In the Blood (18 page)

“Mother’s eyes aren’t so good,” Helen said in a low voice, as though expecting Emily wouldn’t hear her.

“Nonsense, dear,” Emily said.
 
“It’s just my legs that don’t seem to work anymore.”
 
Her eyes were fixed on Tayte.
 
“Closer,” she said.
 
“If I’m going to share a secret with a stranger, I should like to feel better acquainted.”

Tayte shuffled further along the bed, all the while looking back into Emily’s eyes as she seemed to measure him, as though what she saw in his would determine whether or not she would share what she knew.
 
Without warning her entire face began to smile, and although he couldn’t explain it, Jefferson Tayte never felt more welcome anywhere in his life.

Emily broke the lock between them, looking away to Helen.
 
“Fetch my album would you, dear?”
 
She reached a frail hand onto Tayte’s, who edged closer until he was within comfortable reach.

“You have cold hands, Mr Tayte,” Emily said.

Tayte hadn’t really thought about it, but the hand resting on the back of his certainly felt warm.
 
“Not really, ma’am.”

Emily raised her eyebrows to him.
 
“Cold hands - warm heart,” she said.

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about matters of the heart,” Tayte said, honestly.

Emily looked sad for him.
 
“No love in your life, Mr Tayte?
 
No
passion?
”
 
Her eyes sparkled.

“Only my work,” Tayte offered.
 
“I get so involved.
 
Never seem to stay in one place long enough for romance.”

“Or perhaps you’re running from something?”

Tayte was lost for words.
 
It had always felt like he was chasing, not running away; chasing his identity.
 
The vivid image of Sandra Greenaway, the last girl he’d found the nerve to ask out, pulled her sour face at him again, reminding him of that prom night rebuff he’d never really recovered from.
 
Was that it?
 
Rejection.
 
Was he running from what he supposed must be every adoptive child’s ghost?
 
The fear of facing up to his own mother’s rejection?

“I really don’t think I’m the loving kind,” Tayte said, moving on.

“But you are,” Emily said.
 
“I can tell.”

Tayte felt a blush rise and break across his face.
 

Helen saved him as she returned to the bedside.
 
“Here you are,” she said.
 
She placed a heavy, brown vinyl folder on the bedcover next to Emily and opened it at random.

“Thank you, dear,” Emily said.
 
She caressed the edge of one of the photos like she was remembering the scene.
 
Then she began to turn the pages back.
 
“Lowenna Fairborne knew about love,” Emily said.
 
“For a short while at least.”

Tayte watched Emily’s features change with every page she turned like she was re-living every captured moment.
 
The photographs were no longer in colour now and they were soon back beyond even Emily’s long lifetime.

“I never knew Lowenna Fairborne, of course,” Emily said.
 
“That was too long ago even for me.
 
But hers was quite a story.
 
Though not a happy one, I’m afraid.”

Emily kept turning the pages, pausing over the images as she went.
 
“But stories like hers, Mr Tayte, find their own way of being told.
 
My mother-in-law told it to me, as her mother-in-law told it before that.
 
I’m afraid my son has no interest.”
 
Emily looked around the room.
 
Where
is
David?” she asked.

“He has a golf game, Mother,” Helen said.

Emily smiled to herself.
 
“It’s going to rain.
 
You’d better tell him to take a brolly.”
 
She turned another page, close to the start of the album now.
 
“Ah, there she is.”
 

The photograph was small, no bigger than a playing-card, fixed to a slightly larger mount to stop the edges curling.
 
“This was taken in the 1850s,” Emily said.
 
“Somewhere in London.
 
She was brave to make the trip at her age, but I suppose it was all the rage then for those who could afford it.”

Tayte leant closer.
 
The photograph showed an elderly lady dressed in mainly dark clothing that was poorly defined.
 
She wore a light-coloured bonnet and a very serious expression.

“This is Lowenna’s mother, Susan,” Emily said.
 
“I suppose she would have been in her late eighties or early nineties then.
 
I don’t have many pictures of the family from that time.”

Tayte looked up from the album to Emily, whose eyes were still fixed on the photograph.
 
“Have you ever heard the name Mathew Parfitt?” Tayte asked.

Emily shook her head.
 
“No,” she said, taking no time to think about it.

“How about Jane?
 
Parfitt or Forbes?”

Emily looked highly amused.
 
“I don’t believe so.”

Tayte was trying to think of another question to ask her when Emily began to laugh.

“Do you want me to tell you about Lowenna Fairborne, Mr Tayte?
 
Or do you want to go on fishing?”

“I’m sorry,” Tayte said, smiling with her.
 
“Please go on.”

Emily closed her eyes for what seemed to Tayte like an eternity.
 
He felt like he was part of some captive audience waiting for the curtain to open.

“Lowenna Fairborne,” Emily began at last, “was just sixteen years old when she was sent to live for a time with Susan’s parents - sent to this very house.
 
That was in 1803.”

Tayte heard the year and felt goose bumps tingle on the backs of his arms.
 
The year Mathew Parfitt was born.

“There was some trouble with her father,” Emily continued.
 
“Just what that trouble was, I couldn’t say, but it was serious enough to send her here without notice, and Lowenna and her father were known to be close - like two peas.”

Emily closed the photo album and pushed it towards Helen.
 
“Lowenna arrived alone by carriage late in the night with very few personal effects, not even the maid she’d grown up with.
 
Maybe it was just to cool Lowenna’s heart, but everyone knew there was more to the matter than that.
 
Lowenna brought many secrets to this house with her that night.”

“Cool her heart?” Tayte said.
 
“So she had a lover?
 
Someone her father disapproved of?”

“Oh yes, Mr Tayte.
 
A farmer, I believe.
 
And not long after Lowenna arrived, our side of the family knew just how far their relationship had gone.
 
Her father knew all about it of course, and he had his plans carefully worked out for her.
 
But something else had been troubling that one.
 
Something that meant more to him than his own daughter it seems.”

The gathering clouds outside brought with them a stiffening breeze off the moor.
 
It started the trees in Dartmoor Forest talking and aggravated the net curtain at the window, prompting Helen to go over and close it.

“Lowenna was inconsolable for weeks when she first arrived,” Emily said.
 
“You see, the love she had known, even at her tender age, was strong enough to break her heart when that love was snatched away from her.
 
Carrying his child made it all the more unbearable.”

Tayte let out the breath he’d been holding.
 
The Washington Redskins had just scored a touchdown right there in Emily Forbes’s bedroom.
 
An illegitimate pregnancy and a childless aunt and uncle who desperately wanted a child.
 
Jane and Lavender Parfitt were ideally placed to take the child as their own.
 
Tayte felt like a million fizzy bubbles had just risen through him, rendering him momentarily weightless.

“Lowenna tried to run away twice during her first week here,” Emily said.
 
“She must have wanted to leave very badly, but where could she go, poor thing?
 
Dartmoor was her guard and her keeper, and very effective it was in those days.
 
She almost caught her death the second time, when they found her wandering out on the moor.
 
It’s a wonder the baby survived.
 
I think that’s what stopped her trying again.”

Emily turned to Helen.
 
“Pass me that glass of water would you, dear.”
 
She took a sip then said, “It was quite a few months later.
 
Sometime after her seventeenth birthday and not long before the baby was due, that Lowenna heard the terrible news that her farmer was dead.
 
They said he’d been murdered and it very nearly killed the poor child where she stood - and the baby growing inside her.”
 
Emily took another sip of water and paused, like she was reflecting on what else she knew.
 
“It might have been better for the poor girl if she had died there and then.”

“What happened to her?” Tayte asked.

“Patience, Mr Tayte.
 
I’m coming to that.
 
You see, the family tried to protect Lowenna from the news for as long as anyone could.
 
But it was all very public with a hanging soon afterwards.
 
Even so, by the time she found out, the murder was old news in Helford where it happened.
 
When Lowenna heard the date of the murder ... well, she also knew that that was the very last day she’d seen him alive.”

“Do you know what that date was?” Tayte asked.

Emily smiled.
 
“It was all a very long time ago now, Mr Tayte.
 
I don’t recall ever hearing it, but it all happened in 1803.
 
It was a busy year for the family, that much I do know.”

The bedroom door opened and David Forbes poked his head in.
 
“I’m just off then,” he said.
 
“Everything okay here?”

“Come and sit down, David,” Helen said.
 
“We’re having a nice chat aren’t we, Mother?”

David tapped his watch.
 
“Look I really can’t.
 
We’re teeing off in fifteen minutes.
 
I’ll be lucky to make it as it is.”
 
He blew a kiss into the room.
 
“I’ll pop in and see you when I get back, Mother - tell you all about it.”
 
Then he was gone again.

Tayte heard Emily sigh, though from her face he supposed that she meant to hide her disappointment.

“Always in a rush to be somewhere else - that’s my David,” Emily said.
 
“But he’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

“Mother!”

Tayte caught Emily’s wink and returned a sympathetic smile.
 
“So do you know what happened to the child Lowenna was carrying?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Emily said.
 
“About a fortnight before the child was due, Lowenna’s father came to take her home, and he made it quite clear that she could not keep the child.
 
It was for her own good of course, that’s what they told her.
 
And it was for the good of the family.
 
But she didn’t understand, poor thing.
 
How could she?”

Emily took another sip of water and handed the glass back to Helen.
 
“She was to have nothing to do with the child,” Emily continued.
 
“She wasn’t even to be told what was to become of it, but I suspect she knew.
 
Her mother, Susan, was a kind woman.
 
How could she bear to keep it from her?”

Tayte knew too.
 
The child had to be Mathew Parfitt.

“She must have felt so helpless,” Helen said.

Emily nodded.
 
“Desperately helpless.
 
Her lover was dead and their child was to be taken from her the instant the poor thing was born.”
 
Her eyes began to glisten, like wet marbles.
 
“Yes,” she said.
 
“1803 was a desperate year for Lowenna Fairborne.”

It was late in the October of 1803.
 
An early frost smothered the night and to Lowenna Fairborne it was like a cold white pillow hovering over her face, ready to suffocate her.
 
Rosemullion Hall and all its grounds were still and crystalline beneath a near full moon that stole all colour from the world, replacing it with its own inimitable palette.

Behind a tall window on the third floor, set high into the south-west roof gable at the front of the manor house, Lowenna pretended to sleep.
 
The room was not her own.
 
It was seldom used at any time and had now been made barely accommodating for the solitary purpose of removing the baby from her womb as discreetly as possible.
 
She had feigned sleep soon after the ordeal and the nurse who watched over her had left soon afterwards, calling to check on her throughout the evening.
 
But it was late now.
 
The nurse had not returned for some time and it seemed at last that she would not come again until morning.
 
The exposed floorboards should have felt cold against the bare soles of Lowenna’s feet as she lowered her legs out of the bed and slowly stood up.
 
She felt nothing.