by Issy Brooke
“Thank you. Does it ever happen more than once a night?”
“No. And once it’s done, it’s done.”
“Does it occur at the same time each night?”
“No. And that drive me quite, quite mad. One is so on edge, you see, waiting. Waiting for it. I cannot rest now until it has been and gone. Then I can sleep.”
“Does it happen every night?”
“No. Most nights, though. It is a torture! If it does not happen, I do not sleep at all; I am waiting, all night for it.”
“And how long has it been happening?” She dropped her voice and leaned in so that the old lady could still hear her, but eavesdroppers outside could not. “Since Mrs Newman arrived, perhaps?”
“No, no,” Miss Dorothea said. “She has been here for many months, but the noise started up only very recently.”
“And yet, have you any suspicions of her?” Marianne recalled that the previous time, Miss Dorothea hadn’t seemed to speak warmly of Mrs Newman – although she had just had a midnight fright.
“No,” Miss Dorothea said. “I do not suspect her of anything. She is as frightened as I am.”
“And the boy?”
“He has been here over a year. There can be no connection. He is a poor, troubled lad.”
“Then actually, he is very likely to be the culprit,” Marianne said. “If only he could be sent back to school...” As she said it, she realised that was the perfect explanation for everything. He was a clever boy, after all. Perhaps he was manufacturing a mysterious noise, knowing he’d be suspected, and knowing he would be sent away to test such theories. They had been played, simply played by the boy.
How clever.
But Miss Dorothea was still shaking her head. “No, she has said that is impossible.”
“For him to have conjured up the noise, or to be sent to school?”
“He is a good lad. A good lad. I will see him right.”
“If the money could be found...”
Miss Dorothea coughed in indignation. “It’s all tied up in the house. If I could help him, I would. I promise you that. I would. There might be a way, if I sell some items, but she ... oh, you know.”
It was a delicate matter and a private one. She let it drop.
Marianne could not think of anything else to ask her. Miss Dorothea’s bird-claw hand was poking out from the sheets, and Marianne patted it awkwardly, about to take her leave.
Miss Dorothea’s fingers gripped her hand suddenly and Marianne was dragged closer to her face.
“There is something else in this house.”
“There are rats,” Marianne said. “Above you, in the attic. I am sorry to tell you, but don’t be alarmed.”
“I am not talking about rats. I am old. I know about rats. I know their sound. There is something else.”
“A person? Someone hiding?”
“Not someone. Something.”
“What? What have you seen, what have you heard?” Marianne said.
Miss Dorothea let go and Marianne heard a cough behind her in the corridor. Mrs Newman had returned. “Is everything all right? It had gone quiet and I was worried.”
“Of course, of course. I think your aunt is tired. I am so sorry if I have over-taxed her.”
With a flurry of apologies, Marianne gathered up her things from the antechamber, and let herself be escorted out of the house. She wondered about Miss Dorothea’s final words, and studied the younger Mrs Newman, and decided not to ask her any further questions.
She could not go to Inspector Gladstone and request yet more time. Her investigation had failed. She still suspected Tobias to be behind it all, but she was longing to know why. The school theory was tenuous at best and she would have been embarrassed to even try to explain it to anyone else.
She would have to let it go.
Seven
“Letting things go is not my strongest suit,” Marianne complained to her friend Simeon.
He laughed. “On the contrary. I’d argue that it’s your best trait!”
She pouted and looked around for something to throw at him, and then thought better of it. Nothing was as it seemed in the stage magician’s abode. He rented two rooms above a tailor’s workshop in London, a veritable palace of space for one person alone, and here he created illusions both large and small. The place was a huge trap for the unwary. If she threw a ball, it would probably unfurl into a peacock while it was still in the air.
“It is,” Simeon insisted. “What would have got you through your studies at university if not your dogged determination? What would have got you to London to take your degree at last, if not bloody-mindedness? What would keep you at your father’s side even when he is unwell? What would have kept you going when you were starting out as a professional investigator? If you were inclined to let things go, you would not be the success that you are now. You’d be a wife and a mother and unhappy. You’d turn to drink and laudanum and possibly affairs and scandal.”
It was almost sounding appealing – the drink and scandal part, at any rate. “Yet I am not a success,” she said mulishly. “I am poor and I have failed in my latest task. Now I must return to the police and tell them I cannot solve it. Then I will go home and face Phoebe’s mother. She is intent on marrying me off, and turning Phoebe into the perfectly moderate housewife, a shining example of Christian frugality and restraint.”
“Good heavens,” Simeon said, feigning an attack of the vapours as he clutched his throat with one hand and pressed the back of his other to his forehead, staggering against a tall wooden cabinet. “She must be some kind of miracle-working saint, for those two tasks are surely impossible.”
“What can I throw at you that won’t come apart in the air?” Marianne said crossly.
“Nothing. Don’t touch that stick! It is a sword.”
“Of course it is.” She let it drop. “Nothing is as it seems. Let me tell you about Rosedene. Perhaps you can spot something that I have missed.”
“May I continue working? I promise you I am listening,” he said. He was sanding down a long wooden box that was set up on a pair of trestles.
“Go ahead. It soothes me to watch others labour.”
“Ha, ha.”
She laid out the whole business to him, point by point. He was impressed by Tobias’s rat-scarer. “And it actually worked? Does the boy need a position?”
“As apprentice to you? Don’t be silly, Simeon, you can barely keep yourself in bread and coffee. Every time I come here, I expect to find you evicted and a family of Italian jewellery-makers here in your place.”
“Aha,” he said, flourishing a cloth and beginning to polish the smooth box. “Now you may laugh on the other side of your face, for I have changed! You are too rude to not ask how I am.”
“Oh, Simeon. Please tell me: how are you?”
“Well, since you ask,” he said, dripping with heavy sarcasm, “with such concern and genuine interest in my life...”
“Tell me, or I shall explore the uses of this stick. Sword. Thing.”
“I have taken your advice,” he said, finally ceasing his perpetual motion, and standing quite still. He gazed above Marianne’s head as he spoke, like he was uncomfortable meeting her eye. “You have told me for a long time that my talents do not lie as a performer on the stage. I have been unwilling to accept that.”
“I know,” she said gently. “And I don’t say that your talents lie elsewhere, exactly. Just that your performance needs adjustment.”
“You once said that I was better as scenery.”
“I might have done, but was I drunk?”
“Yes, and in vino veritas. But look, Marianne, look at this!” He gestured to the box that lay before him. “I have undertaken a commission for someone else. This is not for my own tricks. This is for the Marvellous Brothers Clay, and their magic show. What do you think? They are paying me handsomely for this contraption.”
She got up to examine it. “It is just a box. But I am sure that i
t is far more than it seems. Are there sliding panels? Mirrors?”
“Both, and more besides. I am honestly rather surprised at how much they are paying me.”
“You are worth it!” she exclaimed in pride. “Well done. You shall surely get as much satisfaction from seeing this in action as being on stage yourself. Um ... what does it do?”
“The woman gets in, and she disappears! I cannot show you the mechanism while it stands on the trestles. It must be on the floor. But this panel here moves on these runners, and this side is completely false – do you see?”
She tried to follow the action of the box’s sides but she could not completely picture it. “I look forward to seeing it for real,” she said. “Now, then. How would you recreate ghostly screaming?”
“There is much that does not make sense in what you told me,” he said. “The screams come once a night, and not every night, and not on a schedule. They cannot be traced to one source. They have no purpose. They are recent. They might be an accidental offshoot of the child’s pranks but how? And why at night? And from where? I would like to see the place myself.”
“I don’t think it is possible,” she said. “I doubt I shall ever be able to go back. It is all over, and I have failed. What a mess.”
“Don’t worry,” he told her, in an annoying but touching role reversal. “Stay strong, and I am sure everything will be all right. I know you. You will go to bed, and wake up the next morning full of ideas. Some of them might even be the right sort of ideas.”
“You are too kind.”
IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON when Marianne returned home to Woodfurlong. She slipped straight to the Garden Wing, and this time was successful in avoiding being seen by Mrs Davenport. She passed by her father’s room and poked her head in.
He was sitting in his favourite armchair in a pool of sunlight, his head back, and his eyes closed. He had lost more hair lately, she noticed. His nurse, the ancient and formidable Mrs Crouch, sat on a harsh upright chair with some mending in her lap. She nodded at Marianne, but pursed her lips, indicating silence. Marianne withdrew.
She changed her clothes and sat down at her desk. She had a small day room to herself, which doubled as a study, and alongside that was a shared laboratory. Truly, she was blessed in what she had been allowed at Woodfurlong, and she was ungrateful to chafe at living in someone else’s house. She had more here than she could ever afford on her own.
She smiled then, at her own shortcomings. I am far too independent for Mrs Davenport to be able to succeed in her machinations, she thought, and she allowed herself a little bit of glee at that. But only a little. Now she had an unpleasant task to perform, and she could put it off no longer. She pulled her writing set open and took out a narrow-nib pen, and some good laid paper, and set to work on a letter to Inspector Gladstone that detailed every inch of her recent failure.
Once it was written and dry, she folded it carefully in the old-fashioned way she had been taught at school, so that it became its own enclosure and she didn’t need one of the new envelopes, and laid it to one side.
She didn’t feel ready to send it yet.
As she sat in contemplation of events, gazing out of the window rather than look at the horrible white paper evidence of her defeat, someone knocked at her door. She twisted around as Phoebe came in before Marianne had even said she might enter.
Phoebe closed the door and hurried right over to Marianne’s side, agitation showing in every line of her.
“What is it?” Marianne asked in alarm, urging her to sit down. Phoebe drew up a chair and took Marianne’s hands in her own. She squeezed too hard.
“My dear cuz, I implore you, I beseech you; I need your help!”
“I told you, I am not going to poison your mother,” Marianne said. “Not fatally, anyway. Although I suppose it is true when they say that poisons and medicines differ only in degree.”
“Oh, goodness, could you? Well. Actually, no, it was not that which I came to ask you, but it’s worth knowing.”
“Forget I mentioned it.”
“No, no. I never forget anything of such usefulness.”
As the leading gossip-merchant in the area, such a skill had served Phoebe well over the years.
“So what can I help you with? I am having no luck with screaming,” Marianne said.
“I can scream, and frankly, I have been doing so every night, into my pillow,” Phoebe replied. “And once, today, in the middle of the morning, when I had to turn around and stuff my face into the curtains in the drawing room. It is on account of my mother, of course.” She sighed heavily. “Marianne, could you possibly advance me a small loan?”
It was the very last thing that Marianne could do. She had gathered together a small amount of money which she guarded jealously. It was to be her ticket out of Woodfurlong and into a place of her own. “How much?” she asked cautiously.
“Not so very much. It is just that before my mother arrived, I had already asked for a new gown to be made up for me, in the latest fashions, for the winter season, and some gloves of course, for they simply don’t last, and a fur muff, as Mrs Cogwell said that the onions had such thick skins this year and that means a hard winter, does it not?”
“What of your allowance from your husband?”
“Price is too far under the sway of my mother,” she said bitterly. “He defers to her in all things, saying her age gives her wisdom. And she says that I must learn to adapt my own dresses, and that I am giving society the impression that I am nothing better than an ill-bred hoyden. She told me I might as well paint my face.”
“You do paint your face.”
“Yes, but I do it so that it looks as if I have not. It is better that way.”
“Phoebe, do you really need a new dress?”
“I do,” she said, pouting. “And as I had ordered it before she arrived, I must honour my commitment. I cannot cancel. You do not understand. My mother does not understand. She is stuck in the past. It is true that people look to me to set an example, but they want me to show taste and wealth. My mother thinks people want me to show restraint but it simply isn’t true. Think of how small, and mean, and awful so many people’s lives are! I bring joy and hope if I am dressed well. Are women not supposed to be a delight for the eyes?”
“I agree with your mother, to be honest. We are supposed to be useful,” Marianne said.
“It is only a loan. Once she goes home, Price will loosen the purse strings once more. I shall pay you back with interest,” she added. “Enough to make it worth your while.”
“Usury, as well as pride and vanity,” Marianne said. “Not to mention the duplicity of going behind your mother’s back.”
“When did you become such a lover of scripture?”
Marianne pulled her hands free of Phoebe’s grasp, and rubbed at her temples. She could not really refuse. She paid no rent, and did not contribute to the food or general household budget. Mrs Crouch was paid for by Price, too. Marianne’s earnings bought her medicines, clothing, travel, and the rest was saved, stored away for the future.
“Very well, then. Of course I will help you.”
Phoebe clapped her hands. “Thank you, dear, dear cuz! You have positively saved me.”
Marianne took some money from her locked box.
“Good. Now go away before I change my mind.”
Phoebe danced to the door, clutching the little purse to her chest. “One more thing that you might do for me...” she said lightly.
“I’ve said no, about the poison.”
“No, not that, not yet. You must attend dinner tonight. You have missed too many meals and I am feeling the strain of making correct conversation with my mother.”
“And you think I can converse any better?”
“No, but listening to you try so hard to be good will amuse me.”
“I shall bring my father, too, and then you’ll be sorry.” Russell rarely dined with the family.
“I know that you dare not.” Phoebe
pulled an inelegant face, and was gone.
MARIANNE WAS DISTURBED a little while later by another knock on her door. This time it was Mrs Crouch, telling her she was having to leave early, and would Marianne sit with her father? He was asking for her. She dismissed Mrs Crouch – as if she had any say over the nurse’s movements, who would simply do as she pleased anyway – and went to talk with her father.
He was making sense, but he was tired. He asked her to read to him, but he could not quite follow the thread of the novel she chose. Then she tried the letters page of the newspaper, which had more success. It usually woke him up, and got him angry, which was something. Suddenly he told her to put the paper down, and asked what she had been doing lately.
She glowed with a warm feeling of affection. His illness was affecting his brain and some days she thought that he didn’t even know he had a daughter. In some of his fits, he’d called her by her mother’s name, and those nights she had cried, just a little.
She seized the chance to tell him everything about the mystery at Rosedene, hoping that his old analytical reasoning would show her what she had missed.
She ran on, almost breathless in her enthusiasm to share, and was just coming to the main point about Tobias’s rat-scarer when she heard him snore.
He was asleep, and probably had been for some time.
She stifled her disappointment, and went to dress for dinner.
Eight
Dinner did not improve her mood at all. Price was notably silent throughout. Phoebe and her mother were continuing a tight-lipped discussion about the way the meal was served. The Claverdon household, like most people who were of note, had moved to the modern style of service à la russe, which Mrs Davenport argued should make considerable economic savings. There was no need to display elaborate heaps of food laid across the table, much of which would not be eaten. The servings were brought out in careful, small portions, and given to each individual diner.