The Silent Companions

by Laura Purcell

  I could not stop myself. The question flew from me. ‘Mercy . . . Mercy for whom?’

  Those dark eyes turned in my direction. Diamonds of snow stuck to the long lashes. ‘Brother.’

  The floor spun away from me. Gooseflesh crept over my skin and I knew in that moment what it really was to have the second sight. Not my strange forebodings and dreams, but the power in this girl’s ink-black eyes. I did not need to hear the name, yet she gave it.

  ‘Brother. Merripen.’

  Jane shrieked again.

  ‘God’s blood! It’s that gypsy,’ Mark roared. ‘It’s the kin of that foul boy!’

  ‘Take her through to the master,’ cried Cook. She steadied herself against the wall and belched. ‘String her up alongside him, he will.’

  As one, the servants surged. There were fewer than a dozen of them, but they had become legion: a mass of grasping fingers and furious red faces.

  Lizzy was jostled sideways. Her black partlet ripped. She clung onto the brick chimney, a plea passing from her eyes to mine. Stop them. I started forwards, but they grabbed at the child, clumsy and rough in their liquor.

  ‘Stop!’ Lizzy launched herself from the chimney and tried to wrench their hands away. ‘Run, child!’ she cried. ‘Run!’

  I added my voice. They did not heed it. Who was I to halt them, now? The disgraced mistress, the wife Josiah treated like refuse in a street kennel.

  Lizzy managed to free one of the child’s wrists. Scratching and hissing, the girl pulled the other one to liberty. Just then, a stray fist caught the side of Lizzy’s head. She went down – there was nothing between the girl and the mob.

  I have never moved so fast in all of my life. Heedless of the benches, of my skirts, I darted into the space Lizzy had left and made my decision. They would not dare to strike me, but I could not hold them at bay for long. I had to get the girl away.

  Planting both hands on her bony shoulders, I shoved her back through the door, into the waiting claws of the storm. Her hands flailed and caught at my throat – I felt my diamond necklace lift from my skin. Our eyes met again for the shock of an instant. Then she was gone, obscured by a drift of snow.

  I whipped around and slammed the door shut behind me. My spine was firm against the wood, my arms out to bar the way.

  ‘Back!’ I shouted. ‘Get back!’

  Mark met my gaze. His face twisted. ‘I will tell Master of this.’

  One by one they fell away; either to their rooms or to the floor. Jane lies now, stretched snoring before the burnt-out fire. It is deathly cold. Yet Lizzy and I sit here together by a single candle, unable to stir ourselves.

  All we can do is listen to the wind as it chitters and thumps through the woods. Nothing shows through the window: it is coated with snow, and we are buried.

  ‘It is very cold,’ Lizzy says, every so often. ‘It is very, very cold.’

  End of the first volume

  THE BRIDGE, 1866

  Elsie sat rock solid on the squabs, staring straight ahead as the carriage rumbled towards Fayford. Outside, the weather was mild. Pale, soft light showed buds in the hedgerows and blossom on every tree. But this year spring was a spiteful mockery.

  Her cheeks felt hard, like set wax. A thrush trilled in the woods and it seemed the most painful, jarring noise she had ever heard.

  How could this have happened?

  An accident, Mrs Holt said. Mabel was washing greens for the servants’ dinner and didn’t take the time to dry her hands before preparing the meat. The cleaver must have slipped.

  Slipped. A convenient word: out of control; hard to hold, even in the mouth. Too fast. You could not prove a slip. Elsie knew that well.

  But if Mabel’s hand had slipped, why didn’t she run for help? Why did nobody hear her scream? How could it be that no one knew about the accident until Helen found her in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, a vertical slash running from her wrist to her elbow?

  Only one answer offered: she did not want help. She had intended it.

  ‘This is my fault.’ Jolyon had sucked on a cigar and exhaled forcefully through his nose as he paced up and down the office. ‘I was angry. I accused her of those dreadful things. Easter is approaching, she must have been so afraid of returning to the workhouse that she . . .’

  ‘I do not know that you were wrong, to accuse her as you did.’

  ‘How can you talk so?’

  ‘Think, Jolyon. This suicide – if suicide it was – confirms, rather than disproves, your suspicions. So often, this type of thing is an act of remorse. If she played a trick on me and it killed my baby . . . Well, who could live with that?’

  He took another sharp puff. ‘Either way,’ he said into the smoke, ‘my words have pushed a girl towards self-murder. There is blood on my hands.’ And he had stared at his fingers, shaking on the shaft of his cigar. ‘You must go down at once, Elsie. I have business to finish here, but I will follow you as soon as I can.’

  Whatever the truth, they would maintain Mrs Holt’s conclusion: an accident. The least they could do was ensure Mabel was buried in hallowed ground.

  To think of all that life and bold-faced cheek, gone. Death lent the girl a dignity she had never possessed in life. They would stand around her coffin silent, respectful, expecting her to wake up any moment and ask them what they were moping about.

  A cold hand twisted her gut as they approached the village. The spring sunlight did nothing to improve the cottages. Weeds sprouted from the mouldering thatch on the roofs. She shifted on the seat, feeling something unwind deep within her. She was wiggling back into all her old fears, donning the superstitions like an old cloak.

  She put up her veil and looked out at the chestnut trees brooding over the church. White blossom wilted between the new leaves on the branches. Was that Sarah, by the south entrance? She peered through the window but the figures behind the stone wall were so small and blurred that she could not make them out. Of course it was possible that Sarah would be at church, making arrangements. What would she say about the death? What would Mr Underwood say? It was such a terrible mess.

  Her carriage trundled over the bridge. Water gurgled beneath, seeming to laugh at her misfortune. There was something wrong about The Bridge. In London, she had learnt to scoff at her fear as nonsense, but now she was back she could feel it, creeping, slithering. Something dark and insidious, all the way down to the roots of the plants that grew in the garden. It was not just the past, those strange events Sarah spoke of from Anne Bainbridge’s diary. The very fabric of the building was bad. Elsie could face the match factory where she had suffered as a child, but this . . . this place made her nervous.

  When Mabel was buried, she would take Sarah back to London with her and shut up the house for good.

  As the carriage turned and wound down the drive, the sun flared over the hills, burnishing the grass. From this distance everything was made up of shadow and light; the shrubbery glowed, the bricks fell dark, the windows blazed.

  It was not until Peters drew the carriage round before the fountain that the flames died in the windows and Elsie saw the sight that struck her heart cold.

  It could not be.

  She threw the carriage door open and stumbled, blinking, onto the gravel.

  ‘Ma’am?’ Peters sounded anxious. ‘Wait there, I’ll come and help you.’

  ‘No,’ Elsie moaned. ‘No, you’re dead.’

  Watching, as she always did, just watching.

  ‘Ma’am?’ A crunch as Peters jumped down from the box.

  Ma couldn’t have, she didn’t enjoy watching?

  ‘Are you unwell?’

  Elsie paid him no heed. She had never noticed before, but she saw it now – that flicker of morbid excitement in the pupils. It was the look of someone before the scaffold, come to watch a hanging. Bloodthirsty.

  ‘Oh, no, Ma.’ The thought was worse than anything else, worse than the act itself.

  Peters was shaking her arm now, his voice tight
. ‘Mrs Bainbridge? Mrs Bainbridge? What’s wrong, what are you staring at?’

  ‘The companion. Look!’

  ‘Companion? No, ma’am. I chopped them up, remember?’

  ‘Not that one.’ She extended her hand. There was a kind of satisfaction in pointing her out, like a victim accusing her attacker in court. ‘It’s my mother.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the window! Look, man!’

  But Peters stepped back, shaking his head. ‘There’s . . . there’s nothing in the window, ma’am.’

  It couldn’t be true. She clutched her forehead with both hands. ‘Look again.’

  ‘I’m looking. The window’s empty.’ Peters was moving slowly, holding out his hands, the way he might try to placate a dangerous dog. ‘Let me fetch Mrs Holt, ma’am. Sit you down, get you a nice cup of tea.’

  ‘No. No! She’s in there, I’ll show you.’

  ‘Please, ma’am!’

  She was beyond reason, beyond even fear. She ran up the steps to the front door and streaked into the empty Great Hall. Sawdust scented the air. A fire popped and crackled in the grate.

  ‘Ma! Ma!’ She marched on through the drawing room, calling out for her mother. A thousand echoes rang in that cry: childhood pleas from years ago. Now, as then, only silence responded.

  The music room. ‘Ma!’ Her voice bounced back from the high, moulded ceiling. She shouldn’t be surprised. Ma never came to help, not even when Elsie was bleeding and desperate and screaming her name. ‘Please, Ma, just this once!’

  Tears burnt in her eyes as she stumbled into the card room. She never should have done it. She never would have had to do it, if Ma had only—

  A voice erupted from deep within her, rumbling up, pouring out of her mouth in a raw scream. She fell to her knees.

  ‘Mrs Bainbridge!’ Peters’s boots on the carpet beside her. ‘Mrs Bainbridge, what’s – oh, good God!’

  He staggered against the wall, holding it for support, as he saw what she saw.

  The stag’s head no longer hung against the wall. It had fallen, antlers first. But it did not fall unimpeded.

  Helen lay there beneath it. Impaled, skewered, penetrated.

  Blood welled from a dip where her eye had been. The muscles around it still twitched, as if they could blink out the horn lance sticking through the eyeball, pinning Helen to the carpet.

  Fluid ran from her lips. They were moving – trying to move – but she was drowning. A hideous gurgle left her at the same time Peters threw up.

  Elsie swayed. Images were blurring, vanishing. Or rather, she was vanishing – withdrawing from the carnage before her to hide somewhere, deep inside.

  ST JOSEPH’S HOSPITAL

  The pencil was sharp. Dr Shepherd had trimmed it with his penknife. She didn’t like the way it wrote now: scratching along the page; snagging; threatening to snap when she pressed too hard. She had to hold it delicately, as if it were made of glass.

  But it was not made of glass, it was made of wood. It smelt of wood, after the trim – she recognised the unsettling scent of trees cracked open.

  Over and over again, the same words. Perhaps they would blunt the lead. Make it soft and shining so she could pick up her story again. She refused to continue while the letters looked like this: crisp and startling in their clarity.

  Could she blunt her senses also? Once upon a time, the drugs had done that. She remembered shambling down the corridors with Dr Shepherd, barely able to stay awake. But now her traitorous body was growing accustomed, as it had grown accustomed to so many ordeals.

  She began to sense the sadness ingrained in the hospital’s bleak white walls and cold tiles. Her whole existence dwindling to a lone, barred cell. Why did chemists manufacture medicines that awoke people, when reality was dismal and hopeless? Better the laudanum dreams, the tranquillisers. For now she felt like a woman in bed on a baking summer’s night – desperate to sleep but turning over and over, unable to rest. Writing the same two words, over and over.

  Jolyon. Protect Jolyon.

  Her incantation since the day he was born, her twelfth birthday. Protect Jolyon. Yet he was not here and he had not come to visit. That could only mean one thing: she had failed.

  The observation hatch slid open. ‘Mrs Bainbridge? Do I disturb you? May I come in?’

  She saw Dr Shepherd’s spectacles, glinting behind the gap in the door. The pencil dropped from her fingers.

  He shot the bolt from its cradle and entered the cell, closing the door behind him. The stack of papers he carried was thicker than ever.

  ‘Why don’t you sit upon the bed, Mrs Bainbridge? I am quite willing to stand.’

  She did as he asked. The covers were still warm from her body, laced with her own scent. Strange, how a bed had come to mean safety and escape for her. It was not always so.

  ‘I thought it best that you sit down, Mrs Bainbridge, because I fear our talk today may prove upsetting. Your story has progressed to the point where I begin to understand the pattern of your mind. We have come to the crux of it now.’

  His words sank to the bottom of her stomach. She had an urge to pitch herself off the bed and run. Her eyes darted about the room, from the barred window to the heavy lock on the door. No escape.

  ‘You have written of these “companions”, as you call them. You say you were afraid of them. But do you know what really scares us? It is not things that go bump – or even hiss – in the night. Our fears are much closer than that. We are afraid of the things inside us – be they memories, sickness or sinful urges.’ He tilted his head. His spectacles slid to the left. ‘You, I deduce, are afraid of becoming like either of your parents.’

  They were bound to come, of course: the pinpricks of light in her vision and the rush like water in her ears. Childish memories, childish thoughts, that if she squeezed her eyes shut, somehow Dr Shepherd would not be able to see her.

  ‘I understand what you are feeling. I cannot pretend to be ignorant of the hints you drop, however much natural delicacy would prefer to draw a veil over the subject. And I think that’s what you have done, Mrs Bainbridge: drawn a veil. First through coercion and then through a sort of mental necessity, you have hidden the fact that your parents mistreated you.’

  If she still had a voice she would scream, No, no, speak of anything but that. Or would she? A part of her, a small treacherous part, must want it to be known or she would not have written it, she would not have told him.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Believe me, Mrs Bainbridge, I feel deeply for you. A betrayal of trust at such a young age, from those instinct prompts us to hold most dear . . . And a mother, who should nurture and protect, but instead . . .’

  She’d hoped to outlive tears, move beyond them to an arid landscape where they never flowed. Yet here they came; hot, sliding down to her chin, restricting her breath. Had they been lurking there all along, just waiting to thaw?

  ‘I wanted, more than anything, to tell you that this is a positive development. Naturally, it does not feel so – it is forcing you to face a world of distress. Yet you are facing it, Mrs Bainbridge. You have had strength enough to recall these unnatural abuses of your trust. I know you will also find the strength to remember what happened at The Bridge the night of the fire. Then we can make our report. We can clear your name.’

  Surprised, she met his gaze: eyes the soft green of buds in spring; pliable, forgiving. And she realised, with a relief so sharp it was almost pain, that he was on her side.

  THE BRIDGE, 1866

  The room was tender with Elsie at first. Objects retreated to a considerate distance, hazy around the edges, withholding their full weight. Panic hovered in a place she could sense but not quite feel.

  Light played upon the ceiling in ripples. She fluttered her eyelashes.

  ‘Elsie.’ Pressure upon her hand. ‘Mrs Holt, make a hot posset! Quickly! She’s awake!’

  Clanging downstairs. It was all too sharp, penetrating the soft fuzz.

  ‘Elsie
, dear Elsie. Thank goodness.’ Gradually, Sarah’s strong features became defined.

  ‘I am not . . .’ Her mouth tasted metallic. She tried again. ‘Why am I . . .’ No memory would stay still long enough for her to catch hold of it. She saw a deer, then a match . . . They darted away again.

  ‘Do not try to speak. The doctor says we must keep you quiet. I have telegrammed for Mr Livingstone, he will come at once.’

  She looked around. It was all there: the heavy bedposts carved with grapes and flowers; the washstand; the triple mirror on the dressing table. Features of The Bridge returning like a long-forgotten dream. She could not process them.

  Jolyon was coming. Jolyon, her constant, her ballast. She must hold on to that. But why was he not here with her now? He was upset, wasn’t he? Mourning over something. Ma. No, Mabel. Mabel. Helen. She jolted upright, drenched in cold sweat. ‘Helen! She was – she—’

  Sarah’s hand pressed on her shoulder, laying her back against the pillows. ‘Hush, hush. I know.’ She swallowed. ‘We were at the church, Mrs Holt and I, talking to Mr Underwood about Mabel’s funeral. But now it seems . . . Now we will have to hold two.’

  Elsie shut her eyes. It was with her still: Helen’s strawberry face staring up from the carpet in all its mangled horror. ‘How? How could this happen?’

  Sarah took a trembling breath. ‘We had the constable come down from Torbury St Jude. Then some inspectors. Peters gave a statement. From all they can conjecture, it was some kind of terrible accident. Helen must have been cleaning the stag, they said, when . . .’

  Lights flashed behind her eyelids. ‘But you don’t believe that, Sarah. I can hear it in your voice. You don’t believe a word of it.’

  She felt Sarah edge closer. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Sarah burst into tears.

  Elsie’s eyes snapped open. Sarah’s face was scrunched into a wet, red mess. She struggled to breathe through her heaving sobs. ‘Sarah? What is it?’

  ‘This is my fault. It is all my f-fault.’

  ‘How can you possibly think that?’