Starling’s heart clenched at the cruelty of her own words, with the thrill of being able to wound her rival so. I was wounded, too. But in the next instant, she felt deflated. Mrs Weekes put out a hand to steady herself against the wall; her face had turned ashen, and was so full of horror that Starling at once felt the need to make amends. She tried to resist it. Alice would embrace her, and call her sister, and comfort her. But I am not Alice. Still, she felt her resolve waver and her anger seep away. The woman looked abject in her misery. Starling almost put out her hand, but could not quite do it. ‘Mrs Weekes…’ she said, but was unsure what else to add. The woman raised her eyes, expectantly. ‘Aren’t you angry?’ said Starling, eventually. ‘Aren’t you angry with me? With him?’
‘I am angry only with myself,’ said Rachel Weekes, her voice tight and trembling. ‘I’ve been a fool. An utter fool. And it cannot be undone, can it? It cannot!’ She dissolved into a storm of tears. The verger looked over at them curiously, and Starling shushed her, herding her further back into the shadows.
‘Shh! Quiet, people are looking. What can’t be undone?’
‘The marriage!’ Rachel Weekes gasped, between sobs that shook her chest.
‘Well, no. That much is true. I was fool enough to love him but not fool enough to marry him, at least,’ said Starling, almost to herself. Though I would have, if he’d asked. I’d have been fool enough then. At this, Rachel Weekes grew calmer, and stopped crying.
‘You loved him?’ she said. Starling glared at her in silence. ‘Then he has treated you very ill…’ She looked at the bruise on Starling’s face, and seemed poised to begin weeping again. Starling tried to distract her from it, and was surprised to hear Bridget’s words coming out of her mouth. Two mothers I had, one soft, one hard.
‘Well, there’s no point crying over spilt milk,’ she said wryly.
To her surprise, Rachel Weekes laughed; a startled snatch of laughter.
‘My mother used to say that,’ she said.
‘Everyone’s mother says that sooner or later, I reckon,’ said Starling. ‘What’s done is done; there’s nothing between him and me now. As far as I know he has been true to you, since you wed.’
‘No.’ Rachel shook her head. ‘I have been much deceived. But then, perhaps I deceived myself most of all,’ she murmured. She sounded calmer, dejected. Starling felt a stab of worry.
‘Don’t challenge him about this, will you? Don’t tell him we’ve met, for pity’s sake! It would go ill for both of us. You must swear not to tell!’
‘I won’t tell. I won’t… challenge him,’ said Rachel Weekes.
‘I can’t stay here all day – I must get back to the house. Was this what you wanted from me, then? To know that you married a knave?’ said Starling.
‘No, that was not it…’ Mrs Weekes wiped her face with gloved fingers, and took a deep breath. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Jonathan Alleyn. And about Alice Beckwith.’ Starling froze at the mention of both their names together. She couldn’t remember when she’d last heard them spoken in the same breath. Jonathan and Alice. J & A; carved into the flesh of the lovers’ tree for ever. She swallowed.
‘Well? What of them?’
‘When we spoke before, at the house, you said to me that Miss Beckwith had been too good for this world.’
‘I spoke the truth. What of it?’
‘Do you think her… dead, then?’ Rachel Weekes had stopped crying, and now a strange light was in her eyes, a strange eagerness that Starling mistrusted.
‘I know she is dead.’
‘How do you know? Were you still in touch with her, after she absconded?’
‘After she…? No, you don’t understand a thing! She never absconded. She never had another lover, and she never left her home with another… She was killed! That’s the truth of it!’ Whenever she spoke of it, Starling’s pulse quickened with desperation; the terrible frustration of knowing the truth but being believed by no one. But Rachel Weekes’s eyes had gone wide with shock.
‘She was killed? You mean… murdered?’
‘Aye, murdered! By Jonathan Alleyn!’
‘By… God above, you cannot mean it?’ Rachel Weekes said breathlessly.
‘I would not say such a thing lightly.’
‘But… what happened? Will you tell me?’ she said. Starling stared at her for a moment, and realised that nobody had ever asked her to describe that day before.
The last time Starling ever saw her, Alice had been winding the front of her hair into rags before bed; patiently wrapping each lock around a strip of cloth, and then twisting it up and tying it near her scalp. The back of it she left to hang loose, down between her shoulder blades. When she unwound the rags in the morning, the curls were never quite as neat as she wanted them – her hair was too fine, too wilfully straight. Most nights Starling didn’t wake when Alice came up, but that night, that last night, she woke from a dream of running and never tiring to see her sister at the dressing table, fixing her hair in this way. At once, Starling felt safe. Her dream, though it had almost been wonderful, had left her with the uneasy feeling that she was not quite normal, not quite real. But there was the smooth pallor of Alice’s skin in the mirror, and the way she curled up her toes and crossed her feet to one side of the stool, and everything was real and right again.
The morning sun woke Starling, casting a spear of light across her face through the gap between the shutters. Low, chill, winter sun that told her she had overslept. It was early February, the year 1809. Alice’s bed was already empty, so Starling hurried out of the blankets, wincing at the cold in the room, pulled on her everyday wool dress and stockings, and went downstairs to help. Bridget was at the stove, cooking drop scones for breakfast in a black iron skillet.
‘Hey ho, Bridget,’ said Starling, yawning. ‘Where’s Alice?’
‘Up and out already, far early this morning,’ said Bridget, always curt and grumpy at that time of day – her back ached, the first hour or two she was up. ‘I heard her go. She’s not let the hens out or fed them,’ she grumbled.
‘I’ll do it.’ Starling swung her shawl around her shoulders, tied her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck and stuffed her feet into her pattens. There was frost on the ground and in the trees, frost sparkling on every tendril of wild clematis that grew along the front wall of the yard. Her breath made miniature clouds against the brilliant blue sky. Alice loved such mornings – crisp and still and beautiful; she didn’t feel the cold as much as it seemed she ought. Starling searched, but Alice wasn’t in any of the barns, at the sty or in the stable with the horse. She shielded her eyes and stared out along the river, looking for the tell-tale flash of colour that would mark Alice’s approach – her bright hair, her blue dress, her pale pink shawl of warm lambs’ wool, which she sometimes wrapped around her head when it was this cold, laughing and saying she would make a fine shepherdess. There was no sign. Shivering, Starling fed the hens and let them out of the coop, quickly gathered the eggs and hurried back inside.
Alice did not return in time for breakfast. Bridget and Starling ate it without her, neither one acknowledging any concern. Starling didn’t want to betray herself, didn’t want to be the first to say it; as though whoever first expressed fear would be responsible for giving it cause. But at lunchtime the two women, Bridget past fifty, and Starling just thirteen years old, gave up pretending that all was well. Gradually, they stopped going about their chores and drifted to the kitchen window to look out in hope. The sun had melted the frost by then; the world was green and brown and grey again, dowdy and unremarkable. Unable to hold her tongue any longer, Starling took a deep breath and turned to face the older woman.