No doubt Sarah meant it kindly, but Elsie could not endure her saccharine words. She pulled away.
Sarah opened the door again, letting in a fine spray of rain. The gardens were soaked. The hedges dripped and water cascaded from the jowls of the stone dog like drool. Sarah put one foot out of the door.
‘Wait!’ Elsie reached into her pocket and gave Sarah her purse. ‘Take this, in case you run into trouble. It will pay for lodging or a conveyance home.’
Bestowing one last look on her, Sarah ventured out into the rain. Elsie watched her go: a hunched, grey figure crunching over the gravel, growing darker and darker as the shadow of the house fell over her. She crossed the hills and disappeared from sight.
Less than ten minutes later, the mist descended.
She slumped down by the fireplace and sat with her legs stretched out, next to Jolyon. Or what passed for Jolyon: the cruel, blue-grey parody of him. She did not want to store this image of her boy: waxy and puffed; features imprinted with horror; vicious cuts to the dear skin. But she knew it would encroach, stealthily, and overwrite all the happier times. Death, once conceived, was rapacious. It took all with it.
Every tick of the grandfather clock echoed through the Great Hall. The rain drummed in counterpoint. Elsie sensed the clouds pressing down, blotting out the sun. Taking her head in her bandaged hands, she waited.
She did not dare to close her eyes. With her back to the wall, she kept a vigil. The companions might take Jolyon’s life, but she’d be damned if they desecrated his body with more splinters. She knew how that felt – to be invaded, against your will. She would never, never let that happen to him.
Time crawled by. Nothing moved. All she saw was grey stillness; all she heard was the constant patter on the windows. It was a kind of torture.
Her mind wandered down the misty paths to Torbury St Jude; saw Sarah lost, falling into the river, dragged beneath the current by her sodden skirts like the gypsy girl in Anne’s diary. She slapped her cheeks and tried to steer her thoughts in a better direction. They twirled for a moment and then, dizzy, stumbled towards Jolyon. No.
After two hours had passed, she thought she would lose her mind. Stiff in her joints, she clambered to her feet with a groan. Still the rain fell, light but insistent. Everything looked the same as it had in the morning. She felt she had lived ten lifetimes since then.
The air was turning. Odour rose slowly, like a blush from Jolyon’s corpse, stealing the smell of bay leaves and lime that had always been a part of him. He looked so dirty and neglected: streaks of mud on his hands, fragments of glass sparkling in his tangled hair. Police be hanged – she was going to wash her boy.
She limped through the baize door into the servants’ quarters. It creaked shut behind her, encasing her in cold stone.
Last time she entered this passage there had been a staff of five. Now the hallways carried an air of abandonment. Gone was the sound of the kitchen range and the smell of soap. No oil lamps shone.
As she edged towards the kitchen to fetch water, she passed the housekeeper’s room. The door was shut. Had Mrs Holt sat there alone, all this time, in the dark?
Her hand hovered over the panels, unsure. If Mrs Holt wanted to be by herself, she had no right to disturb her. She had just made up her mind to walk away when she heard a sound from inside.
Not a sob, as she expected. Something lower, prolonged. A groan or a creak, like old bones.
She reached for the doorknob, but she did not turn it. The pulse drummed in her throat.
Creeeak. A draught crept under the door and touched her ankles. She had to get back to Jolyon, she had to—
Just as she turned away, Jasper cried out.
It immobilised her. That pathetic, reedy sound, so like a baby’s wail. She tried to shove it aside and harden her heart but it came again, louder this time. Piercing. Then the same creak.
‘Damn it, Jasper.’ Berating herself, she turned the knob and pushed.
The room glided into view. Elsie tightened her injured fingers around the jamb, driving her nails into the wood.
Every drawer of Mrs Holt’s desk stood open. Papers covered the little table with the floral cloth. Jasper sat on it, mewling, as the various receipts and recipes fluttered beneath him. Diamonds of rain spotted his black fur. The window gaped wide open.
‘What . . .?’ One of the chairs was missing. ‘Jasper, where is Mrs—’
The creak sounded, right by her ear. She spun around. The air clogged in her throat.
It was the movement she saw first – gentle, like a tree swaying in the wind. Only then did she begin to make sense of it: the creak, not of wood, but of hemp; the swinging feet. Her gaze travelled up the black dress to slumped shoulders and a face that belonged to no one: blue-red; the eyes popping; the tongue lolling out. The housekeeper had looped a noose around a hook in the ceiling. All that had once been Mrs Holt hung there, suspended like a sack of grain.
Nausea pushed up from her stomach. As the skirts waved back and forth, she caught flashes of a wooden face behind them, a maid’s face made terrible by fear. Helen.
She reached out and snatched Jasper from the table.
Fear dominated her pain as she skidded out of the door, through the passages, into the kitchen. Hiss, hiss. Oh yes, they were coming now. They had only waited for her to see Mrs Holt’s nightmare before starting her own.
Her hand fumbled with the yard door. ‘Come on, come on.’
Jasper scratched with her.
It creaked and groaned, but it would not move. The door was locked.
Hiss.
The housekeeper’s room – Mrs Holt had the bunch of keys. She just needed to get in there and – no, damn it, she didn’t need to rob a corpse of keys, she could climb out of the open window in the room. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?
Hiss, hiss. Inside her brain, buzzing along her thoughts. Hiss.
‘Shut up!’ she screamed. ‘Shut the hell up!’
She was forced to stoop down and place Jasper at her feet. Pain burnt: hot needles up and down her leg, flames raging in her chest. Then that feeling inside her head as the hiss came again, a firecracker going off.
Jasper mewed and trotted forwards, turning back to see if she would follow. With great difficulty, she limped after him.
Hiss, hiss. Different from the sound that haunted her dreams: now she heard the steam of the factory in it. A saw too, but not one cutting through wood. It ripped through some other substance, spraying liquid.
‘No.’
The white-paint letters spelling Housekeeper swam into view. Those letters were on the front of the door – but hadn’t she left it open?
Hiss.
Locked. Another door, locked. She threw her shoulder against the panels, crying out in pain and frustration. Her fists pummelled, useless, on the wood.
Hiss, hiss.
Jasper hissed back. He prowled off down the stone passage. Hunting.
‘Wait.’
She stumbled after him. Pain flared and threw black shapes before her eyes. She had to ignore it, she could not give in now. This agony was nothing compared to—