Maud had spent all of last night and most of today trying to shut out the sounds of Thomasina and Simon tapping on Twygrist’s walls, but in the end it had become impossible. Tap-tap…Let-us-out…Tap-tap…We’re-not-dead… On and on it went, until she wanted to scream. All night she had lain in bed listening to it, and she had been grateful for the thin daylight that finally came into her bedroom because surely the tapping would not continue through the day. She felt sick and dizzy from not having slept.
By now those two must be dead. But what if they were not? What if they had found a way to get out–Twygrist’s outer door was not locked–and had somehow crept back to this house? Maud would not put it past them to do that. Well then, they would have to be kept out. She thought about this, and remembered it was Mrs Minching’s night for evensong, and that the two maids would also be out tonight. That was very good indeed; Maud waited until Mrs Minching was safely out of the house, then went round all the rooms, locking the doors and drawing the bolts. Aha, Madam Thomasina and Master Simon, you won’t come sneaking in now! No one would come sneaking in–she had made sure of that.
She lit the lamp in the music room. It was warm and there was a comforting crackle from the logs in the hearth. The tapping seemed to have stopped for a while. Maud relaxed, and began to drift into a half sleep. It was nice to sit here and know she would not be forced to do ‘It’ with Thomasina or Simon ever again. Nice…
But it was not nice after all, because Thomasina and Simon were waiting for her, just on the other side of sleep, reproachful and threatening. Their faces were already fading to a sick whiteness because of being shut away from the light. They had crawled across to the steel doors–it had taken them most of last night and all of today because they were getting weak with not having eaten, and because it was pitchy black in the kiln room–but they had managed it and now they were hammering against the doors. Simon said they would keep on hammering until someone heard. He lifted his hands up to show Maud how his fingers and knuckles were already starting to protrude through the skin. That was good, he said, because bones made effective hammers.
Maud managed to climb up out of the nightmare at this point, but even awake she could still hear the hammering of Simon’s knucklebones against the kiln room doors. Dreadful dull knockings, over and over, like someone beating against a bruise in your mind…
That had been when she thought of blotting out the sounds with music, and had sat down at the piano and begun to play her beloved Caprice as loudly as she could. Part of Paganini’s legend was supposed to be that he had sold his soul to the devil, and that this was a devil-inspired composition. Maud found this believable. She did not care if the music conjured up the composer’s devils in this very room, if it meant they would keep her safe from Thomasina and Simon.
It was Cormac who banged the brass door knocker of Quire’s main door. It echoed through the house like the crack of doom, and George could not believe it could not be heard inside. But even though Sullivan plied the heavy knocker several times, there was no response.
‘Nothing,’ he said, at last. ‘We’ll go around to the back and see what we can find there. Mrs Minching, you wait here, if you would.’
Without waiting for an answer he set off, and George followed, blundering into bushes in the dark, torn between annoyance at the way Sullivan seemed to have taken over, and relief at having decisions made for him.
‘Nothing to be seen,’ said Cormac, having peered in through all the windows. ‘No sign of your girl anywhere. That’s the music room, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, whatever she might have been doing earlier on, she isn’t there now,’ said Cormac, having peered through the partly open curtains. ‘There’s no one there. Nothing else for it, Lincoln, we’ll have to break in.’
‘Oh, we can’t do that,’ said George, shocked. ‘Whatever will Miss Thomasina say?’
‘Thomasina Forrester isn’t here to say anything. If you want my opinion, she’s sloped off to London on one of her jaunts. She has a liking for the ladies in Seven Dials, so it’s said.’ He glanced at George. ‘You didn’t know that?’