Pale as the Dead

by Fiona Mountain

  They lifted her onto a stretcher. An oxygen mask was placed over her face, attached round her head with elastic bands.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’

  The woman answered, with a brisk smile of sympathy that was genuine for all it was obviously practised. ‘Hard to say at this stage, I’m afraid.’

  The stretcher was carried swiftly down the steep stairs. The village was still deserted. If any of the invisible inhabitants had heard the ambulance siren none appeared to have paid it any attention. The blue lights were still revolving silently. A mortuary colour. The woman paramedic climbed into the back, Natasha followed, and the door swung after her.

  The sirens were turned on again once they’d left Kelmscott and were speeding back towards Burford and the Farringdon Road.

  ‘Whatever was she doing there?’ the woman paramedic asked Natasha.

  That was one question she could answer. Bethany had come here, to her grandmother’s house, for some space; a little peace and quiet to think. About Adam and what she was going to do with the rest of her life, however long that might be.

  Except Jake Romilly hadn’t allowed her that.

  Forty-Eight

  IN ACCIDENT AND Emergency, one of the nurses behind the reception desk took down again the little information Natasha could offer.

  She was shown to where Bethany had been laid on a bed and wheeled into the corner of a long ward, the curtains pulled around her. A heart monitor had been wired up, a web of coloured cables, the oxygen mask still over her face, the tank beside the bed. A young, white-coated doctor was inserting a drip into her arm, gripping her thin wrist lightly between his fingers and thumb. Her hand dropped lifelessly and almost fell back onto the bed as the doctor released it to scribble on a chart.

  ‘Do you know what’s wrong with her?’ Natasha asked.

  ‘Pneumonia. Could be other complications.’

  He gave Natasha a perfunctory smile as he left.

  She found a staff nurse, told her she had to go out for a while but would be back soon.

  It was the start of visiting hours and a taxi was dropping someone outside the main entrance. Natasha asked it to take her to Exeter College, to wait and bring her back.

  She sprinted through the quadrant, up the stairs to the Morris Room. She could hear the hum of conversations from meters away. The gallery looked entirely different to how it was when Adam had given her an exclusive sneak preview. The publicity had obviously worked a treat. You could hardly see the photographs for the throngs of people who fell into two camps. Expensive coats and coiffured heads with champagne flutes, ponytails in leather and denim jackets drinking bottled lager with limes inserted in the neck. She asked a couple of people if they’d seen Adam Mason. They all had but couldn’t see him now.

  Then she noticed Jake Romilly at the back of the room talking to one of the denim jacket brigade, who was armed with a notebook. A reviewer. What a sensation it would be, if they knew the truth. Lizzie Siddal’s granddaughter, with a few greats thrown in, posing in a replication of the picture for which Lizzie would always be best remembered.

  Christine was draped on Jake’s arm. So the relationship wasn’t exactly over. Christine was staring at him adoringly, as if all her fears had been expertly diffused. At that moment Jake turned, scanned the room as if the interview was becoming tedious and he was looking for someone more interesting or important. He stared hard at Natasha. Christine saw her too and her face went from red to grey. Natasha knew then. Once Christine had started talking about what happened that night she hadn’t been able to resist confronting Jake. Had confessed to him, no doubt, that she’d already told Natasha what she’d overheard.

  Someone tapped Natasha’s shoulder. ‘Mr Mason’s over there.’

  He was behind the door, beneath Ophelia, talking to Angie.

  His look was one of surprised pleasure. He came towards her, then stopped when he saw her face.

  ‘I’ve found her. She’s in hospital. I think she’s going to be OK. There’s a taxi waiting outside if you want to come.’

  He gave a brusque nod, went back to Angie, said something quickly to her.

  Natasha glanced at Jake Romilly feeding the reporter a last line.

  Jake would see Adam leave with her. Would grasp the urgency. Should she tell Adam to tell Angie not to say anything to Jake about where they’d gone? What did it matter now?

  Natasha took Adam to where Bethany still lay behind green and white flowered drapes.

  As she turned to leave them alone, Natasha saw him lean over the bed and place a kiss first on Bethany’s lips and then on each of her eyelids. Just like the handsome prince. Except the kisses didn’t wake her.

  Natasha went to wait on a blue, moulded plastic chair in the visitors lounge, drank a cup of sour, scalding machine coffee. It was noisy, the usual mishaps of a Friday evening in the city, bleeding noses and cuts, a young man reeking of alcohol with gashes on his forehead, and a mother cradling a toddler with a finger swathed in cotton wool.

  How could anyone work in a hospital? Surrounded each and every day by so much tragedy and suffering and pain? They gave her the creeps more than any graveyard.

  She looked up, saw Adam, stood and put her arms round him. After Marcus, his body felt almost delicate. ‘I need a cigarette,’ he said.

  Outside, he leant against the wall by the automated doors, inhaled deeply.

  ‘Thank God you found her.’

  * * *

  Andrew Wilding arrived half an hour later, and after he’d spoken to the consultant he came to find them in the waiting area, dragging over another chair. It was a cliché to say someone had aged overnight, but Andrew Wilding’s face seemed more lined, and he looked thinner. Even his hair appeared greyer than Natasha remembered it being a few days ago. ‘They say she’s got pneumonia.’ He shook his head. ‘She was dehydrated, is still running a fever. She was never very strong and she’s been in that freezing house with no proper food and drink. Doctor said she might have been drifting in and out of consciousness for days.’ He turned to Natasha. ‘Heaven only knows what she thought she was doing there. Did she want to kill herself?’ He said it incredulously, as if the idea was impossible.

  Natasha thought that just because Bethany hadn’t thrown herself from a bridge, or taken an overdose, or slit her wrists, it didn’t mean she’d not intended to die. There were two ways to end your life, actively and through negligence.

  Jake Romilly had done the greatest damage clearly.

  ‘If you’d not found her…’ Andrew Wilding let his words trail off.

  A few hours later, and Bethany would have died on the opening night of Adam’s show.

  Andrew went back to Bethany’s bedside and Adam leaned forwards, hung his head in his hands.

  Natasha was suddenly afraid for him. She stood up.

  He caught her fingers. ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘I was going to fetch us another coffee.’

  She slipped outside, called James, explained where she was and asked him to give Boris a walk. When she went back up, the ward was strangely peaceful, the lighting had been muted, the night shift preparing to start.

  Adam had moved to the otherwise empty patients’ lounge and was slouched in one of the low chairs, his feet crossed at the ankles on top of a coffee table. The television was on quietly, showing a western film. The picture was almost invisible through the electric snow but Natasha could tell he wasn’t really watching. His elbow was resting on one of the chair arms, his head in his hand. She thought he might be asleep but his eyes were open, unfocused.

  She touched his arm, sat down next to him.

  He heaved himself up in the chair.

  She handed over the coffee and a cheese roll.

  ‘Thanks.’ He took a bite. ‘This place makes you feel ill even if you’re not.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I found something out the other day,’ she said quietly. ‘Lizzie Siddal’s baby didn’t die. Rossetti’s doctor, Dr Marsh
all, took her and called her Eleanor.’ She looked at him. ‘Bethany is Eleanor’s descendant.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘There’s a letter from Marshall’s daughter, Jeanette, the diarist, explaining it all.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ He stared up at the ceiling. Then shook his head in amazement. ‘Actually,’ he said. ‘You know. I can believe it.’

  She was about to tell him about Lizzie’s note, but stopped herself. She felt somehow that Bethany should be the first to know about that.

  ‘Will you tell her?’ Adam said.

  ‘If you want me to. It doesn’t seem the right place somehow.’

  ‘Surrounded by doctors? Andrew says she’ll be quite at home, interested in all the things they’re doing to her. I’m sure if it were me, ignorance would be bliss.’

  ‘Her Marshall heritage coming through,’ Natasha said. ‘Even if it’s not in her blood.’

  ‘The nurture not the nature bit.’

  ‘There’s a genetic screening test that can be done, to see if she’s at risk’

  ‘You were right all along,’ Adam said quietly. ‘About the past being important. We carry it with us, don’t we? In every cell of our body. All that stuff you told Bethany. About, what was it? Ancestor Syndrome. I thought it was pretty cranky but it’s true. You can inherit fate, not necessarily in a supernatural kind of way, but scientific, through your genes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Adam uncrossed his feet, took them off the coffee table. ‘I know what it is about her that’s different now. She doesn’t take anything for granted. All her life she’s been living each day as if it might be her last.’

  ‘Maybe not all her life. Someone once said to me, that you only really fear death when you find someone you can’t bear to leave behind.’

  Adam looked at her. ‘I’m scared.’

  She understood what he meant. While Bethany was lost it had been easier in a sense. Rossetti had yearned for a lover to idolise in heaven. Adam wanted to keep Bethany as a similar ideal, not allow the chance for their relationship to alter or go stale.

  But that was no reason to give up.

  She went to look in on Bethany, to say goodbye to Andrew. He had his daughter’s limp hand between both of his. When Natasha asked how she was doing he said, ‘She’s comfortable.’

  She looked anything but, lying on her back, propped up slightly in the unnatural posture of the ill. But the mask had been removed from her face and a delicate rosy hue had turned to her cheeks. Now that she was warm, with concentrated oxygen in her lungs and pumped full of antibiotics, her breathing was more regular. The starched white sheets, the hard bed, were a stark reminder of the picture Adam had taken of her as the Sleeping Beauty, as if the picture had been a premonition. Who actually slept in that position?

  Andrew smiled at Natasha. ‘It takes me back to when she was a little girl, and I used to look in on her at night. She used to lie just like this then, never on her side like everyone else. She hated to hear the sound of her heart beating.’

  In case it stopped.

  Natasha rested her hand for a moment on his shoulder. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m fine.’ He turned to her. ‘It would be nice if you came back when she wakes. I’m sure she’d love to see you again. The doctor said she should respond to the drugs within twenty-four hours or so.’

  Bethany would be back in the land of the living, then. But Natasha didn’t feel ready to meet her there just yet.

  Forty-Nine

  BY THE TIME Natasha had found a minicab to take her back to Kelmscott to fetch the car, the sky was the colour of pearl, a cold sun illuminating the drifting mist. The temporary lakes that were the submerged fields of the Thames flood plain were strange and beautiful, with tussocks of grass and trees growing out of the bright sheets of water.

  Kelmscott was still deserted except for a chestnut horse and rider in the distance, where the fields met the sky.

  The signs to Kelmscott Manor led through the heart of the village and out the other side on a track towards the Thames. Natasha paid off the minicab, got out and walked. As she rounded a bend she could see, over the high hedge and wall, the tapering north towers and gables of the Elizabethan house, the lichen-covered stones of the roof. She had looked round it once, had loved the ebonised furniture, the tapestries and caskets that dotted the wide windowsills. An ‘out of the world’ kind of house, as William Morris had described it before he agreed to lease it, sharing the rent with Rossetti as they also shared the same woman. Like all the best chivalric tales, they were rivals for mastery of the manor and for one woman’s love.

  She carried on along the potholed track, following the sign for the Thames path. It was slippery with mud. Cold water seeped through the leather of her boots. There was a stile and gate for bicycles, beyond which a footpath over grassland led down to the narrow band of river.

  She vaulted over the stile and headed towards the bank, her ankles twisting on the uneven ground, squishing in the part-frozen mud.

  The Thames. Flowing under the ancient crossing point of the Folly Bridge at Oxford, where Adam first asked her to help find Bethany. The river a shadow then of the mighty waterway it became at Blackfriars, where Lizzie died and where Bethany said she had lived. And now here, higher up, closer to the source.

  A silver thread, linking everything together. Or a dark cord. Into which the Celts cast the bodies of the dead, and human sacrifices, littering the bed with skulls.

  Elaine just said she was going for a swim in the river. I’ve never really cared for the place.

  It was here that Bethany had seen her mother die. You’d think she’d never want to return. Or maybe she felt close to her mother here.

  * * *

  Natasha remembered she’d left the back window of the house open, the front door unlocked.

  In the light, the house looked homely and friendly, though the stone roof was sagging badly. Natasha imagined the buyers the house might attract. Young couples who couldn’t afford a place that was all done up, who were prepared to spend weekends and evenings doing the renovations and decorating themselves, turning it into a home where they could bring up a family. It was a beautiful house, the kind she and Marcus had talked of moving to.

  Some developer would probably snap it up and ruin it completely.

  She opened the front door, bolted it from the inside, turned the heavy key. Then she went back to the kitchen, heaved herself out through the window, the way she’d first come in, and pulled the casement shut behind her.

  When she went round to the front again, Jake Romilly was leaning against the Alpine. She looked for the Celica, couldn’t see it anywhere. He must have taken the trouble to hide it. She carried on walking up the garden path, one step at a time, shut the gate carefully behind her. She took her keys out of her pocket and went towards the car, towards him, trying to look as unfazed as possible.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ He thrust his hands in the pockets of his great coat. ‘How is she?’

  She remembered the pattern of bruises on Bethany’s skin, levelled her eyes at him. ‘How do you think?’

  ‘I rang the hospital. They say she’ll recover.’

  ‘Your concern is very touching. How did you know I’d be here?’

  ‘Hospital put me on to her father. I asked to talk to you and he most obligingly told me you’d gone to collect your car.’ She could see the bulge of his fists in his pockets, clenched, or he was concealing a weapon. ‘How about we go for a walk?’ he said.

  She glanced round at the empty dawn-lit lanes, houses with curtains still drawn, icy puddles. Adam and Andrew Wilding knew she was here, but beyond that …

  ‘For some reason, I’m not really in the mood.’

  He sniggered. ‘In that case, I’ll be seeing you around.’ He spun back. ‘You don’t happen to know what time visiting hours are at the Radcliffe, do you? I must drop in and pay my respects.’

  He was never goi
ng to leave Bethany alone.

  ‘Wait.’ The determination in her voice halted him. Let him go. No. Put an end to it right now. Her reckless streak won through. ‘I wanted to ask you. How do you plan to shut up your friend, Alex?’

  He looked round, snorted. ‘He’s not exactly lived his life on the right side of the law. Believe me, I know enough about him to be sure he’d never breathe a word.’

  ‘With friends like that…’

  Slowly, he retraced his steps. ‘I hardly touched her.’

  His face was just a few inches from Natasha’s but she stood her ground. ‘Hardly?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Except harass her for weeks. Then follow her here. Scare the hell out of her. Forced yourself on her until she passed out?’

  ‘If she goes to the police they’ll not listen to one word.’ His voice had a rasp in it. Gloating. ‘We were lovers for three months. I’ll tell them she told me to meet her here. It’ll all come out, The Ravens, everything. Alex and Christine will vouch that Bethany was more than happy to be involved. On every level. When they see the photographs she let me take of her in private, it’ll discredit everything she says.’

  She stared him out. Finish it now and be damned. ‘Photographs can be useful in other ways. Being around you guys gave me an idea or two. The bruises on Bethany’s chest for instance. I thought they were worth preserving for posterity.’ He backed off a little. Removed one hand from his pocket, held it down at his side, concealing something. Sunlight on metal. A set of keys. On the same ring, a Swiss army knife. Idly, he flicked the sharp little blade out, retracted it again. Out. In. Don’t look. Keep talking, Natasha told herself. ‘A secret society is one thing. But breaking and entering is quite another, wouldn’t you agree? Going through my papers. Stalking, of course. Crimes where you know exactly where you are. And they know where you were, that’s for sure. They’ve got fingerprints, from the desk. At first I thought you were on my tail because you still wanted her, wanted me to lead you to her. But that’s not quite the whole story is it? You were shit scared when she passed out and you ran for it. Because you thought whatever it was you weren’t doing to her might have been enough to finish her off.’ She wasn’t going to tell him that Bethany was prone to blackouts. Let him live with that. ‘She’d told you as much about her family as she’d told Adam, zero, which put you in a bit of a fix, didn’t it? No way to find out if she was missing, all right, or wanting your hide. It took me a moment, I must admit, to work out why you didn’t just come back here. But you’d seen the For Sale sign, presumed there’d be estate agents and prospective buyers wandering in and out, nosing through the windows. You’ve obviously never had a house to sell, or you’d know, it all goes frustratingly quiet around Christmas. Or was it just that you thought Bethany’s family would be arriving for the holidays? Is that what she told you? Just as well you were offered an alternative, Adam asking me to find her. You had to make damned sure you got to her parents first, or as soon as possible, to see what you were guilty of. When you found out that piece was coming out in the paper saying she was missing, you got desperate, broke in to my house to see what you could find. How am I doing?’