She entered, sashing her dressing gown at the waist as she strode toward me.
“Lucy, what is the matter?” Her face was all concern. “You are supposed to be on your honeymoon. Has something gone wrong? Have you and Kit had a fight?”
I had to stop her coming toward me, had to stop her before she attempted to lay a comforting hand on my arm, which I could not have abided, so I did it with words.
“Hello, Mother,” I said.
It was the last time I would ever call her that to her face.
. . . . .
She laughed nervously. At the harshness in my tone? The look upon my face? It was impossible to say. “You are overwrought, Lucy. Whatever this fight you have had with Kit—”
“Do not lie to me about anything,” I said. “Never lie to me again.”
Father had once said that Aunt Helen would make an excellent solicitor, were it not for her gender, but I saw that he had pinpointed the wrong twin as being the most fit for a life of using words to her own best advantage. Still, I did not see how words could save her this time, and even she had to see now that there was no line of defense against the knowledge in my eyes.
I knew something was wrong, had been wrong all along, and she knew it.
Mother had always had a certain light about her, an energy that was different from anyone else’s, but now I saw that light extinguished, turning to ash like the last spark in the fireplace grate.
All the way home from the inn, in the carriage, as the ice clattered the roof and the horses slid on the slick streets, one thing had bothered me. True, nearly everything bothered me now, but for some reason, this one item stood supreme.
“Did Father know?” I asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Before he died—did he know about you and Richard?”
She laughed blithely. “How could he possibly know? I only met Richard long after Frederick’s death.” Suddenly she looked wounded. “I cannot believe you would accuse me of such a thing, Lucy. How could you possibly think that I—”
“I already told you: do not lie to me.” I did not give her a chance to respond. “I saw you one day, years ago, in the park with Richard.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She raised her dressing gown a bit as though she was about to stride from the room. “I don’t have to listen—”
“You will listen!” I stopped her with the steel of my voice. “Your …relationship must have been going on for a very long time. Now I ask you again: did Father know about it?”
The wounded look fled as instantly as it had come. Replacing it was a harsh coldness. “Your father was a weak man.” She laughed bitterly. “You ask me about Richard? Well, what of your father and Helen?”
My father and …
Then I remembered a day when I had come across a blond woman sitting familiarly on Father’s desk and how I’d first assumed her to be Mother, only later realizing it was Aunt Helen; I remembered a time when Mother had gone away to visit Aunt Martha and how I had heard peculiar sounds coming from Aunt Helen’s bedroom, sounds I now recognized as man-woman sounds.
My father and …
“He slept with her!” She spat out the words, a hard gleam in her eye.
Before I could even fully digest what she had told me, she went on.
“And he made a baby with her!”
Wait? What? The child Aunt Helen had been carrying when she was murdered was Father’s?
“Thank God,” she said triumphantly, “that ended with her death!”
There was something about that triumph in her tone that chilled me to the very core. I had thought that my outrage, my need to confront her, had stemmed from my feelings about her betrayal of Father. And yet, really, given the size of my anger—hadn’t something else been simmering under the surface all along? As soon as I realized that she and Richard had known each other far longer than I’d previously thought, hadn’t I suspected, even if I would not voice that suspicion in my own mind, that something yet darker was afoot?
But no. That couldn’t be. Really, I told myself now, it was merely a case of a wife betraying a husband who had already betrayed her. Surely that was all it was.
So my father, whom I had mostly thought to be so strong all the years of my life, had been a weak man, a flawed human being. Well, what of that? We were all flawed, my perfect mother as well. Perhaps, I thought now, she was not the monster I had been making her out to be. Perhaps her behavior was no worse than his had been? But no. It was worse. The way she had treated him after Aunt Helen’s death, the contempt, not to mention that while there had been human weakness in his behavior, there appeared to be a real vindictiveness in hers.
“Those years after Aunt Helen was murdered,” I said, “the years you encouraged him to eat more, drink more—were you trying to kill him too?”
She laughed at the notion, causing me to immediately recognize how ridiculous had been my fancy. Perhaps she had encouraged him, but he had chosen to eat the food, drink all that alcohol.
“I cannot say I would have minded if he died sooner rather than later,” she said, “and I would have gladly hastened it along if I could have.” She was so cold. “But I was content to wait.”
While we’d been talking, Mother had been slowly circling, like a cat, so I had to keep turning slightly to keep her in direct view until her back was to the fireplace and my back was to the door.
“I was content to wait too,” another voice spoke now, a masculine one with a sardonic twist to it.
I felt the knife at my throat without ever having heard the footsteps behind me.
The feel of that voice, that knife at my throat—suddenly I saw something fully in a way I had never seen before. There was more here than just the betrayal of a wife against her husband, or even a husband against his wife. There was murder here as well.
“There never was a red-haired monster, a giant, was there?” I asked, unflinching, eyes steadfast on Mother. “It was Richard.”
I felt the knife at my throat press down, just the tiniest bit of added pressure.
“Is this the same knife you used to kill my aunt?”
Richard did not even bother to dignify my question with an answer, instead addressing his words directly to Mother.
“Do you want me to kill her now, my dear?” he asked in a calm, almost cheerful voice, as though he were asking her if she would like a drink of water. “Just say the word.”
To Mother’s credit, and to my surprise now that I knew what a monster she could be, she looked horrified at the notion of my slaughter. For all I knew, it was an act.
“Won’t that be hard to explain?” I asked. “After all, how many women can have their throats slit in the same parlor before the police become suspicious that something is not quite right in this house?”
Richard’s laugh told me he was unconcerned.
“I will bury your body in your father’s garden,” he said. “And if there is blood on the carpet? I will roll it up and throw it away. The servants in this household have always been deplorably lazy. They sleep through everything, and they will not mind having one less carpet to clean.”
“No,” Mother said. “We can send her away, as if none of this happened. What proof does she have? No one will ever believe her.”
There was a pleading quality to her voice, as though she would change this one thing, prevent it from happening if she could.
Of course, there was something else in her voice, in her words. In her …maternal desire not to see my throat lashed right in front of her, her words were an admission that what I had merely guessed at was the truth: Richard had murdered Aunt Helen, and she had somehow been complicit in that act.
“No,” Richard said. “As long as this one lives, she will always be a threat.”
Step. Tap. Clack.
It was a sound I imagined in my mind, a sound of footsteps in a tunnel, a sound no one else could hear.
Slam!
“What is that?” Mother j
umped at the sound, which could have been a trapdoor snapping shut … or open.
“It must be the storm howling the windows in Father’s study,” I said hastily. Despite the knife at my throat, I cocked an ear, put my hand behind it. “Or perhaps it is his ghost coming back to haunt you?”
A strange thing happened as I watched Mother’s face, saw her blanch at my words: I realized that I enjoyed the prospect of scaring her, and that she was in turn indeed scared at the prospect of being haunted.
Step. Tap. Clack.
This time the sound was not in my mind. It was real.
“What is that noise?” Mother’s voice was strained.
“Perhaps this time it is Aunt Martha haunting you?” My taunting voice rose in volume in an attempt to mask other approaching sounds. “After the way you kicked her out of the house, not once but twice, I am sure she would want to do that!”
“Richard?” Mother was puzzled.
“Look over there!” I shouted, pointing behind Mother, drawing their attention away from the door.
“What?” she turned. “What is it?”
“Don’t you see Aunt Helen?” And now my voice turned bitter. “Your own sister? Now, there’s a woman who really does have good cause to haunt you!”
Step, tap, clack.
“Richard!”
Mother wheeled, pointed to the doorway, where stood Kit. In his hand was a pistol, relic from his war.
For a woman who, unlike Mother, had never surprised anyone, I had held one surprise in my sleeve, keeping it from them until now: I had brought Kit with me; Kit, who had stolen into his own house, retrieved his pistol, come to me through the tunnel.
Back at the inn, when I had told Kit the things I knew and what I wanted to do about it, his immediate response was to say that he would come with me. But I had refused, impressing upon him my need to confront her first alone. He had at last conceded that I was a force, a force he trusted, and that for us to be the equals we both wanted to be, he would need to trust me to do this in my own way.
“I can kill you now,” Kit said to Richard, “or you can answer all of Lucy’s questions and I will kill you later.”
“I will kill her first,” Richard warned, tightening the knife at my throat once more until it bit into my skin.
“And then I will kill Aliese.” Kit swung his arm so that now the pistol was aimed straight at Mother’s heart, that black thing that yet beat within her, giving her life. “You would be surprised at how good a shot a peg-footed man can be.”
Richard’s feelings for Mother must have been stronger than his desire to see me dead, for the pressure at my throat disappeared and an instant later the knife made a dull, impotent thud against the carpet as he released it from his hand.
“Now go and stand by her.” Kit waved the pistol at Richard, who obeyed as I hurried to Kit.
Kit dropped his cane, pulled me to his side, kissed my forehead, keeping his eyes trained on them all the while.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I have been better,” I said, “but I have most assuredly been worse too.”
He nodded.
“Now talk,” he commanded the others. “Tell Lucy everything she wants to know.”
“What happened that day?” I asked Mother.
“You do not have to answer,” Richard instructed Mother.
“Oh yes, she does,” Kit said, pointing the pistol first at one of them and then the other, “unless she is prepared for you both to die right now.”
“It was exactly as I told that Chief Inspector Daniels,” she said defiantly. “A man came here on New Year’s Day, asking for the loan of the servants to help put out the Carsons’ fire. When the servants left, he told your aunt that he wanted to see me, that if she cooperated, I would not lose my life.”
“My aunt,” I echoed her words. “Your sister,” I added bitterly.
She did not flinch at the reminder of her bond.
“Go on,” Kit said.
“Helen,” she said, careful now in her choice of how she referred to the relative we shared in common, though there was an undeniable contempt there as she continued, “was calm. She did everything in her power to spare me.”
“And you repaid her by permitting her slaughter!” I said. I turned to Richard. “And you helped her.”
“I would have done anything she asked,” he said, as though he did not care what anyone thought of him, unless it was her.
“How long have you two known each other?” I demanded.
“For a very long time,” Mother said.
“How long?” I demanded again. “Before you learned of Father and Aunt Helen’s relationship, or after?”
“What does it matter now?” she countered. It was clear she would not give me satisfaction in this. “It has been a very long time.”
“And how did you first meet?” I asked. It had been troubling me ever since my awakening to the truth about them, the question of how two so seemingly mismatched people could ever meet, grow intimate.
“It is a funny story,” she said. “We met in the park one day. Richard approached me—he thought I was Helen! He had known her in her previous life.” She paused, looked at him. “But once he got to know me better, he decided he liked me more.”
A funny story?
I wondered how Richard had known Aunt Helen. Had he been her friend? A lover? And what would he and my mother have possibly had in common to draw them together? Well, I could see what Richard saw in Mother. Beauty. Wealth. But what could she have seen in him? Then it occurred to me: it must have been that he was the opposite of Father, more a part of an almost animal world, where Father had always been so cerebral. Then, too, there was no doubt the appeal of having something that had been Aunt Helen’s, and perhaps even possessing it in a way that Aunt Helen never could, but …
A funny story?
“Do you see me laughing?” I asked. “Aunt Helen is dead.”
“Do not blame her,” Richard said. “It was my idea that it was time for her sister to die, after what she’d been through.”
“But why did Helen have to die?” I said, as if my desperate asking of the question could make the event not have happened at all. “Why then?”
Mother spoke the words one at a time, so there could be no mistaking them: “Because … she … was … pregnant!”
Earlier she’d said that Aunt Helen’s baby had been Father’s baby. Those years Mother had tried to have a second child, only to fail, then discovering that her sister had not only slept with her husband but that her sister was also carrying that husband’s child—still, that was no reason, at least not for a normal person.
“Did Father know the child was his?” I asked.
“You mean Helen’s child?” She did not wait for my nod. “Well, of course, when he believed that she was the one who had been murdered, he thought it was his. But then later, when he started to believe I was Helen …”
What?
And yet, that made a queer sort of sense too.
“You must have noticed how guilty he started acting,” she said. “With Helen out of the way, I felt free to indulge my contempt for him. And then, too, I was more …energetic in some of the things we did together, as I imagined she might be with him, so although he never said …”
“He believed that you were Helen and that his wife lay in the graveyard with his child,” I finished for her simply. “He believed that the wrong sister had been murdered, and that he was the only one who knew it.”
“For an intelligent man,” she said, “your father did have his stupidities.”
I wanted to slap that smirk off her face.
But did she really think any of what she’d said was sufficient cause for what she’d done? She really was crazy. Why had I never seen that before?
Does not a child recognize her own mother?
Clearly, I never had, had never known her.
“That day of the murder,” I wondered, “why wasn’t your ring on your
finger?”
“That was his fault,” she said, glaring accusation at Richard for the first time. “He ever hated to see me wearing your father’s ring, made me take it off every time we met, even that day.”
They were a pair, and they were awful.
“Tell me something, Lucy,” she said, sounding miffed. “You seem very outraged at our betrayal of your father, but I don’t see you as being equally outraged about his and Helen’s betrayal of me.”
“The answer should be obvious,” I said, spitting out my next words. “They never murdered anybody!”
And then Mother said something, let something slip, that were Kit not there to witness it with me, had he not told me later that my hearing had been accurate, I never would have believed it.
“That first day Helen came here, knocked on our door,” she said, “I had always known she would, and yet I had hoped and prayed that day never came.”
Mother had known of Aunt Helen’s existence all along? She had known she had a poor twin and had done nothing to help that twin until forced to? And Aunt Helen, poor Aunt Helen, had put her own self forward on that murderous day when Richard came to call in the hopes of saving Mother?
“Do you want me to kill them now?” Kit asked me. “I will do it, for you.”
I was sure he had never killed anybody in cold blood before; in war, yes, but never in cold blood.
But this—he would do this for me.
It was so tempting, even though she had given birth to me, it was still so tempting …
It was a changed and ever-changing world, where the surface was revealed to be far different from what lay underneath, from what was in fact the real world, the underworld.
How to conduct oneself in it …
I thought about Kit’s offer for longer than I care to admit.
“No,” I said at last. “It is not that they are not worth killing. It is that they are not worth dying for. They are unarmed. They present no threat. It is not worth running the risk of you hanging for it.”
Then I started to scream.
. . . . .
Everyone came.
The servants, bleary-eyed, they all appeared one by one in the back parlor, like ghosts summoned to a macabre ball.
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