Chapter Twenty-Five
Bert’s replacement was a much younger man and could not have been more different.
He was tall and powerfully built with hands like shovels and a slightly flattened and crooked nose.
He had a tattoo on both of his forearms – a dagger on the left and a skull on his right.
Rarely was he seen without a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth, whether he was lolling on a bench in the sun or climbing a ladder to fix something.
In no way, in Venetia’s opinion, could he be described as good-looking, yet somehow he attracted the attention of some of the girls. He would whistle at them when they passed by or give them a wink which would have them stupidly giggling.
He didn’t impress Venetia in the least. Lucien didn’t like him.
‘He looks like he’s a gangster from the East End of London,’ Lucien said one day.
‘Or trying to pretend he is,’ Venetia had said.
It turned out that Lucien hadn’t been that far wrong.
Terry had been taken on by Lady Constance in one of her many generous acts of altruism and it soon became known that he had been to borstal for assault and robbery and had recently been released.
Working as a handyman at Hope Hall, so Edie Buckle told Venetia, was his chance to prove that he had learnt his lesson and turned his back on a life of crime.
He might well have deceived Lady Constance into believing he could become a transformed character and that he was grateful for the chance to make a new life for himself, but he didn’t fool Venetia.
Not when she’d heard him boasting that he’d once met the Kray twins and that just as soon as he could, he’d leave and go back to London and get a job more fitting to his talents.
Being a handyman, he said, wasn’t for him, he was destined for bigger and better things.
His grandiose tales of what his life would be like once he’d completed his time here, making it sound like Lady Constance’s generosity in taking him on was akin to serving a prison sentence, added to his attraction in the eyes of the girls silly enough to be taken in by him.
He was the Bad Boy they had all been warned about, the type to avoid. Clearly for some that was his appeal.
Venetia knew what kind of a person Terry really was, she’d seen him shoot a rabbit in the garden of his cottage in the grounds – Bert’s old house – and that he hadn’t killed it instantly like Bert used to, not wanting the animal to suffer unnecessarily.
Terry had put the wretched animal in a cage and then smoked a cigarette with a twisted smile of pleasure on his face, while he watched the rabbit writhing in pain.
Only somebody with the blackest of hearts could have done that.
Terry’s time at Hope Hall coincided with Lady Constance marrying Mr Butler, their history teacher, and the two of them going away on an extended honeymoon around Europe.
Their marriage had surprised no one, the wonder was why it had taken them so long to get around to doing it.
Mind you, no one wanted to think what they might do on their honeymoon.
Lucien had reckoned they were far too old for sex – a subject they had learnt about by sneaking a look at one of Edie Buckle’s medical books.
‘They’ll spend all their time looking at churches, art galleries and museums,’ he’d claimed.
Venetia wasn’t so sure. She’d seen Mr Butler kissing Lady Constance when they didn’t think anyone was around. And it hadn’t been a polite peck on the cheek.
‘You make them sound ancient,’ she’d said to Lucien, forever protective of Lady Constance, their benefactor. Despite his being at Hope Hall for three years now, Lucien still harboured an element of resentment at where he was, as if Lady Constance was personally responsible for his presence there.
‘They are ancient,’ he’d asserted. ‘Work it out for yourself. Mr Butler was in the Battle of Britain, so that must make him in his forties.’
‘But that’s still not what you’d call ancient.’
‘If you say so,’ Lucien had said, nudging at his spectacles on his nose.
It was one of his many gestures which she knew and loved.
In fact, she knew his face as well as her own, maybe even better because she seldom spent any time looking in the mirror at herself if she could help it.
Sometimes she even found herself copying his gestures, like the way he frowned or shrugged or tilted his head when he was concentrating on something.
Mimicking him made her feel closer to Lucien, a part of him.
‘Have you ever thought that we’re two sides of a coin,’ she said now as they lay in the darkness on a soft cushiony bed of leaves in the woods while listening to the owls hooting out to one another.
Lucien’s right hand was wrapped around her left and as he squeezed her hand gently, she turned her head to look at him and found herself staring into his eyes just inches from her own.
‘I’d never thought of it quite like that,’ he said.
‘But I know what you mean. It means we can never be separated.’ He squeezed her hand again, then kissed her.
They kissed for the longest time and Venetia could feel the familiar flare of his desire for her.
It matched her own for him, but they knew the rules – thanks to that medical book – they would never go further than just kissing and touching.
Going all the way, they both agreed, and as much as they loved each other, was to be avoided at all costs.
They had discussed it many times and neither wanted to take the risk of her getting pregnant.
The thought of her having to confess such a shocking thing to Edie Buckle or Lady Constance was just too awful to contemplate. Besides, she and Lucien had plans.
Next year they would both be sixteen and with Lady Constance’s encouragement and support, they were going to be allowed to stay on at Hope Hall and be privately tutored so that they might be the first ever children from here to go to university.
‘It will be a marvellous feather in our cap,’ Lady Constance had said, ‘and would show all those doubters that my unique approach to nurturing abandoned children is the right course, that a poor start in life is absolutely no obstacle.’
Lucien wanted to study medicine and be a doctor and Venetia had her sights set on studying history.
Mr Butler said she had a real grasp of the subject and that she could appreciate the importance of understanding the past to understand the future.
Never did Venetia imagine just how prophetic those words of Mr Butler’s would be.
They had been so lost in the exquisite pleasure of kissing they had been deaf to the sound of approaching footsteps.
Either that or he had been deliberately furtive in his approach, because the first they knew of Terry’s presence was when he was standing in the clearing just a couple of yards from where they lay.
‘Now, ain’t this just lovely,’ he said in an ugly, mocking voice, ‘a pair of kids at it like rabbits in the woods. And you know what happens to rabbits, don’t you, they get shot, skinned and thrown into a pot and cooked for supper.’
That was when Venetia and Lucien, having scrambled to their feet and straightened their clothes, realised that Terry had been holding a shotgun at his side and was now raising it straight at them.
‘You shouldn’t point guns at people, only an idiot does that,’ Lucien said in his most authoritative tone, the one he used when he was helping in the library and insisting the younger children behave and keep quiet. Venetia didn’t think it would have the same effect on Terry.
She was right. Terry laughed nastily at Lucien. ‘Listen to you with your fancy I’m-better-than-you-voice! You think you’re so ’igh and mighty, but you ain’t. You’re nothing. You’re not even the dirt on my boots. Now get down on your knees and say sorry for speaking to me the way you did.’
‘Why should I?’ said Lucien defiantly.
Terry raised the gun so it was aimed directly at his head. ‘Well, Lucy-Boy, I’ll give you one good reason.’
‘And what then after you’ve killed me? What comes next? Because as far as I can see, you’ll just get yourself into a load of trouble and you’ll be sent to prison. Or better still, you’ll be hanged. So go ahead, shoot me and do society a favour by being rid of you.’
Venetia wanted so much to be proud of Lucien for his bravery, but she feared it was misplaced. Terry didn’t look or sound like someone who gave a damn about consequences. He looked and sounded like he was mad enough to do anything.
‘You’re a cocky little sod, aren’t you?’ Terry responded with a snort.
‘But how about I blow your girlfriend’s head off instead?
’ He swung the gun so it was pointing at Venetia now.
‘Still wanna call my bluff? And I’ll tell you for nothing, Lucy-Boy, pulling the trigger on this shotgun will be the easiest thing in the world for me.
I ain’t afraid to kill you both and then I’ll bury your bodies so no one will ever find them. ’
‘You’re crazy!’ Venetia shouted, her frightened voice ringing out loud and shrill in the night air.
Then grabbing Lucien’s hand, she yelled at him to run.
And they did run. They ran as fast as they could, weaving their way around trees, jumping over tree stumps but all the while they could hear Terry bearing down on them.
‘You can’t get away from me,’ he said in a terrifyingly menacing voice. He seemed to know the woods as well as they did and then, just as they had almost reached the outer perimeter of trees, Venetia tripped and cried out as an agonising bolt of pain shot through her ankle.
Lucien stopped running and bent down to help her up. ‘Come on, we haven’t got far to go,’ he said with an urgent wheezy gasp. She recognised the rasp in his voice as the onset of an asthma attack. It was something he’d started suffering from in the last year.
‘It’s no good,’ she said, ‘I can’t—’ She broke off as from behind them Terry pounced out of the darkness.
‘Gotcha!’ he said, grabbing hold of Venetia’s ponytail and yanking it so viciously he lifted her off the ground.
Lucien hurled himself at the man, but Terry was stronger than the two of them put together and he shoved the butt of the gun at Lucien’s chest, sending him flying, and then dropped her like she was a puppet whose strings had just been cut.
Falling onto the ankle she had just twisted, and recalling the rabbit in the cage and how Terry had enjoyed watching it slowly die, she stifled a cry, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d hurt her.
As though proving he really was as dangerously cruel as Venetia believed him to be, Terry threw back his head and started to laugh, saying he was going to enjoy making their lives a living hell for the rest of the time he worked at Hope Hall.
‘You’ll be looking over your shoulders the whole time just waiting for me to do something to one of you,’ he crowed, ‘or maybe both of you, depending how I feel.’
Venetia thought that for as long as she lived, she would never forget that sickening laugh, and his vile threat.