by Ken Follett
Then he heard Lydia say: "Why, you've grown a beard."
He spun around and stared into the darkness, stupefied.
She came forward into the circle of candlelight. Her blond hair was unpinned and hung around her shoulders. She wore a long, pale nightdress with a fitted bodice and a high waist. Her arms were bare and white. She was smiling.
They stood still, looking at one another. Several times she opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Feliks felt the blood rush to his loins. How long, he thought wildly, how long since I stood naked before a woman?
She moved, but it did not break the spell. She stepped forward and knelt at his feet. She closed her eyes and nuzzled his body. As Feliks looked down on her unseeing face, candlelight glinted off the tears on her cheeks.
Lydia was nineteen again, and her body was young and strong and tireless. The simple wedding was over, and she and her new husband were in the little cottage they had taken in the country. Outside, snow fell quietly in the garden. They made love by candlelight. She kissed him all over, and he said: "I have always loved you, all these years," although it was only weeks since they had met. His beard brushed her breasts, although she could not remember his growing a beard. She watched his hands, busy all over her body, in all the secret places, and she said: "It's you, you're doing this to me, it's you, Feliks, Feliks," as if there had ever been anyone else who did these things to her, who gave her this rolling, swelling pleasure. With her long fingernail she scratched his shoulder. She watched as the blood welled up, then leaned forward and licked it greedily. "You're an animal," he said. They touched one another busily, all the time; they were like children let loose in a sweet shop, moving restlessly from one thing to another, touching and looking and tasting, unable to believe in their astonishing good fortune. She said: "I'm so glad we ran away together," and for some reason that made him look sad, so she said: "Stick your finger up me," and the sad look went and desire masked his face, but she realized that she was crying, and she could not understand why. Suddenly she realized that this was a dream, and she was terrified of waking up, so she said: "Let's do it now, quickly," and they came together, and she smiled through her tears and said: "We fit." They seemed to move like dancers, or courting butterflies, and she said: "This is ever so nice, dear Jesus this is ever so nice," and then she said: "I thought this would never happen to me again," and her breath came in sobs. He buried his face in her neck, but she took his head in her hands and pushed it away so that she could see him. Now she knew that this was not a dream. She was awake. There was a taut string stretched between the back of her throat and the base of her spine, and every time it vibrated, her whole body sang a single note of pleasure which got louder and louder. "Look at me!" she said as she lost control, and he said gently: "I'm looking," and the note got louder. "I'm wicked!" she cried as the climax hit her. "Look at me, I'm wicked!" and her body convulsed, and the string got tighter and tighter and the pleasure more piercing until she felt she was losing her mind, and then the last high note of joy broke the string and she slumped and fainted.
Feliks laid her gently on the floor. Her face in the candlelight was peaceful, all the tension gone; she looked like one who had died happy. She was pale, but breathing normally. She had been half asleep, probably drugged, Feliks knew, but he did not care. He felt drained and weak and helpless and grateful, and very much in love. We could start again, he thought: she's a free woman, she could leave her husband, we could live in Switzerland, Charlotte could join us--
This is not an opium dream, he told himself. He and Lydia had made such plans before, in St. Petersburg, nineteen years ago; and they had been utterly impotent against the wishes of respectable people. It doesn't happen, not in real life, he thought; they would frustrate us all over again.
They will never let me have her.
But I shall have my revenge.
He got to his feet and quickly put on his clothes. He picked up the candle. He looked at her once more. Her eyes were still closed. He wanted to touch her once more, to kiss her soft mouth. He hardened his heart. Never again, he thought. He turned and went through the door.
He walked softly along the carpeted corridor and down the stairs. His candle made weird moving shadows in the doorways. I may die tonight, but not before I have killed Orlov and Walden, he thought. I have seen my daughter, I have lain with my wife; now I will kill my enemies, and then I can die.
On the second-floor landing he stepped on a hard floor and his boot made a loud noise. He froze and listened. He saw that there was no carpet here, but a marble floor. He waited. There was no noise from the rest of the house. He took off his boots and went on in his bare feet--he had no socks.
The lights were out all over the house. Would anyone be roaming around? Might someone come down to raid the larder, feeling hungry in the middle of the night? Might a butler dream he heard noises and make a tour of the house to check? Might Orlov's bodyguards need to go to the bathroom? Feliks strained his hearing, ready to snuff out the candle and hide at the slightest noise.
He stopped in the hall and took from his coat pocket the plans of the house Charlotte had drawn for him. He consulted the ground-floor plan briefly, holding the candle close to the paper, then turned to his right and padded along the corridor.
He went through the library into the gun room.
He closed the door softly behind him and looked around. A great hideous head seemed to leap at him from the wall, and he jumped, and grunted with fear. The candle went out. In the darkness he realized he had seen a tiger's head, stuffed and mounted on the wall. He lit the candle again. There were trophies all around the walls: a lion, a deer, and even a rhinoceros. Walden had done some big-game hunting in his time. There was also a big fish in a glass case.
Feliks put the candle down on the table. The guns were racked along one wall. There were three pairs of double-barreled shotguns, a Winchester rifle and something that Feliks thought must be an elephant gun. He had never seen an elephant gun. He had never seen an elephant. The guns were secured by a chain through their trigger guards. Feliks looked along the chain. It was fastened by a large padlock to a bracket screwed into the wooden end of the rack.
Feliks considered what to do. He had to have a gun. He thought he might be able to snap the padlock, given a tough piece of iron such as a screwdriver to use as a lever; but it seemed to him that it might be easier to unscrew the bracket from the wood of the rack and then pass chain, padlock and bracket through the trigger guards to free the guns.
He looked again at Charlotte's plan. Next to the gun room was the flower room. He picked up his candle and went through the communicating door. He found himself in a small, cold room with a marble table and a stone sink. He heard a footstep. He doused his candle and crouched down. The sound had come from outside, from the gravel path: it had to be one of the sentries. The light of a flashlight flickered outside. Feliks flattened himself against the door, beside the window. The light grew stronger and the footsteps became louder. They stopped right outside and the flashlight shone in through the window. By its light Feliks could see a rack over the sink and a few tools hanging by hooks: shears, secateurs, a small hoe and a knife. The sentry tried the door against which Feliks stood. It was locked. The footsteps moved away and the light went. Feliks waited a moment. What would the sentry do? Presumably he had seen the glimmer of Feliks's candle. But he might think it had been the reflection of his own torch. Or someone in the house might have had a perfectly legitimate reason to go into the flower room. Or the sentry might be the ultracautious type, and come and check.
Leaving the doors open, Feliks went from the flower room, through the gun room, and into the library, feeling his way in the dark, holding his unlit candle in his hand. He sat on the floor in the library behind a big leather sofa and counted slowly to one thousand. Nobody came. The sentry was not the cautious type.
He went back into the gun room and lit the candle. The windows were heavily curtained here--there had
been no curtains in the flower room. He went cautiously into the flower room, took the knife he had seen over the rack, came back into the gun room and bent over the gun rack. He used the blade of the knife to undo the screws that held the bracket to the wood of the rack. The wood was old and hard, but eventually the screws came loose and he was able to unchain the guns.
There were three cupboards in the room. One held bottles of brandy and whiskey, together with glasses. Another held bound copies of a magazine called Horse and Hound and a huge leather-bound ledger marked GAME BOOK. The third was locked: that must be where the ammunition was kept.
Feliks broke the lock with the garden knife.
Of the three types of guns available--Winchester, shotgun or elephant gun--he preferred the Winchester. However, as he searched through the boxes of ammunition he realized there were no cartridges here either for the Winchester or for the elephant gun: those weapons must have been kept as souvenirs. He had to be content with a shotgun. All three pairs were twelve-bore, and all the ammunition consisted of cartridges of number-six shot. To be sure of killing his man he would have to fire at close range--no more than twenty yards, to be absolutely certain. And he would have only two shots before reloading.
Still, he thought, I only want to kill two people.
The image of Lydia lying on the nursery floor kept coming back to him. When he thought of how they had made love, he felt exultant. He no longer felt the fatalism which had gripped him immediately afterward. Why should I die? he thought. And when I have killed Walden, who knows what might happen then?
He loaded the gun
And now, Lydia thought, I shall have to kill myself.
She saw no other possibility. She had descended to the depths of depravity for the second time in her life. All her years of self-discipline had come to nothing, just because Feliks had returned. She could not live with the knowledge of what she was. She wanted to die, now.
She considered how it might be done. What could she take that was poisonous? There must be rat poison somewhere on the premises, but of course she did not know where. An overdose of laudanum? She was not sure she had enough. You could kill yourself with gas, she recalled, but Stephen had converted the house to electric light. She wondered whether the top stories were high enough for her to die by jumping from a window. She was afraid she might merely break her back and be paralyzed for years. She did not think she had the courage to slash her wrists; and besides, it would take so long to bleed to death. The quickest way would be to shoot herself. She thought she could probably load a gun and fire it: she had seen it done innumerable times. But, she remembered, the guns were locked up.
Then she thought of the lake. Yes, that was the answer. She would go to her room and put on a robe; then she would leave the house by a side door, so that the policemen should not see her; and she would walk across the west side of the park, beside the rhododendrons, and through the woods until she came to the water's edge; then she would just keep walking, until the cool water closed over her head; then she would open her mouth, and a minute or so later it would be all over.
She left the nursery and walked along the corridor in the dark. She saw a light under Charlotte's door, and hesitated. She wanted to see her little girl one last time. The key was in the lock on the outside. She unlocked the door and went in.
Charlotte sat in a chair by the window, fully dressed but asleep. Her face was pale but for the redness around her eyes. She had unpinned her hair. Lydia closed the door and went over to her. Charlotte opened her eyes.
"What's happened?" she said.
"Nothing," Lydia said. She sat down.
Charlotte said: "Do you remember when Nannie went away?"
"Yes. You were old enough for a governess, and I didn't have another baby."
"I had forgotten all about it for years. I've just remembered. You never knew, did you, that I thought Nannie was my mother?"
"I don't know . . . did you think so? You always called me Mama, and her Nannie . . ."
"Yes." Charlotte spoke slowly, almost desultorily, as if she were lost in the fog of distant memory. "You were Mama, and Nannie was Nannie, but everybody had a mother, you see, and when Nannie said you were my mother, I said don't be silly, Nannie, you are my mother. And Nannie just laughed. Then you sent her away. I was broken-hearted."
"I never realized . . ."
"Marya never told you, of course--what governess would?"
Charlotte was just repeating the memory, not accusing her mother, just explaining something. She went on: "So you see, I have the wrong mother, and now I have the wrong father, too. The new thing made me remember the old, I suppose."
Lydia said: "You must hate me. I understand. I hate myself."
"I don't hate you, Mama. I've been dreadfully angry toward you, but I've never hated you."
"But you think I'm a hypocrite."
"Not even that."
A feeling of peace came over Lydia.
Charlotte said: "I'm beginning to understand why you're so fiercely respectable, why you were so determined that I should never know anything of sex . . . you just wanted to save me from what happened to you. And I've found out that there are hard decisions, and that sometimes one can't tell what's good and right to do; and I think I've judged you harshly, when I had no right to judge you at all . . . and I'm not very proud of myself."
"Do you know that I love you?"
"Yes . . . and I love you, Mama, and that's why I feel so wretched."
Lydia was dazed. This was the last thing she had expected. After all that had happened--the lies, the treachery, the anger, the bitterness--Charlotte still loved her. She was suffused with a kind of tranquil joy. Kill myself? she thought. Why should I kill myself?
"We should have talked like this before," Lydia said.
"Oh, you've no idea how much I wanted to," Charlotte said. "You were always so good at telling me how to curtsy, and carry my train, and sit down gracefully, and put up my hair . . . and I longed for you to explain important things to me in the same way--about falling in love and having babies--but you never did."
"I never could," Lydia said. "I don't know why."
Charlotte yawned. "I think I'll sleep now." She stood up.
Lydia kissed her cheek, then embraced her.
Charlotte said: "I love Feliks, too, you know; that hasn't changed."
"I understand," said Lydia. "I do, too."
"Good night, Mama."
"Good night."
Lydia went out quickly and closed the door behind her. She hesitated outside. What would Charlotte do if the door were left unlocked? Lydia decided to save her the anxiety of the decision. She turned the key in the lock.
She went down the stairs, heading for her own room. She was so glad she had talked to Charlotte. Perhaps, she thought, this family could be mended, after all; I've no idea how, but surely it might be done. She went into her room.
"Where have you been?" said Stephen.
Now that Feliks had a weapon, all he had to do was get Orlov out of his room. He knew how to do that. He was going to burn the house down.
Carrying the gun in one hand and the candle in the other, he walked--still barefoot--through the west wing and across the hall into the drawing room. Just a few more minutes, he thought; give me just a few more minutes and I will be done. He passed through two dining rooms and a serving room and entered the kitchens. Here Charlotte's plans became vague, and he had to search for the way out. He found a large rough-hewn door closed with a bar. He lifted the bar and quietly opened the door.
He put out his candle and waited in the doorway. After a minute or so he found he could just about make out the outlines of the buildings. That was a relief: he was afraid to use the candle outside because of the sentries.
In front of him was a small cobbled courtyard. On its far side, if the plan was right, there was a garage, a workshop, and--a petroleum tank.
He crossed the yard. The building in front of him had once been a barn he gu
essed. Part of it was enclosed--the workshop, perhaps--and the rest was open. He could vaguely make out the great round headlamps of two large cars. Where was the fuel tank? He looked up. The building was quite high. He stepped forward, and something hit his forehead. It was a length of flexible pipe with a nozzle at the end. It hung down from the upper part of the building.
It made sense: they put the cars in the barn and the petroleum tank in the hayloft. They simply drove the cars into the courtyard and filled them with fuel from the pipe.
Good! he thought.
Now he needed a container: a two-gallon can would be ideal. He entered the garage and walked around the cars, feeling with his feet, careful not to stumble over anything noisy.
There were no cans.
He recalled the plans again. He was close to the kitchen garden. There might be a watering can in that region. He was about to go and look when he heard a sniff.
He froze.
The policeman went by.
Feliks could hear the beat of his own heart.
The light from the policeman's oil lamp meandered around the courtyard. Did I shut the kitchen door? Feliks thought in a panic. The lamp shone on the door: it looked shut.
The policeman went on.
Feliks realized he had been holding his breath, and he let it out in a long sigh.
He gave the policeman a minute to get some distance away; then he went in the same direction, looking for the kitchen garden.
He found no cans there, but he stumbled over a coil of hose. He estimated its length at about a hundred feet. It gave him a wicked idea.
First he needed to know how frequently the policeman patrolled. He began to count. Still counting, he carried the garden hose back to the courtyard and concealed it and himself behind the motor cars.