Octavia studied him for a moment. His wounded air was plainly affected, but that was hardly unusual. As with all his affectations, it seemed to invite the suspicion that a truer sentiment lay beneath it, bravely withheld. ‘Well, in any case,’ she said, relenting a little, ‘why did you bring it up? Is that how you mean to help me? By saving me the trouble of finding Lord Strythe? Are you going to produce him triumphantly and take a bow? Is that why we’re here?’
He gave a measured sigh. ‘Look, old thing, you’ve got the wrong idea. I’m not doing any of this to spoil your fun. If I’ve taken a keen interest in our friend Strythe, it’s because he and his household have begun to attract an unwelcome degree of attention.’
‘What do you mean? What sort of attention?’
‘My connection is to the Home Office, as you may remember. I have oversight of, well, certain police functions.’
‘The police? Lord Strythe has come to the attention of the police? What on earth for?’
‘A suicide at his home, to begin with. And then he went missing, which was a little disobliging of him. And now, this morning – well, you’ll see when we get there. You’ll want to see everything, I’m sure, for the purposes of accuracy.’
‘Accuracy? What are you talking about now?’
‘I’m talking about the account you’re going to write for the Gazette.’
‘Of what, for goodness’ sake? Elf, this is absurd.’
‘Of a sad event that will attract a good deal of public notice.’ He glanced out again. ‘Look, we’re turning into Piccadilly. There isn’t time to explain everything now, so I must ask you to trust me. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? A worthier subject? Secrets that are worth uncovering? Trust me, Wavy, and I promise you, there will be more. Not just Strythe, but the rest too. The Spiriters. The missing girl. All of it.’
She had been about to speak, but now she could only stare. She shook her head slowly. He leaned towards her.
‘Don’t ask how I know. It’s not the right question any longer. You do want to find her, don’t you? Perhaps you’ve even promised to. You really needn’t say. I do too, you see, even if it’s for slightly different reasons. Please, just trust me for now. This is what you can do for me. Afterwards, there will be much more I can do for you.’
Octavia drew back, considering him. Elf reclined too, opening his hands as if to welcome her scrutiny. She shook her head again. ‘Healy won’t print it.’
‘Oh, he’ll print it, dear heart. If he doesn’t, he will be beaten to it by half the papers in London. He might even be inclined to put out a late edition.’
The carriage paused at the corner of Half Moon-street, where a small crowd had gathered in spite of the weather. A pair of police vehicles had been drawn together to block the way, and before them a loose rank of constables stood glowering at the onlookers. A man in brown moved unobtrusively among them, muttering occasional instructions. He was watchful and unhurried, and his hat and coat had a borrowed drabness about them, just as Elf’s did. When he caught sight of their carriage he gave a signal, at which the barricade parted and the constables began clearing a path. The man in brown looked on wordlessly as they passed, only raising a desultory finger to his hat brim. Elf, who seemed to have looked for him as they arrived, gave a languid salute in acknowledgement. It was only then that Octavia recognised his face.
‘That man,’ she said. ‘We saw him at Ashenden House. You said you knew him vaguely. Who is he, Elf? A policeman?’
‘Not exactly, old thing.’
She studied him again. It was not only his clothes. In the greyish light, even his skin had an unfamiliar pallor, as if his habitual colour had been carefully suppressed. ‘Honestly, Elf,’ she said. ‘I feel I hardly know you at all. And if you can engineer all of this, why bring me into it? I’m quite sure you can have something reported on in the papers without my help.’
‘Look, Wavy.’ He faced her again, and now his manner was confiding. ‘Don’t think I don’t understand. I know this isn’t quite what you’d have wanted. You’d much rather have made your name with a scandal you’d ferreted out for yourself, but the circumstances that come to define us are almost never of our own choosing. Fate is a fairy tale, my darling. In life, there is only opportunity and advantage.’
She waited, keeping her expression neutral. She knew there would be more.
‘And there is something else you must understand, Wavy. This is an opportunity, yes, but it is also a necessity. I can’t explain exactly what I mean – not yet, at any rate – but we must take these steps first if there is to be any hope of our finding the missing girl. There are other interested parties in all of this, who will almost certainly frustrate our efforts if we do nothing. This will win us time – not a great deal of time, perhaps, but it may be just enough. Well, what do you have to say, Miss Octavia Hillingdon? Is this to be your opportunity?’
She sighed in resignation. ‘You’re pretending I have a choice. It’s kind of you, I suppose, in a way.’
He pulled on his gloves and gave an equivocal smile. ‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Now, then. I haven’t been given all the details yet, but they wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to keep the crowd back unless there were something pretty ghastly for them to gawk at. I know you’re not the frail sort, and no doubt you see all manner of things as you bicycle about the meaner districts. But even so, I’m afraid you must prepare yourself.’
‘Prepare myself? How?’
He drew his pocket-flask from his coat again and offered it to her. ‘Well, to begin with,’ he said, ‘you really ought to reconsider that drink.’
MAYFAIR GAZETTE
February 4, 1893
ANOTHER FATALITY AT STRYTHE HOUSE
A SECOND UNEXPLAINED DEATH HAS OCCURRED AT STRYTHE HOUSE IN HALF MOON-STREET, MAYFAIR, THE LONDON RESIDENCE OF LORD STRYTHE, 14TH EARL OF MAUNDLEY. The fatality follows the death of MISS ESTHER TULL, 37, a seamstress, who met her end in strikingly similar circumstances late in the evening of the 1st inst. These are to come before an inquest at a date to be announced by MR A. BRAXTON HICKS, Coroner for the South-Western District of London and Surrey.
The deceased in the present case was a male person aged approximately 55 years, whose death was in apparent consequence of falling or jumping from an upper part of the residence. His remains were discovered in the early hours of this morning by John Warnock, an inspector of police, C Division, who was in the vicinity on unrelated police business and granted an interview to a correspondent of the Gazette.
The dead man had occasioned grievous injuries to the face and upper body, which the present correspondent was permitted to observe at close quarters. No identification had yet been made, and the police surgeon had yet to attend the scene. Insp. Warnock would not enter into speculation, but affirmed that the age of the deceased was consistent with that of Lord Strythe.
Asked whether adult males other than His Lordship were ordinarily resident at Strythe House, Insp. Warnock said that to his knowledge there were none, with the exception of the household staff, and remarked that the deceased did not appear to be clothed in the manner of a domestic servant, but rather in the evening attire of a gentleman of rank.
The present correspondent sought the testimony of other members of the household, but none was forthcoming. Callers are discouraged from presenting themselves at Strythe House, and no statement is expected from His Lordship’s representatives until such time as the proper Authorities have made an official determination.
XXI
Gideon was woken by a quietness in the weather.
He had felt it as he slept, this lull, and his dreams had grown uneasy. He had seen his mother and father, faceless now in his memory. They had left him behind, on a rutted track in some colourless fenland. He had called to them from where he stood, but his voice had failed in his throat.
His mother looked back once, raising the crook of her hand to shade her whited face, then trudged onwards at his father’s side to a place in the
road where a laden cart was waiting. A hawk crossed the vacant sky, and the cart lumbered slowly away. Nothing else stirred, and the soundlessness troubled him. Perhaps it was like that, in the end. Perhaps a silence came.
Gideon woke to these unravelling thoughts, and to a peculiar sense that something in his surroundings had been altered. He lay still for a moment, then sat up abruptly, as if to catch sight of some stealthy intruder. There was no one, and no sign that anyone had come in while he slept. His water glass stood undisturbed at his bedside. His clothes hung just as he had left them on the chair by the washstand. The curtains were not quite fully drawn, leaving an interval of darkness where the moon had been before he slept.
Nothing had changed, or nothing that he could name, but his conviction persisted. Some subtle transfiguration had occurred. It was in the stillness of the air, in the spill of cold light at the doorway.
Gideon stood with no clear intention, confronting himself in the dressing mirror, a borrowed nightshirt hanging loosely about his meagre frame. He flexed his feet, looking about him in wariness. The boards were dry against his soles, and minutely fissured, like the ridges of seashells. He crossed to the window, drawing back the curtains so as to let in what moonlight there was. A stalled wind stirred faintly among the fringes of the dunes. Where it met the darkness, the skin of the sea had the greenish pallor of lichen.
There.
To his left, at the margin of his vision. It had crossed the doorway, the quadrant of pale light from the landing beyond. If he waited. If he hid the thought from himself, or looked away until it receded. If he waited, he would turn and see nothing. He would admonish himself, sighing with fond relief as he returned to his bed.
And so it was. He turned. There, you see. He turned, and he saw nothing.
But it was not so.
There.
He pressed his eyes closed. When he opened them, his senses were sundered, adrift. He saw her and he did not.
‘Angie? Miss Tatton?’
She was fading. He had seen her only hours before, yet he was shocked by how far advanced the changes seemed. He approached her, surveying her anxiously. Perhaps it was her clothing, at least in part. She had been a good deal covered up, and now she wore only a yellowed and threadbare nightgown. The vanishing had crept from her extremities on the right side. Her right arm had faded now almost to her elbow, and from just below the knee her right leg was reduced to the same spectral translucence. Yet there was a delicate wholeness still to what remained of her. The taut hollow of her throat, the stark clavicle enclosing its scoop of shadowed softness.
‘Oh, Angie.’
‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Hush-a-by, rock-a-by.’
On the landing, a pale light flickered and brightened. It was chilly and pure, and came from some unseen source. He thought of an opal he had been shown once, by a chap at Selwyn whose father had been in the Colonial Office. It had been mined in Zanzibar, and it had looked, even against a clammy palm, like a phial of Arctic sunlight.
Gideon ventured closer. ‘Angie?’ he said. ‘Is something the matter? Did something wake you?’
But it came to him even as he spoke the words. She had not been sleeping. He had not seen her sleep since taking her from the hospital. A half-shade, Cutter had called her. She was not yet a ghost, perhaps, but there were needs she no longer felt.
Yet perhaps she had been disturbed, even so, by this strange quiescence in the weather. It was passing now, he thought, and the air was astir once more. At the windows, in ragged pulses, he heard the returning rain.
Miss Tatton had been pacing the floor, silent and distracted, but she halted now, suddenly alert.
‘When the wind blows.’ Her voice was vacant and desiccated. ‘Lord have mercy.’
‘Angie?’
She seemed agitated, in her distant and unknowable way, and he felt the urge to comfort her. He reached for her hesitantly, meaning only to touch her arm, but she hissed and spun away. Her face, for an instant, was cold and feral.
‘Miss Tatton?’ He drew back. ‘Miss Tatton, forgive me. I did not mean to—’
But the moment passed. She grew distracted again, looking uneasily about her as the rain gathered force against the eaves.
‘Angie?’ He spoke gently, fearful still that she would turn on him again. ‘Angela mea. Is that what you are becoming, an angel? We are taught to distrust such notions, but Augustine himself might have entertained it. When we speak of angels, he said, we speak of the office they hold, not of their nature. In nature, they are spirits.’
She paid no attention. She raised her face to the air, as if to catch the thread of a scent.
‘Miss Tatton?’ But he knew it was useless. He shook his head ruefully. ‘I believed I was in awe of you once, but I had forgotten the first meaning of that word, that there was terror in it long before there was wonder. I had forgotten the angels in scripture, who are not always seraphs. There are angels of destruction too.’
She glanced at him, or through him, her face avid and fierce.
‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I cannot keep from babbling. I was helpless from the very beginning. Do you not remember, Angie? Those first days, in the summer? Do you really not remember?’
She took a step towards him, her bare soles soundless on the boards. Her gaze flickered about his face, as if seeking out a resemblance in a portrait. He made himself still.
‘Angie?’
‘One for the master,’ she whispered. When she raised her hand, or the ghost of it, he could not tell if her fingertips had touched his cheek. ‘And one for the dame.’
‘Yes.’ He whispered too, afraid even to disturb the air. ‘Young master, you called me, though I wished you would say my name. And how I wish it now. It is me. It is Gideon.’
But she looked away even as he spoke. She had grown intent again, as if she were certain now of something that had eluded her. She stared into the darkness, her attention fixed on something he could not guess at. The landing overlooked the entrance hall two floors below, but the wall she faced was windowless and dark. She crossed to the stone parapet that joined the banister at the head of the stairs, skimming it with unseen fingertips as she peered out into the shadows.
‘Angie?’ he said. ‘Miss Tatton?’
She was still for a moment, hunched and alert. Then – silently, and with unnatural ease – she mounted it and stood lightly upright. Gideon clapped a hand to his mouth, as if to keep his breath from disturbing the air. She craned outwards into the darkness, intent on something only she could see.
‘Angie.’ He spoke in the faintest possible whisper. ‘Miss Tatton, please. The drop must be thirty feet. Come down, I beg you.’
The parapet was eight or nine inches wide, and her toes – those he could see, at least – extended a little way beyond its outer edge. She flexed them gently, testing the surface of the stone. He wondered if she had lost sensation in her faded limbs. If she could still feel pain. From outside, at some distance still, he heard the first low rupture of thunder.
‘Rock-a-by, baby,’ she sang faintly. ‘On the treetop.’
‘Angie.’ He crept towards her. ‘Angie, please.’
‘When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.’ She swayed gently as she sang, but her gaze never wavered. ‘When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.’
‘Angie! Oh, Jesus Christ!’ He lunged, grasping in desperation at the hem of her nightgown. She turned for a moment, glancing over her shoulder as if at the source of some faint irritation. She spread out her arms, and spoke the last words in a whisper.
‘Down will come baby.’
Lightning. In the stutter of brightness he saw her, crouched and hawk-still, then she was gone. He felt it as she vaulted clear, her fierce cold quickness. He heard the slicing air, the snap of cotton. He hung there then, stretched above the vacant darkness. For a moment he could not be sure if he had closed his eyes, and in the devouring silence when she was gone, he could not tell at first that he had screamed.
The man who waited for them at London Bridge Station was by now familiar. The train for Deal had been due to depart some minutes before, and an agitated conductor now hovered at his elbow, but the man in brown was unperturbed. He watched Octavia and Elf approach from the door of the first-class coach, keeping one foot on its step and the other on the platform, and he made it plain by his bearing – even as the steam gathered about him – that he would not be moved until he was ready.
Octavia had seen it in him at Strythe House, that air of stolid assurance, the way he had of seeming indifferent while observing everything. Inspector Warnock had been in notional command of the scene – a ludicrous, preening oaf with a reeking cigar – but it was this man whose quiet directions had been heeded. It was this man, too, who had drawn back the sacking that covered the body, whose unblinking gaze she had felt while she mastered her breathing and made her notes.
When he was obliged to speak – to explain, for instance, that he would deliver her finished article to the Gazette while she returned home to pack her things – he made the smallest possible concessions to civility. Even now, as Elf stood aside to let her board first, the man in brown greeted her with no more than a fractional nod.
‘Dear me,’ said Elf, as they settled themselves in their compartment. ‘We do find ourselves in sadly reduced circumstances, don’t we? All this humping from one dreary coach to another. I’m afraid I have dragged you rather a long way from our usual milieu. But perhaps even the South Eastern Railway may stretch to a bottle of champagne to steady our nerves.’
Octavia studied their unnamed companion. He had taken the seat opposite hers, folding his arms and turning with equanimity to the window. The train slipped its cowl of steam, shuddering eastwards under a decaying mass of grey cloud. They passed a vinegar works and a brewery. Beneath them, against the dingy bricks of Bermondsey, the snow persisted in meagre scatters.
The House on Vesper Sands Page 23