by Ruth Ware
I walked to the end of the jetty, feeling the damp wood fraying against my bare toes, and I dipped—just dipped—the tips of my toes in the water, watching with pleasure the scarlet polish I had borrowed from Maud glowing bright beneath the water.
And then—almost before I knew what had happened—a hand seized my ankle, and I felt a tug, and I stumbled forwards to prevent myself from going over backwards—and I was in, the golden waters closing over my head, the mud swirling up around me—and it was more beautiful and terrifying than I could ever have imagined.
I didn’t see who pulled me in—but I felt him, beneath the water, his skin against mine, our arms grappling, half fighting. And in that moment when we both surfaced I felt it—his fingers brushed my breast, making me shiver and gasp in a way that wasn’t just the shock of the water.
Our eyes met—blue and dark—and he grinned, and my stomach flipped and clenched with a hunger I had never known—and I knew then that I loved him—and that I would give him anything, even myself.
After we rowed back, we walked up to the house and had tea on the lawn, wrapped in towels, and then we stretched out to bask in the sunshine.
“Take a photo . . .” Maud said lazily, as she stretched, her tanned limbs honey-gold against the faded blue towel. “I want to remember today.”
He gave a groan, but he stood obediently and went to fetch his camera, and set it up. I watched him as he stood behind it, adjusting the focus, fiddling with the lens cap.
“Why so serious?” he said as he looked up, and I realised that I was frowning in concentration, trying to fix his face in my memory. He flashed me that irresistible smile, and I felt my own mouth curve in helpless sympathy.
Later, long after supper, when the sun was going down, Mrs Warren had gone to bed and the others were playing billiards on the faded green baize, laughing in the way they never did when my aunt was home. Ezra had brought his stereo down from his room and the tape deck blasted out James, REM, and the Pixies by turns, filling the room with the clash of guitars and drums.
I could never play billiards—the cue never did what I wanted, the balls flipping off the cushions with a life of their own. Maud said I wasn’t trying, that it was perfectly simple to match up cause and effect, and work out where the ball would end up, but it wasn’t true. I had some gene missing, I think. Whatever it was that enabled Maud to see that if a ball were hit from this angle, it would ricochet over there, I didn’t have.
So I left them to it and wandered out onto the lawn in front of the old part of the house. I was sitting, watching the sun beginning to dip towards the horizon, and thinking about how beautiful this place was, in spite of it all, when I felt a touch on my shoulder, and I turned, and saw him standing there, beautiful and bronzed, his hair falling in his eyes.
“Come for a walk with me,” he said. And I nodded, and followed him, across the fields and through sunken paths, down to the sea. And we lay on the warm sand and watched as the sun sunk into the waves in a blaze of red and gold, and I didn’t say anything, because I was so afraid to break this perfect moment—so afraid that he would get up and leave forever, and that everything would be back to normal.
But he didn’t. He lay next to me, watching the sky in a silence that felt like the breath you take before you say something very important. As the last streak of sun disappeared beneath the horizon, he turned to me and I thought he was going to speak—but he didn’t. Instead he slipped the strap of my sundress down my shoulder. And I thought—This is it. This is what I have been waiting all my life to feel, this is what those girls at school used to talk about, this is what the songs mean, and the poems were written for. This is it. He is it.
But the sun has gone now, and it’s winter, and I feel very cold. And I am no longer sure if I was right.
CHAPTER 19
* * *
Hal wasn’t sure how long she had been sitting there, staring at the photograph, trying to work out what she should do. But at last she heard, very faintly, the sound of the clock in the hall downstairs chiming eleven, and she stood, stretching out her cramped, chilly limbs.
The urge to run back to Brighton and hide from the nightmare she had created was still strong—except that they knew where to find her. Mr. Treswick had her address, and he would come and track her down and start asking questions. And besides . . . Her stomach clenched at the memory of Mr. Smith’s awaiting enforcers, her crushed belongings. Hal had never thought of herself as a coward, but she was, she knew that now. She thought of the man’s voice, his slow soft lisp . . . broken teeth . . . broken bones sometimes . . . and she knew she did not have the courage to face him again.
No. She could not go back there without the money.
Could she run away for good—from everyone? But where would she go, and how, without money? She didn’t even have the money for a taxi back to Penzance, let alone the cash needed for a fresh start in a strange city.
Well, whatever she decided, she couldn’t hide up here forever. She would have to go down and face the family at some point.
Flexing her cold fingers, Hal opened the door.
Standing outside, perfectly still in the darkness of the hallway, was a figure, dark clothes disintegrating into the shadows, standing motionless just inches from Hal’s face.
Hal gasped and took a step backwards into the room, her hand pressed to her chest.
“Jesus—what—”
She found her hands were shaking, and caught at the metal bedstead to steady herself.
“Yes?” The voice of the figure in the shadows was cracked, with a flat Cornish burr. As her fright subsided, Hal felt anger flood in its wake.
“Mrs. Warren? What the hell are you doing snooping outside my room?”
“ ’Tain’t your room,” Mrs. Warren said bitterly. She took a step forwards, over the threshold, sweeping Hal’s meager possessions with a contemptuous look. “And it never will be, if I’ve anything to do with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.”
Hal pushed her hands inside her pockets to hide their trembling. She would not show this old woman she was afraid.
“Get out of my way.”
“Just as you like. I came up to tell you, he wants you downstairs.”
“Who’s ‘he’?” Hal said. She tried to keep her voice steady, and it came out colder and sharper than she meant.
“Harding. He’s in the drawing room.”
Hal could not bring herself to say thank you, but she nodded, once, and Mrs. Warren turned to retreat into the shadows of the hallway.
Hal followed her, and was just shutting the door of her room behind her, when Mrs. Warren spoke, jerking her head back over her shoulder towards the room and the scattering of Hal’s belongings.
“She was into all that muck.”
“What?” Hal stopped with her hand on the knob, the door just ajar, a crack of room showing through the gap.
“Them cards. Tarry or whatever she called it. Pagan stuff, it was, devils and naked men. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t have had them in the house. I would have burned them all. Disgusting things.”
“Who?” Hal said, but Mrs. Warren only continued slowly down the corridor as if she hadn’t heard, and Hal found herself bounding after her retreating back, grabbing the old woman’s wrist, harder than she meant, forcing her to turn back to face her. “Who? Who are you talking about?”
“Maggie.” Mrs. Warren spat the name like a swearword, her vehemence sending little flecks of spittle into Hal’s face. “And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll ask me no more questions. Now, let go of me.”
“Wha—” Hal gasped. The words hit like a slap in the face, and the questions rose up inside her, churning too quick to be caught. But the one that beat inside Hal’s skull was unsayable: Did she know?
Before Hal could do more than gasp, Mrs. Warren had wrenched her wrist out of Hal’s grip, with a strength Hal would not have given her credit for, and hurried away down the
stairs, silent and malevolent.
Hal let out a long, shuddering breath and then went back inside the bedroom, her heart beating fast enough to make her feel dizzy with it.
Maggie. Her mother’s nickname. Maggie. Her mother who had been here, more than twenty years ago. What had Mrs. Warren meant in bringing her up, here, now? Was it a threat? Did she know the truth? But if so, why had she stood by and said nothing?
There were no answers—and at last, for want of anything else, Hal picked up the tarot cards and began to pack them back into the tin. Mrs. Warren’s threat echoed in her head. She wouldn’t really dare to burn them, would she? It seemed ridiculous—and yet there was something about the venom in her voice that made Hal think it might be a real possibility.
There was no lock on the bedroom door, or on the case, so all Hal could do was pack the cards away inside their tin, push them deep into her suitcase, and hope for the best.
What had made her pack them in the first place? It wasn’t as though she believed.
Hal zipped up the case and turned to leave the room—but then, with a sudden misgiving, she stopped, opened the case, and pushed the tin into her back pocket, alongside the photograph. Let Mrs. Warren snoop. Let her come and look through every pocket of the case. It was only as she reached the top of the narrow, windowless stairs that a thought came to her—a memory of yesterday, of the tap, tap of Mrs. Warren’s cane on the wooden steps of the secret staircase.
But the woman standing outside her doorway just now had held no cane, and her approach had been utterly silent.
The thought made Hal shiver for no reason that she could put her finger on, and she wished again that there was a lock on the bedroom door. She had never felt the need for one before coming here, but the thought of that bitter old woman, creeping silently about the house at night, opening the door to Hal’s room . . .
Hal paused, looking back along the narrow, dark corridor, remembering the way Mrs. Warren had stood there in the darkness. What was she doing? Listening? Watching?
She was about to carry on downstairs when something caught her eye, a darkness in the dark, and she made her way back to stand in front of the closed door, running her fingers over the wood, feeling, rather than seeing, how very wrong she had been.
There was a lock on the door. Two, in fact. They were long, thick bolts, top and bottom.
But they were on the outside.
CHAPTER 20
* * *
There was no sign of Mrs. Warren when Hal finally descended, and for a moment she stood in the front hallway, trying to get her bearings and remember which of the wooden doors hid the drawing room. She had passed it on her way to breakfast, but then the door had stood open. Now they were all closed, and the long, monotonous hallway with its featureless tiled floor and identical doors was surprisingly disorienting.
Hal tried one at random—but it opened onto a dim, paneled dining room, far grander than the breakfast room they had used that morning. The tall windows were shuttered, thin gray shafts of light piercing the shadows, and a vast table draped with calico dust sheets stretched the length of the room. Above her head hung two huge shapes swathed in gray that at first, in the darkness, Hal thought were giant wasps’ nests. She ducked reflexively, before her eyes adjusted and she realized they must be chandeliers, encased in some sort of protective covering.
Her footsteps swirled in the dust, and backing out slowly, she closed the door quietly behind her and made her way up the corridor.
At the next doorway she put her hand out to knock—but before her knuckles could make contact with the wood, she heard a voice coming from inside, and paused for a moment, unsure if she was about to interrupt a private conversation.
“. . . conniving little gold digger.” It was a man’s voice, one of the brothers, Hal thought. But she could not be sure of which.
“Oh, really, you are impossible.” A woman’s voice, Mitzi’s, clipped with impatience. “She’s an orphan, no doubt your mother felt sorry for her.”
“First of all, we have no proof of that whatsoever, we know nothing about this girl, we have no idea who her father is or was, or whether he’s still in the picture. For all we know, he could have put Mother up to this. And second”—it was Harding, Hal realized, as he raised his voice to speak over Mitzi’s exasperated protests—“second, Mitzi, if you had known my mother in the least, you would realize how very unlikely it would be for her to be motivated by anything as charitable as pity for an orphan.”
“Oh, Harding, what nonsense. Your mother was a lonely old woman, and perhaps if you’d been willing to let bygones be bygones the children and I might have got to know her a little better, and this whole situation—”
“My mother was a bitter, cruel harpy,” Harding shouted. “And any reluctance to let you and the children be exposed to her venom was entirely out of concern for you, so don’t you dare suggest that this situation is my fault, Mitzi.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that for a moment,” Mitzi said, and a placatory note had crept into her voice, beneath the irritation. “I understand your motives were good, darling. But I just think that perhaps it’s not really surprising at this point if your mother chose to pass over two sons who were completely estranged, and a third who kept his wife and children away for nearly twenty years. I can’t blame your mother for being a little hurt. I certainly would be! When was the last time we were down here? Richard can’t have been more than seven.”
“Seven, yes, and she told him he was a sniveling little coward when he burned his finger on the grate—remember?”
“I’m not saying she didn’t have her faults—”
“Mitzi, you are not listening to me. My mother was a bitter, poisonous woman and her one aim in life was to spread that poison as far and wide as she could. It’s exactly like her to continue to spread division from beyond the grave. The sole surprise is that she didn’t leave the entire place to Ezra in the hope that he, Abel, and I would end up in a bitter dispute over all this, and the whole estate would get swallowed up in legal fees.”
“Oh, Harding, that’s absurd—”
“I should have seen it coming,” Harding said, and Hal had the feeling he was no longer even really listening to his wife. “She wrote to me, d’you know that? About a month ago. No word of her illness, of course, that would have been too simple, too straightforward. Oh no. She wrote her usual letter, full of complaints, but her sign-off was different—that’s what should have told me.”
“Different, how?”
“She signed off, always, your mother. Always. Even when I was at boarding school, crying my eyes out every night. All the other boys’ mothers signed off with love and kisses, and ever your adoring mummy, and a thousand hugs. All that sort of tripe. But Mother—no. Your mother. That was it. No love. No kisses. Just a cold statement of fact. A perfect metaphor, in fact, for her life.”
“And the last time? Did she add something?”
“Yes,” Harding said. And he paused, a brooding silence that made Hal hold her breath, wondering what was coming. Not the love that Harding had waited all his life for, surely? The silence stretched, until Hal thought she must have missed whatever Harding was about to say, or that he had thought better of it, and she raised her hand, ready to knock and announce her presence, but finally Harding spoke.
“She finished, après moi, le déluge. That was all. No name. No sign-off. Just those four words.”
“Après what?” Mitzi sounded completely nonplussed. “After the . . . the rain? What on earth does it mean?”
But before Hal could hear Harding’s answer, she heard a voice at her back.
“Eavesdropping?”
Hal spun round, her heart thumping.
It was Harding’s daughter, what was her name? Kitty. She was standing in the corridor, twirling her long blond hair around one finger, and chewing something. When Hal didn’t speak, she held out a packet in one hand.
“Tangfastic?”
“I—” Hal swal
lowed. She spoke low, not wanting Harding and Mitzi to hear from inside the room. “I wasn’t—I mean, I didn’t mean to—I was about to go into the room, but they seemed—”
“Hey, no shade from me.” The girl threw up her free hand, the charm bracelet on her wrist jangling. “It’s the only way I ever find out anything around here.” She pulled out a jelly shape from the packet, examined it critically, and then popped it in her mouth. “Look, I kept meaning to ask, what are you?”
“I—I, what?” Hal swallowed again. Her mouth felt dry, and she flexed her cold fingers inside her pockets, digging her nails into her palms, trying to anchor herself. She was uncomfortably aware that the Pandora bracelet Kitty was wearing on her left wrist probably cost more than her own entire outfit, possibly more than her whole wardrobe. “What am I? I’m not sure what you—”
“I mean, like, I know you’re some kind of relation, but Dad hasn’t really explained the connection. Are you the missing aunt? No, wait, you’re too young, right?”
“Oh! Right. No—” She blinked, trying to remember what exactly she was supposed to be doing here. The photograph of her mother lounging on the lawn outside the drawing room flashed through her mind, and she screwed her eyes shut for a moment against the image, rubbing her forehead as if to vanquish her mother’s face.
She must not think about her mother. She had to remember who she was supposed to be—not who she was. Maud was Harding’s sister, which meant . . .
“I guess I’m . . . your cousin?”
“Oh, right, so your mum was the one who ran away?”
“I—I suppose so, yes. She—she didn’t really talk about it.”
“So cool,” the girl said enviously. She pushed another Haribo into her mouth, and spoke around it. “Not gonna lie, there’s been points where I’ve seriously considered it, but I reckon you need to be at least eighteen to pull it off, otherwise you’re pretty much guaranteed to end up on the streets, and there’s no way I’m turning tricks for some pedo pimp.”