The shrill cries of the blackbirds became frantic, then fell silent, and a flock of crows rose suddenly from a spinney, flapping blackly across our path. Sidney Grice crossed his arms over his head, his cane raised like a sword about him. He darted towards the mulberry and the crows disappeared.
‘They will not harm you, sir.’ Cutteridge held back a long bramble for us to pass.
‘Their very existence harms me.’ My guardian put a hand to his right eye and shuddered. ‘No wonder they are called a murder.’
‘Now who is being poetic?’ I asked as we rounded a clump of skyward-straining bamboo, the stems as thick as pine trees, and found ourselves in a clearing. The gravel was still tangled with creepers and thistles, but the canopy was gone and ahead of us stood a massive edifice of grey stones. Amongst the confusion of soaring towers and angular turrets were domes and spires, closed balconies and empty niches, jutting ledges, crenelated walls and windows of every shape high overhead – arches rounded and pointed; circular and oval; square and rectangular; many with stained glass, some unglazed, some with panes smashed, some no more than archers’ slits. The walls were strewn with ivy, all but obscuring many of the openings.
A clock tower leaned to the right of us, the time fixed at eleven fifty-nine.
‘One minute to midnight,’ Sidney Grice observed.
‘Or noon,’ I said.
‘Midnight,’ he insisted.
There was a dead pigeon under a dock leaf, its breast bursting with wiry red worms.
‘The locals call this the Madhouse,’ Cutteridge told me. ‘They say the architect lost his mind after he built it.’
‘After?’ I queried and he smiled crookedly.
‘Part of the trouble is that every Baron Foskett had his own ideas on remodelling the house, but all of them died before they could realize their intentions. Please follow me, sir, miss.’
We went up the wide marble steps – tilted and cracked, slippery green with algae – that led to massive bleached oak doors, the right-hand one being already open, and into a great hall, lit only by the entrance, the windows being heavily curtained and the central lantern skylight being boarded over from the outside.
‘I shall inform the baroness that you have arrived,’ Cutteridge said and made his way up the cantilevered stairs, surprisingly strongly for a man of his age, while we stood under the high ribbed ceiling, the plaster blistered and fissured, and looked about us. The walls were grey and tidemarks had crept up and down the sides. The smell of damp and mould was almost suffocating. I pointed to the floor, broad planks with a threadbare Persian rug thrown over, in front of a huge, cobwebbed marble fireplace and littered with droppings.
‘Rat?’ I suggested.
‘And bat.’ My guardian’s eye was misty. ‘I remember liveried footmen on duty night and day, ostlers holding magnificent black horses on the driveway, gold and green coaches with coachmen uniformed to match, French maids dusting these mirrors, and valets bustling with their masters’ wardrobes. This hall was filled with flowers – roses from the garden in summer and rare orchids from the hothouse in winter. There was an ornamented spruce in every room at Christmas.’
I had never heard him so lyrical about anything before, not even murder.
‘So what happened?’
‘Death and decay,’ he said. ‘When society rots, it rots from the top. The greatest of our families are in decline now – loss of land and power – wealth squandered and bloodstock contaminated by marriages to peasants and Americans, which amount to the same thing.’ He lifted back a curtain and a dull rhombus of day fell down the wall and over the floor. ‘Look.’ The windows were scratched, every pane of glass being filled with columns of numbers – thousands upon thousands of tiny digits in neat rows disappearing behind the cobwebs. ‘Rupert loved numbers. He would cram his journals with them. Sometimes he only spoke in equations.’
‘How entertaining,’ I said.
‘Indeed.’ He put on his pince-nez and said excitedly, ‘What an unusual web. Clearly the spider has a damaged front right leg.’ He took out his notebook to sketch an outline of it.
‘A useful clue’ – I took a look – ‘if you wish to track down the killer of that lacewing.’
He let the curtain drop and the daylight scrambled away.
There were panelled doors ajar on the right-hand side of the hall. I wandered over and pushed them apart, the cream paint peeling like birch bark to my touch. They led into a long wide gallery, the full-length windows covered by frayed satin curtains, the walls draped with faded tapestries, the chandeliers bagged in cotton sheets and the floor patterned with snail tracks.
A tall frame hung on the left-hand wall with a clean white sheet over it. I lifted the cloth aside and saw a full-length portrait – a slender, elegant woman in an ivory and silver-threaded gown, with one hand resting lightly on the head of an Afghan hound.
There was an enormous mirror, fixed floor to ceiling and bordered by dull gold ferns. The glass was covered by a dust sheet. I wiped the surface through a triangular rip and something moved, ghost-like, deep behind the tarnished backing.
‘Is she not lovely?’ Cutteridge said so suddenly behind me that I jumped.
‘Quite beautiful,’ I said. ‘Is that Baroness Foskett?’
‘In the first year of her marriage.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Ah, the balls we had here, the glittering ladies, the aristocratic men, the sparkling conversation, the baths of iced champagne, the music, the laughter… Oh, miss, if you could have been here…’ He drifted through his memories for a moment. ‘But that was all so very long ago.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘All life is dust, miss.’ Cutteridge wheezed long and wearily. ‘Dust and vipers.’ He straightened his cuff. ‘Her ladyship will see you now.’
The three of us ascended the staircase. I refrained from observing that most of life’s dust appeared to have settled in that house, for there was not a surface that was not encrusted in it.
‘Mind the banister rail.’ My guardian reached over and demonstrated how easily it wobbled. I stuck close to the wall, the steps bowing and creaking under our feet as we climbed.
‘I expect you used to slide down these,’ I said to my guardian.
‘That would have been frivolous,’ he said.
‘I did once,’ Cutteridge declared. ‘When I was the under-butler, the late Baron Reginald bet me a month’s wages to a hundred guineas I could not do it carrying a tray of sherry glasses. I slipped off at the first turn and broke both arms. So I lost six months’ wages anyway.’ His shoulders quaked in remembered mirth.
‘How jolly,’ I said.
‘Happy times,’ Cutteridge agreed as we paused on a half-landing. ‘Master Rupert made an attempt as well, but he was disadvantaged by his thumb.’
‘The Foskett males had an extra spur of bone…’ Sidney Grice explained.
‘Is that what he scratched the window with?’ I whispered.
‘Which made it difficult for them to grip things tightly,’ my guardian continued flatly.
‘Master Rupert broke his ankle and it never really healed,’ Cutteridge continued. ‘The game was banned after that.’
‘What a shame,’ I commented. ‘How many servants work here now?’
‘I am the last, I fear.’
Sidney Grice was quiet, seemingly lost in wonder at his surroundings. A portrait hung lopsidedly, so darkened that all I could make out was part of an ear and two eyes gaping from the grime. I peered gingerly over the banister. We must have been thirty feet up by the time we reached the first floor.
The stairs wound upwards and a corridor disappeared into the darkness on either side. Here the windows were all shuttered, the light creeping between warped slats, weak and grey on to the bare boards. Even the dust specks floating in numberless argent stars only served to add to the gloom.
My guardian sniffed. ‘Serpula lacrymans,’ he said. ‘Dry rot.’
‘The whole House of Foskett is rot
ten now, sir.’ He led us a few more paces. ‘Here we are.’ Cutteridge stopped and put a hand on my guardian’s arm in an oddly familiar fashion at which he appeared to take no offence whatsoever. ‘I must warn you, sir, that the baroness has changed greatly. She has not been well for many years and is unused to visitors now. Even I see her but rarely. Also, she tires very easily so I shall presume upon your good nature not to overtax her.’
‘You may rely on it.’ Sidney Grice put a finger to his eye, ran a hand through his hair, plumped up his cravat and shone his shoes on the back of his trousers as Cutteridge pushed open the door.
14
Whispers in the Dark
The room we entered was in complete darkness. From the dim corridor I could see nothing at all, but Cutteridge strode confidently in and almost immediately disappeared.
‘Mr Sidney Grice and Miss March Middleton,’ he announced from nowhere into nowhere.
There followed a silence, the distant groan of disturbed floorboards re-settling and then a shallow rasp: ‘Light the candle, Cutteridge’ – a whisper but louder than any whisper should be and curiously remote and metallic. I looked at my guardian. He was staring intently in the direction of the sound and I thought a shiver rippled over him, but it was not one of fear.
There was a scratching noise and a hiss, and a sudden flare of light as Cutteridge struck a Lucifer and put it to the wick of a half-burnt candle in a frosted glass bowl on an otherwise empty scalloped oval table. He blew the match out and there was only the yellow flame, sinking, then rising fitfully, wavering in the globe, a dull halo fading into nothing. We walked towards it and Cutteridge directed us to two low chairs.
Gradually, my eyes made out the shape of a box on the far side of the room. It was about the size of a four-poster bed and draped in what reminded me of mosquito netting, but was more of a heavy black gauze, hanging from top to floor, so that it was impossible to see the person inside.
‘Good afternoon, Lady Foskett,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘I trust I find you well.’
The same breath and tin voice: ‘You will never find me that, Sidney. What time has passed until this day?’
‘Twenty-nine years, ten months and four days,’ he said.
‘So brief a span? It seemed to touch eternity.’ The words came wheezing from her. ‘You must learn to forgive the darkness, but even the conflagration of that waxen taper scorches the lining of my eyes now. I assume the sun still blazes in the ill-named heavens, but I have not confronted it in all these years for here is the realm of endless moonless night.’
‘Do you have no visitors?’ I asked.
‘You will speak when you are spoken to.’
‘If I did that I should be almost mute.’
My guardian murmured, ‘March.’
But the voice resumed flatly, ‘You are the first people I have allowed in this mansion since the great losses.’
‘You did not meet a pharmacist by the name of Mr Horatio Green then?’ Sidney Grice asked.
‘I meet no one and address no soul except to instruct Cutteridge, and my speech is so weak now I must needs use this brass speaking trumpet built into my chair. I passed messages to Mr Green at the gate.’
There was a strong smell in the room like incense, not the frankincense I had smelled in a Roman Catholic Church but more like the masala incenses of India – cedarwood and something sickly.
‘It is good of you to allow us in,’ I said ironically and she coughed rapidly three times in what may have been a laugh.
‘There is no goodness in me, young lady, and I am enervated already. Tell me your business.’
‘I have come to ask you about a society which we have been told you joined,’ Sidney Grice said.
‘The Death Club? I did not join it. I conceived, gave birth to and suckled it. It is the bastard child of my unhappy fancies and now I have sent it out into the world.’
My guardian craned forward. ‘And may I ask why, Lady Foskett?’
‘I have heard about your profession and it does not dumbfound me. You were always an insufferably inquisitive child.’
‘I mean no impertinence.’
‘It was you who showed my second cousin, Mr Hemingway, his wife’s love letters to his father. He shot them and himself as I recall.’
‘If I had kept the correspondence from him I should have been an accessory to her deception.’
‘You were always an arrant prig, Sidney Grice.’
‘I have a love of the truth, Lady Foskett.’
‘The truth?’ The voice became distorted. ‘You may stride around and about this noisome earth until the last fire grows cold upon it and never find such a thing.’ She said something inaudible to me and then, ‘I formulated the society because it amuses me. I do not read – why be perturbed by the trivial meanderings of men when I can wallow in the depthless mire of my own morbidity? But Cutteridge scours the newspapers on my behalf, clips out the obituaries and delivers them to me on a copper salver. What greater pleasure could I have than to discover obituaries of everyone I knew, all those coruscating perfumed ladies with their gorgeous powerful husbands and their beautiful precocious children. Those strutting, pomaded, shiny-skinned, fine peacocks and their toadying flunkies – what are they now?’ Something rattled in her throat. ‘Putrefying matter in their marble tombs.’ She coughed drily. ‘Rotting flesh on crumbling bones in their splendid sarcophagi.’ The baroness fought for air. ‘But there is a great famine of deaths for me to crow over in this age of steam and drains and telegraphy, and so I must devise some more: people whose complete corporal necrosis will bring me the additional gratification of fiscal advantage.’
‘But, Lady Foskett,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘you must realize that your death is also to their advantage.’
Something bumped and the baroness exhaled heavily.
‘I cannot die,’ she whispered. ‘I essayed to quench my thirst for death with a draught of vitriolic oil, but whilst it corroded my voice yet it did not kill me. It flows through my veins now. For two years I took neither food nor water. I willed my vital forces into extinction but whilst this wretched body grew weaker, my aspirations availed me naught and I found I could not die.’
‘But surely that is not possible,’ I said, and for a while all I could hear was her amplified breathing.
‘I feed on my hatred,’ she said. ‘It is a thin food but pure.’
‘But what about your friends?’
‘Every man with a pulse, every woman with uncoagulated blood, every infant with a fluttering heart – they are all abominations detestable to me, every one of them my irredeemable enemies now.’
‘But I am not your enemy, Lady Foskett,’ Sidney Grice said, the shadows dancing on his cheek.
‘From henceforth you are.’ And for the first time since I had known him, when I looked at my guardian in the candle’s flicker, I saw that he was shocked.
He put a hand to his brow and then his scarred ear. ‘You know that Mr Edwin Slab died?’
‘I rejoiced in my gelidity to hear it.’
‘And Horatio Green?’ I asked.
‘The very fetidness of my soul exults. How and when did he die?’
‘Yesterday, of poisoning, in my house.’
‘You should take better care of your clients, Sidney’ – the whisper was fading now – ‘or soon you will have none left.’
‘I hope to take care of you, Lady Foskett.’
The air soughed from the speaking tube and as my eyes learned to capture more light, I could just make out the outline of a figure through the black netting, a small woman seated motionless on a high throne. ‘Enough…’ A long sigh and a longer silence. ‘Enough… enough.’
‘I am sorry, sir, miss.’ For the second time that day Cutteridge made me start. I had forgotten he was still behind us.
‘Of course,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘Thank you for receiving us, Lady Foskett. We shall not tire you any further.’
‘How weary, flat, stale and unprofitable seem to me
all the uses of this world.’ Her words were cracked like old leaves. ‘There is no rest for the damned in this world or the next. I shall always be tired even beyond the end of time.’
Cutteridge blew out the candle and we followed his silhouette out of the room. He closed the door and took us down the creaking stairs.
‘You will try to save her ladyship, sir?’ His old eyes blinked anxiously as we set foot in the hall.
‘I will do everything I can to protect her,’ my guardian promised.
‘May I shake your hand, sir?’
‘It would be a privilege.’
Cutteridge’s hand was huge. It wrapped around my guardian’s and held on. ‘We are dependent upon you, sir.’
‘One vital question before we go,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘Where is the nearest tea shop?’
Cutteridge smiled. ‘I see you have not lost your affection for that beverage, sir. Might I suggest Trivet’s Tea House, just down the road to the right? They serve a good potted meat sandwich as I recall.’
We stepped out, dazzled by the greyness, and Cutteridge followed to lock the gate behind us. I heard the lock clank as we crossed the road, but when I looked back he had gone.
‘That was an odd thing for him to say – asking you to save her,’ I said, and Sidney Grice chewed his lower lip.
‘There was something very wrong in that room,’ he told me.
The crowd was thinning outside the gardens and a few cabs were waiting to pick up fares.
‘Only one thing?’ I asked and he flipped a peach stone into the gutter with his stick.
‘Apart from all the obvious oddities that even you would have noticed,’ he said, ‘there was something else, something I heard but I cannot think what. One thing I do know is that Lady Foskett must be extricated from that awful society at the first opportunity.’
A woman of about my age wobbled past on a velocipede.
‘How indecent,’ Sidney Grice said.
‘It looks like fun to me,’ I said.
‘Sooner or later you will come to realize that all fun is unfeminine.’
‘I hope it is later then,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I do not think Lady Foskett wants to be removed from the society.’
The Curse of the House of Foskett Page 7