Dangerous to Know

by Tasha Alexander

  “Where’s Lucy?” I asked, desperate to distract him from the course of action on which he was bent.

  “Don’t worry about the child,” he said. “She will come to no harm. I’m taking care of her and soon will introduce her to Madeline, who I know will be an excellent mother to her.”

  “Why did you take her? Would it not have been better to leave her where she was safe and well cared for?”

  “She may show signs of the illness, too. I might need her.”

  “You can’t do this, George. The poor child! What must she think? Surely she knows something is dreadfully wrong.”

  “No, I’ve taken exquisite care of her, even if I have had to hide her away. Sometimes she gets upset in the night and cries for her mother—which is to be expected, I suppose. I take her for long walks in the countryside until she falls back asleep. She’s come to quite depend on me. She knows that her mother’s illness was fatal, and all orphans, you know, long for a real home. I’ve told her she’s to have one.”

  I shuddered, realizing the eerie keening I’d heard had been the child—a real one—weeping over the loss of her mother. The reality of this all-too-human pain, hopeless and devastating, felt far more frightening than any ghostly apparition could have.

  “And what will you tell everyone else?” I asked. “You can’t just magically have a child appear in your household.”

  “Lucy believes that her father, Vasseur, had an accident on his way home from the Foreign Legion, and asked me, as he lay dying, to look after her. She thinks her mother had to spend time away from her because she was ill, and that Madame Sapin was taking care of her only until I came for her.”

  “What really happened to Monsieur Vasseur?”

  “I served in the Foreign Legion with him—did a stint after serving in the British Army as a physician. We traded stories of the girls we loved. When he confessed to me his amour had been sent away in hopes of having her progressive madness cured—the symptoms of which I recognized all to well as those beginning to plague my own dear wife—I told him of Madeline’s troubles. In short order, he realized she was Edith’s distant cousin, a revelation that made me all the more interested in her treatment. If something worked for her, it would almost certainly help Madeline. I made note of the location of the asylum to which she’d been sent by her family, and when I returned to France, I visited her, telling her Vasseur had sent me.”

  “Did she believe you?”

  “Why wouldn’t she?” he asked. “We bonded almost at once, both of us knowing the pain of having the one you love taken away from you. She trusted me.”

  “And Vasseur? Did he trust you?”

  “We lost all contact after I left the Legion. He did, however, keep in touch with Edith. I read all of his letters while she slept—she hid them in her headboard. Eventually, I decided I could use him to lure her away from the asylum.”

  “Why did you want to remove her from Dr. Girard’s care?”

  “Girard was making no progress with her, so I talked to him, asked him to consider more radical treatments. But it was to no avail. I’d studied enough to have learned of the potential benefits of medical electricity, and the fact that Madeline and Edith were nearly the same age and build…”

  “You befriended Edith so that you might use her to test treatments for Madeline?”

  “Can you fault me for it? Would you not do the same for your own husband?” he asked.

  “How did you convince her to leave?”

  “I told her Vasseur and I had arranged to bring her to live with him in Étretat. I thought it would be dead easy, but she refused to go unless Lucy was with her. She’d told me about the girl early on in our friendship. I would have preferred not to be saddled with her, but Edith grew quite hysterical on the subject, and I knew that Lucy might prove useful herself, so I found her and brought her to Edith’s window on the night we fled. She did not hesitate for an instant once she saw her child.”

  “Did Vasseur know what you were doing?” I asked.

  “Not at first,” he said. “But Edith managed to send him a letter begging him to meet her in Étretat. He realized her parents didn’t know where she was going, and I suppose felt it would be safe, at last, for him to try to be with her. A terrible misjudgment on his part.”

  “You killed him.”

  “I tried not to. I explained to him that I wanted to help Edith—to find a treatment that would cure her. But he wouldn’t agree to let me try even one course of electricity on her. He left me no choice, Emily.”

  “Please tell me where Lucy is, George.”

  “She’s here and safe. I tried to place her at a school in Rouen not long ago, but she cried so much on the way we never even made it to speak to the headmistress. Once things have calmed down here, I shall try again. Madeline and I will visit her, but Lucy will not come here until enough time has passed for this scandal to be forgot.”

  “Murder goes beyond scandal.”

  “No one will ever connect me with murder.”

  The irrationality of this statement pushed indignation ahead of fear in me. “My husband will notice I’m missing, George.”

  “Not quite, Emily. He’ll notice you’re dead. When you’re unconscious, I will drop you off this tower, and he will believe you could no longer bear the pain of the loss of your child.”

  “He’ll never believe that.”

  “Of course he will. You left a note.” He waved a page taken from the diary I’d brought with me to the house and left in my bedroom—I could not read the words, but could guess it was something I’d written in the dark haze of mourning that paralyzed me after my days in Constantinople.

  “It won’t work. He’ll recognize it as being from my journal.”

  “He’ll be consumed with grief and more malleable than you can imagine.”

  “That’s a risky assumption,” I said.

  “I’m confident,” he said. “He’s got nothing but a clear mind now and is convinced Laurent Prier killed Edith. If he does decide you were murdered, Laurent will be found guilty of that as well.”

  I needed time. Time to get away, time to find Lucy, time to get Cécile and Mrs. Hargreaves away from this house. “We’ve had a raucous, celebratory evening,” I said. “No one would believe I’d kill myself after such a night.”

  “You collapsed in the maze,” he said. “You were frightened and overwrought and slipping into madness. Everyone knows you’ve been seeing ghosts, that your grasp on reality has become more and more elusive over these last weeks.”

  My situation was beyond dire. “When are you going to do this?” I asked, not bothering to fight back my tears. “Can I at least have time in private to make peace with myself?”

  “I’m not a monster, Emily,” he said. “Of course you can. I’m going to check on the others and make sure they’re sleeping soundly—though I can’t imagine laudanum would let me down. I shall return in less than a quarter of an hour and we shall begin. I know it’s hard to accept such a fate, but I beg you to focus on the good that will come from it.”

  “Do you have a Bible?” I asked. “It would give me comfort to read.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t unfasten your hands so that you might hold a book. I understand all too well how strong the instinct to survive is—you forget I saw how Edith fought. Pray, cry, do what you must. I will return shortly, and promise to be as kind and gentle as possible.”

  32

  I heard the lock snap into place as he turned the key after closing the door behind him. Knowing I had extremely limited time, I forced all fear, all thoughts of what might lie ahead of me from my head and focused on the only task that mattered: freeing my hands. I twisted and wriggled against the leather straps, but to no avail. They weren’t tight enough to cut off my circulation, but they were too tight to allow for escape. Tears stung in my eyes, but I ignored them, working harder on the leather.

  Stretching it seemed the only hope, so I mustered all my strength and pulled as hard as I
could, over and over until I could feel the slightest hint of a gap forming between the straps and my wrists. It wasn’t enough, though. Now, instead of trying to free both hands, I expended my energy all on the right, using the whole of my body to tug against the rails on the side of the bed to which I was attached. The leather was bending to my will, but not quickly enough.

  And then I heard it. The wailing. The sad sobs, the small voice. Was Lucy up here with me? I was not going to see her lost to the clutches of a maniac like George Markham. I would find her, I would save her, I would return her to Madame Sapin, the only mother she’d known. I felt as if something primal in me had kicked in, enabling me unlimited strength to defend this child.

  Only my strength fell somewhat short of unlimited. Nonetheless, with repeated, brutal tugs, I finally managed to slip my right wrist, bloodied and battered, through the binding strap. With a shaking hand, I unbuckled the cuffs on my other hand, ankles, and forehead. Lucy’s cries were fading again, and I rushed in the direction of them, pausing when I realized that if I did not first stop George, there would be no escape for either of us.

  I assessed the space around me. There was little furniture, and no hope I could block him out of the room for long. The door opened inward, so I dragged the bed in front of it, figuring its presence might buy me at least a few extra seconds. Then I turned my attention to George’s strange machine.

  I’d heard of the use of electricity in medicine, but never paid much attention to the topic. My mother had once mentioned that a long-ago Duchess of Devonshire had been a proponent of it. That, unfortunately, was my entire knowledge of the subject. The device looked simple enough—turning the crank had to provide the power, so I began working on it at once, figuring I would need as much stored up as possible—and I knew George hadn’t been turning it when he shocked me. I then moved the contraption to the bed. Electricity needed metal, so I wrapped the wire George had used to shock me around the tarnished doorknob.

  And then I had to figure out how to turn up the current. I played with the dial on the flat surface of the machine’s base, carefully touching the wire. Nothing happened. Frantic, I studied the object before me again, finally seeing a small switch. I threw it, touched the wire, and recoiled at the shock. I then turned the dial farther to the right and touched the wire again. A harder shock.

  I spun the dial as far to the right as it would go, made sure the switch was still on, and was careful to touch neither the wire, nor the doorknob. I stepped away from the bed and steeled myself for George’s return, hoping the shock he got would knock him out, even if only momentarily. He’d said he’d not gone even halfway up with Edith, so surely full strength would have a diabolical effect on him.

  The thin wail of Lucy’s cry filled the room again. Startled and on edge, I spun around, taking better stock of my surroundings. Where could she be? There were no windows in the room, so the sound could not have been coming from outside—it wouldn’t have been able to penetrate the thick stone walls—and there was no visible door except the one through which George had exited. There had to be another one—hidden—that I hoped would lead to the child.

  A cold chill shot through me. Scared out of my wits, I shuffled back to the door, my legs so feeble I could hardly support myself. I felt a presence—someone had to be here, but it didn’t seem possible. The crying ceased and was replaced by the sound of heavy footsteps just outside.

  My heart pounded. I pressed my lips together and closed my eyes, knowing I had only one chance at survival. I could hear him on the other side of the door. He’d stopped walking but hadn’t yet touched the door.

  I heard him sigh, fumble with a key. I held my breath waiting for it to slip into the lock, then turn. The instant the lock clicked, I turned on the machine.

  And then, a buzz, a hum, and a shriek—a hideous shriek of pain—followed by a thump. More scared than ever, and trembling uncontrollably, I closed the switch on the machine, hesitating to touch the wire even though I knew it should be off. Then, afraid he might return to his senses quickly, I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and reached for the wire.

  Nothing happened.

  I ripped it from the knob, pushed the bed away from the door, and opened it. George lay before me on the floor, twitching, foam bubbling from between his lips. My stomach turned and I felt sick, but there was no time for contemplation, guilt, or compassion. I raced down the stone spiral stairs to the bottom of the tower, then stopped.

  Lucy had to be somewhere near, and I couldn’t leave her here in case George should wake up before I could return with help. I forced myself back up the steps, took the key from the door, and locked myself into the room from which I’d only just escaped. Unable to stop shaking, I made my way around the perimeter, steadying myself against the stone wall, feeling for any imperfection that might unlatch the hidden door I was convinced had to exist. Weren’t castles full of passages through which escape would be possible should the inhabitants have fallen under siege?

  The silence around me was oppressive, broken only by the sound of my heart thumping and the blood beating its way through my ears. I circled the room for a fifth time, with each rotation scrutinizing another swathe of the wall. Finally I found a place where the smoothness of the stone gave way to a rough patch, a spot where the mortar had crumbled. I thrust my fingers into it, and felt a cold, hard switch. It took all the strength left in my already injured hands to pull it, and as I did, a rectangular piece of the floor swung down like a trapdoor to reveal a narrow staircase.

  I grabbed a lamp from the table on which George had placed his machine. Pausing, I considered checking to make sure he was still unconscious, but it didn’t seem wise to waste any precious time. I placed a foot carefully on the first step and made my way to the bottom, where I found a tight passageway, too short for me to stand up straight. Another switch was here, on the wall, a twin to the one I’d found in the tower. Holding my breath, I flipped it, knowing it would close the way from which I’d come. Another layer of protection should George wake up.

  Frightening, though, if it wouldn’t reopen should I need it to. I could not, however, imagine the point in building a secret passage that led to nowhere.

  I continued on as quickly as I could, my feet slipping on the mossy pavement, until I heard Lucy’s cries, and the sound of small footsteps. In an instant, the child was in front of me, tears streaming down her pale, dirt-streaked face, a blue satin ribbon crumpled in her little hand. I scooped her into my arms and held her close, then shot the rest of the way down the tunnel to where it hit another set of steps.

  At the top of which was a door that led to the dovecote.

  Above it, a key hung on a high hook. I jumped up and grabbed it, unlocked the door, burst through it, and didn’t stop running until I’d reached Mrs. Hargreaves’s house.

  27 July 1892

  At last it’s all over, thank heavens. If I never am subjected to such drama again, it will be too soon. It’s impossible to reconcile the neighbor and friend I’d known for years with the brutal killer for which he’s now been exposed.

  Emily’s strength shows through better now than ever before. The servants say she appeared here with the child, breathless and exhausted, surely terrified out of her mind, but she was calm, direct, and put them all at ease as she told them what to do.

  The police came in short order and it’s all settled now. No more murderous neighbors to contend with, no more ghost stories or strange cries in the night.

  I have, without question, been in the country too long.

  Gladstone’s won. It’s time I return to London.

  33

  “I think perhaps I ought to be slightly affronted you didn’t come rescue us before sending for help,” Cécile said as we all sat at a rough-hewn table under the shade of a magnificent tree in the garden at Mrs. Hargreaves’s house the next afternoon. None of us had touched the spread of cakes on pretty silver platters, but the scalding hot tea proved a panacea for all, and we consumed p
ot after pot at an alarming rate.

  “I was afraid if he woke up he’d catch me again before I could sound an alarm,” I said. In fact, he hadn’t regained consciousness until after Inspector Gaudet and his men arrived, having been summoned by Mrs. Hargreaves’s servants the instant I’d told them what happened. His physical condition was not great—I’d injured him severely—but his mind was intact, and the police physician who examined him predicted what he called a full-enough recovery.

  “It’s terrifying to think—” my mother-in-law started, but stopped at a fierce glare from Colin. We all fell into a tense silence. Madeline was still with us, shaken and devastated, incoherent. I wished Dr. Girard could look after her. We’d arranged for his partner to come for both her and her mother, and I had no doubt they’d be well taken care of in the asylum, although seeing them committed felt something like a failure. George, for all his evilness, had started with a noble motive—trying to cure his wife’s illness so that she would never be relegated to hospital. His ill-formed plan had in the end served to do nothing but guarantee she would spend the rest of her life in one. And he would certainly be executed.

  “Adèle!”

  The sound of Madeline’s voice startled me. Cécile dropped her fan and Mrs. Hargreaves poured tea onto the table instead of into her son’s cup. Madeline had been only short of catatonic all day, but now her face was bright, her eyes eager.

  “Adèle!” she said again. “What do you think? Should we go to Paris? It’s been too long since we’ve been to a real ball, and I’m desperate to see Mr. Worth about new dresses.”

  “Oh, Madeline,” I said, sitting next to her and taking her hand. “Of course we’ll go to Paris.”

  “I’ve met the most handsome gentleman and I’m certain he’s going to propose to me. He’s English—but I suppose I can learn to tolerate that. He’s called George, and I absolutely adore him.”