I slam the book closed in agitation. There’s still so much I don’t understand and I’m running short of time.
Ideas gnaw at me as I head upstairs to Anna who’s pacing back and forth outside Bell’s bedroom, examining the sketchbook in her hands. I can hear muffled voices on the other side of the door. Daniel must be talking to Bell in there, which means the butler is down in the kitchen with Mrs Drudge. He’ll be along shortly.
‘Have you seen Gold? He should already be here,’ says Anna, staring into the shadows, perhaps hoping to carve him out of the gloom with the sharpness of her glare.
‘I haven’t,’ I say, looking around nervously. ‘Why are we here?’
‘The footman will kill the butler and Gold this morning, unless we get them somewhere safe, where I can protect them,’ she says.
‘Like the gatehouse.’
‘Exactly. Only it can’t look like that’s what we’re doing. If it does, the footman will know who I am and kill me, as well. If he thinks I’m just a nursemaid, and they’re too injured to be a threat, he’ll leave us be for a little while, and that’s what we want. The book reckons they’ve still got a role to play in all this, assuming we can keep them alive.’
‘So what do you need me for?’
‘Damned if I know. I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to be doing. The book says to bring you here at this time, but’ – she sighs, shaking her head – ‘that was the only clear instruction, everything else is gibberish. It’s like I said, you weren’t exactly lucid when you gave it to me. I’ve spent most of the last hour trying to decipher the pages, knowing if I read them wrong, or arrive too late, you’ll die.’
I shiver, unnerved by this brief glimpse at my future.
The book must have been given to Anna by Gregory Gold, my final host. I can still remember him raving at Dance’s door about the carriage. I remember thinking how pitiable he was, how frightening. Those dark eyes wild and lost.
I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.
Folding my arms, I lean against the wall next to her, our shoulders touching. Knowing you’ve killed somebody in a previous life tends to narrow possible avenues of affection.
‘You’ve done a better job than I did,’ I say. ‘The first time somebody handed me the future, I ended up chasing a maid called Madeline Aubert halfway across the forest thinking I was saving her life. I nearly frightened the poor girl to death.’
‘This day should come with instructions,’ she says glumly.
‘Do whatever comes naturally.’
‘I’m not sure running and hiding would help us,’ she says, her frustration punctured by the sound of hurried steps on the staircase.
Without a word we scatter out of sight, Anna disappearing around the corner, while I duck into an open bedroom. Curiosity compels me to keep the door open a crack, allowing me to see the butler limping down the corridor towards us, his burnt body even more wretched in motion. He looks balled up and tossed away, a collection of sharp angles under a ratty brown dressing gown and pyjamas.
Having relived so many of these moments since that first morning, I would have thought I’d become numb, but I can feel the butler’s frustration and fear as he races to confront Bell about this new body he’s trapped within.
Gregory Gold is stepping out of a bedroom, the butler too preoccupied to notice. At this distance, with his back to me, the artist seems oddly shapeless, less a man, more a long shadow thrown up the wall. There’s a poker in his hand and, without any warning, he begins striking the butler with it.
I remember this attack, this pain.
Pity takes me, a sickening sense of helplessness as blood is sent flying by the poker, freckling the walls.
I’m with the butler as he shrivels up on the floor, begging for mercy and reaching for help that isn’t coming.
And that’s when reason washes its hands of me.
Snatching a vase from the sideboard, I burst out into the corridor, advancing on Gold with hell’s own wrath, and smashing it over his head, shards of porcelain falling around him as he collapses to the floor.
Silence congeals in the air as I clutch the broken rim of the vase while staring at the two unconscious men at my feet.
Anna appears behind me.
‘What happened?’ she says, feigning surprise.
‘I—’
There’s a crowd gathering at the end of the corridor, half-dressed men and startled women, roused from their beds by the commotion. Their eyes travel from the blood on the walls to the bodies on the floor, latching onto me with an unbecoming curiosity. If the footman’s among them, he’s ducked out of sight.
It’s probably for the best.
I’m angry enough to try something reckless again.
Doctor Dickie is rushing up the stairs and unlike the other guests, he’s already dressed, that huge moustache expertly oiled, his balding head gleaming with some lotion.
‘What the devil happened here?’ he exclaims.
‘Gold went mad,’ I say, bringing a tremor of emotion to my voice. ‘He started attacking the butler with the poker, so I—’
I wave the rim of the vase at him.
‘Fetch my medical bag, girl,’ says Dickie to Anna, who’s positioned herself in his eyeline. ‘It’s near my bed.’
Doing as she’s bid, Anna begins deftly sliding pieces of the future into place without ever appearing to take control. The doctor requires somewhere warm and quiet to tend the butler, so Anna recommends the gatehouse while volunteering to administer his medications. By simple expedient of having nowhere else to lock him up, it’s decided Gold should be taken over to the gatehouse as well, with sedatives to be administered regularly until a servant can bring a policeman back from the village – a servant Anna volunteers to find.
They descend the staircase with the butler on a makeshift stretcher, Anna offering me a relieved smile as she goes. I meet it with a perplexed frown. All this effort, and I’m still not certain what we’ve accomplished. The butler will be consigned to bed, making him easy pickings for the footman this evening. Gregory Gold is going to be sedated and strung up. He’ll live, but his mind is broken.
That’s hardly a reassuring thought considering it’s his instructions we’re following. Gold gave Anna that book, and while he’s the last of my hosts, I have no idea what he’s trying to accomplish. I can’t even be certain he knows. Not after everything he’s suffered.
I dig through my memories, searching for the pieces of the future I’ve glimpsed, but not yet lived. I still need to know what the ‘all of them’ message Cunningham delivers to Derby means, and why he tells him he’s gathered some people together. I don’t know why Evelyn takes the silver pistol from Derby when she already has the black revolver from her mother’s room, or why he ends up guarding a rock while she takes her own life.
It’s frustrating. I can see the breadcrumbs laid out ahead of me, but, for all I know, they’re leading me towards a cliff edge.
Unfortunately, there’s no other path to follow.
45
Freed of Edward Dance’s advanced years, I’d also hoped to shed his niggling pains, but my night in the cupboard has wrapped my bones in brambles. Every stretch, every bend and twist brings a jolt of pain and a wince, piling some new complaint atop the mound. The journey to my bedroom has proven unexpectedly taxing. Evidently, Rashton made quite an impression last night, because my passage through the house is punctuated by hearty handshakes and backslaps. Greetings lie scattered in my wake like tossed rocks, their goodwill bringing me out in bruises.
Upon reaching my bedroom, I throw off my forced smile. There’s a white envelope on the floor, something bulky sealed inside. Somebody must have slipped it under my door. Tearing it open, I look up and down the corridor for any sign of the person who left it.
You left it
begins the note inside, which is wrapped around a chess piece that’s almost identical to the one Anna carries around with her.
Take amyl nitrite
pearls, sodium nitrite and sodium thiosulfate.
KEEP HOLD OF THEM.
GG
‘Gregory Gold,’ I sigh, reading the initials.
He must have left it before attacking the butler.
Now I know how Anna feels. The instructions are barely legible, and incomprehensible even once I’m able to untangle his terrible handwriting.
Throwing the note and chess piece on the sideboard, I lock my door and bar it with a chair. Normally, I’d go immediately to Rashton’s possessions or a mirror to inspect this new face, but I already know what’s in his drawers and how he looks. I need only stretch my thought towards a question to find its answer, which is why I know there’s a set of brass knuckles hidden in the sock drawer. He confiscated them from a brawler a few years back, and they’ve come in handy more than once. I slip them on, thinking only of the footman and how he lowered his face to mine, breathing in my last breath and sighing with pleasure as he added me to some private tally.
My hands are shaking but Rashton isn’t Bell. Fear motivates, rather than cripples. He wants to seek the footman out and put an end to him, to take back whatever dignity was lost in our previous confrontation. Looking back at our fight this morning, I’m certain it was Rashton who sent me down the stairs and into the corridor. That was his anger, his pride. He had control, and I didn’t even notice.
It can’t happen again.
Rashton’s recklessness will get us killed, and I can’t waste the host. If I’m to get myself and Anna out of this mess, I need to get ahead of the footman, rather than constantly trailing behind him, and I think I know somebody who can help, though they won’t be easy to convince.
Taking off the brass knuckles, I fill the sink and begin washing in front of the mirror.
Rashton’s a young man – though not quite as young as he pictures himself – tall, strong and remarkably handsome. Freckles are splashed across his nose, honey-coloured eyes and short blond hair suggesting a face spun out of sunlight. About the only note of imperfection is an old bullet scar on his shoulder, the ragged line long faded. The memory would give itself to me if I asked, but I’ve enough pain without inviting another man’s misery into my mind.
I’m wiping my chest, when the door handle rattles, causing me to snatch up the brass knuckles.
‘Jim, are you in there? Somebody’s locked the door.’
It’s a woman’s voice, husky and dry.
Putting on a fresh shirt, I pull away the chair and unlock the door to find a confused-looking young woman on the other side, her fist raised for another knock. Blue eyes peer at me from beneath long eyelashes, a dash of red lipstick the only colour on a glacial face. She’s in her early twenties with thick black hair tumbling over a crisp white shirt tucked into jodhpurs, her presence immediately setting Rashton’s blood racing.
‘Grace...’ My host shoves the name onto my tongue, and plenty more besides. I’m boiling in a stew of adoration, elation, arousal and inadequacy.
‘Have you heard what that damn fool brother of mine has done?’ she says, barging past me.
‘I suspect I’m about to.’
‘He borrowed one of the cars last night,’ she says, flinging herself onto the bed. ‘Woke the stablemaster at two in the morning dressed like a rainbow and took off for the village.’
She’s got it all wrong, but I have no way of salvaging her brother’s good name. It was my decision to take the car, to flee the house and make for the village. At this moment, poor Donald Davies is asleep on a dirt road where I abandoned him, and my host is trying to drag me out of the door after him.
His loyalty is almost overpowering, and searching for a reason I’m immediately beset by horrors. Rashton’s affection for Donald Davies was moulded amid the mud and blood of the trenches. They went to war as fools and came back brothers, each of them broken in places only the other could see.
I can feel his anger at my treatment of his friend.
Or perhaps I’m just angry at myself.
We’re so jumbled together, I can no longer tell.
‘It’s my fault,’ says Grace, crestfallen. ‘He was going to buy more of that poison from Bell, so I threatened to tell Daddy. I knew he was angry with me, but I didn’t think he’d run off.’ She sighs helplessly. ‘You don’t think he’s done something foolish, do you?’
‘He’s fine,’ I say reassuringly, sitting down next to her. ‘He’s got the wind up, that’s all.’
‘I wish we’d never met that damn doctor,’ she says, smoothing the creases from my shirt with the flat of her hand. ‘Donald hasn’t been the same since Bell turned up with his trunk of tricks. It’s that damnable laudanum, it’s got hold of him. I can barely talk to him any more. I wish there was something we could...’
Her words run smack bang into an idea. I can see her standing back from it wide-eyed, following it from start to finish like a horse she’s backed in the Derby.
‘I need to go and see Charles about something,’ she says abruptly, kissing me on the lips before darting into the corridor.
She’s gone before I can respond, the door hanging open in her wake.
I stand up to close it, hot, bothered and not a little confused. On the whole, things were simpler when I was in that cupboard.
46
Step by slow step, I proceed down the corridor, poking my head into every bedroom before allowing myself to walk past it. I’m wearing the brass knuckles, and jumping at every noise and shadow, wary of the assault I’m certain is coming; knowing I can’t beat the footman should he catch me unawares.
Pushing aside the velvet curtain blocking the corridor, I pass into Blackheath’s abandoned east wing, a sharp wind stirring drapes that slap the wall like slabs of meat hitting a butcher’s counter.
I don’t stop until I reach the nursery.
Derby’s unconscious body isn’t immediately obvious, as it’s been dragged into the corner of the room, out of sight of the door and behind the rocking horse. His head is a mess of congealed blood and broken pottery, but he’s alive and well hidden. Considering he was attacked coming out of Stanwin’s bedroom, whoever was responsible obviously had enough of a conscience to keep the blackmailer from finding and killing him, but not enough time to take him anywhere safer.
I quickly rifle through his pockets, but everything he took from Stanwin has been stolen. I didn’t expect otherwise, but as he is the architect of so many of the house’s mysteries, it was worth a try.
Leaving him sleeping, I continue on to Stanwin’s rooms at the end of the passage. Surely only fear could have pushed him into this misbegotten corner of the house, so far from the meagre comforts afforded by the rest of Blackheath. By that criterion though, he’s chosen well. The floorboards are his spies, screaming my approach with every step, and the long corridor offers only one way in and out. The blackmailer clearly believes himself surrounded by enemies, a fact which I may be able to exploit.
Passing through the reception room, I knock on Stanwin’s bedroom door. A strange silence greets me, the din of somebody trying to be quiet.
‘It’s Constable Jim Rashton,’ I call through the wood, putting the brass knuckles away. ‘I need to speak with you.’
The declaration is met with a flurry of sounds. Steps go lightly across the room, a drawer scrapes, something is lifted and moved, before finally a voice creeps around the doorframe.
‘Come in,’ says Ted Stanwin.
He’s sitting on a chair, a hand stuck inside his left boot, which he’s brushing with a soldier’s vigour. I shiver a little, rocked by a powerful sense of the uncanny. The last time I saw this man, he was dead on a forest floor and I was going through his pockets. Blackheath’s picked him up and dusted him off, winding his key so he can do it all again. If this isn’t hell, the devil is surely taking notes.
I look past him. His bodyguard is sleeping deeply on the bed, breathing noisily through his bandaged nose. I’m surprised Stanwin hasn’t moved him, and more surprised to see how the blackmailer�
��s angled his chair to face the bed, much as Anna has done with the butler. Clearly, Stanwin feels some affection for this chap.
I wonder how he’d react knowing Derby’s been next door this whole time.
‘Ah, the man at the centre of it all,’ says Stanwin, the brush pausing while he regards me.
‘I’m afraid you have me at a loss,’ I say, confused.
‘I wouldn’t be a very good blackmailer if I didn’t,’ he says, gesturing towards a rickety wooden chair by the fire. Accepting his invitation, I drag the chair closer to the bed, making sure to avoid the dirty newspaper and boot polish strewn on the floor.
Stanwin’s wearing a rich man’s approximation of a stable hand’s livery, which is to say the white cotton shirt is pressed and the black trousers are spotless. Looking at him now, dressed plainly, scrubbing his own boots and squatting in a crumbling corner of a once-grand house, I fail to see what nineteen years of blackmail have bought him. Burst blood vessels riddle his cheeks and nose, while sunken eyes, red raw and hungry for sleep, keep watch for the monsters at his door.
Monsters he invited there.
Behind all his bluster is a soul turned to ash, the fire that once drove him long extinguished. These are the ragged edges of a man defeated, his secrets the only warmth left to him. At this point, he’s as much afraid of his victims as they are of him.
Pity pricks me. Something about Stanwin’s situation feels terribly familiar, and deep down, beneath my hosts, where the real Aiden Bishop resides, I can feel a memory stirring. I came here because of a woman. I wanted to save her, and I couldn’t. Blackheath was my chance to... what... try again?
What did I come here to do?
Leave it alone.
‘Let’s state facts plainly,’ says Stanwin, looking at me steadily. ‘You’re in league with Cecil Ravencourt, Charles Cunningham, Daniel Coleridge and a few others; the lot of you fishing around a murder that happened nineteen years ago.’
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Page 30