In her jeans pocket was the sheaf of letters—the letters, postmarked from Penzance, that she had found beneath the bed. It had taken her a long time to decipher them, but at last she had read them all. They were letters between Maud and Maggie, and they were planning to run away. They were not dated, but from the sequence of events Hal thought that the last one was the one on top—the one she had read part of when she first opened the packet. Now she got it out of her back pocket as she walked steadily along the coast road, the wind in her face, chapping at her lips, and she bit her lip, and tasted salt.
Dear Maud, I am sending this to you via Lizzie, as I don’t dare to put this in with the rest of the post. I am so glad you’ve found us a flat. Please don’t worry about the deposit—I have a little money left from my parents and beyond that I’ll—oh, God, I don’t know. I’ll tell fortunes on Brighton Pier, or read palms on the seafront. Anything to get away. I never thought I would write this, but I am afraid—really afraid.
Write back via Lizzie, her address is at the bottom. She’ll bring it up when she comes to clean—but if it comes to the house YOU KNOW WHO will open it, and all hell will break loose.
I love you. And please hurry. I can’t cope with it here much longer.
Mxx
There was an address on the bottom: 4 Cliff Cottages, St. Piran, Cornwall. The address now in Hal’s phone.
The paper fluttered in the wind as Hal folded it up, but the words stayed with her. I am afraid—really afraid.
She had held them inside her all of that long train journey, rattling in her head in time with the wheels of the train.
When she had first read the letter, curled up on the sofa with her phone in her lap, it was her great-aunt she had imagined, standing in the door of the little room, drawing the bolts. Or maybe Mrs. Warren, with her hissed invective and her hatred. But now, Hal wondered. For her mother had been . . . not fearless, perhaps, but full of courage. Hal could not remember a time when she’d turned away from something because she was frightened. Because it was stupid—yes. Because it was risky, and she had a child to protect and bring up, certainly. But just because she was afraid—no, that never. If something was difficult but necessary, Hal’s mother faced it.
What had made her so afraid that she had run far away from Cornwall to the other side of the country, and never spoken of that time again?
Hal wondered. And as the sky darkened with snow clouds and the chill deepened, she realized something. She was afraid too. Not just of what she was about to do. But of what she might find at the end of it.
CHAPTER 35
* * *
St. Piran turned out to be not so much a village as a collection of buildings blown together like driftwood along the roads and lanes that wound down to the sea. Here was a farm, hardy little sheep crouched low against hedgerows, shielding themselves from the wind. There was a petrol station, shuttered up and closed with a cardboard sign in the window: RING BILL NANCARROW OR KNOCK ON COTTAGE FOR KEY TO PUMP.
The church where the funeral had been held was nowhere to be seen, but as she traipsed down the main road Hal heard a far-off church bell tolling the hour—ten slow strikes, rather mournful.
At last, Hal saw a red pillar-box and beside it a solitary phone box, sticking out into the road, and as she rounded the bend she saw the post office Abel had described. Inside the pocket of Abel’s coat, her phone buzzed, indicating a turning; pulling out her phone, she checked the route again and saw that she was supposed to turn left down a little unmade road, past a modest row of brick-built council houses, with sensible gardens, low roofs, and storm porches closed against the sea winds. CLIFF COTTAGES, read the sign at the corner as she turned into the road, and Hal felt her heart speed up.
Number four had a neat square of frosty grass in front of it, and a crazy-paving path up to the front door, and Hal found her hands were trembling, not just with cold, as she licked her lips and tucked her hair behind her ear, and walked up the garden path to ring the bell.
Somewhere inside the house a novelty chime sounded, and Hal waited, her heart beating hard as she heard the sound of shuffling footsteps and saw a shape appearing through the glass patterned door.
“Hello?” The woman who stepped into the storm porch was in her forties or fifties, very plump, with rolls of curly hair dyed a slightly improbable shade of yellow that almost matched the wet rubber gloves she was still wearing. But there was something kind about her face, and Hal found herself relaxing a little in spite of her nerves. She swallowed, wishing she had rehearsed what she was about to say.
“Hello . . . I . . . um . . . so sorry to disturb you, but do you know someone called Lizzie?”
“I’m Lizzie, yes,” the woman said. She folded her arms. “What can I do for you, my love?”
Hal felt her heart quicken, hopefully.
“I . . .” She licked her lips again, tasting the salt that seemed to permeate everything around here. “I—I think you knew my mother.”
? ? ?
ON THE WAY DOWN TO Cornwall, Hal had gone back and forth over the problem of what to say, and how to phrase her questions. She had thought of imaginary cousins . . . fake names . . . even of resurrecting Lil Smith as an alias.
But when the door opened, and Lizzie had been there in person, with her plump kindly face, and her Cornish accent soft and rich as clotted cream, somehow all of that had fled, and she had found herself saying the last thing she had intended. The truth.
Now she was sitting in Lizzie’s living room, and the story was tumbling out, so fast that Hal barely had time to consider it.
Her mother’s death, the lack of money. The letter from Mr. Treswick, and the improbable hope that this mistake might actually be real—followed by the growing conviction that it was not. The disquieting discovery of the photograph, and the bolts on the attic door, and the midnight flight back to Brighton. And then, finally, the diary in her mother’s papers, and the letters, and the care-of address that had led her here.
“Oh, my lover.” Lizzie’s round, red face was full of concern as Hal came to a halt, and she sat back against a cushion, and fanned herself. “Oh my days, what a right old pickle you’ve got yourself into. And you ent told them?”
Hal shook her head. “But I will. I know that. I have to. I just— I don’t . . .” She stopped. “I wanted to find out all I could before I burned my bridges.”
“Well, I’ll tell you all I can, but ’tain’t much. It’s so long ago, and I never saw neither of ’em after they left, so I can’t tell you much beyond what happened here. Your ma, she arrived . . . when must it have been . . . 1994, I suppose it was. Late spring or early summer, I remember her arrived in the taxi from Penzance station and it was a right cold day, and those bloody magpies were wheeling and circling and making a nuisance of ’emselves as usual. She was a lovely girl, your ma. Pretty, and kind, and always happy for a chat. Whereas her cousins . . . I don’t know. They always kept themselves to themselves. It was always very them-and-us, with the villagers. I suppose for so long it had been all of ’em up there in the big house and all of us down here, they was used to it. But your ma being brought up somewhere else, she saw it different. We were always talking when I was supposed to be cleaning, and Mrs. Warren—my, she had a sharp tongue, she’d come along and snap at me with her tea cloth. Fair hurt, it did! And she’d say, ‘Back to work, Lizzie, they don’t pay you to stand there gabbing.’
“But I always felt . . . well, I suppose the truth of it was, your ma was lonely. She’d lost her mother and father, and she’d come here expecting to find family, and what did she get? The old maid’s room in the rafters, and the cold shoulder from her aunt and cousins.”