them into the fireplace, where they oozed smoke and stank on the embers of the morning’s fire. Then she looked around, temporarily at a loss, before her eyes lit on the embroidered pillowcase at the head of the bed. It had fine, precise needlework, depicting yellow, ribbonlike flowers. The linen was smooth and thick. Caroline stripped the pillow bare and put the struggling baby into the case. She did this tenderly, her hands aware of her love for the child even if her mind could not encompass it. But she did not use it to wrap him in. Instead she turned it into a sack and carried the baby out in it like a poacher might carry rabbits. Tears wet her face, wringing themselves from the core of her. But she could not pause, she could not let herself love him again.
Outside it was raining heavily. Caroline crossed the lawn with her back aching and the skin of her scalp crawling, feeling the eyes of the house upon her. Once safely out of sight beneath the trees she gasped for breath, her knuckles white where they gripped the pillowcase shut. Inside, the child was fidgeting and mumbling, but he did not cry out. Rain ran through her hair and dripped from her chin. But it will never wash me clean, she told herself with quiet despair. There was a pond, she knew. A dew pond, at the far side of the grounds where the estate met the rolling downs from which sprang the stream that flowed through the village. It was deep and still and shaded; the water dark on a cloudy day like today, matt with the falling rain, ready to hide any secret cast into it. She held her breath as the thought of it rose in her mind. It turned her cold. No, I cannot, she pleaded, silently. I cannot. She had taken so much from him already.
She walked further, not in the direction of the pond but away from the house, praying for some other option to present itself. When it did, Caroline staggered with relief. There was a covered wagon, parked in a green clearing where the woods met the lane. A black-and-white pony was tethered next to it, its rump hunched into the weather, and thin skeins of smoke rose from a metal chimney pipe in the roof. Tinkers, she thought, with a flare of desperate hope in her chest. They would find him, take him, move away with him. She would never have to see him again, never be faced with him again. But he would be cared for. He would have a life.
Now the baby began to cry as rain soaked through the pillowcase and reached his skin. Hurriedly, Caroline hoisted the sack back onto her shoulder and made her way through the trees to the other side of the clearing, further away from the house so that the trail would not point in that direction. It would seem, she hoped, that somebody coming along the lane from the south had left the child. She put him among the knotted roots of a large beech tree, where it was fairly dry, and backed away as his cries grew louder and more insistent. Take him and be gone, she implored silently.
She stumbled back into the woods as quickly and quietly as she could, and the baby’s cries followed her for a while before finally falling out of earshot. When they did, her steps faltered. She stood still, swaying, torn between continuing forward and going back. I will never hear him again, she told herself, but there was no relief in this, in the end. It could not be any other way, but a chill spread through the heart of her, solid and sharp as ice, because there would be no getting away from what she had done, she knew then; no forgetting it. It sat inside her like a canker, and just as there was no going back, she was no longer sure that she could go on either. Her hand went to her midriff, to where she knew a child lay nestled. She let it feel the warmth of her hand, as if to prove to this child that she was still living, and feeling, and would love it. Then she made her way slowly back to the house, where she would realize, hours too late, that having carefully stripped the baby she had then left him to be found in the fine, embroidered pillowcase. She pressed her face into her bare pillow and tried to wipe the boy child from her memory.
Chapter 1
’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight
At least it’s winter. We only ever came here in the summertime, so the place doesn’t seem quite the same. It’s not as dreadfully familiar, not as overpowering. Storton Manor, grim and bulky, the color of today’s low sky. A Victorian, neo-Gothic pile with stone-mullioned windows and peeling woodwork green with algae. Drifts of dead leaves against the walls and moss spreading up from behind them, reaching the ground-floor sills. Climbing out of the car, I breathe calmly. It’s been a very English winter so far. Damp and muddy. The hedgerows look like smudged purple bruises in the distance. I wore bright jewel colors today, in defiance of the place, in defiance of its austerity, and the weight of it in my memory. Now I feel ridiculous, clownish.
Through the windscreen of my tatty white Golf I can see Beth’s hands in her lap and the wispy ends of the long rope of her hair. Odd strands of gray snake through it now, and it seems too soon, far too soon. She was feverish keen to get here, but now she sits like a statue. Those pale, thin hands, folded limply in her lap-passive, waiting. Our hair used to be so bright when we were little. It was the white blonde of angels, of young Vikings; a purity of color that faded with age to this uninspiring, mousy brown. I color mine now, to cheer it up. We look less and less like sisters these days. I remember Beth and Dinny with their heads together, conspiring, whispering: his hair so dark, and hers so fair. I was cramped with jealousy at the time, and now, in my mind’s eye, their heads look like yin and yang. As thick as thieves.