Harriet began to understand that theirs wasn’t the only family with secret sorrows.
As well as their trips into Middlebeck, the local children would venture up to Riverbend for summertime cricket matches in the meadow. Verity and Harriet would make gallons of lemonade to serve alongside scones laden with locally churned cream and Riverbend strawberries. On especially warm days, they would head to the water, the less daring girls lounging on blankets in the sunshine while the others paddled in the shallows, risking splashes from the boys showing off on the rope swing.
In the autumn, they gathered wood from the forest and built giant bonfires, warming their bellies with sausages donated by a local farmer’s son, and cracking teeth on toffee apples from the orchard.
Riverbend was bursting with life again. Verity would sigh with contentment and ask Harriet, ‘Can you feel it? The house is happy now. This is what it was built for. Mess, mayhem and muddy footprints.’
‘I wish it could always be like this,’ Harriet would sometimes whisper, but her mother’s face would go hard, like the statue by the rose garden, and she’d turn away as if she hadn’t heard.
Because, like summer evenings and snowy days, eventually they would be replaced with a dark cloud. With Him. Pulling into the drive and thudding up the front steps, dispelling the peace and light with one glare, or snarl of displeasure.
Harriet learned at a very young age how to creep along a skirting board unnoticed. Never to leave a stray pencil or a hair ribbon outside her bedroom. To discern a mood via the tilt of someone’s head, or the weighted pause before they spoke. To keep her answers short, and her questions to herself.
She learned the places she could linger after school and on a Saturday. Places like the café or the church hall, where she’d be warm and welcome. She also learned that if she crawled into her wardrobe and pulled the door shut, she could sometimes muffle the sound of her mother’s tears, or her father’s temper.
Most importantly, she learned how to escape into a drawing, or a watercolour. That stepping into these other worlds, faraway places on the pages of her sketchbook, she could leave behind the horror of her mother’s bruises. Alternatively, some days the only way she could deal with the fear and anger was to get it out onto the paper, with slashes, scrawls and splatters. She could never tell her parents how she felt, knowing that invisibility was her best means of survival. But her pictures said it for her. The misery, the guilt. The confusion. The longing. The times she hated Him for coming back. The times that, even as she loved her more than her own life, she hated her mother for always letting him.
As she grew older, Harriet moved from Middlebeck primary school to a private academy, several miles away. There was talk of boarding school, but then another card game, or reckless investment, another woman demanding luxury in return for discretion, and the funds were inevitably diverted elsewhere.
So, she stayed at Riverbend and did her best to embrace the good days, and to endure the bad. She spent more and more time in the forest, sketching the animals and birds, who cared nothing for money or whisky, for women who laughed too loud and stayed too long.
Then, one day, Mother went to bed and didn’t get up again.
And that was when things went from bad to horrible.
* * *
We spent the rest of the weekend taking our time as we sorted through reams of old documents, many of them highlighting the financial devastation that her father’s lifestyle had wreaked across the Riverbend estate. Sunday night, as the sun began to set behind the treeline, the stars emerging unhindered by clouds or city lights, we carried boxes stuffed with papers down the two flights of stairs, across the lawn and behind the kitchen garden to the fire pit. Protected from the spring chill in warm jackets and woolly hats, we built a fire using a pile of pre-chopped wood, and fried local sausages and onions as the papers burned, the dogs observing from a careful distance.
‘For the first time these documents have helped people feel better,’ Hattie said, tucking the meat inside a soft roll and adding a generous squirt of mustard and relish. ‘Even if it is in their dying breath.’
‘Are you feeling okay about it?’ I asked, handing her a glass of the champagne she’d insisted we brought with us.
She lifted the glass up to where a twisting column of pale-grey smoke mingled with the twilight. ‘I feel as though years – decades – of resentment and hurt are floating off me, up into the sky, carried along with those ashes and sparks. I hadn’t realised how heavily that attic was pressing down on my shoulders until you started helping me. Honestly, Sophie, therapists can be the worst people at listening to their own counsel. But this.’ She took a long, slow sip of her drink. ‘This is definitely okay. Cheers, Leonard Langford. You were a pathetic man and a dreadful father. You took from me everything that mattered, but it’s time to stop allowing you to keep taking my peace and happiness, too. So, off, up into the sky you go. I forgive you for selling my family’s land, and so many of their valuable possessions. For forcing your wife and child to scrimp and save while you gorged on the stolen profits. Maybe if you’d had the benefit of a decent therapist, things would have been different. However, my inner jury is still deliberating on the rest of your abominable deeds.’ She turned to me, raising her glass again. ‘Cheers, Sophie. You being here, preventing me from having to face this alone, is priceless.’
‘Cheers.’
I didn’t know how to say that, while sitting on a tree stump in the deepening dark with this woman, the glow of the fire warming my cheeks, I also felt more okay than I had in a very long time. I looked up at the coil of smoke, disappearing into the indigo haze, and I did my best to unclench my tattered heart and allow some of the ancient pain and grief to drift away with it. I watched them go, and I breathed in some of the peace and happiness that had been stolen from me by an overtired lorry driver trying to get home to his family.
As the last streaks of sapphire darkened to ebony, the bats flittering in and out of the branches behind our heads and the fire dwindling into embers, a figure approached along the edge of the trees.
‘Good evening, cousin,’ Hattie said with a smile, before I’d identified the face amongst the shadows. ‘What has you sneaking about in the dark?’
He took a seat, removing one of the hands huddled in the pockets of his coat to pet Flapjack’s head, now pressed against his knee. ‘As estate manager, I consider it my duty to investigate the smell of smoke.’
‘Thought you might be missing out on a party?’
‘Either that, or some village kids were having the kind of party we can do without.’
‘You smelled this tiny fire all the way from the boathouse?’ Hattie asked.
Gideon turned his head to look at me. ‘I was fishing.’
It was too dark to see his expression, but those eyes burned into me all the same.
He shrugged off his rucksack and pulled out a flask. ‘I thought you could probably do with a coffee, given how cold it is.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Although I’ve only got one spare mug.’
It felt as though some of the bonfire sparks had ended up trapped inside my chest. In the days since we’d eaten together, it had crossed my mind that he might bring an extra mug to watch the sunset. I’d tried not to mind that I didn’t have either the time, or the courage, to find out.
