Pompey whined and scratched again.
It would be better to face the truth quickly. Like pulling a tooth or ripping off a bandage. Courage, Louise, he used to say. Courage. She forced her eyes open.
He had gone.
The bed was empty, its covers thrown back to reveal a sweaty stain on the mattress and the pillow left at an angle. Louise gaped at it.
Dawn had broken without her realising. The window sash was raised, letting in a thin stream of air. There was no conceivable way he could have climbed out of it. The gap was too narrow, the drop too high.
The door jolted as Pompey jumped against it.
Papa must have glided out silently and shut the door behind him.
She struggled to her feet. What a traitor she was, what an absolute fool! How had she managed to drift off when Papa needed her? She opened the door and Pompey spilled in, jumping at her legs with urgency. He had come to fetch her, she realised. This could not bode well.
‘Where is he, boy? Help me find him.’
He streaked straight along the corridor and thumped down the stairs.
Louise followed, calling breathlessly for Creeda as she went.
The maid emerged from the west wing, holding Louise’s teapot and a dusting rag.
‘Where is Dr Pinecroft? Did you not see him? Hear him?’
Creeda paled. ‘Has he gone?’
Pompey was pawing at the front door.
‘Come with me,’ Louise demanded as she crossed the hall to stand behind her dog. The bolts were already drawn back. Papa must have gone down to the beach, to the men. To Harry …
Panic rolled in like a storm.
She opened the door and pulled Creeda, who was still clutching the teapot, outside with her. Pompey shot between their legs, and round the house.
How innocent the scene appeared. Light touched the clover flowering on the cliff. The sun burnt far above the horizon and the day had begun in earnest. A soft breeze blew through the ash leaves and there was a gentle green scent in the air.
Anticipating the direction of their steps, Creeda attempted to turn back. Louise tightened her grip on the maid’s arm and forced her on.
‘Don’t make me go,’ Creeda pleaded. ‘Not to the fairy cave!’
Louise felt a pinch of sympathy but it was distant, as if it were being experienced by someone else.
Pompey did not bark. That was the eerie thing. As they half-ran, half-fell down the track, they saw him standing on the shore, his ears raised, the wind ruffling through his fur. Bearing witness.
Louise followed his gaze a little further out to sea.
‘Oh God.’
A dark hump lay in the water. Foam seethed around it, fluttering the edges. In a few more steps she could see the knotted hair and the unravelled hem of a shirt. It was a man. A man face down in the shallows.
‘Papa!’ she screamed. ‘Papa!’
She began to run.
Damp sand snatched the shoes from her feet, but she did not stop. She tugged Creeda with her, all the way to the water’s edge, where she was forced to drop the maid’s arm and hold up her skirts. The waves kept trying to shove her back. She struggled to keep her balance, but she managed to wade knee-deep, close enough to touch the clammy, swollen skin.
It was not her father.
Water inflated the loose shirt and breeches that hung about the withered frame, pushing the man in her direction. Swallowing her horror, Louise grabbed hold of his sleeve cuff and began to drag him towards the shore. He was heavy – far heavier than he looked – and her wet skirts made it feel like she was walking in shackles, but the tide was working with her, now. She saw the shoreline coming closer, Pompey and Creeda poised at its edge.
‘Help me,’ Louise cried.
With an absurd amount of care, Creeda set the teapot down beside Pompey and paddled towards her.
Together, they heaved the man over to face the sky.
It was Michael.
The consumption had not carried him off. His jaw hung open, slack, revealing smashed teeth and a mouth stuffed full of sand. He had not stumbled out of the cave and fallen into the water to drown. Someone had done this to him.
Louise stared at the corpse, sure her vision would suddenly clear and reveal a different picture. If she could only concentrate, surely this must change? No one could want to kill Michael …
‘Miss.’ Creeda’s hand on her shoulder, demanding her attention. Angrily, she brushed it off. ‘Miss!’
She looked up. Creeda’s hair lifted on the wind. She looked like a saint: stern, pitying, righteous. She pointed behind Louise to where Pompey still gazed, transfixed. ‘I … I told you he wasn’t himself, miss.’
Slowly, Louise turned.
There were more. Two protrusions from the ocean, two more human rocks. And just beyond, a third that still thrashed and scattered water.
Old Seth.
Papa was holding him down.
Her feet carried her forward before she authorised them to do so.
Veins stood out on her father’s arms and forehead. His features were distorted, goblin-like. He thrust down on the transparent back of Seth’s shirt, a satisfied grimace appearing as the old man’s motions became steadily weaker.
Pompey barked.
It did not break the spell. Papa swivelled his head to watch them, but he was a stranger still. A blood vessel had burst in his right eye, streaking the white with red like a gory egg.
Louise sobbed. ‘Stop it! Let him go, P—’
She could not finish. Could not call this creature Papa.
‘Changelings!’ he bellowed over the roar of the surf. The air of self-congratulation turned her stomach. ‘They were changelings.’
Seth twitched and grew limp.
Papa discarded him the way he would a used bandage. Coughing, he began to wade towards her.
‘It was all as Creeda said! Dirty creatures, sickly, fairy stock.’ Staggering up the shore, he threw his arms wide. Water dripped from his sleeves like blood. ‘Oh, they wanted to drag me down, to ruin my reputation along with everything else, but I have bested them. Fairies are a poor match for a man of science! See, Louise! I have found the cure for all ills! I have saved our men!’
‘You killed them!’
His smile wavered. ‘No. No, I destroyed the fairies, Louise. They tricked us …’ His body heaved with another cough. ‘But I have found the solution. They are gone now, and they will be forced to send our men back. Healthy men.’
‘Our men are dead!’ she screamed. ‘They were people. People, and you have killed them!’
There was a moment with only the rush of waves and a chough calling.
Something hardened in his jaw. ‘You do not believe me. My own daughter!’ He ran a hand through his wild hair and gave a harsh, bruised laugh. ‘God, I thought you were my equal, but you are not. Your mind is too narrow to grasp the advance of our discoveries. You are just like those damned old college fograms, standing in the way of progress.’
Even after all she had seen and heard, these words cut her to the quick.
‘You are very sick …’ she tried to explain. ‘The fever …’
That bloody eye bored into her, its pupil sharp and black as a poker. ‘No. No, I am not the one in need of treatment. How foolish I was not to see before. You reek of their glamour. My real daughter would have believed me.’
He sprang. Louise stumbled back, her wet skirts tangled around her legs. He was coming for her and he would drown her, too.
She began to run away but she was slow, painfully slow; her soaked dress pulled her back and she could hardly breathe for tears. Pompey and Creeda were not far off. If she could only reach them …
‘Help me!’
She tripped. Pain exploded in her foot where it had collided with a rock or some other debris; she hardly knew what it was, for the next moment she was scrabbling in the sand.
‘Help!’
White flashed past her. She heard a growl and then a shout of pain.
Pompey. Pompey had come to her rescue.
Painfully, she climbed to her knees. Red speckled the sand. Pompey had driven his teeth into Papa’s calf and clung on with the strength of a bulldog. He was not large, but Papa couldn’t shake him off. The pair of them flailed, inseparable.
It was only as Louise hauled herself to her feet that she noticed the teapot on its side, without its lid. That was what had tripped her. Not a rock or seaweed but china. She remembered how Papa had given it to her, a lifetime ago.
‘Get off me, you damned cur!’
The man who looked like her father knelt on the ground, his murderous hands buried in fur. Papa had cossetted Pompey from a puppy, taught him tricks, fed him scraps from the table. Now he had his fingers around his throat.
The dog’s paws flailed as he let out a strangled whine, his brown eyes bulging in panic. Papa began to squeeze.
She did not think. She picked up the teapot, ran at her father and cracked it over his head.
She should not have heard the sound, not with the waves lapping, the cry of the gulls and Pompey coughing at his sudden release. But everything seemed to shatter with that pot.
A warped mask glared up at her, astonished. Shards of china were driven deep into its temple. It fell back, hard – or perhaps she did. It happened too fast for her to tell. The last things she saw were those white porcelain chips and the blood, welling like an ocean beneath.
Chapter 38
Louise’s hand hurt. That was the sensation that pulled her back to consciousness. It rested on the arm of a chair. Small white fragments, like the teeth of a tiny creature, were embedded in the knuckles. She watched with strange detachment as blood oozed from her skin.
Through her left eye, the image was clear. But in the right it doubled, quadrupled, splintered into a thousand pieces. It took her a moment to realise it was her spectacles: the right lens had cracked.
The chair she sat on was made of horsehair. It moulded to her body, cradled her. She wondered if she should try to stand, but the desire evaporated before it was fully formed. She felt sewn in. Carefully contained. One false movement would ruin the balance.
Pompey mumbled at her side. He was staring opposite, at the empty hearth and the china Creeda had displayed upon it. Reaching up to her face, Louise removed her broken spectacles. Without them, she could not discern the individual shapes, only smudges of blue. Cool, elegant blue. It doused the red that threatened to spread across her mind.
‘Did everything ee asked, Creeda.’ It was Gerren, his voice distant, like everything else.
There was a gentle scratch inside her head. Gerren … he should not be there. Had she not told Creeda to send him to town? She tried to remember, but could not. Memories slipped through her hands like sand. It did not matter. Nothing mattered, now.
‘Smashed the dam,’ he went on. ‘When the tide come in, happen it’ll look like an accident.’
‘It’s only the doctor they’ll mind.’
‘Rock might’ve hit un,’ he suggested. ‘Swept by a wave and … bam!’
She flinched.
‘They shouldn’t ask too many questions,’ Creeda assured him. ‘It’s no wonder to have a group of consumptives die. It’s only the doctor’s head we’ll need to explain, and he was living in a cave full of convicts. If the coroner won’t believe an accident … Well, it won’t take much to persuade him one of them criminals hit our master.’
Once, Louise would have told her that the coroners were not medically trained. That even if they suspected murder, it would take a rich and interested party to pay before they sought prosecution. But her worldly knowledge no longer seemed important. It felt like a story she had read long ago.
‘Loss of blood, were it?’ Gerren asked softly.
‘Think so. Who can know? It wasn’t human, Gerren. At the end there … that was a fairy.’
The idea did not seem so very unlikely to Louise now. There was certainly something, peopling the silence; she could feel it, as surely as she had felt death prowling around the men.
‘Their bodies.’ She sounded listless, unlike herself. ‘What will you do with the bodies?’
A hand stroked her arm. ‘Hush, now.’
‘The money it would cost to bury them all …’
‘There’s more than one way to dispose of bones, miss. I know just what to do.’
Of course she did. Creeda knew. She knew all the things Louise did not.
‘He is dead, then. My …’ She trailed off. She had not noticed before that this room resembled the cave, when the light was shut out. Dark brown walls pressing close. The gloom and the chill. She had loathed that cave, but now it made her feel better. It reminded her of being with Harry.
‘Miss, it wasn’t your father,’ Creeda insisted. An edge of panic crept into her voice. ‘Don’t you see? They got the men and then they came after you. They wanted you and me.’
Louise exhaled. Even that was an effort. She wanted to see them, to see the fairies dancing. The pretty, dainty fairies she had read of as a child. Not cruel and savage like that man on the beach.
‘Has my father been taken by the fairies, Creeda?’
‘Yes, miss. I’m afraid he has.’
Her ribs seemed to scrape against her heart. ‘And I’ll never see him again.’
‘Well …’ Creeda took a breath. ‘I don’t know about that. Maybe you will. I came back, didn’t I? One of them brought me back.’
Back from under the ground. Could it happen? She did not see why not. Everything else Creeda had said had come to pass.
‘You could … stay here,’ Creeda went on, tremulous. ‘In this house, close to the cave. Just in case. But you’d need me here. To protect you from them.’
She could not imagine parting with the girl now. Could not imagine a future at all. Vague images of chains and straw flickered in her mind. That was right. Creeda had been threatened with incarceration in the madhouse. As if that would help her.
She thought of medicine and it was like mourning for a lost love. A sweetheart whose true colours gave only disillusionment. Mama, Kitty, Francis, Harry, Papa … physic had not saved a single one of them. It had left her with nothing, not even faith in the science that had once been her passion.
‘Will your father not come to fetch you away from here?’ she asked wearily.
‘Not if you write,’ Creeda pleaded. ‘Not if you tell him you’re a nurse, and you’ll care for me now the doctor’s gone. He’s got plenty of money, he’ll keep paying for me …’
Louise sighed. ‘I will write whatever you wish. Sign whatever you want me to.’
‘We’ll look after each other, miss. We’ll wait for them to be returned. What do you say?’
Louise did not blink. It was not only china that lay before her. It was a choice.
She could believe that Harry was gone forever, his life a pointless waste; that her beloved father, driven mad with grief and illness, had committed the gravest of sins; and that she had murdered both. There was no heaven, no forgiveness, for any of them.
Or there was Creeda’s way. She could believe they were coming back. Stare deep into the china and picture two men blinking, stumbling into the light and the welcome spray of the waves.
‘I will wait,’ she said. ‘I will wait as long as it takes.’
PART SEVEN
Pixy-Led
Chapter 39
I did not believe Miss Pinecroft when she said it was too dangerous for me to spend a night in the china room. Now that morning has come, I wish I had listened to her.
I retch into Miss Pinecroft’s chamber pot again and again.
A spell. It must be a spell.
Creeda has done this to me.
The muscles of my stomach heave, beyond my control. How they burn. Either side of the chamber pot, my hands appear soft and bloated. I drive my fingernails into the floorboards as an anchor.
Every spell requires a lock of hair. That was why I found Miss Pinecroft’s brush picked
clean. The crone must be controlling my mistress, somehow, causing harm in subtle and insidious ways through the power of hair.
And now she has mine.
‘Hester?’ It is Miss Pinecroft. Through watery eyes I peer at her; the lady and her chair are nothing more than a blur to me.
I cannot answer her.
Dawn dribbles beneath the curtains, pale as death. It grazes my hands but does not light the china room. Nothing, it seems, can illuminate this infernal chamber and its paganism.
I close my eyes and focus on breathing.
The tide draws breath with me, lapping in and out.
Gradually, my insides cease their bubbling. My belly settles. Exhausted and giddy with relief, I fall back onto my haunches.
Floorboards bump upstairs. I hear clattering down the corridor and realise it must be Merryn, going to wake the kitchen from its slumber.
Should I tell Merryn?
Once, I might have done so. But if my behaviour has not already convinced her I am soft in the head, this story will do it. I can picture myself streaking into the kitchen, dishevelled and gaunt, rambling about Creeda cutting my hair for witchcraft.
Can she be a witch? Both Merryn and Lowena mock her, yet no harm has befallen them. I recall my own brew, mixed in the cold white-tile kitchen of Hanover Square. There was no dark magic involved there. The fault was entirely human.
Scrabbling to my feet, I lurch towards the door.
Miss Pinecroft releases her breath.
The corridor rocks. With every step, the floor tilts in a different direction, but somehow I manage to stagger on, through the white haze of the stucco hall and beyond.
Heat reaches out and takes me by the hand, leading me to the kitchen where the fire spits.
‘Merryn.’
She jumps as I haul myself into the room. How young she looks. I realise now that Merryn does not hate me for my previous outburst: she is frightened of me.
She shrinks close to the wall, no informant ready to run to the magistrate; just a poor girl who does not want to be shouted at.
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