Finding me lying beside her, she drops her head on the pillow with a disappointed sigh. Such obvious disdain should make me uncomfortable, but any ruffled feathers are smoothed by the remembrance of our first meeting; the shame of our mutual need and the eagerness with which she came into my arms when I pulled one of Bell’s laudanum vials from my pocket.
My eyes lazily search the cottage for more drugs. My work for the Hardcastles is complete, their new portraits hang in the long gallery. I’m not invited to the party, and I’m not expected at the house, leaving me a free morning on this mattress, the world circling me like paint down a plughole.
My gaze snags on Madeline’s cap and apron, which are hanging off a chair.
As if slapped, I immediately return to myself, the uniform summoning Anna’s face, her voice and touch, the peril of our situation.
Clinging to this memory, I manage to elbow Gold’s personality to one side.
I’m so filled with his hopes and fears, lusts and passions, that Aiden Bishop had felt like a dream in the morning light.
I believed I was no more than this.
Edging off the mattress, I knock over a pile of empty laudanum vials, which roll away across the floor like fleeing mice. Kicking them aside, I go to the fire where a single flame licks the embers, swelling as I add more tinder and wood from the pile. Chess pieces line the mantelpiece, each of them hand-crafted, a few painted, though splashed in colour might describe them better. They’re only half finished, and lying beside them is the small knife Gold is using to carve them. These are the chess pieces Anna will spend the day carrying around, and the blade is a perfect match for the slashes I saw on Gold’s arms yesterday.
Fate is lighting signal fires again.
Madeline’s retrieving her clothes, which are scattered across the floor. Such haste speaks of an unruly passion, though there’s only shame at work within her now. She dresses with her back to me, eyes on the wall opposite. Gold’s gaze is not so chaste, gorging on the sight of her pale white flesh, her hair spilling down her back.
‘Do you have a mirror?’ she asks, doing up her dress, the lightest touch of a French accent in her words.
‘I don’t believe so,’ I say, enjoying the warmth of the fire on my bare skin.
‘I must look terrible,’ she says absently.
A gentleman would disagree out of respect, but Gold is no gentleman and Madeline is no Grace Davies. I’ve never seen her without powder and make-up, and I’m surprised by how sickly looking she appears. Her face is desperately thin, with yellow, pockmarked skin and tired eyes rubbed raw.
Skirting along the far wall in order to stay as far away from me as possible, she opens the door to leave, cold air stealing the warmth from the room. It’s early, still hours until dawn, and there’s fog on the ground. Blackheath is framed by trees, night still draped around its shoulders. Given the angle I’m seeing it from, this cottage must be somewhere out by the family graveyard.
I watch Madeline hurrying along the path towards the house, a shawl pulled tight across her shoulders. If events had followed their original course, it would be me stumbling into the night. Driven mad by the footman’s torture, I’d have taken the carving knife to my own flesh before climbing Blackheath’s stairs to bang on Dance’s door, screaming my warning. By seeing through Daniel’s betrayal, and overwhelming him in the graveyard, I’ve avoided that fate. I’ve rewritten the day.
Now I have to make sure it has a happy ending.
Closing the door behind Madeline, I light an oil lamp, pondering my next move as the darkness slinks into the corners. Ideas claw at the inside of my skull, one last half-formed monster still waiting to be dragged into the brightness. To think, when I woke up that first morning as Bell, I fretted about possessing too few memories. Now I must contend with an over-abundance. My mind is a stuffed trunk that needs unpacking, but for Gold the world only makes sense on canvas, and it’s there I must find my answer. If Rashton and Ravencourt have taught me anything, it’s to value my hosts’ talents, rather than lament their limitations.
Picking up the lamp, I head towards the studio at the back of the cottage to search for some paint. Canvases are stacked against the walls, the paintings half-finished or slashed in a fury. Bottles of wine have been kicked over, spilling across the floor onto hundreds of pencil sketches, scrunched up and tossed aside. Turpentine drips down the wall, blurring a landscape Gold seems to have begun in a flurry and abandoned in a rage.
Stacked at the centre of the squalor like a pyre awaiting the torch are dozens of old family portraits, their woodworm-riddled frames ripped off and tossed aside. Most of the portraits have been destroyed by turpentine, though a few pale limbs have managed to survive the purge. Evelyn told me Gold had been commissioned to touch up the art around Blackheath. Seems he wasn’t terribly impressed with what he found.
Staring at the pile, an idea begins to form.
Rummaging through the shelves, I snatch up a charcoal stick and return to the front room, placing the lamp on the floor. There’s no canvas to hand so I dash my thoughts across the wall instead, working within the small pool of dancing light cast by the lantern. They arrive in a frenzy, a lurch of knowledge that wears the stick down to a nub in minutes, forcing me into the gloom to scavenge another.
Working downwards from a canopy of names clustered near the ceiling, I feverishly sketch a trunk of everybody’s actions over the course of the day, the roots stretching back nineteen years, burrowing into a lake with a dead boy at the bottom. At some point, I accidentally reopen an old cut on my hand, smearing my tree red. Tearing the sleeve from my shirt, I bandage the wound as best I can before returning to my labour. The first rays of the new dawn creep over the horizon as I step back, the charcoal stick dropping from my hand and shattering on the bare floorboards. Exhausted, I sit down in front of it, my arm trembling.
Too little information and you’re blind, too much and you’re blinded.
I squint at the pattern. There are two knots in the tree representing two swirling holes in the story. Two questions that will make sense of everything: what did Millicent Derby know and where is Helena Hardcastle?
The cottage door opens, bringing the smell of dew.
I’m too tired to look around. I’m melted candlewax, formless and spent, waiting for somebody to scrape me off the floor. All I want to do is sleep, to close my eyes and free myself of all thought, but this is my last host. If I fail, everything starts over again.
‘You’re here?’ says the Plague Doctor, startled. ‘You’re never here. By this time, you’re usually raving. How did... what is that?’ He sweeps by me, his greatcoat swishing. The costume is utterly ridiculous by the light of a new day, the nightmarish bird revealed as a theatrical tramp. Little wonder he makes most of his house calls at night.
He stops inches from the wall, running his gloved hand along the curve of the tree, smudging the names.
‘Remarkable,’ he says under his breath, looking it up and down.
‘What happened to Silver Tear?’ I ask. ‘I saw her shot in the graveyard.’
‘I trapped her in the loop,’ he says, sadly. ‘It was the only way to save her life. She’ll wake up in a few hours thinking she’s just arrived and repeat everything she did yesterday. My superiors will notice her absence eventually, and come to free her. I’m afraid I have some difficult questions ahead of me.’
As he stands in communion with my painted tree, I open the front door, sunlight drawing across my face, warmth spreading down my neck and bare arms. Squinting into the glare, I breathe in its golden light. I’ve never been awake this early before, never seen the sun rise over this place.
It’s miraculous.
‘Does this painting say what I think it says?’ asks the Plague Doctor, his voice tight with expectation.
‘What do you believe it says?’
‘That Michael Hardcastle tried to murder his own sister.’
‘Then, yes, that’s what it says.’