The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious] (8 page)

Jasper could not have been more right; he neither knew his own mind, nor could predict what it would fasten on next. And perhaps this thing between them, this mad oscillation of desire and rejection, suspicion and trust was responsible for that. It was a sin because it drove men mad? But wasn't love also a divine madness?

Love!
He tapped the papers back together, raised them like a shield against the thought. Whatever lay between them, it was at present the least of his problems. He read through a tailor’s bill, the date a month ago, and by the time he reached its obsequious signature his flutter of spirits had calmed a little.

Here were letters from the doctor, some still with the stain and sharp tincture of opium smell folded into them. A ledger from the drawer above his knees confirmed the letters; entries for the purchase of laudanum stretched back, page after page, twice a month for the past five years.

Only the initials changed by each entry; DF must surely be Doctor Floyd. DS puzzled him for a moment until he reckoned in the other items—fishing licence, a new rifle, an ostler’s bill for feeding and stabling the coach horses. Doctor Samuels then, from the estate in the Cotswolds, where Ambrose took his regular holidays.

A cluster of entries for Samuels caught Charles’ eye.
Night visit, two pounds, 4 shillings and sixpence. DS in attendance all day; 5 guineas. Four guineas to DS for services rendered.
And the curious
To Mrs. M, four pounds, the bedclothes and a quart of spirits.

A day later and a DC paid back some of this bounty;
received of DC two shillings and a hunter watch
, but this name eluded Charles entirely. He knew of no family doctor with a name beginning with C.

Three months ago. Yes, he did recall that his father had returned from that trip looking wan and nervous. Some shooting accident, perhaps? Or a duel, hushed up for the sake of his reputation? Charles made a pencilled note on the edge of the ledger to remind himself to find out. His father’s valet would never betray a confidence, but Ambrose had, as always, taken half of the household servants with him. One of them might be persuaded by coin or loyalty to disclose what they knew. He could even journey to the Cotswold house himself, make enquiries on the spot…

Rain still tapped on the windows, and it was cold and damp in here, with the wind blowing in and no fire. Charles went over to close the window, and as he did, a faint shadow of grief came over him; such a lived-in room, now as empty as the body it had housed.

Sighing, he returned to the desk, opened another drawer and pulled out more paper. The chill made him wish at first for a fire, and then for Jasper—for that moment of more than physical warmth as they clung to one another. More than that, he wished for the man's voice, his company, his half-mocking, half-comforting presence, and his thoughts.

As he rubbed his weary eyes, the wind skirled down the chimney. With it sharp and close came the crying of that bodiless child, melancholy, unending, hard to deny. He snapped the ledger closed, turned to the next pile.

Here on top was an inventory of his mother's clothes, with a tick placed against certain items; a cap, a light sprigged shift with lavender ribbons, a fichu “of silver-blue moiré silk,” a sack dress “of mulberry brocade, the hem much torn.” Beneath that, a stack of letters from creditors, demanding money.

Slithering out from between a wine merchant's begging missive and the slightly more frosty tones of the bank of England, a folded letter fell to the desk top. It had been torn in two pieces, and shook out from the bundle like waste paper.

Charles gathered the halves, his heart speeding and a little wash of excitement going over him at discovering from the address it was from Admiral Vane. He smiled at the bold handwriting for a moment, before recollecting himself. Dear God, such sentimentality, he would be keeping a lock of Jasper's hair in his pocket next, tied up with ribbon.

You infamous rascal!

The first words shoved his undecided heart, sent it swinging once more over to the other side of its oscillation. Straight from tenderness back to accusation.

Receiving your communication of the thirteenth, I have treated it as it deserved and wiped my arse with it. I send it back to you now that it has served its office, that you may treasure it as you treasure all your dung.

How dare you think to rebuke me with my birth? Your place in society you hold on the merits of your ancestors, such as they were. Mine I have earned by my own virtues.

Chief amongst those virtues is the inability to endure any stain upon my honour. You, sir, have done me calumny, and since you are so cowardly as to refuse me satisfaction, like a man, I must treat you like the rat you are.

You will regret making an enemy of
Admiral Sir Harold Cheveley Vane.
c
hAPteR seven

What did it mean? Charles rested his forearms on the desk, and looked at the ripped paper in his hands, while wind blew the rain against the panes and the sobbing in the walls rose in pitch, frustrated and angry.

“Be still,” he told it, bowing his head, touching the paper to his lips, remembering Jasper’s touch there; the warmth and softness, the bold, plundering authority of his touch. The voice cried on. A loose hair, missed when his wig was dressed, fell over his face like a cobweb. He blew it away, raised his head. “Did you hear me? Be quiet!” And the hair settled gently over his eye, catching in his lashes, tickling his nose.

He plucked it out, felt the others shift in their ribbon, ready to unravel themselves. The child cried on. Charles put down the two pieces of death threat and pushed them together with stiff, unwilling fingers. So Elizabeth had been right. She must have known of this, perhaps even been watching Jasper in dread of what he would do.
The Admiral makes a threat, he sends his ward, and soon after his enemy dies, like a rat, of poison.

The door sucked closed, rattling against its frame. His heart plummeted into cold, fear making his hands prickle as he looked up. But it was only the wind.
Jasper
he thought. Somehow the man had convinced them all there was a ghost at work. Like the wicked family who had faked the Cock Lane ghost in order to get their tenant hanged, Jasper must have faked the apparitions for his own purposes—to make himself indispensible, to cover his more mundane mission.

Charles pressed two fingertips to the mark on his throat. The deep throb of the bruise hit his lungs like a perfume, arrowed on to his groin. In the walls the little cat-like roar of an angry baby scaled again to a pitch that should have brought all the servants running. He plugged his ears and it travelled along the bones of his fingers. His pulse raced, panicky, in his temples.

“Shut up!” Leaping to his feet he bared his teeth and bellowed it at the whole house. “Shut up! In God’s name, shut up!”

And a woman’s scream answered him, pealing down the stairs, shrieking in the great echo chamber of the hall. He had swung back the door, was racing down the corridor, his heart racing with a kind of exaltation, his body light, swift, buoyed up by battle ardour, before it came again; a tearing, gibbering wail.

Elizabeth!
He reached the stairs, ran up them, three at a time, almost colliding with George as he pelted from the library, his banyan like red wings. But it couldn’t be Elizabeth. Elizabeth was tough as ivy, sharp as rose stems, braver than her whole male clan. Nothing, nothing on earth could bring Elizabeth to make a sound so inhumanly afraid.

Her door was jammed shut. He tried to lift the latch but it would not shift. “Let me!” George struggled with the handle, light catching the new grey hairs of his brows, the cruel slashed lines on either side of his mouth. “So help me, if you do not let me in, whatever you are, I will have every stone of this house blessed against you. I will have you cast out and cursed to a hell fifteen levels below the one you currently occupy.”

To Charles’ astonishment, this threat appeared to work. The handle turned in George’s hand. He threw the door wide and Charles’ shoe scraped his heel as they scrambled through.

His first thought was “thank God!” Elizabeth huddled in the far corner of the room, with one of the curtains of her bed in a great swathe of gold cloth clutched around her. Her eyes and nose streamed and she was crying with hysterical sobs, the high pitched bubbling wail wet with tears and snot. But she was alive. As he ran to her side something gritty on the floorboards ground with a squeaking sound beneath his shoe.

George had reached her already, his arms around her shoulders. She turned and clutched convulsively at him, burying her sodden face in his pearl-embroidered shoulder. "It was…" Her grasping fingers dug in with such force they ripped the centre seam of his coat. "It was…" He stroked her braided hair, the tears rolling down his own face as they rocked in place.

Charles looked away, embarrassed for them both. He moved his foot, and beneath it there lay a little fragment of white plaster, now ground to dust. More dust scattered over the floor, white and soft, slippery underfoot. Here to the side of the fireplace lay another, larger fleck, white on the outside, tan within. Three ragged hairs the colour of chestnut emerged from it and trembled as his footfall approached.

Above the dust, the wall had bulged out oddly. Trickles of grit and soil wept through the cracks in the wallpaper.

"I…" Elizabeth raised her head, took off her nightcap and mopped her face with palsied hands. "I was tired. I'm always tired these days. I came back to bed and the…"

She sniffed. Without her white makeup she was a pitiful spectacle, her face blotchy and red, her eyes and nose swollen. Charles offered a handkerchief and received a determined smile in return.

"I thought I was dreaming at first. I… It seemed to come out of the wall. Over there."

"Maybe the plaster gave way, and the sound of it suggested a particular nightmare?" Charles rubbed his thumb over the hairs, then dropped the crumb of plaster and wiped his hand on his sleeve until it was sore.

"Don't be an arse, Charles." George rested his cheek against Elizabeth's hair, all gentleness for her, his ire reserved for Charles. "No nightmare killed Emma. I have no notion how you dare suggest it."

"Something," Elizabeth pinched her trembling lips together, swallowed, "whispered by my ear. I felt something… wet. Ah. Like a…” Her chin crumpled again, and she pulled the fallen curtain more tightly around her. "Like a hand. A dead hand. It…" Fresh tears coursed down chapped cheeks. The breath stopped in Charles' body as he remembered what that had felt like himself.

"It touched my belly, where the baby is." She covered her face with her hands and shook with gentler, more desolate sobs. "I knew it could pass through the… It started to push through my skin. I think it touched the baby. Oh God, I think it killed the baby!"

"You two men go along now." Cook's voice from the doorway startled them all from the daze of horror. She bustled in with an armful of linen and a steaming jug of water, Mary following her with a tot of brandy in a glass.

"Cook?" George dashed the tears from his face, stood up, "what?"

"Ain't it the baby coming then?" The big woman looked crestfallen. "With all that screeching I said to the girls for sure it was Mrs. Sheldrake's time. Kitty's done run for the doctor."

"Ere, drink this, miss." Mary knelt at Elizabeth's side and wrapped her shaking hands around the brandy glass, watching with an almost maternal look as she sipped. "This house ain't a happy one, and that's for certain, but I'm sure, whatever it is, it ain't got nothing against you."

The spirits eased some of Elizabeth's trembling, loosened her grip on the curtain. She took George's lowered hand and with his help rose to her feet. "I want to go home, George."

"You can't travel in your state. Cook's right," George smiled at the servants, his eyes lingering a little on Mary. She looked very fine indeed today, particularly when compared with Elizabeth's swollen, dishevelled bulk. The silver-blue silk of her fichu brought out the vivid shade of her clear, peridot eyes. "You must be very close to term now."

"I'd rather give birth by the side of the road than in this house."
"Yes, well, I would rather you didn't."

Charles watched the two of them glaring at each other with a strange feeling of melancholy. He was a late child, a surprise child after a long barren gap, and he had never quite managed to catch up to the fondness of the rest of the family for each other. "Perhaps I can ask the Admiral if you could stay there instead?" he said, "Just until you are delivered of the child."

He had no idea where the thought had come from; fully expected Elizabeth to remind him that Vane had killed their father. Perhaps that was what he was asking for, the voice of reason telling him not to run straight back to Jasper.

But Elizabeth finished the brandy, took her bedgown from Mary's hand and pinned it closed. "Yes," she said, in the kind of voice her soldier husband might have used for agreeing to a death or glory charge. "If you would, please, Charles. I'd be grateful."

c
hAPteR eight

“Mr. Charles Latham.” Admiral Vane’s butler exuded a salty air. It was probably the wooden leg, and the appalling mess of the right hand side of his face. He bowed Charles into the orangery as if welcoming a captain on board his skiff, and was not above accepting a small token of esteem before he left.

The orangery too bore a faint nautical flavour; the stones whitewashed, the lime trees trimmed into severe regularity, the slate of the floor roughened and dulled by incessant holystoning.

The Admiral sat at a small table, surrounded by dark green foliage, amber moons of oranges and the scent of citrus. He wore a great wig, more suited to the past century, its cascading curls the glossy blond-brown of new cut oak. A plump man. When he smiled, as he did now, his shrewd brown eyes all but disappeared into the round cheeks. His bull neck was swathed from collarbone to ear in a cravat that looked soft as gauze and lay in a limp bow over his uniform waistcoat. “I won’t rise, Mr. Latham,” he said. “Waiting for death, hey?”