A light drizzle had started to fall at Boar’s Hill and when Rowan arrived back, the house looked damp and sullen, as if the atmosphere inside had seeped through the walls to infect the fa?ade. When she closed the front door, the light coming through the glass panels was barely enough to see by so she walked to the table and switched on the elephant lamp.
Turning back past the bottom of the stairs to hang up her coat, she saw movement at the corner of her eye and gave a cry of alarm.
Four or five steps up, beyond the reach of the lamp, a man was sitting. Weak light from the landing window behind him outlined broad shoulders, a strong neck. His face was hidden in shadow. Run, her instincts urged, run, but fear rooted her to the spot. She couldn’t move her feet.
‘So here you are.’
A voice out of the gloom. An American voice. Cory – it was Michael Cory. She put her hand over her mouth as he stood up, extending himself to full height. Rowan’s heart beat against her ribcage like a panicked bird. He came towards her, down the steps, and as he moved into the light, she saw that he was dressed entirely in black: black jeans, a black sweater. Black leather gloves. No hat or coat, just gloves.
‘What . . .’ Her throat was dry; she choked. ‘How did you get in here? What are you doing?’ She couldn’t take her eyes off his hands. Why was he wearing gloves?
‘What am I doing?’ When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he loomed over her, nearly a foot taller and several stones heavier. ‘No, Rowan,’ he shook his head. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
She stared at him. Cory stared back, eyes glinting in the half-light. Then, spinning round, he went to the stairs and reached back into the darkness.
When Rowan saw what he was holding, her skin went cold.
The cardboard box from the wardrobe in her room. Marianne’s sketches.
‘Clearly you know what this is.’
She said nothing. Heart beating wildly, she watched as he carried the box to the hall table and took off the lid. Setting it aside, he lifted out the wad of tissue that held the contents in place then the batch of sketches that Marianne had given her over the years, the hands and the windfalls, Seb’s vinaigrette and the nude. As he put them down and reached into the box again, her stomach turned over so sharply she thought she was going to vomit.
He brought it out, careful to hold it only by the edges despite his gloves. Her eyes were accustomed to the low light now and she saw that the Sellotape had already been undone. He folded the edges back with the tips of his fingers, minimal pressure.
As if it were an offering, he carried it on open palms. When he reached her, she turned her head away, kept her eyes trained on the floor, which seemed to be tipping under her feet.
‘Look at it, Rowan.’
‘No.’
‘Look at it!’ he roared, his mouth inches from her ear, his voice so loud it was all she could do not to shriek in fright. He thrust it at her.
She kept her hands by her sides, she refused to touch it, but she looked.
She hadn’t seen it since the night a decade ago when she’d wrapped it up, taped it tightly and laid it to rest at the bottom of the box but ten years had done nothing to diminish its power. The impact was almost as great as the first time she’d seen it, upstairs on the worktable in Marianne’s studio. It was so skilful, so gorgeously done, and so appalling.
The houseboat had been moored near Donnington Bridge, where the river was distracted from its course for a few hundred yards by a handful of islets overgrown with willow trees and silky rushes. The day she and Marianne had gone to find it, a breeze had stirred among the leaves, making the whole scene scintillate with light, a million Impressionist brushstrokes. The boat was beautiful, too, not a narrow-boat built to negotiate locks and canals, but one of the wooden barges commissioned by colleges at the end of the nineteenth century to entertain guests for the racing at Summer Eights. Twenty feet wide and high-ceilinged, it had an elegant pillared porch and huge oval windows along the sides to allow maximum views of the rowers in inclement weather.
But if the scene that day had been a play of light, Marianne had reimagined it in darkness. The innocent green was gone, replaced by flickering shards of orange and black. In all but one of the windows, the glass had shattered, and the cabin behind was filled with fire. She’d drawn the scene then painstakingly coloured it: flames in yellow and orange and gold licked with a sort of voluptuous pleasure around the hands and face pressed against the one window that remained intact, the smallest one nearest the prow. The face of a woman whose agony made Rowan think of Hieronymus Bosch’s hideous tortured souls. A woman who knew she was dying.