He shook his head, turning again to look at me. “We’ve found nothing, no. Lena told DS Morgan that while Nel did wear it often, it wasn’t something she had on every day. Although,” he went on, dipping his head, “I suppose you couldn’t have known that.” With a glance up at the house, he climbed into his car and backed slowly out of the driveway.
JULES
So somehow this has ended up being my fault. You really are something, Nel. You are gone, possibly killed, and everyone is pointing the finger at me. I wasn’t even here! I felt petulant, reduced to my teenage self. I wanted to scream at them, How is this my fault?
After the detective left, I stomped back into the house, catching sight of myself in the hallway mirror as I did, and I was surprised to see you looking back at me (older, not so pretty, but still you). Something snagged in my chest. I went into the kitchen and cried. If I failed you, I need to know how. I may not have loved you, but I can’t have you abandoned like this, dismissed. I want to know if someone hurt you and why; I want them to pay. I want to lay all this to rest so that maybe you can stop whispering in my ear about how you didn’t jump, didn’t jump, didn’t jump. I believe you, all right? And (whisper it), I want to know that I am safe. I want to know that no one is coming for me. I want to know that the child I am to take under my wing is just that—a blameless child—not something else. Not something dangerous.
I kept seeing the way Lena looked at DI Townsend, the tone of her voice when she called him by his first name (his first name?), the way he looked at her. I wondered whether what she’d told them about the bracelet was true. It rang false to me, because you’d been so quick to claim it, to make it yours. It was possible, I supposed, that you only insisted on taking it because you knew how much I wanted it. When you found it amongst Mum’s things and slipped it onto your wrist, I complained to Dad (yes, telling tales again). I asked, Why should she have it? Why not? you replied. I’m the eldest. And when he was gone, you smiled as you admired it on your wrist. It suits me, you said. Don’t you think it suits me? Pinching a layer of fat on my forearm. I doubt it would fit around your chubby little arm.
I wiped my eyes. You stung me like that often; cruelty always was your strong suit. Some jibes—about my size, about how slow I was, how dull—I shrugged off. Others—Come on, Julia, tell me honestly. Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it?—were barbs embedded deep in my flesh, irrecoverable unless I wanted to tear open fresh wounds. That last one, slurred into my ear on the day we buried our mother—oh, I could happily have strangled you with my bare hands for those words. And if you did that to me, if you were capable of making me feel like that, who else did you make murderous?
Down in the bowels of the house, in your study, I began to sift through your papers. I started with the mundane stuff. From the wooden filing cabinets against the wall I retrieved files containing medical records for you and Lena, a birth certificate for Lena, with no father named. I’d known that would be the case, of course; this was one of your mysteries, one of your secrets held tight to your chest. But for even Lena not to know? (I had to wonder, unkindly, whether you genuinely didn’t know either.)
There were school reports, from the Park Slope Montessori in Brooklyn and from the local primary and secondary here in Beckford. The deeds to the house, a life-insurance policy (Lena the beneficiary), bank statements, investment accounts. All the ordinary debris of a relatively well-ordered life, with no secrets to spill, no hidden truths to tell.
In the lower drawers were your files relating to the “project”: boxes filled with rough prints of pictures, pages of notes, some typed, some in your own spidery hand, in blue and green ink, words crossed out and capitalized and underlined, like the ravings of a conspiracy theorist. A madwoman. Unlike the other files, the administrative ones, none of it was in order; everything was a mess, all jumbled up. As though someone had been through the files, looking for something. My skin prickled, my mouth was dry. The police have been through them, of course. They had your computer, but they’d still want to see this. Maybe they’ve been looking for a note.
I flicked through the first box of pictures. They were mostly of the pool, the rocks, the little sandy beach. On some, you’d marked things on the borders, codes I couldn’t decipher. There were photos of Beckford, too: its streets and houses, the pretty stone ones and uglier new ones. One of these was pictured over and over, a plain Edwardian semi with dirty curtains, half drawn. There were pictures of the town centre, the bridge, the pub, the church, the graveyard. Libby Seeton’s grave.
Poor Libby. You were obsessed with her when you were a child. I hated the story, sad and cruel as it was, but you wanted to hear it over and over again. You wanted to hear how Libby, still a child, was brought to the water, accused of witchcraft. Why? I’d ask, and our mother would say, Because she and her aunt knew about herbs and plants. They knew how to make medicine. That seemed a stupid reason, but adult stories were full of stupid cruelties: little children turned away at the school gates because their skin was the wrong colour; people beaten or killed for worshipping the wrong god. Later you told me that it wasn’t about making medicine, it was because Libby seduced (you explained the word) an older man and enticed him to leave his wife and child. That didn’t diminish her in your eyes; it was a sign of her power.
When you were little, six or seven, you insisted on wearing one of Mum’s old skirts to the pool; it trailed in the dirt although you’d pulled it up under your chin. You climbed up the rocks and flung yourself into the water while I played on the beach. You were Libby: Look, Mum! Look! Do you think I’ll sink or swim?
I can see you doing it, the excitement on your face. I can feel my mother’s soft hand in mine, warm sand between my toes as we watched you. That doesn’t make any sense: if you were six or seven, then I was two or three—there’s no way I could remember that, could I?
I thought about the lighter that I found in your drawer, about the initials engraved on it. LS. Is this for Libby? Really, Nel? Were you really so obsessed with a three-hundred-year-long-dead girl that you had her initials engraved on your belongings? Maybe not. Maybe you weren’t obsessed. Maybe you just liked the idea of being able to hold her in your palm.
I returned to the files, looking for more about Libby. I sorted through printed pages of type and photos, printouts of old newspaper articles, cuttings from magazines, here and there your indelicate scrawl on the edge of the pages, illegible usually, rarely clear. There were names I’d heard of and names I hadn’t: Libby and Mary, Anne and Katie and Ginny and Lauren, and there, at the top of Lauren’s entry, in thick black ink, you had written: Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.
THE DROWNING POOL
1679
LIBBY
Yesterday they said tomorrow, so that’s today now. She knows it won’t be long. They’ll come to take her to the water, to swim her. She wants it to come, wills it to come, it can’t come soon enough. She’s tired of feeling so dirty, of the itch on her skin. Knows it won’t really help with the sores, putrid now and smelling bad. She needs elderberry, or marigold maybe, she’s not sure what would be best, or whether it’s too late to do anything at all. Aunt May would know, but she’s gone now, swung from a gibbet these eight months past.
Libby likes the water, loves the river though she’s afraid of the deep. It’ll be cold enough to freeze her now, but at least it’ll take the insects from her skin. They shaved her when they first arrested her, but the hair’s grown back a bit now, and there are things crawling everywhere, burrowing into her, she feels them in her ears, at the corners of her eyes and in between her legs. She scratches until she bleeds. It’ll be good to have all that washed away, the smell of the blood, of herself.
They come in the morning. Two men, young, rough-handed, rough-mouthed, she’s felt their fists before. No more though, they’re careful about that, because they heard what the man said, the one who saw her in the forest, her legs spread and the Devil between them. They laugh and slap, but they’re afraid of her, too, and in any case, she’s not much to look at these days.
She wonders, will he be there to watch her, and what will he think? He thought her beautiful once, but now her teeth are rotting, and her skin is mottled blue and purple as though she were half dead already.
They take her to Beckford, where the river turns sharp around the cliff and then runs slow, slow and deep. This is where she’ll swim.
It is autumn, a cold wind blowing, but the sun is bright and so she feels ashamed, stripped there in the bright light before all the men and women of the village. She thinks she can hear them gasp, in horror or surprise, at what’s become of lovely Libby Seeton.
She’s bound with ropes thick and rough enough to bring bright, fresh blood to her wrists. Just her arms. Legs left free. Then they tie a rope around her waist, so that should she sink, they can bring her back again.
When they take her to the river’s edge, she turns and looks for him. The children scream then, thinking she’s turning the curse on them, and the men push her into the water. The cold takes all of her breath. One of the men has a pole and he shoves it at her back, pressing her on and on and on until she cannot stand. She slips down into the water.
She sinks.
The cold is so shocking that she forget
s where she is. She opens her mouth to gasp and sucks in black water, she starts to choke, she struggles, she kicks with her legs, but she’s disoriented, no longer feels the riverbed beneath her feet.
The rope pulls hard at her, biting into her waist, ripping her skin.