‘It’s so good to be out of that house,’ she cries, tipping her face to meet the rain. ‘Thank goodness you came along when you did, Doctor. Honestly, a minute later and you’d have found me with my head in the grate.’
‘Lucky I stopped by then,’ I say, somewhat startled by her change in mood. Sensing my confusion, Evelyn laughs lightly.
‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ she says. ‘I loathe getting to know people, so whenever I meet somebody I like, I just assume a friendship immediately. It saves a great deal of time in the long run.’
‘I can see the appeal,’ I say. ‘May I ask what I did to earn a favourable impression?’
‘Only if you allow me to be frank in my answer.’
‘You’re not being frank now?’
‘I was trying to be polite, but, you’re right, I never seem to land on the right side of the fence,’ she says with mock regret. ‘Well, to be frank, I like your pensiveness, Doctor. You strike me as a man who’d much rather be somewhere else, a feeling I can wholeheartedly sympathise with.’
‘Am I to assume you’re not enjoying your homecoming?’
‘Oh, this hasn’t been my home in a very long time,’ she says, skipping over a large puddle. ‘I’ve lived in Paris for the last nineteen years, ever since my brother was killed.’
‘What about the women I saw you with in the Sun Room, are they not your friends?’
‘They arrived this morning and, truth be told, I didn’t recognise a single one of them. The children I knew have shed their skins and slithered into society. I’m as much a stranger here as yourself.’
‘At least you’re not a stranger to yourself, Miss Hardcastle,’ I say. ‘Surely you can take some solace in that?’
‘Quite the contrary,’ she says, looking at me. ‘I imagine it would be rather splendid to wander away from myself for a little while. I envy you.’
‘Envy?’
‘Why not?’ she says, wiping the rain from her face. ‘You’re a soul stripped bare, Doctor. No regrets, no wounds, none of the lies we tell ourselves so we can look in the mirror each morning. You’re –’ she bites her lip, searching for the word – ‘honest.’
‘Another word for that is “exposed”,’ I say.
‘Am I to take it you’re not enjoying your homecoming?’
There’s a crook in her smile, a slight twist of the lips that could easily be damning, yet somehow comes across as conspiratorial.
‘I’m not the man I’d hoped to be,’ I say quietly, surprised by my own candour. Something about this woman puts me at ease, though for the life of me I can’t tell what it is.
‘How so?’ she asks.
‘I’m a coward, Miss Hardcastle,’ I sigh. ‘Forty years of memories wiped away and that’s what I find lurking beneath it all. That’s what remains to me.’
‘Oh, do call me Evie, that way I can call you Sebastian and tell you not to fret about your flaws. We all have them, and if I were newly born into this world, I might be cautious too,’ she says, squeezing my arm.
‘You’re very kind, but this is something deeper, instinctive.’
‘Well, so what if you are?’ she asks. ‘There are worse things to be. At least you’re not mean-spirited or cruel. And now you get to choose, don’t you? Instead of assembling yourself in the dark like the rest of us – so that you wake up one day with no idea of how you became this person – you can look at the world, at the people around you, and choose the parts of your character you want. You can say, “I’ll have that man’s honesty, that woman’s optimism”, as if you’re shopping for a suit on Saville Row.’
‘You’ve made my condition into a gift,’ I say, feeling my spirits lift.
‘Well, what else would you call a second chance?’ she asks. ‘You don’t like the man you were, very well, be somebody else. There’s nothing stopping you, not any more. As I said, I envy you. The rest of us are stuck with our mistakes.’
I have no response to that, though one is not immediately required. We’ve arrived upon two giant fence posts, fractured angels blaring their noiseless horns on top. The gatehouse is set back among the trees on our left, splashes of its red-tile roof showing through the dense canopy. A path leads towards a peeling green door, which is swollen with age and riddled with cracks. Ignoring it, Evelyn pulls me by the fingers towards the back of the house, pushing through branches so overgrown they’re touching the crumbling brickwork.
The back door is held fast with a simple latch, and undoing it, she lets us into a dank kitchen, a layer of dust coating the countertops, the copper pans still out on the hob. Once inside, she pauses, listening intently.
‘Evelyn?’ I say.
Motioning for quiet, she takes a step closer to the corridor. Unsettled by this sudden caution, my body tenses, but she breaks the spell with laughter.
‘I’m sorry, Sebastian, I was listening out for my father.’
‘Your father?’ I say, puzzled.
‘He’s staying here,’ she says. ‘He’s supposed to be out hunting, but I didn’t want to risk bumping into him if he was running late. I’m afraid we don’t like each other terribly much.’
Before I have the chance to ask any more questions, she beckons me into a tiled hallway and up a narrow staircase, the bare wooden steps shrieking beneath our feet. I keep to her heels, snatching backward glances every few steps. The gatehouse is narrow and crooked, doors set into the walls at odd angles like teeth grown wild in a mouth. Wind whistles through the windows carrying with it the smell of the rain, the entire place seeming to rattle on its foundations. Everything about this house seems designed to unseat the nerves.
‘Why put the butler all the way out here?’ I ask Evelyn, who’s trying to choose between the doors either side of us. ‘There must have been somewhere more comfortable.’
‘All the rooms in the main house are full, and Doctor Dickie ordered peace and quiet, and a good fire. Believe it or not, this might be the best place for him. Come on, let’s try this one,’ she says, rapping lightly on a door to our left, pushing it open when there’s no response.