The Misbegotten

1821

My Dear Mrs Weekes,

I do hope this note finds you well and quite recovered from any distress you might have felt upon recently meeting my son, Mr Jonathan Alleyn. I am more grateful than you can know that you agreed to speak with him, in what must have seemed very peculiar circumstances. I can only apologise if his behaviour towards you seemed in any way uncouth. He suffers a great deal, and has been so long out of polite company that I fear he forgets himself and his good manners upon occasion. I pray that you will find it within you to forgive this, and see only the troubled soul that plagues him.

I can quite understand that the meeting was not a pleasant one for you, but it has given me cause to hope. My relationship with my son has been much strained both by past events and by his current malaise, and I regret to impart that he rarely confides in me. It causes me great distress. Forgive the candour of this letter – I thought it best to speak plainly: Jonathan has asked to see you again. It has been far too many years since he made any such request of any visitor, and it fills my heart with joy that he makes it now. So I must ask, though I have little right to: will you call here again at your earliest convenience? Whatever passed between you and my son upon your last visit, it must have had some beneficial effect, and so I have much to thank you for already. But I beg you now, please call again.

Yours &c

Mrs Josephine Alleyn

For several days, Rachel carried Josephine Alleyn’s note around in her pocket, and spoke of it to no one. She took it out and reread it often, and thought about throwing it into the grate and forgetting she had ever seen it. Surely if she did, she wouldn’t be invited to Lansdown Crescent again, and that would be the end of it. She would never have to see them again – the man who had attempted to throttle her, and his beautiful, unreadable mother, so highly regarded by Richard. When she thought of the house, and of Jonathan Alleyn, waiting in his darkened rooms like some ghoul, she shivered. Even his mother, who was gentility itself, and so graceful, had a lost and mournful air. She put Rachel in mind of a porcelain doll – lovely but frozen, and liable to shatter. But then, when Rachel thought what life must be like for Josephine, trapped with a mad and invalid son who scared all callers from the house, she felt a stab of pity, and of guilt. So she kept the letter, and never quite managed to throw it into the fire, however sure she was that she would not see Jonathan Alleyn again, even if attacking her had indeed been beneficial to him.

Though Richard Weekes chafed at the cost of the extra housekeeping Rachel had arranged, he chafed even more about widening their social circle, and about obeying Josephine Alleyn, and so was persuaded to fund them an evening at a public ball in the Upper Assembly Rooms. Rachel wore her new gown, recently back from the seamstress – plainly cut, wide across her shoulders and low at the neck, but of a wonderfully soft, heavyweight satin, silvery in colour, with long sleeves and a sheer muslin overlay. In spite of it, and the coat she wore over it, she felt the cold as they walked out of Abbeygate Street in search of a pair of chairs to carry them – since even Richard Weekes’s sense of thrift would not allow for arriving at a dance on foot. It was early October, and in the mornings the cold glass of the bedroom window was misted over with their night-time breathing. The air had a bite, even on sunny days; the leaves of the plane tree in Abbey Green had turned leathery brown and yellow, and made a clattering sound when the wind shook them. Rachel wrapped her arm tightly around Richard’s, and felt the breeze teasing her hair loose from its pins.

They arrived at around seven o’clock to a mêlée of carriages and sedan chairs; horses and people alike throwing their heads and stamping their feet. The scene was lit by oil lamps high up on the portico above the entrance, and by the glow from the tall windows, and Rachel felt a flicker of excitement. The place and the racket of footsteps and hooves and voices had not changed at all since her last assembly, when she’d been sixteen years old; only the fashions and everything about her own life were different. She glanced at Richard, in his best coat and cravat, who looked as tense as a schoolboy called up before the master. He was worried that they would have no acquaintances within, and would drift about all evening making no impression – which was entirely probable, Rachel knew, since the assemblies were always so crowded that even if you knew twenty people in the room, you might not manage to find any of them. But that evening she felt no urge to reassure Richard, so she merely gave him a thin, incomplete smile, and said nothing as they went inside.

A wave of heat poured out through the doors, and after the cold of the evening it felt smothering. From the cloakroom they moved through to the main ballroom, where the cacophony was almost too loud for conversation, and the press of bodies made it hard to move. Above it all, on a central balcony, the orchestra was playing a lively tune, and the floor had already filled with dancing pairs, who added the pounding of feet and the rustle of cloth to the swelling din. The room was a sea of faces, either flushed and happy or scowling and harried; the smell of sweat, perfume and powder was everywhere. Five vast glass chandeliers hung from the distant ceiling, glittering with hundreds of candle flames, banishing shadows from the elaborate plasterwork and columns of the walls. Rachel knew better than to stand directly below one of the lights. Once before, when she’d attended as a girl, the heat from the revellers had caused the candles to soften and droop, dripping hot wax into carefully coiffed hair and propped décolletages. Rachel felt a flush creep into her cheeks, and her underarms prickled with perspiration. Her dress was unfashionably plain, but at least the vogue for wearing few ornaments suited her situation.

The air of merriment was infectious. Rachel relaxed and began to glance around at their fellow guests. She could feel Richard’s expectation.

‘Well? Do you see any acquaintances here, Mrs Weekes? I understood you had some, in Bath?’ he asked, impatiently.

‘Had, at one time, indeed. But I see none yet. Shall we take a turn on the floor for the next dance, Mr Weekes?’ she said, raising her voice to be heard. Richard looked hot and unhappy, and answered her question with a shake of his head.

‘I shall need something to drink first of all.’

‘Very well. Can you see no acquaintances of your own, Mr Weekes? Some of your clients, perhaps?’

‘I’m looking, I’m looking,’ he muttered, and they resumed their slow procession around the room. Then, against all expectation, Rachel did see some faces she knew. An elderly couple, a Mr and Mrs Brommel, who had been her neighbours the year her family had taken the apartment in Camden Crescent. Mr Brommel wore a heavily powdered wig, and Mrs Brommel a gown of burgundy velvet cut after the fashion of twenty years past. She had been quite deaf when Rachel knew her before, and her condition had not improved with the passage of thirteen years. It took a great deal of prompting for her to know who Rachel was, and when she finally exclaimed:

‘Rachel Crofton, yes of course, I remember your family now,’ still Rachel suspected that she did not. Rachel thought Richard would be pleased, as the introductions were made, but he didn’t seem so. Perhaps the Brommels were too old, their garb too dated, their conversation too slow.

They moved on, into the Octagon room, where men and women played cards and gambled in a cluttered maze of tables and chairs. The roar of voices was lower, and underneath it was the soft slap and scrape of cards, the rattle of coins and dice and occasional exclamations of delight, or muttered displeasure. A steady stream of revellers made their way across the Octagon from the hallway and the ballroom to the tea room, and vice versa, and were scowled at by the players for the distraction they caused. At the far side of the room was the doorway to an additional card room, quieter and more private, where the stakes were higher and the mood more sombre. Richard and Rachel paused by the hall doors to enjoy a breath of cooler air, and then Richard stood up straighter, and smiled.

‘There! Captain Sutton!’ he cried, and was off at once towards a wiry-haired man in military dress. ‘Captain Sutton, what a great pleasure to find you here,’ he said, smiling as he gave a short bow. ‘And Mrs Sutton, you are looking extremely well.’ This was spoken to a tiny woman with mousy hair and lively blue eyes. She and her husband both appeared to be past forty, with touches of grey in their hair; they had an air of open happiness and vitality that immediately put Rachel at her ease.

‘Mr Weekes! Well met, sir; and who is this charming young lady?’

‘Captain Sutton, may I present my wife, Mrs Rachel Weekes? Mrs Weekes, this is Captain Sutton, a valued client and acquaintance of mine, and his wife Mrs Harriet Sutton.’

‘How do you do?’ Rachel said, as she curtsied.

‘How do you do. And may I offer you my congratulations on your recent marriage,’ said Harriet Sutton; a soft and gentle voice, perfectly matched with her appearance. Captain Sutton towered over his wife, though he was not of excessive height. Mrs Sutton stood only as high as his shoulder, and her narrow frame and tiny hands were childlike. The captain was not a handsome man – his nose was too large and too bent, and his ears stood proud of his skull – but like his wife’s, his voice and expression were so genial it was impossible not to warm to him.

With the introductions made and a polite conversation about health, family and recent events exchanged, the men drifted away towards a game of pontoon while the ladies found seats against the wall. Mrs Sutton had a painted fan which she used constantly, and angled so that Rachel might also feel the benefit.

‘Do you often come to the assemblies, Mrs Weekes?’ she asked.

‘This is the first time as a married woman, and the first time in thirteen years, truth be told,’ said Rachel. ‘I came as a girl, with my family. But then we left Bath and I had not been back since, until I wed Mr Weekes.’

‘Ah! So you are no stranger to our lovely city.’ Mrs Sutton smiled. ‘I have heard people say that Bath is out of fashion now – the haunt of invalids, widows and spinsters! Let such nay-sayers stay away, I say. It has been our home these past twenty years, and I would live nowhere else. My daughter has known no other home.’

‘And how old is your daughter?’

‘She is nine years old now. Her name is Cassandra, and she is a source of constant delight to her father and me.’ Mrs Sutton laughed at her own effusiveness, and Rachel hid her surprise that the girl was not older, since Mrs Sutton herself was no longer young.

‘That is a very beautiful name.’

‘She is a very beautiful girl. Thankfully, she has inherited only a measure of my stature, and nothing whatsoever of my husband’s beauty.’ She smiled. ‘You have the joy of motherhood all before you yet, Mrs Weekes, and I envy you.’

‘Well, yes.’ Rachel fumbled for something to say. ‘I do look forward to the condition, of course.’ She shouldn’t say that she couldn’t envisage raising a child in the small, dark lodgings in Abbeygate Street, where he or she would always have no choice but to share the one bedchamber with them; yet something about Mrs Sutton encouraged confidence. ‘Mr Weekes’s business increases all the time. Before long we hope to move to more spacious lodgings, so our family will have more room to grow.’

‘Ah, it can be hard, in the early days of a marriage. When I first wed Captain Sutton, we had just one room to live in, at a boarding house near his regiment. We slept on a bed of our own clothes, since the mattress was so thin! My family were none too pleased with my choice, I can confess. I did not marry for fortune! Thankfully, things have improved since then. We have an apartment on Guinea Lane now. And you must come to call! Do you know where that is?’

‘I think I do – near the Paragon Buildings?’

‘Just so. So, have you remade any old acquaintances in Bath since your return?’

‘No, I… I was just a girl when I was here, and not a great deal out in society. I met Mr and Mrs Brommel just now,’ she said, but Mrs Sutton didn’t know them. ‘I have made just one other acquaintance of late. A client and patroness of my husband, a Mrs Alleyn, who has a very fine house on Lansdown Crescent.’

Mrs Sutton put one hand to her mouth in surprise.

‘Oh! But I know Mrs Alleyn, of course,’ she said. ‘My husband fought alongside Jonathan Alleyn against Napoleon’s French.’ As she spoke, a new gravity came into her tone, and Rachel understood that she knew of Jonathan Alleyn’s decline. ‘His mother was once one of the most celebrated beauties in Bath. I understand she is beautiful still, though I have not seen her in a good few years.’

‘Does she never come out into society?’

‘I daresay she does, but only rarely. And never to a public ball any more. I think she prefers quieter gatherings, of close friends.’

‘I have met her on two occasions now.’

‘So… you understand that she is greatly troubled,’ Mrs Sutton said carefully.

‘This last time, I also met her son, Mr Jonathan Alleyn,’ said Rachel. At this Mrs Sutton’s eyes opened wide, and she grasped Rachel’s hand.

‘In truth? You saw him? How was he?’

‘He was… clearly most unwell,’ she said. To her surprise, Mrs Sutton’s eyes glittered with tears, and she blotted them with her gloved fingertips before giving herself a little shake.

‘Forgive me. I cry at the slightest thing – ask anybody. It’s only that… a more tragic tale would be hard to imagine.’

‘Do you understand what ails him, then?’ asked Rachel, curious in spite of herself.

‘Indeed. Thanks to my husband’s close association with him during the war… Perhaps I ought not to say. It is not really my place to, and perhaps Mrs Alleyn would not thank me, if you are to be further acquainted with her.’

‘It is my feeling that his current condition cannot solely be ascribed to the treatment he received from Alice,’ said Rachel, tentatively. In the back of her mind, her shadow companion stood up, and called for her attention.

‘But, then you know some of it already? You know about Alice Beckwith?’

‘I know a little. Only what my husband has told me, and then Mr Alleyn… mentioned it. He loved Miss Beckwith a great deal, I think.’

‘Truly. As much as any man ever loved a woman. There was some impediment to their being wed, I know not what it was. Yet they were betrothed, and determined to marry. Jonathan went into the army, and went with my husband to fight the French in Portugal and Spain, in the year 1808. Early in 1809 they returned to England, and were billeted in Brighton when he got word from Miss Beckwith that she was breaking off their engagement. Captain Sutton has told me… he has told me just how grievously Mr Alleyn took this news. He took leave of his regiment and rushed home immediately, only to find that she had already taken off with a new suitor, and presumably wed him forthwith. Mr Alleyn never saw her again, and had no word from her since that last letter she sent him in Brighton.’

‘But… where did she go? What became of her?’

‘Nobody knows. She and her new companion made good their escape. Alice Beckwith was the legal ward of Mr Alleyn’s grandfather, you understand – of Mrs Alleyn’s father. So her disgrace was a disgrace to them all.’

‘And so it is this alone that has driven Mr Alleyn to… that has left his health so ruined?’

‘In part. It is at the root of it, to be sure. He waited for word from Miss Beckwith for as long as he could, but to no avail. Then he returned to the war, and did not set foot on English soil until after the siege of the fortress of Badajoz, in 1812. He was injured in the battle, and fought no more after that. And upon his return he… he was most altered. Those of us who knew him before could hardly believe how altered he was.’ Mrs Sutton shook her head sadly. ‘I’m talking too much, I know I am. But you must know, if you are to call on them, how greatly that family has suffered. And that Jonathan Alleyn was one of the gentlest souls I have ever encountered. Before the war.’

‘Gentle? Truly?’ Rachel thought back to the violent fury in his eyes, and her hand went unbidden to her throat, where the marks of his fingers had only just faded. She swallowed, and could not make the two versions of the man meet up.

‘Oh, yes. He was a sweet, kind boy. Young man, I should say. Thoughtful, and prone to introspection, perhaps, but bright and loving and full of joy. To remember him as I last saw him… oh, it breaks my heart!’

‘When was that?’

‘It must be four years past, now. We took my daughter along to see him. I thought… I thought a child might help to remind him that there is still good in the world. But he ordered us to leave, and bade us not return.’ She sighed. ‘To my shame, we have heeded his wish. Cassandra was so upset, so frightened by the way he spoke to us. I forgive him, of course, but I will not put her in that position again. I had hoped… I had hoped he would realise – there is still time for him to make a new life, to start again. To find a wife and have a family. It isn’t too late. Though he seems older than his years, he is young enough to begin anew.’

‘He doesn’t seem to want to try,’ Rachel murmured. Mrs Sutton might still see the sweet boy she knew in him, but Rachel had seen only a man, dark and mad and violent.

‘No. I fear you’re right. I hope it wasn’t ill-mannered of me, to speak so much about them? But I sense that you are a gentle soul too, and will understand that I only hope to mitigate for him any… extreme impressions you might have formed.’

‘It is a sad story indeed.’ And I look just like her. I look enough like this faithless Alice to make them both mistake me. But I know of another. I know of another who also wore this face. She swallowed against a sudden hollow feeling beneath her ribs, a strange bubble of expectation. Could it be?

‘Can you tell me, where did Miss Beckwith come from? Who were her parents?’ she asked.

‘I cannot tell you.’ Harriet shrugged. ‘But you must come to call, Mrs Weekes. Promise that you will,’ she said impulsively.

‘I do promise – it would be my pleasure, and I should very much like to meet your daughter. Before my marriage, I was governess to a family. I find that I miss the children a great deal.’

‘I should be delighted to introduce you to her. Oh, look – it’s nearly nine. Let’s go in for tea before the mad dash begins.’

There was already a crush of people around the tables of food and drink that had been laid out beneath the arches at one end of the tea room. People jostled and reached and chafed with impatience, like a flock of pigeons around spilt grain. Rachel and the captain’s wife managed to snatch some jellies and a glass of punch each before retiring from the throng to sit in a quieter part of the room. They talked of simple things, and Mrs Sutton shared harmless pieces of gossip about the people they saw, introducing Rachel to some of them. They were in conversation with a doctor and his wife when Richard and Captain Sutton emerged from their card game, late on in the evening. Richard was flushed, his eyes bloodshot in a way that Rachel was fast coming to recognise, and she took a steadying breath. He looked angry, and downcast, and was barely able to be civil as he was introduced to the doctor and his wife.

‘Are we come too late for tea?’ said Captain Sutton.

‘No, I think not – but make haste, or it will all have been eaten,’ said his wife.

‘Mr Weekes – may I bring you something?’ Rachel offered, since Richard didn’t look like he had the energy left to fight his way to the food.

‘No, indeed. My thanks. Unless it be a cup of punch,’ he said, his voice low and sulky.

‘Allow me,’ said Captain Sutton, making his way towards the tables.

‘Is everything all right, Mr Weekes?’ Rachel asked, in a low voice at Richard’s ear.

‘Yes. I… I had little luck at the table, is all.’ Richard found a weak smile for her. His lips were pale, and stood out against his reddened cheeks.

‘Not too much was lost, I hope?’ Rachel asked, carefully.

‘Nothing that I can’t recoup, at some later date.’

‘Here now, have this to combat the heat in here!’ Captain Sutton handed Richard a glass, and he gulped at it gratefully. ‘And how have you enjoyed your evening, Mrs Weekes?’

‘Oh, very much, thank you, Captain Sutton. Save for one thing, that is.’

‘And what is that?’

‘I have not danced once,’ she said.

‘Well now, that will not do at all, and if it does not offend you to stand up with so ancient a partner, I would be glad to escort you to the floor. By your leave, sir?’ he asked Richard, as he held out his arm to Rachel. Richard waved them on with a sickly smile and sank into a nearby chair. They joined another couple in a well-known quadrille, which Rachel had learnt from Eliza’s dancing master years before. Captain Sutton was a lively partner, more graceful than his appearance suggested, and Rachel was smiling and out of breath by the time the music stopped. ‘There now – will that suffice?’ he asked cheerfully.

On the way home, Rachel looked out of the chair’s small window at dark streets and rain-streaked walls sliding past, and thought. Hearing the story of Jonathan’s fall into madness made her much more sympathetic, both to his plight and the pain it must cause Mrs Alleyn; but if he had banished a good, close friend like the captain, why on earth would he wish to see her again? It could only be because she resembled his lost betrothed, Alice Beckwith, but apparently his urge was to hurt her for it, not to love her for it. But Rachel was curious, in a way she hadn’t been before. Curious to know what he would say to her if they met again; curious to know more about the girl she so resembled. My mirror image. My echo. Harriet Sutton’s words gave her courage, and the evening had been the most uplifting since her wedding day. She knew, by the time she’d helped Richard out of his sedan and up to bed, that she would go again to the Alleyns to find out.

On Friday the coalman came with his filthy wagon and sacks, his wheezy, broken-winded horse and his wizened face netted with sooty wrinkles. The coal cellar was underneath the pavement in front of the house, accessed by a door from the courtyard below street level. That door had a weak latch, and Starling took up her usual position, bracing it shut with her back as the coal was poured in through a small hatch in the pavement. With each sack that was upended came a thudding at her back, a pattering noise and a cloud of black dust that curled out around the door to gather in her hair and clothing. She felt sharp little grains in her eyelashes when she blinked. She braced her feet against the flagstones, feeling them slide where the stones were damp and slimy. I am a doorstop, she thought ruefully. Alice brought me up a sister, Bridget trained me as a housekeeper, and now I am become a doorstop. In the silence after the last load came down the horse coughed, and the coalman halloed down to her. Starling stayed a while in the gloomy courtyard, quiet with her thoughts. She heard Lord Faukes’s voice, unwelcome as it was: But you were a starveling guttersnipe, so be content. Ever with a smile in his voice to belie the barbs in his words.

Starling washed her face and hands under the pump, wincing at the water’s bite, then stood with a stiff-bristled brush and swept the soot from her clothes and hair. Through the kitchen window she heard Sol Bradbury singing ‘Proper Fanny’ as she crimped the crust on an eel pie, and through the corridor window Mrs Hatton was berating Dorcas for something. Intrigued, Starling stepped closer to the window to listen.

‘Oh, madam, please don’t make me!’ Dorcas quailed, in that shrill, wobbling voice of hers.

‘Dorcas, this cannot go on! I understand that Mr Alleyn is not an easy man to serve, but serve him you do, and those rooms must be cleaned at some point. The stink in there is starting to crawl out underneath the door, for heaven’s sake. There must be some forgotten dinner plate or something in there, going foul. At least go up and find what it is, and clear it out. Throw the windows open for as long as you can…’

‘But he has devilish things in there, Mrs Hatton – wrong things!’

‘There’s nothing in there that can hurt you. You know as well as I do how rare it is for Mr Alleyn to come downstairs. We may not have this chance again for some time…’

Starling blinked, unsure whether she’d heard correctly, then she rushed inside to where the two women were standing.

‘I’ll do it, Mrs Hatton,’ she said hurriedly.

‘Thank you, Starling, but really, Dorcas is the housemaid, and she must-’

‘Is he truly come downstairs?’ she interrupted.

‘That he is. He has a visitor.’ There was interest in Mrs Hatton’s voice, however much she tried to hide it. For a moment the three women stared at one another in wonder at this unlikely turn of events.

‘I’ll see to his rooms,’ said Starling, and went up the stairs on nimble feet.

She crept over to the parlour door and listened for a moment, to check that it was true. Sure enough, Starling heard three voices within – Jonathan Alleyn, his mother, and another female voice that she didn’t recognise. She wasted no time wondering but hurried on, climbing the stairs two steps at a time. The visit might be short, and even if it wasn’t Jonathan might conclude his part of it at any moment. She burst into his rooms, holding her breath, and ran to open the shutters and the windows. The smell was quite awful. Grudgingly, Starling hooked the remains of the rat out from under his desk with the poker, and cast it into the fire. She could still be cleaning his rooms when he came back up, that would cause no outrage; she could not be caught searching them, however. Opportunities to do so were precious rare, since he spent so much of his time ensconced within. Even when he’d passed out with drink, she didn’t dare. He woke with the ease of a soldier, as readily as a guard dog. Several times she’d been sifting silently through the papers on his desk, only to look up and find his eyes on her, watchful and unblinking. She shivered at the memory. His silent scrutiny was somehow worse than his rages. Starling had no idea where he kept the letters. He had all of Alice’s letters, she was sure of it – the ones she had written to him, as well as the ones he had written to her; the ones she’d kept in her rosewood box, which had vanished from her room right after she had. Right after he killed her.

She opened the drawers of his desk in turn, running her fingers through the contents. Papers and journals; bills, receipts and military missives; small instruments like magnifying glasses and tweezers, and other things she could not guess the purpose of. One drawer was filled with tiny metal pieces – cogs, wheels, screws and spindles. It rattled as if full of money when Starling opened it, and she frowned, pausing to listen for any sound of his approach. Her heart thumped in her ears, sounding like footsteps. She continued to search until the desk was exhausted, but there was no sign of the rosewood box, or of a bundle of letters. Cursing, Starling went to the shelves next, which were laden with books and more strange instruments, and the glass specimen jars that so terrified Dorcas.

Jonathan had acquired them some years earlier. He’d gone to watch the dissections of several human cadavers at the hospital, though his mother declared such things an abomination; he’d been friends, for a while, with one of the doctors she sent to see him, who had dark theories about opening the skulls of living patients. Then the jars had started to appear – pale shapes preserved in alcohol solutions. A two-headed piglet, all wrinkled and white; a grey thing of wriggling, convoluted ridges, with two halves and a stem, which reminded Starling of the huge fungi that sometimes grew on the floodplain at Bathampton; a tiny creature that almost resembled a human baby, though its head was far too big and its body too small, and its eyes were nothing but large dark shadows either side of the translucent stub of a nose. The liquid in the jars sloshed as Starling reached her questing hands behind them, and her skin crawled away from them. She did not like to think about their origins, or how they would smell if the lids were opened up.

Then, from beneath her feet came the unmistakable sound of the parlour door opening, and footsteps in the hallway. Desperately, Starling returned to the desk and scrabbled through the jumbled papers and detritus on top of it. She nicked her finger on a scalpel, and left a drop of her blood on the blade. She heard the click of boot heels on the stone stairs. Then she saw a letter, just one; unsealed, the paper dog-eared and wrinkled. She stuffed it into her pocket and rushed into the bedchamber, where she was shaking up the eiderdown as Jonathan Alleyn came back into his rooms. Starling held her breath. He stopped as soon as he was through the door, as if trying to work out what was different, then turned his head towards the open shutters, the raised windows. She waited for the barked command for her to close them, but to her surprise Jonathan walked slowly over to the curving bay window, and stood in front of it, looking out at the damp, crisp autumn day.

Starling cleared all the dirty plates and glasses, all the empty bottles and filthy clothing from the room. She emptied the night soil from the pot, swept the floor and rubbed the furniture, relaid the fire and replaced all the candles. And all the while she could feel the letter in her pocket, swinging with her skirt, threatening to rustle and give her away. She itched to make her escape, to find a private place, and read it. When she was done she thought to just slip away, but at the doorway she paused. Curiosity gnawed at her, almost as strong as the urge to read the letter she’d stolen. Cautiously, Starling walked up behind Jonathan. He had not moved from his place by the open window, and stood with his arms hanging limply by his sides.

‘Sir? Should I close them up now?’ she asked. Jonathan did not reply. She stepped a little closer and peered around at his face. His eyes were shut and he was breathing as slowly and deeply as one asleep. Was it possible to sleep on your feet? Starling wasn’t sure. A moist breeze scurried in from outside, and pushed at his hair and the untidy loops of his cravat. It smelled of wet grass, of damp stone and mushrooms – of the deep autumn that had settled over England. It was cold enough to pucker Starling’s arms into gooseflesh, but Jonathan looked almost serene. At once, she thought of ten different ways she could rouse him, anger him, disturb him. But she did none of them; she had the letter to read, so she slipped quietly from the room and went down to the coal cellar for privacy.

Rachel halted as the Alleyns’ front door closed behind her, and took a deep lungful of fresh, chilly air. She could hear the distant bleating of sheep on the high common, the tuneless clank of the bell-wether’s clapper, leading the herd. If she shut her eyes it was almost like being out of the city entirely, like being at Hartford Hall, perhaps; at the far end of the long oak avenue that ran, straight as an arrow, across the parkland. For a moment she longed to be there, to walk with the illusion of never having to return to any of it – her old job at Hartford, or her new job as Mrs Weekes. The thought troubled her. She opened her eyes to reality with a sinking feeling inside. Her second meeting with Jonathan Alleyn had been almost as unsettling as the first, especially in its outcome; for although there’d been none of the violence and peril of before, that time she had left convinced that she would never return, whereas now she was leaving having pledged to. Her throat was as dry as paper, and she swallowed with an effort; she felt strangely light-headed, and her thoughts refused to coalesce. Stepping into the house behind her felt like stepping out of time and place; into a world where the rules she was so familiar with no longer applied, and anything might happen. It was exhausting. She put a steadying hand on the railings as she descended the steps at last.

Movement in the courtyard below caught her eye, and she looked down to see the red-haired servant crossing from the coal cellar to the kitchen door.

‘You there!’ Rachel shouted down to her. The girl froze and glanced over her shoulder, looking as guilty as sin. When she saw Rachel, her eyes widened in surprise.

‘What are you-’ she began to say, then closed her mouth and moved to go inside again.

‘Wait!’ Rachel called. She leaned over the railings to get a better look at the girl, and was surer than ever that she’d been the one at the Moor’s Head on her wedding day. ‘I must thank you,’ she said. At this the girl turned again.

‘Thank me, madam?’ she said.

‘Yes. It was you who… persuaded Mr Alleyn to unhand me, when I first met him last week. Wasn’t it?’ The servant looked uneasy, and hesitated before she replied.

‘Aye, madam.’

‘Were you watching us, then? And listening?’ said Rachel, to which there was no reply. ‘No matter. I am glad you were. I am glad you were there. And thank you for helping me.’

‘Very good, madam,’ the girl said curtly. She turned to go again.

‘Wait – didn’t I see you at the Moor’s Head? A few weeks ago, on the day I was wed. Didn’t you serve us wine that day?’ The serving girl turned again, and looked so angry that Rachel knew she was right.

‘You must be mistaken, Mrs Weekes,’ she said grimly. Rachel didn’t press her further; she was already sure she was right, though she couldn’t say why it bothered her so much to know.

‘Will you tell me your name?’ Again, the servant seemed to seek a way not to answer before conceding to.

‘Starling,’ she said. ‘I must get on, madam. There’s much work to be done.’

‘Well. You have my thanks, Starling,’ Rachel called as the girl vanished through the door. Mrs Weekes, she called me. So she knows exactly who I am, too.

She found Richard in the cellars at Abbeygate Street. With the onset of autumn, he had taken to lighting a little brazier in the middle of the room to keep the casks and bottles at an even temperature. The room smelled faintly of cinders and smoke, amidst the wood must and wine smells of the stock. It was a strangely restful place, only ever softly lit. Richard was drawing off white wine from a barrel into a bucket. The smell of it was sharp and vinegary, and he wrinkled his nose. He’d rolled up his sleeves, and in the wan light his hair shone softly, and the skin on the backs of his broad hands was smooth and tanned. Rachel watched him for a while, soothed by his methodical movements as he worked, and the mild, diffuse expression on his face. In that moment, she could see what it was about him that she was trying to love. She took a long, slow breath, and sought to fan this tiny flame.

‘How now, Mr Weekes?’ she greeted him. Richard looked up with a smile.

‘My dear. Is aught amiss?’

‘No. I only wanted to tell you about my latest visit to Lansdown Crescent.’

‘Oh yes?’ To the denuded barrel of wine he added a bucketful of fresh milk, then a handful of salt and one of dried rice. Then he began to stir the mixture with a long pole. Rachel watched, fascinated.

‘What are you doing to that wine?’

‘It’s foul.’ Richard grimaced. ‘This whole batch from Spain tastes like horse piss. This treatment will improve it no end, given a few days to work.’

‘Won’t the milk turn sour? And spoil it further?’ she asked, Richard shook his head.

‘It will settle out. You’ll see. Now, tell me of your visit.’

The sounds of sloshing and the gentle clonk of the pole against the barrel filled the cellar. Rachel seated herself on the corner of one of the racks, and drew a pattern in the sawdust with the toe of her shoe.

‘Mr Jonathan Alleyn came downstairs to talk to his mother and me, on this occasion,’ she said.

‘In truth? That is good, good. So he is not so very unwell?’

‘Perhaps not. Or, perhaps not all of the time. He does limp badly, however.’ She did not say that he had seemed like a dead man still standing, from the pallor of his skin and the unhealthy sheen upon it; and the way his eyes shone like glass, and the bones of his face and hands stood proud beneath the skin. She did not say that the sight of him had made her recoil.

‘And what did he say this time?’

‘He apologised for… his ill-behaviour last time. He said he had been suffering a great deal that day from the pains in his head, and that it hadn’t been the best time for me to visit.’ At that point he’d glanced quite coldly at his mother, and there’d been anger in his eyes that was older and deeper than this polite reprimand. When he’d looked again at Rachel his face had shown… something. Something she hadn’t expected, and wasn’t sure of. A slight awkwardness, almost sheepishness. He’d said he had little recollection of what they’d spoken of that day, but that he had a knock on his head he couldn’t account for, and remembered her running from the room in haste. At this he’d grimaced, one corner of his mouth pulling to the side in displeasure.

‘And what else? Did Mrs Alleyn say aught of note?’ Richard asked, still stirring the barrel. The air had ripened with the odd, unhappy smell of wine and milk combined.

‘How long must you stir that brew?’ Rachel asked.

‘Half an hour or more, to be sure all has been taken up. Go on, tell me of Mrs Alleyn.’

‘She was obviously delighted that her son had come downstairs and was willing to meet and take tea with us.’ A brittle kind of delighted, which was poised at all times to revert to nerves, to remonstration, to apology. ‘We spoke of our interests, and I told them of my love of poetry and reading… Mr Alleyn agreed that reading could be a greatly soothing balm to a troubled mind. He also declared an interest in philosophy, and expressed regret that he is unable to read a great deal any more.’

‘Oh? Why can’t he?’

‘It’s too great a strain on his eyes, he says, and brings on the pains in his head. He finds that he can’t concentrate to read more than a page of printed text.’ She paused in her recounting of the conversation, just as the three of them had paused, and Rachel had seen an idea, a tremulous hope, come upon Mrs Alleyn. Perhaps… she had begun to say, and Rachel had known at once what she would suggest. Perhaps you might come and read to my son, Mrs Weekes? From time to time? You have a pleasing voice, and a clear diction… Rachel had swallowed, but with them both watching her, the mother alight with hope and the son bewildering, unreadable, her instinctive refusal had died on her lips. For a moment she’d wondered at this, at being welcomed so readily into the circle of so great a family. She, the wife of a wine trader. But then, with a blink, Mrs Alleyn had added: You will be compensated for your time, of course, Mrs Weekes. An employee then – governess to a grown man; companion to an invalid. Rachel had felt slighted, even somewhat hurt, to be reminded so bluntly that she was not their equal, and was not expected to give her time freely, out of friendship. ‘I have been asked to return and read to him. As a… regular habit. Mrs Alleyn has offered to remunerate me for my time. I thought… I thought that perhaps it would be more seemly to refuse.’

‘To refuse her request?’

‘To refuse the payment, Mr Weekes. One does not rise in society by being in the employ of those higher than oneself, after all,’ she said. ‘Better to be unpaid, and therefore charitable. Better to be there as a… friend and acquaintance, rather than as an employee.’

For a while there was quiet but for the clonking and sloshing of the barrel.

‘I can see the sense of what you say, Rachel,’ Richard said at last. ‘But… that you alone should be invited there, and not the both of us together, on more than one occasion, tells me that this is how we are viewed already. That this is what Mrs Alleyn had in mind for you all along – that you could be employed in service to her son. For if it was merely to be sociable, why was I not invited back with you?’ Rachel made no reply. She hadn’t guessed that Richard would see their position so clearly. He was ever ready to climb, it had seemed, rather than to admit that the Alleyns were too high to reach. ‘And, in truth… an extra income would be most welcome,’ he added.

‘Indeed? But I thought your business was…’

‘My business increases, but so do our… outgoing costs.’

‘Which costs, Mr Weekes?’ Rachel asked, carefully. Richard had the good grace to look away, and frown uncomfortably.

‘The extra housekeeping we have taken on. The extra… food, your new clothes, and… sundries,’ he muttered, not meeting her eye. The money you lose to drink and the gaming tables, Rachel thought, and an angry blush coloured her face, that she alone should be blamed for their want of funds.

‘Well then, I suppose I shall have to accept. I have no wish to become a financial burden to you, husband.’ She stood, smoothing the back of her skirt and turning to go upstairs.

‘Rachel,’ Richard called. She turned, expecting an apology, or some words of thanks. ‘Be sure to let me know, when you discover it, how much she intends to pay you.’

Rachel filled the kettle from the pump then went up to the kitchen and set it on the stove with quick, angry hands. It was perfectly reasonable that the wife of a working man should be paid to provide some service to a wealthy family, and yet, in truth, she had thought to leave employment behind her and devote herself to being a wife, nothing more and nothing less. It was not truly Richard she was angry with, more herself – that she had been foolish enough to think herself invited as an equal, albeit the lesser of equals. And she was afraid. The thought of being alone with Jonathan Alleyn, of perhaps being in his rooms again, made her pulse speed up and her thoughts scatter. The memory of his hands around her neck, and the unbreakable strength of them, was too fresh. She was not sure she could do it, in spite of his calmer demeanour this time. And when they looked at her, both of them, they saw her echo; they saw in her the memory of another. Is it reading they want, or is it Alice’s face? Under Jonathan’s gaze she’d felt unsure of what to do with her expression, or her voice. It felt as though anything she said would sound like a lie; like she had something she ought to hide, when she did not. Nothing felt natural any more, not even breathing. The air simply sat in a lump at the top of her chest, and made her feel dumb. He loved Alice Beckwith, who had this face. He can tell me of her. It was that, more than anything, which urged her to return to him.

Rachel brewed a pot of tea, then went to the window and looked out over the city. To the north, on the hill, she could see Lansdown Crescent. She could see the curved bay front of the Alleyns’ house. She could see, just, the exact windows of Jonathan’s room. In reverse, it would be impossible to pick out the Abbeygate Street house – the jumble of buildings was too confusing. How well this reflected their lives, also, she thought: the Alleyns grand but set apart, easily recognisable and yet isolated too; then she and Richard, part of the commingled soup of humanity pooling in the river valley, in the heart of the city. She wondered if a man could really mourn a betrayal for so long – for twelve long years. She wondered if losing Alice could truly be all that ailed Jonathan Alleyn.

Unbidden, the red-haired serving girl with the name of a bird came into her mind. Mrs Weekes, she called me. She knows who I am, and it was her at the inn, at our wedding feast. Rachel tried to work out what nagged her memory about that, and then realised it – the girl had been as struck by her appearance as Mrs Alleyn and her son had. She saw Alice too, when she looked at me. She knew this Alice well. Rachel wondered how she might talk to the servant, about this girl who’d worn the same face as her, and had disgraced herself for love; because the shadow in her mind had been ever more alive since she first heard of Alice. That distant voice, that echo, grew ever louder, and begged her attention, until Rachel sometimes caught its movement as a flicker in the corner of her eye. As with mirrors, she didn’t dare turn to look because she knew it would vanish, and she so longed to have it near. To have her near. Could it be?

January 11th, 1809, Corunna, Spain

My Dearest Alice,

I scarcely know how to write to you, my love. In truth, I can scarcely write to you, the cold has injured my hands and made it near impossible. We have reached the coast at last, we are at Corunna, but there are no ships. The ships were supposed to await us here but there is nothing but the wide ocean horizon – how unimaginably vast it seems, after so long a time spent watching my own feet marching. The French are close behind us. We face the prospect of having to fight them here, when we have been starving for weeks, and frozen half to death. My heart is so heavy, my love, only thoughts of you keep it beating. Suleiman is dead. Bravest, most valiant and noble creature. Oh, how it grieves me! I cannot bear to relate to you the manner of his death – suffice to say it is a bitter injustice, a most terrible injustice, when he made it through the mountains with us, all the way, as so many others fell or gave up. He was steadfast, the most courageous creature I have ever known, and a truer friend I never had, other than you, dear Alice.

I know I am cowardly to despair. We have reached the coast, after all, when it seemed for some weeks that we would not. The men are in grievous poor shape. They are thin, and exhausted, and much beset by frostbite and illness. We have lost thousands on the march through the mountains. I have seen… oh, but I should not write of what I have seen, because I would not wish to pain you. But I have seen things, and done things, which will haunt me ever after. I have done things, my dearest. Things I can never tell you. There is such a stain of shame upon my heart, I fear you will perceive it and love me no longer. And then I would die, Alice. I would die. A shadow of dread looms over me, and it is the sure knowledge that I am worthy of you no longer. But I will not speak of it, and can only hope you will forgive me. Yours is the sweetest and best soul I ever knew. Can you forgive me a weaker one? A corrupted one? The Spanish call us ‘Caracho’. It means something foul. It is a curse word. It is a name we deserve. I await the means to send you this letter. I long to see you, or to have a few words from you.

Yours most faithfully,

Jonathan Alleyn

Post script, January 13th. The ships are coming, Alice. This letter will travel the first leg of its journey to you with me. I will send it on when I land; we are bound for Brighton, I believe. We will be two weeks at sea, all being well. I will see you soon. To write those words makes my spirits soar.

The paper of the letter was as creased and stained as a blacksmith’s hands; one small sheet, the writing cramped and filling the margins, Jonathan’s lettering as hard as ever to read. There was a smudged thumbprint in the bottom right-hand corner, in some reddish brown substance Starling didn’t like to touch. Soon it would have to go back. That very evening, in fact, when she took up his supper tray. If he happened to notice it gone, or guess that she had taken it, he could dismiss her, long association or no, and then she would have nothing, and be nowhere. But the date of the letter made her hands shake, and made the back of her throat ache.

We will be two weeks at sea, he had written, on the thirteenth day of January. Alice had vanished on the eighth of February, 1809. That was the last day Starling had been happy, out of all the long days that came after it. The last day everything had been as it was supposed to be; and everything after was humiliation and fear, and a chaos of grief and anger. February the eighth, 1809. And the day after that, Jonathan came to the farmhouse door, all desperate and grim, like some part of him had died. The deranged ghost of himself, eyes wild with something like fury, something like despair, something like guilt. A fine alibi, to demand to see the person you have murdered. On the eighth day of February, Alice had gone out alone first thing in the morning. She went to meet Jonathan, Starling knew. She knew it like she knew the sky was above her head and the earth was beneath her feet. Alice went to meet Jonathan, and could not forgive his blackened soul, or these things he wrote of, that shamed him so. And so he killed her. Starling shut her eyes, feeling such bitter rage and disappointment welling up inside her it was almost unbearable. By itself, this letter told her nothing new, and could not prove his guilt. She ground her teeth together as she jammed it back into her pocket.

Suleiman. The word whispered in her memory; she remembered learning it for the first time – rolling it around her mouth until she had committed it to memory. Few other words had such a clear provenance in her personal lexicon. Suleiman was Jonathan’s horse, and she first saw him, and learned his name, on a late summer’s day in 1807, the year before Jonathan set sail to Portugal to fight the French. She remembered sitting in the meadow grasses by the river with Alice, counting bumblebees and damsel flies with bodies like blue enamel darning needles. Then they heard the cattle stir, disturbed from their grazing as Jonathan cantered nearer. He grinned down at them as he reined to a halt, and the horse blew out hard through flared nostrils. Starling scrambled to her feet and backed away, and the horse reared up on its hind legs, startled. Alice’s face lit up in admiration; she went fearlessly to lay a calming hand on the horse’s shoulder. Its neck was an arch of muscle and blood vessels beneath a coat that shone like polished wood.

‘Easy, boy. ’Tis only Starling and she’ll not hurt you,’ Alice murmured. ‘Oh, Jonathan! He’s magnificent! What’s his name?’

‘His name is Suleiman,’ Jonathan told her, and they both laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ Starling demanded, cross that she had been afraid of the horse.

‘Suleiman the Magnificent,’ said Alice, as if that explained everything. Starling scowled.

Jonathan dismounted and began to relate the horse’s pedigree to Alice, and Starling stopped listening. She walked as close to the animal as she dared. It wasn’t like the farm horse or the barge horses that went plodding by every day, or even like the grey mare Jonathan usually rode. Suleiman was bright bay, his coat a rich gingery brown but for his legs and nose, which were glossy black. His mane and tail were black too – what was left of his tail, anyway. Like the barge horses’, it had been docked to six inches. Suleiman flicked this inadequate stump at the flies that settled on his flanks, and the fact that he could not reach them made him more restless still. Starling put out tentative fingers and touched his nose, which felt like the finest suede leather. The horse blew damp air onto her hand, and Starling looked right into his eyes, and was smitten.

‘Can I ride him?’ she asked, interrupting Jonathan.

‘Well… I’m not sure that would be wise, Starling. He is very sensitive, and strong,’ said Jonathan. He showed Starling his hands – there were blisters and shreds of pulled skin between his fingers from battling with the reins.

‘Oh, please! Please let me! Just here in the meadow. I’ll only walk him… I promise not to fall off.’ Jonathan still argued that she might get hurt, but Alice persuaded him, blushing when Starling hitched up her skirt and petticoat, showing them both her long drawers as Jonathan boosted her into the saddle.

‘You are too grown up for that, now, Starling,’ Alice said. ‘If you ride again it must be with the side saddle.’

Jonathan kept careful hold of one rein, and Suleiman rattled his teeth against the bit and pulled for his freedom. He seemed perplexed by such a small jockey, and danced from side to side, casting looks over his shoulder as if to ask after the meaning of it. With her pulse racing, Starling knotted her fingers through the coarse black hair of his mane, and hung on. The scent of crushed grass rose up around them, ground beneath Suleiman’s hooves. His slightest movement made her wobble in the saddle, and fight for balance, but for a few heavenly moments she rode the magnificent horse, and she loved it, and she loved Jonathan for letting her. In the end, Suleiman lost patience with walking in small circles, and danced into a canter. Starling gave a small yelp and slithered off to one side, landing with a thud in the long grass. Alice rushed over to her, but Starling was laughing, delighted.

‘Will you teach me to ride, Mr Alleyn?’ she said breathlessly. ‘Oh, will you? Please, please?’ Jonathan glanced at Alice, who smiled.

‘I see no reason why not,’ he said, and Starling loved him even more. ‘But not today. Today, we picnic.’ He reached into the saddlebag, and drew out a large pork pie wrapped in a handkerchief, and a bottle of beer.

After they’d eaten, they lay side by side in the grass. The sunlight was strong, dazzling; it cast a brilliant halo around everything, so that their faces were too bright to make out, and expressions had to be guessed from laughter and words, from the silhouette of a smile. They were at a place where the river curled in a long, lazy arc through the meadow, and a shallow shelving beach of muddy pebbles had formed, the water eddying gently past. Starling lay on her back and blew dandelion clocks, watching the weightless seeds drift away into the blue. Alice and Jonathan were taking it in turns to read sonnets, back and forth. Their voices were hushed and private, carrying messages only they could unravel; the rhythm of the words lulled Starling quiet for a time. When silence fell she rolled her head to one side and watched Jonathan. He was staring away into the distance, lost in thought. A trickle of sweat wound through the hairline at her temple, and she rubbed at the tickle.

‘Can I paddle, Alice? I’m boiling. Please?’ she said, sitting up and squinting at her.

‘If you’re careful, and don’t go out into the current.’ Starling grinned as she wriggled out of her dress and boots. ‘What were you thinking about, just then?’ Alice asked Jonathan. He shrugged.

‘Nothing. Everything,’ he said, and then smiled. ‘Sometimes my thoughts run away with me, and I get caught in the twists and turns of them.’ He cocked his head at the river. ‘How about it?’

‘You can’t mean…’

‘I’m roasting as well, and you must be too.’ He grinned.

‘I haven’t been into the river since I was thirteen! It’s not… suitable,’ Alice protested, smiling.

‘There’s nobody around to see. I know how modest you are, Alice Beckwith. A swim won’t alter that.’

‘Hurray!’ Starling cheered, as they both got to their feet and began to shed their shoes and stockings. Alice lowered her face as she unlaced her dress, looking up at Jonathan through her eyelashes. The air between them seemed to thrum. As the girls waded into the water their white petticoats billowed up around them, swelling with air. ‘We look like dandelion seeds,’ said Starling.

The river’s cold stole their breath. Alice took the longest time to submerge herself. She stayed in the shallows, smiling uncertainly and exclaiming at the feel of mud between her toes. Shadows marked the ribs at the top of her chest, and the thin ridges of her collarbones. Wisps of pale hair hung around her neck, and water droplets sat like jewels on her skin. Starling took all this in, admiringly, and when she looked at Jonathan he was staring too, with an expression of complete surrender.

‘I bet I can swim to the other side and back,’ he said, paddling his arms beneath the surface.

‘No! You mustn’t!’ Alice’s voice was wrought with alarm at once. ‘You mustn’t try! The current is very strong, even in the summer. Jonathan, don’t!’ she cried, when he cast a speculative look across the water. She sounded close to panic.

‘All right, I won’t,’ he said, calmly enough. He waded closer to the bank, then pulled up a handful of green weeds and came after Starling with them, grinning like a fiend; she squealed and tried to flee through the dragging water. Alice laughed, and the moment of her fear was forgotten.

Before long a small wooden boat came along, carrying two men; a younger one pulling the oars and an older one tending to their nets and lines and eel traps.

‘Do you know them?’ Jonathan asked, as the boat approached. Alice looked anxious for a second, then relaxed and shook her head.

‘No. I never saw them before. Did you, Starling?’ Starling shook her head.

‘Then we should play the simple country hobnails, and say that we know no better,’ Jonathan declared. ‘Well, Starling, can you manage it? Can you talk like a hobnail from the village?’ He smiled at her.

‘Aye, sir,’ Starling replied, in her best Bathampton accent. Alice grimaced. Soon the dip of the oars brought the boat alongside them, and they halloed the fishermen quite cheerfully. The younger man grinned bashfully at Alice, and waved to them, but the older man tutted and darkened his face.

‘Have you no shame, young ’uns?’ he muttered. ‘’Taint decent, baring yourselves for all to see.’

‘We b’ain’t bare naked, sir,’ Starling replied. ‘Why, these ’un drawers o’ mine reach fairly down past the knee bone, see.’ She lay back in the water and waved her feet at the river men, and Jonathan dissolved into laughter. He had a low, pleasing laugh; it bounced along, like a ball dropped onto a hard surface.

‘Hoggish wench,’ the older fisherman muttered, and resolutely turned his face away as the boat passed them by.

Starling was giggling when she felt Alice’s hands grasp her around her ribs.

‘These ’un drawers o’ mine?’ Alice echoed. ‘Where on earth did you learn to talk like that?’ The question hung for a moment in the summer air, and both were reminded of the first lost seven years of Starling’s life, before she’d found Alice.

‘You were quite brilliant, Starling,’ Jonathan declared, still laughing. ‘The finest hoggish wench I ever heard.’ They stood close together, the water up to their waists and the reflections of it dancing in their eyes and under their chins. Starling glowed with Jonathan’s praise, and had a feeling inside as though her heart was swelling up to bursting. They stayed that way for a moment, and when Starling looked down she saw that Jonathan was holding Alice’s hand with fierce resolve beneath the water’s surface; their fingers woven together tighter than the reeds on the riverbank. They gave each other a long look, and Starling noticed how fast the rise and fall of Alice’s chest had become. Embarrassed, pleasantly scandalised, she flung herself backwards into the water again, sending up a huge plume of water to soak them.

When Alice and Starling returned to the farmhouse later that afternoon, hand in hand, Bridget took one look at their bedraggled hair and the wet patches on their clothes, and widened her eyes in outrage.

‘You’ve never been in the river, Alice!’ she gasped. Alice chuckled.

‘But it was the perfect day for it, Bridget. You should come with us, next time.’

‘You’ll not catch me submerging myself like that – it’s not wise, miss, not wise at all. What if you’ve taken a chill? And look at the grubshite you’ve made of your clothes!’

‘Bridget!’

‘Pardon my language, miss, but, really!’ Bridget’s admonishments followed them into the house, and continued as she filled the washtub to rinse the river from them; but the invectives soon lost their heat, met with the girls’ indefatigable good cheer. Starling was careful not to wash too well because she liked the mineral smell of the river on her skin, and in bed she cupped her hands to her face to breathe it in, feeling a wonderful echo of that swelling feeling she’d had, lulling her to sleep.

The short time Starling had spent astride Suleiman that day turned out to be her first and last riding lesson. After that, Jonathan was away with the army, training and preparing, assembling his kit, then away to Portugal, in the summer of 1808. The times that he did come to the farmhouse without his grandfather he wanted to spend with Alice, not teaching Starling to ride. She had never paused to think about what happened to Suleiman, not when Alice had vanished and everything got turned upside down and destroyed. I cannot bear to relate to you the manner of his death. Starling swallowed, and every time she read or thought of the words Jonathan had written she felt a tug of deep sorrow, of angry outrage, that the world had turned out to be so ugly, and so cruel, when Alice had taught her to think it was fair and lovely. It was a cold and heavy feeling.

Was this the letter that had convinced Alice to separate herself from Jonathan? Had it caused some crisis in her? She had been harder to read, full of fear and nerves and sudden storms of weeping after Jonathan set sail, and worst of all in the last three months before she vanished, following her fateful decision to visit Lord Faukes in Box. The last three months before Jonathan came home again, all black inside, half mad with grief and violence; a stranger wearing a familiar face. No wonder she loved him no more, no wonder he killed her for it. Starling played this scenario over and over, until it started to feel like fact. Perhaps letters like this one had been what killed Alice’s love for him to begin with – I have done things… things I can never tell you. There is such a stain ofshame upon my heart… I am worthy of you no longer – and then when she saw him again, it was confirmed. Something had happened to Alice, in those last three months. Some spark inside her had died, and though she was clearly full of secrets, they no longer lit her up and made her flit about like a firefly. They were heavy on her shoulders, and exhausted her; and when Starling asked her, late at night, what the matter was, Alice only shut her eyes and said I can’t bear to tell you. Starling had been left to wonder what could possibly have been so bad. Being kept in ignorance had been torture then, and it was torture still.

That evening, Starling slid the letter back into the mess on Jonathan Alleyn’s desk as he lay on his bed with the drapes closed, so she couldn’t even see him. His rooms were darkened again, the shutters latched. There was no sound at all, and at the faintest rustle of paper as she returned the letter his disembodied voice came across to her, like a ghost:

‘Touch nothing on my desk. Leave me be.’ Bridling, Starling put down an uncorked bottle of wine for him with a loud report. It was ordinary wine – she’d run out of the strengthened stuff Dick had once mixed for her. She could only hope that Jonathan would drink enough of it to damage himself. There was a slice of chicken pie on the tray she’d carried up as well; she picked up the plate, tipped the pie into the fire. As she crossed towards the door she paused, and turned to face the closed drapes.

‘Whatever happened to Suleiman? Your horse?’ she asked. There was a long, loaded silence, and she began to think he would not answer.

‘Suleiman… my good friend. I… We ate him.’ Jonathan’s voice was thick with revulsion, with sorrow. Starling swallowed convulsively; his words caused a lightning bolt of horror and rage to shoot down her spine.

‘Murderer!’ she hissed. ‘You will burn for it!’ She flew from the room, tears springing in her eyes.

Captain and Mrs Sutton’s lodgings were in a tall, narrow townhouse on the north-east side of the city. As Rachel walked across town, the frigid air seemed to press needles into her skull, just between her eyes. The mist on the inside of the bedroom window had become a fine layer of ice crystals, tiny and perfect and dead. On days like this at Hartford Hall, in the heart of winter, the chambermaid would have been in to Rachel’s room to stoke up the fire an hour before it was time to rise. The soft sounds of her doing so would reach Rachel, comforting and familiar, as she lay nestled beneath the thick eiderdowns and blankets on the bed.

Rachel was shown into the Suttons’ parlour by an elderly female servant who had tired eyes and a faded dress. It was a small room, but well furnished. Harriet Sutton had been sewing, but she put down her work and rose with a smile.

‘Mrs Weekes, how good to see you again. Tea, please, Maggie. Unless you’d prefer coffee, or chocolate, Mrs Weekes?’

‘In truth, some chocolate would be lovely,’ said Rachel.

‘I agree. Something to ward off this wretched chill wind. Chocolate for both of us then, Maggie.’

‘Very good, madam.’ The old woman curtsied slowly, as if not sure of her knees.

‘Now, come and sit by the fire, Mrs Weekes – you look quite blue!’ Mrs Sutton took Rachel’s cold hands in her warm ones, and drew her forward to sit in the fireside chair.

‘I’ve never known it be so cold this early in the season,’ said Rachel.

‘Aye. It bodes ill for a hard winter. I pity the poor what is to come,’ Harriet said gravely. Then she smiled. ‘And we will have to go to the assembly rooms more often, just for the warmth.’

‘I’m not sure I will be there much. I don’t think Mr Weekes enjoyed it a great deal last time,’ said Rachel, carefully. After the losses he’d made at their last ball, they could scarcely afford to go again soon.

‘But the Mr Weekes I know loves nothing better than a dance, and good revelry!’

‘Well.’ Rachel shrugged. ‘Perhaps he grows more sober as time passes,’ she said. She remembered the stiffness of Richard’s arm beneath her own; the fixed, distracted look on his face. She had a sinking feeling inside. In all, he had grown less and less jovial, less and less cheerful, with each day that had passed since their wedding. ‘How long have you known my husband?’ she asked.

‘Oh, a good many years, now. When Captain Sutton first went into the army, and became friends with Jonathan Alleyn, that was when he first met Mr Weekes.’

‘Oh? While Mr Weekes was at their house, perhaps? On business?’

‘Well,’ said Harriet Sutton, looking slightly uncomfortable. ‘Not exactly business, no. Mr Duncan Weekes, who I am sure you must know, was coachman to Lord Faukes, Mrs Josephine Alleyn’s father. For years and years. After his wife died, Duncan Weekes and your husband had their lodgings above the coach house. This was not at Lansdown Crescent, you understand, but at Lord Faukes’s great house, in Box. Your Mr Weekes grew from a boy to a man during that time. But I am sure he must have told you as much?’

At that point the servant came in with a tray and their cups of chocolate, and Rachel was grateful for the chance to compose herself. Small wonder then, that Josephine Alleyn thinks of me as her servant, since I am indeed wedded to one of her servants. An ostler, he said his father was. She thought back to Richard’s stories, his confessions to her during their brief courtship, when he had seemed to lay himself bare. Yet how carefully and completely he had concealed this truth about himself. With a jolt, she realised how little she might really know her husband.

‘In truth, no. He had not mentioned it. There is some… bad blood between my husband and his father. Mr Weekes does not speak to me of Duncan Weekes. I hope I might reconcile them. Perhaps I will manage it, in time,’ she said, in a strained voice.

‘Oh! Forgive me, my dear Mrs Weekes, if I have spoken out of turn! I didn’t mean to talk about your own family as if I knew better.’ Harriet took Rachel’s hand and squeezed it, to make good her apology. Her expression was open and mobile, and once again it put Rachel at her ease. She felt that here was a person with whom she could speak freely, with no fear of misunderstanding. Trust. She inspires trust, and how greatly I need such a person close to me.

‘But in this case you do know better, that much is clear. There’s no need to apologise,’ said Rachel. ‘It is my impression that Mr Weekes would rather forget his… start in life, and focus on his future.’

‘A wise man, then, and a philosophy we should all espouse. Our birth should not define us so much as what we do thereafter, surely?’ said Harriet.

‘But society runs contrary to that very idea, though it is a pleasant one.’ But I am not a gentlewoman any more, though I was born one. ‘In this country it seems that those who are born lowly must remain lowly, no matter how they strive or what they achieve; and some that are born gentlefolk remain so in spite of their base actions and debauchery,’ she said. Harriet Sutton’s expression grew troubled.

‘We live in an unjust society indeed, to be so wilfully blind,’ she murmured. ‘I think you are speaking of Mr Jonathan Alleyn, when you speak of base actions.’

‘The family are a great deal on my mind, in truth. I am to return there to act as reader and companion to Mr Alleyn,’ said Rachel, and smiled slightly at the expression of disbelief that flooded her friend’s face.

‘But… I am all astonishment, my dear! I had never thought…’

‘Nor I, after my first encounter with the man! Here’s the secret, though – it seems that I bear a strong resemblance to Alice Beckwith.’

There was a pause, and Harriet sipped her drink delicately.

‘I do not understand,’ she confessed at last.

‘Nor I, Mrs Sutton. But both Mr Alleyn and his mother reacted strongly in… recognition, when they first saw me. And their servant too, who must have known Miss Beckwith. And so, for some reason, he can tolerate my presence. His mother thinks it would do him good to be read to. She thinks it would soothe him, and… aid his recovery.’

‘But… this is most strange, Mrs Weekes! I am delighted, of course… at this sign of improvement in Mr Alleyn. But I cannot think how a reminder of – forgive me – a person who betrayed and wronged him so terribly would be of help.’

‘Nor I, Mrs Sutton, nor I. But there it is – I am to return there on the morrow and read for him,’ said Rachel, feeling herself tense up at the idea. And if he flies into a rage again, and kills me this time, at least I will be paid for my trouble, she thought. But he knows. He knows all about Alice, the echo whispered, keenly.

‘My dear, I hope… I do hope you can help him. Few men find themselves in such a dark place as he. How it would gladden all our hearts to hear that he can be woken from his nightmare.’ Harriet Sutton’s tiny face was serious and sombre, but her voice betrayed little hope, and Rachel felt the knot of tension in her gut tighten ever more.

‘Come, now, on to the main reason for my visit – other than to see you again, of course, Mrs Sutton. But you did promise to introduce me to your daughter,’ said Rachel. Harriet Sutton beamed, and went to the door to call. Cassandra Sutton was a thin, delicate little girl, tall for her age of eight years. She had a soft, olive-toned skin and greenish eyes, and hair as black as crow feathers.

‘How do you do, Mrs Weekes?’ she said shyly, and Rachel was enchanted.

‘Well now, this must be the prettiest little girl I have ever seen,’ she said warmly, and Cassandra fidgeted, pleased and embarrassed. ‘How do you do, Miss Sutton?’

‘Very well, thank you, madam,’ the child replied with immaculate manners.

‘Come, Cassandra. Come and sit with us a while.’ Harriet Sutton held out her hand to her daughter and the girl hopped onto the couch beside her. Her small, even face was dominated by a pointed nose and thin, dark eyebrows; there was something elfin and endearing in her appearance, and not one jot of Eliza Trevelyan’s pride or sullen temper.

‘I should very much like to have a daughter like you. But my husband would rather have a big strapping son, to work alongside him,’ said Rachel.

‘Perhaps you could have both?’ Cassandra suggested. ‘I should very much like to have a brother.’

‘Well,’ said Harriet, her smile turning a little sad. ‘You might have one, one day. We will have to wait and see what God has in store for us, won’t we?’ The look she gave Rachel was full of quiet resignation, and Rachel understood that there would be no more children for Captain and Mrs Sutton. From the age her new friend and the captain appeared to be, she guessed that their marriage had weathered a good few barren years before Cassandra was born.

‘I had a brother,’ said Rachel, and wished at once that she had not. She swallowed the sadness that choked her whenever she thought of Christopher. ‘His name was Christopher,’ she added, because there was a silence after she’d spoken, and both mother and child seemed to know instinctively not to ask where her brother was now.

‘Christopher is a good name. We have a bear called Christopher, don’t we?’ Harriet put her arm around her daughter and squeezed. ‘Now, why don’t we go into the music room, and you can show Mrs Weekes how well you’ve been learning to play your guitar?’

After her visit, Rachel went to Duncan Weekes’s lodgings, rapping her cold knuckles on the flaked and splitting door, and calling down at his small window. She had promised to visit again, even though she had little news to give, and she was deeply curious too – she wanted to ask her father-in-law about his time in service with the Alleyns, and about Richard’s upbringing with them. After a while it seemed clear that the old man was not at home, and nobody else came to open the outer door to her. She walked on, towards Abbeygate Street, thinking hard, trying to guess why her husband would have kept the nature of his long acquaintance with the Alleyns from her. Could it be as simple as not wanting to admit, out of pride, that he had been their servant? Or their servant’s son? But then, he had told her about his father’s lowly profession, and even boasted at how far above it he had risen. Perhaps he would rather have Rachel think he’d built his own success, and not been hoisted into it by a charitable former employer. He had told her that Mrs Alleyn had been a patron, and loyal customer… now it was a good deal clearer why such a grand lady should concern herself with the business of a young wine merchant.

Rachel walked quickly, agitated. Her breath streamed behind her, a wake in the cold air. She intended to confront Richard, and insist that he tell her everything about his relationship with the Alleyns. But he was not in the cellar, or upstairs either, so she had little choice but to wait. He got back after dark, and reeking of wine, though she could not tell for sure if that was due to the amount he had drunk, or the splashes his work left on his clothing. He smiled and kissed her cheek, but his face darkened when she asked him about the Alleyns, and about his father’s job as coachman.

‘I told you as much, already,’ he muttered, sitting in a chair to pull off his boots and warm his damp feet by the fire. The rank smell of his stockings drifted over to Rachel.

‘No you didn’t, Mr Weekes. You told me only that your father had been an ostler, and Mrs Alleyn an important patron of your business.’

‘Just so. If you had asked me more, I would have disclosed it. But you have had the whole story already, it would seem. Some might consider it disloyal, to ask others for gossip about your own husband.’ He leaned his head back and gazed at her, eyes heavy with fatigue, but watchful.

‘I did not ask about you, I asked about the Alleyns. Since I am soon to work for them, too. Mrs Sutton understandably assumed that I knew of your association with the family.’

‘Well, what matter if you had not had the full story? It changes nothing.’

‘Mr Weekes, I-’

‘You what?’ Richard cut across her, two short, hard words. Rachel flushed.

‘I don’t understand why you felt you had to keep this from me. That’s all.’ And why you are so loyal to the Alleyns, and yet so touchy at any mention of them. Richard shrugged, and shut his eyes.

‘It has been a long and wearying day, my dear. Let us have no more of this. Is there no food in this house, for its master?’ Rachel waited, in case he would say something more or she would find the nerve to speak on. When neither one happened she rose, frustrated, and went to prepare him a supper plate.

The following day was stormy. A strong wind blew out of a slate-grey sky, clearing away the smog of coal smoke and mist, and carrying flecks of biting sleet that felt like splinters on Rachel’s face as she walked to Lansdown Crescent. She walked as slowly as she could, to postpone her arrival at the Alleyns’ fine house, with its dead air and watchfulness, its strange, sad occupants. She took several deep breaths, and reminded herself of her duty to her husband; her sense of charity towards Josephine Alleyn; her desire to learn about Alice. She had no idea how long she was expected to read to Jonathan Alleyn, or to sit with him, but she hoped not more than an hour or two at most. There was no binding agreement; she could leave at any time. She was employed there, but she was not a servant. All these things she reminded herself, as she climbed to the front door.

Josephine Alleyn saw her first. She was by the canary’s cage again, speaking words of soft entreaty to the bird. The canary cocked its head at her, eyes sharp and unblinking, but it said nothing.

‘Ah, Mrs Weekes. It is good of you to come. My little bird here is silent and sad. Nothing I can feed him or say to him seems to cheer him,’ she said wistfully. She passed the bird another sunflower seed, but it only looked at it, and did not take it.

‘I understand that whistling to them sometimes encourages them to sing,’ said Rachel. She hovered by the door, unsure whether to go further into the room or not.

‘Oh? A pity. A lady should never whistle. Such a coarse habit, and it creases the mouth. Perhaps Falmouth might be persuaded to give it a try. But then, I never once heard a jolly sound come from that man, in more than twenty years of service. I fear his company might make my poor canary even sadder.’ Josephine looked over at Rachel with a wan smile.

‘Some other music, perhaps? Do you play, Mrs Alleyn?’ Anything but the shroud of silence in this house.

‘I used to. My father loved music, and I often played the piano for him before I married, and then after my husband had died, when I returned to live with him. My husband died when Jonathan was only five. Did you know that? Poor boy, he really never knew him. Lord Faukes was more like a father to Jonathan than a grandfather.’

‘He was lucky, then, to have such a grandfather.’

‘Lucky? Yes…’ Josephine sighed, and fell into thought, and Rachel waited uncomfortably.

‘Will I be sitting with your son in this room, Mrs Alleyn, or in some other?’ she asked at last.

‘What? Oh, no. He will not come down. I will take you up to him.’ The older lady turned and walked slowly towards the door, her face immobile, betraying nothing of her thoughts. Rachel’s heart sank. Back to his rooms then, to the darkness and the vile smell and the feeling of being confined, just like that poor canary.

She tried to remain calm, as they climbed the stone stairs in silence. Josephine Alleyn walked with her all the way to her son’s door, and by the time they reached it she was wearing an equal measure of hope and doubt on her lovely face. Rachel tried desperately to think of Jonathan Alleyn as he had seemed the last time she called – apologetic, uncomfortable, and even nervous – rather than as she had first met him: violent and inebriated. They almost seemed like two distinct people. Oh, let him be sober at least. She would not stay if he was drunk, she decided there and then. There would be little point in reading to him if his mind was addled. Josephine Alleyn knocked on her son’s door and then opened it, then stepped aside and ushered Rachel in, alone. ‘Perhaps the Bible, if all else fails,’ Mrs Alleyn whispered, before she closed the door. ‘Perhaps the Bible would help him back into the light.’

The room was in near darkness again, and at once Rachel was on edge. The stink of death and decay had gone, however, so she was able to breathe more easily. She turned, and saw Jonathan Alleyn sitting in an armchair in the bay window. His long legs were thrust out in front of him, his elbow rested on the arm of the chair, fingers pressing lightly into the side of his face.

‘Mr Alleyn-’ said Rachel, nerves making her voice blare out abruptly. Jonathan quickly raised his fingers in protest.

‘Please, not so loud. Do come and sit, Mrs Weekes.’ He gestured at a wooden chair that had been placed opposite him, near enough for her hem to brush the tips of his boots as she sat down in it. It was cool by the window; a draught crept around the shutters, and Rachel shivered.

‘It will be very hard for me to read with so little light,’ she said, more quietly.

‘To read?’ he said. A strip of light lit one of his watchful brown eyes, and sculpted itself into the contours of his face – the hollows in his cheeks and beneath his brows. His scrutiny again gave her that conspicuous feeling, that sense that all her words and expressions were false. It is her he sees. As if reading her thoughts, Jonathan Alleyn frowned. ‘In truth, you are not so very like her. Like Alice. It is only a… an initial resemblance. You are taller, and narrower, your eyes are more grey than blue. Your hair is… your hair is just as pale as hers; your face… remarkably alike. But much of the similarity goes once speech and expression animate your features,’ he said. Rachel felt absurdly disappointed, almost insulted. But much time has passed; the years will work changes. ‘When I first saw you my vision was blurred… the headaches do that sometimes.’

‘Well, I never claimed any connection to Alice Beckwith…’

‘No more you did. You came in ignorance. I… I must apologise again for my reaction. For laying hands on you. It was inexcusable.’ He spoke in a flat voice, with no marked emotion or expression, and only a slight frown to give his words credence. Rachel began to form an acceptance of his apology, but it wouldn’t come. She laced her fingers in her lap and studied them.

‘Laying hands on me? You half strangled me.’ The words burst out, unbidden. Shocked at her own frankness, she saw a look of surprise and then despair fill Jonathan’s face.

‘I barely remember,’ he muttered. ‘It has vanished into the dark spaces.’

‘Well,’ said Rachel, not quite understanding him. She rearranged her hands. ‘How are you today? You’re not suffering a headache now?’

‘No, madam. Though the term “ache” scarcely gives a true idea of the sensation. It is more like a knife, twisting slowly in my skull. Like a thunderstorm, caught between my temples.’

‘Have you consulted a doctor over it?’

‘My mother has sent every doctor, quack and hedge witch in England to me at some time or another,’ he snapped. ‘All they do is bleed me, which makes me weak, then tell me to rest. None of it does any good. Only wine… only wine eases it. For a time.’ He shut his eyes for a moment then leant forwards suddenly, moving so quickly that Rachel jumped. ‘It’s the things I have seen, you understand? It’s the things I have seen and the things I have done, clawing away at my mind like rats!’

‘Things… things you saw in the war with the French?’ Rachel ventured, cautiously.

‘Oh, how much you know, about the war and what happened there, and about Alice… How much everybody knows and how all the voices chatter on and how well informed everybody is about my infirmity! About my very thoughts!’ he snapped, leaning back again, disgusted.

‘In truth, sir, I know very little. I was only trying to-’

‘You know nothing,’ he stated flatly.

Stung, Rachel sat silent for a moment. There was a slight sound from the far end of the room, where a doorway led through to his bedchamber. She thought at once of the redhaired servant. Starling. Was she watching them again? Keeping guard?

‘It was nothing. Only the house shifting in this wind,’ said Jonathan.

‘Last time… last time I was here there was a girl,’ said Rachel. Jonathan grunted.

‘Yes, that one. She gets everywhere. Sneaks around this house like a cat, far too bold for her own good.’ He shut his eyes and pressed his fingertips into his temple again.

‘A curious name. Has she no other?’

‘No. She is a curious girl, given her curious name by another girl, the sweetest that ever lived.’

‘You mean… Miss Beckwith? Did Starling belong to her, then?’ said Rachel, puzzled.

‘You are not here to question me about Alice Beckwith.’ He spoke in that flat, adamant tone again, cold and hard as steel. Rachel swallowed to ease her dry throat.

‘Why am I here, sir?’ she asked eventually, steadily.

‘You’re here because my mother will not stop trying to fix what cannot be fixed. You’re here because you bear a passing resemblance to a woman I loved, a woman I would have married, a woman who-’ He cut himself off, took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know why you’re here. There is no need for you to be. You may go.’

‘I understood I was here to read to you. To assist you in that, when it is beyond you these days?’

‘To assist me?’

‘Yes. What would you like me to read?’

‘You didn’t bring something with you? Something wholesome and healing, something that will be good for my soul? Psalms? A book of sermons?’ The question was sour. He wishes me gone. For a second Rachel almost stood up to leave, but something kept her in her chair. It would feel like failure, she realised, should she leave so soon, having achieved so little. Give every endeavour your best effort, her father had said, over and again, usually in reference to a page of unconjugated Latin. But what is my endeavour here? To help this man, or to know what ails him? To know Alice, who changed everything.

‘I’ll choose something from your shelf, shall I?’ she said, in as light a tone as she could muster.

Jonathan said nothing as she went over to the wooden shelves that filled one wall of the room. She ran her eyes along the spines of his books, many of which were dusty and faded, and had names she could barely understand, or which were written in foreign languages. There were other things on the shelves as well – strange implements, mechanical toys and little jointed wooden figures, like the ones her mother had sometimes used for her drawing studies. There were the three glass jars with their pale, fleshy occupants that seemed to look back at Rachel. She recoiled from such dead, unnatural scrutiny. For a while, she was so intrigued with her exploration of the shelves that she forgot her purpose in looking. She ran her fingers along a smooth wooden tube, nine inches in length and screwed together from two sections, widening at one end like a funnel.

‘It’s for listening to a person’s chest. To their heart, and their breathing, and all the strange mechanisms of the body.’ Jonathan spoke quietly, close behind her. Rachel hadn’t heard him approach, and tried not to show her unease.

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘A Frenchman has invented it, lately; a man by the name of Laennec. Shall I show you? The sound is quite incredible. As though skin and bones and flesh have been peeled away, and the heart is left naked to be examined.’

‘No, I don’t want that,’ said Rachel, alarmed. ‘Your mother told me that you hated the French, and all things French. That you would not even have French wine to drink.’

Jonathan’s expression darkened. ‘She knows nothing of what I think, nor how I feel. It is quite astonishing, how much she misunderstands…’

‘I believe it pains her a great deal that-’

‘Stop. You know nothing, Mrs Weekes, and you make yourself sound foolish.’ Rachel bit her lip angrily, and said nothing. She took a step away from him, along the shelf, until her eyes fell on a tiny toy mouse.

It was life-sized – a little more than three inches long, with a delicate whip of a tail. Its body was made of thin, overlapping scales of copper, the edges crenulated to mimic the look of fur. Its tail was a piece of leather, stiff enough to stand out behind it, everything else was made of the same bright copper but for its eyes, which were round jet beads, large and lustrous. It was attached to a piece of ebony wood, as though it had been walking across it when it had frozen, and turned to metal. Rachel picked it up gently, and examined it. The detail was exquisite. Individual horse hairs had been attached to give it whiskers; it had tiny copper claws, and its ears were tiny, perfect circles.

‘You like it?’ Jonathan asked, his tone softening.

‘It’s charming,’ said Rachel.

‘Look – see what it does.’ He took the copper mouse from her, turned it around and wound a key that fitted into the wooden base, and then held it out on his palm. As the key wound down, the little mouse moved. Its feet pattered along as though it was running, then it paused, and lifted its nose as if to sniff at the air. Its tail curled higher and it sat back on its haunches, front paws dangling under its chin. Then it returned to all four feet and ran on. Again it performed this cycle, as Rachel watched, delighted; then after a minute or so the spring wound down and the mouse fell still.

Rachel looked up, smiling.

‘I have seen something like this before,’ she said. ‘A schoolfriend of mine had a box, and when the key was wound, the scene on the lid came to life, and little skaters slid about on a frozen lake. But it was just a flat scene, not a real creature like this. It’s wonderful… where did you come by it?’

‘I made it,’ said Jonathan.

‘Truly, Mr Alleyn? How came you by such skill?’

‘I was trying… I read a treatise on such mechanisms by a Swiss man, a maker of clocks. And I have taken apart several other such toys, to learn how they function. Most of my efforts were failures, but then this little mouse… continues to run.’ His tone was strange, almost embarrassed.

‘It is exquisite, Mr Alleyn. And a fine skill to have taught oneself as a hobby, to be sure,’ she said encouragingly, but her words had the opposite effect. Jonathan frowned, and turned the copper mouse over in his hands.

‘A hobby?’ He shook his head and thought for a while. ‘The philosophers have it that animals have no souls. That without a soul, the body is just a machine, like this. It performs mechanical functions with no thought, no governing mind. There was an automaton built by a Frenchman, the Canard Digerateur – do you know of it? The digesting duck? It can eat grain and digest it, just like a real duck. Does that not prove that animals are mere machines?’ He paused, and Rachel shook her head, baffled. ‘But if they have no souls, why is their blood hot, like ours? Why do they show fear? Why do they hunger? Why do they fight for life? Why will a cow stand and fight a wolf rather than let her calf be taken?’

‘I do not… but animals cannot have souls. It is written…’

‘In the Bible? Yes. A great many things are written in the Bible.’

‘Surely, you do not doubt the word of God?’

‘I doubt God a great deal, Mrs Weekes, as would you, had you seen and done what I have seen and done. And if animals have no souls, than perhaps neither has man. Perhaps we are all but machines.’

‘You cannot truly think so.’

‘Can I not? What can you understand of what I think? You have no knowledge of what man can do to his fellow man. I tell you, if there is a soul then there is also a beast in all men, which would take over all thought and deed if it could, and wreak havoc.’

‘There is not a beast in all men, sir,’ Rachel protested quietly. Jonathan’s voice had risen as he spoke, and she feared to provoke him. His words frightened her; they sounded like a warning.

‘You’re wrong,’ Jonathan said abruptly. He looked down at the copper mouse, and then thrust it into her hands. ‘But keep this trifle, if it pleases you. Let it remind you of what I’ve said today.’ He strode back to his chair in the window and threw himself into it. Carefully, Rachel put the clockwork toy back on the shelf where she’d found it.

Desperately, she scanned the books for something appropriate to read, and was relieved when she finally spotted a small volume of poetry by Dryden. She took it down and returned to sit opposite Jonathan Alleyn. His head was tilted back and his eyes were shut. As Rachel began to read she wondered if he’d fallen asleep, but he interrupted her at once.

‘You choose poetry over philosophy, over science and reason? How like a woman.’

‘I am more accomplished at reading poetry than the more… esoteric tracts you have available.’

‘ “Yet when the soul’s disease we desperate find, Poets the old renown’d physicians are, Who for the sickly habits of the mind, Examples as the ancient cure prepare.” Is that what you hope? That my soul’s disease can be cured with poetry?’

‘Not cured perhaps. Only cheered. Who wrote that verse you spoke?’

‘Sir William Davenant.’

‘Then you must know some poetry, and take pleasure in it? Or you did, at one time?’ said Rachel.

‘I knew another, who did,’ said Jonathan. He closed his eyes wearily, so Rachel began to read again. She kept her voice low, and her tone soft, and read for half an hour without any reaction from Jonathan Alleyn, save for at one verse. When she read:

‘ “I feed a flame within, which so torments me, That it both pains my heart, and yet contents me: ’Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it, That I had rather die than once remove it” ’, she saw a flicker of movement, and looked up to find him watching her through barely opened eyes. Her voice faltered and she lost her place in the text, and felt herself foolish and clumsy. Then she read on, and Jonathan closed his eyes once more, and when she got up to leave she was sure he was sleeping.

Rachel shut the door behind her, and with the quiet click of the latch felt herself sag. Her head felt light and was throbbing softly, and her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten anything at breakfast, such had been her nerves over this appointment, but it was more than that that ailed her. It was him, and his torment; the shifting dark things behind his eyes, and the way he wore his rage for all to see. To keep the world from seeing something else about him? He seemed to leach the strength from her, with his gaze that was so full of things she did not understand that it might as well be empty, and the hard, uncompromising way he spoke. He made her manners and her poise and her decorum seem like paper cutout things, painted and unreal; and without them to cover her, she felt bare. Rachel went downstairs and knocked softly at the parlour door, but there was no reply. She tried the other receiving rooms, but they were similarly empty. She stood alone in the cavernous hallway for a moment, unsure of what to do. It seemed rude to let herself out, to leave without a word. In the end, she turned towards the back of the house, and found the servants’ stair that led down into the basement.

At the foot of the stairs was a broad, bare corridor leading left and right, lit by candle lamps in wall sconces which guttered at her arrival. From the right came the herby, smoky smell of the kitchen, along with sounds of industry. Rachel’s stomach growled again, and she turned towards it. It was a wide, vaulted chamber, dominated at one end by a massive inglenook containing the stove and bread oven, and a roasting fire in an open grate. She heard the pop and sizzle of hot fat, the creak of the jack wheel turning in the chimney. A squat woman with meaty arms was cracking eggs into a basin, humming to herself and quite unaware of Rachel. As Rachel drew breath to speak, the woman glanced up.

‘And who might you be, dithering in my kitchen?’ she asked. Rachel stepped forwards.

‘I have been visiting with Mr Alleyn, and I… I could not find anyone upstairs…’ The cook wiped her hands on her apron and curtsied inelegantly, looking flustered and annoyed.

‘Beg pardon, madam, I had not known you… But you should not be downstairs, as a guest…’

‘No – I know. My apologies. But, perhaps… I am not quite a guest, you see. I am in the employ of the household, for my visits.’ Rachel took a step further into the kitchen and glanced at the fire where a joint of pork was turning.

‘Well, you should no more be below stairs for all that, madam. Go on up, if it please you, and I’ll call for Falmouth to see you out…’

‘I was wondering if I might have a word with Starling? And perhaps…’ Rachel could not quite find the courage to ask the cook for something to eat; the woman was clearly irritated by the intrusion into her domain. There was a basket of pears on the table. Rachel eyed it wistfully, and was sure that the cook noticed her gaze, but she did not offer her one. Rolling her lips together so that her chin puckered, the woman went to the doorway to call along the corridor.

‘Starling! Someone wants a word with you!’ There was a pause, in which Starling did not appear, and the cook muttered a curse under her breath. ‘She’s in a world of her own of late, that one. Go back up, madam. Please. I’ll send her up to you,’ she said.

‘No, it’s quite all right. No need to fetch her, I shall go along and find her,’ said Rachel, returning to the corridor. The cook paused, and then shrugged.

‘Last door at the end, on the right.’

Rachel went along and knocked at the last door she came to; since it was open, she stepped through it. The room was split into two, and through the inner doorway she saw the red-haired girl, down on her knees, putting a bottle of ale into a jute sack. The girl jumped up when she heard Rachel come in, quickly kicked the sack underneath the bed and then turned with flaming cheeks and furious eyes. Rachel took a step back and forgot what she had been about to say.

‘This is my room,’ the girl blurted out.

‘I know. I… beg your pardon.’ Rachel joined her hands awkwardly, and then remembered that she was the girl’s superior. She drew herself up, several inches taller than Starling. ‘I want to ask you some questions. It won’t take long. I am sure you have… duties to attend to.’ Rachel glanced down to where the corner of the jute sack was still visible, poking out from beneath the bed. Starling glowered at her, but there was fear in her eyes as well. A loose tendril of ginger hair hung in front of her face, and moved in time with her breathing.

‘Questions about what? Madam,’ said the girl, curtly.

‘About Mr Alleyn – I understand you have known him the longest of all the servants. And about Miss Alice Beckwith.’

‘Alice?’ Starling faltered. Her eyes widened, and some of the anger left her. ‘You know about Alice?’

‘Precious little. Only that she treated Mr Alleyn very ill, and is partly to blame for his malaise. And that… I look like her. Or so I am led to believe.’

‘She never treated him ill! She never treated anyone or anything ill, not in her whole life!’

‘You knew her well?’

‘I… she raised me. As a sister.’

‘A sister?’

‘Aye, a sister! Partly. As a servant too, perhaps… I knew her from when I was a child.’

‘And… do I look very like her?’ Rachel asked, almost shyly. Like the girl a man loved so much that losing her has ruined him. Starling stared at her with an expression Rachel could not read.

‘That you do, Mrs Weekes. At first. You are older than she was when she disappeared, of course. And… your expressions are different. Your voice. It is a passing resemblance, nothing more.’

‘That’s just what Mr Alleyn said,’ Rachel murmured. At this, Starling blinked, and incredulity flooded her face.

‘He speaks to you about her? About Alice?’

‘But a little. Perhaps he will speak more in time.’

‘Then… you are to call again?’

‘Yes.’ Rachel drew her shoulders back, and tried to sound resolute.

‘And… he does not alarm you?’

‘Why should he?’ said Rachel, and then felt foolish, since it was this girl who had prevented Jonathan strangling her a little over a week ago. ‘He does not alarm you, that much I know.’ She remembered the hearth brush striking Jonathan across his head. How could a servant act that way, and yet not be dismissed?

‘I’ve known him a long time indeed,’ said Starling, flatly.

‘What was she like? Alice Beckwith?’

There was a long pause, and though Starling’s eyes were fixed on Rachel it seemed that they looked right through her, into the shadow behind her that flickered on the wall. For a while, Rachel thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she took a quick, deep breath.

‘One day we went to have tea with the vicar and his wife in Bathampton… The place was newly built, and the vicar that proud that he showed her the whole house, even down to the servants’ floor and the kitchens. Alice was pleased enough, and saw nothing inappropriate in being below stairs. She gave herself no false airs.’ At this, Starling flicked her eyes over Rachel. ‘She didn’t see servants or lord and ladies, poor people or rich people. She only saw people. In the kitchens, Alice noticed the dog wheel, set up to turn the spit, with a little white dog that had to run and run to turn it, hour after hour. If it got tired the cook would put a hot coal in behind it, so it had to run or be burned. Alice wept when she saw it. She wouldn’t let it continue a second longer.’ Starling smiled, but looked sad. ‘She made such a fuss with her crying and her accusations that the dog was released at once – the vicar had little choice. She brought it back to the farmhouse and nursed it, and the vicar’s kitchen maid had to turn the meat until they had a clockwork jack installed instead. That was what Alice was like. She could not bear to see cruelty, and there was no cruelty in her. Not a jot. She was too good for this world, and people who speak ill things of her are far wrong.’ Starling broke off her story and wiped her hands unnecessarily on her apron. She took another deep breath and looked down at the floor, eyebrows drawn together. And this girl misses her still, Rachel thought.

‘I must get to work now, Mrs Weekes,’ Starling said at last.

‘Could we talk again, perhaps?’ said Rachel, catching the girl’s arm as she went to go past her.

‘I daresay,’ Starling muttered, and pulled her arm away; she vanished into the stairwell on quick feet. Rachel waited a moment, and then went back to the kitchen and caught the eye of the cook.

‘Get what you wanted, madam?’ the woman asked, still clearly nonplussed by her presence.

‘Yes, I suppose so. After a fashion.’ She paused, and felt her conscience prick her. ‘I thought I ought to tell you… when I went into the girl’s room, I am sure I saw her concealing something beneath her bed. A bottle of ale from the pantry, it seemed,’ she said.

‘Starling? I’m sure you’re mistaken, madam. Do go on up, and I shall call for Falmouth…’

‘No, I am not mistaken. She was stealing, I am certain of it,’ Rachel insisted. The cook gave her a steady, blank look.

‘I am sure you are mistaken, madam,’ she said tonelessly. Rachel’s cheeks flamed.

‘Well, then,’ she said, flustered. The cook said nothing more, and only watched her, so Rachel turned and went back to the stairs, fleeing the woman’s disrespect.