House of Splinters, page 23
He sat in the wingchair and inhaled deeply through his nose, tasting smoke. All the events in his life were reframing themselves under his new and terrible knowledge. The home he had craved, the house that was always meant to be his legacy, had proved as traitorous as any unfaithful spouse.
On first reading the old man’s letter, he’d retained a healthy pinch of scepticism. It was too much, he thought, to blame everyone’s faults on a nameless evil, as if they exercised no free will of their own. But now he had finished Anne’s diaries too, he was beginning to wonder. His mother did spend an awful lot of time with those companions. As much time as Hetta herself. And she had died, malnourished and sick to her stomach as something tried to grow inside her.
Only a couple of flames remained in the grate. He could not rouse himself to rise and stir them up. He was thinking of the Roberts companion he’d found in the music room, behind the wall his father had shot at on the night that he died. What was that – one last taunt at the poor old man? Perhaps his father had even tried to get rid of the companions, as they’d discussed, only to have them return to him that night. Wilfred would never know for sure how much he had suffered.
The question was: what to do now?
Could he sell up? Despite all the horror he’d read about, it would hurt him to lose The Bridge. But what was worse, he’d have to let the whole place go for a song. Who would want unruly tenants, skeletons in the garden and a house where repeated accidents befell the servants? Even the land had little value since it was not producing a good yield. Renting the manor out carried the same difficulties. And then there came the matter of conscience. However many generations removed he was from Anne and Hetta, this curse had been brought about by the actions of a Bainbridge. Could he trick other families, with other small children, to pay him for the privilege of occupying a haunted house?
No. He wanted Belinda and the children out and safe: that was non-negotiable. But The Bridge was his responsibility. It had been since the day of his birth. If there were demons here, he must be the one to vanquish them.
Drag, thump. Wilfred started. The fire was nothing but embers now. He must have dozed in the chair, for when he consulted his pocket watch, it was two in the morning. But that was not the only change. Dead leaves were strewn between his feet and the hearth.
He stared, confounded. The low red light of the fire showed clumps of withered thistles. Rising, he crunched through the leaves to the mantelpiece and picked up a chamberstick. He lit the candle quickly in the smouldering remains of his fire. Turned. His exhalation blew the flame straight out again.
She was by the bed, directly behind where he’d been sitting. Not Hetta. Not even Tiffany, whose appearance had chilled him to the core. This was a companion that should not exist. Could not.
Wilfred’s mother stared at him with vacant, unloving eyes.
She was dressed as if for a ball: pearls in her hair, a lace choker at her neck. Side hoops made her imposing, even to his adult self. A face painted lead white showed black velvet patches on the cheek and at the corner of one eye. A closed fan pointed coquettishly at her lips, red as a wound.
He couldn’t think. Fear and grief were crashing inside him, turning everything to rubble.
Belinda sighed in her sleep. It gave him the impetus he needed. Striding forward, he gripped the rough edge of the thing and dragged it across the carpet. It emitted a low hiss against the pile. He tried to pull down the shutters over his senses, avoiding those familiar eyes, ignoring the way it somehow smelt of the sickness that had killed her. All that mattered was that he got it out of the room, away from his wife and daughter.
They did not wake as he clattered the board out through the dressing-room and into the hallway. He propped it against one of the marble busts, while he closed the door and locked it firmly behind him. Out here, all was in shadow.
He fumbled in his pocket for a tinderbox. After several tries, he managed to relight the candle. But when he turned back, there was only the row of marble heads glowing eerily in the darkness. The silent companion had gone.
Drag, thump. The flame of his candle shivered and distended. Drag, thump. Cautiously, he took a few steps down the hallway, towards the staircase.
‘Mamma?’ he whispered. He sounded like a child.
Screwing up his courage, he made his way down the staircase, following the noise. It might be going towards the nursery, towards Freddy. As he reached the last few steps, he thought he heard a door click, but the candlelight didn’t reach far enough to show him anything of note. Only a sea of black lay straight ahead.
He would not give in to fear. This was his house. Whatever stalked these corridors always has, and it had never chosen to hurt him before. He heard a creaking, a juddering, like a ship straining in the wind; or perhaps it was footfalls on the old wooden stairs leading to the Great Hall.
He moved quickly to the gallery, where he could command a bird’s eye view, keeping one hand firmly upon the wall. But as he searched outwards, towards the rail, his blood ran cold. The Roberts companion was there, standing in the very place he had fallen from all those years ago.
Wilfred opened his mouth. No sound emerged. They had come back. The footman and the mother who had loved him. They wanted their revenge.
The flame of his candle guttered. Hinges whined as a breeze fluttered in. Wilfred forced himself to look away from Roberts and peer further over the rail into the Great Hall. The main door had been cracked open and left slightly ajar. Moonlight spilled onto the flags.
He started down the creaking staircase, his jacket flapping at his knees. The candle flame dwindled into a scroll of smoke, but he didn’t need it now. The moon rode high in the sky as he burst outside, illuminating his way. The scent of the country air seemed intensified by the night, full of pollen and herbs. Sounds were amplified, too. Each crunch of his boot against gravel came like a gunshot.
Whoever had been there could not have run far… He cast about to the fountain. Silver ripples crossed the water and the stone dogs glowed impossibly white.
‘Hello?’ he called.
There was no one. Nothing. The hills rose dark and silent on the horizon.
Then the door slammed shut behind him.
Startled, Wilfred turned to see the iron studs gleaming in the moonlight. Impossible. There was no wind to push such a heavy door closed. He tried the handle, made the whole thing rattle, but it would not open. He’d been expelled from his own house.
He swore. This could not be an accident. He was being lured away, prevented from protecting his family. At least Belinda and Lydia were locked inside their room. Freddy was with the nurses. They all ought to be safe…
There was a door around the other side of the house, leading from the stable yard into the kitchen. Maybe it was not bolted at night. He’d try it first before rousing the servants to let him in.
He was glad now that he hadn’t undressed or removed his shoes. The gravel cracked beneath them as he rounded the parterres and came into the gardens. Everything was ashen by moonlight. No beams touched the patch where the skeleton had emerged; where Hetta had grown her poison over a century ago. It was dark as a slick of oil.
His breath rasped. He pinched his eyes shut, steeling himself for what he might see in stables or kitchen. The old man had been right: the house played tricks. This all felt horribly familiar. He half-remembered, now, waiting up for his mother to come home from an assembly and stealing out from the nursery to her rooms. Following the whisper of her train, the clip of her heels and the trail of her scent she left behind. Watching through a crack in the door, he had seen what no child ought to see. Not a tired and fond mother ready to tell him of her evening as she undressed. A lover, taken by a servant.
Wilfred opened his eyes. Even darkness was better than that memory.
A lamp burnt up ahead in the stable yard. He couldn’t think why it should be there. Dawkins slept in the loft above the stalls and would only wake if one of the horses were ill.
Just as he reached the hunched outline of the well, he heard the scream.
Wilfred hurried forward. It came again; eerie, unearthly, followed by a snort and a bang. Surely it was too deep, too guttural, to be human.
He found all the horses in a state of agitation, their heads swinging wildly over the doors of their stalls. Gimcrack’s eyes rolled white, her ears flat. He did not even attempt to soothe her. Grunts and scuffles were coming from the box at the base of the horseshoe arrangement, the stall holding Freddy’s little Sebastian. One lamp hung outside and another was flickering hectically within.
Wilfred dashed to peer over the half-door, his hands gripping the rough edge.
It was not what he’d expected.
There was a companion propped against the far wall: the lady with the sword who had taken his place at the dinner table. Bright spots of blood mottled her dull surface. But she was not alone. Dawkins knelt in the straw, his mouth gagged and hands bound behind his back. Restraining him was Ross Roberts.
On the other side of the box, poor Sebastian kicked and tried to rear but he could not shake himself free of the halter securing him to the iron ring on the wall. Two deep slashes ran across his flank. Blood dribbled down his brown and white coat.
A man stood hunched beneath the swinging lamp. His face was a confusion of light and shadow, peaks and hollows, but Wilfred could clearly see the gore-tipped sabre gleaming in one hand. The other was braced upon a cane.
Nathan paused, sword held aloft, to face him over the stall door. There was no panic, no guilt. The expression in his eyes was one of disappointment. ‘Oh, Wilfred. I wish you had not seen this.’
He did not have time to absorb the gravity of the scene before him. Instinct overpowered anger. There were two of them, one of him. And Nathan held a sword.
He turned, bolting for the shadowy house. If he could hammer at the door and rouse the servants, if he could just get inside, he could fetch help. Witnesses, at least. A knife from the kitchen if all else failed.
Had it been only Nathan in pursuit, with his injury Wilfred might have made it. But Ross Roberts was upon him before he even left the yard, tackling him onto the cobbles. Winded, he kicked and swung for all he was worth. His coat ripped, yet Roberts remained an iron clamp upon him. For all his advantages, Wilfred would never be a physical match for a working man.
Through the scuffling and the terrified whinnies came the steady click of Nathan’s cane approaching.
‘Careful,’ he said, and for a second Wilfred thought his brother would save him. ‘We have to do this right. It complicates everything.’
With a final blow to his jaw, Roberts dragged Wilfred up onto his knees and began to bind his hands behind his back, as he had done with Dawkins. The stable yard swam. ‘What—’ Wilfred tried to say. ‘Nathan, why—’
His brother stood blocking the light, his shadow stretching to where Wilfred knelt. ‘Damn it, Wil. It was never supposed to go like this. I gave you so many chances! Why couldn’t you just leave?’
His head was spinning. Everything hurt. He groped uselessly for words.
‘Or at least let me be part of it. But you never saw me as your equal, did you?’ Something more dangerous crept into his brother’s tone. ‘I think maybe you knew, all along.’
‘Knew…?’ Wilfred started, but Nathan gestured to one side, and before Wilfred could understand what he meant, Roberts was hauling him towards the water trough.
He was forced down, his head breaking the stagnant surface of the water. Cold and bitter fluid forced its way up his nostrils, down his throat, bubbled in his ears. This was it, he thought. This was how he died: on his knees beside the dung heap.
Suddenly, he was up. He gasped for breath as water cascaded everywhere. God, it was cold. It hadn’t been this cold earlier. He swung back his head, trying to butt Roberts behind him, but all he got was a blow on the base of the skull.
‘You didn’t even write to me,’ Nathan spat. It sounded as though he was still underwater. ‘But Ross did. He never learnt his letters, yet he got his sister to seek me out and send me a message in India. Imagine the effort! And you couldn’t lift a pen more than once in eighteen years.’
Wilfred’s face crashed into the water before he could close his mouth. His lungs burnt as a taste of mildew and rotting leaves flooded in. Just as he thought he was about to pass out, there was air. He coughed, vomited. He could only see in bleared streaks, like a watercolour painting.
‘Can you guess what Ross told me, Wilfred?’
He couldn’t. He could barely grip onto consciousness or follow what Nathan was saying.
‘There were letters to prove it. Our stupid bitch of a mother never had an ounce of discretion, did she? She damned herself over and over in her own hand. It wasn’t Tiffany, Wil. She wasn’t the one. Roberts sired me.’
Wilfred just had time to draw in a shocked breath before he was plunged back into the bubbling darkness. Images from the past seemed to twist around him in the water. Tiffany, his mother, Roberts’ provoking smile. Was it possible? Had he got it all so terribly wrong?
The night air cut like a knife as he came wheezing up, cold water flowing down the back of his shirt.
‘You made me kill him! You made me a patricide, forever cursed. And even though I tried to patch it up, you just wouldn’t let me in.’ His brother’s voice caught. ‘Now you’re forcing me to do this, Wil. You’ve brought it all on yourself.’
He had a last, smeared glimpse of Nathan’s impassioned face before water overtook his senses once more. It did not bubble in his ears now. It hissed.
He didn’t have the strength left to fight. Everything was so heavy. The edge of the trough cut into his chest as his head went lower and lower. There seemed to be no bottom.
All he could see was Freddy, rippling in the water. Those wide blue eyes that had already beheld too much sorrow.
Don’t show him, he prayed. Whatever strange visions Freddy has, don’t show the poor boy this.
Then everything went black.
*
A scream tore Belinda from her sleep. Rough and low-pitched, more like a bellow. Dev barked a warning from the other wing of the house.
Her eyes flew open and she gave another start to see Lydia lying next to her, mere inches from her face, silently observing. Her daughter’s stillness disturbed her almost as much as the scream. The room was striped with slats of morning light and Lydia had not been fed since ten o’clock last night. Usually she would be the one wailing at this time, demanding milk.
But the noise seemed to be coming from outside.
Scooping the baby up and minding her injured arm, Belinda moved to the window, only to find it still shuttered. She didn’t have the patience to open everything up. Striding to the dressing-room door, she noticed Wilfred’s empty chair. Her skin chilled. Had it been him, crying out? He must have left the house and come back again at some point during the night, for skeletal leaves were strewn about and trodden into powder on the carpet. Strange. It was the kind of detritus to be expected in the height of autumn – not the end of summer.
Around her, The Bridge was awakening. The thick walls prevented her from hearing any more from outside. The dog barked again. Feet thumped on the floorboards.
Her fingers reached for the door handle.
It was locked.
She tried again, sure it must be a mistake. But no. She could not budge it an inch. They were trapped.
Belinda whipped around, certain she would see silent companions emerging from out of the woodwork to take her baby. But it was only the same empty rooms, with pale paper and heavy furniture. She took a steadying breath. Placing her back to the door, she kept watch. Her head was starting to pound. Nothing. No threat, no sign of what had locked her in. But the longer she watched, the more agitated she grew.
She banged on the door. ‘Let me out!’
Lydia grumbled, her face creasing.
‘I said “let me out!” Who is there? Why is this door locked?’
Belinda slapped her open palm against the wood and Lydia started to cry in earnest. Her distress only made Belinda hit harder. ‘Hello? Help! We are stuck in here!’
There was a grate, a click, and the door swung open, revealing a bleary-eyed Daphne in nightgown and cap. ‘How did you…’ she started, confused. ‘Who locked the door?’
‘It must have been Wilfred.’ Belinda pushed past her into the hallway. ‘Have you seen him?’
Daphne shook her head and rubbed at her face. ‘We’ve only just woken up. There’s something going on downstairs… and then I heard you shouting.’
The marble busts watched them gravely as if they already knew something she did not. Belinda thrust the weeping baby into Daphne’s arms.
‘Take Lydia. I must go and see.’
Daphne made a protest, but Belinda did not hear the exact words. She was already fleeing, trying to outrun this feeling of impending doom.
Of course it could be anything. Dawkins kicked by one of the horses. Wild deer got into the garden. A burnt pot in the kitchen, a bird half-eaten by a fox and left turned inside-out. But workaday incidents like that didn’t seem to happen in this house. Here everything was amplified.
Nathan was thumping slowly downstairs with his cane, a banyan thrown over his nightshirt. She leant over the balustrade and called to him.
‘What has happened?’
He raised a grey, exhausted face to hers. ‘Really, I don’t know, Belinda, I’m just going to find out.’ He took another step. ‘Where’s Wil?’
‘He did not come to bed last night. He was in the chair but now… he’s not.’
Nathan yawned. ‘Well, he is probably sorting out the servants as we speak. But still, I’ll go and see if he needs any help.’
She could not wait for him to plod his way outside and back again. The anticipation would drive her mad.
