Virtue Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Serena Mackesy

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Serena Mackesy’s school predicted a dire end for her, so after stints as a teacher, temp, lexicographical proof-reader, barmaid, crossword editor and door-to-door salesperson, she became a journalist. She currently contributes columns, interviews, features and travel writing to a variety of national newspapers. She lives in South London, likes airline food, seeing in the dawn, Malta and talking, and dislikes ideologues, tidiness and cheap shoes. Her first novel, The Temp, was published to great critical acclaim and became a bestseller.

  Also by Serena Mackesy

  The Temp

  VIRTUE

  Serena Mackesy

  For Asif

  Acknowledgements

  My agent, Jane Conway-Gordon, whose magnificence knows no bounds. Kate Elton at Century for her dedication, sound judgement and endlessly tactful delivery, and Anna Dalton-Knott for her painstaking care and vital comprehension of bad jokes. Asif for general Asifness and practically everything else as well. Titus Andronicpuss for constant disruptions, and his auntie Tracy for saving his life, Mum, Dad, Will and Cathy for being the backbone of my existence, and my friends, who have shown me how damn sweet life can get.

  Prologue

  Unforgettable

  Were someone to conduct DNA sampling on the remains of Marshland Mary, the jute-wrapped peat burial preserved like a squashed Klimt painting in a glass case at Ditchworth museum, they would find that her descendants have scarcely moved five miles from where she lived and died. There have been Burges at Belhaven since well before the land got its current name. By the time the furriner Moresbys were given everything they could see from Marksman’s Hillock – which in East Anglia is a lot of land – in exchange for a certain facility with a bodkin and a vial of adder juice in the post-Hastings mopping-up operation, the Burge family had been scratching a living from the soil thereabouts for well over a thousand years. Not that they have ever discussed the matter, or indeed given it much thought. People only tend to keep family records if they feel that there has been some distinction to show off, and, while each generation has known the skills of fencing and digging and raising a fine batch of hunting fodder and tipping their caps with just the right combination of humility and dignity, the chief achievement of the Burge family lies in its singular economy with words. Throughout the ages, when the wedding trestles have been brought out, the Burges have sat in corners eating pickled sweetmeats and silently holding out their mugs for refills. And it is, after all, these peculiarly taciturn qualities that have kept the Burges in the employ of successive generations of Moresbys when their more loquacious neighbours have had to up sticks and head for less heated parts of the country. For if there is one quality a great family values in its retainers – above, even, the ability to do huge amounts of work without complaining – it is discretion. And discretion the Burges have in spades.

  And they’re good at getting up in the morning. If you don’t tend to waste precious resources sitting up after dark discussing the current political situation, deconstructing your relationships and comparing tattoos, mornings present little by way of problems.

  Before dawn on a Monday in late March, a day when the least possible number of visitors is expected at Belhaven Great House to disturb – or, worse, witness – the planned operations, lights are on in two of the tied cottages of Belhaven village. Behind light cotton curtains, heavy hands reach for army-surplus trousers, large wool-covered feet emerge from beneath the bedclothes and plunge into trouser legs, sweatshirts go over sleep-vests and woollen hats over mussed hair. Down in kitchens, slices of Wonderloaf forsake their packaging, PG Tips swills in teapots and the sound of that long, post-sleep evacuation rings out through bathroom windows. Burges don’t waste time; they will never do one thing when they can do two.

  Derek Burge is the first to emerge in his wellingtons, for the gamekeeper’s cottage is a hundred yards further down the Belhaven road, which doubles as a drive to the Great House. Derek is the younger of the Burge brothers; dark, hairy of arm and relentlessly reliable, he walks, boots shushing on the tarmac as though raising the feet is a waste of effort, down the road, glancing neither left nor right. There’s little, after all, for him to see in a village whose every inch he has known since childhood.

  Derek Burge reaches the head gardener’s cottage, crunches over the frost-pocked gravel round to the back door, where he drops into total stillness. His breath flumes from his nostrils and from time to time he shifts from one foot to the other to encourage his circulation, but otherwise there is no sign that anything is happening behind his eyes at all. Behind the door, the odd muffled clunk and scraping suggests that his older brother, George, is pulling on his own wellingtons and preparing to emerge. George’s wife, Margaret, insists on grilling his Wonderloaf for him on the grounds that he needs a proper breakfast inside him, and he is consequently always a few minutes behind schedule, as he has never got used to the change of routine in the seventeen years of their union. So Derek waits, hands deep in pockets, while Margaret finds his brother’s beanie, and, in the fullness of time, the door opens.

  The two nod in greeting, and set off. Not a word passes between them as they negotiate the length of the Great House drive, and George precedes his brother through the gate in the wall that separates the family chapel from the rabbit-mown lawns of the house. Neither asks after the other’s well-being, or what he watched on the television the night before, what he might be planning to watch tonight. Neither remarks on the m
ajesty of the ancient oaks studding the parkland that spreads across the landscape around them to the nearest horizon, on the progress of the spring, which is beginning to dot the rough-hewn grass with daffodils, or the beauty of the mackerel sky breaking into ecstasy above them. And, though their minds must both be on the task ahead, not a word, not even a joke to alleviate the inevitable tension, passes a pair of lips. Silently, the two men cross the grass to the back of the chapel, where the door to the crypt already lies open.

  The Duke of Belhaven emerges: tweed jacket, flat cap, cavalry twill trousers, brown suede brogues, spots of colour patterning the apples of his cheeks. ‘Morning,’ he says, as though this is just another day. The Burges nod. ‘Good morning, Your Grace,’ they say, only, with their remarkable taciturnity, the entire phrase comes out as a single word: ‘Grease’.

  Gerald Belhaven rubs his hands together in his leather gloves, stamps a couple of times to acknowledge the cold and his appreciation of it, and says, ‘Well, might as well get on with it, I suppose.’

  The Burges follow him down the stone steps into the basement of the church where an iron-barred gate is hidden behind a slab of oak. Despite the fact that this place is only officially visited when there’s been a death in the family, the steps leading down are worn; the fourteenth-century builders of the chapel failed to notice that it lies directly in the line of a small stream that only springs to life during the height of winter, and by the time the error was noticed, the building was half-finished. A drain was quickly installed at the bottom of the stairs to prevent the scions of Belhaven from floating away, but the steps themselves have done service as a decorative waterfall for centuries now, and thriving lichen has made the going entertaining.

  Nonetheless, the medieval architect did his job, and the interior of the crypt beyond the drain is dry enough that coffins, as long as they are lead-lined and left as undisturbed as possible, can on the whole protect their contents until those contents have become inoffensive.

  The Duke and his servants make their way past the drain-pool, weave their way among ancient bones in search of their quarry. Here, the glorious Moresby family lies at peace, rotting gently among their peers and relations. On the left, Guy de Mauxbois, trusted camp follower and, as it turned out, accomplished assassin, who established the family line in this windswept enclave, slumbers in an elaborate stone sarcophagus – or at least what could be found of his bones, dug up by his descendants when this crypt was established, does. The skull, strangely, was never reunited with the body. On stone shelves that line the walls are memorial tablets to George, last Baron Moresby and first Viscount Ditchworth, who received the title from Henry VII two weeks before he finally succumbed to wounds sustained in battle the year before, and Harry, fourth Viscount Ditchworth, lost at sea off Virginia while establishing a tobacco plantation for Queen and country. Above and below the fourth Viscount, his first wife, Arabel, who tragically died from a surfeit of almonds in her thirty-seventh year to heaven is commemorated; her widower was so grief-stricken that, on the advice of his friends, he took another wife, seventeen-year-old Catherine, three weeks later. Tragically, she, too, failed to outlive her spouse, being found at the bottom of the great staircase fifteen years later, having tripped on a carelessly discarded ermine tippet. The Viscount was drowned before he was able to marry again.

  The Burges follow His Grace past Red Malcolm, famed for his beard and his battleaxe, past Benedicta Belhaven, whose husband, despite a singularly obvious lack of achievement, received a dukedom from Charles II in recognition of his contribution to the well-being of the monarch; past Henrys and Geralds and Dianas and Sarahs; past children lost in hunting accidents and dowagers dead of gout; past adulterers and soldiers and philanthropists and scholars (well, one scholar: Charles, sixth Duke of Belhaven, whose History of the British Aristocracy lies as good as new on the shelves of the Bodleian to this day); past gluttons and ascetics; past bashful debutantes and stern matriarchs. Torchlight bounces off the vaulted ceiling, breath hangs in the air like steam from a carny attraction, and not a word is spoken. At the back of the basement, Gerald Belhaven slips between the coffins of Thomas Belhaven, whose command of the tragic Nineteenth Light was one of the more discussed events on the Crimea, and Henrietta, responsible for the considerable collection of Chinoiserie that lines the canton room on the first floor of the Great House. He plays his torch over the simple wooden casket that rests against the wall, checks the nameplate as though he had not himself overseen its being placed there. Nods.

  ‘Here we are,’ he says, and the Burges start forward to take stock of the task in hand.

  It’s not a particularly big coffin, for its occupant was famous for the frailty of her build. Simple but dignified, it is carved from the wood of a 600-year-old oak that had been felled the winter before her death, in one of the series of storms that are still talked about in the area and very nearly resulted in the disappearance of Ditchworth Old Town beneath the North Sea. The plaque, too, is simple but dignified, a plate of shiny brass, only slightly discoloured by the intervening years, on which only a name and two dates are to be discerned. ‘Godiva Fawcett’, it reads, ‘1950–1985’. There is nothing else, for nothing else is necessary to add: that simple name, those tragically short-lived dates, is enough to bring tears to most eyes.

  Godiva has been dead fifteen years now, though those who mourned her then mourn her still. That glorious face is still now, the hands that danced crossed across her breast, those eyes, green like emeralds, green as Tara, green as the bottom of a Hollywood swimming pool, dropped closed in modesty, those lips, that braved the disapproval of society in support of the needy, pressed together in quietude. Godiva, so lovely, so missed, is to be moved today to her final resting place in the mausoleum built fifteen years ago for her followers to visit, though it was tacitly agreed that to leave the body within while public emotion was at its height was asking for trouble. As it is, the statue that graces the front of the building has had to be replaced three times after well-wishers armed with chisels took a few too many souvenirs. But the worst of the furore has died down now and the shrine gets only a hundred or so visitors each day, swelling to maybe a thousand on special anniversaries, and Gerald Belhaven feels that the time has come to risk moving his stepmother to where she is meant to be.

  The three men stand for a moment, contemplating the casket. And then, at a nod from the Duke, the brothers step forward and grip the casket. Bend at the knees, as working men have always done without the aid of ergonomists to tell them how, lift. Apart from a small grunt that issues from Derek, who is at the front end and taking the weight of the head and shoulders, neither says a thing about their burden, which is surprisingly heavy. It would hardly be appropriate, and anyway, Burges know better than to voice comments on anything to do with The Family.

  Gerald Belhaven stands back, arms crossed over the little paunch that has started showing under his checked lawn shirts since he turned forty. The Duchess calls it his ‘food baby’, and likes to make a show of patting it in public. Emotion is one of those things that the Belhavens were trained out of some time in the eighteenth century, and this playfulness is part of the reason that the current Duke is widely believed to have one of the most stable marriages in the aristocracy. Gerald’s mother was his father’s second Duchess, Godiva his third and last.

  The gap between Thomas’ and Henrietta’s tombs is narrower than anyone had remembered, and the Burges have to tip the last Duchess on her side to get her through. Shoulders sloping, Derek Burge’s face turns suddenly puce, and a small hiss of air escapes from between his teeth. ‘Are you all right?’ asks the Duke, mildly concerned, for no one has ever heard a sound of pain from a Burge. Derek nods and mutters, ‘Ar’, between gritted teeth, and they’re through to where the plain sailing begins. ‘Want to put it down?’ enquires the Duke. Burge minor shakes his head, and the brothers plough forward.

  Across the floor they plod, these three conspirators, landing heavy footfalls on the
heads of Moresbys loved and Moresbys lost, Moresbys great and Moresbys fallen, Moresbys in heaven and Moresbys in hell. They reach the stairs. Though winter is over and the waterfall has dried up, the lichen is thick and new on the stone and slippery underfoot. Slowly, the Burges edge their way upward, Derek in front and George following in the rear to take the worst of the load. Derek, the strain of his weak shoulder showing on his face, gets halfway up before his brother reaches the bottom. And then disaster walks in.

  Three steps up, George gets his right wellington halfway on the step, puts his whole weight down upon it. It grips, and he moves confidently forward, lifting the other foot to go one step higher. And as he does so, the balancing foot shoots backward with the speed of a fairground ride. One moment he is upright, the next he has tumbled face-down upon his load, and it has come crashing to the ground.

  ‘Careful!’ cries the Duke, as though such advice will somehow save the day. For two seconds, two long, teetering seconds, the whole shebang rests in the powerful hands of Derek Burge. His eyes pop, tendons stand out in his neck, the corners of his mouth pull down to reveal the dentures beneath. Fingers vainly strain to dig into unyielding wood, arms try to clamp themselves round their load, knees buckle to allow a gentle landing for this end of the box, but in the end it’s all too much to bear. With a roar of despair, he concedes defeat, the fingers unclamp and the coffin crashes to the steps. Clatters, bump-bump-bump, all the way down into the crypt, carrying the slipshod George before it, and comes to rest with a sickening crack, half-on and half-off the staircase. George is pinned into the drain and the Duke, dropping his torch in his horror, plunges them all into total darkness.

  Silence for a moment, broken only by the tick-tick-tick of settling wood, then George groans and begins to extricate himself from beneath the load. Derek stands halfway up the stairs, hand clamped to his torn shoulder muscle, and peers into the gloom. ‘Is everyone all right?’ cries the peer and, scrabbling about, finds the torch to illuminate the scene once again.