by Lyndsay Faye
The cover was lifted, the air flooded with cinnamon-spiced mutton, and not another word would Mr. Thornfield speak regarding adventures abroad. Instead he spoke of the new mare, and warned me lest Sahjara knock her head off, and pretended that he had just told me everything I desired to know.
Through it all the gloves remained; and I watched him, riveted.
My instant fascination with Charles Thornfield puzzled no one so profoundly as myself. I had taken enough lovers to know that he was not conventionally handsome, his visage too worn with crags of care to compare with my strapping young working lads. Come to that, he was acerbic and peculiar in equal measure, and he could raise an eyebrow as if raising a middle finger.
I had already borne firsthand witness to his capacity to love, however, thanks to his ease with his ward and the heightened circumstance of Mr. Sack’s visit, and as a needy, greedy thing, I was curious as to how one would go about stealing a fraction of it.
“Good night, Miss Stone, and do take care with your ankles,” was his send-off when we had finished. I think courtesy—even his rough version of it—had exhausted him. “Should you ever desire a bigger knife than that hatpin you’re carrying, seek out the billiard room.”
Smiling, I returned his farewell and made a great racket with my crutch as I went upstairs.
For Mr. Thornfield intended to meet with Mr. Singh after supper; and I knew every inch of Highgate House, the creak of each stair and the groan of each floorboard. If I was going to solve the twin mysteries of the forbidden cellar and the missing trunk, I was going to have to add eavesdropping to my vices.
NINETEEN
“A deal of people, Miss, are for trusting all to Providence; but I say Providence will not dispense with the means, though He often blesses them when they are used discreetly.”
My boundless affection for the protagonist of Jane Eyre has already been established; and yet, I cannot resist stating that she made the most dismal investigator in the history of literature.
Consider: she discovers Edward Fairfax Rochester practically in flames. Upon the morrow, whom does she meet but Grace Poole, the assumed culprit; and when Jane suspects the vile Grace of sounding her out over bolting her door? Jane, wise woman that she is, proceeds to deliver all her intentions regarding door-bolting to the dour nurse, in detail, upon a silver platter.
Apparently there is nothing like telling murderous fire-starters exactly what they want to know about locked doors when they ask you—it confuses them, most likely.
After dinner, I made such a purposeful din going up the stairs that Mrs. Garima Kaur’s face appeared at the bottom, eyes sharply inquisitive within the enormous bowls of their sockets.
“No, no, I’m all right,” I called down, panting. “Nearly there, anyhow!”
“Nothing bad?” she insisted.
“Nothing bad whatsoever. Mrs. Kaur, are you concerned over something in particular?”
“Do not worry,” she said, though the quizzical look had not left her eyes.
“Good night, Mrs. Kaur.”
“Good night, Miss Stone.”
She stood there with face uplifted, watching me until I had turned my back.
When I made it to my room, I locked the door and cast the crutch aside; I was nearly certain my plan would work, but only so long as I could execute it. After a few hobbling circuits, wincing dreadfully, I confirmed that I could walk, provided nearly all my weight was upon my left leg.
Breathless, I sat down and stared at my mantel clock.
Though not well versed in Mr. Thornfield’s habits, I did know Mr. Singh’s, and we had concluded our dinner during the time the butler checked the doors and windows; I had only to wait for him to finish sealing the house like a crypt, and then rush to the drawing room without my crutch, hoping I had not missed anything.
Schooling myself, I chose a time: eleven twenty-four in the evening. Milksops mewl that sin corrupts the willpower, but I have that in spades—so I sat until the minute exact and set off.
The corridor presented little difficulty, but the fourth step upon the first flight always bellowed as if someone were tormenting a calf: I avoided it. My ankle burnt, but not unbearably so, for I held both hands to the rail and proceeded with a sideways step-hop, step-hop motion. I remembered just in time that the banister squeaked above the second landing: I put my hand against the wall and gingerly set my sprained ankle upon the final step.
Pain lanced through it, and I pressed my free hand over my mouth. I managed, however, jaw screwed tight, and resumed my ludicrous progression to the ground floor.
Once in the hall, I paused, and yes—a muted glow from the drawing room combined with the muted thrum of male voices told me to hurry, or all would be for nothing. The lights were out, a single pretty bell-shaped lamp of fractured rose glass remaining; by daylight, it was one of my favourite sources of illumination, for it made the drear midwinter light blush charmingly. Now, in the surrounding darkness, all seemed feverish and bruised.
“—thrash the dog from here back to Calcutta, and then good riddance, says I,” growled Mr. Thornfield.
My entire frame snapped to alertness.
This was not Mr. Thornfield’s usual baritone—it was a voice meant to carry across dunes and canyons, bereft of pretension, barely even English though he possessed no foreign accent. This was who Charles Thornfield actually was, or at least had been, when living under vast Eastern skies.
“For heaven’s sake, Charles.” Mr. Singh sighed. “You always say that first, and it has never been helpful. Not a single time.”
I limped close enough to the slightly open door to hear them clearly.
“I haven’t another solution,” Mr. Thornfield insisted. “Sardar, I need hardly tell you the man is a menace in the extremest degree—and who knows what burchas* he has in his employ.”
“Which is why I cannot comprehend why you indulged in his request to see Sahjara.”
The voice was so stern that my scalp prickled.
“I was wrong to try it,” Mr. Thornfield answered instantly. “Pray don’t be angry, I’ve already taken myself to task. But what if meeting Sack again had … jostled something loose in what seems to be a fixed state?” A wistful pitch of yearning had crept into Mr. Thornfield’s voice and I pictured him as I knew he must look, muscled shoulders taut and dark brows threatening his stately nose. “What if seeing him had made a difference?”
“Charles, Sahjara is not an experiment!” Mr. Singh hissed. Then he sighed once more, and I heard liquor being poured, and I craned my neck further. “That was uncalled-for and yet I delivered it, rather an unforgivable sin in a khansamah,* wouldn’t you say? Accept my apologies. Tell me your object in letting Sahjara within five miles of Sack, then.”
“We will never be safe until a permanent solution is found!” Mr. Thornfield rasped. “When he arrived, shocked as I was, I imagined that if she saw his face again, his own plan might snake round and bite him in the arse. That she might—”
“Ah,” Mr. Singh said sadly. “You thought Sahjara might recall everything, maybe even the trunk. Which would allow us to—”
“Grant the vermin king Sack’s wishes like simpering djinn—”
“And send him on his way, and then we could live as we please.”
“Not that the exquisite scoundrel wouldn’t have been practically invited to rob us blind in that case, which would chafe me terribly.”
“Yes, Charles, we kept horses and hounds once, but now …” Mr. Singh trailed off, exasperated.
“It’s not about the money!” A pause occurred, and Mr. Thornfield’s voice was calmer thereafter. “No, no, this blasted huge draughty English house is …” I bristled. “This house is wild and weird and cold, bloody cold and wonderful. Sahjara loves it, and I am finding it ever more charming that my bollocks clack against my teeth when I piss.”
“Are you? My bollocks have not yet quite got accustomed to making the leap past my kidneys.”
“But now Highgate
House is ours, you understand that Sack will never stop,” Mr. Thornfield ended in a much lower tone. “I told him I inherited it, but he must not have believed me. He must have thought we still have the trunk, that I bought the estate. What else could explain it?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Singh confessed. “The fact of his being here was, I agree, the greatest mystery of all.”
Briefly, I heard only the crackling of the fire; when Mr. Thornfield spoke next, it was almost too deep and too soft to catch.
“Sardar, if I have arrived at the point where I think experimenting with Sahjara’s brains is reasonable, then perhaps it’s best if—”
“No,” Mr. Singh said calmly.
“No?” Mr. Thornfield’s voice grew ever more serrated. “You don’t even—”
“No, you are not embarking upon a crazed quest to murder Augustus Sack, who has assured us that the entire scandal will come out via any one of a dozen solicitors if we so much as touch him. Neither are you murdering a dozen solicitors.”
“So the scandal comes out? Who is affected?” Mr. Thornfield had risen, for I could hear his boots striking the carpet. “This is a Company affair. Sack dies mysteriously, my shame is aired for all to see, I throw myself upon the mercy of the Director and face some sort of court-martial and five or ten years in gaol, and—”
“And you still miss Sahjara’s entire childhood, emerging broken by hard labour with a ruined constitution.”
“Is that worse than perennial torment?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you wouldn’t be here, and she needs you.” Mr. Singh sounded three shades beyond exhausted. “I need you, for God’s sake.”
Mr. Thornfield sat, breathing hard.
“Mark me,” Mr. Singh said carefully. “That you want to go to gaol for a crime we both committed long ago, simply to save the rest of us, is both typically thickheaded and typically noble. However, you are not thinking this through. Who was your accomplice when you committed the deed?”
“You were,” Mr. Thornfield said testily.
“Now. Supposing the Company doesn’t actually want to tar and feather you? The white prodigy raised in Lahore who journeyed back on their commission and was rushed through Addiscombe to do so, they were so eager?”
“Well—”
“Why, yes, Charles, I believe the Director would find a scapegoat if he didn’t want to sully the papers with ill repute of the Company.”
Mr. Thornfield thought this over, shifting in his seat.
“I wonder who might suit.”
After a longer pause, Mr. Thornfield admitted, “You are rather brown.”
“How brown am I, Charles? Take a good long look now.”
“Darkish, though a sight short of black.”
I did not know what they had done, of course; but my heart gave a rabbity leap at the thought of Sahjara without either of them. As self-sufficient a child as she was, she fed off love as if she were a walking siphon, and both Mr. Thornfield and Mr. Singh quietly, almost without gesture and never with words, delivered the substance to her in staggering quantities.
“All right, throwing myself upon my sword is out,” Mr. Thornfield said pettishly. “Your advice is loathsome, Sardar, and it dis-endears me to you.”
“So often the way with advice,” Mr. Singh muttered.
“Well, I think it’s deuced unfair, really.” Mr. Thornfield lightened the tone. “Sack seeing me at the funeral by accident when I’d no idea he was in England at all seems like cheating.”
“It is regrettable, though it does not entirely explain his swaggering into our home with such complete confidence. Thankfully we have both been upon our guard—”
“Of course we’ve been on our guard! But the die is cast. And a sight too soon after arriving here, if you ask me.”
“Undoubtedly.” I heard the sound of a vesta being struck. “I meant to take up cricket.”
Mr. Thornfield snorted, then guffawed, and then the pair of them wheezed together as I leant against the wall, smiling.
“Oh, I don’t know what to do.” Mr. Thornfield sighed as the laughter faded.
“Fight back,” Mr. Singh said. A chair creaked. “The same as we always do.”
“And to think that if the good Sam Quillfeather hadn’t posted me, we should never have known John Clements had died at all. It’s a hard push whether to be grateful or vengeful.”
My back was already against the wall, thankfully, or I should have fallen as the fear seized me—Sam Quillfeather, the policeman who questioned me after Edwin’s death? Sam Quillfeather, the inspector who had drawn unspoken conclusions over Vesalius Munt’s?
“It’s a lucky chance,” Mr. Singh agreed. “Enough to make me wish to meet him one of these days. Considering your new arrangement, doubtless I’ll make his acquaintance quite soon.”
My vision swam; I was in a crazily tilting corridor lit the colour of blood.
“You’ll like him—he takes more care with his profession than any man I’ve ever seen. Makes a point of keeping his investigations utterly quiet unless he has the evidence necessary to prove a party’s guilt, not like these boorish peelers who bully their way to solutions, pissing on every water pump they see. Certainly of all the lads going in for medicine at Charing Cross, I liked him best, for he’d no business being there and I felt as if neither did I. I was still sweating curry, and here’s this mad chowkdar* twenty years my senior taking desultory anatomy lessons. The mind reels, Sardar, that such wonders exist.”
“I’d be less shocked at a courteous tax collector.”
“Imagine if he had taken the tiger by the tail and joined the Royal College instead of merely brushing up on his tibia versus fibula.”
“Incredible. A constable who also just happens to be a doctor of medicine.”
“Because he thinks it will make him a better police officer.”
They were both laughing helplessly again, and a good thing too, for I was struggling noisily for breath. The notion that the Sam Quillfeather I had known would take an anatomy course upon a whim was directly in character—the man was the definition of inquisitive, which is why I felt sick at the mere mention of his name.
“Is it certain, then, Charles?” Mr. Singh’s voice had grown grave. “Are you positively certain John Clements was murdered, without question?”
My eyes, which had been shut in terror, flew open again.
“Certain as daybreak.” It was a complex tone, layers of sadness and regret. “Poor old Johnny, with that puppyish way he had about him. Remember when he used to sniff around your secretary as if she were Cleopatra?”
“The poor woman must have put him off a thousand times—I asked her if she wanted my help over it, but she said there was no more harm in him than a mule. I’ve never met a more credulous person.”
“True enough. Johnny had sand where his brains ought to have been, but he certainly didn’t deserve to be served cyanide with his tea, or however Sack managed it.”
“You seem very sure of yourself.”
“Consider!” Mr. Thornfield admonished. “Clements and Sack return from the Punjab together to rub elbows with the Company nabobs and kiss their grannies and such before being reassigned. Quillfeather gets called in as a special consultant after Clements expires mysteriously in his rooms, as Quillfeather is madder than a flock of loons but can both solve a murder and keep quiet, and the Director wants to know why they lost Clements. Sardar, you recall the poor blighter—he was tanned same as us, but he weren’t never ruddy, and his corpse was flushed something awful, not to mention the fact he was in the prime of life and a heart episode seems very unlikely. Cyanide is the military poison of choice, and who save Sack would be coward enough to stir prussic acid in his brandy rather than killing him like a man would do?”
“Yes, but where’s the motive? You said Quillfeather called you in initially because of some papers he discovered Clements was working on?”
“Aye, Johnny was look
ing up David Lavell’s record, and naturally there were our names in stark print—reports from his superiors, correspondence, journals. What cause could Johnny possibly have to investigate a scoundrel dead since the first war unless he suspected something amiss?”
“He wanted to know why we did it, perhaps.” Sardar said softly. “He knew we were guilty—he wanted to know why.”
“And Sack found out he was digging.”
“It doesn’t quite wash, Charles. Even supposing he discovered Lavell was a blackguard, what difference should that have made?”
“Puts a whole different colour on the affair, don’t y’ see? It’s one thing to harass a pair of footpads, quite another to persecute old friends—Johnny Clements was an intellectual ant, but he was damned decent to the end. The more he knew of Lavell’s character, the less easy it would have been for Sack to keep him leashed.”
They fell silent. I was breathing easier by this time, yet still hardly myself; I had wanted information, but this variety led only to more questions, and the notion that Mr. Thornfield had an arrangement with Inspector Quillfeather was nothing short of horrifying.
“How was dinner?” Mr. Singh inquired.
My feet sidled closer to the door.
“Very passable. Jas Kaur always did have a way with sheep.”
“Charles,” Mr. Singh chided.
“Oh, you mean how was the governess?” He was smiling, I could hear as much. “She gave me a straightforward explanation without much prompting. Hard living and harder men made her cautious, and the same circumstances led to the saltiest tongue I’ve ever heard in an English head.”
I should not have taken pride in this; and yet, I could not help myself.
“She’s a remarkable woman,” Mr. Singh replied. “I did my best to take the measure of her whilst you were away, and I confess I did not get far. Miss Stone seems a clear enough pool on the surface, but glimpsing the bottom is another matter.”