You Yet Shall Die

By Jennifer Barraclough

"I'm Nicky. Your little sister." With these words from a stranger, Hilda's quiet existence in a marshland cottage with her rescue cats is turned upside down. She resolves to find out the truth about her parents' marriage, her father's secret life and her mother's untimely death. Meanwhile her brother Dunstan is scandalized by Nicky's claim to be the "love child" of his father, a respected doctor who recently died. In his efforts to stave off the threat Dunstan resorts to desperate measures, with tragic results. Meanwhile Hilda discovers some disturbing truths about her family background and uncovers a long-ago crime. This gentle mystery novel set in the Kent and Sussex countryside in the early 2000s, with flashbacks to 1940s Oxford and the 1960s London nightclub scene, ends with a shocking twist.          

• Language: English
• Publisher: Overcliff Books
• Release date: Jan 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223689225

Jennifer Barraclough

Jennifer Barraclough was born and brought up in England, and practised as a medical doctor there for many years before moving to New Zealand with her husband. She has published both fiction and non-fiction books. Besides writing, her interests include animal welfare, choral singing and holistic health care. 

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Southeast England 2005

I’m Nicky. Your little sister.

As I tramp over the marshland in the summer evening dusk these words keep replaying in my mind, like one of the cracked gramophone records we had at home when I was a child, making me wish that I had asked my parents more about our family background before it was too late.

Mother died when I was sixteen. Nearly thirty years later I still miss her, and still wonder how much I was to blame for her death.

Father died this winter, and I do not miss him at all.

The two of them are buried side by side in the churchyard of the village where we used to live. I have not been back there since attending Father’s funeral on a cold February morning four months ago.

1 HILDA

I am spending this fine June afternoon in my garden, planting out seedlings of beetroot, broccoli, carrots and swedes. Mother used to emphasize the importance of fresh vegetables for health and taught me how to grow them, and I am thankful to have retained this knowledge because I have a limited budget for food shopping. I only hope some of these new plants will survive, though things do not always grow well here in the North Kent marshland, where the weather can be cool and windy all year round.

After doing the gardening I give my three cats their evening meals, feeding Daisy separately because she requires a special renal diet, then brushing and combing her tortoiseshell coat in the places that she is getting too old to reach. Then, looking forward to a rest, I go to the kitchen to make some tea. My brother has recently reproached me for not taking more interest in current affairs so, while the kettle is coming to the boil, I listen to a news program about prime minister Tony Blair’s forthcoming speech to the European Parliament. The topic means little to me, so I switch off the radio before taking my tea and biscuits into the living room. I sink down into the sofa with Chester, purring loudly, curled up at my side and pick up my new library book, which is called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I am just getting absorbed in the story when there is a knock on the door.

The sound makes my heart jump. I seldom have a visitor, and do not want to see one at the moment, especially as it may well be my landlady with another complaint about the cats.

But I dutifully get up to see who it is, and there is a strange young woman standing on the doorstep holding out her right hand and saying with a bright smile Hello there Hilda Harper – found where you live at last! I’m Nicky. Your little sister.

When she moves closer as if to embrace me, I shrink back. I stare at her for what seems a long time. She is short and slightly plump. Her rounded face has a child-like expression. Her blonde hair is cut in a short spiky style and has pink streaks. Her ears have been pierced, and she is wearing dangly earrings. Her floral sundress reveals the top of her bosom. Her high-heeled sandals are totally unsuitable for the country. The general effect is pretty but slightly artificial, and she reminds me of a doll.

I was once made to attend a course in social skills, but it did not prepare me for a situation of this kind. I ignore the woman’s proffered hand with its orange-painted nails, and eventually she withdraws it. The smile fades from her face as she says, You did know about me, didn’t you?

I reply, I haven’t got a sister.

Oh yes you have, she says, putting her hand on my arm in a way I find over-familiar. I do not like being touched. Why don’t we sit down and have a chat.

I can hardly refuse to let her come inside, reluctant though I am to do so, and I lead the way into the sitting room. On catching sight of the stranger, Orlando leaps down from his chair and out of the window, but his brother Chester continues to sleep on the sofa.

Nicky keeps up a continuous prattle, remarking on what a big cat Chester is, what a lonely spot I live in and what a lot of books I have. I do not respond. I can feel my heart beating uncomfortably fast, and a tightness in my chest, and hope I am not going to get one of my attacks in front of this stranger. I gesture her towards the battered sofa, and notice that she inspects it carefully and brushes off the cat hairs before sitting down as far away as possible from Chester. It would seem that she does not like animals. We look at each other in silence for a while. I have the vague impression that I have seen her somewhere before but cannot place the memory. At last I say, I don’t understand what this is about.

Don’t you recognize me? she asks. From our father’s funeral?

It grates to hear her speak of our father in that casual tone. The opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, Our Father who Art in Heaven, come incongruously into my mind. And then I have a mental image of the small group of mourners gathered in the village churchyard on that winter morning when Father was, as the vicar put it, laid to rest. My brother Dunstan asked me Who’s that woman in the yellow coat? and I said I didn’t know, while noticing that the coat in question, unsuitably bright for wearing at a funeral, was the same color as the daffodils growing around the gravestones. The service inside the bitterly cold church had been very long. Dunstan, sounding even more pompous than usual, delivered a seemingly endless eulogy of praise for Father’s professional excellence and personal virtues. He even said something about Father and Mother being reunited forever in the afterlife, which if it were true would seem most unfortunate from Mother’s point of view. I could have painted a different picture of Father if I had been asked to speak, which of course I had not. I would have refused in any case. I felt indifference rather than grief over his loss.

After the service was over, we all moved to the churchyard to see Father’s body being lowered into the grave inside the ornate walnut coffin that Dunstan had insisted on buying, in my opinion a waste of money. It was when we all had to file round and scatter a handful of dried petals on top of the coffin that I noticed the young woman in the yellow coat, probably the same one who is visiting me now. 

My failure to reply to her question has left an awkward silence, and I am relieved when it is broken by another knock on the door. I get up to answer it. A teenage boy is standing on the threshold carrying a cardboard box in his arms. He asks, Are you the cat lady?

I tell him to come in and close the door. He hands me the box, so light that it feels empty, but I hear a faint meow coming from inside. I close the window before putting the box down on the table and opening the lid. The kitten, black with white bib and paws, is tiny and very thin and there are streaks of mud on her coat. She – for I have the impression of a female – does not appear frightened. She stretches out her head towards me and licks my hand. Nicky coos Sweet little poppet.

Where did you find her? I ask the boy.

In a ditch by the barges. We heard it crying and my Mum said to bring it here. He adds There was some others there too, but they were dead.

I no longer bother to waste my energy on feeling anger towards those cruel and callous people who dump unwanted litters of kittens. Nor on wondering about the fate of the mother cat, whether she had been killed, or was still alive and searching for her offspring. My job now is to look after this plucky little survivor and, in contrast to the situation with my so-called sister, this is something I know how to handle.

Ignoring Nicky’s comment of It’s all dirty, better not touch it, I pick up the kitten. She looks at me through big eyes that are just changing color from their baby blue, and her thin chest begins vibrating with a rudimentary purr. Probably three to four weeks old, so may be able to drink a milk substitute by herself rather than needing to be fed by syringe every few hours both day and night, which will make things easier. Perhaps even mature enough to try some kitten food, though only very little to start with, given her malnourished state. Apart from being underweight she looks healthy, though I will take her to the vet for a checkup in the morning. Remarkable that she is so friendly and confident after what she must have been through; almost a miracle really. I try not to get too fond of my rescue cats, but I often do end up keeping them, and this one is rather special. I decide to name her Magic.

Thanks for bringing her in. I’ll look after her now, I call out to the lad, who is already halfway out of the door. I put Magic back in her box and then turn to Nicky, saying firmly I need to deal with this kitten now, so I think you’d better go.

She looks reproachful. I can see you don’t believe who I am, but I can explain.

You’ll have to come back another time, I tell her, although I am not sure if I want to see her again.

She says in an appealing tone, I want us to be friends. After all, we are family. It’s not our fault if our Dad was playing around, is it? Discomfited to see the tears in her eyes, I have no idea what to say. After another awkward silence she stands up and takes a card from her bag. She presses it into my hand, saying, Ring me soon. Please. Then she leaves.

I quickly shut the door behind her, and then bolt it, just in case anyone else tries to come in. I suppose I have been rude and unwelcoming to my visitor and feel sorry, because she actually seemed quite a nice person. But I find that talking to strangers is difficult at the best of times, and her outlandish claim about being my sister took me aback. I put her card down somewhere without looking at it and return to dealing with Magic, gently wiping the mud from her fur, and setting up her water bowl, feeding bowl, bed and litter tray in the bathroom to keep her away from my other cats and even more importantly away from my landlady.

Looking after the new kitten keeps my mind occupied for a while, but after she has settled down to sleep on a blanket in a clean cardboard box, I keep thinking about the stranger’s visit. I’m Nicky. Your little sister. Whatever could that mean, and should I not have tried to ask her for more information, instead of sending her away so abruptly?

I make myself another mug of tea and some baked beans on toast, then try to read my library book but cannot concentrate. My quiet solitary routine has been disturbed. I put on my gumboots and set out to walk out across the grassy marshes towards the Thames estuary. On this summer evening the area is deserted, as it usually is, except sometimes at weekends when there are birdwatchers and naturalists and amateur historians searching for relics of the area’s industrial, agricultural and military past. From time to time there is talk of building an airport here, and I very much hope that will never happen, for I love the peaceful solitude of this place.

I cross a wooden stile and follow the path that runs alongside one of the ditches that crisscross the marsh. Now, in early summer, the bleak landscape is brightened by patches of color with the white elderflowers and pink dog roses and yellow water irises in bloom. After a while the path peters out and I stride on across the grass towards the mudflats that lie on the south bank of the Thames estuary, littered with derelict barges, the place where some heartless person left a litter of kittens to die. 

Fresh air and exercise are supposed to clear the mind but, as I tramp on in the summer twilight, I find myself still mulling over Nicky’s visit and trawling through my memories of childhood. Was it possible that I did have a sister?

I believe that some parents enjoy telling their children all about their family background. Our parents did not. If I ever questioned Mother about how she and Father met, or what her own childhood had been like, she usually replied with dismissive statements like There’s very little to tell or I don’t remember. She did once say that her grandparents had owned a tea plantation in India, which sounded romantic, but she did not seem to want to explain further. Her own parents, my grandparents, practiced a fundamentalist brand of Christianity and interpreted the Bible in a literal fashion. They lived frugally, were strictly teetotal, and shunned material luxuries and pleasures. I was to discover after they died that despite their spartan lifestyle they had been quite well off financially.

When Dunstan and I were children, Mother sometimes took us by train to visit our grandparents for afternoon tea. The meal consisted of sliced bread – one piece each – with butter or jam but not both. Their house was often cold, but no heating was allowed except between December and February. Dunstan got severely reprimanded there one day, first for jumping on a flowerbed in the garden, and then for touching the grand piano. Grandfather ordered him to sit down and study The Young Folk’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I had to read it to him, because he had not yet learned to read himself. Poor little Dunstan was bored by the text and frightened by the illustrations of subjects such as The Valley of the Shadow of Death and The Slough of Despond. He begged to go home, and after that was so frightened of his grandfather that he would burst into tears whenever another visit loomed.

Mother never escaped the influence of her puritanical upbringing but, perhaps due to Father’s more liberal outlook, the regime in our own home was not quite so austere as that of our grandparents. Dunstan and I grew up in a Sussex village. Our house was next to the church, and had formerly been the vicarage, but the parish no longer had its own vicar because the congregation had shrunk so much. There was a rota of visiting priests and lay readers to lead the Sunday morning services to which Mother insisted on taking us children each week. We both found them rather dull, but Mother took her religion seriously, and apart from any spiritual benefit she may have gained from attending the church I expect she welcomed having a break from the endless drudgery of looking after our house. Despite her hard work the dingy rooms never looked quite clean, they never felt quite warm enough, and the smell of boiled cabbage never quite went away. It was home, the only one we knew, but not a comfortable house. Never modernized in any way, it stood like a relic of the past beside the growing number of smart executive-style residences occupied by city commuters and their families.

With their big cars, color televisions, cocktail parties and winter skiing holidays, these neighbors were very different from us and we never socialized with them. The couple next door had a daughter about my age who was obsessed with horses and had a pony of her own, but she had made it clear she was not interested in being friends with me, not that I minded that at all. Everything about our upbringing, including our Christian names Hilda Gertrude and Dunstan Anselm, was old-fashioned. Mother did not even have a washing machine, and the house had no central heating. I presume Father could have afforded to pay for some mod cons, but Mother saw virtue in self-denial, and believed that money should be saved for a rainy day and not wasted on non-essentials. Through my contact with the other girls at school I realized that the world was moving on, but we were not part of the trend.

If Mother had any free time she would retreat upstairs, to the bedroom which Father did not share. If I ever went in, I would find her reading a book. In the daytime it was usually the Bible, but late in the evening it might be one of the murder mystery novels that were the nearest thing she had to a secret vice.

I suspect that Mother led a dreary life, only doing all that housework from a sense of duty. Looking back, I know I should have helped her more. If she did too much, she sometimes had one of her turns, feeling faint and having to sit down. But I was absorbed in my own world. I have always been a solitary person, and during the school summer holidays I spent most of my days out in the back garden, which faced south and was light and sunny in contrast to the house itself. In the middle of the lawn grew a majestic yew tree, so ancient that the trunk had become hollowed out. Some former occupant of the property had put a wooden bench inside the bole, and I used to sit there for hours with my library book, sometimes with a cat on my lap.

Another of the large old trees in our garden produced Bramley apples in the autumn, delicious when stewed with sugar, alone or mixed with blackberries. One of Dunstan’s favorite tricks was to climb up that tree and hide, in the mistaken belief that nobody knew he was there.

At the bottom of the garden was the fruit and vegetable patch. It was another of Mother’s jobs to keep it free of weeds, harvest the produce, and make jams and preserves from the excess