“You should be in bed,” she said. “You can look in the morning.”
“No, I can’t sleep until I have ascertained that it is still here.”
“Why wouldn’t it be? Nobody has been here in twenty years. Didn’t you say that?” Merula asked, puzzled.
“Yes, I suppose so. I can’t be sure. I am worried that…” He rubbed his forehead again.
Merula came into the room and sat down on a chair. She put her candle on the table beside her. There was light enough in there already from several lanterns he had lit.
Royston said, surveying her, “Why are you still dressed?”
“I was too tired to get into my nightgown.” She didn’t want to tell him she had been too afraid to be in that still dark room in this eerie house. “I just wanted to sleep.”
“Which explains perfectly why you are sitting here now,” he said ironically.
Merula looked down at her hands. She didn’t want to say she was worried about him. He’d probably balk at the idea that he needed anyone to look after him, even if only a little. “How can one sleep when everything is so … unclear and strange?”
Royston sighed. He sat down on the floor beside the crates and crossed his legs. Raking his thick black hair back with one hand, he said, “I guess you have never felt before as if you were all alone in the world.”
Merula tilted her head. “I have always had my uncle and aunt and Julia, if that’s what you mean. Julia is older than me, and she loved me like her little sister from the day I arrived at their home. But I did feel at times like I was alone. I’m not really a part of their family. I mean, they are not my parents. I don’t know who my parents are.”
She had never spoken about her past like that, so candidly, and she winced briefly, but Royston nodded. “They died when you were a baby?”
“I assume so. I was delivered to my aunt and uncle to raise.” She lifted her hand to touch the neckline of her dress, under which the pendant with the only clue she had to her past was hidden. “I have no idea why my parents would have left me with family if…” She fell silent and bit her lip.
“You did consider the possibility,” Royston concluded. “You are not sure if they are really dead. You wonder if they abandoned you, and if they did, what for.”
“And where they are, if they are still alive. If they ever think of me.”
She said it spontaneously and regretted it at once. Men would not understand, and Royston would probably consider her melodramatic.
But to her surprise, he nodded again. “It would be odd if you had never wondered about that. One gets to thinking after…”
He looked about him with that sad pensive look she had seen on his face as they had arrived here.
“Are your parents still alive?” she asked.
He shook his head. “My father died three years ago. We were never close.”
“And your mother?”
It took him so long to reply, she was sure he wouldn’t respond at all. Perhaps her question had been too personal. Perhaps she had assumed a confidentiality between them that wasn’t really there?
But Royston did speak at last. “She died here.”
“Here? In this room?” Merula looked about her.
Royston shook his head. “On the estate. It was an accident.”
“I see.”
His curt words seemed to be hiding a much longer and more complicated story, but she didn’t know how to ask about that. She just sat and looked down at her hands. “It must be difficult for you to come back here, then. I appreciate that you were willing to do that for the case.” For me as well. “Thank you.”
He made a dismissive gesture. “Not at all. I should have come here earlier. I mean, the place needs a little cleaning. You must think it is very dirty.”
“I can imagine why, when no one has been here in such a long time.” She looked at him with a frown. “Didn’t your father come here either?”
“No, we went away right after the accident and … neither of us had been back. At least, he never told me that he ever came back.”
Royston looked at the crates surrounding him. “He might have been here. To remove things.”
“You mean things that belonged to your mother? Things that had sentimental value to him, perhaps?”
“Or things that could prove something.”
“Prove something?” Merula echoed. She stared at Royston. “About her accident?”
She was wide awake now, and her mind was working. “What kind of accident was it, anyway?”
“She drowned when she fell into the pond at the back of the estate.”
“I see. Must have been a deep pond. And it must have been dark or nearly dark. Else you don’t just fall into a pond on grounds you know.”
“Very astute,” Royston said.
It sounded cynical, and Merula blushed painfully. She rushed to say, “I don’t mean it to sound as if I’m analyzing a case. Your mother’s death is not a case, of course.”
Royston looked at her. “Don’t apologize,” he said tightly. “Analyze it for me. It’s not logical that you fall into the pond near your own home. A pond you know well. Go on.”
Merula was undone by his mood, his strange tone, but she responded, “I’d say it must have happened while it was nearing darkness. And I’d almost think she would have been upset or otherwise undone. Not watching carefully where she was going.”
“Blinded by tears?” Royston asked. It sounded sarcastic again, as if he didn’t believe her assumptions at all, and still something nervous quivered under his words.
Merula was determined to explain her reasoning. “Well, I imagine a woman leaving her house as night closes in. She is walking fast, upset or agitated, and stumbles, falls, maybe hurts herself so she can’t climb out of the pond again. Was no one with her? Didn’t anyone hear any cries?”
“No, but you can’t blame them for that. It didn’t happen at nightfall when people might still be around. It happened in the dead of night. The grounds were completely abandoned.”
“Your mother left the house in the middle of the night?” Merula asked bewildered. “She must have been upset indeed.” And not confiding in her husband …
Royston leaned his head back and stared up at the ceiling. “She wasn’t found until the afternoon of the next day. The doctor thought she had fallen into the pond and drowned. That is what they told me. I was only ten. I thought later they might have kept from me that … she…”
He faltered.
“Killed herself?” Merula asked softly.
Such a topic was very inappropriate to address, but she couldn’t ignore the emotions that had gripped Raven upon being back here. She didn’t want to act distant and polite as if they were just acquaintances. He had helped her escape arrest at the fatal lecture; he had helped her escape the burning conservatory. He had selflessly thrown himself into the investigation to clear her uncle’s name. She wanted to do something in return. And discussing his mother’s death honestly, without pretending she didn’t understand the implications, was the least she could do.
Royston said, “There have been whispers. Because she was ill before she died. It started in the city, and she was told to recuperate in the countryside. My older brother was in boarding school already, so she took only me. But it got worse once we were here. She was terrified.”
“Terrified?” Merula echoed, not fully understanding. “Of being ill? Do they think she killed herself because she couldn’t accept that she wasn’t going to get better? Or perhaps because she was afraid to lose her beauty? I heard of such a case in our acquaintance. My aunt spoke about it with a close friend. Julia and I were not supposed to learn of it, but we did anyway.”
Julia had said that she could understand the fear of losing your beauty, your husband’s love. That a woman’s face was the most valuable asset she had. Merula had protested that perhaps a man’s affection began when he saw a beautiful face but that it had to become more than that as time went by. That
a man could also love a woman who lost her beauty. That he might even love her more as he knew she was slipping away from him and wanted to hold on to her.
Julia had called this romantic nonsense.
It was the only time she had ever called Merula romantic.
Royston said, “My mother was not physically ill. And I like to think my father would have still cared for her even if she had been. But it was … all in her mind, as he put it. And he had no patience for that. He believed she was imagining things and creating panic, also for the servants and for me.”
“Do you remember panic?” Merula asked.
Royston kept staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I remember an uneasy feeling, like not being quite sure what was going to happen. I remember thinking it was odd that my father was with us so little. He had to go to the city for business, and often he didn’t come back until late if he came back at all. He didn’t like it here.”
“So your mother was alone most of the time? Also on the night she died?”
“My father says he came to the house in the morning. Around eleven. But I heard a male voice that night. I heard arguing.”
Merula sat up, staring at him. “You think your father was here the night your mother died? And that they fought, even?”
Royston looked at her, pain pinching his mouth. “I don’t know anything for certain, Merula. And my father is dead now. As she has been for many years.”
Merula looked at his tense expression. “Did you ever discuss the night of her death with him? Before he died?”
“Yes, but in the wrong way.”
“How do you mean?”
Royston sighed. “I was only ten when she died. I didn’t really know what to think of it. I was told she was dead, that I could not see her again. I was taken away from here in a rush, back to the city. I think … for some time I blamed her.”
He threw Merula a sad look. “For leaving me behind, just sneaking away like that. Then, when I turned eighteen, I got a bundle of papers in the mail. I have no idea who sent them to me. They were notes written by my mother. Some quite legible and sensible and real. Others scribbled in a rush, full of mistakes, of panicked thoughts and fabrications.”
“Fabrications?” Merula repeated, unsure what to make of this word choice.
Royston sighed. He obviously had to force himself to repeat what he had read in those notes. “That she was hearing hands knocking on her windows at night, that she found a dead bird under her bed, that she saw blood smeared on her mirror. She was obviously dreaming things or perhaps even hallucinating. I wondered as I read all of it if she was addicted to some drug like opium that induced these fanciful thoughts.”
Merula tilted her head. “Why had she written those things down?”
“To prove she was hunted.”
“Hunted?” Merula echoed, perplexed. “By whom? What for? And who did she want to prove it to?”
“She wrote several times that she was afraid of someone taking me, her little boy, away from her.” Royston swallowed. “I think she was worried she was going to be proclaimed mad.”
“I see.” Merula considered this in silence for some time. If people had known about his mother’s “fanciful thoughts,” they might have thought them the result of some nervous illness, indeed. The onset of insanity?
Royston said, “Are you afraid now?”
She looked at him. “Of this house? Because it happened here?”
“No. Of me.” Royston held her gaze, his eyes deep and dark. “She was my mother. She died probably out of her mind with fear. You know how madness creeps through families, transmitted by blood.”
“You think you will go insane?” Merula frowned at him. “I have rarely met anyone who could think so logically and who is given so little to panic and irrational thought. Even in that burning conservatory, you were not afraid.”
Royston laughed softly. “But I am afraid now. As I sit in this quiet room and listen to the silence in this house, I wonder if the hands she heard on that window were in her head and if someday I will start hearing them too.”
“And what if they were real?”
He turned his head to look at her. “Excuse me?”
“What if they were real? What if there were hands knocking on her windows and there was a dead bird put under her bed and someone did smear blood on her mirror to make her afraid? To make her lose her mind?”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. Revenge? Hatred against your family? Wanting to tear you apart? Take you away from her? I don’t know, but I do know that it is far more likely that the things she described were real than that they were in her head, as you put it.”
Royston looked her over. “It is the middle of the night, we are at an old, creaking, abandoned country home, I just told you my mother lost her mind here and even ran out into the night and died, and you are discussing this with me as if there is a rational explanation for all of it? You don’t want to run away screaming yourself?”
“Not really, no.” Merula half smiled. “As long as there is no dead bird under my bed, you will not hear me scream.” She folded her hands in her lap. “There was a moth pinned to my dress this afternoon. Did you consider me mad when you heard that story?”
“No, but I know we have enemies who are persecuting us. And Bowsprit saw the moth. It is all real. What my mother described in those notes…”
Royston inhaled hard. “I went to see my father. I asked him what it all meant. He told me to destroy those notes and make sure no one knew my mother had been going insane. He said it would ruin my reputation and my prospects of marriage. That no woman would ever have me if she knew I’d go crazy one day. I asked him about the dead bird, the blood on the mirror. He said there had never been any.”
“But how could he be sure if he spent most of the time in the city? Is it so impossible that someone was playing cruel tricks on her, driving her to distraction while she was all alone here? All alone except for you, of course. Did you ever see someone lurking about the house? Or trying to get in?”
Royston shook his head. “But we had servants then. There was a strange old gardener. He was also a poacher, so he could have brought in dead animals. His daughter cooked and cleaned for us. She was odd, too. I caught her one day in my mother’s bedroom with my mother’s dress on. She was twirling around in front of the mirror and laughing, laughing, until tears gushed down her cheeks.”
“She might have been the unstable one, driving your mother to distraction to take her place. To become mistress of this house.”
“My father would never have allowed her to come near my mother’s things.”
“She might have believed, in some fanciful idea, that your father would marry her.”
Royston stared down at the floor. “I asked my father what he believed had happened to my mother. He refused to answer at first, but when I pressed him, he admitted he believed she had killed herself because she was crazy. That he had tried hard to believe the accident theory but in his heart had always known the truth.”
“What did he say about the night before her death? The male voice in the house and the argument?”
“He said he knew nothing about that. But later he said to me that my mother might have had a lover and that I shouldn’t talk about that either.”
“So he made you afraid with all kinds of speculations but told you nothing that you could rely on.”
“I started telling myself that it didn’t matter. That whatever had happened, it was too late to save her.” Royston’s eyes were sad. “That is what I really wanted when I was eighteen. To save her. But there was nothing left to do. She died, and I wasn’t able to do anything to prevent it.”
He looked at her. “That is why I am helping you now, Merula. I told you in the carriage ride from Havilock’s to your uncle’s that hasty conclusions destroy people’s lives. My father never believed my mother, and in not believing her, he might have driven her straight to her death. Whether she killed herself or
she died running away from whatever she was so afraid of, the fact remains that my father didn’t believe her and didn’t help her. He thought she was just going crazy. But what if she wasn’t? What if she was really in danger? What if someone put the blood on the mirror and the bird under her bed, just as you suggested a moment ago? If someone had looked into it and caught the culprit, she might have survived. That idea won’t let go of me. I can’t let your uncle take the blame for something he didn’t do or let you be harmed. It must stop. I must stop it.”
“It won’t bring your mother back,” Merula said softly.
Royston didn’t reply. He sat motionless, his eyes fixed on the crates. Slowly a tear appeared in the corner of his eye and trickled down his cheek. He didn’t bother to wipe it away.
Merula’s heart clenched for his hurt. She wanted to get up and wrap her arms around him and tell him it would be all right. But she knew it would not. His mother was dead. She had died near this house, afraid and alone, abandoned by the man who had married her but had not believed her. Who had stayed away from her as if she were contagious because he believed she was going mad.
Royston blinked. “I never wanted to come back here,” he said. “Because this house is an accusation. Against my father, but also against me. We did nothing to prevent her death.”
“You were only ten years old,” Merula protested, shocked that he could think that way. “What could you have done? She probably tried not to let you notice any of it, as she wanted you to be happy.”
“Yes, she always wanted other people to be happy. She was kind and considerate and never asked anything for herself. That killed her. That selflessness.”
He banged his fist on a crate. “Here are her things, left behind and abandoned like she was. And I find someone has been through them and … I don’t know if it was my father. If he knew more than he ever told me. I’m not even sure if … he was here the night she died.”
“You’re not sure if he was involved in her death,” Merula said, her heart heavy but knowing she had to put into words what Royston himself would not.
Could not, perhaps.
He nodded. “What if he really believed she was losing her mind and people would find out and point the finger, at her, him, me, my brother? He meant it when he said that our prospects had to be protected. He might have killed her also for my sake!” His voice rose. “My father was so proud of our family name, of our heritage and our future. He would never have let anything threaten that.”
The Butterfly Conspiracy Page 13
