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.”