Edmund could feel the memories crowding in, and he could see his father as he must have been in those days: young, charming, eager, his hair the colour of honey with the sun in it, his eyes vividly blue…
‘Lucretia had come to live in England after the war,’ said the voice that was no longer his father’s. ‘I think she had bought a house near to Ashwood – Essex or Sussex, somewhere like that. The first time I saw her I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful. She was perfect, Edmund – skin like porcelain or ivory, and that black hair like polished silk. And a shining quality, as if she was perpetually surrounded by light. You didn’t actually see it, but you felt it. She could light up a room just by walking into it. But she was mischievous as well. Come to bed, she said, and I went. It was like being under a spell – I sometimes thought she was a witch, but I would have done anything for her.’
He paused again, his mind still deep in the past. ‘A long time afterwards I married your mother – an old childhood friend, someone I had known all my life. A marriage based on friendship it was, and I thought it might help me to forget. It didn’t, of course. After Lucretia, no other woman could ever—’ Sanity flared in his face, faded away, and then struggled pallidly back, like an electrical current flickering on and off in a thunderstorm. Edmund wanted to tell him not to speak, to try to forget, but his father’s memories were winding their tendrils around his own mind now, pulling him into that same past.
‘That day,’ said his father, ‘that day at Ashwood, I believe I stepped over some kind of invisible line. I crossed a Rubicon or I forded a river somewhere, but whether it was the Jordan river or Charon’s Styx or the measureless sacred Alph, I never knew. But once you’re over that line, Edmund, you can never get back.’ A spasm of coughing wracked him.
‘Try to sleep,’ said Edmund rather helplessly. ‘Everything’s all right.’ But of course it was not all right, because the final strings of sanity were unravelling fast, and his father’s mind was moving beyond anyone’s reach.
‘Sleep, yes, sleep. To sleep perchance to dream, that’s the worry though, that’s always been the worry…And supposing death is only the prince’s hag-ridden sleep, after all…? Aye, there would be the rub, wouldn’t it? What punishment do they keep in hell for murderers, I wonder? Do you know, Edmund?’
‘You aren’t a murderer,’ said Edmund after a moment. ‘Lucretia von Wolff killed those two men. Afterwards she stabbed herself rather than face the gallows. She was – she was bad. Cruel.’
‘Was she?’
‘Murder is cruel and bad.’
‘Oh Edmund,’ said the unfamiliar voice from the pillow. ‘I know all about murder.’ A pause. ‘I’m a murderer,’ he said. ‘I was the one who murdered Conrad Kline that day at Ashwood.’
The silence that closed down was so complete that for a moment Edmund almost believed his father had died and pulled him down into death with him.
After what might have been moments or hours, he said, ‘Dad, listen. Lucretia von Wolff killed Conrad Kline.’
‘Lucretia didn’t kill Kline.’ The strength came back into the weak voice. ‘Listen to me, Edmund. I was nineteen when it all happened, and she was – I don’t know how old she was. Thirty-eight. Forty, perhaps. It didn’t matter. It was my first time with a woman – they’d laugh at that today, wouldn’t they: nineteen and a virgin, but it’s quite true. And I was clumsy and fumbling and mad with excitement, but I thought I had found the heaven that the religious talk about.’