Secret Lament (33 page)

“
He
did it?” Hugh said amazed. “Proctor? Damn it, Charles, I’ve known the fellow for years. He even hates killing wasps – all God’s creatures and all
that!”

“The Matthew Proctor you know is in Carlisle,” I said. “This is a different person altogether.”

Proctor had taken hold of the back of the one rickety chair in the room – I was half afraid he might decide to pick it up and try to throw it at us. “I didn’t kill
Julia,” he said fiercely.

I shook my head. “You told me yourself that you’d been watching the house,” I said. “You were there almost the whole time, every night.”

“To keep her safe!”

I sighed; I had hoped that, once cornered, he would simply admit his guilt.

“On the night of Julia’s death,” I said, “you had an argument with Mazzanti at about nine o’clock. He came home drunk and shouted at you. You told me yourself that
he sent you packing then. Mrs Baker told me the same story. But several other people also saw you outside the house – at
midnight
– at about the time Julia was waiting for her
lover.”

“They were wrong!” he said wildly.

“No,” I said. “At nine o’clock you did indeed leave the street but once Mazzanti was in the house you went back to resume your vigil. And you saw Julia come out of the
house and hang about as if waiting for someone. She didn’t see you because you hid – there were other people in the street you didn’t want to see you. Three drunks for instance.
And Mazzanti himself was peering out of the window. Then you saw Julia walking off.”

Proctor gripped the chair as if it was the only thing holding him up. “She was running away. Eloping with some fortune hunter! After everything she had said to me!”

I thought of the Julia I had met in this world, the Julia dressed in a mature woman’s finery, who had been waiting in the kitchen with two glasses of wine for a man who never returned. The
Julia who had asked me anxiously if I knew where Proctor was.

“She wasn’t your Julia, Proctor,” I said gently. “This was a different woman.”

I took a deep breath. How in heaven’s name was I to explain to him what had happened? How could I tell him that he had accidentally stepped from his own world into another that bore a
resemblance that was in many respects so close that a distraught man might not notice it? How could I explain that he had fastened his attentions on a girl who was not the woman who was already his
lover?

“Have you never wondered,” I said, “why your key no longer fits the door of the house?”

“Damn landlord,” he said with uncharacteristic spite. “Changes the locks all the time. Then we have to pay for new keys.”

I glanced at Esther and Hugh; they were standing silently, almost as unnerved as Proctor. I tried again.

“What about your daughter? Flora? She should have been sitting here at home doing her fine needlework to supplement your income, shouldn’t she? When your key didn’t fit, did it
not surprise you that she didn’t come to let you in?”

He looked about him helplessly. The girl’s workbox lay overturned on the floor, spilling out pins and threads and scissors. He darted a look at Hugh keeping watch near the door, then at
Esther. She was looking at the window with an air of puzzlement. I couldn’t see what was perplexing her.

“Proctor.” I started again. If a roundabout way would not work, then I must try directness. “You have, by chance, stepped through to another world – ”

He began to laugh, almost hysterically; I could not blame him. I persisted. “You saw and heard the spirits there, Proctor.” I remembered how they had frightened him so much.
“Spirits do not exist in this world, do they? But they have surrounded you this last week.”

He stopped laughing, gasped for breath. “Demons! Legions of demons rising from the very stones!”

“It’s no good,” Esther said. “He cannot believe.”

Proctor was not seeing any of us. “She was so beautiful,” he whispered. “And she turned away from me. I pleaded with her not to be unfaithful but she wouldn’t listen. It
was the demons. They spoke to her and she laughed.”

I thought of the spirit on the house next to Mrs Baker’s. The spirit who liked a good-looking woman, who had been unable to resist a little flirtation with Julia.

I said softly: “You were lovers?”

“We were going to marry,” he said. Hugh snorted in derision and I signalled furiously to him to keep quiet. “We talked about how we could afford it. She was going to save all
she could from the money she got for playing Lucy in London. She was going to sell her jewels and her lace – ”

“What were you going to contribute?” Esther said tartly. The candle stub began to splutter and die.

“We were going to travel the country – I would teach the congregations their psalms, she would teach the ladies the latest songs from the London operas.”

Oddly, I could imagine the Julia in this world actually making such an impractical idealistic plan work, although I wondered what would have happened to the daughter, Flora, in this idyll.

“But she tried to pretend she didn’t know me!” He battered at the back of the chair with his fist. “When I tried to embrace her, she pushed me away, said she’d call
for help! She said she didn’t know me!” He almost shook the chair in his fury. “And then she walked away from me. I told her she had to go home.” He turned his face
pleadingly towards me. “It wasn’t safe! But she said she had to find him.
Him
! That weedy fellow. Just because he was a gentleman. She was going to his house, she
said.”

Julia had been going to knock on Ord’s own door! Had she been as desperate as that?

“This was outside her lodgings?” I asked. “Did her parents not hear you argue?”

He stared at me, apparently disorientated. “No – it was a street or two away.”

“Which street?”

The only sound in the room was the sparking of the dying candle and our own breathing.

He swallowed hard. “I could not let her go, I could not!”

“You caught up with her. You took hold of her.”

“I thought – ” He hesitated. “I thought a kiss would bring her to her senses.”

“But it did not,” Esther said, dryly.

“I didn’t mean to hurt her!” he insisted. “I thought I could make her remember how we loved each other. But she kept trying to push me away, kept hitting me.”

“She struggled and fell,” I said.

“She hit her head,” Proctor said, “on a stone at the base of a wall. She was dazed. I thought I could comfort her.”

“Yes, yes,” Hugh said derisively. “I’ve heard it called that before. You raped her.”

Proctor was weeping, great silent tears rolling down his cheeks. He wiped his eyes and left a smear of blood across his nose. “She said she didn’t know me!” He looked at me
pleadingly. “I didn’t know what to do. I ran away. Then I thought I should go back. And then – ” A great convulsion of tears overtook him; Hugh muttered contemptuously,
Esther shifted impatiently. “I didn’t know what to do!” Proctor insisted. “And then – I found her dead. And – and – God help me, all I could think of was
that she couldn’t now tell anyone what I had done.” He gave us all desperate glances. “I was scared!”

“You took one of her ribbons,” I said.

“To remember her by.” He added listlessly, “I lost it.”

“You raped her and then you killed her,” Esther said with contempt. “And then you ran away. You left her body in the street for anyone to find and take advantage of.”

“No, no,” he protested. “I didn’t – You don’t understand.”

“And it wasn’t even the right woman,” Esther said.

“Julia,” he whispered.

“Not your Julia.” Esther strode across the room and lifted the heavy bar securing the shutters. It dropped with a heavy clatter. She pulled one side of the shutters open.

We were drenched in sunlight. That line of light below the shutters had not been moonlight but the full sun of midday. The sunshine flooded into the room, setting dust motes dancing. As I
squinted against the dazzling brightness, I saw the dim shapes of carriages in the street outside, the blurs of people passing the window. Then my eyes adjusted and I turned to look at Proctor. He
was staring out into the daylight.

“Midnight?” Esther said mockingly. “In our world, yes. Here it is full day. Now do you realise we are telling you the truth? You were not in your own world. It was not your
Julia you killed.”

Proctor stared out into the street. We heard the clatter of horses’ hooves, the call of a carter, the barking of dogs.

“She was not betraying you,” Esther said. “She genuinely did not know you. You killed an innocent stranger.”

“No, no,” he protested.

There was a noise at the door. The door opened inwardly, bumping into Hugh. He shifted aside, startled, started to raise his pistol. I called out to stop him.

It was Julia Mazzanti, the still-living woman. She stood in the doorway with the gossamer-thin shawl over her lace-bedecked dress, fake jewellery sparkling at her ears and around her neck.
Yellow embroidered ribbons hung through her hair.

Hugh was staring in blank amazement; Esther, by the window still, was startled into immobility. I thought that Julia Mazzanti saw none of us. She was staring at Proctor with a face alive with
joy.

“Matthew!”

Proctor shrieked. He started away from Julia who stared at him in astonishment, backed away round the chair, half-lifted it as if in defence.

“Matthew?” Julia said bewildered. “You’re hurt!” She reached for him then seemed to see me for the first time. “Mr Patterson? What’s
happening?”

She took one step towards me. It was enough to clear Proctor’s way. He threw down the chair, cannoned into Esther, sending her stumbling aside, darted for the door.

I knew I was too far away but I tried to catch him anyway. I pushed unceremoniously past Julia, vaulted the fallen chair and ran for the hallway. The door to the street was open to the warm
autumn sunlight and the rattling carriages. Proctor was just disappearing through it.

I almost caught him. My fingers snagged on his coat tails as he dashed out into the street in panic. Someone shouted a warning, a dog set up a furious yapping. A woman screamed. Then horses were
rearing and Proctor was under the wheels of a brewer’s wagon.

Somehow, true satisfaction always seems to elude us.

[
Instructions to a Son newly come of Age
, Revd. Peter Morgan (London: published for the Author, 1691)]

I knelt and reached under the wheels to touch Proctor. One glance was enough to tell me he was dead; his neck was twisted, his eyes wide open and blank.

The carter was murmuring soothing noises to his nervous horses; a woman, clearly a farmer’s wife, said comfortably, “It was his own fault. He ran out as if all the demons in hell
were after him.”

“They were,” I said.

I turned to look back at the house. On the doorstep, Julia Mazzanti was standing dry-eyed and rigid. Esther murmured something in her ear; Julia shook her head. I went back to them.

“I thought everything was going to be all right,” Julia said. “I thought I’d found happiness after all that had happened to me. A husband and a child. After everything so
dreadful and sordid, I thought there was one man in the world who believed in God and in love.”

I searched for words that might comfort her but she turned her head and looked on me with contempt. “Are you not going to ask me what I mean, Mr Patterson? Or are you going to change the
subject or keep silent too?” She smiled mirthlessly. “Like my mother.”

And then to my fury we were crashing back into darkness. The daylight winked out, the chattering crowd was silenced, the dog’s barking cut off. A great chill overtook us,
and left me shivering and trembling and cursing and railing against the perversity of whatever force it was – fate, or God, or chance – that controlled the links between the two worlds.
I found I had shut my eyes; when I opened them again, I was standing in the drawing room of Esther’s house, with candles flickering in the doorway and Corelli shouting.

I knew I would not see Julia Mazzanti again.

I got my breath back, felt warmth seeping back into my bones. Flickering candlelight showed me Hugh sprawled on the floor, tangled in a chair; I looked round for Esther and found her by the
library door, staring blindly into space.

The door to the hall burst open; Corelli rushed in, flourishing his sword. “What happened?” he demanded. “Where the hell is he? Devil take it, he didn’t get away? He
didn’t go out the front door. He must still be in the house!”

Fowler came up behind him. “He didn’t go through the servant’s door to the back of the house.”

“How about the library windows?” I said brightly. “They overlook the gardens. If he could get out there, he would have been able to get out into the street.”

Corelli plunged through into the library. Fowler gave me a hard look but followed the Italian; like master, like servant, I thought – more perceptive than I would have liked. But then
Heron could never stand fools about him.

Esther pushed past me, hurriedly unlatched the drawing-room window shutter and dragged the window up an inch. Corelli and Fowler in the library were making enough noise to awaken the dead;
Catherine’s voice came through from the kitchen. Esther pulled the window up a little further and called out. “This way! He must have got out here!”

Corelli came back, cursing and swearing. He took one look at the window and dashed for the front door. Fowler and Ned went after him; Ned was grinning with all his old recklessness.

Catherine hovered in the library door. “Tom’s gone out to check the garden. Shall I call him back?”

“No,” I said. “Tell him to check everything.”

She went off to do my bidding. Hugh and Esther exchanged glances. The noise and heat of excitement died away; I could hear Corelli and Ned shouting out in the square, waking half the neighbours
no doubt. I sensed that while half an hour or so had passed for us in the other world, for Corelli and the others no time at all had passed; they had seen us go into the drawing room and followed
us there at once. That discrepancy in time seemed to work both ways.