Then another shadow crossed the image – one of the dark-gowned ushers – and there were whispers at the front of the room. Then, an announcement: the session was adjourned. The room seemed to let out one collective sigh. The papers on the front desks were folded and packed away and the people around me shuffled in their seats and bent to pick up bags, folding coats and cardigans over their arms. They stood tall around me, coats and legs flashing past me, a hum of voices and clatter of heels, until they were gone and only a lone clerk remained – collecting papers from desks and unplugging the projector, the glowing spindles extinguished, leaving only a skeletal metal carcass.
I turned up my collar and put my hat on, pulling the brim low over my face. It was something I had done every day since the trial began, although there were few people left who would recognise me and even fewer who knew me. I stood up slowly and left the courtroom, my footsteps echoing in the emptiness.
* * *
At Oxworth station I kept my head down, conscious only of the gusts from the passing trains, the catch of electricity echoing along the tracks and the warm bustle of people around me as they exchanged greetings, laughter, and then words – ‘Iris Caldwell’. I realised that I stood among the people from the trial again, the people who had travelled from Missensham and were returning home just as I was. I raised my eyes to watch them but they jostled together, their backs to me, until I could see only one face – a man who was taller than the others and spoke at length. Then I heard more words: ‘Returned, alive!’
I grabbed at a woman’s coat sleeve. ‘Please,’ I began, ‘what did that man just say?’ But she pulled away from me and hurried towards the tall man, standing on tiptoes so she could see over the gathered heads.
I listened to the man’s words as they faded in and out of the hum of voices. I could not make out every word but I heard enough – the trial in Shire Hall had been called off because Iris Caldwell had returned. She had handed herself in at the police station completely unscathed.
The world seemed to spin around me. I saw the tall man, the words still spilling from his mouth and the lady listening on tiptoes, the man with the crooked walking stick and the clerk from the grocer’s. There were women in skirts so short you could see the seams on their stockings, their hair set in waves that barely reached their shoulders, but among them the flash of an ankle-length tea dress or the elegant curve of a corset, a glimpse of a cravat or pocket watch among the suited men.
But the things I now saw were not real, they were glimpses from a time I had once known – memories returning uninvited. These ghosts were everywhere and I moved with them, jostling among handbags and elbows until I was swept along the platform and through the doors of a waiting carriage. I stumbled to a seat and leant my forehead on the window, while people squashed themselves against me, laughing when the lurch of the departing train caused them to stagger in the aisle. As the train gathered speed, I looked out at the passing landscape – the fields, farms and houses that I had once known.
Iris Caldwell was still alive. While others had concerned themselves with the details of what had happened to the girls, all I had ever wanted to know was whether Nell was alive or dead. The amount of blood on the petticoat and nightgown was thought to be too great a loss to survive. One of the girls had died, and I knew that if it was not Iris, then it was my Nell who was dead. I was sure that she was for, if Nell had lived, she would have read about the trial in the papers and come forward to speak up for her beloved Sam.
My thoughts had been riddled with memories that day, but I had not seen Nell. I had not seen her in the chair by the window before I set off that morning. I had not glimpsed her face in the courtroom, nor her figure on the platform, and I could not see her now. I realised that I had not seen Nell since the time, two months ago, that I had sat in my front room and Roy and I had spoken of Sam’s arrest. Over those weeks I had not even seen her shadow or reflection – there had been nothing in the chair with the faded shawl where my companion had once sat. My last connection to my daughter was lost, for I knew that if I could no longer see Nell then she must be dead. At last Nell was gone.
Nell
32
I did not see the film when it was shown in the courtroom of Shire Hall that day. I did not see it when it was first projected on to a bed sheet in St Cuthbert’s Church Hall, and I did not see it all the other times it was played for policemen, lawyers and the hordes of villagers who claimed that they could identify Iris Caldwell and the man she walked with. I did not see the two figures, who appeared only in light and shade as they walked, arm in arm, among the long shadows of the speckled morning light. I did not see the film because I never got the chance to.
I did not see the film, yet I will always be part of it, for it was me, Nell Ryland, who walked across the village green with Iris Caldwell on the morning of May Day 1912. It was my body clothed in Sam Denman’s riding britches and jacket, and my face peering out from under the brim of his cloth cap. Some thought that Iris appeared drunk or drugged in that film, but she was not – she was weakened from losing the baby that her childlike body had been carrying for months. Others thought she was being led away by a man – a villain – but I was no more than a fifteen-year-old girl with short hair and borrowed clothes.
Someone once told me that the camera cannot lie, but I know now there are things that it does not see. That grainy film did not show my love for Iris and the rejection I felt. It did not show Iris’s grief for the loss she had just suffered, nor the plans that she was making as she stumbled wearily across the grass. It did not show how small and alone we were in the dark of the new morning. It did not show the fear in our eyes, or what we were escaping from, and it did not show Francis Elliot-Palmer as he hid in the undergrowth and slowly wound the crank handle, framing the oak tree and the maypole as he tried to flood the lens with the sun’s early rays.
That camera recorded only a brief moment in time – a time in which the sun became bright enough to enter the lens and for the light to hit the spooling film and capture two girls as they stumbled together across the village green. They walked only for a few seconds, one leaning on the other before she – Iris Caldwell – raised her head for a brief moment, her eyes looking towards the camera as if she had heard something or sensed a change in the air.
Then the film stopped, leaving nothing more than white light projected on to the screen, bed sheet or wall. It did not show Francis Elliot-Palmer, his hand paused on the crank handle, and his head raised to look across the village green. It did not show him watching Iris and me as we headed towards Oak Cottage, took the key from the top of the porch, unlocked the front door and entered the house.
Francis had watched Oak Cottage for several minutes – every twitch of a curtain and every lamp that was lit – observing and planning as he hid in the undergrowth. Then he had packed the camera away, folding the tripod carefully into its long bag. He had walked slowly across the village green, past the long shadows cast by the maypole and the oak tree, as he headed in the direction of Oak Cottage. He had opened the door silently before letting himself into the house, and he shut it quietly behind him.
All of this the camera did not see, and it did not see how that day ended.