The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

by Stuart Turton

  Staring at the pile, an idea begins to form.

  Rummaging through the shelves, I snatch up a charcoal stick and return to the front room, placing the lamp on the floor. There’s no canvas to hand so I dash my thoughts across the wall instead, working within the small pool of dancing light cast by the lantern. They arrive in a frenzy, a lurch of knowledge that wears the stick down to a nub in minutes, forcing me into the gloom to scavenge another.

  Working downward from a canopy of names clustered near the ceiling, I feverishly sketch a trunk of everybody’s actions over the course of the day, the roots stretching back nineteen years, burrowing into a lake with a dead boy at the bottom. At some point, I accidentally reopen an old cut on my hand, smearing my tree red. Tearing the sleeve from my shirt, I bandage the wound as best I can before returning to my labor. The first rays of the new dawn creep over the horizon as I step back, the charcoal stick dropping from my hand and shattering on the bare floorboards. Exhausted, I sit down in front of it, my arm trembling.

  Too little information and you’re blind, too much and you’re blinded.

  I squint at the pattern. There are two knots in the tree representing two swirling holes in the story. Two questions that will make sense of everything: What did Millicent Derby know, and where is Helena Hardcastle?

  The cottage door opens, bringing the smell of dew.

  I’m too tired to look around. I’m melted candle wax, formless and spent, waiting for somebody to scrape me off the floor. All I want to do is sleep, to close my eyes and free myself of all thought, but this is my last host. If I fail, everything starts over again.

  “You’re here?” says the Plague Doctor, startled. “You’re never here. By this time, you’re usually raving. How did… What is that?”

  He sweeps by me, his greatcoat swishing. The costume is utterly ridiculous by the light of a new day, the nightmarish bird revealed as a theatrical tramp. No wonder he makes most of his house calls at night.

  He stops inches from the wall, running his gloved hand along the curve of the tree, smudging the names.

  “Remarkable,” he says under his breath, looking it up and down.

  “What happened to Silver Tear?” I ask. “I saw her shot in the graveyard.”

  “I trapped her in the loop,” he says sadly. “It was the only way to save her life. She’ll wake up in a few hours thinking she’s just arrived and repeat everything she did yesterday. My superiors will notice her absence eventually and come to free her. I’m afraid I have some difficult questions ahead of me.”

  As he stands in communion with my painted tree, I open the front door, sunlight drawing across my face, warmth spreading down my neck and bare arms. Squinting into the glare, I breathe in its golden light. I’ve never been awake this early before, never seen the sun rise over this place.

  It’s miraculous.

  “Does this painting say what I think it says?” asks the Plague Doctor, his voice tight with expectation.

  “What do you believe it says?”

  “That Michael Hardcastle tried to murder his own sister.”

  “Then, yes, that’s what it says.”

  Birds are singing, three rabbits hopping around the cottage’s small garden, their fur made rust-colored by the sunlight. If I’d known paradise was on the far side of a sunrise, I’d never have wasted a single night on sleep.

  “You’ve solved it, Mr. Bishop. You’re the first one to solve it,” he says, his voice rising in excitement. “You’re free! After all this time, you’re finally free!” He removes a silver hip flask from the folds of his robe and presses it into my hand.

  I can’t identify the liquid in the flask, but it sets fire to my bones, jolting me awake.

  “Silver Tear was right to worry,” I say, still watching the rabbits. “I’m not leaving without Anna.”

  “That’s not your choice,” he says, standing back to better see the tree.

  “What are you going to do, drag me out to the lake?” I ask.

  “I won’t need to,” he says. “The lake was simply a meeting place. The answer was all that ever mattered. You’ve solved Evelyn’s murder and convinced me of the solution. Now that I’ve accepted it, even Blackheath can’t keep hold of you. Next time you sleep, you’ll be freed!”

  I want to be angry, but I can’t rouse myself to it. Sleep is tugging at me with soft hands, and every time I close my eyes, it becomes that much harder to open them again. Returning to the open door, I slide my back down the frame until I’m sitting on the floor, half of my body in gloom, the other half in sunshine. I can’t bring myself to abandon the warmth and birdsong, the blessings of a world so long denied.

  I take another sip from the flask, forcing myself awake.

  I’ve still got so much to do.

  So much you can’t be seen to be doing.

  “It wasn’t a fair competition,” I say. “I had eight hosts whereas Anna and Daniel only had one. I could remember the week and they couldn’t.”

  He pauses, considering me.

  “You had those things because you chose to come to Blackheath,” he says quietly, as if afraid of being overheard. “They did not, and that’s all I can say on the matter.”

  “If I chose to come here once, I can choose to come again,” I say. “I won’t leave Anna behind.”

  He begins to pace, glancing between me and the painting.

  “You’re afraid,” I say, surprised.

  “Yes, I’m afraid,” he snaps. “My superiors, they’re not… You shouldn’t defy them. I promise you, after you leave, I’ll offer Anna all the assistance it’s in my power to grant.”

  “One day, one host. She’ll never escape Blackheath; you know she won’t,” I say. “I couldn’t have done this without Ravencourt’s intelligence and Dance’s cunning. It was only because of Rashton that I started looking at the clues like evidence. Hell, even Derby and Bell played their part. She’ll need all of their skills, just as I did.”

  “Your hosts will still be in Blackheath.”

  “But I won’t be controlling them!” I insist. “They won’t help a maid. I’ll be abandoning her to this place.”

  “Forget about her! This has already gone on long enough,” he says, swinging around to confront me, swiping his hand through the air.

  “What’s gone on long enough?”

  He’s looking at his gloved hand, startled by his own loss of control.

  “Only you can make me this angry,” he says in a quieter voice. “It’s always been the same. Loop after loop, host after host. I’ve seen you betray friends, make alliances, and die on principle. I’ve seen so many versions of Aiden Bishop, you’d probably never recognize yourself in them, but the one thing that’s never changed is your stubbornness. You pick a path, and you walk down it until the end, no matter how many holes you fall down along the way. It would be impressive if it weren’t so intensely irritating.”

  “Irritating or not, I have to know why Silver Tear went to such lengths to try to kill Anna.”

  He offers me a long, appraising look and then sighs.

  “Do you know how you can tell if a monster’s fit to walk the world again, Mr. Bishop?” he says contemplatively. “If they’re truly redeemed and not just telling you what you want to hear?” He takes another slug from the hip flask. “You give them a day without consequences, and you watch to see what they do with it.”

  My skin prickles, my blood running cold.

  “This was all a test?” I say slowly.

  “We prefer to call it rehabilitation.”

  “Rehabilitation…” I repeat, understanding rising within me like the sun over the house. “This is a prison?”

  “Yes, except instead of leaving our prisoners to rot in a cell, we give them a chance to prove themselves worthy of release every single day. Do you see the beauty of it?” exclaims the Plag
ue Doctor. “The murder of Evelyn Hardcastle was never solved, and probably never would have been. By locking prisoners inside the murder, we give them a chance to atone for their own crimes by solving somebody else’s. It’s as much a service, as a punishment.”

  “Are there other places like this?” I say, trying to wrap my head around it.

  “Thousands,” he says. “I’ve seen a village that wakes up each morning with three headless bodies in the square, and a series of murders on an ocean liner. There must be fifteen prisoners attempting to solve that one.”

  “Which makes you, what? A warden?”

  “An assessor. I decide if you’re worthy of release.”

  “But you said I chose to come to Blackheath? Why would I choose to come to a prison?”

  “You came for Anna, but you got trapped, and loop after loop Blackheath picked you apart until you forgot yourself, as it was designed to.” His voice is tight with anger, his gloved hands clenched. “My superiors should never have let you inside. It was wrong. For the longest time, I thought the innocent man who’d entered here was lost, sacrificed in some futile gesture, but you’ve found your way back. That’s why I’ve been helping you. I gave you control of different hosts, searching for those who were best equipped to solve her murder, finally settling on the eight of today. I experimented with their order to ensure you got the best out of them. I even arranged to have Mr. Rashton hidden in that cupboard to keep him alive. I’m bending every rule possible so that you can escape. Do you see now? You must leave while you’re still the person you wish to be.”

  “And Anna…?” I say haltingly, hating the question I’m about to ask.

  I’ve never allowed myself to believe that Anna belonged here, preferring to think of this place as the equivalent of being shipwrecked or struck by lightning. By assuming her to be a victim, I took away the niggling doubt of whether this was deserved, but without that comfort, my fear is growing.

  “What did Anna do to deserve Blackheath?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, passing me the flask. “That’s not for me to say. Just know that the weight of the punishment is equal to the crime. The prisoners I told you about in the village and on the boat received lighter sentences than either Anna or Daniel. Those places are much less harrowing than here. Blackheath was built to break devils, not petty thieves.”

  “You’re saying Anna’s a devil?”

  “I’m saying thousands of crimes are committed every day, but only two people have been sent to this place.” His voice is rising, racked with emotion. “Anna’s one of them, and yet you risked your life to help her escape. It’s madness.”

  “Any woman who can inspire that loyalty has to be worth something.”

  “You’re not hearing me,” he says, his fists balled.

  “I’m hearing you, but I won’t leave her here,” I say. “Even if you make me go today, I’ll find my way back in tomorrow. I did it once. I’ll do it again.”

  “Stop being such a bloody fool!” He thumps the doorframe hard enough to bring dust down on our heads. “It wasn’t loyalty that brought you to Blackheath; it was vengeance. You didn’t come here to rescue Anna; you came for your pound of flesh. She’s safe in Blackheath. Caged, but safe. You didn’t want her to be caged; you wanted her to suffer—so many people out there wanted her to suffer, but none of them was willing to do what you were, because nobody hated this woman as much as you did. You followed her into Blackheath, and for the last thirty years, you’ve dedicated yourself to torturing her, just as the footman tortures you today.”

  Silence presses down on us.

  I open my mouth to respond, but my stomach’s in my shoes, my head spinning. The world has upended itself, and even though I’m sitting on the floor, I can feel myself falling and falling.

  “What did she do?” I whisper.

  “My superiors—”

  “Opened Blackheath’s doors to an innocent man intent on murder,” I say. “They’re as guilty as anybody in here. Now tell me what she did.”

  “I can’t,” he says weakly, his resistance all but spent.

  “You’ve helped me this far.”

  “Yes, because what happened to you is wrong,” he says, taking a long swig from the flask, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down in his throat. “Nobody objected to my helping you escape because you weren’t supposed to be here anyway, but if I start telling you things you shouldn’t know, there’ll be repercussions. For both of us.”

  “I can’t leave without knowing why I’m going, and I can’t promise not to come back until I’m certain of why I came in the first place,” I say. “Please, this is how we end this.”

  The beak mask turns toward me slowly, and for a full minute, he stands there, deep in thought. I can feel myself being measured, my qualities weighed and set aside, my flaws held up to the light that they might be better judged.

  It’s not you he’s measuring.

  What does that mean?

  He’s a good man. This is when he finds out how good.

  Bowing his head, the Plague Doctor surprises me by taking off his top hat, revealing the brown leather straps holding the beak mask in place. One by one, he begins undoing them, grunting with the effort as his thick fingers pry at the catches. As the last clasp comes loose, he removes his mask and pulls down his hood, revealing the bald head beneath. He’s older than I would have imagined, closer to sixty than fifty certainly, his face that of a decent, overworked man. His eyes are bloodshot, his skin the color of old paper. If my tiredness could take a shape, it would look like this.

  Oblivious to my concern, he tilts his face to catch the early morning light seeping through the window.

  “Well, that’s done it,” he says, tossing the mask onto Gold’s bed. Freed from the porcelain, his voice is almost, but not quite, the one I know.

  “I don’t imagine you were supposed to do that.” I nod toward the mask.

  “It’s getting to be quite a list,” he replies, sitting down on a step outside the door, positioning himself so that his entire body is bathed in sunlight.

  “I come here every morning, before I start work,” he says, taking a deep breath. “I love this time of the day. It lasts for seventeen minutes, then the clouds gather and two footmen resume a quarrel from the evening prior, ending in a fistfight at the stables.” He’s peeling his gloves off, finger by finger. “It’s a shame this is the first time you’ve been able to enjoy it, Mr. Bishop.”

  “Aiden,” I say, extending my hand.

  “Oliver,” he says as he shakes it.

  “Oliver,” I repeat thoughtfully. “I never thought of you having a name.”

  “Perhaps I should tell it to Donald Davies when I confront him on the road,” he says, a faint smile on his lips. “He’ll be very angry. It might calm him.”

  “You’re still going out there? Why? You have your answer.”

  “Until you escape, it remains my duty to shepherd those that follow you, to give them the same chance you had.”

  “But you know who killed Evelyn Hardcastle now,” I say. “Won’t that change things?”

  “Are you suggesting I’ll find my task difficult because I know more than them?” He shakes his head. “I’ve always known more than them. I knew more than you. Knowledge was never my problem. Ignorance is the condition I struggle with.”

  His face hardens again, the levity slipping from his tone. “That’s why I’ve taken my mask off, Aiden. I need you to see my face and hear my voice, and know that what I’m telling you is the absolute truth. I can’t have you doubting me anymore.”

  “I understand,” I say. It’s all I can manage. I feel like a man waiting for the fall.

  “The name Annabelle Caulker, the woman you know as Anna, is a curse in every language in which it is spoken,” he says, pinning me in place with his gaze. “She was the leader of a group that sowed
destruction and death across half the nations of the world and would surely still be doing so if she hadn’t been caught, over thirty years ago. That’s who you’re trying to free.”

  I should be surprised. I should be shocked, or angry. I should protest, but I don’t feel any of those things. This doesn’t feel like a revelation, more the voicing of facts I’ve long been familiar with. Anna’s fierce and fearless, even brutal when she needs to be. I saw her expression in the gatehouse when she came at Dance with the shotgun, not realizing it was me. She would have pulled the trigger without any regret at all. She killed Daniel when I could not and casually suggested murdering Evelyn ourselves as a way of answering the Plague Doctor’s question. She said it was a joke, but even now, I’m not certain.

  And yet, Anna only killed those people to protect me, buying time so that I could solve this mystery. She’s strong, she’s kind, and she stayed loyal even when my desire to save Evelyn threatened to undermine our investigation into her murder.

  Of all the people in the house, she’s the only one who never hid who she truly was.

  “She’s not that person anymore,” I argue. “You said Blackheath was meant to rehabilitate people, to break down their old personalities and test the new ones. Well, I’ve seen Anna up close this last week. She’s helped me, saved my life more than once. She’s my friend.”

  “She murdered your sister,” he says bluntly.

  My world empties.

  “She tortured her, humiliated her, and made the world watch,” he continues. “That’s who Anna is, and people like that don’t change, Aiden.”

  I drop to my knees, clutching my temples as old memories erupt.

  My sister was called Juliette. She had brown hair and a bright smile. She was charged with capturing Annabelle Caulker, and I was so proud of her.

  Every recollection feels like a shard of glass tearing through my mind.

  Juliette was driven and clever, and thought justice was something that had to be defended and not simply expected. She made me laugh. She thought that was worth doing.

  Tears roll down my cheeks.

  Annabelle Caulker’s men came in the night and took Juliette from her home. They executed her husband with a single bullet to the head. He was lucky. Juliette’s bullet didn’t come for seven days. They tortured her and let everybody watch.