A Half Forgotten Song (47 page)

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “They’re coming up here to get you.” He could tell, in the woman’s silence, that she could not understand him. In the dim light from his phone her eyes shone above raw cheekbones. She stared at him in frustration for a moment, and then burst into French.
“Vous parlez français?”
Her accent was strange, but to Zach’s surprise he understood her, and he dug about in his distant schoolboy French for the words to reply.

“Hannah et Ilir . . . sont ici bientôt
.
Tout est bien.”
All is well.
The words had a visible effect on Rozafa. She slumped back against the wall, clasping one hand around his forearm and shutting her eyes.

“Merci,”
she said, so quietly he hardly heard her. Zach nodded, and wished he had the language to ask if Bekim was all right, if there was anything he could do for the limp, gray little boy.

Stiffly, he got to his feet, glad that Rozafa could not see his deep unease. With gritted teeth, he put out a blind hand, fingers splayed, and felt along the wall for the light switch. The plaster was soft, slightly damp. It came off on his fingers as a fine powder. He couldn’t find the switch, and to his shame, he hardly dared take a step away from Rozafa to search farther afield. Then something brushed against his neck and he yelped out loud. Rozafa was on her feet in an instant with an answering cry of alarm, as Zach scrabbled to find what had touched him. It was the light switch—a wooden toggle at the end of a string. He tugged at it savagely, and light came on overhead, a single bulb so bright that they were temporarily blinded. Through watering eyes, Zach squinted around the little room. Slowly, things swam into focus, and he realized what all the many dark shapes were. His mouth hung open in shock, in utter disbelief; he was so stunned that thought abandoned him.

S
till cradling Élodie in arms that felt boneless, not like her own, Dimity struggled out of the car when it pulled up at Dorchester hospital. It was a towering, crenellated building of redbrick walls and towers, built early in the previous century and taller even than the church spire in Blacknowle. Dimity felt it looming above her as she rushed along behind Charles. She felt the countless windows watching, recognizing the thing in her arms for what it was. The thing she had done. Dimity stumbled. Her knees crumpled and for a moment she thought she would fall. The strength had gone out of her; bones turned to sand and washed away.
The thing she had done.
Delphine was at her side, lifting her, helping her up.

“Hurry, Mitzy! Come on!” In Delphine’s frantic tone Dimity heard the remnants of a dangerous hope. But there was no hope, and she wanted to scream it, wanted to shout it out loud so that she could put down the thing she was carrying. The little dead thing. Their footsteps echoed in the hallway of the hospital, and the light of many bulbs blinded them. Charles’s voice echoed around, calling for help. Then strong arms in white sleeves took Élodie from Dimity, and she sank to her knees in relief.

She was left alone, and she waited. For a while she knelt in the hallway, in the sudden quiet after the Aubreys, both well and sick, had been herded away by a knot of grim-faced people. She could have followed them, but felt too weak to move. Slowly she stood up, and she waited, and she tried not to think. There was a ringing sound inside her head, like the hum after a bell has sounded; deafening, deadening. The weight of something was pushing down on her inexorably. The weight of something undeniable, which, once done, could not be undone. In due course she let herself be led to a long, empty corridor where there were wooden pews against one wall. The person who led her was anonymous, faceless; a different species from her altogether, and wholly incomprehensible. A cup of tea was put next to her, but Dimity had no idea what she should do with it. She sat down and stared at the wall in front of her. Days passed, weeks, months; or just the space between one labored heartbeat and the next—she could no longer tell the difference. It was night outside, and the light in the corridor was weak. Dimity heard echoes from time to time. Footsteps, soft snores, wordless shouts from a long way away. Disembodied sounds that drifted along the corridor like ghosts. There was sandy mud all over her shoes; dried and crumbling away. Sandy mud from the ditch where the cowbane grew. Dimity wished she didn’t exist at all; she wished that she was just one more ghost who could wander the corridor, lost and all alone.

I
t was light outside when Charles appeared through a door, walking out into the corridor with his shoulders slumped and his head down. He moved like a sleepwalker, dull and unaware; when he saw Dimity, he came to stand in front of her, and did not speak.

“Charles?” she said. He blinked and raised his eyes to her, then sat down beside her. His skin was gray, purple shadows under his eyes. He tried to speak but his throat was closed; he had to cough and try again.

“Celeste,” he said. The word sounded like an accusation, like a plea. “Celeste will pull through, they think. They have given her something . . . Luminol, to stop the spasms. They are giving her drugs through a tube into her veins. I never saw such a thing before. But Élodie . . . my little Élodie.” The word collapsed into a sob. “They have taken her away. She was not strong enough. There was nothing they could do.” The words were not his own, Dimity realized. They were words he had been told, and parroted now in place of words of his own, of which there were none.

“I knew she was dead,” Dimity said breathlessly. Something was squeezing her chest, tightening painfully. “I knew she was dead when I carried her. I knew it. I knew!” she gasped. Charles turned his head to look at her, and the look was one of incomprehension. He couldn’t even see her, she realized.
I am a ghost, an echo. Let it be so
. She wanted to touch him, but to do so she would have to become flesh again. It would all have to be real. They sat in silence for a while; then Charles got up and went back through the door, and Dimity, drawn along by the shackle around her heart, followed him.

There was another corridor, shorter this time, with tall white doors opening off it. The stink of disinfectant was everywhere, sharper than cat’s piss but not quite masking the smell of sickness, of death. There was no sign of Élodie. Gone already; gone as if she never was. Dimity shook her head at the impossibility of it. Celeste was lying back against a single pillow, her jaw slack and her hair smeared out around her, tarry and slick. There was a spidery contraption hanging over her, a needle and a cord attached to her arm; a bruise spreading down her forearm. Her lips were white, her eyes shut. She looked quite dead, and Dimity wondered that nobody had noticed, until she saw the shallow rise and fall of her rib cage. She stared and stared at the woman. Stared hard enough to see the flicker of a pulse through the thin skin of her neck.

“There will be consequences,” said Charles, and the words hit Dimity like an electric shock. She jerked her eyes to him, but he was staring at Celeste. His voice was quite broken. “The doctor says . . . she may never be the same again. Hemlock has side effects. She will have . . . some memory loss, of the days leading up to today. She will be confused. There will still be tremors. It will take time for these effects to fade, and she may never . . .” He paused, swallowing. “She may never be her old self again. She may never be as she was before. My Celeste.”

On the other side of the bed sat a pitiful figure. A figure curled in on itself, as if trying not to be. It was doing such a good job that Dimity only gradually became aware of it. Delphine. She was crying without pause, even though she was near mute and her eyes were dry and dull, as if they’d run out of tears. Still she shook and quivered almost as much as her mother had done, before they’d come to the hospital, and the sounds she made were terrible, like the repeated keening of a rabbit in a snare, but quietly—so quietly. Trying not to be. Dimity stared at her, and gradually Delphine looked up and met her gaze with eyes all red and bloody, and so swollen they had almost shut. But there was something in those eyes, besides grief, that took Dimity’s breath away. It was unbearable to see, and she turned away, drifting a few paces to slump against the wall. She sank slowly to the floor. Nobody seemed to notice, or think it amiss. She put her fingertips in her mouth, and bit down on them till they bled, feeling nothing. Delphine’s eyes were full of guilt. Utter, consuming, poisonous guilt.

A while later, Dimity was back on the pew in the corridor. She didn’t know how she’d got there. Voices roused her—men’s voices, arguing in hushed tones by the doorway to the rooms. She rubbed at her eyes, and struggled to focus. Charles Aubrey and another man, tall and thin, with steel-gray hair. She recognized him as Dr. Marsh, one of the doctors who made regular visits to Blacknowle to treat those too ill for any of Valentina’s potions.

“It must be recorded, Mr. Aubrey. Such things cannot be avoided,” the doctor said.

“You can write part of the truth without writing the whole truth. And you must. My daughter . . . my daughter is tearing her own heart out. If you record the death as a poisoning, there will have to be an inquest, am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“Then for pity’s sake, do not record it as such! She will carry this with her the rest of her days. If it is made public . . . if the whole world knows what she did, however accidentally . . . it will ruin her. Do you see? It will ruin her!”

“Mr. Aubrey, I understand your concerns, but—”

“No! No buts! Doctor, I beg you—it will cost you nothing to record the cause of death as a gastric disturbance . . . but it will cost Delphine dearly if you do not.
Please.
” Charles gripped the doctor’s arm, stared into his eyes. His desperation was written all over his face. The doctor hesitated. “Please. We have suffered enough already. And we will suffer a great deal more as it is.”

“Very well.” The doctor shook his head, and sighed.

“Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Marsh.” Charles released the man’s arm and put his hand up to shield his eyes.

“But you should know . . . I was in Blacknowle last night. My last call was to see Mrs. Crawford with her ulcer. I drank a glass in the pub afterwards, and there were those that were asking after you . . .”

“What did they say?” Charles asked anxiously.

“They said you’d been in earlier frantically trying to find a doctor, saying that your wife and child had eaten something they shouldn’t have. Perhaps some plant, eaten by mistake. I will do as you ask, but you ought to be prepared for . . . rumors, in the village.”

“Rumors we can ignore. And we will leave Blacknowle, as soon as Celeste is well enough to travel. Then they can keep their rumors, and bother us no more.”

“It’s probably for the best.” The doctor nodded. “I am most terribly sorry for your loss,” he said, shaking Charles’s hand and turning to walk away. As if reminded by these words, Charles rocked on his heels, seemed about to fall. Dimity rushed over to him, instinct seizing control of her body. As she reached him, Charles’s legs buckled and he toppled, his arms flailing as though he was falling from a great height. Gladly, Dimity let him drag her down with him. She knelt and put her arms around him, and crooned to him gently as he sobbed and sobbed. She stroked his hair and felt his tears wetting her, and she let love light her up like the dawn breaking, strong enough, she hoped, to save her.

W
hen she was asked, as asked she would be, she was to say
gastric flu
. Charles reminded her of this, two days later, when his tears had given way to a kind of dreadful, stony calm that was more like a state of wakeful catatonia; as though he’d been hypnotized. He moved as though he was half stunned, and Dimity felt unsafe in the car as he drove her to the top of the track to The Watch, and left her there. Dimity nodded and did as she was instructed, though the only person who asked her was Valentina, who then studied her daughter, looked her deeply in the eye, and knew that a lie was being told. She extracted the true cause of death from her, by the sheer weight of her will and the subservience that she’d bred into her daughter; then she put her head to one side, considering.

“No cowbane within three miles of the village by my reckoning—not when the summer’s this dry, and the farmers cut and burn it wherever they can. I wonder how the girl came by it? Hmm? I wonder if you might know how she came by it?” She gave an ugly cackle, and Dimity cowered away from her, shaking her head, saying nothing more. But she didn’t need to. Her mother could read her mind sometimes, and her spiteful smile, her grudging respect, were bitter as bile to Dimity.

On the third day, Dimity saw the blue car creeping cautiously down the driveway to Littlecombe, as if carrying something precious and desperately fragile. She followed it down, a short and unhappy procession. Celeste was escorted into the house by Charles, who kept one hand around her waist and one hand in the air before them, as though to ward off any obstacle that might arise. In the September sunshine, Celeste’s face was transformed. Her complexion was gray, her cheeks drawn and hollow. Her eyes had a distant, haunted expression, and her hands shook constantly—sometimes just a tiny tremble, like a shiver, sometimes jerking convulsively, like Wilf Coulson’s grandma, who had the St. Vitus dance. Dimity hung back as they went past her into the house. Delphine followed them, and did not look up. She was pale and looked older somehow; and as though she would never smile again. Dimity saw this, and could not believe that this was how things would be, from then on. Things could not be fixed, or changed. Things could not go back to the way they’d been. The thought turned her guts to water, and for a moment she feared she might mess herself. Something inside her was fighting to get out, but she felt that if she let it, it would kill her. So she fought with it as she followed them into the house and stood, and waited, and watched.

Nobody spoke to her. Nobody spoke at all. Nobody seemed to notice her until she put a cup of tea down next to Celeste, drawing her flat and lifeless blue gaze.