The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious] (4 page)

BOOK: The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious]
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He thought of years sifting slowly, weightlessly down, like feathers. Years, settling in soundless melancholy, piling up, until death fell like a flit of shadows at the end. Then eternity in the dark streets of Hades, where the spirits were too weary to whisper. His father was dead, and it didn't seem to matter.

He slogged his way back towards the garden gate. Its wrought iron fancywork left an orange stain in his palm as he opened it, and he found himself pausing, looking down, while that one colour remained bright, and all around him the hues drained from the world, until he might have been a ghost himself.

Perhaps some sleep? Even now the thought of his bed— feather mattress, feather quilt, linen smelling of lavender, scorched warm by the coal and hot brass of a bed-warmer—had a delicious quality. He closed his eyes and rested his cheek against his palm, sliding the fingertips up into his hair, covering again the skin that Jasper had touched. Remembered heat replaced the trickle of drizzle as he flushed. Life still pulsed in him somewhere then, at least.

Rubbing his hand clean, he turned right this time, away from the front of the house, and walked through the kitchen gardens. Apples shone yellow on branches trained in rectangles. The whiff of cherries succumbing to mildew mixed with the fat green smell of cabbage. As the drizzle thinned and sun peeked out again, the ash pit shone as if covered with sheet silver. A dazzle of raindrops flickered at the tips of rufous spikes of fur.

The ash pit's sewage stench floated in a miasma amid the damp air, but that glimpse of russet drew Charles despite it. His feet slithered on the boards above the piss coloured liquid that seeped from layer upon layer of ash, night soil, and kitchen scrapings.

A slurry of discarded food covered the top. He recognised the dregs of last night's dinner—bones of chops, lumps of stew washed clean of gravy. That was what had drawn the fox, no doubt. It lay rigid amongst the rubbish, its thin black lips drawn up over needle teeth, its wrinkled muzzle flecked with foam, lolling tongue red amidst a yellow mess of vomit.

Murder then. Charles had time to feel and detest the flare of relief as bright as joy, before his newly purposeful strides brought him to the kitchen door.

Inside, the red tiled floor smoked from a recent scrubbing, and the long, wooden table was cluttered with bowls. Mary Dwyer and her sister Kitty squeaked together as they heard his footfall, and bobbed the best curtseys they could manage; Mary with her jacket off and her bare arms soapy to the elbow from washing plates, and Kitty with a mixing bowl of pastry tucked beneath her elbow and her hands floured to the wrist. The turnspit boy slept by the hearth, and Charles stopped Cook before she could struggle to her feet and kick him awake.

"Please. I don't mean to interrupt."

Cook knocked her pipe out into the fire. It was strange to think that Mary and Kitty—Mary particularly, with her nut-brown hair and eyes like absinthe, freckled face clear and fresh beneath her petals of white cap—would one day grow to be like her mother. Cook's face was red as rare meat, and the upright chair on which she sat entirely disappeared beneath her. Her chin rested on the shelf of her breasts, and her eyes were shrewd.

"We're all right sorry for your loss, Mr. Charles," Mary spoke up unexpectedly. "He were a kind man, the master."

"Mary!" Cook ladled water into the kettle and settled it on the trivet over the fire. "'T'aint your place to make observations to Mr. Charles. You just get on with them dishes."

Mary's jaw hardened. "Reverend Ollerson says we'm all equal in the sight of God, Mam. I can say how sorry I am if I like."

Cook rolled her eyes and brought a slab of chocolate from a drawer beneath the table. "Them Wesleyans with their strange ideas. Little better than popery, that's what I say."

"But still," Charles interrupted the incipient argument with a smile, "thank you, Mary. It is a shock, I admit."

"I tell you what else is wicked," Cook broke off a square of the chocolate and pulverised it with a half dozen practiced whacks in a mortar. She waved the pestle at Charles like an accusing finger. "That Doctor Floyd, saying as how it was
my
food what killed the poor man!”

“I don’t think anyone is blaming you, Cook.” Charles leaned back against the dresser opposite the fireplace. Blue and white china crowded by his shoulders, and the scent of jugged hare arose from a bowl by his elbow. “The butcher, now, I daresay he passed off some inferior cut or diseased animal…”

“Ooh, Mr. Charles!” Cook added warm water to the ground up chocolate and whisked it with what seemed unnecessary fervour. “As if I couldn’ta told! That stew was as wholesome as lemon barley water, which I'd have given it to my infant did I have one."

"And we ate it too." Kitty looked up from her rolling pin, only to look down again quickly before Charles could meet her eye. The mouse of the family, clearly.

"You did?"

"Yes sir." Mary placed the final plate in the rack and dried her arms on her apron. Round, white arms, she had, a shade lighter than her face. He thought she had thinned somewhat over these past three months, and her features grown sharper. If that was the case, however, it had not yet begun to damage her beauty.

She caught him looking and dipping her head, gave him a coy little smile from the corner of her eye. But her reply was all business. "Four bowls out of that there pot. One onto a tray for the master, and three we ate ourselves. Then the tureen filled for the dining room and the boy and the grooms scraped the bottom when they supped."

"My father's food went into the hall though, didn't it? And waited for his valet to take it upstairs to him." Charles felt sure from their intent faces that they knew very well why he was asking.

Cook nodded carefully as she fetched a cloth and lifted the heavy kettle from the flames. She poured water, whisked again, and handed Charles a blackjack of foaming chocolate. "It did, sir."

"Might it have sat there long enough to grow unhealthful?" A shudder wormed its way past his guard. He wrapped his hands about the mug and sipped to cover it.

"I should hope not! Not without going cold. It does sit on the sideboard in the hall not more'n five minutes. The master… the old master, that is, wouldn't have stood for no cold dishes in the place of hot."

Tainted food, the doctor had said. But if they had all eaten the same thing with no ill effects, it could not have been tainted at the source. Something introduced later, then. Deliberately.

He sipped the chocolate again. Thick, frothy and bitter it cleared his mind a little of the lingering fog. Some human feeling returned in the amorphous press of dread.
Someone murdered my father. But why?

The kitchen fire hissed gently over its coals. Cook returned to her chair, filled her pipe and lit it with an ember. The ribbon of smoke smelled acrid-sweet, like tweed fresh off the roll.

“Why” led him to places he didn’t wish to visit. “Why” led him to George; George with his debts and his horses, his terror of being seen in the same suit twice. George who had just inherited an Earldom and whose credit was now almost infinitely extendible.

But it also led him to Jasper. The Admiral, Jasper's guardian, had been in dispute with Charles' father for years—some long lying aggravated feud over field drainage and pasture land that only the two of them fully understood. Could a neighbourly dispute, carried on more as a hobby than through any real malice, truly have led to murder? Might the ward have taken up arms on behalf of his guardian, struck out like a medieval avenger, defending his family honour? It seemed unlikely, but there was no denying the man was odd. Suppose he had some deformity in his moral makeup, and thought it his duty to exact a revenge entirely disproportionate to the injury?

And then again, George and Jasper were old friends. Suppose they had worked together, Jasper seeding this story of a curse to draw off suspicion of human malice?

“Why” brought no answers, only more questions. He put the blackjack down on the well scrubbed table, nodded thanks and went out. Better to concentrate on how and see if that proved clearer.

A flight of steps and a bare, white panelled corridor led him from the kitchens back to the entrance hall. His ancestors looked down on him from their frames with unanimous disapproval as he came out of the kitchen door. If the pictures were to be believed, the Lathams continually bred true to type—slender, of a middling height, blessed with open, handsome countenances and pale hair. The chapel, indeed, boasted a stained glass window of St. Stephen the martyr, whose frank beauty and powerful innocence was said to have been drawn from Sir Henry Latham—the most notorious rake of his age.

Sir Henry's portrait hung above the black and gold half-table, and disconcerted Charles by being too much like looking into a mirror; seeing himself a hundred years ago, with a pointed beard and a devil-may-care glint in his eye.

This was the table where the tray with his father's food had stood, waiting to be taken upstairs. Now nothing graced its black marble surface but a pair of golden candlesticks, their exuberant curves echoed in the bows and swags beneath it. He picked them up one by one, looked at their bases and their sockets and put them down again, feeling foolish. What on earth did he expect to find there?

A chinoiserie vase, decorated with golden chrysanthemums, stood to one side of the table, and he picked it up, looked inside and found only the cigar butt he had dropped in there himself a fortnight ago.

Flanking the vase on the other side of the table a second lacquered pot contained a plant of some kind—horticulture was Elizabeth's area of expertise. Still, Charles knew enough to guess that the drooping, flaccid leaves, yellow as jaundice, were not signs of good health. He poked the thing warily and it rocked sideways, the roots showing like shrivelled worms. Surface soil shifted, and beneath it gleamed a snow white heap of powder.

Charles took a pinch between thumb and forefinger, rubbed it. Square crystals ground into dust at the pressure. Prepared to spit, he lifted the finger to his mouth and touched the end with his tongue. Salt!

Salt? Someone had hated this plant enough to salt the soil beneath it? He shook his head with perplexity and went up to see if Emma was awake. She'd had a sharp mind before the onset of her illness, and was lucid enough still, when propped up and not in pain. Perhaps she could help him pick it all apart.

c
hAPteR fouR

“I suppose it would be difficult to buy poisons?” Charles tried not to bury his nose in his cravat as Emma coughed and hacked, blood spreading over the handkerchief she held to her mouth. She lay back at last against her pillows, and her nurse sponged the streaks of gore away from her face and hands, held a glass of water for her to sip. Her hair seemed the only thing left to her which still had strength; a loose mass of auburn, russet as autumnal leaves. The shape of her skull gleamed through flesh gone colourless as glass.

"Simplest thing in the world," she whispered. "When I ran the estate, I bought arsenic by the sack. There should still be a pile in the barn."

He found himself kneeling by the fire, feeding in lumps of coal and watching the amber light dance fierce between them. It was hard to look at her, almost harder than it had been to look at his father's corpse. Death stood in the room here too, and she had made an intimate of it. "Why on earth?"

"You never did learn the ways of the farm, did you?" Her blue eyes in that whey-blue face looked luminous as the sky, too tired for tact. "We make a… we put it in water. Put the seedcorn for the fields into the liquid before sowing. It keeps off the birds until the corn can sprout. After that… they don't like it."

"I had no idea," he said, frustrated. He had thought he could at least interview the local apothecaries, ask who had bought rat poison, find some answers there. Now it seemed anyone at all could have gone into the barn and come out with their pockets full of the stuff. "Is this something George would have known?"

"Of course," she said, and pinched shut her blue-veined eyelids. Her brows twisted like copper snakes. "George… Why must he stay away? I should have liked to see him one last time. To say goodbye."

Charles forgot the hand he was using to feed the fire. Flames licked his fingers and he drew it back, reddened, stinging, just as a worse pain twisted in his chest. If it felt like this for him, he didn't wish to imagine how much George would suffer, sitting here watching her die. "I imagine that is the very reason he dare not come."

§ § § §

Charles thought he was dreaming at first. Dreaming the splish and splatter of rain on the window and the warm enveloping float of his featherbed, darkness tinted brown by the dying ashes of his fire. Someone stroked his face, two fingertips across his forehead, light as a draft of air, barely stirring the ends of his hair. He tipped his head back, drowsy, just dreaming, and the touch grew firmer. Cool fingers gently brushed across his eyes.

Jasper.

His cheek flamed where it had been touched and, swaddled in its cocoon of feathers, his body blazed into life, sweat prickling behind his knees, beneath his arms, in his lap. His prick stirred and strained against the sheets.

Against his hot face the fingers that slid slowly down towards his lips felt rimed with frost. They traced the contours of his mouth and began to push inside.

His father’s dead face. The white handprint. Evil—the certainty of evil—came over him and every particle of his body shocked wide awake with a jerk. He reached up, grabbed, and felt a wrist like two twigs in a dirty blanket. He pulled and pulled with all his strength and the fingers edged on, inexorable, cold and wet into the cavity of his mouth.

No! No! Oh God no
! Daytime doubts could not touch his terror. He heaved and arched, threw himself off the bed, and it was gone, sinking back into his pillow like the lady beneath the lake. He crawled to the corner, grabbed his banyan, and fled into the corridor.

A floorboard creaked, and the house settled with a faint groan. Moonlight and rain drew shifting blue patterns on the floor, and as Charles collapsed against the wall he heard again the echo of an infant’s voice in the brick. Wrapping his arms around himself he hugged tight, tucked in his head and rode out the wave upon wave of shudders.
A dream. It was only a dream
.

BOOK: The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious]
9.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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