The House on Vesper Sands

by Paraic O?Donnell

  Lady Ada made a dismissive gesture. ‘The whole of my existence is a painful subject,’ she said. ‘One acquires a certain fortitude. My experience was not quite as you describe, however; not to begin with, at any rate. I learned to be discreet, of course, when in company. I led rather a sheltered life, in my early years, though there were certain occasions that could not be shirked. My family had a certain standing, after all. But my father had no great liking for balls or field days. He preferred his study, his laboratory. I was like him, in that way, and it pleased him. And not only in that way.’

  ‘Forgive me, madam,’ Neuilly said. ‘I do not follow.’

  Lady Ada turned from the window at last. ‘Isn’t it obvious? My father saw what I saw. I don’t recall when I discovered it first, but it became a secret we shared, at least for a time. I remember once, at Ascot – one was obliged to go, in those days – my father crouched next to me, when he was sure we weren’t observed. He pointed out a little girl. She was scrubbing kettles in one of those tents where tea is served. An awning had been raised in the heat, and we could see the kitchen to the rear. “Look, Ada,” he said. “Do you see how bright she is? Isn’t it marvellous?” And that was all. He winked then, and led me away. I don’t recall that we ever mentioned it again, but there was a look he used to give me, when we encountered them. A look, that was all. But it was enough.’

  They were interrupted by Mrs Cornish, who entered the room with a rattling tea tray, setting it down with no particular delicacy. ‘You might wish to take something, ma’am, having gone without your breakfast. I have put out some of your nuts and berries, along with the tea things. You might take a sup of something hot, ma’am, against the damp.’

  ‘Take that rubbish away,’ Lady Ada snapped. ‘It is whisky I want. And some pudding. And what have you done with my cigars, woman?’

  ‘You’ll find them in their case, ma’am, nearly by your elbow. Which they ain’t never moved, to my knowledge.’

  ‘How dare you utter such a brazen lie?’ Lady Ada replied with great vehemence. ‘I scarcely know where to look for them from one hour to the next. Why do you persist in tormenting me, now that your paymaster lies dead?’

  Cutter raised an eyebrow at this, but said nothing. He would have a good many questions, no doubt, but for now he seemed content to let this exchange run its course.

  Neuilly seemed to acknowledge this when he spoke again. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘There are other subjects we must turn to shortly, but if the inspector will permit it – and if you will indulge me a little longer, Lady Ada – might I ask if your brother came to know? About what you could see?’

  ‘My brother.’ Lady Ada had lit a cigar. She stroked the lid of the case as she closed it, then released a slow furl of smoke. This small ritual seemed to soothe her. ‘My brother, yes. My brother always came to know of things. And somehow it never ended well.’

  Octavia ran, clutching her sodden hat to her head. It was foolish of her, perhaps – she had no clear notion of which way Angie had gone – but she had acted on instinct. Poor Georgie had called out after her, laden with baggage and unable to follow, but there hadn’t been time to explain. She caught another glimpse of Miss Tatton, or thought she did; a gauzy disturbance at the edge of her vision, crossing the shaded interval between two pines. She ran heedlessly then, letting her hat fly off in her wake. It didn’t matter now how she might appear. Nothing else mattered.

  She sighted her again and changed her course, realising she had gone astray. The grounds were wild and featureless in places, and a mist had risen from the shore. The sleet had ceded now to an insistent rain. She stumbled along choked footpaths and climbed overgrown terraces, searching the colourless vistas for something to orient herself by.

  She turned back uphill, passing a blackened fountain, and came to a narrow walk of untended yews. At the far end – she was almost sure of it this time – she saw the girl again, and halted for a moment in confusion. The walk led to the summerhouse she had seen from the gate. She had doubled back without realising. The rain was heavier now, though it hadn’t seemed to trouble Angie before. Perhaps she had sought shelter.

  The summerhouse had been painted at one time in French grey, though it was now much disfigured. It was set out in an octagon, with doors that gave on to a mossy terrace. The wind caught them as she let herself in, so that she struggled for a moment to pull them closed behind her, fearful that a pane would be knocked out. She smelled the cigarette smoke before she turned to look. The scent of sandalwood. Then he spoke.

  ‘Hello, Wavy.’

  Lady Ada said no more until the housekeeper had cleared away the tea things and withdrawn, and even then she would not be rushed, choosing not to speak until she had smoked almost three quarters of her slender but noxious cigar.

  ‘Tell me, Inspector,’ she said at last, ‘what do they say of me in London?’

  Cutter looked up, slightly vexed at this digression. ‘Begging your pardon, madam, but I do not take your meaning.’

  Lady Ada strode to the centre of the room to face him. ‘Do not try my patience further, Cutter. You are a policeman of some years’ standing, I take it, and charged with looking into my brother’s affairs. Am I to believe that you have discovered nothing of my family’s history? That I have been shut away at my brother’s whim for the better part of thirty years, and no explanation for it was ever put about in society?’

  ‘As you say, madam, I hear a good deal in my profession about a great many things, and I heed very little of it. What I have heard of your circumstances, since you put it to me so directly, is that your brother obtained against you some finding of incapacity, and was given leave to confine you and to direct your affairs.’

  ‘Incapacity.’ Lady Ada repeated the word with a forceful contempt. ‘Incapacity. Do I appear incapable to you, Inspector? Do I seem feeble in mind or body? No, it was not incapacity that concerned my brother. If I had been merely an imbecile or a lunatic, it would have suited him very well. The moment my father died, he would have consigned me to an asylum, and he would not have needed half a dozen medical men to make the case for him.

  ‘It was not incapacity that made me intolerable to him, but the very opposite. Neuilly asks if my brother came to know of it – of this perception of mine, as he puts it. And he did, of course, though I never quite knew how. I imagined we were discreet, my father and I, but I was a child still. Who knows what he observed, what talk he might have overheard?

  ‘Whatever he knew, he kept it to himself while my father was alive. He was a monster always, and filled with jealousy, but my father restrained him. Once he was gone, well …’

  She broke off for a moment, and looked away.

  ‘There was a serving girl, at the home of my father’s cousin. He saw me watching, I suppose, saw how fascinated I was. But he wasn’t sure who it was. It was a large household, you see, and there were other serving girls. He couldn’t pick her out. Not at first.

  ‘He began to taunt me openly, to accuse me of hysteria, of madness, of witchcraft. But then he would alter course. He would claim that he perceived it too. He would try to describe how she appeared, this serving girl, as if from his own observations. He wanted me to confirm what he said, so that the details would seem convincing. And he wanted to be sure of who it was.

  ‘When I wouldn’t answer, he would torment me again. These were nothing but delusions. I was disordered, he said. My father had known it, but he had indulged me out of kindness. What he couldn’t bear, you see, was the thought that he did not understand – that there might be secrets to which he was not admitted. He would show me, he said, that it was all in my mind. He would show me that the serving girl was perfectly ordinary.

  ‘I didn’t know what he meant, or what he intended. I couldn’t tell if he had discovered who it was. But of course he had. I must have been careless. I must have paid attention to the girl when she was alone. He came to me with the newspaper, after it happened. She hadn’t merited more than two or three
lines. She had gone into the canal, near the Paddington Basin. The afternoon was dark, and the towpath was icy. Some bargemen from a brewery pulled her out. Alice Coakes, aged thirteen. In service at Gowden House in Mayfair.’

  Cutter allowed a moment to pass before he spoke. ‘Make a note of the particulars, Bliss. You will not object, Lady Ada?’

  She ground out her cigar with a look of impatience. ‘Let your sergeant get his notebook out and write down what I say, since he is diligent about such things. I am not speaking for the good of my health.’

  ‘Did your brother confess to the act, madam? Openly or otherwise?’

  ‘He was a brute, Inspector, and much less clever than he believed, but he wasn’t an outright fool. How inconvenient for the Gowdens, he said. But I suppose it won’t be terribly difficult to find another serving girl. One is much like another, after all.’

  Neuilly gave a heavy sigh. ‘Now we begin to see. “Thou look’st through spectacles”, Donne said. Do you know his verse? When we look through spectacles, he said, “small things seem great”. He was talking of the divine, of course, and how little we may know of it, with our pitiful faculties. “But up unto the watch tower get, and see all things despoiled of fallacies”. I think we have begun to climb the watch tower at last, though it is a sad and wearying business. We begin to see.’

  Octavia turned slowly at the sound of his voice. It was not shock that she felt, but a surge of revulsion. Elf had arranged himself on a bench seat at the rear of the summerhouse. His posture was languid, as if it were an afternoon in June and they had chanced to meet at a garden party, but he could not quite conceal his laboured breathing, his slight agitation when he tapped away his ash.

  ‘It isn’t possible,’ she said. ‘Ours was the first cab to be had. Master Alfred said you might be waiting an hour or more.’

  ‘Poor Wavy.’ He inclined his head. ‘How confusing it must all seem.’

  ‘My name is Octavia.’ Her voice in her own ears was unfamiliar and brittle. ‘You may address me as Miss Hillingdon.’

  ‘Just as you wish, of course. And perhaps it will give you some comfort, Miss Hillingdon, to know that I might indeed be waiting still, if I had depended on your Master Alfred. But a man in my position would not keep it for long if he depended on the Master Alfreds of this world.’ He paused. ‘Is it Master Alfreds, do you suppose, or Masters Alfred?’

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘All those poor girls. Why?’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ He sat upright, discarding his cigarette end and crushing it fastidiously beneath the toe of one shoe. ‘I’d been wondering quite how much you knew. He removed certain items from Mr Brown’s person, didn’t he? Our friend on the train. Well, I suppose there’s time to tell you just a little. Won’t you sit down?’

  He slid to one end of the bench, indicating the other with a courtly gesture. She backed away, pressing herself against the door and shaking her head. He sighed, as if in weariness, and reached into his coat. For a strange moment, Octavia did not recognise the object he had produced. The fear enclosed her then, like a skin of cold.

  A gun, a pistol. How unobtrusive a thing it seemed.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘It’s vulgar of me, I know. But do sit down, there’s a darling. You aren’t given to making a fuss, as a rule. I’m sure we can avoid any unseemliness.’

  She glanced out over the gardens again as she edged towards him, keeping to the margins of the room. He held the gun with practised nonchalance. ‘Who is it that you hope to see, my dear? Your poor, vanishing orphan? Not your brother, alas. He has found a use for himself as a porter, I gather, which seems about right.’

  Octavia lowered herself carefully to the bench, gripping its edge and keeping her arms braced at her sides. She moved carefully, taking slow and even breaths.

  ‘My brother is a naval officer,’ she said. ‘And a finer man than you have ever been.’

  ‘A lieutenant, yes, how very splendid. He needed no more than three attempts, I am told, to pass his examination. Whereas you distinguished yourself at Girton College, and have charmed half of London into overlooking the matter of your birth. Who knows how well you might have married, if you had only given up that wretched bicycle of yours. How differently things might have turned out.’

  ‘I want to know why,’ she said quietly. ‘Tell me why.’

  ‘Well, as to the why of it, Strythe would have been the man to ask. He was the true zealot, the one with the grand notions. But I’m afraid he no longer has much to say. Hanged himself from the front gate in the night, I gather. I’ve been speaking to the servants here, who have made themselves useful in various ways, over the years.

  ‘As for me, well, I came to the enterprise quite late. Much of what I’ve told you is true, you see, as far it goes. I do hold a position at the Home Office, in one of the more obscure Directorates. Secret, one might even say. We take an interest in cases of a particular sort, in certain phenomena. Strythe’s little experiments were just the sort of thing that tends to attract our notice. I took a professional interest, nothing more. Or at least, that’s how it began.’

  ‘And then what? What were these experiments, as you call them? What did you want with those poor girls?’

  ‘What does any of us want, my love? Life. To live. That’s what they had, these bright ones. Life in abundance. Life to burn. But wasted on them, really. I mean, you’ve seen how these people live. Strythe’s first was some little parlour maid, if you can imagine such a thing. I gather that he acted out of spite to begin with – the girl was a favourite of his sister’s, if you take my meaning – and I suppose he meant only to take whatever coarse pleasure such a creature could offer. But he wrung rather more from her than that. Life, Wavy. A surfeit of it that infused his own being like some restorative tincture. The effects were modest at first, and persisted only for a few days, but he knew he had been given the merest taste. And the thought came to him that it might be distilled somehow, this vital essence – that it might be purified. And what use did they have for it, these girls? It would do nothing to better their prospects, this peculiarity of theirs. What harm was there, then, in taking what they didn’t even know they possessed?’

  ‘What peculiarity? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Haven’t you been listening, darling? They may be common, these wretches, but they aren’t quite ordinary. They are gifted, if that’s the word, with some rare superfluity of the soul, with a freakish excess. And we found a way to divert it, this excess, to consume it. Well, Strythe and his hirelings did, and naturally their method was documented for our files, but I never concerned myself much with the mechanics of the thing. The sickly ones were best, that much I gathered, the ones who’d been weakened in some way. It made them brighter, it seems. That’s how it was manifest, you see, as a brightness of some sort, though I couldn’t see it myself. Nor could Strythe, though he’d had certain instruments made. But we discovered that there were those who could. We learned to make use of them. Did you know that certain plants produce a great flush of flowers when they’re dying? So that there will be seeds, I suppose. So that something will persist. At any rate, Strythe had employed all manner of people, even before he established his charitable institution. That was a delightful touch, don’t you think? There was some disgraced medical man from Edinburgh, I remember – and a chemical agent had been perfected. A resin, I suppose you’d call it. It had to be kept in special vessels, made by a chap in Antwerp. You can’t imagine the expense. It became a vapour, this resin, when the bottles were opened.’

  ‘The black air,’ Octavia said quietly. ‘The smoke.’

  ‘It was black, yes, and terribly noxious. Rather a nuisance to administer, too. It all had to be done very slowly, or they’d skitter over the edge before we’d got what we needed. But when it did work, my goodness. It just rose up from them afterwards, and we breathed it in. After the last one that worked – Felicity something, I think it was—’

  ‘Hardwick. Felicity Hardwick.’

&n
bsp; ‘Yes, that sounds right. After that one, well – my man Macken hardly recognised me the next morning. Said I looked ten years younger. Ten years. I mean, what wouldn’t one do? And if there were someone brighter still, how much more might have been possible? Twenty years? Fifty? A hundred? But then there was all that fuss. That damned woman. That cunt. She destroyed the vessels, you know, when she jumped. And the resin that was left. A fucking seamstress, of all things. I told him it was a foolish risk. I warned him. But he had a weakness for theatrics, I’m afraid, and indulged all sorts of grand notions about higher knowledge. He couldn’t just take a girl and get on with the job. He had to make a bloody ceremony of the thing. I knew it would be our undoing in the end. I knew what had happened that night, when word reached us at Ashenden House—’

  ‘It was you, then. It was you I saw, climbing into his carriage.’

  ‘Oh, you saw, did you? Ever the curious little cat, weren’t we? Well, someone had to take charge of things, after all, if anything was to be salvaged from all of this. Someone had to conceal him, to begin with, since there was no question of his returning home. Besides, he’d rather exhausted my patience, and I wanted him within easy reach when the time came. But he grew suspicious, I think. He began to see, when he had had time to reflect, the predicament in which he had placed me. I could still maintain the appearance, just about, that I was doing no more than investigating this little case, but now there had been a grubby little incident. Questions would be asked, if there was anyone left to answer them. At any rate, my man Macken had been watching over him at Grosvenor-crescent, but he had fled when I returned from our little soirée at Mrs Digby’s. I knew where he would go, of course. The carrier’s cart was waiting still, and there were the remains of that ridiculous clergyman to think of – or so we believed. I knew he would come here – he always did – and it suited my purposes admirably. In the meantime, a story had to be put about that would allow me to conclude my business without any tiresome fuss, and in that regard you proved most obliging. Of course, I’d had to put the hours in first, telling you just enough to keep you keen. I’d had to cultivate you, as one always does with rare blooms, but my efforts were rewarded in the end. No one else was looking for Strythe, and I had a free hand. He robbed me of a certain satisfaction in the end, with that garish suicide of his, but at least he saved me some trouble.’