by Alys Clare
She turned to me, the protuberant eyes wide open so that the pale irises were entirely surrounded by white. The rims, I noticed, were red and scaly. ‘You already know, I think.’ Her voice was cold.
‘I know a little,’ I admitted. ‘I surmise more.’ Deciding I had nothing to lose, I went on, ‘I believe his appetites were for boys.’
I stopped, very much hoping she would pick up where I had left off. After some time, she did.
‘Boys. Yes.’ She sighed again, deeply, as if drawing it up from the very depths of her. ‘There had been others, or so it was believed, but then he saw the angel, and he was never the same again.’ She shook her head, her face drooping in sadness. ‘He had us – Mother, me, Denyse – and he had position.’ I sensed she wanted to shout the word, but she restrained herself to a sort of suppressed hiss. ‘I tried, I tried so hard, to make myself be enough for him, for although I wasn’t the son and heir that he wanted, I was his child, his daughter, and he should have loved me.’ A tear ran down her face. ‘But he didn’t want me. He wanted his angel. Always, always, it was boys.’
It seemed cruel to push her when she was clearly in distress, but I did.
‘Boys, yes, I understand,’ I said. ‘I believe there was evidence of these unnatural desires, here in your house, and that you – your mother, your husband, you yourself – wanted above all else to ensure that nobody ever unearthed it. I believe that when a sick, hungry, desperate vagrant came to your house and somehow managed to get inside, he saw, or found, or tried to take away, something that, if it were to be seen by outside eyes, would have blasted apart for ever the image of your father that you try so hard to keep alive. The honourable, upright, God-fearing justice of the peace that you want so much to keep in the world’s memory would be shown for what he was. For what he did.’ I paused, watching her closely. Her face hadn’t moved by a fraction.
I went on. ‘I believe that someone from this house ran after this vagrant and, finding him alone in his ruin of a hiding place, put a cloth or a small pillow over his face and held it there until he was dead.’
She went on staring at me.
‘It was your husband, wasn’t it?’ I nodded towards Avery Lond, curled up on his settle, his back to us. ‘But I believe it was your mother who made him go and commit the deed, for it was she who had the most to lose.’
Agnes Lond gave a faint tut of annoyance, as if some minor event in the daily life of the household had gone amiss, causing mild annoyance. She looked away, muttering, ‘He always does as Mother commands him, but afterwards he complains lengthily and bitterly to me. He’s so weak.’ She spat out the word. ‘I tell him, if you don’t like it, find a house for us so that we need not always be here under Mother’s roof. Shut in with the past,’ she added in an almost inaudible whisper.
It was so utterly quiet in the house that I heard the tiny sound of her words quite clearly.
Silence. Profound silence. But it was still the afternoon of a pleasantly warm and sunny day, so why was there no evidence of people going about their daily work?
Just now she said they have gone. I thought she was referring to Christopher Hammer and Cory, the groom and the stable lad. So where were the rest of them? I tried to recall the indoor servants. There was a housekeeper I’d heard someone refer to as Joice, a fat man with straggly strands of shoulder-length hair and a bald dome who smelled of alcohol, and various maids including the wall-eyed girl who said she’d seen the wolf.
And the woman who looked after Denyse.
‘Where’s Mary?’ I said sharply. ‘Is she with Denyse, keeping her calm?’ Sweet Christ, I thought, I hope somebody is. ‘It’s very important that Denyse is made to feel safe!’ I added, my voice rising, when Agnes still didn’t answer.
Very slowly Agnes turned her head so that she was looking at me. ‘Mary has left.’
‘And the housekeeper? And the man with the greasy hair and the big nose?’
‘He is called Leagh,’ she said. Then, with a sudden grin, ‘He has got a big nose, hasn’t he?’ She giggled, quickly suppressing it. ‘And the housekeeper’s name is Joice. But they have gone. I told you,’ she added with irritation. ‘You’re meant to be a physician, so why don’t you listen to people when they speak to you?’ She shot me a haughty look, in which was distilled all the arrogance, confidence and pride of her long line of illustrious forebears.
Who had come, I thought, to this. A dirty, neglected house, desertion by the staff, brutal murder and madness running rife.
Agnes Lond had turned back to her steady contemplation of the hearth. She had begun humming.
Dread flooded through me. Leaping to my feet, I ran for the stairs and up to where I remembered Denyse’s room to be, at the far end of the corridor. The door to Mary’s room was open, the bed stripped, no sign of anybody in residence.
But there was someone in Denyse’s room.
She lay in her bed, the bedclothes tucked around her shoulders, the once-white linen sheet with its embroidered border neatly turned down.
And, like her nightgown, soaked in blood.
Denyse’s throat had been cut.
I searched the rest of the bedchambers. All were empty. I ran back downstairs and raced through the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry, the rest of the servants’ quarters.
Not a soul.
Slowly I walked back to Agnes.
I stared down at the still figure of Avery Lond and, as I had expected, I saw that it was not moving at all. There was no soft rise and fall of the chest. No expansion and contraction of the ribs as the lungs took in and expelled air. There was no visible wound, but a cushion lay on the floor in front of the settle.
Like his sister-in-law upstairs, Avery Lond was dead.
With the greatest reluctance I’d ever felt in my life, I sat down once again on the stool and gently took hold of Agnes’s hand.
‘Did you kill them?’
She nodded.
‘And what about the vagrant?’
She nodded again. ‘Oh, yes. He had to be killed too.’
‘Your mother commanded your husband to do it because you had to stop him speaking about what he’d seen?’
She sighed but this time she didn’t nod. Nor did she speak.
‘How did your husband know where to find him?’
She gave me a cold look, her eyes full of contempt. ‘We saw him run off and watched to see where he went. When he took the track up onto the moors, we knew there were only a handful of places where he would find shelter.’
I thought of Jannie, curled up on the filthy floor. Then I saw in my mind’s eye the huge figure of his friend crouching over him, whispering his love and his concern, trying to tempt him with some morsel of food, some tiny sip of hot drink, weeping as Jannie turned his head away. ‘But he was not alone there,’ I said. ‘He had a companion, who—’
‘You refer of course to the big simpleton,’ she interrupted dismissively. ‘But he was not there all the time. He had to forage for food, and it was simply a matter of waiting until he went off again.’ She sniffed, and her over-long nostrils seemed to flare briefly. ‘The man was too stupid to think to look behind him.’
Because all his thoughts would have been bent on the desperate state of the man he loved, I reflected sadly. Even as he’d lumbered away from the hovel, he’d have been trying to work out where he could steal some food.
I said softly, ‘But it was for nothing, for what the vagrant took from this house was still on him when his body was found.’ She looked up at me then, vague surprise in her eyes. ‘The sketch,’ I said. ‘The page of heavy paper, that must have torn when one of you tried to snatch it from his hand as he ran away.’
But slowly she shook her head. ‘No.’ I thought she wasn’t going to go on, but then she said in a rush, ‘It was Father’s, and all that he had left. He gave up everything else but at the last he couldn’t bear to part with that drawing. He kept it hidden and nobody knew he still had it, until one day Mother found him with it in
his hands, staring down at it, such love and adoration in his face, the tears streaming from his eyes.’ Her expression hardened into hatred, cold, cruel, chilling. ‘Mother screamed at him and she tried to take it away, but he held on tight and it tore in two, and she only had the lower left corner. She threw it on the fire, cursing his name, cursing what he had done and what he had unleashed upon her. Upon us all.’ Her head dropped. ‘He hid the half that he held on to,’ she whispered. ‘And then that man came’ – I thought I saw her shoot me a swift, crafty look – ‘twice, he came twice, the first time nosing around and peering in the windows, and then the second time he broke in, he came right inside, and I don’t know how he knew where to look for it but when he was here, in this house where he had no right to be’ – her voice rose to a shriek – ‘he went straight to the very place where Father always kept it and by the time we realized that he was here and what he was doing, he already had it in his grasp and he wouldn’t let go.’ The last words were screamed at such volume that I heard her voice crack.
She was panting hard as if she had just been running. I waited a few moments, then I said, ‘So why did your husband not remove it from the body?’ She didn’t answer. ‘He knew the vagrant had taken it!’ I cried. ‘Once he was dead, it would have been a simple matter to search him and reclaim it.’
She looked at me with disdain. ‘It wasn’t important,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t because of any drawing that he had to die.’
I didn’t understand.
I glanced at Avery Lond’s body. I wondered how she had killed him. Then suddenly I thought: He didn’t suffocate the vagrant. Agnes did.
I felt ice run up my spine. The woman sitting before me had killed the vagrant, her sister, her husband. Her mother? I didn’t know, hadn’t even tried to find out. And why had she killed them? Had Denyse had to die because she wouldn’t stop screaming? Had she suffocated her husband because he had discovered what she’d done to her sister and come flying down the stairs, horror all over his face, to confront her? But no, that couldn’t be right, because surely the only way she could have put that cushion over his mouth and nose was if he was relaxed in deep sleep.
Avery Lond, I thought, had died because he was weak and wouldn’t stand up to his formidable mother-in-law.
But I thought perhaps I could supply an answer, for I was beginning to suspect what was the matter with Agnes Lond. She too was a child of Sir Thomas Fairlight, who had borne a terrible scourge of a sickness that passed from man to woman, from woman to child.
And Agnes had been shut out from her father’s affections because he preferred to expend his love on boys.
Agnes Lond was probably as mad as her dead sister.
And I realized, as I sat there trying not to alarm her in any way at all, that there was a fair chance she might kill me too.
I sat there beside her, wondering what to do.
It felt as if I was in a dream. Time had stopped, there wasn’t a sound to be heard, and Agnes Lond and I might have been alone in some strange little bubble cut off from the rest of the world.
But then she made a small movement. Turning to look at her, I saw she had a large knife in her hand. There was blood on the blade.
She said in a tone of utter reasonableness, ‘I am sorry but I don’t think I want to talk to you any more.’
Then she lunged at me.
I had time to fling up an arm to protect my throat, and the knife struck the underside of my forearm and was deflected off into my shoulder. It felt as if she’d punched me. I felt the blood begin to flow – a lot of it – and my head swam. I saw her stand up, the knife still in her hand, and give a little nod, as if some small domestic task had been completed to her satisfaction.
Then she wasn’t there any more.
She has disappeared, I thought. Vanished. In my shocked state, blood pouring out of me, it seemed quite a logical assumption.
I think I was going in and out of consciousness. I remember pain, acute pain that throbbed in time to my heartbeat, and being mildly concerned because I knew that each heartbeat was pulsing more blood out of me. Then it all seemed to go black.
I came back to myself to find that I was lying with my head in someone’s lap, and that someone’s firm hand was pressing a soft cloth to the wound in my shoulder. I risked a swift opening of my eyes and saw that there was a big white bandage wrapped tightly round my forearm, and it was hurting a great deal. Shutting my eyes again I said feebly, ‘Ouch. That’s too tight.’
‘It is not,’ said a calm voice. ‘It needs to be just so, to stem the bleeding.’
I knew that voice.
I opened my eyes once more and looked up at the woman bending over me. It was Mary, and I realized that she had probably just saved my life.
‘I thought you’d gone,’ I said, quite taken aback to discover my voice was no more than a feeble whimper.
‘I came back,’ she replied shortly.
Had she been upstairs? Did she know? ‘Denyse is—’ I began.
‘Sssh,’ she hushed me. ‘I know.’
I struggled to rise. ‘I have to—’
But moving was not at all a good idea, for instantly the room began to whirl around and I thought I was going to be sick.
‘Stay still,’ Mary said, gently but firmly pushing on my uninjured shoulder. ‘You are far too weak to move yet.’
I obeyed. Her lap felt soft, and there was a blanket over me. I was shivering.
I saw images of the very recent past. Agnes, sitting humming to herself. Agnes, with a knife in her hand.
Agnes.
Once more I tried to sit up. ‘Agnes has a knife!’ I tried to cry out. ‘It’s not safe, we have to—’
But Mary said quietly, ‘Agnes is dead.’
‘Dead.’ A pointless repetition of the one word was the best I could manage.
‘She was on the stairs when I arrived,’ Mary went on. She sounded very sad. ‘There was no knife, or at least I didn’t see one. Oh, I’m not denying she had one, and used it,’ she added swiftly at my faint protest, ‘for the evidence is right here lying in my lap.’ She smiled briefly. ‘I asked her if she was all right, and she shook her head and said, “I will never be all right, Mary. I know that now.” Then she started walking up the stairs, and when I followed her, she broke into a run, and she went on, past the first landing, up the little stairs to the servants’ quarters in the attic, and then she was out on the ledge and over the parapet. I tried to grasp hold of her, but she pushed me away.’ There was a huge bruise, I noticed, on her right wrist. ‘She jumped. She threw herself off the roof.’
And calm, imperturbable Mary gave one harsh sob.
‘You cannot move yet,’ she said very firmly a little while later. ‘I just told you. I shall leave you here only for as long as it takes me to prepare some food and something to drink, and I shall make up a fire because you don’t seem to be able to stop shivering. Then,’ she went on, raising her voice as I tried to interrupt, ‘both of us will pray very hard that someone comes to call – your friend the coroner said he would be back late today, so I have every confidence that our prayers will be answered – and we will tell him what had happened and ask him to send for Doctor Thorn, who will sew up your wounds.’ She glanced at me. ‘If nobody has come by sunset, I will ride for the doctor myself.’
‘Is there really nobody else here?’ Nobody else living, I might have said.
‘No. Agnes told her husband to dismiss the outdoor staff. When he demurred, protesting that it wasn’t right to send them away with no warning and nothing to tide them over, she shouted at him to shut his mouth and go and tell the staff there was no more money to pay them, they must pack their bags and be gone. She herself did the same for the few remaining indoor servants, most of whom were only too pleased to go.’ She paused, her face distressed. ‘Some – the more perceptive ones, perhaps – had quietly slipped away already. Now,’ she said briskly, ‘I shall make your drink, and I’ll bathe your wounds so they are ready for the d
octor.’
It was good, I reflected with weary irony as she set off for the kitchen, to have something to look forward to. It was many years since anyone had stitched me up, but I was sure it was going to hurt as much as it had always done.
Some time later, we sat before a bright blaze and I had managed a cup of a comforting hot drink and a piece of bread spread liberally with butter and raspberry preserve. I was no longer feeling faint, although still in a lot of pain. To take my mind off it, I said to her, ‘You have lived in this house for – for how long?’
‘Two years, nearly.’
‘You will, I am sure, have some understanding of the household, and have come to some conclusions.’ She made no comment. ‘Will you share them with me?’ When still she did not reply, I said, ‘They are all dead, Mary. Can it harm them now? Besides, I am a doctor, and used to honouring confidences.’
‘You are also close to Master Davey,’ she said shrewdly, ‘and will probably share with him everything you know.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘I probably will.’
Then, after a brief pause, she said, ‘I believe I do understand, as much as anybody could, for I have asked discreet questions here and there and I have kept my eyes open. Some of the servants have been here for many years – Leagh and Joice, for example – and they have long memories.’ She paused. ‘It is a very sad tale, and it has its roots in the past. He could never control his urges, that was the trouble.’
‘Sir Thomas?’
‘Yes,’ she said with slight impatience, as if implying, who else? ‘Everything that has happened here was because Sir Thomas Fairlight did not love his wife, nor his daughters, because he had given all the love that was in him to somebody else.’
‘The boys, yes I know,’ I said. ‘Agnes told me.’
‘One boy in particular, I believe,’ Mary went on. ‘He came into Thomas Fairlight’s life soon after Denyse was born, when Agnes was six years old. Denyse was far too young to be jealous but Agnes felt the pain of rejection very deeply, although at that tender age she could not perceive that her father’s deep love for the boy was sexual and not paternal. She was desperate for her father to love her, but he barely noticed her at all. Then the boy went away – I do not know why or how that happened, although I believe Thomas’s priest remonstrated with him and may have been influential in persuading him he must give up his life of vice and be the man whom the community believed him to be; the man his family so badly needed. And I believe that he managed to do so, and that for a time, at least, matters were resolved. But then it became clear that Sir Thomas – he had received his knighthood by then – was very unwell, and he sank into madness.’
