The Red Bird Sings

by Aoife Fitzpatrick

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

A prize-winning, spine-tingling gothic suspense novel based on a real-life murder trial in 1897 West Virginia

A Sunday Times 'Best Historical Fiction Book of 2023'

'A novel that demands you turn the pages' THE TIMES, BEST HISTORICAL FICTION

'A gothic mystery pulsing with suspense' MAIL ON SUNDAY

'An intense, memorable tale' SUNDAY TIMES

'Brilliant' IRISH TIMES

'I was tenterhooked from the very first to the very last page' JO BROWNING WROE, author of A Terrible Kindness

'Compelling' ANNE ENRIGHT

'Truly superb' VICTORIA MACKENZIE, author of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain

West Virginia, 1897. When young Zona Heaster Shue dies only a few months after her wedding, her mother Mary Jane becomes convinced that Zona was murdered - and by none other than her husband, Trout, the handsome blacksmith beloved in their small Southern town.

But when Trout is put on trial, no one believes he could have done it, apart from Mary Jane and Zona's best friend Lucy, who was always suspicious of Trout. As the trial raises to fever pitch and the men of Greenbrier County stand aligned against them, Mary Jane and Lucy must decide whether to reveal Zona's greatest secret in the service of justice. But it's Zona herself, from beyond the grave, who still has one last revelation to make.

Readers love THE RED BIRD SINGS:

'Amazing' READER REVIEW *****

'This book has so much: feisty feminist characters ahead of their time, ghosts, historical drama, justice,
beautiful writing' READER REVIEW *****

'Very compelling ... not one to be missed! READER REVIEW *****

'A haunting story of love, revenge and grief' READER REVIEW *****

'Difficult to put down' READER REVIEW *****

Release date: March 23, 2023

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 97000

Sample

from:

A TRUE STORYCONTAINING HITHERTOSUPPRESSED FACTS

by Lucia C. Frye

On June 22, 1897, Miss Minnie Grose, recently graduated from the Lewisburg Female Institute, took her seat in the Greenbrier County Circuit Court, and in the shadow of the bench where Justice Joseph McWhorter presided, she set her hands to the stenotype machine. The temperature was holding above ninety degrees, the paper wilting as Miss Grose struck the keys, feeding the narrow roll toward the floor. Upon this cream pulp was the court’s official record – the only evidence that the jury would be allowed to consider in the trial of Trout Shue for the murder of his wife, Zona Heaster Shue.

This transcript was to make no mention of Mary Jane Heaster, mother of the victim, who rose from her seat in hatless dishevelment as the defendant took the stand. Dressed in full mourning, her percale unfashionably loose, she might have been painted, stark, upon the glowing summer air – the frock in blackened bone, the face and hands primed in grey, her expression uncommonly frank.

Mr Shue wore a fresh linen suit and a starched white shirt, both of which he had begged from his jailer, Constable Shawver. And with his mild gaze resting on the jury, he made his plea:

‘Not guilty.’

August 23, 1896

Meadow Bluff

West Virginia

This is Letter No. 1 of 5

My dear Elisabeth,

Where to start? I’ve never done this before, and neither have you. It’s one of those things you can only risk once in a lifetime. And maybe there’s no right way. So here goes.

I’m your mother, Zona. The one who carried you for nine whole months before you arrived screaming into the Meadow Bluff dawn. Today is your first birthday. But if you’re reading this, already the years have passed and you are sixteen years old. My friend Lucy Frye is taking down my words, being better on her Remington than I will ever be with pen and ink. She’ll keep my letters in store for you, Elisabeth, because I might get too nervous to send them when you’re grown. That would be like me.

You’ve no doubt become a fine young woman of great accomplishment. A Virginian wearing the fashions of the twentieth century! Strange to say that if you open this letter in 1911, I won’t be too much younger than your grandma Mary Jane. Right now, I’m a score and four. And when I last saw you, you were smaller than I thought a human being could be – moments into your life, gumming the air like all creatures do when they’re fresh from the darkness. Do you still have the name I gave you when you were born, Elisabeth? Have you been well and happy, in the way that mothers dream of?

I owe you this letter now that you’re grown. Because there must be at least one thing you want to ask me. Why did I give you up? Well, if you’re ready for the answer, I will set it down.

The way that it happened, you and me were separated all of a sudden. We were over at the Harfords’ farm – Bessie and Armsted’s place – staying in gentle Ruth’s old room, Lord rest her soul. Four months I lay in bed, gazing out over Miller Mountain, the boys looking just as small and black as click beetles where they worked the faraway fields. I was hiding, Beth (if I may call you by that sweet name). From everyone. Not because I was ashamed of you – or even of me – but because I didn’t want to hear the bad things people might say. Ma and Bessie fussed, changing the linens every day, scrubbing the walls and floors with lye soap, until you arrived, early one morning. A new person, so exactly yourself. How you shrieked! And the more you cried, the more I gave thanks to the Lord.

Your first fit of bawling was only just settled when that slip of a woman from Richmond came to take you in your swaddles. Whip-thin, she breezed through the door just as Bessie was covering me with a clean sheet. I remember how she smelled: the August air, sweet and grassy, rising from the folds of her skirt. This woman was crisp as a paper swan, Beth, while I sagged like an old ragdoll.

Ann Power, the Irish midwife, was there, too, gathering her clattering wares into her holdall. I watched how her lips parted in her long face, the hard lines about her eyes growing soft, making a more polite arrangement of her features. ‘Mrs Wylie,’ she said, nodding to our guest like she’d known her all her life.

I hauled myself up in the bed, and hissed to Ann, ‘Is this she?’

For months, I’d been ready to hate whoever came for you, but I never expected them so soon. Ann stood back from the crib, and your new mother made for you with eager, but halting, steps. I don’t mind telling you, I was shocked to see this Mrs Wylie’s foot was dragging. And when she bent low to see you, I feared she’d fall into the crib. But then she swept you into the crook of her one strong arm. Beguiled by your little face, she didn’t see me ogling everything from her scarlet cheeks, to her right arm dangling skinny and weak, to her boot, which was turned outward on the same side, the strap of her leg brace showing around the ankle. And the thing is, she fitted my ideal of motherhood exactly.

I’ve never seen a woman so able to love at first sight, drinking you in like a cool glass of water on the hottest day. Her sparse brows lifted, like some burden had been relieved. I know the size of it, because I felt it visiting upon me instead, my arms tingling and burning with the weight of your absence. Even now, the air is heavy as iron in the space where you are not.

‘Missus,’ I said, cold with the panic of losing you. ‘Let me see my baby.’

That’s when Ma came bustling in, efficient as always. Your grandma Mary Jane never tires of moving, right down to her black hair that was breaking free of its pins, stronger than corn shocks.

‘You should be running along, Eugenia,’ she said. Our visitor was Ma’s junior by more than a decade, and she saw no boldness in grasping her withered arm and marching her to the door.

But that Richmond lady, she resisted! – setting her shoulder against the jamb like it was a magnet and she had metal bones. Lowering her narrow chin, she let those honest hazel eyes rest on mine. Eugenia Wylie knew your worth exactly, Beth – what she was taking and what I was losing. She was giving me one last chance to keep you.

With the thumb of her feeble arm, she tugged the linen back from your face. There were curls crusted on your temples, dark as molasses. You had a high bridge on your nose, just like your father’s, and your eyes were set wide apart. (I’ve room for a silver dollar between my brows, and now you’re grown, I wonder if you do too.) I have never seen anyone so gloriously surprised by the world, little Beth. You were a hodgepodge, and beautiful with it.

‘Will you give me the child, Miss Heaster?’

Her plain face held very still, as if one flicker might cost a life. Eugenia Wylie was afraid of nothing. She had the courage to do what was right, no matter what the price. That’s why I let her take you, Beth. I wanted you raised by someone whole in spirit. And in that moment, I believed myself to be less than I should have been.

‘Go,’ I said. I saw the manacles on Eugenia’s soul cleave open, and she slackened. ‘Keep her safe. Always,’ I prayed.

Did Eugenia ever tell you about that day? About me?

There’s a hole in my mind. A place called Missing You. And like a lens bending the light, it changes how I see things. I saw inside a bluegill’s eyeball once. I was feeding bones and fish heads to the barn cats when your grandpa Jacob came along with his penknife, and he sank the blade into the shining dome of a loosed eye. With one squeeze, out came this little ball, cold in my palm, the jelly hard and clear as glass. We held it up to the sunset and it drank in the light, blazing orange and peach. Then we nudged it across the writing in Pa’s notebook – he’s never without paper and a bright yellow pencil – and it made each letter look bigger. It was a piece of magic in among the fish guts, Beth. And you are the magic inside me. Nothing looks the same since you were born. Not even the past.

Before you, I did not know myself. That I take things too much to heart. Every punishment, every unkind word. I was barely as high as Ma’s hip that time she sent me down the well. The dairy had fallen from the bucket where it was cooling, a mess of clabbering cow’s milk and rotting butter souring the water. Every day for a week, I shinned down the rope to skim the bobbing, stinking fat. I worked the walls and soaked the smears from the black liquid until it was a polished mirror that I might slip through and never come back – until the water was good, and I hoped that I was too. A part of me stayed in that half-lit, halfway place. Until you showed me what innocence is, and how much can be forgiven.

So please do not be hasty in deciding who you are. If you hold strong opinions on your nature, look them over, back and front, to see if they were made by you, or wrought by another hand.

There will be more to say, but the paper’s melting in all this heat and Lucy’s fingers have gone black from changing the ribbon. Let me sign off with wonderful news, my darling. I have met a fine man from Droop Mountain. He loves me, just as I love him, and with God’s grace, he will soon ask me to marry him. His name is Edward Shue, but everyone calls him Trout, just like the fish, on account of how long he can hold his breath underwater. He makes an honest living at the forge in Livesay where, being proud of his person, he is the cleanest and most fastidious blacksmith that anyone has ever seen. (He taught me that word. It means that he’s neat and careful in everything he does.) But most of all, Trout is kind. Maybe one day you will visit us here in Meadow Bluff. Or perhaps you will invite me to the fine Wylie residence in Richmond.

I will send you a portrait so that you might find some feature whereby you’ll recognise me. Until then, you have the cardinal I’ve pressed inside these pages. It has no seeds left in its big pods because I set those golden specks floating down the New River – praying for them to make it through the mountains, and along the waters of the Jackson until they find you on the banks of the James. The few petals that are left make little velvet lanterns, as you can see. Trout says the Catholic cardinals in Rome wear hats and sashes in the same colour. Daring and strange as that sounds, I believe him. You will like Trout. He knows things that nobody else does.

Go outside, Beth. Find cardinals by the water. Towering and blazing like my love for you. Lucy will seal my words now, while I still have the nerve to leave them from my grasp.

I will remain,

Yours ever truly,

Zona Heaster

September 16, 1896

Her mother kept urging her to get rid of the Remington, but Lucy couldn’t imagine life without it sitting smart and modern on the dressing table.

Each silver letter was tiny and exquisite on the end of its own metal stalk, and there were few things more satisfying than firing them at the ink ribbon, punching words onto the page. She enjoyed the violence of the click; the permanence of the brand.

When she was buying the used typewriter from the Greenbrier Independent, the editor had doubted her stamina to wallop the stiff keys – questioned her ability to change the ribbon and align the arms so that the basket didn’t end up in a snare. But after only a few months of practice, here she was typing more than seventy words per minute with as many as four cooperative fingers. The tower of writing beside her elbow was a triumph of sorts. Yet the higher this column grew, the worse she felt, riddled as it was with her failed attempts at newspaper articles.

She winced at the titles poking out of the dereliction. ‘Have a Dirty Cut? Dial Franklin 448’. That was the one about the new antitoxin, written after little Prudie Thorne died of lockjaw. The Independent had turned its nose up, advising her to stick to women’s affairs, before publishing an identical article under the editor’s name. Dog-eared, near the top of the pile, she spied ‘Neglect Felt by Society and Community’, a report on the recent scandal at the State Fair when not one woman in the county had competed in the hosing or glove departments. If you were to believe the judges, it was a moral disaster. But the newspaper turned this down, too, telling her to come back with something more cheerful, about fashion, or the household – maybe society.

Dejected at the memory, she dropped onto the chair and grasped her tin of rouge, its equator seeping scarlet. She prised off the lid and leaned toward the mirror, daubing each cheek. It didn’t look right, as usual, though her mother insisted that she try. The crimson might enhance the attractive cushion of a cheek like Zona’s. On her own face, it highlighted her homeliness, and once she’d cycled as far as the Heasters’ farm, it would double up on her redness, too.

Fingers greasy and lurid, she tugged at the paper in the typewriter carriage until it came free. When it was smoothed on the table, she had the strong urge to stay home and finesse her morning’s writing. This hesitation to visit the Heasters was new. She had never felt it, nor any need to shore up her appearance, before meeting Trout Shue. The man had this subtle demeanour when he looked at her – eyes narrowed, always seeming to wish her different in some unspecified way. Whether she was reserved or outgoing, silly or serious, his little frowns and sighs told her that he was never happy. Meanwhile, he worshipped everything about Zona. Her best friend had been praying for Trout to propose marriage, while her own special wish was for the blacksmith to pack up and move on.

She wriggled into the neat jacket of her bicycle suit, regret hard and polished in her chest, because it was her own fault that they’d met. It shouldn’t have mattered that her new bicycle lamp was swinging loose; not in July, when she was in bed every night before sunset. Yet it was she who had insisted on dragging Zona down to the blacksmith to have a wedge fitted to the clamp. That was where they’d found a new man tending the bellows, in the place where old amiable Jim used to be. And she’d acquired a wedge all right. One named Trout Shue, who was still driving himself in tight between her and Zona.

She started down the stairs, cringing at the stupidity of it all, trying not to wake her spoiled parents and beautiful black-haired sisters. In the hallway, her leather tool belt hung by its strap from the coat rack, and she checked inside the stiff pocket for her small tin of oil, her adjustable wrench, her screwdriver and the little .32 calibre revolver that she’d taken to carrying since that rabid fox emerged furious from the grass over at Fort Spring. Alongside these provisions, she squeezed in a small gift for Zona, wrapped in taffeta.

Her bicycle, greased wheels gleaming, was stored under the lean-to behind her mother’s coop of ornamental fowl. The gold frame was shining after its recent wash, and the cork grips on the nickelled handlebars were smart and fresh. With her sleeve pulled over the heel of her hand, she wiped the saddle before hunkering beside the front wheel, a swipe of her thumb cleaning the glass face of her cyclometer. Its cream dial showed a series of small black digits, numbering the miles that she had travelled since midsummer – 0 3 1 7. She was going to drive that number up to 2 0 0 0, no matter how many bottles of Pond’s Extract she needed to soothe her peeling face. Just a few more months on her silent steed and she would finish her best article yet: ‘The Bicycle Woman in the Modern World’.

It was about the exhilaration of wheeling long-distance, and how she no longer felt obscure or uncertain when she was out on the road, in full occupation of her body. When she had told Zona about it, her friend’s eyes had glinted with more kindness than faith. Still, she was encouraging, not believing in being shy or contrite about anything since the birth of her astonishing child. But confessing her ambition to her ma and step-pa had been different. While the pair sat rigid on the tapestry sofa, she had imagined that the painted walls were throbbing along with her pounding cheeks, her face perhaps turning the same shade of brutal magenta.

I can live with it, Lucia, her mother had said, if you try descriptive writing. A bit of harmless showing off. These women journalists exist, but think how hard – and hardening – their lives must be. With all this bicycling, people will think you’re depraved. Or deformed. For your own sake, she had added, exasperation ripening to anger, do something to preserve your . . . allurement. A woman never looks better than when she’s on horseback.

On the downhill toward Zona’s house, she raised her feet up onto the coasters. The air whistled by, sweet with summer’s end; the scent of warm clay and wheat stubble and the last green cuttings of hay. The smell of windfall apples came in a sudden drift, and her soul took its first gentle shift into fall. Patches of crimson flashed amongst the oaks and hemlocks and birches and maples, heralding the march of scarlet and yellow and bronze that would soon flame across the hills.

God hadn’t drawn many straight lines in Greenbrier County. The boundary between earth and sky was almost always curved and high. When she trundled off the Midland Trail, onto the slip for Meadow Bluff, her lungs and legs were blazing with the pain of riding over scores of bending horizons.

With her arms aching from the rutted road jerking the handlebars, she stalled in front of the old Burns house and reached into the pannier for an apple. Clean, sharp juice rinsed her mouth as she collapsed onto the verge, gazing up at the little building. The sashes were open onto the bedroom where she, Lucy Clementine Burns Frye, had been born one New Year’s Day. The log walls were still exposed, the bark scrubbed and whitewashed. The glazing in the front door still had a red pane in the centre, and the same big black iron handle was screwed to the door, rust stains bleeding down the blue paint. Everything was much the same as it had been on that morning when she and her ma had moved out. The new inhabitants probably felt nothing of her father’s spirit inside the house. To her, it had seemed that the walls and the wainscot and the shingles had been saturated with him; enough that when she left on her twelfth birthday, she had grieved the floorboards, the ceilings, the limestone hearth.

Her stepfather’s white-colonnaded house had always been too grand, with its huge teeming pond and seven gleaming horses frisking about the paddock. It suited the character of her siblings very well. They were robust, vivacious children, while she, their half-sister, felt like a half-person in almost every respect.

Zona seemed to understand this without any explanation, meaning that she had never been jealous of Lucy. Not for living close to the painted shopfronts and restaurants of Lewisburg while she herself was left stranded way out in this hinterland. Not for suddenly having housemaids, or a leather-upholstered surrey. She didn’t even mind that Lucy had no labour to do, not in house or field, remaining fashionably plump from one month to the next.

If anything, it was Lucy who was envious; who was sometimes begrudging of Zona’s easy nature, her confidence, her natural inclination toward happiness. And now here she was, nursing resentment against her friend’s beau, dreaming of ways to come between them. With a groan of reluctance, she heaved herself to her feet. She would have to try harder to accept the blacksmith. After all, Trout and Zona seemed to set each other off, like sweet rhubarb and bitter orange. And nothing could be done about such affinity, no matter how bewildering.

She walked her bicycle up the big incline with lunging steps, jumping on when the road hit the level. After a mile of gouged and potholed road, the farm came into view. On the low ridge beyond the house, a spine of chestnut trees looked out over the acres beyond, their leaves already browning, a few of the Heasters’ glossy hogs snuffling in their shade.

The side doors of the barn were open, channelling the cleansing westerly breeze, the building so vibrant in its fresh coat of red oxide that Lucy thought the milk paint might still be wet. The wooden star on the south wall had been revived, too, in a coat of green. Zona had collected a jar of emerald-coloured powder from the cinnamon ferns in the spring, explaining that the hue was a symbol of growth and fruitfulness and all the brothers and sisters she wanted for Elisabeth. And here it was, just as she had promised Lucy, mixed with linseed oil, radiating her hopes out over Greenbrier County.

Coasting through the open gate to the yard, Lucy saw Trout on the steps of the porch. He had a certain sense of occasion, dressed in a brown sack suit and a navy sateen tie with white stripes. He was ten years older than her and Zona, but something about him seemed immature; restless, as if there was always some other place he’d rather be.

‘Lucy!’ Shading her eyes, Zona came down the porch steps, clutching the plaid of her flannel skirts.

Stopping dead on the cracked earth, Lucy wiped her wet brow with her wrist. ‘Happy birthday,’ she said, as Zona ran and took her in a sudden embrace.

‘All Trout’s idea.’ Zona kept her voice low. ‘Let’s call it a special occasion, but Ma’s not really sure what day I was born.’ She gripped Lucy’s wrists, her broad grin almost taking her breath away. Strong and slender and tanned, with good colour in her cheeks. Lucy had not seen her this bright or happy since Elisabeth had been taken.

‘What’s with the ink?’ she said, masking her relief by frowning at the big black marks on Zona’s fingers.

‘I’m helping Pa draw up one of his machines,’ she said. ‘The steam wagon, this time. He reckons a few good drawings will help him get a patent. You-Know-Who will be here in a few weeks to check over the paperwork.’

‘Emory Snow?’ Lucy grimaced. If ever a man knew how to abuse both hospitality and the people who offered it, it was Jacob Heaster’s rich and thin-skinned inventor friend from Wilmington. A visit would be about as welcome as a blowfly in the larder.

‘But speaking of machines.’ Zona seized the handlebars, waiting for Lucy to dismount. ‘I worry what this thing is doing to your insides.’

‘I don’t see why it should hurt my insides,’ Lucy said, stretching her cramped legs, ‘when it does nothing to a man’s outsides. Lula Burr’s given birth three times since Thomas got his bicycle, and his tyres aren’t even pneumatic.’

Zona gave one of her big barking laughs, and wheel. . .