The Widow’s Secret, page 10
She was still worried and smarting from the afternoon with her mother, half wondering if she’d been imagining her mother’s air of dazed distraction, even as memories of her father pulled at her, the way they always did when she went home.
“Shall I take that off you?” Andrew said with a little laugh, and Rachel realized she’d been clutching the bottle of wine she’d picked up at Booth’s in Windermere for dear life.
“Yes, of course, sorry,” she muttered as she thrust it at him. She wasn’t good at social occasions, never had been. She was so different from Anthony, who thrived on socializing – parties, dinners, even chatting in the supermarket queue, always ready and willing to make a friend. It was so alien to Rachel, so utterly other. She couldn’t even begin to understand it, and yet her father had been the same. Perhaps that was what had initially attracted her to Anthony, a thought that had occurred to her before and was still unsettling.
“Come through to the kitchen,” Andrew said. “That’s where we all seem to end up.”
Rachel followed him back through a huge foyer, past several doorways to spacious, elegant rooms built with typically Georgian grandeur, to the kitchen at the back of the house.
It was a large, square room with tall sash windows overlooking the church just a few metres away, and a welcoming Aga against one wall in front of which a black lab lay sprawled, his tail thumping against the ground. It was also filled with people and noise, and Rachel hung back instinctively as conversation flew around her.
“Natalie, did you put glasses on the table?”
“Yes.”
“Can I go outside? Please? We’re not eating yet.”
“Daddy, do you want to see my new dance?”
Over the heads of three children, Jane caught Rachel’s eye with kindly exasperation. “Sorry, you are now officially part of the Hatton chaos. Natalie, Ben, Merrie, meet Rachel.”
Obediently the children turned to her, offering their various greetings – Natalie a quick smile and wave, Ben a jerk of his head, and Merrie a wide grin as she pirouetted over to Rachel on her tiptoes.
“Are you the archaeologist?”
“Well, yes, I suppose.” Rachel gave them all a fleeting smile. She wasn’t sure why, but children made her nervous, even ones as old as this. Natalie had to be in university or close to it, and Ben, shaggy-haired and topping six feet, looked to be at least fifteen or sixteen. Merrie, the youngest, Rachel guessed to be eleven or twelve. They all regarded her so curiously, as if expecting her to perform. Rachel had the urge to do a little two-step, some jazz hands. Thankfully she didn’t.
“I’ll be in the garden,” Ben called after a second’s pause, grabbing a muddy football from a Welsh dresser crammed with china, stacks of post, and a towering pile of folded laundry.
“Ben,” Jane called in exasperation, then shrugged. “He’s better off getting his energy out, if such a thing is possible. Natalie, did you put the glasses on the table?”
“Yes, Mum. This is only the third time I’ve told you.” Natalie rolled her eyes good-naturedly and Jane smiled a distracted apology.
“Sorry, sorry. All right, let’s go into the dining room. It’s far more civilized in there.”
“Do you want to see my dance?” Merrie asked.
Rachel glanced at the young girl with her rosy cheeks and blonde ringlets, and gave an uncertain smile. “All right, then.”
The dining room was enormous, with a bay window overlooking a muddy garden where Ben was enthusiastically kicking a football against a stone wall.
“Sherry?” Andrew asked her. “Or wine? Or something soft?”
Rachel thought of her mother sipping sherry alone in the living room, the lights turned off, as she came home from school. “A glass of wine would be lovely, thank you.”
“Come sit,” Jane entreated as she led the way over to a loveseat and two armchairs positioned in the window. “At least it’s not raining.”
The sky was heavy and overcast, swollen with rainclouds, but at least it was indeed dry. Rachel perched on the edge of the loveseat, wondering why she had so much trouble relaxing.
“Are you going to watch my dance?” Merrie asked and Rachel smiled.
“Yes, sorry. Please, go ahead.” She watched with deliberately intent interest as Merrie did a few minutes of mediocre ballet.
“All right, Merrie, that’s lovely,” Jane said as soon as she’d finished. “Change out of your ballet things now, there’s a good girl.”
“I enjoyed it very much,” Rachel called as Merrie danced out of the room, and Jane rolled her eyes with good-natured affection. “So any news on the shipwreck?” she asked. “It’s all so terribly exciting.”
“I’m afraid not. I’m waiting for my colleagues to arrive tonight so we can dive down and have a look tomorrow, but to tell you the truth there most likely won’t be much there after all this time, based on what I’ve seen from some video footage.”
“But you think it really is a slave ship?”
“I can’t say anything for certain at this point.” Rachel gave her a quick smile. “Sorry.”
“It really is fascinating,” Andrew said as he came back into the room bearing glasses of wine, one of which he handed to Rachel. “I remember a shipwreck being investigated when I was a kid, but I can’t recall its name. It was all the buzz for a bit, though. Or the crack, as we say in Cumbria.”
“Andrew grew up in the Lake District,” Jane explained. “Didn’t you say you did as well?”
“Yes, near Windermere.”
“I lived in Keswick. Which school did you go to? Although I’m not sure we would have crossed paths – you must be five years younger than me.”
“I went to a private school in Windermere,” Rachel murmured. “It closed years ago now. Sorry.”
“That’s that, then. What’s your last name?”
“Gardener, but I’m married.” Anthony had wanted her to take his name, and Rachel had decided that was one argument she could choose not to have.
“And your maiden name?”
She tensed for the barest of seconds. “Barnaby.”
“Barnaby, like the historian?” Andrew’s smile was wide. “Actually, didn’t he live in the Lake District –”
“Yes, he is – was – my father.” Rachel gave them both a quick smile, almost an apology, although she didn’t know why. She’d had this conversation many times before, and it always pleased and hurt her equally. Andrew looked both flummoxed and impressed with her news.
“Will Barnaby was your father? Wow. I feel like I’m meeting a celebrity.”
“Not really.”
“Here I have to betray my ignorance,” Jane said with a laugh. “Who is Will Barnaby? Besides your father, of course.”
“He was a historian on telly,” Andrew explained. “One of the first to become famous, and one of the best. He had a programme every week – Thursdays, wasn’t it?” Rachel nodded. “He explored all sorts of historical mysteries, got his hands dirty. I remember one about a dungeon in a castle. There was a skeleton he found.” He turned back to Rachel. “Didn’t he feature you on a few of the episodes? I have a memory of something.”
“Just one or two,” Rachel said quickly. He’d taken her to a dig in Turkey and a shipwreck off the coast of Sicily. She’d loved both trips, although now they were only hazy memories of sun and sky, the smell of the sea. She hadn’t even clocked the cameras; all her attention had been on her father. Although now something tugged at her brain, a loose thread she wasn’t sure she wanted to pull.
Her father turning away from her, his laugh floating on the breeze, but not for her…
Rachel pushed the memory aside. Her love of history, her choice to pursue archaeology, surely came from him. Her father had fashioned the landscape of her career, just as her mother had done so with the bleak terrain of her emotional life. A double-edged sword.
“Amazing,” Andrew said. “He seemed like such a… a character, I suppose. Larger than life. I loved his laugh. I can remember it, even now.”
“Yes.” Rachel smiled; tried not to feel that flicker of pain.
“Sorry, though, I must be boring you. You must get this all the time?”
“Not too often; not any more.” Her father’s programmes had, after all, finished when she was twelve. “It’s been a long time since he was on telly,” she said quietly, and Andrew’s face took on an almost comical cast of dismay.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Of course, of course. I should have realized. He –”
“Died of a heart attack,” Rachel finished quietly. “Yes. When I was twelve.”
“Oh, how terrible,” Jane cried. “Rachel, I’m sorry. That must have been so very awful.”
“It was a long time ago,” she said stiffly. How had they got to talking about her father’s death in the space of five minutes? She almost wished she hadn’t come.
“Still, that must have been so difficult for you and your mother,” Jane said quietly. “To lose your father at such a young age.”
“Yes.” What else could she say? How could she explain about how empty the house had felt, how empty her life had felt? The endless stony silences between her and her mother, once they didn’t have her father to jolly them along? The feeling that a big, bloody piece of her heart had been carved right out and she’d never found it again? Rachel said nothing more and took a large swallow of wine.
The silence stretched on somewhat uncomfortably for a few seconds before Jane changed the subject so blatantly that Rachel could practically hear the screech of conversational tyres as they switched direction.
“So, how long are you staying in the area? You’re at the beach road B&B, aren’t you?”
“Yes, and I don’t know how long I’ll be here. My colleagues are arriving tonight, and we’ll hopefully do a preliminary dive tomorrow. After that…” Rachel shrugged. “It all depends on the funding.”
“Who is funding the dive?” Andrew asked. “I really don’t have the first idea about any of this.”
“Copeland Mining Company is funding the initial dive,” Rachel said. “But after that it will depend on whether there’s any interest. If the wreck proves to be something worth investigating, funding could come from a variety of sources – Historic England, a private donor, a university.” She smiled and shrugged. “It’s always a bit of a scramble to get the money in place for any project.”
“I can imagine,” Andrew murmured. “It seems as if funding is being cut from everything worthwhile these days.”
“Don’t get him started on the NHS,” Jane cut in with a laugh. “Or he’ll bore you for hours.”
“I’m sure he won’t.” Rachel smiled at Andrew as she started to feel herself relax, just a little bit. They’d got the difficult stuff out of the way now, surely. “How long have you been living in Goswell?”
Jane exchanged a questioning look with Andrew, who raised his eyebrows in return. “Coming up on five years now, isn’t it?” she said. “Hard to believe. I was a diehard New Yorker once upon a time.”
“You still love your lattes,” Andrew reminded her.
“Yes, and you can finally get a decent one in Whitehaven, thank goodness. Our first year here…” Jane trailed off dramatically.
“It’s quite a change from New York,” Rachel said diplomatically. “Did you find it hard settling in?”
Jane pretended to shudder, although Rachel wasn’t sure if she was actually pretending. “I found it utterly dismal. The weather alone.” She shook her head. “And the remoteness. It felt as if the fells were hemming me in. Do you know there are more sheep in Cumbria than people?”
“I imagine there are more sheep than people in many parts of the UK,” Rachel answered with a smile.
“Too right,” Andrew returned with a laugh. “See, Jane, it’s not that bad.”
“I know, I know.” Jane relaxed against the sofa as she took a sip of wine. “Actually, I’m having you on, at least a little bit. I did find it difficult at the start, but I truly love it here now. The people are wonderful, the scenery is amazing. Sometimes it feels a bit like stepping back in time, living in a village community like this, cut off from the rest of the world. Where did you say you live now?”
“Bristol. Not quite New York.”
“But definitely not Goswell. Do you like it there? You work for the university?”
“For the Bristol Maritime Centre. We do marine archaeology, either commercial work like this or projects of historical interest for museums, councils – whoever wants something underwater investigated.”
“Is it mostly shipwrecks?” Jane asked, sounding intrigued.
“Mainly, but there are other things too. Buildings, even whole villages, that have been flooded.” Rachel felt herself relaxing even more, and she took a sip of wine as she described a few of the more interesting projects she’d worked on to Jane and Andrew.
“My job in marketing feels positively dull in comparison,” Jane said after listening to Rachel. “Truly.”
“But you’ve done a bit of historical digging yourself,” Andrew protested. “With Alice James.”
“Yes, you told me about that in the café,” Rachel recalled. “A vicar’s wife who lived here during the war?”
“Yes, I found her shopping list. We’ve got it framed now. Would you like to see it?”
“Absolutely.”
Rachel followed Jane and Andrew out to the hall, where Jane gestured to a small, yellowed scrap of paper framed and hanging on the wall by the stairs. “I know it’s not much, but it really spoke to me for some reason.”
Rachel stepped closer to examine the elegant cursive of a bygone age: Beef joint for Weltons, 2 lb, 2s/3d; Potatoes, 5 lb, 6d; Tea, ¼ lb, 4d; Mint Humbugs for David, 1d.
“Yes, I can see what you mean,” she said. “It almost feels as if you know a bit about her, just from the list. Who’s David?”
“Her husband, the vicar here at the time, and an army chaplain. He died during the war, sadly.” Jane gazed at the framed shopping list for another moment before turning away. “Of course, you must know how it is to find something from the past and feel connected to it. Have you ever found an object during one of your digs that really spoke to you?”
Briefly Rachel thought about the heart-shaped handle; the speculum oris had spoken to her, but in a horrible way, a premonition of something terrible. Just thinking about it made her feel like shivering – she, who through her research had encountered all sorts of atrocities and tragedies. Yet the handle felt like something else entirely, and she wondered what else, if anything, she might find tomorrow, when she finally got a chance to dive beneath the sea. Would the wreck give up any clues, hint at any answers?
“Some things do,” she told Jane. “Every excavation I’ve been on tells a story; some more personal than others.”
“And what about this ship?” Andrew asked. “Do you think you’ll find out who it belonged to?”
“I hope so.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a sudden outbreak of bickering from the next room; Ben sprinted in, muddy and dishevelled, followed by a furious-looking Merrie.
“Ben, you’re tracking mud everywhere,” Jane cried in exasperation.
“Give it back,” Merrie shrieked, and Rachel saw that Ben was holding something pink and glittery that was most likely part of her ballet outfit.
“Ben,” Andrew said warningly. He gave Rachel an apologetic look before going after his son, who had disappeared into the kitchen.
“I’d better see about supper,” Jane said, as she started off after her husband.
“Can I do anything?”
“No, no.” She gave Rachel a distracted smile. “Just relax. Finish your wine.”
Rachel took another sip of her wine. In the distance, she could hear Ben and Andrew’s raised voices, and another protesting shriek from Merrie, along with the rattle of pots and pans. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Natalie in the hall, phone in hand, pouting for a selfie.
It was all so strange and vigorous, she mused, so different from anything she’d ever known. The house she’d grown up in was a lot like this one in terms of its large, gracious rooms and lovably shabby elegance, but her house had always been quiet, dark, sad. At least that was how she remembered it, save for the time when her father had been at home.
The Hattons’ house felt like the complete opposite – brimming with life, with all of its messy emotions, bristling with joy. No matter how Merrie screeched, Rachel knew the Hattons all loved each other. It practically oozed out of them; it was the very necessary glue that held them together.
The realization sent a pang through her – of longing or sorrow or something else, she wasn’t sure what. She hadn’t had that growing up. Yes, she’d adored her father, but it hadn’t been a love that had held her family together, as much as she might have longed for it. The three of them had felt like separate, spinning tops, occasionally colliding with one another before spinning off again.
And as for now? She thought of Anthony, waiting back in Bristol, except he didn’t seem to be waiting so much as getting on with his life. Did they have that glue? And if they did, was she picking at it with her prickliness, her difficult ways? They were questions Rachel hated to ask herself, because she was afraid of the answers, yet she feared she knew them all the same.
“Sorry about that,” Jane said as she brought a bubbling shepherd’s pie topped with crispy mashed potato into the room and placed it on the table. “The family chaos never seems to end, no matter their age. Do you have children?” She smiled at Rachel, eyebrows raised expectantly. Rachel could tell she was ready to launch into the expected barrage of questions about names and numbers, genders and ages. She was thirty-seven, after all, and she’d already said she was married. She should have a couple, at least.
“No.” She forced a rather tight smile. “No children.”
“Oh.” Jane rearranged her expression into something like acceptance, but Rachel could tell she was disappointed. Now they couldn’t have that conversation, the shared camaraderie of ages and stages that mothers everywhere seemed to enjoy. “I’ll just get the salad.”
