Perhaps they saw something at her back, and catching up.
They were all of them conditioned, apparently, like Pavlov’s dogs; the high doors to the dining room stood open and people had gathered in the hallway outside, but no one had gone in yet.
She went in.
She walked all the way through, around the long low tables to the matching doors at the far end.
And opened one of those, and walked on through; and would have closed it again behind her anyway, and never mind whatever might be following, only she felt it snatched out of her hand by something materially stronger than she was, slammed shut with a force that said there’d be no opening it now, not from either side. Not till this was done with.
Candles were all around. Maybe it was only the draught raised by the slam of the door, but for a moment they all seemed to reach toward her, yearningly. Fingers shaped themselves in the flames.
Joss sticks burned in the fireplace and at the window, all along the windows. Again, their smoke twisted and eddied in the shifting air, formed hands and fingers, groped for her from far away. Georgie thought of Frank and charcoal smoke, and shuddered.
Mother Mary sat alone on her sofa, and smiled to see poor Georgie scared.
Grace met her eye to eye, untroubled. ‘What, no captain? What have you done with him?’
‘The captain’s doing grandly,’ she said, soft and dangerous, eternally protective. ‘He’s off being official with the policemen, and dear Frank. Webb’s away too, down to London with his precious Kathie. They can look after themselves tonight, while I . . . look after you.’
‘Everyone knows I’m here.’ That came out too quickly; it sounded defensive where she’d meant to sound only calm and ordered, as well prepared as Mary.
‘People in the house know that Georgie Hale’s in here with me – but who’s Georgie Hale? Does anybody know? If she vanishes, can anybody find her, or any trace of her? Maybe she just left by another door, gone as mysteriously as she came. Maybe that’s a confession.’
‘People in London know who she is. Who I am.’ One person did, at any rate. And he’d come looking. She thought he would. He’d come for the story. Sorry, Tony. You’re too late. Too late for Frank, he’d be too late for her too. If he came.
If he didn’t, there’d be no one to tell her story. Except Mother Mary, who everybody listened to.
‘Oh, I know who you are,’ she said dangerously. ‘I’ve always known. Everyone here has their head in the clouds, those who haven’t smoked their brains entirely; they struggle to know nothing, and they frequently achieve it. I keep my eye on the world, as I do on everyone here. I knew Georgie Hale, even before she lied to me about her name.’
‘Well, then. You know that people will come looking for me.’ For almost the first time in her life she really wanted a cigarette, and of course she didn’t have one. Grace used to carry them routinely, but only for the benefit of men. Georgie never would.
Besides, she really didn’t fancy bringing flame and smoke quite that close to her throat. Not with Mary’s eyes darkly on her, broodingly. She wondered if it were possible to be strangled from the inside.
‘Of course, but again: if they find nothing, nobody, no body – then who’s to say what happened? Grace Harley’s tried to kill herself before. Say she went mad and hanged poor Frank, then came to me to confess; and I tried to keep her for the police, but she wouldn’t stay and I couldn’t hold her, she went running off into the woods and over the moor and she might be anywhere by morning. Her body might never be found. For certain sure it would never be laid at my door.’
There wasn’t another chair, and she wasn’t, was not going to squash up on the sofa next to Mother Mary, but she really needed to sit down now. So she did that, sliding her back down the wall, hoping that it looked cool and self-confident and not at all as though her legs were giving way beneath her.
Here was one mystery solved: the ship’s bell that used to stand by the back door had been removed here, for the moment. Set right here on the floor like she was, out of the way but in the captain’s eyeline when he was sitting in his place.
She said, ‘You really think you can do that? Just make me vanish altogether, in a puff of smoke and nothing left behind? You can’t afford another body.’
‘Oh, not me, dear. I can’t do anything of the sort. Of course not. I’m no magician. I don’t even speak their precious magic language. The gods, though – oh, yes. I reckon the gods could take you away from me, little nuisance that you are. Or burn you right up where you sit and leave nothing but a smear of grease and the smell of overcooking. I’ll ask them in a little while. Then we’ll see.’
Was that how she justified it? Not her work, but the gods’? ‘That must make things easy,’ she said, smiling, relaxed. Nothing to it: this was the face she wore night after night, man after man. ‘You just put it to them, and they decide. No kickback, no responsibility.’
‘That’s right. They take all the responsibility to themselves. They can do that; they’re gods.’
It wasn’t right, of course. It wasn’t even sane. She really wasn’t one to talk, but she knew sheer bloody madness when she heard it: out of her own mouth or someone else’s, no difference.
Besides, it wasn’t how this house worked. Mother Mary might believe it, she might choose to believe it, but she was fooling herself. It wasn’t gods that stalked these high rooms, working strange miracles.
Grace knew. So did other people: Cookie, the doctor, Ruth. And at least Cookie knew where she was, and that she wasn’t about to go running off into the wilds of the land in chase of some wild abstracted death. He was a sensible man; he’d want a more sensible story.
She tried to find comfort in that, that someone at least would want to dig deeper in search of her.
Tried hard.
Meantime, maybe she was only buying time but that seemed fair enough, a reasonable thing to do; she said, ‘What’s it all about, though, Mary? Frank, Kathie . . .’ Me . . . ‘What’s it for?’ And why should the gods oblige you?
‘This is Leonard’s great task,’ Mary said, with just a hint of that breathless awe that said he is my guru, even while her smile said that she worked behind her guru’s back, moved him around like a chess piece: as we do, my dear, with our men; you’ll know, you of all people, how could you not? ‘It’s what he’s meant to do, his work in the world. Of course the gods want to see him fulfil his purpose. It’s what they want for us all.’
And he’s happy, is he, for you to pave his way with corpses? Aloud, she only said, ‘And, what, Frank stood in his way, did he?’
‘Yes, of course. Frank was a spy; he worked for one of those Fleet Street rags that you make such an exhibit of yourself for. I expect you knew him, did you? So he changed his clothes and came up here and made like he was one of us, but I never believed him. He was never right. I looked through his things and found the proof. Notebooks, a camera. Spy stuff. I didn’t mean that he should die, I only wanted rid of him, but the gods knew better. They tried to accommodate me at first, they tried just to scare him away; but he wouldn’t go. He only moved out of the house and bedded down in the woods, and watched us all, and waited.’
And went mad, but it was no use saying that to someone squatting that same territory. She hadn’t quite known till this that a person could be calm and competent and entirely crazy.
‘What do you think he was waiting for?’
‘For you. Obviously.’
She might be mad, but she was almost right, that too. Of course Tony would send someone else, when Frank disappeared; it meant only that the story was getting bigger. Somewhere in the giddy maze of his head, Frank must have known that. He really might have been waiting.
Which made his death her fault, probably. One more blow to her conscience, one more stiffening in her spine. She was going to need it.
She said, ‘And Kathie?’ Never mind me, I know about me. So do you. The assault on Kathie bewildered her.
‘She want
ed to take Webb away from us. Nice little rich girl, Kathie – her dad owns half of Buckinghamshire. She was working to set him up down there: in his own institute was what she called it, with all the communications that are difficult here, and none of the distractions that our colony affords. She would have . . . diminished what Leonard is working for. I couldn’t have that. People should come to us, not move away. I prayed for intervention. That’s all.’
No, that wasn’t all. She deluded herself, she took refuge behind her gods, but somewhere inside her she must know what she was doing. She’d gone out to Frank – using her torch, which perhaps nobody else in the house would have done; there were hurricane lamps for going outside in the dark, but Mary had never quite bought into the simple life – and no doubt she’d say that she’d gone only to witness, and perhaps she even managed to believe it, but that had to be fragile, crêpe-paper thin.
Grace wanted to tear through that, just to see what lay deeper down. She wasn’t sure it would help, but it might make her feel better. Georgie thought that might be important.
Poking gently, she said, ‘But now you’ve lost Webb anyway. You said he’d gone with Kathie . . .’
‘Yes, but he’ll be back. We still have all his work, his records here. And his faithful lieutenant. Tom can take over, if we have to do without Webb. I’m making sure of that.’
A little demonstration, the power of the rational language: yes, Tom had bought totally into that. Never doubting that it was his own achievement, never thinking that the woman who stood behind his shoulder might have been playing with him. Praying to her gods, no doubt, to kill the candle flames at the moment that Tom spoke his potent word. Deceiving him, and deceiving herself, that too.
She said, ‘Why do your gods play with fire?’ Trying to sound a little naive, a little curious, nothing more. A girl at the end of her tether, who only wants to know. ‘It’s all been fire and smoke,’ and nothing to do with gods. Even the hands of wax had been flame at one remove, in either direction: molten by fire, candles without wicks.
Mary hadn’t been there, but that didn’t seem to matter. The house took what it wanted, used that as it chose. For her, from her, it took the cold sucking absence of her baby; for Mary and from Mary, hands made of flame. And you went to Frank and made that happen, Mary, didn’t you? Broke his charcoal heap deliberately to let the fire roar, and then I think you stayed to watch your gods at work.
‘That’s how we communicate,’ Mary said, ‘between the world below and the world above. Fire and smoke are the tools we use, the gods and we. The gods and me, at least. Though I’m not alone. Other believers have other ways to talk to heaven and to hear, I am sure; but fire has always been a tradition. From burnt offerings to altar candles. And smoke, incense, that too. From Catholic thurifers to Chinese joss. I use candles and joss in my own worship, of course, to catch the attention of the gods and speed my prayers on high. Sometimes they choose to use the same means, to bless me with an answer.
‘I’ve always felt a special connection to fire,’ she went on musingly. ‘From a child, I knew there was importance in the flame. More significance than simply warmth and light. The people here let the distinctions blur, and I’m sorry about that. Even the captain doesn’t see what seems so obvious to me. Even though he’s spent so much time in the east, far more than I have . . .
‘That’s where the scales finally fell from my eyes, you see. That’s where I saw what fire really means. The captain sent me to India, where people live closer to nature and closer to their gods, both at once; where fire is still a clear messenger, as it used to be for us. More than a messenger, indeed: where people use it to convey their very souls to the next life. I saw a young woman, newly widowed, dressed in her wedding clothes and seated on her husband’s funeral pyre. I saw the fire lit; I saw her burn beside him. She never stirred to flee the flames, she never raised her voice. Only her hands – I saw her lift her hands to heaven as she burned. That, yes. That has stayed with me all these years.’
She was sure that it had. Hands, clutching out of flame: how not? Never ask if the girl had been tied to her chair, perhaps, or drugged. Or both. Mary had the image that she wanted, with the meaning that she chose. In this place, that was enough. More than enough. Fire and smoke, and hands to do her work for her, oh yes . . .
Mary didn’t need her own hands, apparently, not any more. She spoke a word, and all the candle flames stiffened in response. ‘Blessed be the gods,’ she said quietly, her gaze calm and settled. ‘Now, I have prayers to say, but I can do that quietly in my head and still listen to you. I’ve told you my story. Why don’t you tell me yours? Oh, I know who you are, Grace Harley, and I know what the public knows, what the papers say about you. The party girl who put the Tory party in bed with the Communist party, or might have done. Found guilty of taking money for sex, from the men who were acquitted of paying it. That’s always the way. But I think there’s more to you than that, isn’t there? You’ve made some devil’s pact with the yellow press, I know that too – that you’re here like Frank was, to spy for them – but it’s more than that too. You may as well tell me, you know. No secrets now. It’s just you and me and the gods in here. Nobody will be coming through that door until we’re done.’
A sudden fierce light stood to confirm that. She had set candles in jars on either side of the double doors – but that was no candlelight that leapt out of them. They were pillars of light, rather, cold and tall, as broad around as her arm, thrusting up full-width from the mouths of their jars and then criss-crossing like laces, back and forth across the space between them. She couldn’t imagine what would happen to anyone who forced the doors open and tried to come through. Perhaps the light would hold the doors closed, against any human strength; or else nobody would dream of disturbing Mary while they remained shut. One or the other, she supposed. Or both.
Well, then. No reason not to share her secrets. She never had, with anyone – but one way or the other, it wasn’t going to matter here. Whoever eventually walked out of that door, they were going to do it alone.
She said, ‘I was pregnant, when they sent me to jail before the trial.’
‘Yes, dear, I know that. The whole world knows. Pregnant and unmarried and couldn’t even name the father, there had been so many candidates.’
Couldn’t, or wouldn’t. But she didn’t interrupt; Mary had a head of steam and was forging onward.
‘What better proof could you offer that you were guilty of everything they said? No wonder they locked you away. But then you lost the baby, and the judge took pity on you.’ I wouldn’t have done, her manner said. Never mind what’s happened since, or whatever’s happened here. Hippy morals, never mind those either. Guilty as charged, and you met your just deserts.
No. Never that. No punishment enough: not even this raw confession, made in raw light to a woman who was mad, and who despised her.
She said, ‘I didn’t lose my baby. I killed him.’
She said, ‘While he was inside me still, while I was inside. They were going to make abortion legal, but I couldn’t, you know. I couldn’t wait. He wouldn’t hold still and not grow and just wait until the law let me get rid of him.’
She said, ‘It would’ve been easier on the outside; I could’ve managed it better. I knew people, outside. Of course I did. But that didn’t help me in Holloway. So I asked the women there, and one of them got me something. I don’t know what – a powder, green and bitter it was. I mixed it with water and swallowed it, and she said it’d make me miscarry. It . . . didn’t do that.’
There were tears leaking down her face now, but she ignored them and so did Mary. ‘I was ill for a few days, I bled a little, but that was all. Only, then I didn’t get any bigger, and it didn’t move any more, it didn’t kick; and the doctors said it was dead, my baby, but I still had to carry it until. Until . . .’
That was it, apparently. A word that grounded on a memory too dreadful to discuss, a door she wouldn’t open, a place she refused t
o go: the day she’d given birth, if that was what it was, to the son that she’d killed weeks before.
No punishment enough. Certainly nothing that Mary could do to her now, maybe not even anything the house had to offer. She had a terrible respect for the house, its own judgement, its insight; more than she’d ever had for the systems of law, the man who had sat in judgement over her. She’d seen too many judges with their trousers off.
Mary was something else again. Not constrained. Not sane, perhaps, but powerful even if she wouldn’t admit it. And lethal, of course, that too.
Even now she might claim that she was praying, but what she was really doing, she was setting up to kill.
Where Grace sat – and she was all Grace now, all full of that self and what she had done, full and spilling over – there were candles on either side of her, and their lights were rising: nothing like regular candle-flames, and nothing either like the interlaced pillar-lights that kept the door. These rose like string and stretched like wire, bright golden fierce wires that bent back on themselves and twisted around, scribbled lines in mid-air that burned and burned and would not go out.
Lines that made shapes, yes.
Lines that etched two hands in light, right there in the air, between her and Mary: two hands of flame, each drawn from a thread of candlelight, too big and too bright and too potent, far too near.
Hands that twitched and stretched, that folded their fingers close and stretched them wide, that learned their reach and strength – and then reached out for her throat.
Georgie might just have sat there and let them take it. Take her. Crush or burn or both, she had no idea.
House of Bells Page 24