Spider Light (22 page)

One of the many tragedies in this entire mess of tragedies, was that they had had such a few short years to enjoy it all.

Each evening after dinner George Lincoln sat in the comfortable drawing room of Toft House. He derived a deep satisfaction from looking about him, and knowing that this house, this big well-appointed house, belonged to him. Who would have thought the young man from such modest roots–his father had been vicar of a small parish adjoining Amberwood–would have done so well for himself?

On a dank autumn night he was not expecting anyone to call, but shortly after half past eight there was a rather timid plying of the door knocker, and since Mrs Plumtree would have retired to her own sitting room upstairs, George went along to answer it himself. Standing on the doorstep was Mrs Minching, the housekeeper from Quire House, looking deeply anxious.

‘Mr Lincoln, I’m that sorry to be knocking on your door, but I’m afraid there might be trouble up at Quire.’

‘Trouble? What kind of—Is it Maud?’ said George. ‘Has something happened to Maud?’ And then, belatedly aware of the chill night air, he said, ‘You’d better come inside, Mrs Minching, and sit down. What’s wrong?’

Mrs Minching, perched on the edge of the sofa, was inclined to be voluble. ‘I’d been to evensong, Mr Lincoln. I always go
along of a Tuesday evening. Miss Thomasina knows, of course, and I leave a cold supper out.’

George repressed a strong desire to tell her to get on with it, because if something had happened to Maud…

‘Tonight it was getting on for eight o’clock when I got back, and that was when I found the kitchen door at Quire–the one I normally use–was locked. Not just locked, but bolted, Mr Lincoln. Well, I thought, that’s not usual. So I went round to the other doors–the garden door, the front door, and the French windows of the music room–but at every one it was the same story. Locked and bolted.’

‘Dear me,’ said George, not seeing where this was leading.

‘So then of course, I knocked. And without a word of a lie, I knocked until my hands were fair wore out, but no one came.’

‘But,’ said George, puzzled, ‘aren’t there two girls who work for you? Weren’t they there?’

‘One’s in Chester seeing her sister who’s just had a baby, and the other has the night off. I don’t ask questions as to where she goes,’ said Mrs Minching righteously.

‘What about Miss Thomasina?’

‘Miss Thomasina is away. And it’s not my place to question where she goes.’

‘No, but—’

‘Miss Thomasina,’ said Mrs Minching, compressing her lips, ‘is in the way of sometimes going off by herself for a day or two.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said George, not seeing at all. ‘But are you saying the house is empty? I’m sure Maud would have told me if she was going away with Miss Thomasina.’

‘Oh, Miss Maud’s in the house, Mr Lincoln. That’s why I’m here now. My word, Miss Maud is there all right. She’s seated at the piano, playing that belly-aching row. Beg pardon, sir, but I’ve been out in the cold knocking at the door of a house where I’ve worked for twenty years. Twenty years, I’ve been there, all the way up from scullery maid in old Mr Josiah’s time–and reduced to shouting through the letterbox to be let in. It’s enough
to make a saint swear. I felt no better than a common fishwife, indeed I did.’

‘I’d better come up to the house with you,’ said George, still not overly worried. ‘Maud may not have heard you. If she was practising her music she might have been lost to everything else. I’d better let Mrs Plumtree know I’m going out. Would you like a–some refreshment while you wait?’ He made the offer hesitantly, because he had never really sorted out what was correct when it came to hospitality of this kind. Did you offer a drink to somebody else’s housekeeper?

Mrs Minching took kindly to the idea of refreshment. She said she would not object to a little nip of gin, if Mr Lincoln had such a thing. ‘It’s a cold night, and a little nip of gin’s wonderfully warming.’

The aura of the gin seemed to accompany them as they walked along Scraptoft Lane and approached Quire House. George rather wished he had had a nip of it himself, because it was a dismal kind of night. A thin, spiritless rain was falling, wreathing the trees in mist. The more he thought about it, the odder it became to think of Maud by herself in that great house, Miss Thomasina apparently absent, and all the doors locked against the world.

As they turned in at the gates George spotted a light shining through the trees from Charity Cottage, and it occurred to him that Cormac Sullivan might possibly have keys to Quire House.

‘I suppose he might,’ said Mrs Minching doubtfully. ‘You could ask.’

‘He’s probably not at home,’ said George. ‘I believe I will try, though.’

But Cormac was at home, although did not have keys to Quire House. Thomasina Forrester, he said gravely, did not hand out keys in such a profligate fashion, and especially not to the tenantry.

George explained they needed to get into Quire, and why, and Sullivan said, ‘Curiouser and curiouser. Will I come up there with you?’ and it occurred to George this might be helpful.

‘Wait while I get a coat, then,’ said Cormac. ‘And will we take a flask of something with us to keep out the cold?’

George, who was by this time starting to feel more concerned than puzzled, thought that between Mrs Minching’s nip of gin, and Cormac Sullivan’s flask, they would be lucky to get as far as Quire House by midnight.

Maud had spent all of last night and most of today trying to shut out the sounds of Thomasina and Simon tapping on Twygrist’s walls, but in the end it had become impossible.
Tap-tap…Let-us-out…Tap-tap…We’re-not-dead…
On and on it went, until she wanted to scream. All night she had lain in bed listening to it, and she had been grateful for the thin daylight that finally came into her bedroom because surely the tapping would not continue through the day. She felt sick and dizzy from not having slept.

By now those two must be dead. But what if they were not? What if they had found a way to get out–Twygrist’s outer door was not locked–and had somehow crept back to this house? Maud would not put it past them to do that. Well then, they would have to be kept out. She thought about this, and remembered it was Mrs Minching’s night for evensong, and that the two maids would also be out tonight. That was very good indeed; Maud waited until Mrs Minching was safely out of the house, then went round all the rooms, locking the doors and drawing the bolts. Aha, Madam Thomasina and Master Simon, you won’t come sneaking in now! No one would come sneaking in–she had made sure of that.

She lit the lamp in the music room. It was warm and there was a comforting crackle from the logs in the hearth. The tapping seemed to have stopped for a while. Maud relaxed, and began to drift into a half sleep. It was nice to sit here and know she would not be forced to do ‘It’ with Thomasina or Simon ever again. Nice…

But it was not nice after all, because Thomasina and Simon
were waiting for her, just on the other side of sleep, reproachful and threatening. Their faces were already fading to a sick whiteness because of being shut away from the light. They had crawled across to the steel doors–it had taken them most of last night and all of today because they were getting weak with not having eaten, and because it was pitchy black in the kiln room–but they had managed it and now they were hammering against the doors. Simon said they would keep on hammering until someone heard. He lifted his hands up to show Maud how his fingers and knuckles were already starting to protrude through the skin. That was good, he said, because bones made effective hammers.

Maud managed to climb up out of the nightmare at this point, but even awake she could still hear the hammering of Simon’s knucklebones against the kiln room doors. Dreadful dull knockings, over and over, like someone beating against a bruise in your mind…

That had been when she thought of blotting out the sounds with music, and had sat down at the piano and begun to play her beloved
Caprice
as loudly as she could. Part of Paganini’s legend was supposed to be that he had sold his soul to the devil, and that this was a devil-inspired composition. Maud found this believable. She did not care if the music conjured up the composer’s devils in this very room, if it meant they would keep her safe from Thomasina and Simon.

It was Cormac who banged the brass door knocker of Quire’s main door. It echoed through the house like the crack of doom, and George could not believe it could not be heard inside. But even though Sullivan plied the heavy knocker several times, there was no response.

‘Nothing,’ he said, at last. ‘We’ll go around to the back and see what we can find there. Mrs Minching, you wait here, if you would.’

Without waiting for an answer he set off, and George followed, blundering into bushes in the dark, torn between annoyance at
the way Sullivan seemed to have taken over, and relief at having decisions made for him.

‘Nothing to be seen,’ said Cormac, having peered in through all the windows. ‘No sign of your girl anywhere. That’s the music room, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, whatever she might have been doing earlier on, she isn’t there now,’ said Cormac, having peered through the partly open curtains. ‘There’s no one there. Nothing else for it, Lincoln, we’ll have to break in.’

‘Oh, we can’t do that,’ said George, shocked. ‘Whatever will Miss Thomasina say?’

‘Thomasina Forrester isn’t here to say anything. If you want my opinion, she’s sloped off to London on one of her jaunts. She has a liking for the ladies in Seven Dials, so it’s said.’ He glanced at George. ‘You didn’t know that?’

This was clearly nothing more than extremely distasteful gossip, but George could not think of a suitable answer so he mumbled something vague.

‘But,’ said Cormac, surveying the house, ‘all things being equal, I think we’d be within our rights to smash a window. Will I do the deed, or will you? No? I didn’t think you would.’

He found a heavy stone from the path, and smashed it against the windowpane. The glass splintered, and he reached inside to unlatch the frame.

‘This house is empty,’ he said, as soon as they had stepped through the French windows, avoiding the broken glass. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how you can tell?’

George, who did not see how you could tell if a house was empty or full of people, said they should make a thorough search. Maud might be ill–she might have tripped and fallen and be lying helpless somewhere.

‘So she might. Although if she was playing the piano half an hour ago…But we’ll take a look.’

They let Mrs Minching in through the front door, and set off.

‘It’s a curious thing about Quire,’ said Cormac as they went up the main staircase. ‘There’s all this orderly Georgian elegance’–he waved an expressive hand–‘all the smooth walls and pale ceilings–but there are pockets of deep unhappiness in some of the rooms.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said George. ‘Unless you mean damp or dry rot. There’s always a smell with that, of course.’ There had been dry rot in the roof at Toft House a year or so ago; it had cost a shocking sum of money to get rid of it.

‘I don’t mean damp or dry rot,’ said Cormac. ‘I know all about those. This is like–it’s like stepping without warning into a black icy puddle when you thought it was a warm summer afternoon. Like falling into a well. There’s a bad one in the music room, did you not feel it? There’s another in the bedroom that I think is your daughter’s.’ He glanced at George as he said this, but George had never heard such fanciful rubbish as pockets of unhappiness inside houses, and he set off up to the second floor without bothering to respond.

He had just paused on the upper landing to look out of a window–there was a clear view of Toft House’s chimneys over to the east–when he caught a darting movement down on the ground. Leaning forward he saw a shadow detach itself from the darkness and go purposefully along the carriageway.

George screwed up his eyes, trying to see better. Could it be Maud? Yes, surely that was the cloak with the hood she sometimes wore. He went plunging back down the stairs, shouting to Sullivan.

‘Are you sure it was Maud?’ demanded Cormac when George had spluttered out what he had seen, and Mrs Minching had come puffing up from the kitchens. ‘Mightn’t it have been Thomasina?’

‘Yes, I am sure it was Maud,’ said George, annoyed at the implication that he could not recognize his own daughter. ‘In any case, it wasn’t tall enough for Miss Thomasina or for your daughter, Sullivan. And no one else is likely to be wandering around the grounds in the dark.’

‘She must have been hiding outside while we were searching the house,’ said Mrs Minching. ‘But where she’d be going at such a time of night beats me.’

‘It beats me as well, but we’ll have to find out,’ said George. He looked at Cormac, not wanting to ask for further help, but was relieved when Sullivan said, ‘We’ll go after her. You stay here, Mrs Minching. Ready, Lincoln?’

‘Of course.’

George dared say Sullivan was used to slinking through the night in pursuit of game, either human or feathered, but he, George, was not. By the time they reached Quire’s gates, he was considerably out of breath and Maud was some way ahead of them. But they had both seen her turn left onto the high road.

‘Then she’s not going towards the town,’ said Cormac softly. ‘Can you see her? In this rain she looks like a wraith.’

‘Do you think she knows we’re coming after her?’

‘If I was by myself I’d say she wouldn’t hear a thing, but you’re clumping along like something with spurs or cloven hoofs and huffing like a grampus, so—God Almighty, will you look where she’s going?’

But George had already seen. Maud was going towards Twygrist.

Twygrist was never a very prepossessing place at the best of times, and late at night with the rain sliding from the trees it was as gloomy as it could be. Even George, who had worked there from the days of being Josiah Forrester’s under-manager, always found it forbidding after dark.

Despite Sullivan’s earlier remark, he did not think Maud knew they were here. She walked straight up to the mill, pausing in its shadow to send a stealthy look over her shoulder.

‘Will the door be locked?’ said Cormac softly.