Echoes in the Darkness (22 page)

“Her skull is not broken,” the doctor pronounced at last. “I believe that her symptoms are a result of the severe shock she has sustained. I have known her since she was a baby, and Eleanor here has never been very strong. Sadly, I predict her recovery may be a long one. Now, let me have a look at that wrist, Miss Varga.” Long, painful minutes later, I was feeling rather woozy. My injured arm reposed in a sling, and I had drunk an evil-tasting draught that the doctor assured me would help with the pain. I sent for Eleanor’s maid and gave her instructions to bathe her mistress and dress her in a clean nightdress. There seemed to be little more I could do for her then, so I accompanied the doctor downstairs, where I noticed, with real gratitude, that Porter had set out tea and cakes in the parlour. Although I managed to make desultory conversation with the doctor during this repast, my eyes swivelled constantly toward the door and my ears remained alert for the sound of footsteps.

Pale beams of twilight were beginning to streak the sky by the time the search parties returned to the house. Cad shook his head gravely at my look of enquiry, and I poured tea for him and Tynan while Doctor Munroe gave them details of Eleanor’s condition. Inspector Miller grouped his men together and discussed the areas they had covered in their search for Eddie and Lucy. The road was guarded so it seemed unlikely that he had left the Athal peninsula. Porter and I carried refreshments over to the little group of police officers.

“Tell me again what you heard, if you please, Mr Porter,” the inspector asked.

“There was a commotion in the parlour, sir. Mr Edward was shouting and her ladyship was answering in her usual calm way. Then it went quiet and I did not think there was any cause for concern. It was only when Mr Cad arrived that we discovered the signs of a struggle.”

“Did you hear anything of what was said?” Inspector Miller urged.

Porter looked offended. “I am not an eavesdropper, sir,” he said with great dignity.

“Good God, man! Your mistress’s life may be at stake here!”

“It would be as well to tell the inspector if you did hear anything, Porter,” I said gently.

“Well, I can’t see as how it would be important, miss, but I heard Mister Edward say to her ladyship that it was time to write ‘the end’ at the bottom of the page.”

I drew a sharp inward breath. “I know where he has taken her,” I said to Inspector Miller.

* * *

Dogs howled with excitement and strained at their leashes, mist rising in panting plumes from their open mouths. Servants held their lanterns high above our heads on poles so that a soft, golden glow illuminated the whole cliff top. Darkness was beginning to fall in earnest as, decorum abandoned, I held my skirts up above my ankles and raced ahead of the group, leading the search party along the familiar path. The ground was iron hard and remnants of greying snow clung tenuously to the grass. Even in the desperation of my current mission, I half expected to see the sculpted muscles and flaring nostrils of an ebony stallion as its rider’s hand reached down for me. My heart thudded in time with the questions that burned through my mind. Would we find them? And what would we find?

“This is a lot of time-wasting nonsense, sir.” I heard Sergeant Ross mutter impatiently to the inspector. “My men have been this way several times already.”

After what seemed an age but was in fact only minutes, we reached the arrowhead point where, heart in mouth, I had watched Eddie vault over the edge. “Hold the lanterns aloft here,” I called breathlessly, and Cad gave the order for the servants to come forward.

I knelt on the edge of the cliff and leaned over into the abyss, but I could see nothing. “Hold the lanterns out over the edge.” I stretched even farther and caught a glimpse of Lucy’s gown fluttering in the breeze as she crouched low on the narrow ledge at the exact point where Eddie had talked to me about stepping out into oblivion. She was alone.

Tynan, with some assistance from Cad, scrambled down to her. Drawing her tenderly to her feet, he held her close. At first, it seemed she was too shocked to speak. Eventually, gesturing toward the churning darkness of the Atlantic fury below her, she said simply, “He is gone.” Covering her face with her hands, sobs wracked her slender body. “Oh, Tynan, my love. Eddie is gone.”

I rose to my feet, but my knees trembled and began to give way. Cad caught me up in his arms, and I subsided gratefully against him. “He is at peace at last,
bouche,
” he murmured into my hair.

I shook my head sadly. “I hope you may be right, but Eddie told me once that his soul would never know peace. I think he feared that they—Uther, Arwen, even Demelza who saw him as Uther returned to her—would not let him rest, even in death.”

The next morning, daylight added the final sorry details to the story. Deep gouges in the grassy slope that led to the cliff edge told their own tale. Eddie’s black greatcoat had been flung down on the rocky shelf where, it seemed, Lucy had tried to restrain him. Farther down the steep precipice, my scarf, which he had flaunted in place of a cravat, was caught on the branches of a single scrubby tree that clung obstinately to the rocks. The churning ocean below us sounded out its victorious serenade.

* * *

The Jago crypt sat directly behind St Petroc church. Guarded by statues of angels, the imposing wooden doors bore the Athal coat of arms.
Lucent in tenebris.
Shine in darkness. The words at once so poignant and yet so sinister. Cad and I lingered awhile after the other mourners had returned to the house.

“He was my friend,” I said quietly, pressing my hand against the crypt door in a final gesture of farewell. “Yet I couldn’t help him.”

“The damage was done long before you met him,
bouche.
In truth, it was done long before he was born. But Eddie loved you, you know. In the end, he couldn’t kill you, and given the torture his mind was going through, that speaks volumes about the power of his feelings for you.”

“Did you know it was him all along? Some of the things you said implied it.” We had not really spoken of it. In the period between Eddie’s death and his funeral, we had tried to focus on loving each other. That had been what helped us heal, if “healing” was the right word.

“No. If I had known for sure, or even had anything concrete to take to Miller, I would have spoken, of course. He was my brother, but I could not have allowed another girl to lose her life to him. All I had were suspicions, nothing more. The fact that the girls all looked alike and looked like our mother, for one thing. But I could never quite believe it was him, that my brother Eddie was the murderer.”

“Why did he hate you so?”

“I think perhaps it was because I knew him so well. I could see behind the facade he showed the world, and it was
that
he hated more than me, the person. I still saw the scared, scarred little boy and it didn’t fit the image he wanted to present.”

We had been in Paris, on our honeymoon, when the letter came from Lucy informing us that a body had been washed up several miles south of Athal. Tynan had suffered a relapse of his illness and was too unwell to go and identify the body. Although it was highly unusual for a woman to undertake such a task, Lucy had gone in his stead. Given the condition of the body, it was impossible to say for certain that it
was
Eddie, but she was able to confirm Inspector Miller’s belief that it seemed highly likely it was him. Leaving our elegant hotel on the Champs-Élysées, Cad and I had returned to say this final farewell to Eddie.

“Will we be able to have children, Cad?” I asked as we made our way slowly up the cliff path toward the house. It had been an unspoken question between us since our subdued wedding day two weeks after Eddie’s death. I thought of him and of Eleanor, who was beginning to show more signs of life, although she had not yet spoken or stirred from her bed. I tried not to think of Uther and Demelza. “Could we ever be sure they would not be tainted by the Jago legacy?”

He stopped and drew me into his arms. On one side the ocean roared an angry rebuke to the cliffs and on the other, Athal House slumbered in the early spring sunlight. I still had that overwhelming sense that I belonged here. Perhaps that feeling was more powerful than the words Cad spoke.

“I don’t know,
bouche.
There are those of us who are untainted. My father. His father before him. Myself. Even Eleanor, because, although her mind may be childlike, her heart is pure and untouched by evil. But we can’t know for sure what the next generation of Jagos will be like.”

An image of a boy playing on the sand, his clear, blue eyes crinkling into a smile and his ready laughter ringing out across the bay reached me then. Perhaps “healing”
was
the right word, after all. “Maybe we can,” I said, tucking my hand into Cad’s arm and turning our footsteps away from the house. I led him back toward Port Isaac. “There is someone I would like you to meet…”

Epilogue

August 1888

“The nurse said she is a little better today. I will take a light breakfast up to her shortly,” I say as I enter the parlour. Cad lays his newspaper aside and rises from his chair, coming forward to draw me into his arms. “You are insatiable, sir!” I pretend to protest as his arms tighten around me and the kiss deepens into something more than a greeting.

“As always with you,
bouche,
” he murmurs, his lips sliding down to linger at the hollow of my throat.

We draw apart as Eleanor enters the room, casting her shy, apologetic smile our way. She takes her usual seat by the window and gazes out, with unseeing eyes, across the cliff top to the roaring ocean beyond. Trapped forever in the childlike innocence I failed to recognise when we first met, she has not spoken a word since the night Eddie died. I sit with her for a while and she leans her head against my shoulder companionably. Summer scatters bright jewels over the scene. The English weather has its own vocabulary, one that I have painstakingly learned. I have grown to love my adopted land, although, to the world I now inhabit, I will always be an exotic creature. My mind flies back to the hushed conversation I overheard between two society ladies, not long after my wedding twenty years ago.

“Darling! How delightful. It’s been too long. Now, do tell, who is that positively ravishing creature in turquoise?”

“I can’t quite—oh, you mean the future Countess of Athal?” The voice was lowered dramatically. “Cad Jago married a foreigner, you know.”

“Did he really? How very odd of him, to be sure.”

“Well, quite! His wife is dazzling, of course, but why he couldn’t have chosen a nice English gal, I’ll never know. Still, it was a dreadful time for the family, what with his brother’s death, so I expect he wasn’t himself. The marriage appears to be a success. Indeed, he is rumoured to be quite devoted to her!”

“Cad Jago? Devoted?” An incredulous titter punctuated the words. “My dear, I give it a year at most. But foreigner or not, I am quite determined to discover the name of her dressmaker before the night is out!”

And, as easily as that, Dita Varga disappeared. In her place was Bouche Jago. Fashion plate, society hostess, beautiful darling of the English press. No one would ever know, or could begin to suspect, the secrets of my past. Hungarian bandits, Sandor Karol, stripping off my clothes and striking sultry poses in Parisian garrets were all remote echoes now. As if they had happened to someone else. I only wished that murdered girls, dark, forbidden love and the tortured decline of a dear friend’s sanity could be so easily banished to distant memory. The thunderbolt of love and belonging I experienced when I first saw Tenebris still endures. The ghosts do not, perhaps because I now sleep each night in the arms of my beloved Cad.

I return to join Cad, and we chat idly about everyday matters. The west lawn is overrun with moles, and one of the footmen has broken his ankle. Tristan has written from Manchester about a problem in one of the factories. He plans to travel down to discuss the matter with Cad and spend a few days with his mothers. The mother who lives in the cottage in Port Isaac, and the one who lives here at Athal House. Our two sons are due home from school for the summer in a few days, and we have vague plans to go to Paris now that they are old enough to appreciate its beauty. Cad suggests we take them to Budapest—Buda has now been united with its twin sister, Pest—so that they can learn more of their Hungarian heritage, but I am not so sure. He tries to bribe me with the offer of a detour to Vienna, and, tempted, I promise to think about it.

I can read my husband well and I know that, underneath the ordinariness of his manner, there is something troubling him. “There has been another murder,” he tells me at last, handing me the newspaper. I read the front page with a feeling of increasing dread.

“We have to tell her,” I say firmly. “I’ll do it now, when I take her tray.” He nods, and with a determination I don’t feel, I fold the newspaper and carry it out of the room.

When I reach her room, she turns to greet me with her striking smile. I place the newspaper on the table between us, smoothing it down flat, so that we can both see the front-page article. Her silver head bends close to my dark one, and we read together in silence. At one point she reaches out her hand for mine. I clasp it, my heart sighing at the delicacy of her old, brittle fingers.

Another murder of the foulest kind was committed in the early hours of yesterday morning. An examination showed the horrible nature of the crime. The unknown woman had been dead some three hours. The body had thirty-nine deep stabs, there being other fearful cuts and gashes. The throat was cut from side to side. The left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung was penetrated in two places. The heart was penetrated in one place, and that alone would be sufficient to cause death. The liver was healthy but was penetrated in five places; the spleen was penetrated in two places; and the stomach, which was perfectly healthy, was penetrated in six places. One of the wounds went clean through the breastbone. There were other lacerations of an unmentionable nature. The doctor’s opinion was that the wounds were inflicted by some kind of dagger, and that all of them had been caused during life. Each of the women has been murdered in a similar fashion, and doubt as to the crime being the work of one and the same villain vanishes, particularly when it is remembered that all were carried out within a distance of 300 yards in the Whitechapel district. These facts have led the police to the opinion that only one person, and that a man, committed all of the murders.