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Hanna expected the chilly gusts of air that indicated the Widow’s presence, but felt nothing. “That might explain why Marion invited him to everything. She was attracted to him.”
“Rather. Next time he visited was because she said her daughter had been coughing. He heard no cough, and nothing wrong, and Marion acted as if the kiss had never happened. Until she sent her child off with a nanny, then told my grandfather he was not here to see her in a professional capacity this time.”
“That’s direct.”
Gillian scrunched up her face. “So he did the logical thing and snogged the tonsils off her. Things I didnotwant to know my grandfather did.”
Hanna coughed quietly. “I’m sorry to say, I think all the journals will be like that.”
“I’m starting to get that idea myself. Life was so much nicer when I could pretend my father was the product of immaculate conception. Just like I was.” Gillian turned several more pages, then gave up and closed the book. “Skipping ahead, they kept on like that. They were shagging within two months.”
“I hope your grandmother wasn’t in the picture.”
“Not for a while. He married her late.” Gillian traded out for another journal and flipped through it. “I didn’t get this far in my reading, so we’re all learning about it together. Your records said Marion’s first child died in 1929 at the age of three, when she sickened and died. This journal says otherwise.”
Hanna hunted through the old records, pulling several out to glance at before she put them back. “So do these records. Every visit notes that Patricia seems very healthy.”
“The journal says that, too. My grandfather seems to have spent quite a bit of time at Greenhill Hall. Marion’s husband spent many nights away. Marion suspected he had a mistress but seemed unaffected by it.”
“She had her own paramour. That marriage sounds loveless.”
“That, it does. There are frequent mentions of little Patricia here. A pretend tea party she threw and my grandfather sat for. How he brought her a gift for her third birthday. She went off to play with it, and her mother insisted on a roll. And then? The frantic call from Marion in March. My grandfather drove to Greenhill Hall long after he’d gone home for the night.”
Hanna leaned forward to pull files out of the box. “What happened?”
“She’d drowned,” Gillian said at last. “Marion said she’d run away at bedtime, not wanting to go to sleep, and gotten lost in the dark. When she was found, she was floating in the garden pond. Marion carried her inside and called my grandfather.”
“That’s a very definite cause of death,” Gregory said from next to Hanna. “Why would he lie about that? Why would either of them lie? It was a tragedy, but not an illegal one.”
Gillian took a deep breath and let it out again. “My grandfather’s notes say Marion seemed to be in shock and emotionally divorced from the incident. She was far more upset about repercussions from her husband, who had been out of town for some days and would not return for many more. Grandfather says she begged him to write up the incident with a vague cause of death so it didn’t look like she’d been at fault. He complied. But…”
“But?” Hanna asked, even as she wondered if she knew the answer.
“My grandfather examined the child’s body. She was dressed in her favorite white nightgown, which matched Marion’s story. What didn’t was the fact that the nightgown was clean. No wrinkles, no sign it had been in the pond at all. The child didn’t smell of pond water. He noted she smelled strongly of soap.”
“Like from a bath,” Hanna said.
Gillian inclined her head. “That was my thought. And his. He didn’t question it too closely, because he’d quite fallen in love with the grieving mother and didn’t think she was capable of harming her child. He wanted to spare her the investigation.”
Gregory spoke up again. “What about the household staff? She fished the child’s body out of the pond herself, carried it inside, and called the doctor, but she didn’t call any of the staff?”
Gillian flipped through several more pages. “No. In fact, at the funeral, the staff were all mourning. When my grandfather spoke to them about it, they said they’d wished Marion had called them to help that night. She shouldn’t have had to deal with that alone, and they didn’t understand why she wouldn’t reach out. She called them for more tea, but not to help with her drowned child.”
A hush fell over the room as the information sank in. It was Gregory who finally broke it.
“Marion Pritchard drowned her own daughter,” he said.
“And my grandfather helped cover it up.” Gillian rubbed one hand over her face. “It’s too much to hope that this was a once-off. She had two more children of her own, and then, that boy she took in during the Blitz. My God. This bit I read later makes sense, now.”
Hanna watched as Gillian tore into the case, piling out all the journals as she looked for one in particular. “What bit?”
“I looked at the end entries as I was skimming. Since my father doesn’t mind people reading through the journals that came after, I thought the end of these might have a clue as to why my father keeps them locked away.” Gillian paged through until she found what she wanted, then held the book out for Hanna to see.
Careful not to damage the spine or drop the book in her dreadful eagerness to see, Hanna took it from the doctor. Gregory leaned in so they could both read what Gillian had found.
“Today, I leave her behind me as I drive away from Greenhill Hall, her face forever in my mind no matter how far I run. Her soft skin, her perfect lips, her cold, cruel eyes that reflect her icy heart. Even now, I weep for her, and ache to hear her voice again. Yet I cannot. Marion has led me down darker paths than I imagined myself capable of walking. I fear if I should ever walk with her again, I will find myself on the road to places from which I will never return.
I want to blame her. I want to say she seduced me and enchanted me until I participated in acts I would not have done without her forcing me to. But no one, man or woman, can lead us places we did not have it in us to go ourselves. Perhaps she showed them to me, this is true. The actions, however, were mine.
