The Seance (43 page)

‘Constance – thank God! What happened? It sounded like the Day of Judgment.’

‘No, the chimney fell down. Did you see him?’

‘See whom?’

‘Magnus – he must have locked you in here.’

‘Constance, you’ve been dreaming. Nobody locked me in here; I thought I’d propped the door securely, but it swung shut, and then I couldn’t break it down.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘he was in the gallery, he came up through the tomb, he meant to kill me. I hid the charge in the armour and it crushed him to death.’

‘Constance,’ he said, staring at me in utter bewilderment, ‘you’ve had a terrible shock. Anyway we can’t stay here, the rest of the house may come down at any minute.’

He led the way back to the entrance hall, where he opened the drawing-room doors and stood gazing open-mouthed at the chaos within.

‘I don’t know what’s best to do,’ he said at last. ‘We can’t spend the night out of doors; you would freeze to death. I think we must risk another collapse. Your room is on the other side of the house – it should be safe enough. I shall break up some chairs to make a fire.’

We made our way back upstairs to my room, and washed off the
worst of the grime in icy water. I tried once more to tell him what had happened, but he would not hear me until he had got a makeshift fire going and I had sipped a little wine and nibbled at a biscuit, while the smell of burning varnish filled the room.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘were you asleep when the wall came down?’

‘No, I was wide awake. I went into the gallery to fetch the lantern, and I saw the lid of the tomb start to open ...’

‘Impossible, I assure you; those locks were rusted solid.’

‘The locks didn’t move.’ It came to me in a sudden flash of memory. ‘It was only the very top of the lid, where the band around the edge was. I heard his footsteps; he had a lantern. I took the cylinder out of the tin box in the gallery and lit it and hid it in the armour – you can see here, where I tore a piece from my dress, to make him think I was inside. And then – he said he was Dr Davenant, come to rescue me—’

I stopped short at the change in Edwin’s expression; he was staring at the torn fabric as if he had never seen a dress before. His eyes met mine in sudden and horrified comprehension.

‘
Davenant?
’ he stammered. ‘You – you blew up James Davenant?’

‘Yes, but he was Magnus; he meant to murder me – why do you look at me like that?’

‘Don’t you understand? If the police find out, you could be charged with murder, or at the very least manslaughter.’

‘But he came up through the tomb! Who else—’

‘You
thought
he did. But you were frightened out of your wits; the light was bad; it’s infinitely more likely that you only imagined the lid moving – and that Davenant came in by the front door. Which we left unlocked for the coachman.’

‘I did not imagine it! This morning, in Nell’s room – I followed him there – he tried to mesmerise me. There’s nothing wrong with his eyes – they were Magnus’s eyes. He was trying to find out what evidence I had against him. And how could he possibly have found his way back here, through that fog? He was here all along; he waited until the others
had driven away, and returned before the fog came down. Don’t you remember? We heard him, in the library.’

‘I see what you mean,’ he said slowly. ‘The trouble is, even if you are right, no one will believe you. If you tell this to the police, you will end up in prison – or a madhouse. Whereas if you simply say that you were in the library, and then there was an explosion . . . if they ever find Davenant, they will think he set it off.’

‘But if Nell is still alive—’ I began.

‘Nell, Nell, Nell!’ he cried in weary exasperation. ‘Don’t you see the havoc your obsession has wrought? Supposing Davenant was perfectly innocent? You are putting a noose around your own neck! And besides, there isn’t a single shred of evidence to suggest that Nell is still alive.
Why
are you so certain of it?’

‘Because I am Clara Wraxford!’ There was a long, shocked silence from Edwin.

‘You have proof of this?’ he said at last. ‘You have heard from her?’

‘No, but John Montague was convinced of it – by my likeness to Nell.’

‘And – your parents? Did they tell you ...?’

‘No, they did not. But my heart tells me, just as Mr Montague’s did.’

‘Now Constance, this is simply absurd. The resemblance proves nothing; you and Nell were related, and a likeness can often reappear after several generations. And John Montague, if you recall, thought at first that Nell looked exactly like his dead wife. For all you know it was your resemblance to Phoebe that struck him.’

‘You think I am mad,’ I said bleakly.

‘Not mad, no, but this has been a very great strain—’

‘Which is a polite way of saying the same thing.’

‘No! It’s because I care for you so much that I—’

‘If you cared for me at all, you would believe me,’ I said, aware that I was being unreasonable but unable to stop myself.

‘I care for you enough to risk being hanged as an accessory to murder!’

The words echoed strangely, as if I had heard them before.

‘Can’t
you
see,’ I cried, ‘that this is exactly what happened to Nell? I am caught in the same trap; they will think we killed him twice—’ I broke off, clenching my fists until the nails dug into my palms.

‘You must stop this,’ he insisted, ‘and try to rest. All you need remember is: you were in the library when you heard the explosion, and that is all you know. So long as you keep silent, you are perfectly safe.’

He rose and made up the fire. My head was swimming with fatigue, my body ached all over; and in spite of the fear crawling like ice along my veins, I sank into a black and dreamless void.

The fire was still crackling when I woke, and for a moment I thought I had merely dozed, until I saw daylight at the window. The fog had cleared; Edwin was not in the room. I rose and bolted the door and washed as best I could, trying to subdue the voice that whispered,
you have murdered an innocent man
.

I found Edwin downstairs in the wreck of the drawing-room, combing through the rubble. He had his back to the doorway and did not hear me come in, and so I watched from the shadows as he worked. Debris was heaped several feet high against the far wall, spilling out across the floor amidst the smashed remnants of chairs and cabinets. Edwin was standing about half-way up the slope, tossing the smaller pieces behind him, lifting out the larger fragments and setting them carefully aside. His breath issued in clouds, mingling with the dust that swirled around him. He took hold of a shattered beam and leaned his weight upon it; there was a slippage and a rumble, and a black barrel shape appeared, then a metal arm and shoulder. He knelt down beside it, and I saw that his face was deathly pale. A second later he caught sight of me.

‘Keep back! – and yes, it is Davenant, I’m afraid; he’s ... burnt, but perfectly recognisable. I was hoping against hope that you really might
have dreamt it. Come away; there is nothing we can do for him, and the coach will be here within the hour.’

‘We must be clear about this,’ he said, as we climbed the stairs for the last time. ‘The best thing, I think, will be to tell them – the police, I mean – that you were in the library, waiting for me to come back with the coal – which is perfectly true – when you thought you heard footsteps in the gallery next door. A second later there was a terrible explosion; then you came downstairs and found me; and so this morning I thought I’d see if anyone had been caught in the collapse, and that’s when I found him. You don’t know how he got there, or what he was doing, or how he caused the explosion.’

‘But that would make you an accessory, as you said last night.’

‘No; I was wrong about that. I was trapped in the cellar, after all, so I don’t count as a witness; I only know what you told me – which is that you heard footsteps, and then the explosion, and that is all you know.’

‘But if we don’t – if I don’t tell them he was Magnus, he’ll be buried as Davenant, and Nell will never be free of—’

‘Constance, for God’s sake! Do you
want
to be locked away in a madhouse? If you say one word about Magnus to the police,
I
will tell them that you are delirious from shock – and which of us do you think they will believe?’

‘Do you not care at all, then, about the wrong we may be doing?’

‘All I care about,’ he said, ‘is saving you from yourself – and quite possibly the gallows.’

A thin rain was falling as I looked back at the Hall for the last time, at the jagged rent in the side wall, and the severed cable coiled like a serpent over mounds of shattered masonry, before the darkness of Monks Wood closed over us. The drive to Woodbridge passed in almost complete silence, while the cold ate deeper into my bones. I climbed the steps of the police
station feeling numbly indifferent to my fate, but instead of being led away in chains, I was ushered into a private sitting-room, given a chair by the fire and plied with refreshments while Edwin talked to the sergeant, who accepted his version of events without question. An hour later we were on the train to London, but it proved a sombre journey. We dared not speak of what was uppermost in our minds, and our efforts at small talk faded into the clack and clatter of the rails endlessly repeating,
you have murdered an innocent man, you have murdered an innocent man
. . . until it seemed to me that parting came as a relief to us both.

My uncle’s reaction, once he had got over his shock at seeing me, grimy and bedraggled, in the hallway at Elsworthy Walk, was even worse than I had feared. ‘By remaining alone with Mr Rhys,’ he said coldly, ‘you endangered your life, ruined your reputation – what do you imagine the rest of the party have been saying about you? – and embroiled yourself in the death of this man Davenant. No doubt we shall have journalists pounding on the door. As for Mr Rhys, you may tell him he is
persona non grata
in this house. I thought you had some moral sense, but I see that I was grievously mistaken.’

With which I could only agree. I retreated to my room like a child in disgrace, and lay awake for hours, staring into the dark, until I gave up and lit my candle and paced about the floor in a torment of spirit worse than anything I had endured in the wake of my mother’s death. If only, I thought, I could be absolutely certain that it was Magnus I had killed, I might at least be able to sleep; otherwise I might as well give myself up to the police – but I could not do that without implicating Edwin. Again and again I relived those terrifying minutes at the Hall, but doubts kept seeping in: perhaps he really
had
feared for my safety; he
might
have found his way back in spite of the fog; he
could
have discovered the tunnel by accident; he
might
not have known I was there until he saw the piece of fabric in the armour ... No, my only hope was to find someone who could identify Davenant as Magnus, and since he had deceived the whole world for twenty years, it would have to be someone
who had known Magnus very well indeed. If John Montague had not drowned himself, I thought bitterly, he might have saved me.

There was one other person, apart from Nell herself: Ada Woodward, who had never replied to me, though that was hardly surprising; the news that Nell was suspected of murdering her child as well as her husband must have come as an appalling shock. And of course they had been estranged even before that. What was it Nell had said in her diary? ‘Even if Ada and I were still as close, she and George could not take us in: Clara and I are Magnus’s lawful possessions, and he would reclaim us soon enough.’