Read The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious] Online
Authors: Alex Beecroft
The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious] (14 page)
Elizabeth burned up with energy like lighting. “It’s her!” She ran left, stopped and listened, ran back, frustration and terror in the drum-roll of her heels. “I can’t tell where it’s coming from!”
All the separate strands had begun to connect themselves in Charles’ head. He followed the thought like a guide rope. “Your bedroom!”
The ugly pregnant bulge in the wall of Elizabeth’s bedroom had grown, bursting out of the restraints of the paper. Great clumps of plaster and half bricks lay tumbled on the floorboards, and through the gap between paper and hole there protruded a tiny bare foot, the embroidered slipper spilled amongst the rubble beneath it.
Elizabeth ripped the paper from side to side in one vicious gesture and Harriet rolled—dirty, grazed and furiously indignant—out of the wall to squall in Elizabeth’s fierce grip.
In a long, dry slide after her came lace the colour of dust, handfuls of hair, a skull, and a jaw of fine white teeth. The bones of the child were mere shadows of dark colour stained on the walls.
“I’ll…” Elizabeth backed away, Harriet on her shoulder, cheek held tight to her own. “I’ll find the doctor. See to George. You…” she waved a hand at the tumble of bones.
Elizabeth looked at Jasper as if he had just said “may we convert the seas to beer and get hideously drunk,” which sounded to Charles like a fine idea. Eventually she blinked, working it out, “Do. Take anything. I’m burning it all in the morning regardless,” and fled.
Charles collapsed onto the bed with a groan. An almost imperceptible tremble travelled up from his fingertips and worked its way through his whole body, leaving his stomach unsettled and his mind grey as spent ash. Jasper flicked out the coverlet on the floor and began to transfer the bones onto it, laying each one carefully in its place, sifting through the rubble for any that were missing. Whatever brightness had been in his face earlier had snuffed out. He looked weary. The spots of blood on his chest had stopped growing, turned brown and stiff.
Outside the window the flittering peep of bats skirled beneath the house-eaves. Inside it was silent. Silent for the first time in two hundred years. Peace filtered in through the cracks.
“Are you…” The bloodstains, flexing with Jasper’s movements as he patiently reassembled the skeleton, drew Charles’ stinging eyes. “Are you badly injured? She shot you.”
“I don’t know what she loaded it with,” Jasper’s sideways smile was tentative but warm. He looked down the front of his shirt. “I seem to be glittering.”
Jasper put down the final toe bone, turned to begin sifting through the plaster for any patches that bore the imprint of the child. He gave a gruff little laugh. “I have never been so expensively rebuked. But no, there must not have been enough weight behind them. I’m grazed and a little winded, that’s all. Not like poor George.”
Poor George. Charles bit the inside of his cheek, remembering Jasper putting himself in the place of that evil creature; speaking to her tenderly, one victim to another.
It is best for people like us not to touch this family. Best for us to walk away, if we can, and be at peace.
Charles worried the bitten patch with his teeth. An ache was building at the base of his skull beneath the wig, and another inside his chest, below his breastbone. This was not the time, not the time to be worrying about such things and yet…
“Of course.”
And yet what if everything was over now, the good along with the ill?
The two great windows of George’s room stood uncurtained. Patches of pearl grey sky showed over the misty greens of the deer park. A few determined leaves clung to the trees, as grey as the branches and the morning.
Within, candlesticks clustered on every surface, and the blue and white panelled walls shone sapphire bright. Set in the indigo canopied, gold encrusted, jewelled splendour of his bed, George sat like a partly-broken egg. His face was swaddled in muslin, and his wrongly proportioned arm—too short—padded and wrapped tight in white linen. His eyes, settled in nests of bruised skin, snapped, impatiently bright. “Do we think this is over?”
Charles propped his hip on the window ledge and listened as Jasper heaved a long breath of release and relief. It took him several heartbeats to realize that no one else in the room had understood the obvious “yes.”
His big scene. There should have been a change of costumes, perhaps of backdrop, when he revealed that the mysterious stranger was truly the prince in disguise. There should at least have been a circle of attentive eyes, waiting for enlightenment. Not Jasper's touch on his wrist, and the words "Perhaps you might send for her mother and sister."
Jasper raised his head and looked George square in the eye. "She's just lost her daughter. It would be barbaric not to offer her even an explanation. If you want this to stop now then for once in Latham family history you must begin to offer some justice to your victims."
Another dull blow on Charles' heart. He opened the door and passed the summons on to a waiting servant. Jasper was right, of course, but did he have to rule so clear a line between the Lathams and himself? So clear a line that Charles could have no doubt of being on the wrong side. He'd relived their two encounters often enough to remember now that they'd made no promises. No talk of the future. Perhaps he had assumed a long term interest when there had been only curiosity, or worse. Could Jasper have seduced him out of a desire to prove something to George? To take a small revenge, motivated by the same hurt and anger that had driven the ghost?
He swallowed, forced himself to look at the stump of his brother's arm, clean and inoffensive where it lay outside the bedclothes. If it was so, he had not lost so very much.
Groping his way back to the window ledge, he curled forwards over the unaccountable pain in stomach and chest. The door opened and Cook came in, looking diminished. She dropped a very perfunctory curtsey and collapsed on the seat Jasper offered. He loped over to lean on the wall beside Charles, scruffy as a sailor, surrounded once more by some of that corona of power and peace he had flamed with last night. Afraid of what he might see, Charles did not look up.
Where to start? There were two separate beginnings and he wasn't sure…
"It begins with Sir Henry," Jasper's diffident voice wound in among the hiss of the many candle flames, taking some of the burden for him. "Who got Lady Margaret Evesham with child and then refused to marry her because she was a Catholic. Instead, when she ran to him for help, he bricked her up alive, their unborn child within her, in the wall of Mrs. Sheldrake's room. There she smothered to death, and in her misery and sense of betrayal she refused to move on. She became the white lady. But other than frightening a few generations of children, she was a largely inoffensive ghost until our second set of circumstances intervened."
When Jasper paused, Charles took up the tale as smoothly as he could, determined to bear his part of this ordeal. "'Circumstances.'" He cleared his throat, conscious of Cook, all that weighty presence of her helpless as a whale on the beach. "Mary… I'm sorry Mrs. Dwyer, but I must say some things about Mary that may be uncomfortable for you to hear."
"I'm listening, Mr. Charles. She were a wild one, I give you that. But I don't suppose she'd be alone in that. And she was so beautiful! So beautiful, my Mary, like a flower…"
"Yes. She was." Charles didn't want this, didn't want to spare pity on the family of a murderess. Above all, he did not want to feel this guilt. "And that was what started the trouble, of course. Mary believed in the doctrine of the equality of all men. She believed in it so strongly that she could not understand that others might not agree."
"I remember us talking about that," Cook sketched the outline of a smile. "In the kitchen, when the old Master died."
As Charles wished in vain for a mug of hot chocolate that he could pass to her, Jasper brought out a flask from his pocket and offered that instead. The scent of strong, raw navy rum joined the lingering odour of bone-saw and blood in the room.
"Father took a fancy to her." It was extraordinarily hard to get this out. He could have done with some of that rum himself. "When he said he would marry her, she believed him. Why not? She was as good as any duchess."
"I knowed she was with him." Cook shrugged, "It ain't like the likes of us have much choice in the matter. She says no, we all get thrown out on our ear."
"I don't think it started with coercion, though. She honestly believed he loved and would marry her. He gave her presents— my mother's things—dresses, trinkets, and she was happy. I don't know what happened to change things."
"But I do." Jasper shifted against the wall. The heel of one shoe and the very extremity of his shoulder brushed lightly against Charles, and a burst of warm reassurance tingled down the marrow of Charles' arm. Deliberate touch or accidental? He couldn't tell.
"Mary fell pregnant." This was Jasper's confessional voice, private, encouraging, unshockable. "She told Lord Clitheroe, expecting to be wed, but instead he removed her to the estate in the Cotswolds. There she gave birth to a child, which he smothered with a pillow. He sold the body to a local anatomist for two shillings and a guinea watch."
"You're a lying bastard, Jasper Marin." George winced as Elizabeth's blow trembled the bed beneath him. His eyes shone brighter than ever, the patch of throat between bandage and nightgown flushed pink.
"I have statements from the doctor and midwife in attendance that the child was born alive, and a statement from the surgeon who purchased the body that in his opinion the cause of death was smothering."
"Let him alone." Their furious gazes mobbed Charles like crows. He looked away, scratched at a flake of paint on the sash until the flapping died down, trying to dredge up from the well of humanity some drops of horror. He shouldn't feel like this, not satisfied, as if a piece had slid into place. "The payments, in and out, are recorded in father's ledger. I wondered what they meant. I asked Jasper to find out."
"I had thought to send you a letter with the details, but the wind changed in the night and it seemed likely I could arrive back before the express post. So I hurried home."
Jasper ducked his head to hide his smile. Charles could practically see the lines being redrawn throughout the room as Elizabeth edged her chair closer to George. He thought perhaps if he could reach up and tip that smile into the light, touch and absorb the warm solidity of Jasper through his fingers, then something frozen in him might break loose. He might feel what he should feel. But he didn't dare to return even the fleeting press of shoulders.
"Yes. It was as if the white lady's tragedy repeated anew. She saw a chance to end the story differently this time. If Mary could become Lady Clitheroe, in a way her own suffering would have been worthwhile. Justice would finally be done and she could depart."
Outside the window the clouds thinned. Sunlight feathered over Jasper's shoulders, drawing steam from the soaked grey wool of his coat. His little snort of laughter was sympathetic, wry. "Of course, Margaret was quite insane, and I dare say Mary, unhinged as she must be by the death of her child, was not wholly to blame either. At any rate, they agreed between them that Clitheroe was to die for what he had done, and that Mary would marry George."
"Emma!" George sat up abruptly, choked on the bolt of pain and coughed deep hacking coughs that had to be soothed with more laudanum. "That's why it killed Emma? Dear Lord, to get at me?"
"I'm afraid so." Jasper rested a reassuring hand on Cook's trembling shoulder. She gave a great pig-like sniff and a brave smile. "If it helps, I believe that was Margaret's idea. Emma was dying already. I'm sure Mary would have been content to wait. But the white lady was beyond such fine distinctions. Clitheroe's death though, I can't fully explain."
"But I can." Charles felt their gazes like a graze on his cheek, and again he turned away to watch the spirals of steam, the change of colour from dark grey wool to a lighter slate blue, the lift and lower of Jasper's shoulders the heartbeat that let him continue. "I found salt, tipped into the plant pot next to the table where father's meal stood waiting to be taken upstairs. You know what a drift of salt he took with everything. He would pour it on as if he meant to cover everything with a layer an inch thick."
“So,” Charles’ gaze slipped down from the shoulder to the square, strong hand. His hips tingled with the imprint of those fingertips, bruises not yet faded. He concentrated on their loving little throb, to avoid thinking too hard about anything else. "It was easy enough for Mary to fill a twist of paper with the arsenic we keep in the barn. Only a moment's work to tip the salt out of the salt-cellar, tip in the arsenic, and leave father to scatter the poison on his own food. Father dies, Mary gets to comfort his newly widowed, distraught heir. Nature takes its course, the ghost is placated and can find peace. All is set to right, the curtain falls." Charles smiled, exasperated and affectionate, at George's glower. "Except that you didn't play the part written for you, George. And Mary was too sure of success and caught Elizabeth's watchful eye too soon."
A long silence. The yellow tongues of the candles hissed, and in the grate the fire gave a sigh like the sea, settling. Elizabeth closed her eyes, pressing her cheek against the baby's cheek, the suave, round line of the baby's face looking soft as a boiled pudding. Cook looked at her clenched fists and George at his stump. Jasper moved just enough to slide his hand behind Charles' back and rest a palm soothingly on the bunched muscles about his spine.
