“But you wore this dress. You’ve got her eyes, her gestures. And you’re not a girl now, you’re all womanly and you want me.” He pulls at my dress. Something rips, and I feel a release as a button flies off. Lightning flashes: something has disrupted his face, something ugly rising to the surface. “You deny it?” He grins.
My answer is a knee in his groin. Still not quite believing what is happening, I try to twist out of his reach, but he holds me tight, pinning me down by my wrists. Above me now, his face inches from mine, he is blinking, rain dripping into his eyes, the moment of connection cut like a wire.
“I am Margot,” I scream, hysteria rising, all the afternoons I spent in her room, pretending it was mine, trying on her clothes, Sybil braiding my hair, they all fly away, reveal themselves as stupid fantasy, girlish make-believe. It wasn’t me he wanted. It wasn’t me. It was my cousin but grown-up, some stalled childhood fantasy. “I am Margot Wilde!”
We lie there in shocked, damaged silence, the rain finding its way through the canopy now, falling, pock, pock, pock. Every outline seems changed, nothing what it was.
Very slowly, he lowers his face until the cool tip of his nose touches mine. It feels more intimate than his kiss, that he is trying to make me understand something. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “I don’t know what happened. I . . . I got confused, for a moment. I’m truly sorry, Margot.”
I blink back tears. Questions creep over my skin. I think about the way he recognized the dress—did he remember it from the newspaper? But not even my sisters have remembered it from the newspaper. And I think of us in the river, Harry saying, “You have to face your darkest fears, don’t you? Only then can you survive yourself.” And it strikes me that Applecote is that fear, the meadow, the river, the true reason he’s returned to Cornton Hall. Oh God.
“Harry . . . What happened to her? Please tell me.” I force the words out, heart starting to slam.
I’m sure he’s going to hit me, the way he clenches, rears up. Instead, he pulls himself away, buttons up his trousers. “I don’t damn well know.”
“You’re not covering for anyone?” I sit up, too, tug down my dress, try to pull my body and mind into some kind of order, sensing this might be my chance.
“Very good, Margot,” he says sarcastically. “Are you?”
“What?”
“Was it Perry? Sybil? Moll? Oh, sorry, you’ve guessed,” he slurs. “It was Tom.”
“Oh no.” I clap my hands to my mouth, thinking of Flora and Pam, with him now, oblivious, in danger.
“Of course it wasn’t bloody Tom.” He laughs hollowly. “I wish it were.”
“You wish . . .” I know the comment reveals something. But it is all too much, my thoughts mashed, my body aching, and I desperately want to find my sisters, be safe among them again. But then I hear it, Audrey’s voice in my head, clear as a bell: You have a brain like a board game, Margot, don’t give up . . . And I pull it from deep inside me, that spark, one last attempt at slotting the jigsaw together, a risky, desperate tactic. “I know you didn’t mean to, Harry.”
A silence, a rip in the night. Harry’s shoulders seem to drop with something that looks like relief, and it is this tiny gesture that gives me the courage to continue.
“You were only a boy. A child yourself,” I whisper. Out of the corner of my eye, movements in the gloom, but I don’t want to turn my head in case I break the spell. It feels like Audrey is talking through me. “You held it inside all this time,” I say, my heart pounding in my ears. “That must be so hard. But you did it, Harry.”
Harry is silent, his breathing heavy, fast. I get this tangible sense of something swelling inside of him, pushing at the edges, vying for release.
“Everyone has secrets.” I lift my hand to touch his face. His skin feels clammy, febrile. “Everyone has done something they regret.”
His voice climbs high as a boy’s. “I . . . I didn’t know what to do.”
“You met with Audrey fishing?” I say carefully, as if I were talking Dot back from a nightmare, trying to keep the tremor from my own voice.
“I wasn’t meant to be there. I’d argued with Pa again.” Something in his features twists. “I was never good enough.”
“Nobody was good enough,” I murmur, as Audrey nods eagerly at my shoulder.
“Stupid, stupid boy, get that book out of your hands and do something bloody useful for once. Muck out the horses!” Harry booms, making me flinch. “I went to the river instead, just to defy him. And I saw Audrey . . . I . . .” He stops. And I can see that his eyes are bright with fear, back on the riverbank that August afternoon. “We were playing a game.” He stops again.
“A game?”
“A stupid game. I . . . I tried to kiss her.”
My breath catches.
“She slipped.” He starts to shiver uncontrollably. “Her dress. Her hair. Her hands. She was sinking. She was reaching for me. Two hands. Fingertips.”
“You didn’t pull her out?” I recoil, feeling the splash of cold water as I speak, the bubbles up my nostrils, my mouth full of grassy river.
“I thought she was pretending, she was always pretending things, hiding so I could never find her, teasing, playing with me like a cat does a mouse, but then . . .” His voice knots. “I realized and . . . I . . . I froze. I just froze.” The beechnuts closest to me move as he shudders again, his fear nudging from one little shell to another.
“You stayed there? With her?” I say quietly. Audrey is shrinking away from me, like a figure pulled back on a rope, smaller and smaller, reaching out for my hand.
“I . . . I ran into the stables, and I lay down with the horses. I just curled up next to the horses.” He closes his hands over his face.
“Why did you not get help?” My voice comes out as a croak.
“She was gone, just gone.” And his voice is colder, more certain. “I told myself I would tell, I would, I really would, in a day or two, the day after that. When they found her, I would explain.” His eyes fill with tears. “But they didn’t find her. They never bloody found her. And I lied and lied. To the police, my parents, everyone. And the lie grew and grew until I believed it and it walked around with me. And it’s only now, talking to you . . .” His voice breaks. He looks wretched, tears pouring down his face in the rain.