She is quiet for some time. And he is left with his thoughts spiralling out of control in the dark until he forces his eye back to the shred of light. George is in danger and he is powerless even to send warning, but more than that the idea of Bridget’s suffering is too much to bear. ‘Are you there?’
No answer.
He waits.
All he can hear is the fire and the interminable rasp of his own breath.
The orange sliver wavers.
He drifts.
Bridget is lying next to him. Her skin is cold and waxy. He is dead too. Panic rises in the tight space, filling it. He is drowning. He is boiling. This is him for eternity – in this black hole. Bridget, her corpse pressed up against him, is muttering something about revenge. And George is there with them too now: his teeth are pearls falling from his mouth in a clatter of laughter.
Are you laughing at my misfortune, George? Do you hate me because I failed you?
The woman is speaking again. Drawing him back from the lip of Hell. ‘Are you hungry?’
He hears a loud splash and fizzle. The sound of water thwacking onto the hearth-stone, dousing the flames.
‘I should warn you I am armed, and I have a guard at the door, also armed and ready, so any false move and you will not live long enough to regret it.’ Her voice is terrifyingly steady.
He can’t help but admire this woman, with her hidden reserves of courage. I am armed: there is hardly need for that in his pathetic state. She could topple him with a prod from her smallest finger – if he is even able to stand.
The iron plate scrapes and an oblong of light falls in beside him. Something, an object, drops in with it. It is soft and gives beneath his fingers. Bread. Its yeasty aroma stabs his tongue. ‘Here.’ She passes in a bottle of water and also, with great care, a lit lamp, its flame protected by a bell of glass. He immediately considers the glass as a means to escape, its broken edge run over the thin skin of his inner wrists.
His life would slip away and then … An image of Hell appears to him, a painting he once saw in the Low Countries, of terrible beasts and unimaginable tortures. It makes his will to live suddenly strong.
Gulping the liquid, he feels himself revive miraculously, like a plant after rain. He stuffs the bread into his mouth. It is a heavenly assault of flavours: fruity, rich, malty, buttery and sweet, as if it has sat beside a tray of cakes while they were dusted with powdered sugar. After barely three mouthfuls he is already full to bursting, his gut creaking and burbling agonizingly back to life.
He can hear that the fire has been relit, can feel its heat surge through the space, which seems larger now it is illuminated. A new optimism surges into him. This small act of kindness makes him know he can persuade her to release him. He must first convince her of his contrition.
Hester
I have unpicked every phrase of his journal until I know the way he is welded together better than I know my own self. I have read and reread his sister’s letter. This letter is the key to his soul.
In order to enact my plan, I need to feel as confident as I can that the others have made it safely to Ludlow. And I must be certain that my prisoner has reached the furthest outpost of his despair – though certainty is a luxury in short supply. But I know what it’s like in that godforsaken hole. I have no doubt he is a broken man, without the tincture he relies on so greatly.
I tell Lark and Jem Carter I am not to be disturbed.
Once I am alone, I douse the fire with a bucket of water once more, and wait in silence.
‘Hester?’ His voice is feeble. My name sounds like someone else’s on his lips. I hardly know who I am any more. I am certainly not the same woman I was three weeks ago. I wait for him to speak again and eventually he repeats my name.
And he says: ‘Are you able to forgive me?’ It is an indication of remorse, a sign he can be moulded to my will.
‘It is not my forgiveness you should be asking – it is the Lord’s.’
I inch closer to the hearth, legs, feet, dress black with ash, mouth pressed up to the warm iron. ‘Your whole life has been destroyed, all your potential come to naught because of George’s actions. Think of the man you might have been. Now what are you? A crippled ex-soldier reduced to nothing. Think of all those other men whose lives he stole too, your comrades in arms, their lives, their families’ lives shattered by George’s whims and misplaced pride. You know the truth. You know he sent them all to a certain death. And for what? To play at being the Great Leader of Men. You know the truth. We are all expendable to him – even you.’
I can feel a coolness in the air about my head, sense Melis still watching me, hear the breathy hum of her whisper: Honey and sting, sweetness and sharpness, and sharpness, and sharpness. ‘It’s a wonder someone hasn’t run a knife through George before now. But God knows who would have the courage. It would be an act of true sacrifice.’ I let him think on that a moment.
He doesn’t answer.
After some time, I hear him sigh deeply, and when he finally speaks, he asks again, with more force this time, ‘Are you able to forgive me? I beg of you.’ A moment later he asks again, more pitifully even than the first plea.
I don’t answer. Instead I say, ‘Let’s get you out of that hole.’
The back-plate is still warm to the touch and, loaded pistol in one hand, I grip my fingers round its lip, gaining enough purchase to heave it aside an inch at a time. I have a momentary glimpse of myself as another would see me, filthy with ash and smut, the image of a madwoman, but I have never felt saner.
A rancid stench is released as the lieutenant edges out with excruciating slowness, groaning and wincing, a ghoul, skin grey, eyes blank. By the look of him, cowed, remorseful, pathetic, he is ready, but if I have learned anything it is that appearances can be deceptive. His reaction to his sister’s letter is what will tell me if he can be moulded to my will.
Felton
Felton is disoriented under the steely gaze of the pistol’s eye.
Her glare is fervent, terrifyingly so.
But he is out.
He imagines kicking the weapon from her hand, getting her about the throat – snap – scaling down the building and into the arms of the forest. It is a fantasy. He is too weak to stand unsupported, has to cling to the mantelshelf.
She pushes a stool towards him with her foot. He slumps onto it gratefully as she draws something from her pocket, holding it up in her free hand. It is his phial of tincture.
She must see the craving scored through him as she says, ‘I expect you’ve been missing this. I’d wager you’d give almost anything for a dose of it now.’
She is right. It is the only worldly thing he wants in this moment. It might help obliterate the agony of his mind – knowledge of the deeds he has committed – for a while, perhaps, at least. But he is aware, too, that there is no escape from himself.
She holds up the phial to the light. ‘Almost empty. Here!’ She tosses it towards him. He fumbles the catch and it falls into his lap, rolling off, onto the floor. He folds his body forward, reaching for it, every part of him creaking and painful. Picking it up, he removes the stopper, draining every last blessed dreg.
She offers him a drink of milk, which is warm and gluey, passing through his gullet to sit in his stomach, like a bag of gravel.
‘I think you should read this,’ she is saying, holding out a piece of paper and a small magnifying-glass. ‘It is addressed to you.’
The paper is discoloured and stiff with age. It takes a moment for his eyes to focus, and when they do, it is like a kick to the gut, knocking the breath out of him. Bridget’s hand spidering over the page. Disbelieving instantly, feeling duped, but looking again. When you read this, beloved brother, I will be gone to another place. It is Bridget’s. ‘What is this? Where did you find it?’
‘It was between the pages of your mother’s will.’
‘I don’t understand.’ But he does understand. Whether it will be a better place I do not know.
But this earthly life has become a world of unbearable pain and shame, so better to risk eternal damnation in the taking of my own life. That sealed package contained more than his mother’s will. His head is spinning, as if the past has slid the floor out from under his feet. His mother had kept this from him. An ague, she told him, caused Bridget’s death. She lied. The old welling hatred for his mother burgeons.
‘Read it.’ Hester steps to the far side of the room as if to give him privacy to read his sister’s words from beyond the grave.
He feels disembowelled. Bridget is brought to life in these lines of text. It is her tone of voice, unmistakably, her choice of words. Oh, God! His heart is levered open and out of it emerges new truth that amends all he thought he believed.
I hold the hope, wish, dream that you will make him pay for his ruin of me, your only and most loving sister. I cannot demand you take revenge. What a black word that is. No, no, sorry, it is my anguish giving vent. Do not listen. You must do as you see fit but I wish that he would know what he has done to me.
He is flung back to the last day he saw his sister, her bruised wrist, her desperate tears, not caused by concern for his safety going to battle, as she’d said, but by George’s violence.
Great sobs of grief rack him, a frantic outpouring for his poor blighted sister. He can feel her unimaginable pain and torment, too, for himself, the fool who has spent all his life loving a shadow, loving a fraud, the man responsible for his cherished twin sister’s death. He howls and rages, not caring that Hester is witness to his shame.
He opens his hands, the hands that have snuffed out so much life and all in George’s name. He was blinded by the gleam of George’s gilding, unable to see the festering monster that lay beneath. But his eyes are unveiled. He sees it all, how George has so easily exploited his love, and how easily he draws people into his thrall. He understands now, something he has never before understood, the sheer power of vengeance, how it creates its own force.
Hester
I pass him a handkerchief, which he wipes over his face. Then he looks up at me with hollow eyes. The letter is in his fist, pressed tight to his heart, anguish scored over his features.
‘What do you intend to do with me?’ He creaks gradually to his feet, like an overfilled bucket being winched up from a well, to stand unsteadily before me, arms splayed, hands open. ‘If you intend to shoot me, please make it quick.’
Rather than leaning away from him, which is my instinct, I do the opposite until the gun is a foot from his chest, quashing the part of me that feels afraid now he towers above my small frame.
‘If I do so, I cast myself into eternal damnation.’ I lower the weapon. ‘It is what you intend to do that concerns me.’ He seems not to know what to do with the smile I toss him. ‘I should remind you there is an armed man outside the door, who is unlikely to be as accommodating as I.’
He is haggard and gaunt, the stubble over his chin flecked with steel, but the two days incarcerated with almost nothing to eat have not eroded the bullish shoulders and thick neck. Even so, I know I must show not the smallest iota of fear. ‘Now you know the truth about George.’
He sinks back onto the stool.
‘It must be the bitterest of blows to discover the true fate of your sister.’ He shakes his head, as if refusing to believe what he knows to be the truth. ‘I can’t imagine her suffering. To take her own life and that of her unborn child, to cast herself into the blackest of sin, she must have been beyond despair.’ I want him to feel it, to feel that despair, to know that George caused it, for his heart to be upended irrevocably.
A look of profound sorrow passes over his features and I know I have reached the tender part of him.
‘I’m sure she watches over you. My sister watches me. The dead guide us, if we allow them to do so. You loved Bridget very much, didn’t you?’ He is nodding, and I sense my message is beginning to penetrate. He holds his sister’s letter in a shaking hand.
‘Look what he has reduced you to. Those who rub close to George Villiers risk a bad end. I should know. I was another Bridget. But you are aware of that.’
After what seems an age suspended in febrile silence, he directs a blighted look my way. ‘Did your sister make other predictions that came to pass?’
I nod slowly. He is on the brink of bending to my will. I sense Melis close by and can picture her vision as if it is my own. This time I see, in thrilling clarity, the lieutenant plunging the knife into George’s breast. His hands are sticky with blood. George’s expression is horrified, terrified. George always believed death was for other people.
‘Oh, yes, she saw many things. She saw the fire and Rafe in it.’ I try to keep my voice steady. ‘Had I been more inclined to listen to Melis, recent events might have turned out differently.’
He drops his face into his palm, as if to shut out the world, exposing a rind of dirt around his collar.
‘Do you want to know what she whispered to me just before she died?’ I know I have planted a seed of curiosity in him, can see it in the way he looks up at me and nods. ‘She said it was your hand she saw thrusting a knife into George. Not some nameless assassin’s, but yours.’ I watch his expression as my lie sinks in, first doubt but then something else, more ruthless.
He is staring at his hand, fisting and unfisting it, shaking his head slightly.
‘Think of Bridget – her suffering.’
He sits upright with a sharp inhalation, his forehead ploughed into horizontal furrows. ‘I am mired in sin.’
‘You have been used. A man like George is difficult to refuse. I can see you have been deep in his thrall. You are not the only one. The devil has a powerful pull.’
He is scrutinizing the letter through the magnifying-glass. ‘Bridget must have her revenge.’ His eyes ferment with hate – hate for George – and I know my job is done.
‘I’m going to release you.’ I see something new in his expression now: surprise, hope, determination, it is hard to say which. I grab the collar of his shirt, bringing my face right up to his until I can see his black-clogged pores. ‘If you think you are going to go looking for my son, you will not find him.’ Droplets of spit land on his skin. ‘He is long gone, now. Could be anywhere.’
He meets my gaze with a straight look. ‘Your boy belongs with you, not that devil.’
‘You know what it is you must do, don’t you?’
‘I do.’ He fixes me with a bludgeon-like stare.
Melis’s breath is heavy in the shell of my ear. After all the not-knowing, now I know. I have won. Now I am sure, absolutely sure. A small throb of exhilaration starts in my temple. I have pulled back the bowstring, inserted the arrow. He is my arrow. He is my sting.
Night has fallen by the time he walks out of the gates, glancing back once or twice. I stand with Lark and Jem Carter on the steps watching the lieutenant’s departure, staying there until he is out of sight.
‘You must never speak of this.’
They give me their word. Lark is shaking her head. ‘I don’t know why you let him go.’ She echoes the small uncertainty that still flickers inside me.
‘Mercy has its own rewards,’ I say lightly. They must think me detached from my senses, both had tried to make me change my mind.
‘He’s bound to seek out Rafe at Ludlow.’
‘I made it clear to him that they had travelled on further.’ I can see the concern in the stiff set of Lark’s posture.
‘Do you think he believed you?’
I had been so sure of my plan, so certain I’d set him on a direct path to destroy George, but now shards of doubt are crashing into me. ‘I do, yes. He was repentant. He seeks God’s forgiveness. Who am I to stand between him and the Lord?’ I wonder if she can detect the deceit in my tone.
She simply shrugs and says the livestock needs tending, before loping past the charred skeleton of the henhouse towards the paddock.
I enter the lodge, slowly mounting the stairs, past the empty floors to the blue
room at the top, where I stand at the window looking out, imagining the lieutenant moving towards my adversary. My arrow is in flight, propelled inexorably towards its target. The forest is a dark blur, my own vague reflection cast in the glass. I do not recognize the hard woman who gazes back at me.
For the first time I become aware of a silence so absolute it cannot be quantified in any normal measure of quiet. Melis has gone from here and I envisage her at the lieutenant’s shoulder as he moves through the night, whispering to urge him on, away from this place, far away into another world. Have your revenge, she is murmuring. Our revenge.
Hope
It is Rafe who hears him first, running to the door, where Will Carter is trying to prevent him from entering. Hope can’t believe her ears on hearing the familiar voice and follows her nephew to see him launching himself into the arms of Ambrose Cotton.
Hope is stunned to silence. She has wept for Ambrose, grieved for him, the nearest she has had to a father, and here he is, very much alive. He looks pallid, quite unwell, and his clothes are covered with dirt from the road.
‘We thought you were gone – murdered by the lieutenant.’
‘He tried his best.’ He pulls open his shirt to reveal a bandaged torso. ‘The wretch knew what he was doing. Thought he’d got me right in the heart. Under normal circumstances I’d have bled to death in minutes.’
‘I remember,’ says Rafe. ‘Your heart is in the wrong place.’
Hope is recalling, with a sense of wonder, Rafe sitting on Ambrose’s lap to listen for the heartbeat on the right side of his chest. It seems to her nothing short of miraculous, as if something divine has intervened to spare him, making her feel that they, too, are under its protection now.
‘Where’s Hester – Melis?’ He searches the room with his eyes, a look of horror dropping over his features as Hope recounts what they have endured these last days. She tells him of Melis at peace now, enfolded into the sacred ground of the Ludlow churchyard. She, Rafe and the Giffords had said prayers over the grave. She is gone, but when Hope lies in bed at night, in that moment between sleeping and waking, she still sees her hitting the stone steps, the shock thrusting her breathlessly to full consciousness. And she tells him Hester is still at the lodge.
The Honey and the Sting Page 24
