‘May I ask what happened to Mr Collins?’ I say, wondering if perhaps his assault might be linked to my own last night.
‘Apparently he was set upon by one of our guests, an artist named Gregory Gold,’ she says, knotting her thick scarf. ‘It was an unprovoked attack by all accounts, and Gold managed to thrash him pretty soundly before somebody intervened. I should warn you, Doctor, Mr Collins has been heavily sedated, so I’m not sure how helpful he’ll be.’
We’re following the gravel driveway that leads to the village and, once again, I’m struck by the peculiarity of my condition. At some point in the last few days, I must have arrived along this very road, happy and excited, or perhaps annoyed at the distance and isolation. Did I understand the danger I was in, or did it come later during my stay? So much of me is lost, memories simply blown aside like the leaves on the ground, and yet here I stand, remade. I wonder if Sebastian Bell would approve of this man I’ve become. If we’d even get along?
Without a word, Evelyn links an arm through my own, a warm smile transforming her face. It’s as though a fire has been kindled within, her eyes sparkling with life, banishing the shrouded woman of earlier.
‘It’s so good to be out of that house,’ she cries, tipping her face to meet the rain. ‘Thank goodness you came along when you did, Doctor. Honestly, a minute later and you’d have found me with my head in the grate.’
‘Lucky I stopped by then,’ I say, somewhat startled by her change in mood. Sensing my confusion, Evelyn laughs lightly.
‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ she says. ‘I loathe getting to know people, so whenever I meet somebody I like, I just assume a friendship immediately. It saves a great deal of time in the long run.’
‘I can see the appeal,’ I say. ‘May I ask what I did to earn a favourable impression?’
‘Only if you allow me to be frank in my answer.’
‘You’re not being frank now?’
‘I was trying to be polite, but, you’re right, I never seem to land on the right side of the fence,’ she says with mock regret. ‘Well, to be frank, I like your pensiveness, Doctor. You strike me as a man who’d much rather be somewhere else, a feeling I can wholeheartedly sympathise with.’
‘Am I to assume you’re not enjoying your homecoming?’
‘Oh, this hasn’t been my home in a very long time,’ she says, skipping over a large puddle. ‘I’ve lived in Paris for the last nineteen years, ever since my brother was killed.’
‘What about the women I saw you with in the Sun Room, are they not your friends?’
‘They arrived this morning and, truth be told, I didn’t recognise a single one of them. The children I knew have shed their skins and slithered into society. I’m as much a stranger here as yourself.’
‘At least you’re not a stranger to yourself, Miss Hardcastle,’ I say. ‘Surely you can take some solace in that?’
‘Quite the contrary,’ she says, looking at me. ‘I imagine it would be rather splendid to wander away from myself for a little while. I envy you.’
‘Envy?’
‘Why not?’ she says, wiping the rain from her face. ‘You’re a soul stripped bare, Doctor. No regrets, no wounds, none of the lies we tell ourselves so we can look in the mirror each morning. You’re –’ she bites her lip, searching for the word – ‘honest.’
‘Another word for that is “exposed”,’ I say.
‘Am I to take it you’re not enjoying your homecoming?’
There’s a crook in her smile, a slight twist of the lips that could easily be damning, yet somehow comes across as conspiratorial.
‘I’m not the man I’d hoped to be,’ I say quietly, surprised by my own candour. Something about this woman puts me at ease, though for the life of me I can’t tell what it is.
‘How so?’ she asks.
‘I’m a coward, Miss Hardcastle,’ I sigh. ‘Forty years of memories wiped away and that’s what I find lurking beneath it all. That’s what remains to me.’
‘Oh, do call me Evie, that way I can call you Sebastian and tell you not to fret about your flaws. We all have them, and if I were newly born into this world, I might be cautious too,’ she says, squeezing my arm.
‘You’re very kind, but this is something deeper, instinctive.’
‘Well, so what if you are?’ she asks. ‘There are worse things to be. At least you’re not mean-spirited or cruel. And now you get to choose, don’t you? Instead of assembling yourself in the dark like the rest of us – so that you wake up one day with no idea of how you became this person – you can look at the world, at the people around you, and choose the parts of your character you want. You can say, “I’ll have that man’s honesty, that woman’s optimism”, as if you’re shopping for a suit on Saville Row.’
‘You’ve made my condition into a gift,’ I say, feeling my spirits lift.
‘Well, what else would you call a second chance?’ she asks. ‘You don’t like the man you were, very well, be somebody else. There’s nothing stopping you, not any more. As I said, I envy you. The rest of us are stuck with our mistakes.’
I have no response to that, though one is not immediately required. We’ve arrived upon two giant fence posts, fractured angels blaring their noiseless horns on top. The gatehouse is set back among the trees on our left, splashes of its red-tile roof showing through the dense canopy. A path leads towards a peeling green door, which is swollen with age and riddled with cracks. Ignoring it, Evelyn pulls me by the fingers towards the back of the house, pushing through branches so overgrown they’re touching the crumbling brickwork.
The back door is held fast with a simple latch, and undoing it, she lets us into a dank kitchen, a layer of dust coating the countertops, the copper pans still out on the hob. Once inside, she pauses, listening intently.
‘Evelyn?’ I say.
Motioning for quiet, she takes a step closer to the corridor. Unsettled by this sudden caution, my body tenses, but she breaks the spell with laughter.
‘I’m sorry, Sebastian, I was listening out for my father.’
‘Your father?’ I say, puzzled.
‘He’s staying here,’ she says. ‘He’s supposed to be out hunting, but I didn’t want to risk bumping into him if he was running late. I’m afraid we don’t like each other terribly much.’
Before I have the chance to ask any more questions, she beckons me into a tiled hallway and up a narrow staircase, the bare wooden steps shrieking beneath our feet. I keep to her heels, snatching backward glances every few steps. The gatehouse is narrow and crooked, doors set into the walls at odd angles like teeth grown wild in a mouth. Wind whistles through the windows carrying with it the smell of the rain, the entire place seeming to rattle on its foundations. Everything about this house seems designed to unseat the nerves.
‘Why put the butler all the way out here?’ I ask Evelyn, who’s trying to choose between the doors either side of us. ‘There must have been somewhere more comfortable.’
‘All the rooms in the main house are full, and Doctor Dickie ordered peace and quiet, and a good fire. Believe it or not, this might be the best place for him. Come on, let’s try this one,’ she says, rapping lightly on a door to our left, pushing it open when there’s no response.
A tall fellow in a charcoal-stained shirt is bound by his wrists and dangling from a hook on the ceiling, his feet only barely touching the floor. He’s unconscious, a head full of dark curly hair slumped against his chest, blood speckling his face.
‘Nope, must be the other side,’ says Evelyn, her voice bland and unconcerned.
‘What the devil?’ I say, taking a step back in alarm. ‘Who is this man, Evelyn?’
‘This is Gregory Gold, the fellow who assaulted our butler,’ says Evelyn, eyeing him as one would a butterfly pinned to a corkboard. ‘The butler was my father’s batman during the war. Seems Father’s taken the assault rather personally.’
‘Personally?’ I say. ‘Evie, he’s been strung up like a pig!’
&n
bsp; ‘Father’s never been a subtle man, or a particularly clever one,’ she shrugs. ‘I suspect the two things go hand in hand.’
For the first time since I awoke, my blood is boiling. Whatever this man’s crimes, justice can’t be served by a length of rope in a locked room.
‘We can’t leave him like this,’ I protest. ‘It’s inhuman.’
‘What he did was inhuman,’ says Evelyn, her chill touching me for the first time. ‘Mother commissioned Gold to tidy up a few of the family portraits, nothing more. He didn’t even know the butler and yet this morning he took after him with a poker and beat him half to death. Believe me, Sebastian, he deserves worse than what’s happening to him here.’
‘What’s to become of him?’ I ask.
‘A constable is coming from the village,’ says Evelyn, ushering me out of the small room, and closing the door behind us, her mood brightening immediately. ‘Father wants to let Gold know of his displeasure in the meantime, that’s all. Ah, this must be the one we wanted.’
She opens another door on the opposite side of the hall, and we enter a small room with whitewashed walls and a single window blinded by dirt. Unlike the rest of the house, there’s no draught in here and a good fire’s burning in the grate, plenty of wood stacked nearby to feed it. There’s an iron bed in the corner, the butler shapeless beneath a grey blanket. I recognise this chap. It’s the burnt man who let me in this morning.
Evelyn was right, he’s been cruelly treated. His face is hideously bruised and livid with cuts, dried blood staining the pillowcase. I might have mistaken him for dead if it weren’t for his constant murmuring, distress poisoning his sleep.
A maid is sitting beside him in a wooden chair, a large book open in her lap. She can’t be more than twenty-three, small enough to tuck into a pocket, with blonde hair spilling from beneath her cap. She looks up as we enter, slamming the book closed and leaping to her feet when she realises who we are, hastily smoothing out her white apron.
‘Miss Evelyn,’ she stammers, eyes on the floor. ‘I didn’t know you’d be visiting.’
‘My friend here needed to see Mr Collins,’ says Evelyn.
The maid’s brown eyes flick towards me, before pinning themselves to the ground once more.
‘I’m sorry, miss, he hasn’t stirred all morning,’ says the maid. ‘The doctor gave him some tablets to help him sleep.’
‘And he can’t be woken?’
‘Haven’t tried, miss, but you made an awful racket coming up them stairs and he didn’t bat an eyelid. Don’t know what else would do it, if that didn’t. Dead to the world, he is.’
The maid’s eyes find me once again, lingering long enough to suggest some sort of familiarity, before resuming their former contemplation of the floor.
‘I’m sorry, but do we know each other?’ I ask.
‘No, sir, not really, it’s just... I served you at dinner last night.’
‘Did you bring me a note?’ I ask excitedly.
‘Not me, sir, it was Madeline.’
‘Madeline?’
‘My lady’s maid,’ interrupts Evelyn. ‘The house was short-staffed so I sent her down to the kitchen to help out. Well, that’s fortunate’ – she checks her wristwatch – ‘she’s taking refreshments out to the hunters, but she’ll be back around three p.m. We can question her together when she returns.’
I turn my attention back to the maid.
‘Do you know anything more about the note?’ I ask. ‘Its contents, perhaps?’
The maid shakes her head, wringing her hands. The poor creature looks quite on the spot, and, taking pity on her, I offer my thanks and leave.
7
We’re following the road to the village, the trees drawing closer with every step. It’s not quite what I’d anticipated. The map in the study conjured images of some grand labour, a boulevard hewn from the forest. The reality is little more than a wide dirt track, wretched with potholes and fallen branches. The forest hasn’t been tamed so much as bartered with, the Hardcastles winning the barest of concessions from their neighbour.
I don’t know our destination, but Evelyn believes we can intercept Madeline on her way back from the hunt. Secretly, I suspect she’s simply looking for an excuse to prolong her absence from the house. Not that any subterfuge is necessary. This last hour in Evelyn’s company is the first time since waking that I’ve felt myself a whole person, rather than the remnants of one. Out here, in the wind and rain, with a friend by my side, I’m happier than I have been all day.
‘What do you believe Madeline can tell you?’ asks Evelyn, picking a branch off the path and tossing it into the forest.
‘The note that she brought me last night lured me out into the woods so somebody could attack me,’ I say.
‘Attack!’ interrupts Evelyn, shocked. ‘Here? Why?’
‘I don’t know, but I’m hoping Madeline can tell me who sent the note. She might even have peeked at the message.’
‘There’s no “might” about it,’ says Evelyn. ‘Madeline was in Paris with me. She’s loyal and she makes me laugh, but she’s an atrocious maid. She probably considers peeking at other people’s mail a perk of the job.’
‘That’s very lenient of you,’ I say.
‘I have to be, I can’t pay very well,’ she says. ‘And after she’s revealed the contents of the message, what then?’
‘I tell the police,’ I say. ‘And hopefully put this matter to bed.’
Turning left at a crooked signpost, we follow a small trail into the woods, dirt tracks criss-crossing each other until the way back is impossible to discern.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ I ask nervously, swiping a low-hanging branch from my face. The last time I entered this forest my mind never made it back.
‘We’re following these,’ she says, tugging at a fragment of yellow material nailed to a tree. It’s similar to the red one I found when I stumbled upon Blackheath this morning, the memory only serving to unsettle me further.
‘They’re markers,’ she says. ‘The groundskeepers use them to navigate in the woods. Don’t worry, I’ll not lead you too far astray.’
The words are barely out of her mouth when we enter a small clearing with a stone well at its centre. The wooden shelter has collapsed, the iron wheel that once raised the bucket now left to rust in the mud, almost buried by fallen leaves. Evelyn claps in delight, laying an affectionate hand on the mossy stone. She’s clearly hoping I haven’t noticed the slip of paper tucked between the cracks, or the way her fingers are now covering it. Friendship compels me to play along and I hastily avert my attention when she looks back towards me. She must have some suitor in the house and I’m ashamed to say I’m jealous of this secret correspondence and the person on the other side of it.
‘This is it,’ she says with a theatrical sweep of her arm. ‘Madeline will be passing through this clearing on her way back to the house. Shouldn’t be too long now. She’s due back at the house by three to help finish setting up the ballroom.’
‘Where are we?’ I ask, looking around.
‘It’s a wishing well,’ she says, leaning over the edge to peer into the blackness. ‘Michael and I used to come here when we children. We’d make our wishes with pebbles.’
‘And what sorts of things did young Evelyn Hardcastle wish for?’ I ask.
She wrinkles her brow, the question flummoxing her.
‘You know, for the life of me, I can’t remember,’ she says. ‘What does a child who has everything want?’
More, just like everybody else.
‘I doubt I could have told you even when I did have my memories,’ I say, smiling.
Dusting the grime from her hands, Evelyn looks at me quizzically. I can see the curiosity burning inside her, the joy at encountering something unknown and unexpected in a place where everything is familiar. I’m out here because I fascinate her, I realise with a flash of disappointment.
‘Have you thought about what you’ll do if your memor
ies don’t return?’ she asks, softening the question with the gentleness of her tone.
Now it’s my turn to be flummoxed.
Since my initial confusion passed, I’ve tried not to dwell upon my condition. If anything, the loss of my memories has proven a frustration rather than a tragedy, my inability to recall Anna being one of the few moments when it’s seemed anything more than an inconvenience. Thus far in the excavation of Sebastian Bell I’ve unearthed two friends, an annotated Bible and a locked trunk. Precious little return for forty years on this earth. I don’t have a wife weeping for our lost time together, or a child worrying that the father she loved might not return. At this distance, Sebastian Bell’s life seems an easy one to lose and a difficult one to mourn.
A branch snaps somewhere in the forest.
‘Footman,’ says Evelyn, my blood immediately running cold as I recall the Plague Doctor’s warning.
‘What did you say?’ I ask, frantically searching the forest.
‘That noise, it’s a footman,’ she says. ‘They’re collecting wood. Shameful, isn’t it? We don’t have enough servants to stock all the fireplaces, so our guests are having to send their own footmen to do it.’
‘They? How many are there?’
‘One for every family visiting, and there’s more coming,’ she says. ‘I’d say there’s already seven or eight in the house.’
‘Eight?’ I say in a strangled voice.
‘My dear Sebastian, are you quite all right?’ says Evelyn, catching my alarm.
Under different circumstances I would welcome this concern, this affection, but here and now her scrutiny only embarrasses me. How can I explain that a strange chap in a plague doctor costume warned me to keep an eye out for a footman – a name which means nothing to me, and yet fills me with a crippling fear every time I hear it?
‘I’m sorry, Evie,’ I say, shaking my head ruefully. ‘There’s more I need to tell you, but not here, and not quite yet.’
Unable to hold her questioning stare, I look around the clearing for a distraction. Three trails intersect before striking off into the forest, one of them cutting a straight path through the trees towards water.
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Page 5