‘She was the strong one,’ said Mrs Sharpe. ‘Took after her father.’ ‘Not an easy man, I understand?’ ‘He was wicked!’ Mrs Sharpe’s thin face flushed. ‘I don’t go in for all this modern understanding-what-makes-people-tick rubbish. There are some people just born wicked and he was one of them. He broke my poor girl’s heart and drove her to her death. She was a lovely creature too . . . so gentle. And other women . . . he was supposed to have met this smart piece he went abroad with after Madelaine died. Well I’ve never believed that and I never will. He was carrying on with her all along, to my way of thinking.’ ‘The boy was more like his mother, then?’ ‘He worshipped her. I felt so sorry for him. He tried to be brave . . . to protect her, but he was no match for his father. Gerald was a very violent man . . . once he threw an iron at Madelaine and Michael jumped in between them and got it full in the face. That’s how he got that mark, you know.’ Barnaby shook his head. ‘I didn’t know.’ ‘But Katherine was all for her father. And he went off and left her without a backward glance. It would have damaged a weaker person for good and all but she . . . well . . . she was a chip off the old block all right. She didn’t seem much like him on the surface. He was flamboyant, always showing off . . . she’d draw into herself more, but in their hearts they were a dead spit. Fiery tempers and a cast-iron will. And when he’d gone she turned all her attention to Michael. And he, poor boy, with his mother dead, clung to her in desperation. You’d never have thought he was the elder. She was mother, father, sister, everything to him. Sometimes I wondered what I was doing there at all except there had to be somebody while they were still under age.
Katherine and Michael Lacey’s characterisation in The Killings at Badgers Drift by Caroline Graham
