Charlotte, page 1
Charlotte
A Tree of Life Book
Published by arrangement with the author’s Estate.
Copyright © Clive Lofts 2019.
Originally published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton, 1972. Published (as Out Of The Dark) in the USA by Doubleday, 1972.
Cover illustration:
©J.L.Muñoz Luque
www.jlmunoz.com
The moral right of the late Norah Lofts to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-905806-90-4
Tree of Life Publishing
United Kingdom
Charlotte
Norah Lofts
Also by Norah Lofts from Tree of Life Publishing:
Esther
How Far to Bethlehem?
Jassy
Bless This House
The Devil in Clevely
Scent of Cloves
The Lute Player
The Town House
The House at Old Vine
The House at Sunset
The Lost Queen
Eleanor The Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine
Hester Roon
Michael And All Angels
Knight’s Acre
The Homecoming
The Lonely Furrow
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction but readers of real-life crime stories will recognise in Part One some of the facts that came to light in what has been termed the Case of Constance Kent. Certain details—the unhappy family background, the nature of the crime, the mystery of the missing nightdress and the almost unbelievably fatuous behaviour of the police—tally more or less exactly.
The characters, however, are my own; and whereas those who write factually about a crime—especially one never satisfactorily solved—can only speculate about the motives and, indeed, the identity of the murderer, the writer of fiction, dealing in a more plastic medium, is able to say: This is how it happened.
Part Two owes nothing to the Case of Constance Kent. Incredible as it may seem, it is based on a first-hand account of a school in which my sister once tried to teach, a mere forty years ago. Here again the characters are my own; but I did not invent the oil-stove that was carried up and down…
PART ONE
1
Finish your meat, Charlotte’ Mrs. Cornwall said. ‘I’ve told you before. It sets such a bad example.’
From under half-lowered lids Charlotte looked about the table. Five emptied plates. To whom do I set this bad example, she thought with wry humour. To ask the question aloud would be simply asking for trouble. She said, meekly, ‘It is rather fat.’
The so-called fat and lean had been more than usually fat this week and very coarse as well; people who owed butcher’s bills were not served with the best in any grade. Thinking of that and aware that she was feeling slightly queasy herself, Mrs. Cornwall spoke more sharply.
‘Eat it at once. I will not have good food wasted.’
Thomas, fourteen, growing rapidly and perpetually hungry said, ‘It need not be wasted, Mamma. I’ll eat it for you, Charlie.’
Sticking together! They always did!
‘That is another thing I have spoken about. Charlotte is far too old to be called by that ridiculous name.’
Vincent said, ‘Charlie! Charlie! I shall call her Charlie!’
One could not suspect a child of four, one’s own beloved son, of deliberate defiance; and yet there was a mischievous look on the handsome little face. With something less than her usual affection Mrs. Cornwall said, ‘That is because you are still a baby.’
‘I am not. I am big for my age and very forward. Everybody says so.’ Then with a shift from indignation to what in anyone else Mrs. Cornwall would have recognised as malice, he began to chant:
‘Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling,
Charlie is my darling, the young…’
The next word eluded him, so he leaned forward and rubbed his curly head against Charlotte’s arm with an affectionate, puppyish gesture.
‘Sit up, Vincent. Or you will get no pudding.’
Vincent sat up and regarded his mother with anger and astonishment. Mamma spoke like that to other people, never to him.
Charlotte rose and collected the plates. Nellie, the maid, brought in six plates and bread-and-butter pudding which she placed before her mistress.
‘We shall need only five plates,’ Mrs. Cornwall said and rather ostentatiously returned one. ‘Miss Charlotte was unable to finish her first course. She will not need pudding.’
Nellie threw Charlotte a look of surreptitious commiseration.
Mrs. Cornwall served the pudding, helping Vincent first and then Adelaide who was always regarded as the elder of the twins. Perhaps their own mother had known which of them had first entered the world but she had been dead for five years and Adelaide, as the one with the slightly larger share of their very limited wits and the definitely more dominant personality, was always regarded as the elder.
A potion for Adelaide, one for Victoria, Thomas. The spoon hovered. The pork had been extremely fat, enough to take the edge off anybody’s appetite. Then Mrs. Cornwall remembered that a pregnant woman should eat for two. She helped herself.
The meal proceeded in silence. The twins never had anything to say to other people and even between themselves had a way of communicating that demanded the minimum of words. Charlotte and Thomas had long ago learned that their stepmother, who had been their governess, had a way of twisting almost any remark into something meriting either correction or rebuke. Silence was best.
The pudding was eaten quickly. The twins were anxious to get back to the sanctuary of their room at the top of the house and to the fascinating work upon which they were engaged. Thomas was still hungry. Mrs. Cornwall thought with longing of the moment when she could loosen her corsets and lie on her bed in a shaded room. Vincent had something in mind. Charlotte, with nothing to eat, was putting up that infuriating front of not caring, sitting bolt upright, her hands folded in her lap, so that even her stepmother could not criticise her posture. Vincent carefully scraped up the last spoonful of his pudding and then, cunningly addressing nobody in particular, said what had so often been said to him—
‘Open your mouth and shut your eyes and see what the fairies will send you.’
Significantly—a tribute to his charm and his power—they all obeyed, knowing that he would put the spoonful into his own mouth and then laugh merrily. He had tried that trick before. But today he guided the spoon to Charlotte’s mouth and, while she half choked he laughed and, looking at his mother said, ‘Charlie did have some pudding!’
For the first time Agnes Cornwall understood why, outside the family Vincent, for all his beauty and charm and youth, was not much liked. Even cook had said, ‘I’m sorry ma’am, I can’t have Master Vincent in the kitchen. He’s too mischieful.’ Nellie didn’t care for him, nor had any of her predecessors; the man who helped in the yard and the gardener said he was a young imp, a nuisance, a tittle-tattle who invented tales. Even Mrs. Greenfield, the rector’s wife, had once said, not completely admiringly, ‘Surely he is very precocious.’ Agnes had then thought—And why not? The child of love. His father is clever and I’m pretty smart. Apart from her ordinary mother love Agnes Cornwall felt, on the fringe of her mind, a certain indebtedness to her son; he had timed his arrival so well; one year after her marriage…
But she was annoyed with him now; the gesture, that merry mocking look. She said ‘Go upstairs, Vincent, and take your rest.’
‘I don’t want a rest. Babies have rests. I want to play. Charlie will play with me, won’t you Charlie?’
Charlotte said, ‘If that is agreeable to your Mamma, Vincent.’
Your Mamma. Not mine. Charlotte had, five years ago at the age of eleven, said, ‘I shall never call her Mamma. You can only have one mother and mine is dead.’
An offensive thing to say. But Charlotte had stuck to it, defying the small spiteful persecutions and Papa’s disapproval and the recurring, day by day awkwardness of the matter of address. You couldn’t very well say, ‘Yes, Mrs. Cornwall,’ or ‘No, Mrs. Cornwall.’ It sounded so stilted. So for five years Charlotte had said, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ or ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘Just as you say’, with no other word tagged on and had thereby gained herself nothing except a name for being surly and without manners.
So now she agreed to play with Vincent if that was agreeable to his Mamma. And there was the problem. Charlotte was always willing to take charge of Vincent; she could amuse him for hours on end and she had nothing else to do. Rose Ellis, the nurse, up in the nursery had the baby, Amelia, to see to and had shown, in the last few weeks, a streak of something that could only be called disobliging. ‘When he is restless and noisy, he wakes the baby. I’ve only got one pair of hands, Madam.’ More and more Charlotte had taken charge of Vincent during his waking hours. And the result of that had just been made manifest at the table.
‘Thomas,’ Mrs. Cornwall said ‘can take you for a good long walk, darling.’
Thomas said—and for some reason every time he used the word which Charlotte would not, he felt like a traitor, ‘Mamma, I am sorry. I have to go down to the school. Papa arranged it. Mr. Macferson said three o’clock on Friday would be the best time for him. I am sorry, Mamma.’
‘Oh, very well then,’ Agnes Cornwall said, thinking of the bed in the room with the blinds lowered. ‘Charlotte may play with you. A quiet game, in the shade. It is a very hot day.’
Adelaide and Victoria went across the black-and-white tiled hall, mounted the first flight stairs, laid with crimson carpet, and went diagonally across the landing to the second flight, narrower, steeper, linoleum-covered. Their own room was spacious and, though shabby, comfortably furnished. Their current piece of work lay on a round table near one of the windows; a grey bodice belonging to Victoria which was being refurbished by the application of jet beads taken from an old cape. In this, to the wonder and admiration of all, Victoria would appear in church on Sunday morning. They would then spend the next week in improving Adelaide’s buff bodice by applying strips of brown braid. Although they were so almost identical that they often acted and were regarded as one person, they never dressed alike. Long ago their own mother, thinking that their oddity had something to do with their twinship, had done her best to stress their individuality rather than their likeness. But as Mrs. Greenfield once remarked, ‘I can never tell which is which until I see them together.’ Adelaide was taller, a little less rounded of figure. Victoria had the better complexion.
There was no obvious need for them to spend a sunny June day on making an old garment look new. They were fortunate young women. At a time when a man regarded himself as well-paid at twelve shillings a week, they had between them an income of six hundred pounds a year. They had come into their heritage when they were twenty-one, rather more than a year earlier. In five years time, when Charlotte was twenty-one, she would be equally rich. Their maternal grandfather, a tough Scot who had come south and built up a successful business as a merchant in Bristol, had believed that lassies were delicate creatures, to be provided for. Males could fend for themselves, as he had fended. He had never liked his son-in-law and had gone to considerable pains to make sure that John Vincent Cornwall should not benefit directly from his marriage with Emily Burns. On the other hand, Emily must never lack. While she lived, the first Mrs. Cornwall had enjoyed an income of nine hundred pounds a year, by her father’s decree her own, put into her own hand in quarterly sums. It was difficult for the hearty, successful man to visualise his own death, leave alone his daughter’s, but he had faced that possibility. Should Emily die, her income reverted to the trust accumulating for her female issue.
The twins contributed a pound each towards the expenses of the household. Some six months ago Mrs. Cornwall had made a suggestion that this sum should be increased to thirty shillings. Adelaide, always the spokesman and always regarded as half-witted, said, ‘We should have to consult Mr. Watkins. He’s the man who came to see us. All the way from Bristol. He told me… He said it over and over again. We mustn’t do anything about money without asking him first.’ Such a cautionary word had seemed to Mr. Watkins to be a necessity. Two half-wits with six hundred a year between them!
‘I told him,’ Adelaide said ‘that we intended to pay for our room and our food. That was just, I said. And he agreed. He thought a pound a week was enough, since we do not take tea.’
Mrs. Cornwall’s common sense told her it was enough. Quite apart from the fact that they were under their father’s roof. Bed and board with the bed made, the room cleaned and washing done was obtainable for ten shillings a week, in a stranger’s house.
She said, ‘Very well. I shall speak to your Papa.’
Adelaide said, ‘Yes, perhaps that would be best. Then Papa can write to Mr.. Watkins. That would be best.’
Mrs. Cornwall spoke to her husband and he, always shifty and evasive and bad-tempered when money was mentioned, said, ‘Oh, let it go. What difference would it make?’
‘It beats me,’ Mrs. Cornwall said, ‘what they do with the rest of it.’
That was a secret which the twins had confided to nobody. They were saving up to buy a house of their own. Their very own. A quiet house. In this one, remote as their room was, there were always disturbances. Vincent was noisy, chattered, played tricks; the baby cried; March, the gardener, and Catchpole the odd-job man shouted at one another just below their window; Thomas and Charlotte called to one another across the upper landing. Cook and whatever maid was employed were either quarrelling or chatting, quite late at night. And always, always, there was this troublesome question of time, meals arranged to suit other people. Their real grievance was that in this house they were not properly considered, were often called merely, “the girls”. Where are the girls? The girls are late. We can’t start without the girls. Their wishes, their timetable, was never once regarded. Even now, when they were paying their own way.
Threading a bead on her needle Adelaide said, ‘That meat was nasty. In our house we will have chicken. Or cutlets.’
‘And fish,’ Victoria said. She also took a bead which stuck half-way along the needle. ‘Too small,’ she said, wrenching it off.
‘Don’t put it back with the others. We might get it again’ Adelaide said, sensibly. ‘Not on the floor, Vikky! We shall only have to sweep it up.’
‘No. Not on the floor,’ Victoria said, retrieving the tiny glistening speck. After that they worked in a companionable silence.
‘What are we going to do, Charlie?’ Vincent asked as Charlotte led the way to the front garden, into the deep shade of the massive copper beech.
‘I know. Because you are so old.’
`You’ll see. And darling, your Mamma does not like me to be called Charlie.’
Because it’s a pet name; used only by those who are fond of me. Even Nellie sometimes says ‘Miss Charlie’.
‘Yes. I am so old that I must be called Charlotte.’
‘Charlotte. Charlotte. I can say it. I can say anything.’
He hopped, dragging on her hand.
‘You’re so clever, Vincent, that this afternoon I am going to teach you your letters.’
‘I know my letters. A b c d…’ He went right through, finishing up triumphantly, ‘x y z’. He had a parrot’s memory.
‘But you don’t know what they look like,’ Charlotte said.
Between the entrance to the gate and the front door of the house the gravel drive made a swoop, so that most of the house looked out upon the lawn and the beech tree. Under the spreading, bronze-coloured branches nothing grew and the bare soil was dusty. She found a little stick and taught Vincent as she herself had been taught. Big A, little a. A is for apple; she drew the letters and the apple in the dust.
‘Now you try.’ Vincent took enthusiastically to this game. Charlotte felt that in a way she was fobbing him off but she was disinclined for any more demanding pastime. The scene—not that it could really be called that; she could remember many worse—the unpleasantness at the table had upset her. Not to answer back, not to show any feeling had taken an effort. That because one had been unable to eat the grossly fat meat should be denied pudding seemed highly illogical. It was equally illogical to be upset by anything that Mrs.. Cornwall might say or do. Mrs. Cornwall disliked her for a number of reasons; the refusal to address her as “Mamma”; the occasional remark from someone who remembered the first Mrs. Cornwall, that Charlotte was growing very much like her in appearance. Any reference to the dead woman annoyed the second wife; the fact that of the four children of this first marriage Papa liked Charlotte best, far too mild a preference to be called favouritism but noticeable from time to time; and lately, of course, Vincent’s childish attachment. Trivial things in themselves but cumulative in effect.
