The Manor

by Keane Jessie

  ‘Tea?’ asked Jack.

  Belle nodded and went to the table and sat down. Not too long ago, she’d been laid out on here with her life’s blood streaming out of her. But what now?

  ‘You can stay as long as you like,’ said Jack. ‘If there’s any danger they’re still after you, it’s probably safest. You’re not really fully recuperated yet, are you. Better to rest up. Get back to full strength.’

  Belle felt relieved at his words. Truthfully, she was scared right now of the outside world. She’d been battered and bruised and abused by it. Here at least, with this unsmiling stranger, she did feel safe.

  He was bringing the tea and toast over to the table, setting it all out with butter and jam and milk.

  ‘Help yourself,’ he said, pushing a plate toward her.

  Belle buttered the toast, spread on jam. Then slowly, gingerly, she started to eat her first solid meal.

  He was watching her face. Again, instinctively, she turned her damaged cheek away from him.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t turn your face away. I’ve seen it all before, anyway.’

  Belle nodded, embarrassed. He was right. What was the point of hiding her ugliness from him? He’d stitched her up. He’d seen it all, at its very worst.

  ‘I think I should see it too,’ said Belle.

  ‘You ready for that?’

  ‘I have to see it, don’t I. Sometime.’

  ‘Maybe after we take out the stitches?’

  ‘Will it look better then?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  Belle threw down her toast.

  Jack looked at her intently. ‘Look – you’re still alive. You want me to fetch a mirror now? Right now?’

  Belle stared at him mulishly. She wanted to say yes, if only to spite him for being so fucking casual about this. But she was afraid.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘OK. So eat your damned breakfast and stop feeling sorry for yourself.’

  ‘You’re a prickly bastard,’ Belle observed.

  ‘It’s been said.’

  ‘Your parents ran this farm?’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘You going to tell me about them?’ challenged Belle.

  ‘Nothing much to tell.’

  ‘I don’t hear any livestock about the place,’ said Belle, gingerly eating the toast again, realizing that she was actually hungry for the first time in too long. ‘No cows, no sheep.’

  ‘My dad’s prize dairy herd were sold off. The sheep too. All that’s left are a few chickens, my mum’s mare and a Shetland pony to keep her company.’

  ‘Ah! She rode then.’

  ‘She did. When she was a bit younger. More toast?’

  ‘Yeah. Please.’ She eyed him. ‘And you. What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Have you got a job? What do you do?’

  But his eyes were hard again, unreadable. ‘Nothing to tell,’ he said.

  Then there was a knock on the door.

  119

  ‘Who the hell’s that?’ shot out of Belle’s mouth. Her heart literally leapt. It was too late for the postman, and hardly anybody else ever called here.

  Jack was already on his feet. He nodded to the bedroom and Belle scrambled up and quickly went over to it, slipping inside but leaving the door ajar so she could hear what was going on.

  She heard Jack cross to the door, open it. And then all the hair on her arms and neck went upright in a spasm of fear when she heard Nipper’s voice say: ‘Hi, I don’t know if you can help but I’m looking all round this area for my sister. She’s run away from home and we think she was heading down here. The folks used to holiday here and she always liked it so we think she might have come back. Good-looking girl. Blonde. Brown eyes. Mum’s going off her nut, she’s so worried. You seen her?’

  ‘What’s her name?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Belle. I’m her brother, Neil.’

  ‘Nah. Sorry, mate. Haven’t seen her.’

  ‘You’re sure? She always liked this area, so we thought . . .’

  ‘No. I haven’t seen her. Sorry.’

  Belle heard Jack shut the door.

  Presently he came to where she was hiding and pushed the door open. ‘You OK?’ he said.

  Belle was sweating, literally gasping for air.

  ‘You can relax,’ said Jack. ‘He’s gone. I take it you haven’t got a brother called Neil?’

  Belle shook her head and tried to start breathing again. ‘That was Nipper. One of Harlan’s cronies. I recognized his voice.’

  ‘He’s gone,’ Jack repeated.

  ‘What if he comes back?’

  ‘Then we deal with it.’

  120

  They’d been checking the farms and smallholdings and all the hospitals around the area. They checked the lanes again, went miles out of their way and still she was nowhere to be found and frankly Ludo was now getting shit-scared. Harlan wasn’t the type to tolerate failure, and he knew his threat of a trip to the caiman pool hadn’t been an idle one. Ludo understood Harlan’s concerns, he understood the wisdom of the scorched-earth policy, a total wipe-out of the old guard and their kin. You had to leave nothing. No single family member. Well, the others were gone. There was only Belle now.

  ‘We got to find that bitch,’ he told Nipper.

  ‘Yeah, where?’ Nipper demanded.

  They were sitting in Ludo’s flash motor staring morosely at the steady rain blurring the scenery beyond the windscreen. Ludo glanced in irritation at his colleague, who was lounging back, his feet up on the dash.

  ‘Feet off the dashboard,’ said Ludo, swiping at Nipper’s expensive footwear. He sniffed. ‘And what the fuck is that odour, man? You step in something?’

  Nipper sat up. ‘I fucking hate the country. Damned sure I’ve stepped in something, I’ve been traipsing around farmers’ fields and yards – you seen those places? They got nothin’ but mud and cow shit, and Christ knows what else. There ain’t nowhere clean around a farmyard, I’m tellin’ you.’

  Ludo was incensed. ‘Then you put the damned things up on my dashboard? I just had this beauty valeted, you do not do that.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Nipper heaved a sigh. ‘So what now?’ Ludo with his flashy ways and tight-arsed clean habits sometimes seriously pissed him off.

  ‘What now is we go on lookin’. We spread the net further, we knock on more doors, we go on. Because I’m not goin’ back to Harlan Stone and tellin’ him we can’t finish this, OK?’

  Nipper looked surly but what could he do but agree? He didn’t want to face Harlan and tell him it was a no-go, either. ‘Yeah. OK.’

  Ludo started the engine.

  121

  The day came at last, as Belle knew it must.

  ‘Right, let’s get those stitches out, yeah?’ said Jack after they’d had breakfast one morning.

  Belle stared at him. ‘What, so soon? Can’t we wait a few more days?’

  ‘For what? It’s all healed up now, it’s been weeks, it’s best they come out.’

  Sometimes, if she tried hard enough, Belle found that she could almost forget that she was scarred. While Jack went out most days about the farm doing jobs, she stayed in the house making herself useful. It was the least she could do. Mum had never liked too much intervention from anyone in her kitchen, but she’d shown Belle the basics so she could knock up a passable stew or a curry or even a risotto if she had to.

  She did the washing, Hoovered the floors, wet-dusted the mantelpiece and cleaned out the fire. All things she’d never once done in her life. Above all, she tried not to think. If when she was preparing a meal she happened to glimpse her distorted reflection in a pan’s surface, she was quick to look away. Mostly, she was left alone, and she was glad of that. Most days, late in the afternoon, Jack went outside with a towel over his shoulder and came back about an hour later. He didn’t say where he went and she didn’t ask, but his lack of com
munication did puzzle her and it did make her question her own relaxed attitude around him.

  He could be anyone. A rapist. A killer. He could, in fact, be lulling her into a false sense of security, playing the nice guy, getting ready to pounce. But strangely enough, she trusted him, even though she had no reason to. Then she thought of her ruined face and thought: no. She was ugly. Somehow she kept forgetting that. No man would want her now.

  She was hiding. Hiding from the world, hiding from her injuries, from herself. So far, she’d done a damned good job of it, too. But now Jack wanted to take out her stitches, and she had promised herself that, when he did that, she would be brave enough to look herself in the face once again, to accept that this was how it was going to be from here on in.

  ‘Come on. I’ll be careful. Let’s get it done,’ said Jack.

  She couldn’t keep avoiding it. She was terrified, but she had to do it. He wasn’t going to let her put it off any longer.

  ‘All right,’ she said, and sat down at the kitchen table, Trix at her feet. Jack fetched antiseptic and scissors and got to work.

  It didn’t hurt much, really. He snipped and tugged . . .

  ‘Ow!’

  She felt a fresh rivulet of warm blood snake down to her jaw.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, dabbing at it, and then he went on until all the stitches were out. Then he bathed her scars in watered-down Dettol, patted her face dry. She watched him. He had big hands, calloused and lightly furred with dark hair, but he worked delicately and carefully.

  Soon, it was done.

  Her face throbbed, but it was OK.

  ‘Not too bad?’ he asked, putting the first aid box aside and sitting down, his eyes on hers.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, swallowing hard, full of fear. ‘Jack?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘A mirror,’ said Belle. ‘Please.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Belle shrugged casually. She didn’t feel casual. She felt terrified.

  ‘Yeah. I’m sure.’

  He went into the pantry and brought out a hand mirror. It was silver – obviously the one that was missing from the set on the dressing table in Belle’s room. Then he sat back down at the kitchen table and placed it in front of her, face down, on the surface. ‘Here,’ he said.

  Belle looked at it. The filigree work on it was very fine. Very pretty. She hadn’t even touched it yet and already she hated the thing.

  ‘If you don’t want to do it yet, that’s fine,’ said Jack.

  ‘No, I . . .’ Belle gulped. ‘This was your mum’s, was it?’ Belle found she was babbling with nerves. ‘It’s lovely. She had taste.’

  ‘No she didn’t,’ he said.

  End of conversation.

  She stretched out a hand and picked up the mirror. Very slowly, she turned the mirror toward her – and then she looked.

  There was a demon staring back at her. The left side of her face was puckered and purple and weeping fresh blood. To the right she was Belle – the same, unchanged. To the left . . . oh Jesus. The caiman had ripped her cheek right open in a V-shaped flap and the stitching had roughly repaired the damage. But she was altered forever. If she smiled, she would frighten children. Shit, she frightened herself.

  ‘You OK?’ asked Jack.

  Trix licked Belle’s hand and whined.

  Shaking, unable to speak, Belle slammed the mirror onto the table, face down, and ran back to her room, closing the door behind her.

  122

  Milly hadn’t intended to go back to the club, but after her first sweet taste of crack, she thought, why not? She was jittery, wanting more. Her low mood had returned all too quickly. She wanted that high free feeling again. Reality stank. Reality was her parents dead and realizing that hooking up with Nipper had always been a bad idea. It was Charlie’s love she’d craved, she knew that now, but he’d been obsessed with the idea of a son, not a daughter, so she’d substituted sex for affection. Fallen for a crock of shit that Nipper had been only too happy to feed her. It was all so damned sad. And Belle was missing, she’d taken off somewhere, God knew where, without so much as a word. Milly had been down to the gatehouse again but there was nobody about, not even Jill. The place looked deserted and the front door was hanging off its hinges, which was weird, but she felt too wired to even think about what that might mean.

  So here she was, alone as usual, back again in the club drinking voddy and Coke. She was looking around for the cool black-haired girl again. And there was Marsha, shimmying around on the dance floor with a bloke in a Stetson hat and a fringed tan suede jacket.

  When she went to the loo, Milly followed.

  There were other women in there, a crush of bodies, and Milly had to wait quite a long time, fiddling with her hair, reapplying lipstick, until Marsha came out of one of the cubicles and stood beside her and started adjusting her own hairdo in the mirror.

  Milly swallowed hard. Suddenly she was nervous.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘All right?’ said Marsha.

  ‘Got any stuff?’ asked Milly.

  The girl started to smile. ‘You liked it then?’

  Milly nodded. Marsha rummaged in her handbag and pulled out a tiny packet. Three pills in there this time. ‘Twenty,’ she said.

  It had been a tenner last time. But Milly didn’t argue. And she didn’t want the pills, they’d made her feel sick, she wanted the crack pipe, wanted that feeling back again, of being powerful and happy instead of the no-hoper she was. She was in the act of tipping the pills out into her palm when Marsha caught her arm.

  ‘Too many people about this time, you twat,’ she hissed, her eyes fierce.

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Milly, blushing.

  The girl turned away, pushed through the bodies to the door. Milly followed. She headed for the exit, her stash in her bag. She’d go home and take the pills. They would have to do, for now. She hurried out of the club and was in the act of hailing a taxi when her arm was grabbed.

  ‘Hi,’ said the man who’d grabbed it.

  She turned, disinterested, impatient. She just wanted to get home and get high. The bloke was big, with a squashed nose and an immaculate suit. It was Sammy.

  Milly twitched her arm free.

  ‘You want to show me what’s in your bag?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ She couldn’t believe it. She was Charlie Stone’s daughter, and this bastard was interrogating her?

  ‘You heard. You’re in a rush to leave, the night’s young. So, what’s in the bag?’

  ‘Mind your own bloody business,’ said Milly.

  ‘Miss Stone, your welfare is my business,’ he said, and grabbed the bag.

  Milly pulled it away from him.

  Sammy grabbed it back. The bag shot open and its contents spilled out onto the pavement. In the light of the streetlamps and the club neons, there it was among the other detritus: the packet with the pills inside.

  ‘Shit!’ said Milly, and started gathering up her belongings. Sammy grabbed the packet.

  ‘I’ll keep this,’ he said.

  ‘Give it to me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I said, give it to me,’ she hissed, teeth clenched with fury.

  ‘You don’t want to start on this junk,’ said Sammy. ‘Didn’t last time teach you anything? Who sold it to you? That tart with the black hair? Was it her?’

  ‘What if it was?’ The pills were nothing, anyway. Just a sweetener. The crack was the stuff, the real stuff.

  ‘Christ alive, what are you playing at? You can’t do this.’

  Milly drew herself up to her full height. ‘I told you. It’s none of your business.’ Having said that, she stormed over the pavement and hailed a cab. She got into it, red-faced, humiliated, deprived of the only pleasure that she could have hoped for, and went home.

  123

  Every day, Jack would go out working around the yard, making small repairs and feeding the livestock. And every day, late in the afternoon, he would go out with a t
owel on his shoulder and come back an hour later. As summer was fading and the grass was getting thin, twice a day he fed fresh hay to the horses.

  ‘Come out and see them,’ he said to Belle. ‘You won’t see anybody around here for miles. And I’ll be with you.’

  ‘No,’ she said, nervous, remembering Nipper at the door. ‘That’s OK.’

  For days after the big reveal of her ruined face, she’d mostly kept to her room, hardly venturing out at all. Her leg was fine, the bandages off, but her face! Thoughts crawled through her head, the main one being that every time Jack had sat there talking to her, eating across the table from her, he had been forced to look at her ugliness. He’d never reacted in any way to it, which to her was astonishing. Used to turning heads, used to having men adore her, she could barely take it in. She was so changed. She was ugly, and that was it from here on in. She would have to get used to it, somehow.

  When she finally came out into the kitchen again, started cooking meals again, petting the dog, mumbling a few words to Jack, she could see he was relieved.

  ‘Come out later this afternoon and see the horses when I bed them down,’ he said when she was washing up. ‘Nobody’s about.’

  No one to see how disfigured she was. Was that what he meant?

  ‘All right,’ she said, because she was bored with indoors, going stir crazy.

  In the afternoon he went out again, towel on shoulder, and came back an hour later.

  ‘Where do you go?’ Belle asked, curiosity getting the better of her.

  ‘Nowhere,’ he said.

  ‘With a towel on your shoulder. Nowhere. Right. Did your mum have a pool here somewhere?’

  Belle certainly hadn’t seen one from any of the windows. She hadn’t seen one when she’d been out in the yard, hanging out washing. Christ, she was so domestic all of a sudden! It startled her. She’d never lifted a well-manicured finger around the gatehouse, never had to and never wanted to. Now her nails were snagged, her skin roughened by work. Before, she’d always been made up to the nines, but now she had no make-up and anyway, what was the point? Her face was ruined. Now, what the fuck was she? Some sort of hausfrau, cowering away from a world that had hurt her too much. She thought again of Mum, of Dad. Her heart sank and pain gnawed at her. Harlan had taken over Charlie’s evil empire and they were both probably dead. She herself was only breathing by luck alone.