The Legacy: Trouble Comes Disguised As Family (Unspoken Book 2) by T. Belshaw (the best books to read .txt) 📗

‘It sounds perfect,’ said Gwen. She picked up her phone and rang Alec’s number.

An hour later, Jess and Gwen sat at the big oak table in the kitchen and tucked into a plate of cheese and onion sandwiches. Gwen smiled fondly as she picked one up.

‘Alice would have thrown this back at me,’ she said with a little laugh. ‘Ham was her thing. She thought she’d been short changed if I ever made her a sandwich without meat. She loved her mustard too. The strong, yellow, English stuff. “Don’t ever try to feed me any of that insipid, French sludge,” she used to say.’

Jess smiled at Gwen’s anecdote. ‘I can see her saying it.’

Gwen sipped at her coffee and put the half-eaten sandwich back onto her plate.

‘Now, about those missing pages.’

‘Do you still have them?’ asked Jess.

‘No, Lovely. She asked me to burn them, unread, and I did as I was asked. I threw them into my wood burner at home.’

‘But what was so terrible about them, Gwen? Nana had a very troubled life back then, I’m not going to go into detail, but if she thought what was in those pages would upset me, then it must have been truly awful.’

‘Not awful in a nasty sense,’ replied Gwen. ‘She didn’t kill someone, or anything like that. The thing is… well, she suffered from a period of depression.’

‘Depression… and she had to hide that from me? I’d have understood, especially knowing what she went though.’

‘She said it was a period of severe Melancholy. That’s what they used to call it back then. She wouldn’t see a doctor about it, she was terrified that he might book her into the Funny Farm… her words, not mine, Jessica.’

‘Oh, Nana, you silly thing. There was no need to hide it from me.’

‘It was classed as a weakness when she had it. Even doctors would tell you to snap yourself out of it. Anyway. This is what happened.’

Gwen took another sip of coffee and stared into the distance.

‘It was a day or two before she died. You remember she had to have the antibiotics for that awful chest infection? You had brought down the two books she’d asked for from the attic, and she handed one to you, then put the other one in her bedside drawer.’

‘That’s right,’ said Jess. ‘She said I didn’t need to see that one yet.’

‘Well, after you had gone home, she called me in and asked me to get the book from the drawer. When I pulled it out, she told me to sit down and flick through the pages until I got to June, then I was to turn back one page and tear out all the sheets before that one. I asked her why, but she just gave me that look of hers, there was no point in arguing, so I tore them out and handed them over. She stared down at them for a full five minutes with an anguished look on her face as though she was remembering the events she’d written about. Then she told me to get one of the large brown envelopes from the kitchen drawer. When I got back, she had folded the pages in half. She handed them to me and ordered me to put the sheets directly into the envelope without looking at them. I did as I was told, I sealed it, then she took my hand and made me promise to burn it as soon as I could. I had to swear on my husband’s life that I wouldn’t open it. Then she let go of my hand and said, “Jessica must never be allowed to read it.” No one in my family can ever know I was on the verge of being locked away for ever in the lunatic asylum.’

Gwen looked out of the back window as she thought.

‘They couldn’t do that, could they?’ I asked.

‘Alice lay back on her pillows and looked at the ceiling. “Gwen,” she said, “they could do anything back then. At one time, a woman suffering with the baby blues, could be sent there. In Victorian times, a man could have a woman committed for infidelity, claiming she must be mad to have done it. That had stopped by the time I got Melancholia, but anyone with severe depression was pretty much considered to be insane and were shipped off to the nuthouse without so much as a by your leave.”

‘She said, “I couldn’t let that happen. What would have happened to the farm? To Martha? They would have put her in an orphanage.”’ Gwen looked at Jessica through teary eyes. ‘The poor woman.’

‘I’m so angry about this, even though it was a different time with different standards,’ said Jess, putting her hand on Gwen’s.

‘The main reason she didn’t want you to read it was because she had recorded all of her suicidal thoughts. She didn’t want to put you through the anguish of reading them. She said that she was in a really bad way, mentally, and she had sat in the bathroom with a little pot of the barbiturates her doctor had given her when she had complained about not being able to sleep properly. Somehow, she got through without overdosing on them. She said it was probably the thought of her prize boars, Horace and Hector being shot that stopped her taking them… and Martha of course. Anyway, by the summer, she began to feel a little better. She put it down to the lighter nights and mornings but there must have been more to it than that.’

Jess thought about Alice, at eighteen, pregnant, frightened and alone. There was no support in those days. Women were stigmatised and thought of as being wanton. On top of all that, Alice had been left with the huge responsibility of running the farm after her father had drunk himself to death. Jess took a deep breath and let the air out in a huge sigh.

‘Poor Nana, she was under so much