by Abigail Agar
There was a roaring detonation.
Vera didn’t see the shot fired; realising what was happening, just before the puff of smoke, she turned away and fled.
I am too late, she thought gasping for breath. Panic gripped her. The fate of her father had been sealed, and she would live with the awful aftermath of his loss for the rest of her life. But right now, the need for self-preservation overwhelmed everything.
So she ran, and as she ran, Vera heard her mistake in the deafening footsteps on the gravel. They would know there was a witness. Still, she ran on, across the courtyard, past the coach to the back door of the main house. Her voice would still not comply; she could raise no scream, no cry for help she wanted.
She did not dare to turn to look back but could hear the boots of the two men crushing the gravel in her wake. Mishka stood by the pump, looking towards the print room then to Vera, then back to the print room.
‘Misha run, run!’ Vera finally found the breath to shout. But her voice was hoarse in her throat. She must think this is some kind of game was Vera’s only thought before she threw the latch on the front door and ran inside.
The cool gloom of the hallway took a moment to adjust to after the bright light outdoors. And her brief blindness gave her a moment to return to her mind. Through the mist of abject fear and grief, she remembered the movements the lieutenant had taught her. To prime the chamber, to pour the powder, to ram home the balls.
She rehearsed these movements in her head as she rushed through the house, up the stairs to her father’s gun cabinet in the warm smoky confines of his den.
She saw her drafted letters still neatly placed at the side of the desk, everything still in its place. As if nothing had happened.
I was too late, still circled in her mind. But what could she have done? Alternatives rushed through her head.
There would be time for self-recrimination later.
So small was the room, and so packed with natural history samples, jars of pickled amphibians and rows of stuffed rodents, that she had to squeeze between the chair and the wall to get at the gun cabinet.
With shaking hands, she primed the musket and poured the powder.
From elsewhere in the house there came another shot.
Mama? No. I should have found her, warned her. Stupid girl, Father may have been dead, but you could have warned the others.
A small voice, barely audible responded in her head. You panicked. Don’t think about what could have been done. What is next?
The answer she thought must be to prime the chamber, pour the powder, and ram home the balls.
She hoped Mishka had the sense to have hidden after hearing the shot and seeing Vera’s fear.
She was doing everything wrong, making everything worse. Why hadn’t she peeked sooner, intervened when she saw the gun, warned Mishka.
The ball and buckshot rattled down the barrel. The rod scraped, and then she was standing, unsure of herself with an inheritance from her father in her hand that was designed for one reason: to take life.
The stairs outside were creaking as someone came up them fast, but quietly. She cocked the flint.
The steps came closer. She heard the banging of doors swung open further down the corridor.
They were looking in her room, then her parents. The footsteps came closer. The two men were whispering to each other.
She pointed the musket at the door. So close to the door she wouldn’t even have to aim really, not like with the tree in the garden.
Then she remembered the look of fear on Mrs Miniver’s face. Remembered her own panic as she ran across the square back to the house.
Thou shalt not kill, she thought. Could hear the words in the Reverend Thatcher’s voice. The next door banged open, an empty cupboard. Then the feet were outside the study door.
The handle turned, and in one movement, she ducked behind the massive chair and clicked the flint shut over the pan. The door slammed against the shelf behind it, smashing a foul-smelling jar of formaldehyde in which a jellied monster had been carefully preserved.
The smell tickled her nose, and Vera wanted to sneeze. She fought it, so close to her pursuer that she could hear him breathing. Her own breath was stopped; she let a mere hint of breath out and in, scared that to take a full breath would rustle her dress and give her away.
In the cramped space of the room, the hulking brute of a man was limited in his movements. He glanced around then moved off along the corridor, and moments later, she heard him clattering about in the guest bedroom.
She slipped out from behind the chair and listened closely at the door. The men were speaking to each other in angry voices at the far end of the corridor. Vera had a chance to shoot. She raised the gun, but her hands were trembling so violently that had she shot, she would have struck the wall, and they would have killed her in an instant.
Dare I run?, she wondered, feeling as if she were no longer inside herself but looking down on a small version of Vera in a dollhouse of the lodge. As if she were some sort of guiding angel there to assist herself through this trouble.
Papa was dead. The fact of her loss was only just hitting her. Mother too might well have been on the receiving end of that single terrifying blast of gunpowder. There was no time to dwell on this.
But in her safe and distant viewpoint overlooking the little doll of herself, all those troubles seemed to her to be nothing more than the stories she told herself as a girl about the goings on of her cloth dolls or the little wooden and tin animals.
The voices at the end of the corridor became fainter; they were going down the back stairs towards the servant’s quarters. Mishka! thought Vera. If she had slipped away, she would have almost certainly hidden away in her rooms to wait out the trouble. She wished she knew where Maman was.
Although the house had rooms for a full complement of servants, the Ladislaws in their current state of relative penury could only afford to keep Mishka, another Polish émigré to assist Maman with her work.
She had to do something to rescue the poor woman, for these men would surely commit murder and rapine on any poor women they found in this house.
Sliding the door open she pointed the musket down the empty corridor and pulled the trigger. In the enclosed space of the room, the report was deafening, a caustic stinging smoke pricked her eyes and stung her nostrils, and she staggered backwards from the kick of the gunpowder. The window at the end of the corridor exploded outwards into the garden.
‘Run,’ she screamed. ‘Mama, Mishka, run! They have killed Papa. Killed him dead. Murder, murder, murder.’ She hoped that it would be enough to get the others out and about.
She had not realised she was running again, hitching her skirt up and hurling herself down the stairs. Footsteps were hammering across the hallway above her, back from the servants’ rooms as she plunged away from the stairs then through the airy space of the drawing room and out into the garden.
She was still gasping out the word ‘murder’ over and over even as she cleared the garden gate and, staying low like a fox giving slip to the hounds, rushed along below the garden wall and passed over the stile at the end of the road and into the long grass of a field in fallow.
Here she could take a breath between the long grasses and snatching brambles. Peering out from her hiding place, Vera could see that, miraculously, no one followed her. If she could make it to town by evening, she could find a constable or night watchman and bring to their attention this horrific crime.
She trudged across the fields, avoiding the road for the first few miles. Then Vera saw the remarkable coach overtake her speeding its way towards town. She caught sight of the two men aboard it, and as her panic subsided, worry and guilt began to forge upward from the depths of her mind. She retraced her steps back to the house.
With palpating heart she opened the door, the smell of smoke of gunshot still heavy in the air. The parlour door was open, and there spread-eagled across the floor lay the body of her mother. No b
reathing, no pulse. Tears choked up inside her until, summoning the remnants of her courage, she trudged upstairs to be met with a scene all too similar – Mishka, dead on the floor.
It was then that Vera turned and fled with heavy heart. She had to get to town, get help to apprehend the evil men who’d done this to her parents, to Mishka.
After two hours of walking, with Bathcombe showing sprawled across the hillsides whenever she topped a rise, her feet were beginning to hurt, and she could feel that her heel had worn a hole in her right stocking. The hem of her dress was caked with dust that seemed to weigh the cloth down as if it were water.
This pain of the body was a relief to her mind, though, a mind wracked by a more insidious pain. Father dead, and Mother, and Mishka.
She would get revenge for their horrific murders. She would find the constables and ensure justice for her family and Mishka.
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