Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor (28 page)

Daphne still came once a week to check on both Heather and Libby. She had no more concerns about Heather beyond her lack of a birth certificate—something which Maggie intended to remedy soon—but she had some concerns about Libby’s despondency. Maggie thought her daughter might have a bit of the “baby blues.” In time, her sadness would fade.

Maggie slipped into the kitchen to stir the vegetable soup she’d made for dinner to go along with the egg and watercress sandwiches Libby liked to eat.

When she walked back into the sitting room, Heather was finished eating, but Libby wasn’t drawing or singing to her baby. She was staring back out the window.

“Go see the flowers,” Maggie said.

“It’s the butterflies I miss.”

The familiar ache pressed against Maggie’s heart, her desire for Libby to have real friends, the kind who wanted to talk about dances or clothes or even art. Now that she had a baby, there was little hope that Libby would ever have friends her age, but at least she had her family. And her butterflies.

“Go then,” Maggie urged. Sitting inside, pining for butterflies, wouldn’t do her any good.

Libby put Heather into her little cot, but the moment she walked outside, Maggie picked Heather up, singing softly to the infant. Her arrival into the world may have been unconventional, but she would have the most conventional life, the happiest childhood, possible.

Walter walked through the door, fifteen minutes earlier than normal.

He glanced at Heather in Maggie’s arms as he hung his cap on the rack. “Where’s Libby?”

Maggie nodded toward the back window. “Out in the garden.”

In his eyes, she saw the same doubt she’d seen in Libby, but he didn’t say anything to criticize. Instead he lifted Heather into his arms and sat down in the rocker, holding her tight.

Maggie leaned back against the doorframe and watched them, wondering if he’d ever let go of her again.

THE CREAMY VANILLA SCENT OF
clematis breathed life into Libby’s lungs. She trailed the vines along the wall, down the hill behind her parents’ home and through the path in the forest. At the river’s edge, she sat on a rock and dipped her big toe into the current, watching the water swirl around it. The river didn’t seem nearly as frightening as it once had. For she had a new fear now, one even more daunting than the water.

How was she supposed to care for a baby?

She had nothing to offer it except milk, and sometimes that wouldn’t even console it. The baby’s crying frightened her, and she often felt as if her head might explode if she didn’t get outside, away from the noise.

Then Mummy would come alongside her and say that it was tired or needed a new nappy or that Libby’s hands were squeezing too tight.

Her aching breasts reminded her when it needed to eat, but Mummy said the milk wouldn’t last forever. Sometimes when she was younger, in the frantic pace of drawing and dreaming, she forgot to eat or even drink. How was she going to remember to feed another person?

She took a deep breath.

The smell of the flowers was supposed to quench her fears, but all she smelled this time was mud and moss.

Summer was almost here, bringing back the tulips, butterflies, and the promise of Oliver Croft on its warm breeze.

Butterflies needed flowers to survive, just like she needed Oliver Croft. And Oliver needed her more than the baby did.

Baby needed someone like Mummy to care for her.

T
he manager at the grocery market in Cirencester said Edith Lane was working today but not until after lunch. Heather checked her watch and asked for directions to the local library.

Although there was no newspaper in Bibury, the librarian at the main desk said the
Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard
covered the entire region in 1970. They kept all the editions on microfilm, but the librarian had never operated the reader on the back wall. Heather hadn’t operated one since she’d attended college in Portland. Between the two of them, they managed to get the reel on the spindle and the film threaded through the glass, rotating forward instead of back.

Her parents had said Libby died before Heather was born, so she scanned through the obituaries in the late 1960s. When she didn’t find any mention of Libby, she started foraging for information about Oliver Croft’s death.

The first headline about Oliver was published on June 4, 1970. It was quite similar to the one Ella had sent, saying the police found Oliver’s body in the River Coln, and they suspected foul play.

She studied the grainy photo beside the article. Oliver Croft was a handsome young man, and in his eyes, she saw a bit of the recklessness she’d once admired in Christopher. Had her sister loved this man as she’d once loved Christopher?

The next article on Oliver was published a month later. The police, it seemed, had no suspects in the case.

She scanned the obituaries and articles for the rest of the year. There was only one more mention of the Croft family. One of the November papers reported that their daughter, Sarah Croft, was engaged to marry a man from London.

If Oliver Croft, the son of a lord, had been murdered, it seemed there would have been a massive search for the person who had killed him.

Perhaps Brie was right. Perhaps there’d been no foul play.

Did the Croft family ever return to Ladenbrooke after Oliver’s death? The Crofts and her parents were neighbors, and her mum once worked for Lord and Lady Croft. Did they mourn the deaths of their children together? Or did the wall that separated them remain intact, even in their sorrow?

She turned off the machine and sat back in her chair, sadness looming over her. She had returned to England to close the doors to her past, but new doors kept opening, more questions with fleeting answers.

She glanced at her watch. Brie’s sister-in-law should have started work twenty minutes ago. Perhaps she could offer some clarity, at least, to her questions about Libby.

HEATHER FOUND EDITH BEHIND THE
meat counter, a hairnet holding back her graying hair. She looked as if she’d been quite pretty at one time, but heavy wrinkles now lined her forehead and eyelids.

When Heather introduced herself, Edith greeted her with a solid handshake. Then she hung up her apron on a hook and led Heather out behind the supermarket, to sit at a picnic table along the edge of the parking lot. Cigarette butts littered the patches of gravel and grass underneath.

Edith plucked a pack out of her shirt pocket and offered Heather one. After she declined, Edith lit her cigarette, took a long drag, and turned her head to blow the smoke. “So you’re Libby’s kid sister.”

The words sounded strange to Heather’s ears, but she nodded. “Brie said you used to be friends with her.”

She took another drag on her cigarette. “I wouldn’t say
friends
exactly.”

Heather’s cell phone rang, but she muted it without looking at the screen. “What were you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think your sister had any friends when we were kids. She wasn’t particularly fond of people except Oliver Croft, of course. All the girls were fond of Oliver.”

“Did she and Oliver date?”

“Not officially, I suppose. His parents would have had a royal conniption if they thought he was sweet on her.”

“What was wrong with Libby?”

Edith examined her face. “Libby was different than the other girls our age, but that wasn’t the main problem. Oliver’s parents needed him to marry someone with a truckload of cash.”

“And my parent’s didn’t have enough—”

“No one in Bibury had enough money for the Crofts. They had that huge house to maintain, but they didn’t have the income to keep it up.”

Heather pulled out the book of butterflies from her handbag. “Do you recognize this?”

Edith scanned the cover. “No, but Libby was always drawing something in one of her books when we were in primary school.”

Heather slid the book back into her bag. “Do you know how Oliver died?”

Edith shook her head. “Everyone was hush-hush about it. The police came to our school right after they found his body, asking all sorts of questions. We wanted to know what happened, of course, but they wouldn’t tell us a thing.”

“Did Libby die before or after Oliver?”

Edith took another drag on her cigarette. “Your sister left school before Oliver’s death, and I never saw her again. Then I heard she died, but no one told me exactly when or how. It sounded awfully suspicious to me.”

“My parents told me she was sick.”

Edith nodded slowly. “She probably was ill. Your sister was very beautiful, but seemed so simple and . . .”

“And what?” she prompted.

“Different,” Edith finally said. “Back before most people appreciated differences. Oliver really liked her though, and my friends and I—we were jealous. Unfortunately, I didn’t treat Libby very well.”

Heather cringed. “You teased her?”

Edith nodded slowly, smoke clouding her face.

Heather didn’t ask any more questions, afraid perhaps of what she might hear. Children could be cruel, and if her sister was different from the other girls, and pretty, perhaps they had done more than teased her. Perhaps they had wounded her deeply.

Perhaps her sister, the beautiful young woman who’d been fond of butterflies along with the boy next door, had thought life was no longer worth living.

DAPHNE WESTCOTT FIDGETED WITH THE
case of her mobile phone as she waited outside Willow Cottage, praying that someone—
anyone
—would contact her with an emergency. She looked down at the screen. Thankfully there were four solid bars of service up on the hill.

The slightest hint of a contraction, from any of the five women in her care, would have to take precedent over her talk with Heather today. But even though she’d been waiting for almost an hour outside the cottage, no one had called.

More than thirty years ago, she’d finished her schooling to become a midwife, and it was her hard-won reputation of honesty and reliability that kept her working in the years after most nurses and midwives retired.

She loved her job—the wonder of ushering a new life into the world and helping instill confidence in a new mother to care well for her child. She’d had failures over the years, children who’d arrived in the world with medical conditions she couldn’t mend and mothers who hadn’t wanted to mother. She couldn’t remember every baby she’d helped deliver, but she’d never been able to forget the first baby she’d helped bring into the world. Forty-five years ago.