The Solitary House (38 page)

“Try not to blame the boy,” says Abel, trying to come between them. “How could he hae known?—it might a been the same if I’d been there me’sen.”

Slowly Charles lets go of the boy’s sleeve. “I think you’d better tell me exactly what happened,” he tells them quietly.

It’s quickly told, and not very much—on the face of it—but the tale’s tail has a vicious sting.

Molly and Billy had been at the market that afternoon; she to buy the week’s provisions, and he supposedly to carry them, though it’s obvious to Charles that what Billy’s really been doing most of the time is gambling threepences with the coster-lads on Spin-’em-rounds, even if the boy swears blind that this had never happened “ever, on me Ma’s life” before today. And so it was that Billy didn’t even notice the disturbance at one of the fruit stalls, and only realised it involved Molly when Mrs McLeod ran over and dragged him
smartly back. All there was to see, by then, was the girl being helped to her feet, a crowd of bystanders who claimed not to have seen what happened, and half the contents of the basket rolling in the mud. Hearing this, Charles glances at Molly. She’s clearly been badly shaken, but there seems to be no other obvious damage. No bruises, no visible cuts. He remembers his strictures about keeping the house bolted, and wonders whether his own anxiety has made the rest of them unnecessarily susceptible. Because surely the girl is over-reacting this time?

“So that’s all it was?” he says. “Nothing more than that?”

Billy swallows, then shakes his head.

“I got ’er back ’ere and made some tea and all, and she seemed all right. And then we found it.”

“Found what?”

“That,” says Billy, pointing. “In the basket.”

Charles looks at him and then at the spread of provisions on the table. Some in bags, some loose, some tied with string. And one—he sees now—wrapped in brown butcher’s paper, stained with dark marks. A second, closer look eradicates all doubt.

And how, in fact, could he not recognise it? Even if the skin is blackening now and the nail greenish, this piece of carrion was once a part of him.

The girl is not the only one retching now. He only just makes it to the scullery bucket in time, then stands breathing deeply for a moment before scrubbing his face with a cloth and going back into the kitchen. The taste of bile is still hot in his mouth as he seizes the bloody paper and throws it and its contents onto the fire.

“I will be going out again within the hour,” he says, straightening up to face them, “and no-one is to leave this house until I return. Nor
is the door to be opened under any circumstances, even to tradesmen you know. Do I make myself clear?”

Abel nods, his flushed face rather paler now. “We understand, Mr Charles. Now come along Billy, there be fires upstairs that should a been lit an hour ago.”

Stornaway is being discreet, but Charles scarcely notices. He knows he has to say something to Molly, but the task that presses most on his mind is upstairs, and she’s only serving to keep him from it. As soon as Abel and Billy have gone, he goes to the girl and puts his hand gently on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry.”

Sorry for what she has been through that day? Sorry that he’s behaved so coldly with her since they shared his bed? Sorry that he let something begin between them without thinking where it might end? On a conscious level, probably only the first, but perhaps the others would have their place, if he would let them.

Molly nods, raises her eyes to his briefly, then drops her head again. The next time she looks up the room is empty.

Up in the attic Charles is already ransacking one of the crates for his book of English heraldry. Which he does indeed find exactly where he expected it to be, but which turns out not to contain anything even remotely resembling the black swan adorned with the red hand. He could wait until morning and go to the British Library and pore over learned tomes for hours, but if there’s one thing Charles now knows, it’s that time is a luxury he no longer possesses. The package left in Molly’s basket carried more than one message, and the loudest and clearest of them all is that his unseen adversary is closing in. Closing in on Charles, and closing in, now, on all those around him. He could have killed Molly today, if he chose, just as he could have
killed Charles on the City Road. And knowing that, there is only one course of action Charles can take, despite the danger, and despite the enormous risk. For if the people in this house are no longer safe on the street, how long can even these fast-locked doors and windows protect them?

On his way back downstairs Charles stops at Maddox’s door, and gently pushes it open. The old man is asleep in his chair by the fire, his mouth slightly open, and the coals burnt low. Charles hesitates, wondering whether to wake him and tell him what he’s discovered, and what he plans to do now, but he remembers what Stornaway once said about how fast his uncle’s grasp of the world plunges as the day declines, and decides he might be doing more harm than good. There’ll be another opportunity, he tells himself. I can talk to him tomorrow.

TWENTY-THREE

Closing In

T
HE ROOM IS
darkened and still. A thin sliver of moonlight slices between the shutters from the street outside, and zigzags crookedly down the
columbarium
of iron boxes marshalled like a silent legion of the dead behind the empty chair where their master once sat enthroned. He is as mute now as they are, encased in his own dark box downstairs, awaiting the moment when he too will be allotted a narrow niche that bears his name. This room was never much given to receiving company, and seems to have lapsed with relief back into its familiar emptiness. There is no sign, now, of the dozens of uninvited feet that have trod these floors these last few days, sifting every locked drawer, and staring, many of them, up at the ominous ceiling, with its prophetic pointing Allegory, who gazes down as blindly now as he did before, at the mahogany desk and the stiff-backed chair. There is still a bottle of wine and a glass upon the table, and still the two silver candlesticks at either end. But there is a stain on the floor before the table now that was not there when last we visited this place. It’s not so very large, that stain, nor so very dark, but it’s curiously compulsive, and once noticed you cannot seem to escape it, and
find it lurking at the corner of your eye, wherever you look about the room. Many a housemaid will try to get that stain out, and many a housekeeper berate them for incompetence, but soap and scouring will neither rid nor blanch it, and in the years to come that fact alone will endow this room with a fearful fascination for all who come here—a fascination that swells into shivering
frisson
when they raise their eyes to the ceiling and contemplate Allegory, pointing down now with a terrible accuracy at the very spot on the floor where Tulkinghorn lay, all those dark hours alone, face-down and bleeding, with a bullet in his heart.

Time passes. The blade of light creeps, inch by inch, across the floor, turning the flecks of floating dust to diamond in its cold brightness.

And then—what’s that?

A noise. Too muffled by stone and brick and wooden doors to hear distinctly. Is it merely the breathing of the old house, or has someone penetrated its closed and curtained seclusion and found a way within, despite the heavy bar now nailed across the high front door? Yes, yes—look there, on the stairs—the ghost of candlelight grows and takes shape, and wild shadows shudder up the wall. But as the unknown man emerges onto the landing and stands for a moment before the door, shading his candle against his palm, we can see that the hand that holds it is bound about by bandages. And who, indeed, but Charles Maddox would have the impudence to intrude on a house of mourning—for surely these walls must lament their master’s untimely passing, even if no living soul ever will.

If he hesitates as he stands there, it’s only because the candle is guttering badly in the draught, and he’s concerned not to advertise his presence to anyone watching from outside. He crosses quickly and noiselessly to the window and pulls the shutter close, then moves to the desk and tries the drawer—the drawer he’s seen Tulkinghorn open so often, but always, in the past, with a key. But Bucket has been here before him, and this time the drawer slides open and the
ring of keys he’s seeking lies revealed. And next to it, that small obsidian paperweight that Charles once coveted so much. He should have expected to see it there, but it seems to snare his attention all the same. After a moment he reaches out to touch it, and finds to his astonishment that the stone is warm, even in the chill of that cold room—as if its master’s grasping fingers cannot quite relinquish it, and have left what heat they ever had locked inside this hoarded trophy. A voice in Charles’s head tells him to take it—tells him to slip it into his pocket, unnoticed—tells him that no-one will ever know, and that whoever it is who will now take possession of Tulkinghorn’s many treasures, he could not possibly appreciate this obscure object of desire more than Charles does. Is he tempted? Of course, but it is the ring of keys that his fingers close upon. Then he turns to the racks of boxes behind him, and takes the little set of worn library steps in his free hand. We can already see, just as he soon does, that some of these boxes are no longer quite as dusty as they were when Charles first came here, even if others are slumbering still under years of neglect. The next thing he finds—and it’s with a surge of quick elation—is that the boxes are marked not only with the names of Tulkinghorn’s clients, but with a small etching of their armorial bearings. A weakness this, perhaps, in the old lawyer’s otherwise impregnable façade, a hint of vainglory, of overweening professional pride that has now met with all too vertiginous a fall. Resisting the urge to go immediate swan-hunting, Charles turns first to the Cremorne coffer and spends ten fruitless minutes flicking through wills and title deeds and dull affidavits. Little of it is recent, and none of it is even remotely personal in nature, but on second thoughts that is not so very odd, given Tulkinghorn’s almost preternatural concern for caution and circumspection:
Cremorne
is the only name Charles has ever been given, so if any one box here has had its compromising contents removed elsewhere, it is surely this one. Though he cannot fail to notice, in passing, that the box on the shelf below dedicated to Dedlocks dead and present has also been emptied of most of what it must once have contained. But that he suspects
is the inspector’s handiwork, not the lawyer’s. He slides the Cremorne box back into its place and begins his search for the black swan. And now even the alphabet proves to be on his side: no Vavasour or Smithson this, but filed neatly under
G
a mere two shelves farther down. The box has the thinnest film of dust, and no recent fingerprints, so it seems Bucket’s incursions have not stretched this far, though it appears very possible that Tulkinghorn himself was busy about this box in recent days.

Charles pulls the box out and takes it down to the table. Then he sits down at the desk, and opens the lid, holding the candle so close to the sheaves of dry paper that they seem to uncurl and stretch in the heat of the flame.

He’s so absorbed in trying to make sense of this correspondence, so intent on discovering the crime—for crime there
must
be—that lies concealed behind the bland legal language, that he is not as alert as he should be to the creak of the boards—not as suspicious as experience should have taught him, of the elaborate Oriental screen so carefully and so conveniently positioned. But what he does not hear, he soon senses in another way. Faint at first, but unmistakable. Just as it was once before, in this very room. The aroma of the finest Turkish tobacco.

He raises his head and sees at once a figure in the shadows in the far corner. How long he has been there, Charles does not know. Pure instinct tells him it’s Cremorne, but he sees almost at once, even in the half-light, that this figure is surely too slight, too short. But if not Cremorne, then—?

The floor creaks again as the silhouetted shape moves closer, but when he emerges at the edge of the circle of light cast by the candle Charles almost laughs out loud with the absurdity of his own fears. The man in the shadows is barely a man at all—so small, in fact, that his black coat skims its tattered hem along the floor. The assailant his mind manufactured in the darkness is no more fearsome in reality
than Tulkinghorn’s groom. The strange-looking lad with the queer yellow eyes. The rush of relief is just giving way to mystification about what on earth he’s doing here—now, in this room, in the middle of the night—when the boy puts his fingers to his mouth and Charles sees what is in them.

A cigarette.

It’s not merely that the boy is smoking in the house that shocks him, though it does, no question. In fact, it’s not so much
what
he’s doing, but what he’s doing it
with
. Charles’s upper-class contemporaries may be partial to cigars, but the working-man of 1850 smokes only a pipe—indeed it’ll be at least another four or five years before English soldiers in the Crimea are introduced to cigarettes by their Turkish comrades. And even if there are fine hand-rolled versions available in London this very November evening it is only from one very expensive and exclusive shop in Bond Street (though the name above the door would probably be familiar to you). That this lad—this not-much-more-than-stable-boy paid no more than ten shillings a week—should be smoking one, and smoking it in so casual, so pointedly nonchalant a fashion, is utterly unaccountable. Or at least at first. Because the cigarette is not the only thing he’s holding. As he moves slowly forwards and into the light, Charles sees what was invisible at first, and is even now partly concealed by the folds of the coat. In his left hand, catching in the candle flame, is the glint and glitter of a long ebony-handled blade.