House of the Lost

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘But Michael has strapped it up for me,’ she said, holding out the slender wrist with its pink-tipped nails and crêpe bandage. ‘He’s so deft, isn’t he? His hands have an amazing power. But they can be so gentle, as well.’ She smiled slyly when she said this. Mara understood Charmery was telling her she and Mikhail had shared intimacies, and that Mikhail’s hands had done a lot more than strap up her sprained wrist. Scalding jealousy flooded her body once again.

  ‘Are you here for any special reason, Sister? A donation or something? Or were you just passing?’

  The patronizing, lady-of-the-manor tone, annoyed Mara. ‘There is a special reason, as it happens, Miss Kendal.’

  ‘Charmery.’

  ‘Charmery. It’s about my brother. You do know Dr Innes is my brother?’

  ‘Michael,’ she said, as if the saying of his name claimed him as her property, the possessive bitch. ‘Yes, he told me about you. We’ve got rather close this summer.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to talk about. It’s interesting you use the word close – there are all kinds of closeness, aren’t there? All kinds of levels and depths of closeness.’

  ‘If you’re asking if we’ve been to bed, the answer’s yes, we have,’ said Charmery, ‘and very pleasurably, too. I don’t see what it’s got to do with you.’

  ‘I assumed you would have been to bed with him.’

  ‘Did you? Well, you’re very astute,’ said Charmery. ‘Michael’s told me how astute you are. He admires you. He looks up to you because of what happened in Romania. How you tried to protect him.’

  The silence came down again. Mara had the disturbing impression that the stone statues on the lawn’s edge tilted their lichen-crusted faces very slightly, so as not to miss anything.

  ‘I always tried to keep Mikhail safe. For a lot of the time it was an unhappy, dangerous childhood. We lived under the hand of a greedy dictator.’

  ‘I know,’ said Charmery, refilling her glass from the half-empty bottle. Even from where she sat, Mara could smell the sharp fruitiness of it. ‘You were in prison as well,’ she said. ‘That must have been a dreadful ordeal.’

  So Mikhail had told her about Jilava. Again there was the sensation of something stabbing deep into Mara’s vitals. No one in England knew about Jilava or Annaleise, except for Mikhail. It had been their secret, their shared past, one of the things that bound them together. But now this greedy, lacquer-nailed creature knew.

  After a moment, Mara was able to say, ‘Yes, it was a great ordeal. Especially since it was for something I hadn’t done.’

  Charmery said, ‘Hadn’t you? I wouldn’t blame you if you had – that cruel old bitch – the Politburo woman or whatever she was – she sounds such a hag. I’d have done her in without a second thought. No, Michael didn’t tell me you killed her. He said you were set up. Framed.’ She drank her wine, studying Mara over the rim. ‘But I have to tell you I was intrigued by the thought that you might have done it. A saintly and scholarly nun, who’s really a murderess.’

  ‘I’m not a murderess,’ said Mara, forcing herself to remain calm. Charmery was not very sober by this time, Mara could see that. Probably she had not drunk an excessive amount by her own standards, but she had drunk it quickly and it was a hot afternoon.

  Charmery was saying something about Fenn House, about how it was a liability. ‘But my cousin Theo always loved it,’ she said. ‘It’ll go to him if ever I die. Because of the child. It’s still here, you see, that lost little thing.’

  ‘Child?’ This was something new and Mara looked at her with more attention.

  ‘Theo’s son and mine,’ said Charmery, turning to look towards the faint glimmer of the river beyond the boathouse.

  ‘You had a son with your cousin?’

  ‘Yes, but it died,’ she said, dismissively. ‘Hardly anyone knew about it. It’s still here, poor little thing, somewhere in the Chet. It was years ago. But d’you know, Mara, the odd thing is that since I’ve been here by myself, I’ve sometimes thought I heard it crying. Like those things from the old stories – rusalkas.’

  ‘The souls of drowned infants,’ said Mara, softly.

  ‘Yes. My son became a rusalka,’ she said. ‘And he’s still here. His body was never found, so I can’t possibly let Fenn House go to strangers, can I? Not ever. So when I die Theo will have it. Years and years in the future, of course, but still…’

  When I die… Mara felt the world snap back into focus at the words. A tremendous weight descended on her and she saw what she had to do to keep Mikhail safe for ever – and to keep him her own for ever. ‘You’re a bit young to be thinking of dying,’ she said lightly.

  ‘Oh, things happen to people,’ said Charmery. ‘Road accidents and so on. Perhaps I’ll die young and it’ll all be deeply tragic, but everyone will remember me as young and beautiful. And Theo will have this house.’

  ‘It’s a lovely house,’ said Mara conventionally.

  ‘It’s full of memories,’ said Charmery. ‘All the things we used to do here as children. The little rituals and traditions. The rocking chair my cousin Lesley said was a magic one – a gateway to the fantasy lands of the stories. And the old grandfather clock we used to wind up because I said it was Fenn’s heart beating. We used to do that on the first night of every holiday. We said it woke up the house and the holiday couldn’t begin until the clock was ticking.’ She blinked and sat up straighter. ‘I’m a bit drunk.’

  ‘I think you are, a bit,’ said Mara. ‘Why don’t we walk round the garden together – see if that clears your head.’

  ‘All right. A walk through an English garden with a murderess,’ said Charmery, getting clumsily to her feet. ‘Where shall we go? Would you like to see the rose garden? My mother planted Charmian roses for my tenth birthday – she was a bit of a sentimentalist. Theo used to pick a single rose and leave it on my pillow for me to find when I went to bed. Come to think of it, he was always a bit of a sentimentalist as well. In fact he was an outright romantic. I don’t know what he is now. And the rose bushes are nearly all dead. Things die, Sister Miriam. My son died – Theo’s son.’

  Mara took a deep breath, and forcing a casualness she was not feeling, said, ‘Why don’t we walk down to the old boathouse?’

  Afterwards it was easy to go back up the steps – pausing to snap off a couple of the Charmian roses planted all those years ago. The French windows were propped open by a large stone. She glanced back down the garden, then stepped inside the house. This was the place of all those memories. She began to walk through the rooms, touching the fold of a curtain or the back of a chair, seeing the film of dust on the tables.

  The stairs were wide and uncarpeted and it was clear no one had taken polish or duster to them for a very long time. It looked as if Charmery Kendal had been a bit of a slattern. Even if Mara had allowed Mikhail to marry, she would not have let him marry such a sloven. As it was, he would remain hers, entirely and absolutely, just as he had been all their lives, until he was caught in the sticky web of this twenty-first century Messalina.

  Here was the rocking chair those long-ago children had pretended would fly them to magical lands, and in the big bedroom at the front of the house was the grandfather clock they used to wind up to set Fenn’s heart beating for the holidays. Mara touched the pendulum experimentally, and instantly the mechanism sprang to life and a measured ticking filled the room. It startled her because it really did sound and feel as if something had woken. She stopped the pendulum and the ticking faded.

  As she went back downstairs she noticed a bunch of keys lying on a small hall table, and she paused, then picked them up. Would one of these keys fit the main door of this house? She tried one at random. It did not fit, nor did the next one, but the third one slid home and the lock turned easily. Mara checked to see if there was an identical key on the ring – surely no house of this size would have only one key – and when she found the duplicate, she removed it and pocketed it.

  She went inside St
Luke’s, unnoticed, meeting no one. Once in her room, she wedged a chair against the door, then washed away the splashes of mud and river weed that had caught her hands and the edges of her cuffs when she held Charmery down in the river. The cuffs were carefully rinsed clean and put to dry on the windowsill, and new cuffs donned. The key to Fenn House was tucked at the back of a drawer. That left the roses. Mara considered, then laid them between the leaves of a book, and placed two heavier books on top. Later, she would press them properly, using layers of tissue paper. A reminder of what she had done.

  The supper bell sounded, and, obedient to the convent’s day, she went downstairs to the refectory. No one would notice anything different about her, no one would suspect anything.

  No one had noticed or suspected.

  Charmery’s murder wiped a smeary bloodied print across the uneventful life of Melbray for a time, but little by little life settled back into its uneventful pattern. The police were not seen as frequently at Fenn House. They no longer tramped around Fenn’s gardens or crawled over the old boathouse with their cameras and forensic tests. If they found what Mara thought were called DNA samples that matched any of the nuns they would not think twice about it. The sisters did call at Fenn House occasionally – there was no reason to be secretive about it.

  But they did not find anything that brought them to St Luke’s, and after a while journalists and photographers stopped haunting Melbray in the hope of finding new angles on the story.

  Mara did not often see Mikhail, but when she did he seemed quieter and thinner. He would get over it, though; he would not really have loved a woman like that – a Jezebel who had conceived a child without being married, and had let it die. It had become a rusalka, Charmery had said. The odd thing was that Mara kept remembering those words. The souls of drowned infants. It was unexpected that Charmery had known the legend, but it was fitting that she had died in the river where her son had been drowned.

  Later, the news filtered through that Theo Kendal had inherited Fenn House from his cousin. So she did leave it to him, thought Mara. She had some feelings after all – feelings for the cousin she must once have loved. And feelings for the child whose body lay deep within the Chet’s green mistiness.

  The image of the child drowned in the Chet had remained with Mara all these months. It was with her now, as she put on her woollen cape and prepared to get out of St Luke’s without being seen. At last she knew what she must do.

  She silently left her room. Sister Catherine’s room was nearby and twice she had heard Catherine come out and go down to the clinic wing. So it was important to be very quiet. She went down the back stair to the garden door, but before unbolting it peered through the little side window. No one was around. She had not expected anyone would be, not at this hour. She unbolted the door and stepped outside. Then, keeping well away from the main drive, she went towards the gates, and along the lane that led to Fenn House.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Catherine heard Sister Miriam go out because she was staying awake to check on a patient who had had an abscess drained that morning and would need the dressing changed. At first she did not take much notice of the sound, vaguely thinking Sister Miriam was going to the bathroom. But she did not go along the corridor to the bathroom at the far end, she came past Catherine’s own door and went towards the main landing. After a moment, Catherine opened her door and looked out, wondering if anything was wrong. As she listened, she heard sounds from outside. At first she could not identify them, and thought she would just go to the main hall to make sure everything was all right. She slipped into her house shoes, reached for her cardigan, closed her own door and went quietly down the stairs.

  It had begun to rain again and the strong wind was lashing the rain against the window panes, but through it Catherine heard the sound again, louder and more regular: a rhythmic clanging. She paused on the half landing, wiping away the condensation from the window to look out. The narrow window looked out over the side of the building, and through the driving rain Catherine saw that the wrought-iron gate leading out of the kitchen gardens was open and swinging back and forth in the wind. The latch was an old one and had probably worked loose in the buffeting winds. It would keep banging against the garden wall all night like this, and there were a couple of patients on this side of the convent who were suffering fairly bad pain. Dr Innes had given morphine to one of them. It would be better if both of them could sleep as much as possible. It would not take a minute to slip outside and close the gate.

  There was no sign of Sister Miriam, but the side door, which was usually methodically bolted with all the others, was unbolted. Surely Sister Miriam had not gone outside in this storm? But whatever she had done, the gate had better be closed. When Catherine stepped outside the coldness of the night wind made her gasp and the rain came at her like driving knives. She ran across to the gate, and was just pushing it firmly back into place when a darting movement made her turn sharply. Someone there? Catherine stood very still, scanning the darkness, wishing the wind was not quite so wild. She was just deciding the movement had been her imagination, when she glimpsed a figure like a dark shadow going between the thick bushes.

  Sister Miriam.

  For a moment Catherine could not think what to do. If she went back into the convent to get help, Sister Miriam would have vanished into the darkness and anything might happen to her. Catherine had no idea where Miriam was going, but she could at least go a little way after her to find out. She wrapped her cardigan round herself and went after the cloaked figure.

  Her hair was flattened to her head in minutes and her thin house shoes were soaked through before she had gone a dozen paces. Sister Miriam was some way ahead, and wherever she was going it looked as if she was trying not to be seen. She was keeping off the drive, moving through the thick bushes that fringed it towards the main gates. Catherine hesitated, then saw Miriam turn left. Could she be going to the village? But it was a four-mile walk and it was ten o’clock at night. The only other place leading off this road was Fenn House. Theo! thought Catherine, remembering how someone had broken in and attacked him, and how he had told her to be careful because people were not always what they seemed. Had he meant Miriam? She glanced back at the comforting outline of St Luke’s, trying to decide whether she should go back and get help. But that would take too long. If Sister Miriam really had attacked Theo two days ago for some mad, unfathomable reason, it might be too late.

  Trying to ignore the lashing rain, Catherine went after her, keeping well to the shadows of the high hedges so she would not be seen. In this weather she certainly would not be heard. And if Sister Miriam really was going to Fenn House, Catherine could surely bang on the door and shout a warning to Theo.

  As Mara went along the lane towards the turning to Fenn House, she had the strong feeling that something waited for her there. Was it the lost child Charmery had talked about that afternoon? The rusalka, trapped for ever in the cloudy river? Or was it Charmery herself?

  Unmask the sin, Mara, they had said in Jilava. Let it into the light, see it for the evil it is, confront it and be absolved. Be absolved. Tonight Charmery was saying the same thing. Did Charmery want Mara to join her? Was the child with her – the rusalka? Yes, they were calling to her – they were saying that what she was about to do was right, it was the only way to atone.

  Mara began to hurry so as not to keep them waiting.

  As Catherine went into the drive, Sister Miriam was already going round the side of the house and down the path. She’s not going into the house at all, she’s going to the river! thought Catherine in sudden panic, and without pausing, she ran the rest of the way to the house. She half fell against the front door, banging hard on the knocker, not waiting for anyone to open it, but shouting above the rain.

  ‘Theo – it’s me – Catherine! I need help. Sister Miriam’s going towards the river!’

  She saw lights come on in the hall, but she was already running along the path after Mi
riam – along the path she had used all those years ago when Charmery called for help from the boathouse, the night David was born, the night he died. Was Charmery calling now, was that what she was hearing inside the wind and the rain? Don’t be ridiculous, she thought.

  Twice she slipped on the wet stones, and she could have sobbed with frustration, but each time she managed to scramble to her feet again and go forward. Behind her she could hear doors opening and voices: Theo’s and a woman’s voice, and another man’s that sounded like Dr Innes. She half turned and shouted to them to follow her, hoping they would hear and see her in the darkness and understand. Theo’s voice called out something, but the wind snatched it away. Catherine could not tell what he had said.

  Here was the boathouse, dank and dismal, water dripping everywhere. Catherine stopped in the doorway, trying to see through the thick gloom. On the very edge of the landing stage, was a figure, not moving, just staring down at the black river. She’s going to jump, thought Catherine in horror, and called Sister Miriam’s name.

  Miriam turned sharply, and although it was too dark to see her face properly, Catherine was aware of a distortion – of eyes blazing with madness.

  Trying to keep her voice gentle and soothing, she said, ‘Sister, what on earth are you doing out here in the rain? Let’s go back to the convent.’

  She moved forward, hoping to take Miriam’s arm and pull her back, but Miriam put up a hand in defence.

  ‘I’m not coming back with you,’ she said, and Catherine heard with horror the spiralling madness in her voice. ‘This is the only thing I can do. I have to pay for what I did, you see.’