She watched him walk away, the tails of his threadbare coat swinging in time with his step.
Shifting her legs, she got into a more comfortable position and prepared to open the box. A new gown might prove just the distraction she needed. This would be her finest dress – her Christmas Day outfit.
It was difficult to untie the bow with her gloved hands but she managed. Her fingers found the edges of the lid, sweaty with anticipation. Crêpe and bombazine, braided with silk. Three-pieces, tasselled and fringed. She could not wait to see. She pulled the lid free of the box.
Screamed.
Ribbons of black material lay heaped together with dead leaves. Thistles prickled up, sticky and congealed with blood. In the midst of it all rested something black, white and furry, dotted with flies. She made out lumps of mangled flesh, bone. Veins like skeins of red silk. Then the drooping ears, the closed eyes. Blood smeared down the fur at the forehead. A cow’s head.
Beatrice’s head.
The stench caught in her throat and made her gag. She fell onto her back and scrabbled away, hands squeaking against the floor. She was going to be sick. She was going to be sick and yet she could not take her eyes from the box. Beatrice. Poor Beatrice.
Her head collided with a hard object. In utter panic, she whipped round. Hetta stood behind her, smiling still, the rose pressed to her bosom.
‘No, no.’
Pitching forwards, she sent Hetta clattering to the floor. She found her feet – her legs were jelly but somehow she forced them on, up the stairs, two at a time. Her skirts caught around her ankles. She stumbled, tripped and picked herself up again. She had no idea where she was going, only that she must climb, climb – to the roof if she had to. Put as much distance as possible between her and that awful sight . . .
Dimly, she heard Mr Underwood enter the Great Hall and call her name. Then the throttled sound of Sarah’s shock. But she could not stop. That scent of roses: it was following her, getting thicker and thicker with each step –
She jerked to a halt one stair short of the landing. Barring the way was another flat wooden face. A new companion, but one she recognised.
A moustache like a wire brush hung above its lip. Macassar oil smoothed the hair, a single curl falling over the left eye. Broken veins rippled on the cheek. And the eyes . . . The expression of torment in the eyes chilled her blood.
‘Rupert.’
It could not be. She shut her eyes – if she looked any longer, she would go mad. But still she saw it; felt it, close to her face. Getting closer.
‘No, no.’
She took two steps back. The train of her dress coiled around her ankles like a rope. Panicked, she thrashed her feet and stepped into thin air.
Three jolting knocks. Then there was only black.
THE BRIDGE, 1635
This morning I heard a man scream for the first time in my life. It is not a sound I wish to hear again: guttural, shameful, travelling across the stable yard and up through the lantern tower.
I awoke in a sweat of ice. Josiah lay in bed beside me, staring at the ceiling with the same horror I felt all over my skin. Memory fell with a sickening blow: the King and Queen. It could not be – please Almighty God – it could not be that some harm had befallen them?
The dreadful noise came from outside. It set the dogs barking. I flung myself out of bed and ran to the window. Raindrops spotted the glass, I could not see out clearly. A gauzy haze hung in the air after last night’s storm. Puddles steamed in the morning heat.
‘What is it?’ Josiah demanded.
The reply did not come from me – it arose from that place where the dreams brood, where knowledge arrives fully formed. ‘Someone is dead. Life has left this house.’
He was up in an instant, the coverlet thrown back and his bare feet thudding on the boards. I saw him snatch up his sword before he ran into the corridor.
We were not the only ones awake. Guests milled about in their nightclothes, bleary-eyed, their hair tangled from the night before. As soon as Josiah saw them, he assumed an air of calm.
‘Do not be alarmed. Pray, return to your beds. I will go and find the cause of this disturbance.’
They mumbled, rubbing their eyes. Tired as they looked, they did not seem inclined to obey him.
I followed Josiah down one flight of steps, desperate to see the children safe. I found them gathered outside the nursery with Lizzy, all deathly pale. Hetta’s sparrow screeched from within. Hairs raised on the back of my neck. Mary once told me that sparrows carry the souls of the dead.
‘We do not know what the commotion is,’ I told them. ‘Your father has gone to deal with it.’
‘Mistress?’ Lizzy tried to catch my eye but I would not look at her. One glance, and I knew I should lose hold of my composure.
‘Not now, Lizzy.’
I must appear every inch the mistress, in command. I turned my back on her to face the children. Despite her early night, Hetta looked more exhausted than the boys. I felt her forehead. She was burning up.
‘Go back to bed,’ I ordered. ‘All of you, back to bed.’
The boys groaned. I did not heed them; could not stop to argue with them. A strange energy stirred me, a kind of nauseous excitement, and I returned the way I had come, intending to reassure the guests.
Crackling beneath all the fears in my mind was the one I could name: the plague. There had been sweltering temperatures and reports of sickness in London. Now my child was aflame with fever. I prayed to God it was not the plague.
We lost Mary to a sweating sickness. People told me it was a kind, swift death, but they did not see it. If my sister died in kindness, I dare not imagine cruelty.
She was well in the morning. Yet as we dressed, I felt it for the very first time: the sense of foreboding I have come to trust above my other senses. Our eyes met and I knew Mary felt it too. By noon she was abed.
It began with shivers. Then came the heat, scorching through her skin, running off her in rivulets of sweat. Before the night had passed, her jaw was bound. Gone. Dead at only twenty years old.
My bare feet crunched against the rushes on the floor. Beset by memories of Mary, I did not notice Jane running up the stairs. I collided with her and we both fell back, blinking, bewildered.
‘Oh, mistress, forgive me.’ She did not look like herself. She had been up earlier than us, I realised. She had been awake and about her duties before the scream sounded.
‘Jane! Jane, tell me what has happened.’
She burst into tears.
I wrung it from her piece by piece. I did not need to go down to the stables, to smell the blood and see the flies for myself; it was all there gleaming in the pupils of her eyes.
There was a dead horse in the stalls. Not just dead – mutilated. Its tail was cropped and nailed outside the door, its mane attacked with a frenzy of scissors. The ostler found a score of lacerations scratched in the skin, like a tally you might carve upon a tree.
‘Which horse, Jane?’
‘Oh . . . m-mistress!’ she sobbed.