by Sarah Rayne
After the glare of the afternoon sunshine, Cadence Manor was dim and cool, and my father – that’s to say the man I thought of as my father – was waiting for me. He said, ‘Jamie, there’s someone you must see. Come through into my rooms.’
We crossed to the door leading to the small wing where he spent most of the time, and this was interesting because, as a rule, neither Crispian nor I was allowed in there.
‘Your father has his work and his studies,’ everyone said. ‘It’s important for him to be left in complete peace and quiet.’
So this would be something to tell Crispian afterwards. We often made up stories about what was in these rooms. I was better at that than he was. It usually started with a princess being held captive by a wicked enchanter and the two of us having to hack our way through thick undergrowth to rescue her. Or it was a hideout for bandits or jewel thieves and we helped the police catch them. Or it was a lost prince who had been usurped by a greedy uncle or cousin, and whose throne and kingdom had to be restored.
But at first sight the rooms were not much different from the rest of the house. They looked a bit like the ones in the wing where we normally lived, only the other way round. I had recently read Through the Looking-Glass, and I felt a bit like Alice tumbling through the glass that day. As we went up the stairs and along the top corridor there was a dreamlike quality to everything. Everywhere was very quiet and slightly dusty and cobwebby as if no one ever came in here to clean it. There was not much furniture, but what was there wasn’t glossily polished like the furniture in the rest of the house. I remember thinking that if my Aunt Serena could see this she would be icily angry because she was very particular about everywhere being clean and polished. My father was holding my hand quite tightly, which was unusual, and he was not speaking.
And then we went into a big room at the back of the house, and I stopped thinking about Alice and the looking-glass and about this being a prison for an enchanted princess.
The curtains were drawn, but pinpoints of light showed through the thick fabric in places. Dust motes danced in and out of the dimness and there was a sickly, too-sweet smell. Pushed against the far wall was a bed with thick hangings of the old-fashioned kind, partly drawn. I hesitated in the doorway and looked at my father for guidance because I had no idea what was expected of me.
‘She’s over there in the bed,’ he said. ‘She wants to speak to you. But you’ll have to be very brave, Jamie.’
I was perfectly ready to be brave, especially if this turned out to be an adventure I could boast about later to Crispian. So I went over to the bed, not feeling especially nervous, more curious.
The hangings were open a very little on the side that did not face the window, and as I approached I became aware of a figure lying in the bed. A very thin figure, it was, with a cloud of hair spilling over the pillows, but with a thick veil over its face. That was when I started to feel frightened.
A hand came out to me as I stood by the bed – a thin hand that ought to have been slender and smooth but that was mottled and scarred. I had the wild idea that something had partly eaten the hand, which was surely absurd.
‘Take her hand,’ said my father’s voice just behind me. ‘She won’t hurt you; she can’t hurt anyone. She’s very ill – dying – and she wants to see you and say goodbye.’
‘Who—’
‘Oh, Jamie,’ said a voice from the depths of the bed. ‘Jamie, don’t you know who I am. I’m your mother.’
The dim room, the dust motes, the thick drapes and the too-sweet scent whirled madly around me. My mother had died a long time ago – so long I could not remember her. Did this mean that what people in church said about dying was wrong? That all those stories about people falling asleep and going to live with Jesus and being happy, were not true? That instead of that, they lived on in dark dusty bedrooms, their bodies crumbling away like this thin hand seemed to have crumbled away?
I tried to back away from the half-hidden thing in the bed, but my father was there to stop me. ‘Say goodbye, Jamie,’ he said, and kneeled down beside me. ‘Take her hand and tell her you love her and you’ll always remember her.’
‘No,’ I said, terrified, and trying to pull free. ‘I won’t.’
‘Oh, Jamie . . .’ It was a breath of sound from within the bed and, terribly and fearsomely, the figure half raised itself, stretching out its hand. ‘I only want to say goodbye – I only want to see you, just this last time . . . So handsome, so bright and clever . . . Julius must be so proud of you.’
Julius. The name skittered across my mind, and I thought – insofar as I thought at all – that she meant Colm, but was confused.
She leaned nearer and the cloud of hair swung slightly to one side. The veil – a thick black veil – slipped to one side. I was dimly aware of my father lunging forward, fumbling to push it back into place, but it was too late. I had seen the face the thick cloth had been hiding. I screamed and ran blindly from the room.
He found me some time later, huddled in a corner of my own room, not crying, but hunched on the window seat, knees drawn up to my chest, arms hugging them; staring out of the window at the orderly grounds and lawns, and the faint glint of the lake through the trees.
‘I’m sorry I lied to you,’ he said hesitantly. He was never good at speaking to me – he was never good at speaking to anyone.
Because I had been brought up to be polite, I said, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Jamie,’ he said, sitting awkwardly on the end of the window seat, ‘your mother didn’t die when you were small. She’s lived at Cadence Manor for a number of years.’
‘Why did you tell me she was dead?’
‘Because she had a – an illness that she and I both knew was killing her,’ he said. ‘A dreadful illness that— It disfigured her. Do you know what that word means?’
‘No.’
‘It scars the skin and spoils it,’ he said, and even through my anger and distress I heard his sadness. ‘Little by little it destroys flesh and skin and sometimes even the brain . . .’ He broke off, and I saw him dash one hand across his eyes. ‘She couldn’t bear people seeing,’ he said. ‘She was so very beautiful, you see. So we arranged for her to live here without anyone knowing. I would look after her. We didn’t think it would be for very long, you see. Just a few months, perhaps a year. But it’s been four years.’
‘But now she really is dying?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t want to see her again,’ I said. ‘Could you tell her, please. Say I’m sorry.’
‘Yes.’
‘Unless she’s dead already? Is she?’
He turned to look at me and there was an expression in his eyes that, just for a moment, made me feel cold and uncomfortable. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s not dead yet. But I think she will be by this time tomorrow.’
‘Yes, I see. Thank you for telling me.’ I got off the window seat. ‘I’ll go and find Crispian now, if you don’t mind, sir,’ I said. ‘We were going down to the lake.’
It was nice by the lake that day. Sunlight glinted on the water and we skimmed stones across the surface, competing to see who could skim the furthest. Crispian had no idea what had just happened; I don’t think he ever found out.
We made plans for fishing in the lake and thought we might even be allowed to swim in it, although Crispian said it might be too muddy and choked up with weeds. And all the time I was seeing that terrible face and the reaching hand with the scars and sores.
I think she did die that night, my mother, because I awoke in the middle of the night and heard hurrying footsteps and the murmur of voices. But in the morning everything was exactly as it always was, and I never knew when they took her body away or where they buried her. I never knew, either, if the other people in the house – Julius and my Aunt Serena and Flagg and his wife – knew she was there, but I suppose they must have done. I can’t see how Colm could have coped otherwise.
It wasn’t until I was thirteen that
I realized my mother had not been confused over the names that day at all. She had said Julius must be proud of me, and she really had meant Julius, not Colm.
It was Christmas Eve when I found out the truth. There was a houseful of guests at Cadence Manor. Julius liked giving big house parties and he was a jovial and generous host; in fairness I have to say that about him. One of the men made a vaguely bawdy remark, which Crispian and I were not meant to overhear, about it being a wise man who knew his own offspring.
‘And I dare say Julius, old rascal, has one or two colts not in the stud book,’ he said, and somebody else responded with a remark about not housing them in your own stable. There was some half-embarrassed, half-sniggering laughter.
Something clicked inside my head, and the next morning I asked Julius about it. ‘Sir, I’ve been putting a few facts together,’ I said politely. ‘And I’d very much like it if you could reassure me about something.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got it into my head that Colm Cadence might not be my father.’
There was a very long pause. Then he said, ‘I can’t reassure you, Jamie. He isn’t your father.’
‘Yes, I see. I thought he wasn’t. You’re my father, aren’t you, sir?’
He took a bit longer to answer this time. Then he said, ‘Yes, I am.’
It was the truth, pure and simple, although as Oscar Wilde (I think it was Wilde anyway) said in one of his plays, the truth is rarely pure, and never simple.
‘How did you know?’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said, deliberately vaguely, ‘just one or two things I heard.’
‘I see. Well, I hoped you’d never suspect, Jamie, and I certainly hoped you’d never ask me that question. But I promised your mother if you ever did, then I would answer you truthfully.’
And that was when he handed me all that rubbish about them having been so intensely in love they hadn’t been able to help themselves, and how Colm had been impotent. He didn’t put it quite like that about Colm – he might even have thought that at thirteen I wouldn’t understand. I understood perfectly well, of course. No one who went to a boys’ boarding school and shared a dormitory with ten others was ignorant of the basic facts of life by the age of thirteen, and in a good many cases a lot younger than thirteen. So I was quite clear as to what he meant.
But I sat politely in his study for the next half-hour and listened to him telling me how lovely and sinless and warm my mother had been, and how painful it had been to end the romance, and I thought: you bloody lusting old hypocrite.
But there was one other question I had to ask, and I have to be honest and record that this, really, was the main thing I wanted to know.
‘Sir, since I’m your son as much as Crispian, does that mean I’ll one day own Cadences with him?’
‘Oh, no,’ he said at once. Instant reaction, immediate rebuttal. I think I hated him more at that moment than at any other.
‘Oh, no, Jamie,’ he said again. ‘I’m sorry, but that isn’t how things work. Crispian’s my legitimate son. My heir. I’ll make sure you’re looked after, of course, but you won’t inherit Cadences.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Thank you anyway, sir.’
So there it was. I was Julius’s son as much as Crispian but I wasn’t going to get what Crispian would get. The banking house, Cadence Manor, the money and the power.
Unless, of course, Crispian were to die. That was the thought that came, unbidden, into my mind and, once there, it stuck. I thought, if Crispian were no longer here, I’d have everything. There’d be no one else to inherit it. I’d be the obvious heir and no one would raise an eyebrow.
The lake at Cadence Manor has long since dried out, but in those days it was quite deep. We had already made plans for fishing and swimming at Easter, and I was careful to make regular mention of them – of how I was going to ask for fishing rods for my birthday next February so we could try them out. And, of course, whatever I had, Crispian had as well.
It was easy to push him into the lake. I did it clumsily and inefficiently, and all that happened was that he was drenched. He got out almost at once, of course, and I pretended I had slipped on a patch of mud and knocked into him. I cried so they would think I was ashamed and remorseful at what had happened.
I wasn’t ashamed or remorseful at all. I was furious because Crispian hadn’t drowned. It was my first attempt to murder him. But as you know by now, my unknown reader, it wasn’t my last.
These were the memories that coursed through my mind in the infirmary inside Edirne. The clearest was how the veil had slipped from my mother’s face that day, and how I had run sobbing from the room. It never faded, that memory.
But it wasn’t until I saw the same marks on Julius’s face that I realized my mother must have died from syphilis. It was a scaldingly bad thought, but it explained why she had been hidden away all those years. Not just vanity, although I dare say that came into it, but shame. The shame of having contracted a sexual disease, although whether she got it from Julius or he got it from her, I have no idea.
And here’s the real agony: it’s a disease that can be inherited. Not always and not necessarily severely. But if the mother has syphilis during pregnancy there’s a strong danger of the child displaying some symptoms. And when both parents have it . . .
It doesn’t always mark the face, syphilis. Sometimes it marks the mind. Like a smeary pawprint of black disease stamped into the brain. Distorting it and dredging up darknesses.
Darknesses. You can see, can’t you, why I hated my mother and my real father so much?
It was later that night when the Pasha called everyone inside the fortress together and told them that the siege of Edirne was likely to continue for sometime yet. I wasn’t among the people. Even if I had been pronounced fit to leave my room I would have stayed away because I didn’t want to face anyone. But Crispian and Gil were there, and Raif had interpreted the gist of the speech for them. Boiled down to the bones, it meant that Edirne remained an island of resistance, and was still being attacked by the Bulgarians, who were determined to possess the ancient Ottoman capital.
Supplies were dwindling, but the Pasha had pledged that in the event of a siege, the fortress would not surrender for a period of fifty days. God knows why fifty, as opposed to any other number, but that’s what he said.
‘So,’ said Crispian, ‘we’re stuck here for a good while yet.’
I shrugged. It made no odds to me whether I was stuck inside a Turkish fortress or in a British castle.
‘The Pasha has promised the sick people will be given the best of what there is,’ Crispian said. ‘We’ll make sure you’re all right, Jamie.’
I nodded.
‘But,’ said Gil, who was lounging on the end of the bed, ‘I think there’s going to be a good deal of hardship ahead. The supplies of food are already running low. It’s being said that provisions will have to be rationed. If it goes on for long we could be facing what’s virtually a famine. I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that we have a very difficult and painful time ahead.’
Chapter 33
Cadence Manor, Early 1913
Serena Cadence knew she had a difficult and painful time ahead.
The actual birth of the child – the twin that had survived the brutality of the mercury treatment – did not especially worry her, even though she knew it would be painful and exhausting. It was what lay beyond the birth that was so frightening.
Dr Martlet had tried to reassure her. He had said after the birth they might try the mercury procedure again or consider the new German drug. Salvarsan, it was called; he had been able to read some of the reports on it. The outlook was really very promising, he said.
Serena listened politely but she knew he was lying. The outlook was not promising at all. She knew what this disease did. She had seen it ravage Julius’s body and then shred his mind, and the images were sickening ones. But what was far worse was the macabre memory of Fay Cadence.
There had only b
een one occasion when Serena had seen what lay beneath Fay’s shawls and veils, but even that brief glimpse had sickened her. A nightmare figure, she had thought. The skin had been ravaged and corroded; the lips and eyes distorted by the scars and sores. Was that what lay ahead for Serena herself?
Dr Martlet said very firmly that it was not. It might take a very long time for the disease to develop; it might be quiescent for years. In fact, it might remain quiescent and never trouble her in the future. The changes that her pregnancy were currently creating had brought it to the surface, that was all. After the birth, it would recede. But Serena saw the look in his eyes when he said this and she knew that what had happened to Fay – and later, Julius – would eventually happen to her. It was not an absolute certainty, but it very nearly was. And it was a bitter and cruel irony that Serena, of all people, should become afflicted with a tart’s disease, with a sickness that infected libertines and whores.
Fay had been a whore. No matter how Colm tried to pretend otherwise and Julius tried to make excuses, Fay had been a cheap little tart. Even so, they had all done their best for her, including Dr Martlet, although the treatments he had tried had proved useless. At last, Julius and Colm had come up with the idea that Fay should live permanently at Cadence Manor. The west wing was a separate suite of rooms, said Julius; poor Fay could be entirely private. And Dr Martlet, so absolutely trustworthy, would go down regularly and give her what help he could.
It had been the only possible solution. The fact that one of the family had contracted such a shameful illness could not be made known. Serena thought they had all been clear about that. Fay had sobbed with despair, but in the end had agreed to the plan. Her life was over in any case, she said, and all she could do was die quietly and unobtrusively somewhere. Cadence Manor would do as well as anywhere else for that. Serena had been unable to decide if Fay was being courageous in the face of death or simply hysterical and attention-seeking. The vain little creature was so self-centred it was perfectly likely she did not believe she would die.