“I have heard of methods, involving exotic compounds, which, once administered, can rapidly bring about what looks most convincingly like heart failure.”
“But he was just my father!” This was getting ridiculous. Who would want to kill my father?
“Your father was Minister of War, wasn’t he? He was always in the papers. ‘Sir Gustav Templesmith in high-level meetings with officials from France’, that kind of thing, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, that’s right. He was Secretary of State for War, in the Cabinet — he’d served six years. Made great changes.”
“Rather a sensitive position, I would say … ”
“But he was my father!” I protested, too loudly, and with too much feeling.
Gordon looked at me. He said, quietly, “How well did you really know him?”
I went to speak, but stopped. There had always been things about my father that I had never quite understood, though one thing I had always understood only too well was that I was daughter to a man who wanted a son. Mother had had quite a deal of trouble in my birth — or, rather, our birth, I should say. I was one of a pair of identical twins. My sister, Elizabeth, had been stillborn. I thought of her often. As a writer of speculative fictions, I had often daydreamed about Elizabeth’s life, unfolding in another time, hidden from this one, and I wondered what she was like. It was strange, growing up an only child, knowing there had been this other, always around, but never present, ghost. Meanwhile, in my own world, I was a daughter in a world that valued sons, and thus, at a fundamental level, a disappointment, with the thin consolation prize that perhaps my family could make a good strategic sort of marriage with another family and produce an heir, but otherwise my value was limited. Father nevertheless did his best to make a man out of me, which is probably where I acquired the peculiar notion of dressing as I did. Almost all the interesting people I met were men, and they all dressed in expensive suits. The women I had been introduced to were, on the whole, frilly, shallow, and frequently vicious young things. I learned quickly that if a man did not like you, he would be quite straightforward about it; if another woman did not like you, you would be put to a metaphorical death by gossip, and you would never see it coming. I spent altogether too much of my time at that age wondering where were all the interesting women, the ones whose transporting books I read and re-read? In the end, despairing, I learned to drink and shoot and hunt; I learned to converse and have opinions, even if those opinions, at first, were not always my own. I did my best to adapt and thrive, always despite knowing, when my father looked at his freakish offspring, that as hard as I tried to be a boy, I was, still, a silly foolish girl, and of no use to him. We did not have long talks far into the night. We were distant, and this worsened over time. He held me at arm’s length, as he also did with the rest of his influential, rich, well-bred chums. I fit in and I did not. By the time Antony came along on one of Father’s shooting parties, I had been thinking of packing it all in and taking off overseas, where I planned to travel for months or years at a time, and perhaps find a real identity for myself. Perhaps find someone who could see me without also seeing the grand country house and the imposing bank balance, who could see me as Ruth, and not as The Heiress.
Antony saw me, from that first moment, only as Ruth. He didn’t give a toss about the way I dressed, the way I smoked cigars and drank my father’s best single-malt. He saw the woman my father had always tried so hard not to see. Antony only wanted to hold me close. Though one might say it took me a long time to realise this.
“Ruth?”
Blinking, I looked up at Gordon. He was a plump, rumpled, poorly presented middle-aged man. He wore tweed that needed patching; his shirts always looked like they needed ironing. His mousy hair was never brushed, and he never polished his shoes. There was always a great deal of dog dander on his clothes, and he was just as likely to pull a dog biscuit out of his pocket as stray coins, bits of scrap paper infested with doodles, keys to things I did not know about, rubber bands, sticks, or boiled sweets. He was almost everything Antony had not been. And yet, Gordon, in many ways, was a better friend than even Antony had been. Gordon and I had been able to talk without any effort from the day I met him. His mind worked so differently from the minds of the kind of people I had known back home. It was a blessed relief.
He said, “We’re here, Ruth. Are you quite all right?” I realised I had been crying a little, and dabbed at my eyes, glad I did not bother with beauty routines. “What would be the point?” Father used to say.
“I’m fine,” I said, squeezing his hand. “Thank you.”
Rutherford opened my door and helped me out. I looked closely at him, trying to see traces of secret resentment or hostility, but all I saw was professional respect. “Rutherford?”
“Ma’am?” He was straightening my clothing, adjusting my hat against the glare from the overcast sky.
“Vicky and Sally. Would you say they are … how to put this? Would you say they are content in their employment?”
“Ma’am?”
I tried again. “Are they happy, Rutherford? Are there any complaints about which I should be informed?”
“I believe they are fine, ma’am. Is everything quite …?”
I waved a gloved hand. “It’s nothing. Just a stray thought. Nothing at all.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
Rutherford stayed with the car while Gordon and I went inside.
The hospital smelled like hospitals everywhere, almost frighteningly clean, and yet there was something else that wasn’t quite clean, and that was a little worrying. The floors were polished — indeed, we saw a man struggling to operate a gigantic industrial floor polisher down one corridor. Nurses in white, with starched white caps on their heads, darted back and forth. There was a rattle of trolleys, and, as we entered Julia’s ward, there was an elderly lady propelling a large trolley carrying a hot water urn, making cups of tea for patients and staff. In other words, everything seemed normal. I asked at the main desk if we might see Julia.
We found Julia sitting up in bed, sipping a cup of tea. She wore a thin cotton gown neither fetching nor quite large enough. Fortunately, I had brought a bag of necessaries for her. “Ruth! Mr Duncombe! Oh I say, thank goodness you’ve come.” She beamed at us, and then turned to the lady in the adjacent bed, saying, “This is my niece and her marvellous friend Mr Duncombe, the noted inventor!” The other lady looked nonplussed and very ill. Gordon looked rather bashful. I perched on the side of the high bed and Gordon found a rickety-looking chair. Julia was nattering at me about how pleased she was to see us and what a strange night’s sleep she had and how once she was asleep there were all these people wanting to know if she wanted anything to help her sleep, and would she like a cup of tea, and did she want the bed linen changed, and all the usual sorts of thing. At length, I held up my hand, said, “Good morning, Julia. It’s lovely to see you looking so much better.” I handed her the bag of necessaries, in which I’d concealed some biscuits and pastry treats from Murray. Julia looked very pleased. I suspected there were aspects of hospital life that she quite liked, and being spoiled like this was certainly one of them.
Julia got down to business, and told us all about what the doctors were saying, the tests she had been through, and what the people in nearby beds were all suffering from, and had we noticed that funny smell? If I had felt tired before we arrived, now I felt doubly so. Gordon maintained a polite, rather fixed, smile, and tapped one of his feet.
Julia’s mysterious symptoms had subsided. She had had X-rays done of her head. Nurses had been by to take her pulse, temperature and respiration at thirty-minute intervals throughout the night and day. Doctors had frowned at her and asked her a great many questions about her apparent difficulties with visual perception, and there had been a lot of whispered conferences just far enough away from her bed that she knew they were discussing grave matters but not close enough for her to hear details. So far, she reported, the doctors were “wait
ing and seeing”. Which meant they wanted to see if the symptoms manifested again. There was talk of the kinds of horrific drugs she had been told about up in Perth, which was a matter of great concern for her. I said, “Julia, if it comes to that, heaven forbid, we shall seek a second opinion. Worry not.”
I was inclined to think, despite what doctors had told me previously, that she most likely did not have epilepsy. I was given to understand that sufferers experienced attacks both much more frequent and more severe. And besides, there was the supernatural aspect of which these doctors would be unaware, and about which I was not the person best suited to inform them. How would I even begin to broach the idea? I could only barely comprehend it myself. It ran against everything I believed, except that I had always tried to accept that there was more to what we called reality than was commonly thought. The tumult in the world of physics, happening right now, was evidence of that! I had always understood that event B was caused by event A. Yet the latest findings in the new quantum theory suggested, bafflingly, that event B could simply happen, on its own, with no prior cause. It was more than merely counterintuitive. There were suggestions that electrons, far from picturesque little planets orbiting the central star that was the nucleus, were blurry, chaotic things, as likely to be found here as there and elsewhere. That there was no longer such a thing as certainty. There was no telling what further strangeness might be shown to exist. Reality, in a sense, was up for grabs. Perhaps Aunt Julia’s way of perceiving “other bits of reality” was not supernatural nonsense, but a unique capacity to sense something in the bowels of reality which science would one day demonstrate. There was no denying that she had a remarkable way of knowing things she could not possibly know. The whole business gave me the willies, but I was prepared to go along with it. But how to broach the entire matter to Julia’s doctors here at this hospital?
Then I told Julia about the strange note I’d received, and showed it to her. She put on her reading glasses and peered at it. “What, that’s it? Gustav died of heart failure, didn’t he, the poor dear?” She had taken her brother’s death hard. It had reduced her, as if a large piece of her physical substance had been removed. “Who would send such a thing?” she said, and asked me to hand it to her. I passed it to her. She grabbed hold of the note but immediately paused. “Oh dear,” she said, “oh, that does feel most peculiar, I must say … ” She flinched, as if a sudden shiver went through her, glanced at Gordon and me as the colour drained from her face. Gordon asked if she was quite all right. “Quite all right, Mr Duncombe, thank you. But this letter … ” She blinked slowly and went ashen. “This is … ”
She collapsed.
12
We summoned the nurse, who summoned doctors. The nurse asked us to wait in the waiting area, and drew the curtains around Julia’s bed. I tried to explain, to tell them about Julia, that she wasn’t just a slightly dotty lady, but the nurse, very much all business, would have none of it.
It took hours. Julia had “only” passed out, with another seizure, or something like a seizure. I sat and paced and sat in the waiting area, furious with myself. That damned note. I should have realised. What had I been thinking? What I had been thinking was that it was just a strange message typed out on a sheet of paper. It never occurred to me that it might be full of the sort of resonances and emanations that might set off Julia’s condition. Gordon, the sweet man, tried his best to comfort me, to not much avail.
“What if I’d killed her?” To which he said, “But you didn’t. She’ll be fine. And besides,” he went on, “now we know something else: the person or persons out there doing that summoning in the cellar could also be the author of that note.”
“Yes, fine, good, but why?” Why all this stupid, melodramatic nonsense? Why not just come to my front door and kill me with a gun? It was a thought I’d had too many times. The whole thing offended me. It was ridiculous. Even if there were genuine demons beyond the pale of reality, and even if they could be summoned and employed to do vile things on one’s behalf, it was simply too much work, too much bother, surely! It wasn’t sensible. It wasn’t what people did. If you wanted to murder someone and conceal your involvement, you could use poison; you could use a third party, witting or unwitting. Someone in Pelican River was prepared to go to all this absurd trouble, just for the likes of me. And what of all the people I had in my employ? They were surely in danger as well. And yet, if I were to say, “All right, that’s enough, it’s time to leave town, at least temporarily,” there was no way to know for sure that my enemies would not simply bide their time until I returned. And if I were to leave permanently — if I were to return to England, for example, or the Continent — there was no way to guarantee they would not pursue me there and pick up where they left off. This was unacceptable. Julia, my dear Julia, positively relished the adventure of it all, the mystery. But the way things were going, it would be the most sensible thing to put her on the next flight back to England, well away from me, the strange woman with a giant target painted on her back.
More than two hours later, a middle-aged male doctor named Rainer appeared, adjusting his thick, wire-frame spectacles, to tell me, the designated next-of-kin, what was going to happen.
“You are Miss Templesmith’s niece, is that right?” he asked, consulting a ragged-looking notebook, flipping pages back and forth. He had a tendency to bite his lower lip as if nervous, I noticed.
“I am, yes. Mrs Ruth Black. How is she?”
“Miss Templesmith is conscious, but in considerable pain. We’ve prescribed analgesia and a light sedative to help her sleep through the night.”
“Of course,” I said, nodding, feeling cold and numb — and responsible. “When can she come home, Doctor?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, frowning. I saw he had a nasty scar near that part of his neck. The clatter and rattle and booming rumble of noise around us in the ward was crushing me. It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying. What he seemed to be saying was that he wanted to send Julia back to Perth for more serious tests, perhaps some exploratory brain surgery. Failing that, and considering this was her third attack in only a few days, they were considering using Luminal, or phenobarbital.
I could not speak. My mouth was dry; my tongue stuck to my palate. The press of noise was unbearable. It was hard even to think. My only thought was that all this was my fault. I was not sure quite in which way, or why it was, but it felt very much like if it had not been for me, somehow, Julia would be perfectly fine, chattering away, eating other people’s food, living a happy life.
Gordon took my arm. “Ruth, it’s … ”
I shook him off. The thought of surgeons probing about inside Julia’s quivering brain made me ill. It was unbearable. It was all unbearable.
Dr Rainer offered me a chair and asked if I would like a cup of tea. I took the chair, but shook my head about the cup of tea. The doctor got down on his haunches. “I do understand how distressing this must be to you, Mrs Black.”
“Is that right?” I said.
He had done this before. “These are very hard things to face.”
I looked at him. He looked away.
He went on. “We do believe that Miss Templesmith’s condition could be manageable, with the right course of treatment, the right conditions.”
“On Luminal? With the awareness of a parsnip?”
“Ruth … ” Gordon said.
“It’s either that or the ketogenic diet — ”
“I beg your pardon, the what?”
“It’s an experimental treatment for epilepsy. We — ”
“No-one, understand me, is experimenting on my aunt. Is that clear?”
“Ruth,” Gordon said to me. “You’re shouting.”
I had not been aware of this. “Thank you, Gordon.”
“Mrs Black,” Rainer said, speaking in a low, measured tone, and looking as baffled as I was. “Your aunt’s condition is not cut and dried. It looks somewhat like epilepsy, but not completely. Th
ere are other features. Unfortunately, there are limits to what we understand about the workings of the brain.”
I looked up, wanting to scream at him (scream at myself ), but I said nothing. I wished I could tell this doctor about Julia’s special talents, but I knew that was hopeless. Nothing good could come from such a revelation. I said, “Is she awake? Can I see her?”
He nodded, smiled a little, and bit his lip. “Of course. Just for a moment.” Julia was lying down. She looked peaceful. The curtain was all the way around her bed; we had some privacy. The noise in here was less oppressive. “Ruthie … ”
I took her hand. It was cold. I was cold. I did not know what to say.
She smiled slowly, like a ghost. “Don’t be upset. I do not blame you. I came here on my own. Remember that.”
Nodding, I said, “I know.” She could not help what her antenna picked up out of the ether; nor could she help her need to warn her niece who might be in serious trouble. I knew that. Of course I knew that. It did not help. If I had just not shown her the note, if I had left it at home …
“You’ll sort it out,” she said, her eyes sleepy. “I really must get some of this for home … ” She gestured at the bottle of painkilling compound. “It’s better than champagne.”
“Could I ask you about the note, Julia?”
She smiled again. “‘Course, dear.”
“Did it feel … the same? Like last night? And on the aeroplane?”
Julia looked at me as if trying to locate my face, as if trying with enormous difficulty to concentrate, to tell me this. “He’s so angry, Ruth. He could kill you himself. With his bare hands … ” She gestured a weak sort of throttling motion. She subsided, exhausted.
“He? Not a they?”
“There … may be others involved. It’s hard to see.”
“Ruth,” Gordon said, poking his head awkwardly through the curtain. “That’s enough. Leave her be, eh?”
I turned, meaning to snap at him. How dare he tell me when I was finished talking to my aunt when she had something to tell me! But the look on his rumpled, lined face … He looked so kind.
Black Light Page 9
