‘What would you have me do, Starling?’ Jonathan wrenched his arm away from her. Two of her nails bent backwards and tore, but she felt nothing. ‘Do you call my grandfather a liar? And my mother? Do you doubt what Bridget saw? Do you doubt the letter Alice wrote to me? Do you doubt every piece of evidence that she has run away?’ His face was a snarl, and tears ran down it.
‘Yes, I doubt them. How can you not?’
‘You are a fool, girl. She no more loved me than she was sister to you. Both were lies! It was all fiction,’ he said, and Starling recoiled, stung.
‘What letter did she write to you? Where is it? Let me read it,’ she demanded.
‘I…’ He hesitated, frowning. ‘I have lost it.’
‘Lost it? What did it say?’
‘I… I cannot remember. I was not… I was not myself…’
‘But you are well now, sir. Please. You must do something. You must try to find her. Anything could have happened to her – gypsies might have taken her… or robbers left her injured somewhere… You must search, Mr Alleyn! You can’t believe what they are saying!’
‘Enough! I will hear no more. She’s gone! Do you hear? She’s gone.’
‘No! No, she’s not. She wouldn’t,’ Starling moaned, tears blinding her.
‘Yes. She is gone.’ Just then, Jonathan stared into her eyes with such conviction and despair that Starling felt the seeds of a terrible suspicion germinate.
And as the months passed, and Jonathan returned to the war in Spain, and no word ever came, her suspicion grew and grew, flourishing like weeds in the waste ground of her grief. For even if Starling allowed herself to think that Alice would abandon her, she did not believe that she would go so completely, and never send word. Never send a note to say goodbye, or to explain why she had acted in secret. But no word ever came, and nobody in the house at Box would even speak of Alice Beckwith, and Starling could not understand why Jonathan, who had loved Alice, would believe what was said about her. She did not believe that he believed it. So, when she thought back to his ravaged eyes and the cold, bitter way he had said she is gone, it seemed that he must know more. That he must know things he would not say.
There’d been blood on him when he came to the farmhouse that day, blood aplenty. Spatters and smears of it, all over his clothing. And he had been raving, unhinged; he had spoken of a letter that none but he had seen or read, the contents of which had upset him terribly, yet which he now claimed he could not remember. Still some part of her kept its trust in him, though; kept it for three more years until he came back again, his leg wound finishing the war for him. Some part of Starling would not believe Jonathan could harm Alice. Until that man she no longer knew hit her for mentioning Alice’s name. Until she heard him say it out loud, clear as day. She is dead. Then all trust vanished, and all hope with it.
There was a pause after Starling finished her story, and she glanced over her shoulder to make sure the verger and the caretaker weren’t listening. Rachel Weekes seemed dumbstruck. She shook her head minutely.
‘How can that be? Mrs Alleyn says her son got word of Alice’s disgrace while he was fighting overseas… He wasn’t even in the country. Or do you say he killed her after she ran away?’
‘No, no.’ Starling shook her head in frustration. ‘Mrs Alleyn lies, to cover for her son… she doesn’t want it to be true, of course she doesn’t. She’s a noble lady, but as a mother her first loyalty is to her son… He was returned! Alice got word that the men were returning, and stopping in Brighton to recover from the fray. She wrote to him there… I know not what she said. But he came to Bathampton the day after she vanished. The very next day!’
‘Wait,’ said Rachel Weekes, shaking her head. ‘I can’t follow you… he killed her because she loved another?’
‘No!’ said Starling, louder than she’d meant to. Several heads turned towards them. ‘No, she had no other lover. She never did – I would have known about it if she had.’ Starling felt the tiniest pull of doubt as she said this. She remembered what Bridget had said – what she’d claimed she’d seen. She thought of the way she’d betrayed Alice to Bridget after she discovered the lovers’ tree, and shame smouldered in her gut. Could Alice have hidden things from her, after she proved herself so untrustworthy?
‘Why then would he kill her?’
‘I… I think she might have tried to break it off with him. Their engagement, which had been a secret one. I know his family did not approve of the match.’
‘Indeed not.’
‘After Mr Alleyn had gone off to the war, Alice went to Lord Faukes’s house in Box, one day. Where Mrs Alleyn lived, with Jonathan as well. She was never the same after she came back from there that day. I think Lord Faukes told her plainly that she could not marry Jonathan.’ And what Lord Faukes wanted, Lord Faukes got. Starling pushed the memory away, her gorge rising. ‘There must have been some grave reason, some terrible threat… or perhaps it was something Jonathan had said or done – perhaps he was the betrayer! But whatever the reason, I think she wrote to Jonathan to break it off.’
‘This is what Captain Sutton has told me. That Mr Alleyn had a letter from her in Brighton, and he left at once for Bathampton.’
‘Who is Captain Sutton?’
‘A friend of Mr Alleyn’s, or was. They were in the army together, and my husband is acquainted with them. I have… become friends with his wife.’
At the mention of Richard Weekes, both of them fell silent for a moment. Starling felt her cheeks grow hot. She felt absurdly embarrassed, and jealous, that Rachel Weekes should share an acquaintance with Jonathan that she knew nothing about. Folly. He is not your pet, nor your prisoner. But in truth, that was how she had come to think of him – as her possession. He was at the centre of all her thoughts; him, and what he had done.
‘There is the proof of it,’ she said, half strangled. Why, Alice? Why?
‘She said Jonathan took the news very badly indeed.’
‘Yes. Badly enough to kill her.’
‘But surely… he would have been discovered in his crime, if he had done something so terrible? Her body would have been discovered somewhere…’
‘Not necessarily.’ Starling swallowed against a sudden hard lump in her throat. ‘If he cast her into the river, and she was swept a goodly way before she was found… if she was found at all… nobody would know who she was. And nobody was looking for a body… they all thought she’d run away with another, because that’s the story that was put about.’
‘Put about by whom?’
‘By Jonathan Alleyn, and his mother. By Lord Faukes. By the gossips in Bathampton, who had always wondered about poor Alice, and jumped at the chance to malign her.’ By Bridget. Oh, how could you, Bridget?
‘I still don’t understand why you think otherwise,’ said Rachel Weekes. That strange urgency was still in her eyes, fiercer than ever.
‘I know otherwise, because I knew Alice. She would never have betrayed Jonathan. She would never have betrayed anybody. She loved him, and she was true to him all her life. She loved her home, and she loved… she loved me, and Bridget. She would never have gone off and left us all. Never.
‘You are quite certain.’ It was not a question, and a sudden calm came upon Starling. She does not scoff; she listens.