Silence presses down on us.
I open my mouth to respond, but my stomach’s in my shoes, my head spinning. The world has upended itself, and even though I’m sitting on the floor, I can feel myself falling and falling.
‘What did she do?’ I whisper.
‘My superiors—’
‘Opened Blackheath’s doors to an innocent man intent on murder,’ I say. ‘They’re as guilty as anybody in here. Now tell me what she did.’
‘I can’t,’ he says weakly, his resistance all but spent.
‘You’ve helped me this far.’
‘Yes, because what happened to you is wrong,’ he says, taking a long swig from the flask, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down in his throat. ‘Nobody objected to my helping you escape because you weren’t supposed to be here anyway, but if I start telling you things you shouldn’t know, there’ll be repercussions. For both of us.’
‘I can’t leave without knowing why I’m going, and I can’t promise not to come back until I’m certain of why I came in the first place,’ I say. ‘Please, this is how we end this.’
The beak mask turns towards me slowly, and for a full minute, he stands there, deep in thought. I can feel myself being measured, my qualities weighed and set aside, my flaws held up to the light that they might be better judged.
It’s not you he’s measuring.
What does that mean?
He’s a good man. This is when he finds out how good.
Bowing his head, the Plague Doctor surprises me by taking off his top hat, revealing the brown leather straps holding the beak mask in place. One by one, he begins undoing them, grunting with the effort as his thick fingers pry at the catches. As the last clasp comes loose, he removes his mask and pulls down his hood, revealing the bald head beneath. He’s older than I would have imagined, closer to sixty than fifty certainly, his face that of a decent, overworked man. His eyes are bloodshot, his skin the colour of old paper. If my tiredness could take a shape, it would look like this.
Oblivious to my concern, he tilts his face to catch the early morning light seeping through the window.
‘Well, that’s done it,’ he says, tossing the mask onto Gold’s bed. Freed from the porcelain, his voice is almost, but not quite, the one I know.
‘I don’t imagine you were supposed to do that,’ I nod towards the mask.
‘It’s getting to be quite a list,’ he replies, sitting down on a step outside the door, positioning himself so that his entire body is bathed in sunlight.
‘I come here every morning before I start work,’ he says, taking a deep breath. ‘I love this time of the day. It lasts for seventeen minutes, then the clouds gather and two footmen resume a quarrel from the evening before, ending in a fistfight at the stables.’ He’s peeling his gloves off, finger by finger. ‘It’s a shame this is the first time you’ve been able to enjoy it, Mr Bishop.’
‘Aiden,’ I say, extending my hand.
‘Oliver,’ he says as he shakes it.
‘Oliver,’ I repeat, thoughtfully. ‘I never thought of you having a name.’
‘Perhaps I should tell it to Donald Davies when I confront him on the road,’ he says, a faint smile on his lips. ‘He’ll be very angry. It might calm him.’
‘You’re still going out there? Why? You have your answer.’
‘Until you escape, it’s my duty to shepherd those that follow you, to give them the same chance you had.’
‘But you know who killed Evelyn Hardcastle now,’ I say. ‘Won’t that change things?’
‘Are you suggesting I’ll find my task difficult because I know more than them?’ He shakes his head. ‘I’ve always known more than them. I knew more than you. Knowledge was never my problem. Ignorance is the condition I struggle with.’
His face hardens again, the levity slipping from his tone. ‘That’s why I’ve taken my mask off, Aiden. I need you to see my face and hear my voice, and know that what I’m telling you is the absolute truth. We can’t have doubts between us, any more.’
‘I understand,’ I say. It’s all I can manage. I feel like a man waiting for the fall.
‘The name Annabelle Caulker, the woman you know as Anna, is a curse in every language in which it is spoken,’ he says, pinning me in place with his gaze. ‘She was the leader of a group which sowed destruction and death across half the nations of the world and would surely still be doing so if she hadn’t been caught, over thirty years ago. That’s who you’re trying to free.’
I should be surprised. I should be shocked, or angry. I should protest, but I don’t feel any of those things. This doesn’t feel like a revelation, more the voicing of facts I’ve long been familiar with. Anna’s fierce and fearless, even brutal when she needs to be. I saw her expression in the gatehouse when she came at Dance with the shotgun, not realising it was me. She would have pulled the trigger without any regret at all. She killed Daniel when I could not, and casually suggested murdering Evelyn ourselves as a way of answering the Plague Doctor’s question. She said it was a joke, but even now I’m not certain.
And yet, Anna only killed those people to protect me, buying time so that I could solve this mystery. She’s strong, she’s kind and she stayed loyal, even when my desire to save Evelyn threatened to undermine our investigation into her murder.
Of all the people in the house, she’s the only one who never hid who she truly was.
‘She’s not that person any more,’ I argue. ‘You said Blackheath was meant to rehabilitate people, to break down their old personalities and test the new ones. Well, I’ve seen Anna up close this last week. She’s helped me, saved my life more than once. She’s my friend.’
‘She murdered your sister,’ he says bluntly.
My world empties.
‘She tortured her, humiliated her and made the world watch,’ he continues. ‘That’s who Anna is, and people like that don’t change, Aiden.’
I drop to my knees, clutching my temples as old memories erupt.
My sister was called Juliette. She had brown hair, and a bright smile. She was charged with capturing Annabelle Caulker, and I was so proud of her.
Every recollection feels like a shard of glass tearing through my mind.
Juliette was driven and clever, and thought justice was something that had to be defended and not simply expected. She made me laugh. She thought that was worth doing.
Tears roll down my cheeks.
Annabelle Caulker’s men came in the night, and took Juliette from her home. They executed her husband with a single bullet to the head. He was lucky. Juliette’s bullet didn’t come for seven days. They tortured her and let everybody watch.
They called it justice for their persecution.
They said we should have expected this.
I don’t know anything more about myself, or the rest of my family. I didn’t keep hold of my happy memories. Only those that could help me, only hate and grief.
It was Juliette’s murder that brought me to Blackheath. It was the weekly phone calls that stopped coming. The stories we stopped sharing. It was the space where she should have been and would never be again. It was the way Annabelle was eventually caught.
Bloodlessly. Painlessly.
Entirely without incident.
And they sent her to Blackheath, where my sister’s murderer would spend a lifetime solving the death of a murdered sister. They called it justice. They patted themselves on the back for their ingenuity, thinking I’d be as pleased as they were. Thinking it was enough.
They were wrong.
The injustice tore into me at night, and stalked me during the day. It whittled me down until she was the only thing I could think about.
I followed her through the gates of hell. I pursued, terrified and tortured Annabelle Caulker, until I forgot the reasons why. Until I forgot Juliette. Until Annabelle became Anna, and all I saw was a terrified girl at the mercy of monsters.
I became the thing I hated, and made Annabelle into the thing I loved.