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Chapter One

The tide had turned an hour or so ago and was on its way up again, but not enough to make any difference yet. The river was still no more than a streak of silver between the mud banks of the estuary and everything was becalmed in the early afternoon sun. The reeds in the inlet were motionless, long collars of dried grey mud round their stems, not a shiver of breeze to move them. In the middle of them the streak of brighter grey and white that was a heron dozed, stiff and upright as the reeds. It hadn't moved in the half hour I'd been sitting there. Neither had the rowing boat in mid-channel between the gleaming slides of mud. Probably a salmon fisherman and also, quite likely, asleep.

    'You'll hear the motorcar when he goes.'

    That's what Verona's mother had said. Since then I'd been sitting on a rock outcrop in a wood of stunted oaks overlooking the estuary. I'd heard seagulls yelling and curlews gurgling. I'd heard little ploppings of mud falling as the salt water started pushing its way up again. But no motor.

    'He won't stay. Just long enough to pick up his golf clubs, then off again.' Alexandra's eyes were anxious, begging me to understand. A Siamese cat, draped over her shoulder like a long spillage of Devonshire cream, looked a command at me from its squinting blue eyes: Go!

    'Ten minutes at most,' she begged. 'You could wait in the summerhouse.'

    I'd been tempted to stand my ground. I hadn't come all the way down from London to scurry away from a commodore, especially not one who was my least favouritecousin. But Alexandra was desperate.

    'Ben doesn't even know I've written to you. Please, Nell.'

    In the face of her panic I'd given in, let myself be hustled out of the garden door and pointed to a wooden summerhouse that perched on the far edge of the lawn with the sweep of the Teign estuary behind it. As she closed the door after me I heard Ben's voice from the front of the house announcing to wife and world that he was home, dear.

Commodore Benjamin North. There's a respectable strain in my family that I usually prefer not to think about, and he was its pride and joy. One of my mother's sisters married a diplomat and gave birth to an infant who'd probably insisted on three rings of gold braid round the sleeves of his christening robe. Ben was ten years my senior. In twenty years we'd met at precisely three family gatherings and quarrelled at two of them. Ben made a highly suitable match with Alexandra, a general's daughter who whiled away his long absences at sea painting watercolours and breeding Siamese cats. The cats were superb examples of their kind, which was more than you could say for the watercolours. Still, I preferred Alexandra to my cousin. There was just a hint of the unconventional about her that being married to Ben hadn't entirely smothered. They'd produced two children, a boy who was currently a cadet at the Britannia Royal Naval College just down the coast at Dartmouth and his elder sister, Verona.

    Verona North, nineteen years old, was the reason I was sitting on a rock watching the tide go out. Her young perfections had figured in the interrupted conversation with her mother.

    'Always totally fearless. When she was seven she galloped her pony at a wall that must have been all of three feet high. I froze. I thought she'd break her neck. She went over it laughing.'

    When I stood up on my rock I could see that very pony, pensioned off now, knee-deep in grass and buttercups in a field below the house. A solid little bay, sensible enough to save a spoilt seven-year-old from her folly. The house itself was solid too, built of granite blocks, door and window frames outlined in fresh white paint that caught the sun — all very shipshape. The granite, like the pony, came from Dartmoor. If you looked inland you could see the blue outline of the moors and Hay Tor perched on top like a jagged molar. The sea and the moors — a good place to grow up.

    'And she handled the dinghy better than her brother did. Out in all weathers. Archie Pritty used to call her his little midshipman.'

    I didn't ask who Archie Pritty was, for fear of setting off even more Verona worship. Alexandra's little sitting-room was crammed with photographs, including one of two curly-haired moppets in sailor suits with a black labrador lolling at their feet. Senior moppet had a protective hand on junior moppet's shoulder and beamed at the camera, sure of the world's approval. That was Verona. If you looked round at the surface of the baby grand piano, the windowsills, the little tables, there were more of them. Verona standing beside the pony festooned with rosettes, Verona in a rowing boat with her father as passenger, Verona and brother in sailing dinghy — and the same confident smile in all of them. I tried not to be irritated that for this girl's sake Alexandra had begged me to come down here to Devon, two hundred miles from London, and thirty-four shillings return by Great Western. Alexandra should have known, even in this backwater, that the world was falling in pieces around me and my friends.

    'Ben's taken the motorcar to Shaldon to see him. When he gets back you'll have to keep out of the way for a while, Nell. You won't mind, will you? Only all this with Verona has hurt him so much and although I don't think you're to blame in any way — no, of course I don't — the fact is he ...'

    Stated more baldly than Alexandra would ever bring herself to do, the fact was that in my cousin's opinion his darling horse-riding, dinghy-sailing daughter had gone totally off the rails and it was entirely my fault. Eight months ago, a few weeks after her nineteenth birthday, she'd shocked the family by announcing her intention to go off to London to study art. Up to that point she'd shown no signs of talent or enthusiasm, but after all there were Alexandra's watercolours to prove art ran in the family, plus the rooted belief that Verona could do anything if she set her mind to it. When she announced she'd been accepted at the Slade, they found her lodgings in a respectable house and probably hoped she'd be back home by Christmas. One more thing. Alexandra wrote to me, presumably as the supposed expert on London and the Bohemian life, and asked me please to keep an eye on Verona. Cousin Ben didn't know about that. He'd have rather put her in the care of the bears at London Zoo.

I hadn't been pleased. I didn't know Verona. I'd only seen her once in my life when she'd been a bridesmaid at a family wedding, all silk roses and sugar-pink satin. Admittedly it was unfair to hold that against the girl as she would only have been eight or nine at the time, but there was nothing in her life to make her a soul mate of mine.

    Still, with a lot of other things on my mind, I'd done what Alexandra had asked. Back in December, a few weeks after her arrival in London I called at Verona's lodgings with a pot of hyacinths and a fruit cake substantial enough to keep a student fed for days. I found a slim, polite girl with wary brown eyes and hair the colour of beech leaves in autumn. She'd struck me as subdued and I guessed that she might be finding student life in a London winter grimmer and colder than she'd imagined. To my surprise, she wanted to talk. She asked me about the suffragette movement and socialism and pacifism, and sat there taking in the answers with an intent, hungry look. Then she wanted to know how you joined — as if all the whole quarrelsome lot could be rounded up in one nice tidy party, entrance tickets two shillings and sixpence with tea at the interval. I explained that things were more complicated than that and added that if she were really interested in the fight for the Vote she could join the Women's Social and Political Union, address Lincoln's Inn House, Kingsway. Whether she wanted to get involved or not was her decision alone. That was all. That was the extent of my sin against Family and Duty and Pure English Girlhood and goodness knows what else. A few weeks later, in the early days of 1914, I received a letter from Cousin Ben written like fifty strokes from a cat-o'-nine-tails. Verona had joined the suffragettes, got in with a bad crowd, ruined her young life, worried her mother into a decline, blighted her brother's naval career — and it was all my fault. I didn't answer it. I had a lot more on my mind at the time than other people's rebellious daughters.

    Then, in March, another pleading letter had arrived from Alexandra. She'd heard from Verona, who'd left her respectable lodgings and moved in to a house in Chelsea with some other students. Would I please, please, go to the address given and see that she was still all right? Cursing, I'd done as ordered. It was a chaotic place, that student house, but Verona had struck me as a lot happier there than when I'd seen her three months before in her respectable lodgings. When I went in she was sitting on a broken-down chaise-longue, feet bare and hair down, smoking a cigarette. She was watching a short man with a ginger beard trying to juggle three oranges and pretending not to notice a tall dark-haired man who was perched on the windowsill, sketching her, not saying a word. She said 'Hello, Nell', very assured and woman-to-woman, and talked about a march she'd taken part in, as if she'd been deep in suffragette activity for years. I suspected it was as much to impress the men as for my information, and tried not to be annoyed. After all, she was young, thrilled with her independence and probably convinced that she and her fellow students were the first rebels in the history of the world. I remembered how it felt. We'd chatted for a while.

    'I'm learning ju-jitsu too.'

    She'd said it off-handedly but gave me a challenging sideways look.

    'Ah, Mrs Garrud's Suffragettes' Self-Defence Club, I suppose. Do give her my regards.'

    If Verona thought that was something new, she was wrong. Edith Garrud's classes had been going for years and most of us had learned to swing an Indian club or twist out of an armlock under her tutelage. She was under five feet tall but I once watched her throw a thirteen stone policeman — by way of demonstration, not in anger. When I'd had occasion to try the technique in earnest on a policeman of my own it wasn't so successful. I didn't notice his nine stone colleague creeping up behind with a truncheon. Still, I was glad Verona was getting out and taking exercise. I didn't mention the suffragette march or the ju-jitsu lessons when I dropped Alexandra a note to let her know that Verona was safe and well.

    After that, I'd forgotten about Verona again. My friends and I had more serious things on our minds, including fighting the government's iniquitous 'Cat and Mouse Act'. It worked like this. If we were sent to prison for suffragette activities, we went on hunger strike. When the authorities decided we were likely to die on them, we'd be released on licence until we were well enough to be re-arrested, then the cycle would start all over again. Our response was to do our damnedest to see that once a woman was let out, the police didn't get their hands on her again. It was wild work, involving disguises, deceptions and sometimes downright confrontation, and it was taking most of our time and energy. Even today, when I'd been listening to Alexandra talking about Verona, half my mind was on something that should be happening back at home in Hampstead.

    'The thing is, Nell, she was always good about letters. When she was at boarding school and we were away in Gibraltar she wrote twice a week without fail. Wonderful letters. We used to say she could be a successful writer if she wanted ...'

    I'd left the key where my friends could find it, then the plan demanded that I should ostentatiously leave at first light as if for a long journey, carrying a bag. I'd improved on the plan by taking the train to Devon. If it hadn't suited me for that reason, I doubt if I'd have responded to Alexandra's increasingly urgent appeals.

    'Just to disappear. I can't believe she'd do that. She'd know how much it would worry me.'

    I wondered if a man from Scotland Yard's Special Branch had followed me to Paddington. Probably not. They only had a hundred officers and we knew most of them by sight. Just five days ago our headquarters in Kingsway had been raided and taken over by the police. I dragged my attention back to what Alexandra was saying.

    'Something must have happened to her. Ben gets angry if I talk about it. I tried asking Archie for help — he has to go to London a lot — but he's so grieved, so puzzled. I'd go up there myself, only Ben would know and ...'

    Verona hadn't written home for three weeks. There'd been no reply to the increasingly urgent telegrams Alexandra sent to her at the student house.

    'When was the last you heard from her?'

    'I had a note on Sunday the third of May, saying she was well and working hard.'

    'I think I might have seen her since then.'

    'Where? When?'

    Alexandra rocked forward, almost dislodging the cat. It mipped a protest and dug its claws in, but she took no notice.

    'Outside Buckingham Palace last Thursday.'

    Alexandra said 'Oh' and closed her eyes. Then, faintly, 'That terrible riot, the deputation.'

    Since we were getting no sense from parliament, we'd decided to send a deputation to the King. The police had other ideas. They put a cordon of 1,500 men round Buckingham Palace and manhandled any of us who tried to get through it. They backed into us with horses, hit us with truncheons, picked us up and deliberately let us fall. Or, as The Times preferred to report next day, 'In the scuffle, two or three women slipped to the ground'. Altogether, it had turned into one of our most violent confrontations. It wasn't surprising that Alexandra was first shocked, then angry. Not with the police, of course; with me.

    'You let her go to a thing like that?'

    'I'd no idea that she intended to go.' (Not that I'd have tried to stop her.) 'And I'm not quite sure it was her, even now.'

    There had been a girl in a group of other people, her hair the colour of autumn beech leaves streaming down her back. She had the right colouring and build for Verona, but it had been no more than the briefest glance.

    'Didn't you make sure? Didn't you go to her?'

    Just after the point when I thought I'd glimpsed Verona, a lot of other things happened. A hefty constable grabbed one of my friends by the breasts — admittedly she'd been laying about him with a dog whip at the time — and a police horse was deliberately backed into me when I went to help her. I was tempted to tell Alexandra that, but it would only have worried her more.

    'I did have other things to think about at the time.'

    'What was she doing? Who was she with?'

    'She was in a group, I think. Probably students. They were near the Victoria Memorial, not right in the thick of things.'

    'Anything could have happened to her. She could be in prison, in hospital.'

    'She's not. I can promise you that.'

    One of my jobs in the days following the fight had been to keep lists of who'd been hurt or arrested. It wasn't easy, because most of the sixty-six women who appeared in Bow Street police court the next day refused on principle to give their names to the magistrates. But I was satisfied we'd got everybody accounted for, and Verona's name hadn't figured anywhere.

    'She might have dragged herself off to her lodgings and be lying there hurt, too ill to write. I think I'll come up to town with you, whatever Ben —'

    'Don't bother. She isn't there. I checked two days ago.'

    I wasn't quite dead to family duty. When Alexandra began her bombardment of letters to me, I'd found time to go back to the student house. There'd been no sign of the dark-haired man or the ginger-bearded orange juggler. When I described them the other residents thought they were away somewhere, but had no idea where or for how long. As for Verona, they were pretty sure she'd moved out some weeks ago.

    'One of the girls there thought she might have gone home.'

    'Home? Here?'

    It was spring, so they were all feeling migratory. Gone home, gone to roam, gone to Paris, gone to Rome. People strolled out of the door with sketch pads in their rucksacks and a few pounds in their pockets, and came back when it suited them. I'd liked their attitude, it brought back memories, but I knew it wouldn't appeal to Alexandra.

    'But it's not like her, Nell. She wouldn't behave like that.'

    I was saved from having to say anything to that by the sound of the motorcar drawing up on the gravel outside and her urgent need to hide me away from Ben. The one advantage of the situation was that it gave me time to work out whether to tell Alexandra about my guess.

I'd been fidgety, couldn't settle on the knobbly rustic bench in the summerhouse, so had come down to this rock outcrop nearer the water. The heron still hadn't moved. When you looked closely it was standing beside a stream that showed as no more than a dark crack in the field of reeds. Where the stream joined the river there was a neat boathouse of brick and timber, probably commissioned by Ben to keep the family rowing boats and dinghies. With the tide so low, it was separated from the water by an expanse of shining mud and brown bladderwrack. I thought I might have to tell Alex, or hint at least, about what I'd guessed on that second visit to Verona, when she'd been so much happier. That woman-to-woman air had more to it than shared politics. She'd given me a smile that ... well. It was the quality of that smile that I was wondering how to explain to her mother. 'Alex, do you remember when you and Ben first ...?' Not good enough. I couldn't imagine any woman ever smiling that way over anything cousin Ben might do. 'Alexandra, when you stroke one of your cats on a wall in the sun and you can feel it practically melting with smugness ...' Safer perhaps, but would it tell her what I was sure was the case, that sometime between December and March her daughter had begun her first love affair? Now I asked myself — as Alex would ask more forcefully if she knew — whether I should have done something about it. I was a relative after all, however distant, nearly twice Verona's age. She was away from the protection of her home and parents and — I could almost hear her father spluttering — 'in moral danger'. But, looking at it another way, she was an independent and healthy young woman in the second decade of the twentieth century, in love for the first time and starting to live. She and her man — orange man, dark man or perhaps somebody else altogether — had probably run off to a warmer more southern sea than this one. They'd be back when love or money ran out. There was no point in moral cluckings even if, with my disorderly life, I'd been in any position to cluck. When I was only a little older than Verona I'd done much the same myself, in a more censorious generation. Normally, as far as I was concerned, Verona could have kept her secret and I shouldn't have dreamed of hinting at it to her mother. But wasn't my guess better than any of the horrors Alexandra was imagining? Then I looked up at the solid house and the pony in the buttercups, down at the boathouse and the estuary, thought of the ideal I'd be shattering and knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't even hint at it.

The heron made a sudden dive into the reeds then heaved itself into the air, beak empty. I heard the creaking of its wings as it flew over. Still no sound of a motor. Now the decision was taken there was nothing I could do for Alexandra. I wanted to be back in Hampstead, where our plan would be near its critical stage by now. If Ben wasn't gone in half an hour I'd walk the four or five miles back to the ferry across the estuary then to the railway station without bothering to say goodbye. Bored with sitting on the rock, I decided to pass the half-hour having a look at the boathouse. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I was half envying Verona her uncomplicated childhood and her present hypothetical happiness with her lover. I had the childish idea of spending the time sitting in one of the boats, seeing if the tide would come back soon enough to set it afloat. I slid down the bank under swags of wild roses and honeysuckle to the start of a wooden walkway over the reed bed. It had been newly creosoted and the smell fought with honeysuckle and seaweed. The landward end of the walkway joined a narrow path that led up through pasture and orchard to the house. The seaward end went to a small door at the back of the boathouse. I followed it across the reed bed and opened the boathouse door.

    The light hit me. The narrow silver channel of water between the mud flats was blindingly bright against the darkness inside the boathouse. I was standing on a wooden platform with the masts of two dinghies in silhouette. Seagulls were swooping outside, flies buzzing inside. As my eyes adapted to the contrast of light I saw that the platform turned a right angle and went on down the long side of the boathouse to the left. There were a couple of rowing boats moored there, one long and slim, the other a little tub. I started walking towards them and turned the right angle. Concentrating on where I was stepping, I was only half aware that something was hanging over the space on my right above the mud. If I thought about it at all I probably assumed it was a fishing net or a clutch of oilskins hung up to dry. But I'm not sure I even thought about it until flies came up in my face, and the smell wasn't creosote or seaweed. I think I probably put up an arm to wave the flies away and that disturbed the air just enough to set it moving, revolving.

    There was something white in the net or oilskins, as if somebody had hung a mask there. A grotesque mask with a swollen face and protruding tongue. I heard my own voice saying something. I don't know what. Then I'd got a boathook from somewhere and was hooking at the hanging thing. It was some way out from the platform. I could only just reach it with the boathook. It was the jacket belt I hooked. The thing came reluctantly to me, bottom half first, swollen mask tilted away. It was heavy, soaked. A skirt, smelling of wet wool. Then the belt came unbuckled from the weight of it and the thing was swinging out over the mud, then in again towards me, half turning as it came. I dropped the boathook, fell on my knees and grabbed a handful of the skirt. Something rattled against the platform. A plank of wood. The bottom of the thing was lashed to a long soaked plank. The feet, still in their stockings and shoes, green weed trailing over the insteps, were tied with ropes to a piece of wood. I must have let go because she swung out again, over the empty space where the tide had gone away. I called as if she'd come back.

    'Verona!'