‘You said the moondial’s rules were cruel, but, Jocelyn, cruel doesn’t even begin to describe it!’
Both women were staring in the direction of the moondial site, unable to meet each other’s haunted gaze. Morning had slipped silently into afternoon and as the determined September sun fought through the gathering clouds there was still just enough warmth left in the day to heat up the gentle breeze. Holly shivered nonetheless.
‘I couldn’t avoid death without risking another member of my family. The moondial demanded a life and my worst fear was that it could be Paul’s life I was risking. That’s why I did nothing for two years, not until I saw what would happen to Paul if I didn’t try to change the future.’
‘Please don’t say you killed Harry,’ gasped Holly, half jokingly, but with a fear that there were yet more unpleasant surprises to be revealed amongst the ruins of the Hall.
Jocelyn smiled but as she wrinkled her eyes a tear began its solemn journey down her cheek. ‘As good as,’ she confessed. ‘I saw what he would do to Paul and I felt a rage growing inside me that perhaps only a mother can feel. I had never fought back against Harry’s abuse. I couldn’t have been more submissive if I’d tried. But when I saw Harry’s cruelty being directed at Paul, destroying him as surely as it had destroyed me, that rage consumed me and I think I would have been capable of murder if it had come to it.’
Holly did her best to concentrate on Jocelyn’s experiences. Though she was trying hard not to think about how all of this knowledge would dictate her own path, she could feel those familiar insecurities about motherhood returning to haunt her yet again. She thought she had been learning to be a mother, but she wondered if she could even begin to imagine the burning rage that Jocelyn described.
Jocelyn was trembling as she resurrected the spectres of her past and she seemed to have reached the point where she couldn’t go on. Holly desperately needed to hear more to help her understand. ‘If you didn’t kill him, how did you make sure the life that would be taken was Harry’s?’ asked Holly softly.
‘I started fighting back,’ whispered Jocelyn, as if she were afraid to wake up the ghosts that seemed to be crowding around them. ‘Harry had unwittingly given me the skills to undermine him. Of course, unlike me, Harry wasn’t in the least bit submissive, so when I started to stand up to him, his reaction was explosive. The abuse and cruelty he inflicted on me escalated and the physical abuse became more frequent, more intense.’
‘Oh, Jocelyn, I’d never imagined it had been so bad,’ replied Holly, genuinely shocked by the horrors Jocelyn must have faced in the house that was now Holly’s home.
‘I think the saying, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger” certainly applies to me. And through it all, Harry still managed to keep the abuse hidden from Paul. My secret shame would have remained just that if
I hadn’t realized that I could use it to my advantage. I made certain other people knew. Slowly but surely, Harry’s work dried up as people refused to deal with him. The people in the village became my silent allies and, with the help of my sister, Harry was ostracized. He was close to breaking point, but then I started to wonder if I’d gone too far, if maybe I would still die but at Harry’s hands instead of my own. It was only the intervention of a dear friend, my knight in shining armour, who tipped the balance back in my favour and really set the path of my future on its new course.’
‘And who was this knight in shining armour?’
‘Someone you already know,’ answered Jocelyn, cryptically. ‘He’s still a regular visitor to the gatehouse.’
‘Billy?’ gasped Holly.
Jocelyn nodded. ‘He was a young man in his prime back then. He had called around to the gatehouse to chase Harry for money that he owed him. It was the middle of the day and Paul was at school so Harry was making the most of the time we had to ourselves by beating me to a pulp. One minute I was cowering in a corner and the next, Billy was there and it was Harry who was nursing bruises and broken ribs at the end of the day.’
‘Well done, Billy.’ Holly was smiling with a newfound admiration for her builder.
‘It wasn’t so much the beating that Harry found so hard to take but the humiliation, and I reinforced his shame every chance I got. It broke him, and when he was at his lowest, I knew it was time to leave.’
‘And that’s when the moondial showed you it would lead Harry to suicide?’ asked Holly in disbelief. Holly had always known that Jocelyn was much, much stronger than the frail body that ensnared her, but it was still difficult to imagine Jocelyn taking her husband’s cruelty and using it as her own.
‘There was just one more thing I had to do first. The moondial needs a specific event as a catalyst to switch from one vision of the future to another and, for me, it was sitting down and writing Harry a letter, telling him that I was leaving him. I told him how he had failed at everything and the world would be a better place without him, although I think I might not have put it quite so subtly. With the letter written and my bags packed, I used the moondial one last time. It confirmed that everyone I loved would be safe, that it would be Harry and not me that would commit suicide and that it was safe for me to leave.’ Jocelyn lifted her head high and looked directly at Holly. ‘So going back to your original question, yes, in a way I did kill Harry.’
‘And you never told Paul.’
‘No,’ confirmed Jocelyn. ‘I couldn’t tell him before Harry died in case it changed the future, and afterwards, I was wracked with guilt. I couldn’t justify what I had done even to myself, let alone justify it to Paul.’
‘You let Paul believe his father was the innocent party.’ Holly shook her head and tried to suppress her anger.
‘When the gatehouse was cleared out, Paul found the letter I’d written to Harry. I was officially divorced by that point so had no rights to the property, everything went to Paul. As soon as he was old enough, he left me and left the village. He joined the army and travelled the world, travelled anywhere that would take him as far away from me as possible.’
‘It must have been hard for both of you, but you’re all right together now?’
Jocelyn shook her head and a tear trickled down her face. ‘I tried. For years I tried to get back in touch with him, but he was intent on wiping me out of his life as surely as if I had been the one that had died. Every single letter or card I sent to him was returned unopened. Up until last month, I’d not managed to speak to him for years.’
‘I just assumed you went to visit him regularly. You did stay with him, didn’t you? You were away for over a week,’ Holly asked, confusion adding to the raft of emotions brewing up inside her.
‘You gave me the jolt I needed to try one last time. I tracked him down through an army friend who’s also from Fincross. I practically took up roost on Paul’s doorstep until he couldn’t ignore me any longer.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I didn’t tell him about the moondial, if that’s what you mean. I think that would have been a step too far. But I told him his father had driven me to the point of suicide. I told him that I’d left Harry to protect him as much as for my own sake.’
‘Did he listen?’
Jocelyn smiled and the weary lines on her face softened. ‘He listened enough, I think. We’ve not mended all our fences, but some.’
Jocelyn smiled as her tears dried, but the ghost of those tears remained and Holly knew the old lady wouldn’t let go of the guilt she had carried with her for thirty years.
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