The third time, after ten anxious, desolate, lonely days, her father came home and found his wife in bed in what he described as ‘a disgraceful state’. He ranted and raved to a blank face, until eventually, she shocked all of them by sitting up in bed and screaming at him to shut up while launching her alarm clock at his head.
The in-between days were also far from perfect. Sometimes, Verity acted like her old self, gardening and baking, singing as she dusted the cabinets. Other days, she was up and about, but Harriet could tell she was still in the mind-place. She wasn’t really listening and completed a hotchpotch of random tasks as if in a dream.
Occasionally, she stayed in the same, grubby dressing gown for days at a time, hair unkempt and barely lasting an hour or two out of bed before disappearing again. She would cry those times, rivers of silent sorrow that caused Harriet’s stomach to shrivel in anguish.
It stopped making a difference whether or not He was home. As the months drifted into a year, Harriet got used to cooking and cleaning alone, never knowing whether her mother would be at Riverbend, or lost inside her head. Her father refused to contact the doctor, barking that he wouldn’t have that quack prying into their business, her mother would be fine and, for pity’s sake, stop snivelling about it.
At the start of the summer, he decided Verity would be better off upstairs, in the attic. He did her the courtesy of hiring a local man to decorate, adding the furniture from her mother, Louisa’s, bedroom, and installing a full bathroom suite so she didn’t have to face the effort of the stairs on bad days. He lured her up there as if enticing a wild animal into a trap.
The next time, he went away it was for six weeks. When he returned, it wasn’t alone.
Over the next two years, Harriet liked to think she lost count of the number of women who spent time in Leonard’s bed but she knew full well that it was eleven. Some of them stayed a weekend. One moved in for a full month. Her mother got up on one of those days, breezed into the kitchen, took one look at the imposter sitting at her kitchen table, sipping tea from the porcelain cup Verity’s own mother had given her as a wedding present, turned right around and went up to the attic again, where this time, she stayed.
She spent so long in bed that her ungoverned body began to fail. With little nourishment, or movement, the dry skin soon hung off her bones, her lips cracked and bled. After a few weeks, Harriet found clumps of hair on the grubby pillow. The bed sores were worst of all.
Still, Leonard refused to call the doctor. The one time Harriet tried, the current woman imposter overheard and cut off the call. Later that night, her father removed his belt and reminded her that what happened at Riverbend was nobody else’s business. As soon as the welts on her backside and thighs allowed it, she walked to the surgery herself.
But the doctor ignored her insistence that he came when her father was taking the imposter out for lunch, instead arriving first thing in the morning. Father instantly switched on the charm, laughing with the doc, his drinking pal, about young girls with overactive imaginations that bordered on hysteria.
‘She’s been reading too many novels about Victorian waifs dying of consumption.’ Leonard shook his head in wry amusement. ‘Verity has a migraine, that’s all. I keep telling her she’s working too hard, but will she listen? With a place like Riverbend, there’s always more to do, but my sister’s come to visit, and she’ll help ease the load.’
This time, he didn’t bother with the belt, simply pressing his daughter up against the coat closet where she’d been eavesdropping and leaning in so close that his enraged spittle landed on her cheek.
‘If you speak to any more doctors, one of your teachers, friends, or anybody else about your mother being ill, I will kill her. Do you understand?’
Harriet nodded, pressing her legs together tightly so she wouldn’t wet herself.
‘Not you. Her. I’ll feed her so many pills, it will look like an overdose. She’d probably take them willingly if I offered. And then your childish meddling will have killed your mother.’
‘Why would you do that?’ Harriet whispered. ‘She’s dying. Why won’t you help her?’
He threw her a scornful glance after rattling her one last time against the door. ‘No one’s forcing her to stay in bed.’
‘She’s your wife,’ Harriet pleaded as he strode away, too softly for him to hear. ‘My mother. A person.’
Harriet was fourteen when, one day, her mother simply didn’t wake up. Her heart gave out, they said, due to the extreme malnourishment caused by her eating disorder.
‘Her heart was broken!’ Harriet wailed, to the deer and the rabbits in the middle of the forest. ‘Her heart gave up! It wasn’t an eating disorder; it was a Him disorder! He did this! He killed her, just like he said he would.’
If it took one year, eleven months and six days to kill someone, did that mean it wasn’t murder?
The two years following her mother’s death were the bleakest Harriet had known. The imposter left but was soon replaced after what Leonard deemed a respectable mourning period. Worst of all, the trips stopped. Whether her mother had been his real reason for going away, a smidgen of conscience prevented him from leaving his child to fend for herself, or he was afraid that if he did, she’d tell someone the truth about how he’d sent Mother upstairs and let her wither away to nothing, Harriet didn’t know and didn’t care. Her childhood was no longer one of two halves, light and dark, good and evil. It was misery and fear, without end. Her beloved Riverbend had once again been overrun by grief and despair. The bad guy had won.
Harriet learned to wait until her father was asleep and then creep into the study to rifle through his pockets for cash, knowing that he’d prefer to believe he’d mislaid it rather than drinking himself into such a state, he could be robbed in his own home. She would add this to the thin wad of notes she hid under a loose floorboard at the start of each week. The couple who ran the post office were well aware that the state-awarded Child Benefit was safer in this child’s hands than her parent’s.
Sometimes, her father would arrive back from a day out flushed with success, grinning as he emptied carrier bags bursting with nonsensical indulgences such as partridge, tins of smoked oysters or preposterously expensive cheese on the kitchen table.
She grew used to feeling hungry, especially in the garden’s scarcer months when the harvest produced little more than a murky soup.
The second winter, her father neglected to pay the gas bill, forcing her to scavenge the forest for firewood, reminiscent of the days prior to her mother installing central heating.
She went back to finding excuses to linger in the warmth of her school’s stuffy classrooms or volunteering at the community centre. For the first time, she wished there’d been the money for boarding school. The warmer months were easier, when she could spend hours in the woods, or on the riverbank. Drawing, dreaming, keening for her mother.
It was here, while sketching the wildflowers in a meadow her father had sold off, that she saw him: a tall boy leaning on the gate, watching her.
And nothing would ever be the same again.
* * *
