‘Come and sit down,’ insists Hester, moving up to make space for her on the bench.
‘I’m sure there’s a perfectly ordinary explanation,’ says the lieutenant.
Melis, beside her, cups a hand over her ear and murmurs, ‘There’s not an ordinary explanation. I told you there’s something bad in this house.’ Hope’s insides shrivel.
Hester, doing her best to hide her exasperation, says through pursed lips, ‘Stop making things worse, Melis.’
The lieutenant holds Hope with a benevolent look. ‘Don’t be afraid. In the darkness everything seems strange. More than likely the door slamming caused it. And those trestles are on their last legs.’
Felton’s rational explanation, his kindness, allows Hope to see how she had let her fears get the better of her. Hester takes her hand with a smile. ‘He’s right. Why don’t you go out and help Lark with the goats? It’ll distract you.’
Hope pulls herself together. If Hester can manage to keep a level head, when she and Rafe are the targets of the real threat, then Hope is determined not to let her imagination addle her and make things worse for them.
As she leaves the room, she glances back to see if the lieutenant is watching her.
He is.
A delicate bubble of elation inflates in her breast.
In the evening, as Hope takes the clean laundry up the final flight of stairs to the top landing, she can hear a noise coming from the bedchamber. Someone – something – is moving about, the rustle of paper, the creak of a floorboard. Sweat blooms cool on her brow. In her head she accounts for everyone in the house. Her heart gutters. They were all in the kitchen save for the lieutenant, who had gone out to do his evening round of the perimeter fence.
She creeps up, inching closer, pushing the door silently open a crack, peering in.
‘What are you doing?’ She flings the door wide. The lieutenant turns, startled, with a fistful of papers from Hester’s writing box. ‘Those are my sister’s private things.’ Alarm is ringing through her. ‘Did she send you to fetch something?’
Deep in her gut Hope knows that she is seeking a benign explanation because she is sweet on him. Her spirits sink, as she absorbs the scene. ‘Are you stealing? She has nothing of value, you know.’
‘It’s not what you think.’ He steps towards her. He is close, too close, and his body is drawn tight, his eyes flashing with a dark look she can’t read.
Hope is wary but a little flicker of arousal runs up her spine. Perhaps, she allows herself to think, that look was desire.
He leans round her, snapping the door shut. ‘Can I trust you?’ A little crease of sincerity cuts through his forehead and she wants to, she really does. ‘What I am about to tell you is of the utmost secrecy, Hope. It concerns the safety of your eldest sister. You can’t tell a soul. You must promise me that.’
‘I can’t promise you anything.’ She is trying her best to sound firm. ‘But I’d like an explanation.’
‘Dr Cotton instructed me to find some letters your sister has in her possession. He didn’t tell me what they contain, only that they could put her in grave danger. I am to destroy them. It will make her safer. You want that, don’t you?’
Hope picks up the upturned writing box. Hester had said herself the letters were dangerous. ‘Why, if these letters are such a risk, can you not tell her to destroy them herself? Surely –’
He doesn’t let her finish. ‘The doctor was adamant that if she knew, she would prevent me, in spite of the danger.’ He looks so forlorn and there is a plea in his tone that seems authentic.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I understand why you would doubt me but you must believe I have your best interests at heart – all of you.’ He smiles and she can’t help but smile back. ‘Your interests particularly.’
‘Mine? I’m not the one in danger.’
‘Don’t you feel it, too, what I’m feeling?’ He takes her hand then and she can’t bear the idea of him letting it go, that bubble of desire swelling. She can feel it – she can – but daren’t give in to her desire so easily, not this time.
She looks at him again. He is the image of sincerity. ‘She has letters. I’ve seen them.’ Hope is trying to contain her elation. Her hand is alive in his grip. ‘I don’t know what’s in them.’
‘Where does she keep them?’
Hester’s firm instruction not to tell a soul is ringing round her head. He lifts her hand to lightly kiss it. ‘They’re not in here.’
‘Then where?’
She shakes her head.
‘I don’t mean any harm. I just want to protect you all the best I can.’
There is nothing about him that seems insincere and, after all, Ambrose Cotton sent him to protect them – Ambrose who is as good as a father to her and her sisters. ‘Follow me,’ she says, leading him out of the room.
He casts a look over the banisters and follows her into the blue room, where the balcony doors are open and the indigo dusk is spread out across the sky. She starts to drag aside the fire’s back-plate.
‘Let me,’ he says. It moves easily under his strength. ‘So, this is why they were covered in smut when I arrived.’ It is as if he is talking to himself.
She ducks inside. The tight space is horribly close, and she can’t imagine how it might feel to be shut inside. She feels around the walls, eventually finding the package of papers tucked into a niche. Crawling out she looks at them in the light. They are crisp with age and have several large important-looking seals attached to them.
She questions once more whether Hester shouldn’t be the one to decide their fate. He must notice her hesitation, as he says, ‘God only knows what they must contain to put the holder in such grave peril.’
She knows how wilful Hester can be and can imagine her insisting on keeping them, putting herself in greater peril. So, she hands them over.
After a cursory look, he stashes them under his clothes. ‘I’ll burn them later. I don’t want to rouse any curiosity by lighting a fire now.’
He pushes the iron plate back into place, then, placing his good hand on her shoulder, looks her directly in the eyes. The bubble swells further.
‘You’ve done a good thing, Hope.’ He leans closer – she cannot move – and closer still, tucking his nose almost into her neck, without quite touching, and says, under his breath, ‘This is our secret.’
He pulls back then, looking at her clothes, which are smeared with soot. ‘You’d better change. You do that, while I go down. We mustn’t let them think we’ve been together alone. I don’t want anyone thinking your virtue has been compromised.’ He puffs out a gust of air that is almost, but not quite, a laugh.
Was he laughing because he can see that her virtue is already as stained as her dress? The thought makes her heart dip but, she consoles herself, wrapping her arms about her torso. A secret. We have a secret.
Felton
Felton stays awake until the house is silent, reading the letters. How easy it had been to convince the girl, her big dark-brown eyes believing almost without question. The letters are the work of an uncommonly gifted forger. Felton knows George’s hand as well as he knows his own and this is a flawless imitation. They are apparently between George and the Spanish ambassador, dated back some years. Much of the script is faded and hard to make out but what is clear is that they seem to imply George has sold state secrets to an enemy of England. There is no doubt it would be seen as treason and, even at this distance in time, could be proof enough for his enemies to bring about his fall.
He scrutinizes the handwriting once more, questioning whether they are truly forgeries. As doubt arises, he quashes it. He is not here to judge George’s actions.
It is small wonder that George wants them destroyed, and if Felton had held any prior vestige of misgiving about whether these feeble-seeming women truly were the menace George believes them to be, it is now thoroughly dispelled. He had seen for himself the threat Hester had made in her letter to him. He
was right – danger can come in unexpected guises. The sisters – charmingly dishevelled, their butter-wouldn’t-melt expressions, their kindnesses and pity – are lethal as hemlock.
He lights a pile of kindling in the small hearth of his room and watches the papers burn with a thrilling sense of achievement at the ease with which he has completed this first task. Now he must prepare carefully for the next.
His plan is forming in the shadowy architecture of his mind. The idea came to him earlier that evening when he was doing a round of the premises. He had passed the henhouse and noticed its missing balcony. Looking back and up at the balcony on the house, he conjured in his mind’s eye the image of the two falling shapes, could hear the sound of flesh and bone meeting stone, could see the two broken bodies on the steps. He sees them again now, their white dresses stark against the slate, with perhaps an ooze of blood emanating from a cracked head and an arm bent back at an inhuman angle. It will require some careful choreography.
Once the fire has burned away the last of the incriminating words, he sweeps up the ashes, tipping them out of the window to be scattered by the night air, and settles down in his bed content in the knowledge that George is a little safer. He drifts off, allowing himself the indulgence of imagining his and George’s old affinity being rekindled.
The following morning he observes the usual routines of the house, which proceed with clockwork regularity each day. Hester collects the eggs, Melis tends the hives, Lark milks the goats, Margie bakes bread for the day, the old man waters his vegetable garden with the waste water from the women’s ablutions, and Hope puts the washing to soak. He supposes her soiled dress is in there somewhere.
He takes the boy out to help him continue mending the fence. Hope, seated over the washtub, tries to meet his eye as he walks by but he won’t be drawn. It wouldn’t do for someone to notice anything pass between them. He can sense her gaze boring into his back – those besotted eyes.
The boy chats to him, asking questions as he holds the bag of nails, handing them to him one by one. ‘How do you skin a rabbit?’; ‘How painful was it when the shot hit your arm?’; ‘What is it like being drunk?’ As he answers one question, another comes in its wake.
It is no wonder the boy craves to understand the world when he has been cloistered with his mother and aunts. If only he knew the splendid life that awaits him as the recognized son of the most powerful man in the land. The world will be his for the taking.
The child likes him. It will make things much easier when the blow comes.
He hammers in the last loose panel and, taking some off-cuts of timber, nails together a pair of wooden swords. ‘Want to learn how to fence, little fellow?’
Rafe’s eyes glimmer as he takes the weapon.
‘Where are your mother and aunts? I’m sure they’d like to watch you.’
‘Up there.’ The child points to the balcony. Just as Felton had suspected. ‘Except not Aunt Hope. She does the laundry all morning.’
‘How can you be so sure they are there? I can’t see them from here.’
‘They sit there every day, with the sewing and darning, until the sun comes around.’ He calls up, ‘The lieutenant is teaching me to fence. Come and watch,’ and the two women appear high above, at the balustrade.
‘Every morning?’ Felton asks nonchalantly. ‘Why?’
‘Mother says it is too hot to do anything but sit in the shade and sew.’
He shows Rafe how to hold the makeshift sword, the rudiments of how to place one’s body to avoid injury and how to make an opponent misread one’s intentions. ‘You have to be crafty, keep one step ahead, anticipate the way your rival will go.’
The child learns fast and is soon ducking swiftly as he swipes the sword low over his head, jabbing and lunging, then jumping away, backing Felton up to the fence, holding the wooden point to his stomach. Felton laughs. ‘You’ll make a fine swordsman one day.’
Rafe puffs up with pride. ‘What does it feel like to kill a person?’
He is taken aback by the question, as if the child has seen through him, but it is only his curiosity. He certainly has a taste for darker things. ‘It is mostly relief, when that person is trying to kill you.’ He can’t help but be reminded of the surge of excitement and sense of power, too, thinking of Bloor’s terror, of Cotton’s warm blood spilling over his hand.
‘Has anyone died that you knew well?’
‘Oh, yes. Many of my comrades. In battle.’
‘When you kill someone, is it like butchering an animal?’
Felton, wishing the boy would stop talking, glances up at the women and for an instant, instead of Melis, who has the same pale colouring, a vague resemblance, he sees Bridget watching him. His heart is wrenched out of place. ‘No, it’s not the same.’ He pushes the boy’s wooden sword aside brusquely and begins to gather the tools that are still scattered about. He doesn’t want to think of Bridget now, to look into the abyss of grief that he has held at bay for so long.
‘But how is it different?’
He feels exposed, as if pure, perfect Bridget is watching him from beyond the grave and she can see his soul, so clogged with sin it is unrecognizable as that of her beloved brother. She has seen Dr Cotton bleeding to death and Bloor struggling and writhing for breath, and can see, too, the terrible future acts he is set on committing. He forces the thought away – can’t allow a crisis of conscience when everything is falling so beautifully into place.
He marches into the house, without answering the boy, who trots behind him to the door of his room, asking if he can come in. Felton tells him to go to his mother. Disappointment registers on the child’s face.
He shuts himself in, swigging his tincture, then unlocking his box of papers and pulling out his neglected journal into which he has entered only the barest notes of late. He can still sense his sister hovering. He opens a virgin page and dips his pen. The ink is down to its dregs, dense and viscous, daubing unwanted marks and distorting the letters as he writes like a man possessed. On and on, pages and pages, unburdening himself, accounting for every misdeed ever committed, each detail, all his future crimes explained.
When he has finished, he carefully returns everything to its place, locking the box and placing the key high on the top of the door surround. He feels purged, better, more robust, committed once more to the fulfilment of his mission. It is the living he must think of now and ensuring George’s safety.
After they have eaten and all retired to their separate quarters, the house is as quiet as the grave. Felton steals out to the balcony. He stands for a moment, looking out to where the waxing moon has cast its cool glow over the blanket of trees. The air is dead still and hardly less close than it is in daylight hours. Every day they expect the weather to break but the heat continues to thicken, sucking the life out of the forest and the godforsaken house buried at its core.
A door bangs outside. He tucks himself into the curtain of vines, watching as Lark comes out of the barn, a ghostly shape, and disappears out of sight, returning a few moments later. Remembering she sometimes sleeps out with the livestock, he assumes she must have gone to relieve herself. He waits awhile, until he can be sure everyone is sound asleep, then sets to work.
He has helped build enough wooden structures, war machines, scaffolds and the like, to know what he must do. Working as quietly as possible, he removes all the supports of the balustrade. The wood is so rotten in places it’s a wonder the whole structure hasn’t crashed to the ground long ago. That is what people will say when it does collapse.
He props up the struts carefully, contriving that they appear untouched, disguising his handiwork by draping fronds of vine over the handrail. Then, returning inside, he leans through the window, balancing on the sill to loosen the nails from the buttresses that support the body of the balcony. Once done, he surveys his invisible work and, satisfied, returns to bed.
Hester
Rafe is up early and perched on the back step, carefully inspecting
the carcass of a blackbird. I ask him where he found it.
‘On the kitchen floor.’ He is opening its wings and fanning the feathers, scrutinizing them.
‘The cat must have brought it in.’
Hope is talking to the lieutenant inside. I have noticed how she looks at him and warned her that I believe he has a sweetheart somewhere. Surely it is the case, given the manner in which he snatched back his book before I had a chance to read the note written in it. I worry that she is too open-hearted for her own good, and pray she has become less vulnerable to the attentions of men after the Worley incident.
Rafe is turning the dead bird over in his hand, peering under its feathers, fascinated.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
‘Don’t know.’ He shrugs, taking a small folding penknife from his pocket and beginning to cut into the joint of the wing. ‘I want to know how it flies.’ He twists it then, as if jointing a chicken, exposing a ball of white gristle. ‘I see.’ He bites down on his lip in absolute concentration as he pulls away the flesh, exposing strings of sinew. ‘These are what make it flap, I think.’
‘You take after your grandfather.’ I am remembering my father and his fascination with the natural world. He always used to say it was what had led him to become a physician. There is still a shelf of his books at Orchard Cottage, with diagrams displaying the skeletal and muscular systems of different mammals. I have a pang of longing to go back and show them to Rafe. ‘It’s a shame he never knew you. He’d have loved to see you so interested in such things.’
Dipping my handkerchief into the water-butt, I squeeze it out and press it to the back of my neck, relishing the moment of cool it brings, and watch Rafe for a while more, rapt in the task of butchering the bird. ‘Be careful with that penknife. Where did you get it anyway?’
‘This?’ He holds it up. ‘The lieutenant gave it to me.’
‘Gave it?’
‘Yes. He said it wasn’t much use to him any more.’ He turns his gaze on me, looking up through lashes as long as a girl’s.
The Honey and the Sting Page 13
