by Lyndsay Faye
That is, until work upon the cellar was completed a fortnight after Sahjara’s weapons demonstration.
• • •
The pinging of distant hammers and circular progression of workmen hauling rubble out the back exit had been a torment, and I do not mean in the sense of peace disrupted; I yearned to know what was below; and when one day I came downstairs for breakfast to discover profound silence save the ticking of the standing clock, I quickly inferred that the men had, at last, finished.
“Congratulations.” I took the tea Mr. Singh offered me, containing a splash of milk and one lump of sugar, exactly as I liked it.
“Might I ask upon what account, Miss Stone?”
“The completed renovations downstairs.”
Mr. Thornfield stirred his coffee, transfixed by the newspaper; Mr. Singh nodded graciously, whilst an uncaring Sahjara yawned over her bowl of spiced porridge.
“The immediate dangers of an unsafe substructure have been seen to, yes,” Mr. Singh reported, “but it remains best to consider the place entirely unsafe, ladies. That is, supposing you value your lungs, for the place is yet a haven for mould and damp.”
Sahjara’s nose wrinkled; Mr. Thornfield made a remark about the weather.
Unsafe, my shapely white arse, I thought.
That night, I heard a tread in the corridor outside my bedroom which was neither Mr. Singh’s stately glide nor Sahjara’s heedless prance. It was Mr. Thornfield’s vigorous stride, at four o’clock in the morning.
A frontal attack seemed best, as the cellar was now kept locked during the day—and should I catch Mr. Thornfield at whatever nocturnal activity he had been indulging in, I could claim to have been frightened of intruders sent by the odious Mr. Sack. At any rate, I did not fear my nominal master’s wrath, for he now showed me every courtesy, including the caustic teasing I had come to relish. Two days I waited; then a long crate was delivered to Highgate House and quickly spirited away.
Tonight, I determined, and after pleading the excuse of a headache, I lay awake and fully dressed with my ears tinnily ringing, so hard did I listen for the faintest whisper of sound. Midnight chimed, then one o’clock; at last, a bit before two, I heard a man’s steady footfalls. As I had done when eavesdropping upon his conversation with Mr. Singh, I waited a few minutes until I knew Mr. Thornfield was fully engaged and then slipped from my bedchamber with a fitfully flickering candle.
When I reached the door to the cellar stairs, again I heard the suggestion of movement below; this was all to the good, however, and—finding it unlatched—I opened it.
Where once only rubble and the columns of the house’s foundations stood, here a polished wooden staircase plunged below the earth. Though I glimpsed wall sconces, they were unlit, and the breath seized in my chest at the thought of my taper going out, for the terrain was now an uncharted one.
Step by step I advanced, careful of the faint echoes of my healed injuries, eyes watering as I peered into the gloom. The noises grew louder—what was he doing, this unexpected love of mine, that he waited for the dead of night and hid below the earth’s surface?
I reached the bottom and stopped, suddenly fearful; a queer, sweet reek like badly mouldering apples coated my throat. Shaking minutely, I turned the door handle.
Several horrible things happened at once.
There had been a lamp lit, for its amber ribbon had lined the threshold, but upon my opening the portal, the room was subsumed in darkness. This would not have been frightening had I not been pretending false confidence when I threw the door wide, which snuffed out my own flame … but not before I had glimpsed an unholy tableau. A muffled male curse pierced the black curtain at the same time I emitted a strangled squeak—nothing so dignified as a scream—and dropped my candle entirely.
All was sable midnight surrounding me, and I shared the room with Mr. Thornfield and a naked corpse.
I clutched the doorframe to orient myself. More curses followed, then slow, confident steps, until an arm wound about my waist and an urgent hand caught my shoulder.
“Jane, please—are you hurt, or only frightened? Jane … I turned down the lamp to prevent your seeing anything you wish not to, but you’re quite safe.”
When I opened my eyes—for in my insensible startlement I had witlessly shut them—I discerned that I could see after all, as the lamp still held a spark of life, though its ghostly sphere now illuminated only Charles Thornfield’s face, the familiar worried line between his brows, and the edge of a great table like a butcher’s where a carcass lay supine.
“I’m all right,” I managed. “The light gave me a turn when it went out, and … the …”
The truth was, reader, that—though I had created four corpses—I had never lingered over my accomplishments; this specimen was well past its prime, and the candied egg smell was overwhelming enough to choke me.
“Confound it, Jane, you’ve no business here!” Mr. Thornfield snapped. “I gave explicit orders—”
“I heard noises. Pray don’t be angry, I was thinking of thieves, I—”
“And when you supposed ruthless badmashes had invaded, rather than wake the menfolk—who are, I will take the liberty of reminding you, deucedly clever when it comes to sharp objects—you marched down here to challenge ’em to a duel with a bloody pocketknife?”
My mind was a storm cloud, all static and hurtling thoughts. “I was half sleepwalking. I’m sorry.” I steadied myself and gripped Mr. Thornfield’s forearm, looking down.
This was when I noticed: Charles Thornfield was not wearing his frock coat, and neither was he wearing gloves. My lips parted as I studied his fingers spanning my waist; he retreated now I seemed in no danger of falling, but not before I could see that his hands were positively shocking.
There was not a mark on them. Unscarred wrists, one adorned with a silver cuff, led to subtly veined skin, splitting into slender phalanges with well-shaped knuckles. It felt obscene that I could not drag my gaze from them—as if I had happened upon him naked in a woodland pool and refused to turn my back as he fetched his smallclothes.
“What is it, Jane?”
“Your hands, sir. They’re not scarred.”
“I never said they were.”
I wrenched my eyes up. “You must think me a hateful busybody.”
“You haven’t the vaguest idea what I think of you.”
“Forgive me.” My enterprise now seemed detestable. “I’ll not broach the subject again, I don’t care what you’re—”
“Yes, you do!” he exclaimed, shoving a hand over his high brow. “Damn it, I— If we are apologising, then I apologise for accidentally besetting you with waking nightmares. Now, do you wish to see something of my work, or shall I escort you upstairs?”
“Oh, please, if you will have me, I should prefer to … to stay.”
Mr. Thornfield studied me as the devout study God; then he softened the hard spread of his shoulders.
“I have told you that I’ve not practised medicine save in two wars?”
Nodding, I straightened my spine.
“I have told you that I’ve a friend called Sam Quillfeather who is a police inspector?”
Again I inclined my head; Mr. Thornfield stepped back as if testing how much of the view I could manage.
“Behold the Highgate House Mortuary.” His voice rang clear as a brook, but I could not discern any pleasure in the telling. “There isn’t a single decent deadhouse between here and London, and Inspector Quillfeather is a monomaniac when it comes to collecting evidence. I had him round for dinner not two weeks after arriving here and told him I should require an occupation or else succumb to despair. This morgue, with me as its coroner, was his notion, and the men have been hard at work for three months.”
He asked more gently, “If I turn the lamp up, will you swoon?”
“Bugger swooning,” I replied, meaning it.
Mr. Thornfield smiled and reached for the tab; the brightening lamp revealed an incongruously
lovely sight. The floors had been finished with wood stained quite dark, the walls plastered where before there was only stone. The air made my arms tingle, cool as a cave, and the rough-edged pillars remained; but lining the walls were cabinets and tables, and a set of medical tools was arranged upon a counter. I spied a chemistry apparatus, a formidable hacksaw, and what I would later come to understand was termed a rib spreader.
I forced myself to view the corpse, taking a few steps closer. The stranger was of medium build, with a weak chin and ruddy side-whiskers, aged over forty years, and he lay upon a huge slab of wood with grooves carved along the edges.
“I ought to have had a look at this fellow some two days hence, but was delayed by the family’s protests. Chap dropped dead in his barley field, and Quillfeather understands that the bucolic countryside ain’t precisely free of murder,” Mr. Thornfield observed, watching me carefully. “He and I studied together, so he knew that I always had an uncanny knack for autopsies. It was as if they told me the stories of their final moments—I never once got it wrong.”
You’ll feel better when the dead start speaking to you again, I recalled Mr. Singh telling him, and could not suppress a shiver.
“Aye, it takes one like that at first.” Mr. Thornfield’s gloves rested next to a delicate chisel, and he pocketed them as if the sight were too private for sceptical eyes.
“You said that you only used your training when you were at war. Why not start a practice rather than aiding an enthusiastic policeman?”
“Because I touch only the dead, never the living.”
Having experienced a fair number of shocks in my time, I gave no outward indication when he said this.
The silence, however, grew around us like a cancer.
“No, not always, not before, I’m not … it’s a sacrifice,” he told me. “For my sins.”
“For a period of time, sir?”
“For the rest of my days.”
I do not know how it feels when the trap drops and the noose crushes the windpipe—but though I stood perfectly still, staring at the pained crease thickening above his nose, I imagined the sensation was similar.
“I’ll take you on a brief tour, as the facility is modern as possible.”
Mr. Thornfield wanted me to attend, and I wanted to settle his spirits; so I listened dumbly to short lectures. Absently he said, this is a microscope; absently he said, this is a bone saw. The morgue was constructed with an attentive eye for detail—there were grooves in all the tables, drainage, plentiful basins, no white tile even a hairsbreadth out of place. When he was quite through, Mr. Thornfield turned, and the face which ought to have been emblazoned with pride looked near as pale as the body he was about to dissect.
“You are mute, Jane. When we walk out of this place, will we two still be friends?” he asked.
Words formed on my tongue and dissolved like dreams; but I already knew what I wanted to say. Striding towards him, I gripped the bend in his forearms where only shirtsleeves separated us, and his hands lifted to mimic mine as if they were not his own.
“You are either asking me that because you mistakenly think having a morgue under the house would upset me, which it doesn’t, or because you know I seek an explanation for your present distress in your past trials. Mr. Thornfield, I … I should prefer to risk all than to inflict further torments on myself. May I ask you three questions?”
“You may ask them, but whether I will answer is another matter.”
Shaking my head, I pressed warm skin beneath cool cloth. “Have you ever loved?”
“Yes.” The reply was immediate, just as I thought it would be.
“Are you now claimed by anyone who made her pledge in exchange for yours?”
“God, no.”
“Do you find me objectionable, sir?”
My feelings were at such a high pitch that he could have said anything and pleased me better than what he did: he released the grip he had on my forearms, pulling himself respectfully away.
“Jane, if anyone ever finds you objectionable, direct me to his house that I might test my crop upon his sorry hide. Please believe that I do not, and forgive me for having befriended you; I ought to have calculated the effect that our conversations might have upon an English—”
“I do not speak this way because I am a confused Englishwoman!” I cried. “You know that I have fallen into past errors and have admitted as much yourself. Despite this, or perhaps because of it—damned if I know whether ’tis one or the other—I understand you, and that understanding led to admiration. We are scoundrels, are we not? Please don’t turn your face, I am not through! I should not like you to suppose you were endeared to me because I thought you as deficient as I am, or because your past is chequered: that would be a gross misrepresentation of my sentiments. I care for you wholly, entirely, not piecemeal, therefore I charge you to be honest with me regarding your feelings if not your history. Only tell me whether … tell me whether you value me too.”
This last was delivered upon the thinnest breath of air, and then truth telling could bring me no further: I had unravelled myself, and had only to await his reply.
“Jane.” Reaching, Mr. Thornfield trailed his fingers over my shoulder.
“Don’t stand there deciding whilst I watch you.” Tears were forming, and I forced them back.
“Such a fragile soul she turns out to be after all,” he said softly. “Grievous injury frightens her not, yet my standing here without a yes on my lips quite shatters her. How you look, Jane—don’t allow me to hurt you so. I don’t deserve the privilege, I might venture to say no one on earth does. For God’s sake, be the wild creature I found in the lane, free of ties that will only pull you to pieces.”
“I won’t be torn apart at all, supposing you stay near, sir.” Forcing the words from my swollen throat, I added, “I only want to be closer still. You are unattached, you said as much—where is the harm to anyone in claiming me? Whatever you have done, it cannot be so terrible that you must deny yourself human contact forevermore.”
“There you would be surprised.”
“No, I honestly wouldn’t be!” I cried.
He lightly took me by the shoulders, gazing down with such a look of mingled fondness and misery as I have never witnessed.
“If you knew the immensity of my blunders, if you knew how culpable I was, you’d be sore tempted to spit in my eye. But that’s neither here nor there—I know, and the knowledge will never cease to haunt me,” he hissed. “I took small comfort in the fact you were happier here than whatever bloody hellhole you used to occupy in London, the fact I could keep you fed and safe among people who relish your company, but do you really want a partial man, a grotesque carnival figure? The gloves are only an outward symbol of an inner deformity. Please, darling, I hate to see what harm I’ve already caused you. It’s agonising—say only that we can be friends again.”
I could say no such thing; my mind felt full of smoke, my ears muffled with the word darling, my veins laced with laudanum though I had taken none. Meanwhile, his eyes could or would not stop roving—from my own, to my lips, to my throat, and back again.
I decided that I would look desperate if I said anything more, and thus my next words were not calculated; they were like slipping off a ravine’s treacherous edge.
And as long as you still mark me, I don’t care.
“You study me, Mr. Thornfield.” I placed a shaking hand over his breast. “Do you find me beautiful?”
Slowly, Charles Thornfield pulled his gloves from his pocket and slid them back on; then, looking as flayed as anyone I have ever seen, he strode for the stairs and disappeared within the house.
Not such a very long period passed between his exit and my lifting myself from the cold floor where I had curled into the hard shape of a shell, my sobs buried in my skirts; soon enough my pride had reared its haughty head, and I dragged myself back to my room to pour the salty confessions into my pillow.
That Mr. Thornfield co
uld not desire me would have been devastating, but a clean cut—that he would not desire me was a ragged gash indeed. I imagined that no night would ever prove worse, and thus it came as an unpleasant surprise when the following proved very much more hideous indeed.
TWENTY-TWO
There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances; though much to create despair.
The next morning, I resolved to break through Charles Thornfield’s walls as if I were a battering ram; but gently, over the course of years, and in the meanwhile I might see his white head bent over a harness buckle he was adjusting for Sahjara, and hear him casually cursing. This plan greatly improved my spirits, and I set to filling Sahjara’s pate with horse-related facts, feeling quite myself again by the time we parted.
I ought to have noted something malevolent in the air, for the skies were heavy as lead. Still favouring my ankle, I went into the hall to sort through the mail and discovered an envelope postmarked from London, addressed to Miss Jane Stone.
The slender ivory packet crackled in my grip, but I made no move to open it; the missive could only be from my solicitors, and if they reported I had no claim on Highgate House, then nothing would change. Alternately, if I did own the property, I already lived here, and the thought of Highgate House without Mr. Thornfield was now as appealing as London sans Clarke.
“Have you a letter, Miss Stone?”
Mr. Singh approached, and his features beneath the wiry sweep of his beard were grave.
“Apparently so. No one ever writes to me, so I’m at a bit of a loss.”
“We missed you this morning at breakfast.”
“I was a trifle unwell.”
“Then I am glad to see you looking hale now. Miss Stone …” He hesitated, adjusting the cuff upon his wrist. “Did anything distressing happen last night?”
