The Misbegotten

1821

Rachel was ushered in to her next appointment with Jonathan Alleyn so quickly that she was still out of breath from the long climb up to Lansdown Crescent. The grassy slope in front of the buildings was still crisp and grey with frost where it sank into a shaded hollow; the sky was flat white with cloud, giving no clue as to where the sun might be. There was no breath of a breeze. Mrs Alleyn greeted Rachel at the foot of the stairs, as the butler took her hat, gloves and pelisse from her, and she smoothed the front of her dress. There was that same awkwardness between them, which Rachel was sure they both felt – of her being not quite a guest, not quite a servant. Neither one knew quite how to behave, nor was Rachel ever sure of the reception she would be given. The older woman was by turns warm then cold, stiff then easy, sharp then distant. Impossible to know.

‘Perhaps you’ll join me to talk for a moment, when you’ve finished your reading?’ said Mrs Alleyn, as they turned to climb the stairs.

‘It would be my pleasure,’ Rachel replied. And during that time I must somehow work out how to ask for my payment, or Mr Weekes will want to know why I have not.

‘I had hoped Jonathan would come down today, but…’ Mrs Alleyn trailed off, apologetically.

‘Men were ever stubborn, and wont to have things their own way.’ Rachel smiled, to imply no criticism, but Mrs Alleyn’s face went stiff.

‘How right you are, Mrs Weekes,’ she murmured.

Jonathan Alleyn didn’t rise as she entered the room – he hadn’t before, and this simple omission put her on edge. She had never known a gentleman not rise for a lady’s entrance; she didn’t know if his failure to do so made him less the gentleman, or her less the lady. Jonathan had opened one fold of the shutters, and the window just a fraction, so that the frigid morning air drifted in. He wore only dark blue breeches and a white linen shirt, the sleeves of it rolled up. The fire had died in the hearth and the room was heavy with cold, scented with wood and the damp grass of the crescent. Rachel squared her shoulders and went over to him. She could see gooseflesh on his bare arms, but his face had a faint sheen of sweat, where it was not covered by several days’ growth of whiskers. An empty wine bottle and a stained glass were on the floor beside him; the stale smell of his unwashed body hung about him.

‘Mr Alleyn…’ Rachel trailed off as he turned abruptly to look at her. He seemed to have trouble focusing his eyes. ‘Are you well? You look feverish… It’s so cold in here. Let me call for a servant to make up the fire-’

‘No, leave it. I am too hot… only this cold is keeping me alive, I think,’ he said, in a rough voice.

‘But, if you have a fever, we must call a doctor to-’

‘To bleed me? I have bled enough, Mrs Weekes. Please sit, and say no more on it. I am quite well.’ Shivering slightly, Rachel complied. Jonathan’s eyes followed her every move; they were the only lively thing in his gaunt face.

‘I brought a book from home this time. It’s the new poems by Keats… a wedding gift to me from my husband,’ she said. ‘And a selfless one, since I think he cares not one jot for poetry,’ she added, more softly. Perhaps my husband would prefer Byron.

‘Why would he, Mrs Weekes?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Why would Richard Weekes care for poetry? He is an unlettered oaf, and a covetous fool, for all his pretty face. Or, at least, he was when I last knew him.’ Jonathan took a deep breath and sat up straighter in his chair. He propped his elbows on the arms of it, steepled his long fingers in front of his mouth. His nails were bitten and ragged.

‘Well, I… I suppose a person might change, and improve,’ Rachel murmured. Only a few weeks ago she would have leapt to Richard’s defence. Now it seemed loyalty enough to say as little as possible about him.

‘They might. But such improvements tend to be skin deep only, in my experience. Tell me, how came you to be married to him?’

‘How do you imagine, sir?’ said Rachel, with some asperity. ‘We met at the house of my former employers. I was governess in Sir Arthur Trevelyan’s household, at Hartford Hall. Mr Weekes and I met when he came to discuss wine with Sir Arthur…’ She thought back to that moment, the moment she’d seen love storm through Richard like an invading army. It gave her a strange pang almost like nostalgia, or perhaps regret.

‘And it seemed a good match to you? You who are clearly educated, and have been raised a gentlewoman…’

‘Aye, sir, it seemed a good match. I would scarcely have consented to wed if it had not.’

‘I’m curious, that’s all. I would understand more of the ways women think, if I could. More of the reasons why they act the way they do.’ He gave her a tiny, wintery smile.

‘Not all women act in the same way,’ Rachel pointed out, carefully.

‘No indeed, though everything they do has the one thing in common – that it is unfathomable to me.’

‘What about the situation is hard for you to understand, Mr Alleyn?’ Rachel felt tension clipping her words.

‘Well, you cannot love him. I wonder what, then, made him seem a good match, when he is… what he is, and you have all the semblance of a lady. Was it simply his handsome face?’

‘I’m not a child, Mr Alleyn, to be so confused by good looks. A good many years have passed since you were… out in society. Perhaps a good many things have changed since then. And he loves me…’

‘Does he? Truly?’ Jonathan leant forwards in his chair with sudden intensity.

‘Yes!’ She thought of Richard’s anger, of the way he sometimes spoke to her; his unwanted touch, and the way her body had begun to recoil from it. She hoped none of it showed in her face.

‘And do you love him?’

The question hung in the air between them, and Rachel felt a flush begin to spread up from her neck. The choice was between truth and loyalty, between integrity and propriety, and it was not one she knew how to make.

‘You cannot ask me such things,’ she said at last, quietly. Again came his fleeting smile, as cold as the crystals of frost on the window glass.

‘Your reticence is answer enough. And here I am torn – for I could not have admired you for loving such a man, yet nor can I admire you for marrying beneath you, when you did not love him…’ Humiliation made Rachel angry.

‘Why should it matter whether you admire me or not, Mr Alleyn?’ she said stiffly. ‘When we first met you told me that all women are whores, be it for coin, status or safety that we sell ourselves.’

‘Did I say as much?’ Jonathan leant back, his eyes sliding away uncomfortably. ‘I can’t remember it.’

‘But you stand by it, perhaps? Well, ask yourself this, sir, if it is true: what choice does a woman have but to settle herself somehow, for one of those three things?’

‘And which one made you settle, Mrs Weekes?’

‘It is none of your concern. Your mother pays me to come here and read to you, and that is what I shall do.’

‘Whether I will it or not?’

‘Do you wish me to leave?’

‘Far be it from me to thwart another of my mother’s great plans.’ He leant back with a scathing wave of his hand.

‘You are too kind, sir,’ said Rachel, stung, in spite of herself. Jonathan watched her steadily for a moment, through narrowed eyes. Then he blinked, and his eyes softened.

‘Forgive me,’ he said curtly.

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, the sound of children’s laughter drifted up through the window from the street below. Clearing her throat, Rachel began to read. As often happened, she soon got lost in the words, in the beauty and intensity of the images they conjured, and time passed rapidly, without her noticing. She felt a deep sense of calm, of being outside of herself, and of the world. Her heartbeat was slow and steady until Jonathan interrupted her, as she was halfway through ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’.

‘Enough. Please. Read something else,’ he said hoarsely. Rachel returned to the cold gloomy room with a start, and to the thin, haunted figure sitting opposite her.

‘You do not like the poem?’

‘It speaks of things I have no wish to hear about. Enchantment, and betrayal…’

‘But I have not yet read to the end, you will see that-’

‘He is alone, is he not, and driven half mad by his love?’

‘Well… yes. In truth,’ Rachel admitted.

‘No more of it, then. ’Tis a lie, that misery longs for company. The suffering of others does nothing to ease my own.’

‘And what do you long for, sir?’ she asked. Jonathan stared at her for a moment, as if bewildered by the question.

‘I want what I cannot have. I want to unsee things I have seen, and undo things I have done…’

‘And surely you know that can never be done? So another way must be found.’

‘Another way?’

‘A way to be at peace with what is past, and to… turn your back on it.’

‘Really? Another way?’ Jonathan laughed then, but it was a bitter sound. ‘And if those things took the very heart and soul of you, and left only the brutish parts? What other way is there then?’

‘No one but God can take your soul,’ said Rachel.

‘Aye, madam – God, or the devil.’

‘You should not say such things. I’m certain-’

‘No, you are not certain. You are naive, and inexperienced. Go now, and leave me in peace. I made no promise to hear a sermon.’ He shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. With anger making her hot in spite of the chill, Rachel stood and walked smartly over to the door, where she paused.

‘I’m no child or servant, sir, to be commanded stay and go,’ she said, her voice tight with emotion. ‘Perhaps I know nothing of you, and what you have seen, but do not forget that the reverse is also true.’ She shut the door behind her with greater force than was needed.

Josephine Alleyn was in the garden. The sun had burned through the low cloud and mist and was slanting down, touching the dying plants with a lemon-coloured light, the ghost of summer’s warmth. The garden was as wide as the house, and twice as long; surrounded by high walls and laid out in the Italianate style, with pathways curving this way and that between dwarf box hedges and naked rose bowers. An ornamental pond was at the centre of it all, its fountain still and silent, a thin sheet of ice over the black water. Mrs Alleyn was sitting in the far corner, where the sunshine was strongest, and she cut such a lonely figure that Rachel felt a stab of pity for her. She was well wrapped in furs and woollen shawls, but she was not reading, or writing, or drawing; she was simply sitting, with her face turned to the sun and her eyes closed. Rachel cleared her throat quietly, so as not to alarm her.

‘Forgive me, Mrs Alleyn,’ she said. ‘I have finished with Mr Alleyn for today.’ Josephine Alleyn opened her eyes and blinked at the light. The sunshine was so bright that it smoothed the years from her face, and Rachel was struck again by her beauty, which in her youth must have been truly exceptional. For a long moment Mrs Alleyn did not speak, and Rachel waited uncomfortably, her toes going numb in her shoes.

‘Mrs Weekes. Thank you,’ she said at last, and her voice was thin and frail.

‘Are you quite well, Mrs Alleyn? Shall I call for somebody?’ said Rachel. The older lady waved her hand, and seemed to come back to herself.

‘No, no. I was only… lost in thought, for a moment. The older one gets, the more power memory has to enthral, I find. To enthral, and sometimes to overpower. Do sit with me a while, Mrs Weekes.’ She twitched her cloak to make room for Rachel to sit down beside her. The stone bench was bone-achingly cold. ‘How did you find him today?’

‘He was… calm. He seems to have a touch of fever, however. It would be prudent, perhaps, to watch him these next few days, in case it turns any worse.’

‘Yes.’ Mrs Alleyn blinked. ‘Yes, I will do so. I will be sure he is checked,’ she said.

‘Forgive me, Mrs Alleyn…’ Rachel began. ‘I can’t help but notice that your son seems to be… resentful of you, for some reason? When it seems to me that you have only ever supported him in his infirmity…’

‘Resentful?’ The older woman smiled sadly. ‘That’s a gentle euphemism, my dear.’ She turned her face to the sun again, and took a steady breath. ‘In truth, he barely tolerates me.’

‘But why should it be so? He can’t blame you for the war, or for his abandonment by Alice Beckwith.’ Mrs Alleyn winced at the mention of Alice’s name.

‘Of course he blames me, Mrs Weekes. Children always blame their mothers, sooner or later. Even if he can’t put into words what it is that angers him so… We raise them in love, you see. We raise them in love, and teach them to find the world a wonderful place. And when it is not, they feel betrayed. They feel as though we have betrayed them. So no matter how much we love them, how much we try to make all well for them, sooner or later they blame us, and are wroth with us.’

‘That is a sorrowful thought, Mrs Alleyn,’ Rachel murmured.

‘Indeed. We are a sorrowful little family these days, Jonathan and I.’ Mrs Alleyn turned to Rachel with a touch of urgency, as if needing to mitigate. ‘I tried to warn him, you see. When I found out about his… liaison with that girl, I tried to warn him that she was beneath him. That she was unworthy of his heart and not to be trusted with it. He wouldn’t listen of course. Young men never do.’

‘You had objections to the match?’

‘Objections? Alice was little better than a farmer’s child! She was my father’s ward – an act of kindness on his part, performed for an old acquaintance when the girl was born in… unfortunate circumstances. She was merry-begotten, you see – nobody’s daughter. She was of no name, of no connection, of no fortune. Jonathan was betrothed to another, from birth… Foolish boy; he threw the match over for a wench only kept from ruin by my father’s good heart.’ Mrs Alleyn shook her head angrily. ‘Oh, he wept over it, he was sorry to grieve us, but he would not give her up. Thank heavens the war took him off before he could do anything as foolish as marry her.’

Rachel absorbed these words, and was puzzled. Thank heavens the war took him off? The war that near destroyed him? There was a touch of steel about Josephine Alleyn, she saw then; a touch of the indomitable.

‘So, when Miss Beckwith abandoned him in his absence…’ she ventured.

‘He blamed me, of course; though I had no contact with the wretched girl. Still he blamed me, as the one who always told him that she was not worthy of him.’ But he loved her. He loved her enough not to care. Rachel said nothing for a while, feeling a strange sense of outrage on Alice Beckwith’s behalf. She was nobody’s daughter. Those words gave Rachel a faint prickle of joy. They spoke of mysterious origins, of a foundling child. Yes, whispered the echo in her mind. A child that was lost.

‘May I speak frankly, Mrs Alleyn?’ she said.

‘You may, Mrs Weekes. Manners and propriety have little place in this house any more, as you have must already have gathered.’

‘Whether it is the war that has done it, or his treatment by Alice Beckwith… or whether it be those two things combined, it seems to me that your son has lost faith in the world, and in mankind. As you yourself have said, he seems to feel betrayed, and wishes to have no part in his own life any more.’

‘You think… you think he wishes to die?’ Mrs Alleyn breathed, stricken.

‘No, madam! No indeed. I think he wishes… to have nothing more to fear. To never expose himself to the risk of further pain. But in hiding away as he does, he traps himself with his memories and his nightmares. In truth, I believe the biggest, perhaps even the only, barrier to his return to health, and to a normal life, is that… he does not wish for any such return.’

Silence fell in the garden, and Rachel waited fearfully, worried that she had said too much. A robin flew to the top of a nearby pergola, feathers puffed for warmth, and treated them to a cascade of liquid song. The air was so still that Rachel saw the tiny wisp of its breath as it sang.

‘You see things very clearly, Mrs Weekes,’ said Mrs Alleyn at last. There was a note of despair, a note of defeat in her voice. ‘I suppose my next question must be, can you think of any way to change his mind?’

‘In truth, I cannot.’ Never had Rachel felt less qualified for any task. ‘But you told me that it was unusual, and progressive, for him to even consent to see me, and be read to. So I will continue to, if you wish it. I will challenge his despair however I can, though I can make no promise of success.’

‘I wish it, thank you, Mrs Weekes.’ To Rachel’s surprise, Josephine took her hand. The woman’s fingers were profoundly chilled, and her grip first tightened and then loosened, as if unsure of itself. How long has it been since she took anybody’s hand? Rachel swallowed, loath to say what she was about to.

‘I beg your pardon, Mrs Alleyn; I wish that I did not have to mention it, but… my husband is bound to query me later on, over… your offer to reimburse me for my time with your son…’ Rachel hung her head, embarrassed.

‘Poor girl. You are too good for the likes of Richard Weekes,’ Mrs Alleyn muttered. She pulled her hand from Rachel’s and turned away from her slightly, as if to distance herself again. Rachel’s head came up in an instant, and it was Mrs Alleyn’s turn to look uncomfortable.

‘I understood that you thought highly of my husband, as your former servant. That you had done a great deal to aid his elevation to a man of business…’ Rachel said, too quickly, feeling something like panic. Mrs Alleyn pursed her lips, and when she spoke, it was coolly.

‘I spoke out of turn. I meant no slight to Richard, only a compliment to you, my dear. For what he is, Richard has done very well. He has worked hard and deserves the rewards. But you are a finer wife than he could ever have hoped for, and I know he would agree with me. Forgive me. I have known him a good deal longer than you, but I forgot myself to speak so freely about him in your presence. I spoke too truly when I said that manners and propriety had abandoned us here.’

‘Why have you helped him so much? Why do you still keep ties with him, when he left your service so long ago?’ said Rachel. Mrs Alleyn’s mouth twitched to one side, but it was not a smile. It was a curious expression, a mixture of warmth – even affection, or the remnants of it – coupled with distaste.

‘Richard Weekes… was always deeply loyal to me. He served me faithfully throughout some turbulent times in my father’s household. I value loyalty, and always reward it. That said, much of his success is due to his own diligence, and is none of my doing.’ Her tone brooked no argument.

‘Of course.’ Rachel thought of Richard’s nerves when they had first come to call at Lansdown Crescent; she remembered the way he had bowed so low, and trembled. Her mind was alight with enquiry.

‘And you shall have money to show your husband. Come now, let us go in, and I will deliver it.’

‘You are too kind, Mrs Alleyn,’ said Rachel.

Josephine had grown stiff from the cold, so Rachel helped her to rise and they walked back into the house arm in arm. A flash of flame red caught Rachel’s eye as they reached the steps, and she looked up thinking that the robin had returned. But it was Starling she caught a glimpse of, turning hurriedly away from a small window halfway up the house. Rachel’s skin prickled. She was watching me again. This girl who so offends my husband that he will not confess to knowing her. She remembered Richard’s command that she have nothing to do with Starling. She remembered his anger flaring, his voice rising, and afterwards the rough way he had handled her in bed, not looking her in the eye. She tensed as she contemplated what he might do or say if he found her out in what she was about to do, but in the end it didn’t make her hesitate.

As the front door of the grand house closed behind her, Rachel darted quickly through the little gate in the railings and down the servants’ stair. She knelt by the courtyard door and took out the note she’d carried with her from home that morning, written after Richard had left the house. Fingers shaking with nerves, she pushed the paper under the door and was up the stairs again with such haste that her feet slipped on the smooth stone – for a heart-stopping moment she thought she would fall. She paused to catch her breath, then crossed the street and set off down the hill into Bath with more decorum, wondering whether Jonathan Alleyn would be watching her from his window as she went. She resisted a powerful urge to turn and look.

Starling went to the abbey in the grip of mixed emotions. She was excited, and curious, and also afraid; pleased, and for some reason angry as well. Like as not the anger had to do with the tone of the missive. I would speak to you again. Meet me… Starling was ever wont to resent being ordered. She wrapped her shawl around her tightly, wedging the corners beneath her arms. The inside of the huge building was always cool, even in summer. The heat of a sunny day couldn’t penetrate the thick walls; walls so ancient that the stones seemed fused with dust and age and the slow grinding of gravity, so that the abbey was no longer like a manmade thing, but a structure pushed up from the bones of the earth. In winter, the cold seemed to radiate up from the floor, down from the ceiling, and in from all four corners of the echoing space within. A verger was drifting from place to place, lighting candles; a few pews were occupied by the pious and the homeless, and a thin man who stank of the midden was sweeping the floor. The scratch of his besom only seemed to deepen the hush around it. In the shadows beneath the organ loft, Starling saw the person she had come to meet.

Rachel Weekes was standing beside a massive pillar, shifting from foot to foot with her face pinched up in worry. Starling felt her disgust increase. The woman could not have looked more conspicuous, more as though she had a secret. Her arms were folded tightly against her tall, narrow body; her face was white under a faded green hat that matched her faded pelisse. Starling strode up to her with such purpose that she had the satisfaction of seeing Mrs Weekes flinch, and draw back. For this chicken-breasted creature Richard takes to beating instead of loving me.

‘Thank you for coming,’ said Mrs Weekes, quietly. ‘After I left the note, I wasn’t sure if…’ She trailed off, uncomfortably.

‘You weren’t sure if I could read?’ Starling guessed. She felt her mouth pull to one side in disgust. ‘Well, I can. Better than most. And I’ve a fair hand, as well,’ she added.

‘I’m sure you have,’ said Rachel Weekes, and Starling felt her irritation rise again, to be caught bragging.

‘Well, I’m here. What do you want?’ she said. Rachel Weekes was looking at her strangely, and Starling remembered the bruise on her face. A pinkish bloom where Dick had hit her, that had swollen the cheekbone and made the eye on that side bloodshot.

‘Did somebody beat you?’ the woman blurted out, all sudden consternation. Starling took a moment, deciding what and what not to say.

‘Aye, somebody did; a blow, not a beating. For having spoken to you, madam. So let us have the reason for this meeting made plain, so I can be away and nobody the wiser.’

‘Somebody hit you for talking to me?’ Rachel Weekes sounded incredulous. ‘Who?’

‘Can’t you guess?’ said Starling. She glared at Mrs Weekes, and had the satisfaction of seeing, in her eyes, that she could indeed guess.

‘I don’t believe you,’ she whispered.

‘Oh, I think you do.’ Starling watched the woman shift uneasily. She took a deep breath. ‘What do you want with me? He told me never to speak to you again, nor approach you. I don’t think it occurred to him that you would approach me.’

‘You and my husband are… you are…’ She could not bring herself to say the word.

‘We were lovers. Yes. Not since you wed though.’ Starling cast a brief look at the crucifix over the altar, in case Jesus could hear her.

‘How long before we wed did you… did it… cease…?’ The woman’s voice was a strangled whisper, shaking with emotion. Starling did not flinch.

‘Two days before. He wed you still wearing the scent of me, I do think.’

Starling’s heart clenched at the cruelty of her own words, with the thrill of being able to wound her rival so. I was wounded, too. But in the next instant, she felt deflated. Mrs Weekes put out a hand to steady herself against the wall; her face had turned ashen, and was so full of horror that Starling at once felt the need to make amends. She tried to resist it. Alice would embrace her, and call her sister, and comfort her. But I am not Alice. Still, she felt her resolve waver and her anger seep away. The woman looked abject in her misery. Starling almost put out her hand, but could not quite do it. ‘Mrs Weekes…’ she said, but was unsure what else to add. The woman raised her eyes, expectantly. ‘Aren’t you angry?’ said Starling, eventually. ‘Aren’t you angry with me? With him?’

‘I am angry only with myself,’ said Rachel Weekes, her voice tight and trembling. ‘I’ve been a fool. An utter fool. And it cannot be undone, can it? It cannot!’ She dissolved into a storm of tears. The verger looked over at them curiously, and Starling shushed her, herding her further back into the shadows.

‘Shh! Quiet, people are looking. What can’t be undone?’

‘The marriage!’ Rachel Weekes gasped, between sobs that shook her chest.

‘Well, no. That much is true. I was fool enough to love him but not fool enough to marry him, at least,’ said Starling, almost to herself. Though I would have, if he’d asked. I’d have been fool enough then. At this, Rachel Weekes grew calmer, and stopped crying.

‘You loved him?’ she said. Starling glared at her in silence. ‘Then he has treated you very ill…’ She looked at the bruise on Starling’s face, and seemed poised to begin weeping again. Starling tried to distract her from it, and was surprised to hear Bridget’s words coming out of her mouth. Two mothers I had, one soft, one hard.

‘Well, there’s no point crying over spilt milk,’ she said wryly.

To her surprise, Rachel Weekes laughed; a startled snatch of laughter.

‘My mother used to say that,’ she said.

‘Everyone’s mother says that sooner or later, I reckon,’ said Starling. ‘What’s done is done; there’s nothing between him and me now. As far as I know he has been true to you, since you wed.’

‘No.’ Rachel shook her head. ‘I have been much deceived. But then, perhaps I deceived myself most of all,’ she murmured. She sounded calmer, dejected. Starling felt a stab of worry.

‘Don’t challenge him about this, will you? Don’t tell him we’ve met, for pity’s sake! It would go ill for both of us. You must swear not to tell!’

‘I won’t tell. I won’t… challenge him,’ said Rachel Weekes.

‘I can’t stay here all day – I must get back to the house. Was this what you wanted from me, then? To know that you married a knave?’ said Starling.

‘No, that was not it…’ Mrs Weekes wiped her face with gloved fingers, and took a deep breath. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Jonathan Alleyn. And about Alice Beckwith.’ Starling froze at the mention of both their names together. She couldn’t remember when she’d last heard them spoken in the same breath. Jonathan and Alice. J & A; carved into the flesh of the lovers’ tree for ever. She swallowed.

‘Well? What of them?’

‘When we spoke before, at the house, you said to me that Miss Beckwith had been too good for this world.’

‘I spoke the truth. What of it?’

‘Do you think her… dead, then?’ Rachel Weekes had stopped crying, and now a strange light was in her eyes, a strange eagerness that Starling mistrusted.

‘I know she is dead.’

‘How do you know? Were you still in touch with her, after she absconded?’

‘After she…? No, you don’t understand a thing! She never absconded. She never had another lover, and she never left her home with another… She was killed! That’s the truth of it!’ Whenever she spoke of it, Starling’s pulse quickened with desperation; the terrible frustration of knowing the truth but being believed by no one. But Rachel Weekes’s eyes had gone wide with shock.

‘She was killed? You mean… murdered?’

‘Aye, murdered! By Jonathan Alleyn!’

‘By… God above, you cannot mean it?’ Rachel Weekes said breathlessly.

‘I would not say such a thing lightly.’

‘But… what happened? Will you tell me?’ she said. Starling stared at her for a moment, and realised that nobody had ever asked her to describe that day before.

The last time Starling ever saw her, Alice had been winding the front of her hair into rags before bed; patiently wrapping each lock around a strip of cloth, and then twisting it up and tying it near her scalp. The back of it she left to hang loose, down between her shoulder blades. When she unwound the rags in the morning, the curls were never quite as neat as she wanted them – her hair was too fine, too wilfully straight. Most nights Starling didn’t wake when Alice came up, but that night, that last night, she woke from a dream of running and never tiring to see her sister at the dressing table, fixing her hair in this way. At once, Starling felt safe. Her dream, though it had almost been wonderful, had left her with the uneasy feeling that she was not quite normal, not quite real. But there was the smooth pallor of Alice’s skin in the mirror, and the way she curled up her toes and crossed her feet to one side of the stool, and everything was real and right again.

The morning sun woke Starling, casting a spear of light across her face through the gap between the shutters. Low, chill, winter sun that told her she had overslept. It was early February, the year 1809. Alice’s bed was already empty, so Starling hurried out of the blankets, wincing at the cold in the room, pulled on her everyday wool dress and stockings, and went downstairs to help. Bridget was at the stove, cooking drop scones for breakfast in a black iron skillet.

‘Hey ho, Bridget,’ said Starling, yawning. ‘Where’s Alice?’

‘Up and out already, far early this morning,’ said Bridget, always curt and grumpy at that time of day – her back ached, the first hour or two she was up. ‘I heard her go. She’s not let the hens out or fed them,’ she grumbled.

‘I’ll do it.’ Starling swung her shawl around her shoulders, tied her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck and stuffed her feet into her pattens. There was frost on the ground and in the trees, frost sparkling on every tendril of wild clematis that grew along the front wall of the yard. Her breath made miniature clouds against the brilliant blue sky. Alice loved such mornings – crisp and still and beautiful; she didn’t feel the cold as much as it seemed she ought. Starling searched, but Alice wasn’t in any of the barns, at the sty or in the stable with the horse. She shielded her eyes and stared out along the river, looking for the tell-tale flash of colour that would mark Alice’s approach – her bright hair, her blue dress, her pale pink shawl of warm lambs’ wool, which she sometimes wrapped around her head when it was this cold, laughing and saying she would make a fine shepherdess. There was no sign. Shivering, Starling fed the hens and let them out of the coop, quickly gathered the eggs and hurried back inside.

Alice did not return in time for breakfast. Bridget and Starling ate it without her, neither one acknowledging any concern. Starling didn’t want to betray herself, didn’t want to be the first to say it; as though whoever first expressed fear would be responsible for giving it cause. But at lunchtime the two women, Bridget past fifty, and Starling just thirteen years old, gave up pretending that all was well. Gradually, they stopped going about their chores and drifted to the kitchen window to look out in hope. The sun had melted the frost by then; the world was green and brown and grey again, dowdy and unremarkable. Unable to hold her tongue any longer, Starling took a deep breath and turned to face the older woman.

‘Bridget, where is she?’ she said in a small voice. For a moment Bridget didn’t reply. They exchanged a look of shared unease. Then Bridget cleared her throat.

‘Go on into the village and ask a few faces.’

‘It was so icy this morning… and it must have been dark when she went out. What if she fell? What if some harm has come to her?’

‘Then we will find her and scold her for her lack of good sense,’ said Bridget, curtly. ‘Go on into the village.’

So Starling ran from the butcher’s shop to the baker’s, stopping everyone she saw along the way. She went along the river and along the canal, a good distance in either direction, asking fishermen and bargemen and rovers. She went across the bridge and asked the miller and the toll man; she knocked on the door of the parsonage, and checked in church. She steeled herself and went into the inn, which she had never done by herself before. She asked the serving girls, the inn keep, the travellers eating their stew and potatoes. By sunset she could think of nowhere else to go, no one else to ask. She will be home in the kitchen when I get back. Some small mishap detained her, that was all. She pictured Alice seated by the fire, with a hot cup of tea in her hands and a sprained ankle propped up in front of her. She pictured it so clearly that she ran back to the farmhouse in her haste, burst into the kitchen all breathless, and could not understand why the room was dark, the fire gone out, and Bridget still stood at the window with her face pinched up in fear. In that exact moment the ground seemed to shudder beneath Starling’s feet, and everything suddenly seemed breakable. She felt queasy and helpless, and sharp-fingered panic scrabbled in her gut.

‘We must send word to Lord Faukes on the morrow, if there is still no sign of her. He will know what to do,’ said Bridget, in hollow tones.

Neither one of them could go to bed, so they sat in the kitchen through the night, cold and sleepless, until the sun rose once again. There was still no sign of Alice. Bridget paid the yardman’s boy three farthings to run a message directly to Lord Faukes in Box, and half an hour later the rattle of the front gate roused the two of them from their chairs, hope flooding through them. The door was thrown open before they reached it, and the person that came through it stopped them in their tracks.

‘What’s the meaning of-’ Bridget began to say, only to cut herself off in astonishment.

‘Mr Alleyn?’ Starling breathed, not quite believing it was him.

‘Where is she? Where is she?’ Jonathan Alleyn gasped, fighting for breath. He staggered into the kitchen, looking around wildly as though Alice might be hiding behind the table. There were cuts and gashes on the backs of his hands, crusted with filth. ‘Alice!’ he shouted. And then the smell of him hit them, and shocked them even more. Starling clapped her hands over her nose and mouth.

‘Saints preserve us! He reeks of the slaughterhouse,’ cried Bridget. In truth, the stink he gave off was worse than blood. It was blood and rot and burning; excrement, putrefaction and filth. His clothes – his red army jacket and breeches – were so stained and tattered it was hard to recognise them. His hair was long and matted, his face unshaven. He had always been lean but now he was painfully thin. Beneath the clothes his body was like sticks and shards; no softness, no flesh. What skin they could see behind the dirt and bruises was a ghastly greyish white. There was a long tear in the shoulder of his jacket, a messy darkness beneath that gave off the worst smell.

Gagging, Starling followed him as he crashed through into the parlour.

‘Alice!’ he shouted to the empty room. Starling stood in his way, forcing him to stop.

‘Mr Alleyn! How are you here – here and not at the war? Where is Alice? Have you been with her?’ she asked desperately. Jonathan looked down at her and didn’t seem to recognise her at all. His eyes were feverish and wild; the hands that grasped her shoulders shook violently, but had an inhuman strength.

‘Where is she? The letter she wrote… it cannot be. I won’t believe it! Where is she?’ His voice rose from a whisper to a shout, spittle flying from his lips. His fingernails bit into her.

‘We don’t know where she is! Do you know? Have you seen her? What’s happened?’ said Starling, her words garbled by tears that came on suddenly, half closing her throat. ‘You’re not well, Mr Alleyn… please…’ But Jonathan shoved her to one side, and continued his search, trailing his stink behind him until it was in every corner of the house. When at last he came back to the kitchen, Starling stood shoulder to shoulder with Bridget, frightened and bewildered.

‘I must find her. I must tell her…’ Jonathan said indistinctly. He seemed to be losing control of his tongue; the sounds he made were strange and disjointed.

‘He is afire with fever,’ Bridget said quietly. ‘We mustn’t let him leave as he is.’ At this, Jonathan’s head whipped around and he glared savagely at them.

‘Who are you? What have you done with Alice? What have you done?’ he bellowed. It seemed to take the last of his strength. His hand was on his sabre, trying to free it from its scabbard, as he sank to his knees. ‘You cannot keep me here,’ he whispered. And then he collapsed.

Some weeks later, when the fear of harm coming to Alice had evolved into the agony of grief, the bitter torment of not knowing, Starling managed to see Jonathan again. She and Bridget had been made to quit the farmhouse in Bathampton, and Starling was in service to Lord Faukes, at the house in Box. She needed to be near Jonathan, since he was her best link to Alice. She needed to be near him, because he could set about finding her. He could stand up and deny the stories being told about her, and be believed. He could do something. And when Alice came back, and found the farmhouse at Bathampton let to strangers, she would come to Box second of all, Starling was sure. She would come to find Jonathan and Lord Faukes. She would come for her sister. For days Jonathan lay unconscious, and doctors came and went from his room. For days after that he would see no one. Starling was forced to wait, driven to distraction with impatience. When she did at last sneak into his room he was much changed. The stink was gone; he was clean, his wounds bandaged. He could stand, and walk – she had seen him. Yet he did not walk; he did not ride. He did nothing.

When Starling appeared in his room he did not seem to think it amiss. If he was surprised that she’d walked out of his secret life in Bathampton and into his everyday one in Box, he showed no sign of it.

‘Mr Alleyn, why do you not search for her?’ she whispered. Since losing Alice, Starling was less sure of herself, less brave. She was less sure of everything around her, other than that Alice would not have abandoned her willingly. And she was horribly, horribly lonely.

‘There’s no point,’ he said roughly, not looking at her. For a moment his mouth kept working, as if he would say more. He frowned; his eyes were swollen, and had lost their sparkle. ‘She’s gone,’ he said, eventually.

‘You cannot believe what they are saying about her. You cannot believe she had a lover, and has run off with him. You cannot!’

‘Can I not?’ he said, grinding out the words. He shook his head. ‘The letter she wrote to me,’ he said. ‘I wish I could remember! And my lord grandfather, and my mother. All tell the same story. And even Bridget has confirmed it…’

‘What? Remember what? What has Bridget confirmed?’ Starling’s heart felt weak and damaged. When it pounded like it did then, she worried that it might come apart. Her head ached unbearably, with disbelief, with shock, and desperation.

‘She has left with another. She is gone.’

‘She would never! You know that. Mr Alleyn, she loves you! She wants to marry you – it’s all she’s ever wanted! And she made me her sister… she would never just abandon us! Why aren’t you out looking for her? How can you believe them? You know it’s not true! You know it!’ She grasped his arm to make him see. ‘Someone has taken her! Or hurt her! Do something!’

‘What would you have me do, Starling?’ Jonathan wrenched his arm away from her. Two of her nails bent backwards and tore, but she felt nothing. ‘Do you call my grandfather a liar? And my mother? Do you doubt what Bridget saw? Do you doubt the letter Alice wrote to me? Do you doubt every piece of evidence that she has run away?’ His face was a snarl, and tears ran down it.

‘Yes, I doubt them. How can you not?’

‘You are a fool, girl. She no more loved me than she was sister to you. Both were lies! It was all fiction,’ he said, and Starling recoiled, stung.

‘What letter did she write to you? Where is it? Let me read it,’ she demanded.

‘I…’ He hesitated, frowning. ‘I have lost it.’

‘Lost it? What did it say?’

‘I… I cannot remember. I was not… I was not myself…’

‘But you are well now, sir. Please. You must do something. You must try to find her. Anything could have happened to her – gypsies might have taken her… or robbers left her injured somewhere… You must search, Mr Alleyn! You can’t believe what they are saying!’

‘Enough! I will hear no more. She’s gone! Do you hear? She’s gone.’

‘No! No, she’s not. She wouldn’t,’ Starling moaned, tears blinding her.

‘Yes. She is gone.’ Just then, Jonathan stared into her eyes with such conviction and despair that Starling felt the seeds of a terrible suspicion germinate.

And as the months passed, and Jonathan returned to the war in Spain, and no word ever came, her suspicion grew and grew, flourishing like weeds in the waste ground of her grief. For even if Starling allowed herself to think that Alice would abandon her, she did not believe that she would go so completely, and never send word. Never send a note to say goodbye, or to explain why she had acted in secret. But no word ever came, and nobody in the house at Box would even speak of Alice Beckwith, and Starling could not understand why Jonathan, who had loved Alice, would believe what was said about her. She did not believe that he believed it. So, when she thought back to his ravaged eyes and the cold, bitter way he had said she is gone, it seemed that he must know more. That he must know things he would not say.

There’d been blood on him when he came to the farmhouse that day, blood aplenty. Spatters and smears of it, all over his clothing. And he had been raving, unhinged; he had spoken of a letter that none but he had seen or read, the contents of which had upset him terribly, yet which he now claimed he could not remember. Still some part of her kept its trust in him, though; kept it for three more years until he came back again, his leg wound finishing the war for him. Some part of Starling would not believe Jonathan could harm Alice. Until that man she no longer knew hit her for mentioning Alice’s name. Until she heard him say it out loud, clear as day. She is dead. Then all trust vanished, and all hope with it.

There was a pause after Starling finished her story, and she glanced over her shoulder to make sure the verger and the caretaker weren’t listening. Rachel Weekes seemed dumbstruck. She shook her head minutely.

‘How can that be? Mrs Alleyn says her son got word of Alice’s disgrace while he was fighting overseas… He wasn’t even in the country. Or do you say he killed her after she ran away?’

‘No, no.’ Starling shook her head in frustration. ‘Mrs Alleyn lies, to cover for her son… she doesn’t want it to be true, of course she doesn’t. She’s a noble lady, but as a mother her first loyalty is to her son… He was returned! Alice got word that the men were returning, and stopping in Brighton to recover from the fray. She wrote to him there… I know not what she said. But he came to Bathampton the day after she vanished. The very next day!’

‘Wait,’ said Rachel Weekes, shaking her head. ‘I can’t follow you… he killed her because she loved another?’

‘No!’ said Starling, louder than she’d meant to. Several heads turned towards them. ‘No, she had no other lover. She never did – I would have known about it if she had.’ Starling felt the tiniest pull of doubt as she said this. She remembered what Bridget had said – what she’d claimed she’d seen. She thought of the way she’d betrayed Alice to Bridget after she discovered the lovers’ tree, and shame smouldered in her gut. Could Alice have hidden things from her, after she proved herself so untrustworthy?

‘Why then would he kill her?’

‘I… I think she might have tried to break it off with him. Their engagement, which had been a secret one. I know his family did not approve of the match.’

‘Indeed not.’

‘After Mr Alleyn had gone off to the war, Alice went to Lord Faukes’s house in Box, one day. Where Mrs Alleyn lived, with Jonathan as well. She was never the same after she came back from there that day. I think Lord Faukes told her plainly that she could not marry Jonathan.’ And what Lord Faukes wanted, Lord Faukes got. Starling pushed the memory away, her gorge rising. ‘There must have been some grave reason, some terrible threat… or perhaps it was something Jonathan had said or done – perhaps he was the betrayer! But whatever the reason, I think she wrote to Jonathan to break it off.’

‘This is what Captain Sutton has told me. That Mr Alleyn had a letter from her in Brighton, and he left at once for Bathampton.’

‘Who is Captain Sutton?’

‘A friend of Mr Alleyn’s, or was. They were in the army together, and my husband is acquainted with them. I have… become friends with his wife.’

At the mention of Richard Weekes, both of them fell silent for a moment. Starling felt her cheeks grow hot. She felt absurdly embarrassed, and jealous, that Rachel Weekes should share an acquaintance with Jonathan that she knew nothing about. Folly. He is not your pet, nor your prisoner. But in truth, that was how she had come to think of him – as her possession. He was at the centre of all her thoughts; him, and what he had done.

‘There is the proof of it,’ she said, half strangled. Why, Alice? Why?

‘She said Jonathan took the news very badly indeed.’

‘Yes. Badly enough to kill her.’

‘But surely… he would have been discovered in his crime, if he had done something so terrible? Her body would have been discovered somewhere…’

‘Not necessarily.’ Starling swallowed against a sudden hard lump in her throat. ‘If he cast her into the river, and she was swept a goodly way before she was found… if she was found at all… nobody would know who she was. And nobody was looking for a body… they all thought she’d run away with another, because that’s the story that was put about.’

‘Put about by whom?’

‘By Jonathan Alleyn, and his mother. By Lord Faukes. By the gossips in Bathampton, who had always wondered about poor Alice, and jumped at the chance to malign her.’ By Bridget. Oh, how could you, Bridget?

‘I still don’t understand why you think otherwise,’ said Rachel Weekes. That strange urgency was still in her eyes, fiercer than ever.

‘I know otherwise, because I knew Alice. She would never have betrayed Jonathan. She would never have betrayed anybody. She loved him, and she was true to him all her life. She loved her home, and she loved… she loved me, and Bridget. She would never have gone off and left us all. Never.

‘You are quite certain.’ It was not a question, and a sudden calm came upon Starling. She does not scoff; she listens.

‘I know it like I know the sun will rise in the east,’ she said.

Rachel Weekes was watching Starling with a kind of steady amazement. Her tears had left her face mottled, but her eyes had dried; she seemed to consider several different things to say before choosing.

‘Jonathan Alleyn is a tortured soul… he said to me he wished to undo things he had done. And there is much violence in him, I have seen it. But to do so evil a thing… You truly believe it? You would have it that Mrs Alleyn lies to cover his crime? That she has done so all these years?’

‘Yes, she lies. Of course – what else would a mother do? Jonathan is all she has in this world, after all, especially now her father is gone.’ In that, we are alike; though our hearts be worlds apart.

‘When did Lord Faukes die?’

‘He’s seven years in his grave.’ Seven years I pray God he’s spent roasting. Starling fought the urge to spit at the mention of him. ‘Jonathan Alleyn loved Alice, once. But he was different after the war – he was not the same man, nor has been since. You saw how he behaved, when he first saw you! He might have killed you too.’

‘Aye, he might have,’ Rachel murmured. Her eyes were distant, thoughts racing behind them. ‘But why have you not denounced him, if you are sure of his crime?’

‘A public accusation?’ said Starling, in disgust. ‘Who would believe the word of a servant over people like them? Nobody. And I would lose my position, and all access to the man. Why do you ask me all of this? To know the man you are sent to comfort?’ Starling demanded, suddenly suspicious. Rachel Weekes shifted her feet, looking almost sheepish.

‘Yes, to know him… to know what I am to deal with. But also to know… to know Alice. The one whose face I share. The one he loved so dearly. Tell me, who were her parents? Mrs Alleyn says she was nobody’s daughter.’

‘She said that?’ Starling chewed her lip for a moment. ‘Alice herself often wondered, but none of us knew who her parents were. Lord Faukes would never disclose it.’

‘And he was the only one who would have known, I suppose.’

‘He and the parents themselves, whoever they were. But to know Alice you need know only this: that she was all kindness, all decency; all generous and gentle soul.’ Starling took a deep breath, teetering on the slippery edge of the chasm of grief inside her. She feared that if she fell in, she would never climb out again. She collected herself. ‘Alice would have forgiven Jonathan for killing her. That’s what she was like. She forgave people… there was no malice in her. No rancour or spite. To know Jonathan Alleyn you need know only this, that it is truly a fine line between love and hate.’

‘Then I am wed to a liar, this we know, and am possibly in the employ of a murderer,’ said Rachel Weekes, as she absorbed these words. Her voice was heavy and wretched, but she did not sound afraid. Starling looked at her curiously.

‘Then you believe what I have told you? That he killed her?’

‘We… we have not yet had the full story of what passed between them, I am sure, and I pray it is not so. But I believe he could have.’

For a long moment the two of them simply stood in the abbey’s pooling shadows and watched each other. Starling was not sure what else she should say, and it seemed that Rachel Weekes was also confounded.

‘It would not be wise for us to meet again,’ Starling said quietly.

‘But I will be at the house many times. I will be there this Wednesday… if you want to talk to me again.’

‘It was you who wanted to talk to me, remember?’ Starling pointed out, and saw Rachel Weekes flinch, stung.

‘But I am well placed, am I not, to try to discover the truth of the matter?’ she ventured.

‘Why would you want to do that?’ Suspicion flared in Starling again.

‘Because-’ Mrs Weekes broke off. Her eyes searched Starling’s face, as though the answer might be there, and Starling felt something tremulous in the pit of her stomach, like sparkles of joy that faded as soon as they lit. Ye Gods, but she is the very image of my sister. ‘I have thought, since I first entered that house, that it seemed frozen; sleeping, or perhaps only waiting,’ said Rachel Weekes. ‘Now I understand what it was that made time stop. It was Alice, and the way she vanished. She haunts that house… she haunts Jonathan Alleyn and his mother. Such secrets…’ She paused, shook her head slightly. ‘I… I am told I must keep going there, but I… I cannot do so, and not know the truth,’ she said vehemently. ‘The truth will set us free,’ she murmured. ‘Perhaps it could set me free.’

‘I don’t think the Bible was referring to such dark truths as these,’ said Starling. Rachel Weekes frowned, in obvious thought.

‘But twelve years have passed since Alice was seen… In twelve years you have found out nothing new?’ she said.

‘Twelve difficult years, I assure you.’ Starling scowled defensively. ‘I stayed on in their service only to this end… only to keep my enemy close. It is nine years since Mr Alleyn got back from the war for good, and he was more than half mad when he did. I had conversations with him then that he claims not to remember now – not remember at all. Then for years he was near insensible with opium… He dreamed four years away, and drank the rest…’

‘He does not remember that time? Then… is it not possible…’

‘That he does not remember killing her?’ Starling shook her head. ‘I do not believe it. Perhaps he wishes to forget, but I do not believe that he has. That he could.’

‘Then it is this knowledge, you believe, that torments him so?’

‘Should it not torment him to know that he slew the one person who loved him best in all the world?’

‘But he knows what you suspect of him? Then… how can you be safe there? How can you not fear what he might do to you?’

‘You need not fear for me. I can manage Jonathan Alleyn.’

‘It has been so long since Alice was lost,’ said Rachel Weekes. She studied Starling with wide, pitying eyes, and Starling recoiled. No one had looked at her that way in years; Alice had been the last person to. It made her feel vulnerable, somehow weaker, as though she might crack. ‘How have you borne it?’ the woman asked.

‘What choice have I had?’ Starling replied, curtly. What have I become in those years, that I cannot stand to be comforted? ‘If Mrs Alleyn knew what I was about… But she lies for him, I know. She knows more of the truth than she lets on.’

‘Perhaps she also lies to herself,’ said Rachel, softly. ‘A mother’s love is a powerful thing. I have… I have begun to know the lady, a little. Perhaps, in time, she might speak.’

‘You must not say anything of what I have told you! Not to them… they must not know that I know, or in an instant they would be rid of me!’ Panic made Starling’s voice rise. If they send me away, if they do that, what have I then? She had the sudden, fearful sensation of losing control.

‘I shan’t speak of this to them. I… I don’t know what I will do.’

Starling thought quickly. It had been a relief to speak the truth and pass on her suspicions; she had not bargained on recruiting an ally – a person with her own ideas and plans. A person easily shocked, and likely to betray herself. She could ruin everything.

‘Do nothing,’ said Starling. ‘It would be better if you didn’t see him any more. If you went no more to Lansdown Crescent. It would be safer for you, and easier for me.’

‘I must go. My husband commands it, and I would feel… duty bound to Mrs Alleyn to do so, even if he did not. What should I do?’ said Mrs Weekes. Starling took a moment to decide, chewing the inside of her mouth. Her unease remained; the sudden fear of unanticipated change.

‘If you would be a friend to me, then I… Mr Alleyn has Alice’s letters. All of her letters, his letters to her as well. She kept hers in a rosewood box about as long as my forearm, and in all the chaos of the days after she vanished… only once I had recovered my wits enough to look for it did I find it gone. No one else would have taken it, and I have seen him reading them, upon occasion. He clings to them as though they might assuage his guilt. There could be some clue in them, as to what manner of thing made her break with him. For if it was grave enough that she would do that, then it is grave enough that he might kill her for the same. For insulting him.’

‘Do men kill over insults?’ asked Mrs Weekes, softly.

‘Only every day. See if you can find where he hides the box, and in it the other letters. For all the times I’ve searched his rooms, I’ve found it not – it must be in some secret place. If you can find it out, tell me. I need to know what she wrote to him in Brighton.’

‘All right. I will try.’ Rachel Weekes’s expression betrayed scant hope of success.

‘Say nothing of this! To anyone,’ Starling whispered fiercely. Rachel Weekes gave a quick, anxious nod, but made no move. She hardly knows where to go next, or what to do. Starling left her there.

She was loaded with a new and different mix of emotions as she ducked out into the crowded square. The fear was still there, but the anger gone; a nagging foreboding now, and the excitement even stronger, and beneath it all the unease that came from having so long trusted nobody, and suddenly finding trust assumed by another. Why should she trust me any more than I her? And yet she does. She does not scorn the things I told her. She does not side blindly with the Alleyns, as she might. As if the world had lurched slightly and come out of its old rut, it suddenly seemed as though the future would be different; life would change. But for better or worse, Starling couldn’t tell. Isn’t that what I intended when I brought her into that house? For twelve years they have woven such lies that I have not managed to penetrate them. Could she be the one to do it? Starling did not trust the woman, nor understand her one bit, but she felt less alone than she had before; less alone than she had since she was parted from Alice.

Rachel walked with little idea of her destination. She was distracted; she left her feet to find their own path and they stopped on a quiet corner of an unswept street, where rubbish and muck were piled high in the gutters and only the ice on the puddles kept her feet dry. A starving cat came to sniff her shins, hoping for food, but when Rachel lowered her hand to stroke it, it ran away. She leaned against the wall and shut her eyes for a moment, trying to marshal her thoughts. She’d known even before the girl had spoken. She’d known as soon as she’d seen the bruise on her face, and had thought of the way Richard had named her, in his anger. Starling. Named her even though he’d made every effort until then to deflect Rachel’s interest in the girl, and feign blindness to her existence. And she was pretty enough, though her face was pert and her red hair dishevelled. There was a sharpness about her; the liveliness of her expression spoke of intelligence, and wit. But Starling was afraid of Richard too; it was clear from the way she’d made Rachel swear to not reveal their meeting. It would go ill, for both of us. Rachel took several deep breaths to calm down. And he was with her right up until we wed. As we courted, and he said he could not live without me. And she loved him. Did he love her? Could he have, if he beats her now?

Long minutes later the cold begin to work on her, stiffening her fingers, making the joints ache. To keep herself from thinking about Richard, she thought about Jonathan Alleyn instead. Somehow, during her visits to him after the first one, she had written off his violence towards her as an aberration; he’d been so much calmer since, more sober. Black tempered, and alarming, but never violent again; yet she couldn’t deny that she’d witnessed that tendency in him, even if Starling’s story hadn’t had the ring of utter conviction. And all her conversations with him told her one thing above all – that he was tortured by regret and self-loathing. Could he have killed Alice? Is that what torments him so? The thought made her mouth go dry, and anxiety flutter in her stomach. Let it not be so. Yet she was confounded to find that she feared him no more now than she already had; though the thought of how she would even begin to discover where he kept Alice Beckwith’s letters was already troubling her. The one and only time she’d mentioned Alice’s name, he had cut her off abruptly. At least he is no worse than he appeared to be when I first met him, unlike someone else. She stood up from the wall and set off with greater purpose, towards Duncan Weekes’s house.

The old man had been sleeping, though it was early in the evening; he opened the door with a befuddled expression and his cap still on, blinking owlishly. His cheeks were rough with coarse white stubble; he smelled of stale skin, tallow and brandy.

‘Mrs Weekes… dear girl… I had not expected you,’ he mumbled. He stood up straighter, but it caused him to wince.

‘Forgive me, I… I wanted to talk to somebody. I shouldn’t have called at this hour…’ Rachel stammered. Duncan seemed to focus on her face; on her puffy, red eyes.

‘Come, come.’ He ushered her into the chilly room. ‘Are you all right? Has something happened?’

‘No, that is… yes…’ Rachel put her hands to her face and tried to keep hold.

‘Please, sit, Mrs Weekes,’ Duncan said kindly. ‘Be easy, you are safe here.’ Rachel glanced up at this; it seemed an odd thing for him to say. As though he expected her to be unsafe elsewhere. ‘You look chilled to the bone. Can I pour you a tot of brandy, to warm you?’

‘Yes, please.’ Rachel noticed that he poured himself one as well, and swigged it down before he handed hers to her. She sipped it, felt the fire in her throat, and coughed. Duncan smiled briefly and set about reviving the fire, which had all but burnt out while he slept. The few sticks and coals he tipped onto it were the last in the bucket.

‘Ah,’ Duncan murmured, indistinctly.

‘I will fetch more, if you tell me where the bunker is?’

‘No, no. Do not trouble yourself,’ he said, and looked so uncomfortable that Rachel suddenly guessed the truth.

‘There is more coal, isn’t there? You do have more?’

‘Not today, not today,’ he said, with fragile good cheer. ‘I’ve been in a bit of bad bread, lately. But tomorrow I have some work, down on the wharf. I shall buy coal when the day is done, and be warm as toast by nightfall.’

‘But what of tonight?’

‘Well. I have your company to warm my heart, do I not?’ He smiled wearily as he sank into the chair opposite her, and Rachel felt tears well up in her eyes again.

‘Mr Weekes…’

‘Here now, none of that. Tell me what troubles you, my dear, and do not fret over me. I’m a tough old bird, you’ll see.’

‘I… it’s Richard. My husband.’ And your son. Rachel was suddenly unsure whether to continue, but Duncan gazed at her with such sympathy that the words were out before she could stop them. ‘I found out that he… he has been wenching. Right up until the very moment we wed!’ She hung her head, ashamed, and wept again as much from embarrassment as sorrow.

Clumsily, Duncan Weekes put out a gnarled hand and patted hers.

‘Oh, my poor girl. And my foolish boy!’ He shook his head.

‘What should I do?’ said Rachel, desperately.

‘Do?’ Duncan Weekes smiled sadly. ‘Well, you can do nothing, my dear.’

‘Do nothing? But… but he has… he has…’

‘He has kept his wedding vows, you say?’

‘As far as I can discover, yes.’

‘That then is something to be thankful for, is it not?’ said the old man, softly.

‘Thankful?’

‘My dear girl, young men with pretty faces – and even those without them – will always know more of… the world, than young ladies. It was ever so. The world is full of rantipole girls who’ll accept a promise, or even a compliment, as betrothal enough to consummate. Of course you’re shocked – you have been brought up good, and virtuous. But a good many young women have not that advantage, and are led more by their senses than their good sense, if you follow me. Richard has always drawn the morts to him; and like any young man, full of vigour and good health, to expect him not to indulge himself would be like setting sweet flowers before a bee and then bidding it not to sup.’

‘Then such behaviour is to be condoned? Accepted?’

‘Condoned, no, not at all. I say only that it would be a rare and virtuous young man who approached the altar on his wedding day as pure as the day he was born. Perhaps it is behaviour that is to be… expected. The sadness here is that you have found it out, and been wounded by it. Far better that a young lady continues in marriage happily unaware of such past transgressions.’

‘You mean to say that ignorance is bliss?’ said Rachel, bitterly.

‘Sometimes, aye, it is.’

‘Then restraint and virtue in men is naught but an illusion.’

‘Not an illusion, a reality, my dear. It perhaps only wants, now that you know of his folly, an adjustment to what you can understand as virtue. I say again, he has kept to his vows to you – that is something to take comfort in, surely?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Rachel, listlessly. She glanced up, and Duncan Weekes smiled apologetically. ‘I should not have brought this complaint to you. You are his father. It was wrong of me, and I’m sorry.’

‘No, it was not wrong. You are to come to me whenever you need to.’

‘Nothing is turning out the way I had envisaged it,’ she murmured.

‘Ah, my dear girl – nothing ever does! Only try to forgive my boy. What’s done is done, and can’t be altered. He loves you, I am sure of that.’ Rachel considered this, but said nothing.

They sat in companionable silence for a while, as the coals began to seethe and smoke in the hearth – the brandy warmed Rachel far more than the meagre fire. Through the ceiling and walls came a faint, sweet song, repeated over and over, and the thin wail of an unhappy baby. Rachel fumbled in her pocket and drew out her purse. There was money in it to buy supper, and she passed it all to Duncan.

‘What’s this?’ he said startled.

‘Please, take it. Take it and buy some fuel for your fire.’

‘You need not provide for me, my dear. Thank you, but I-’

‘Please take it, or I will be forced to go myself to buy the coal, and then I’ll have smuts all over my dress. Take it. It’s not right that Richard and I dine in warmth by a merry hearth, while you shiver here alone; and I have had my fill of wrong things for today.’

‘You have a kind heart, Mrs Weekes.’

‘Please, call me Rachel. We are family, are we not?’ Duncan Weekes’s face showed his pleasure, even as he fingered the coins uneasily.

‘I do not think Richard would thank you for giving me this, Rachel.’

‘He will not hear of it.’ With luck, he will not notice. ‘I’ll say I bought ribbons with it. Ribbons always befuddle a man, my mother used to say. They know that women must have them, but cannot fathom out the why.’ She smiled, and Duncan chuckled. Rachel finished her brandy and rose to leave, then a further thought occurred to her.

‘May I ask you one more thing, sir? Mrs Alleyn said something to me that lingers in my mind. She said that Richard had been exceptionally loyal to her, during a time of strife. I understood that she meant in years past, while you both were still in her service. Perhaps it is not my business, but I am curious… I wondered if you knew when she might mean?’

She arranged her skirts and shawl, and only then realised that the old man hadn’t answered. She looked up, and was struck by the expression on his face. Duncan’s jaw hung slack, a little open; his eyes were huge and uneasy.

‘What is it?’ said Rachel, startled. Duncan shook his head slightly, and closed his mouth.

‘I cannot say,’ he said, his voice rough. He cleared his throat nervously and rubbed the palms of his hands against his shirt. Rachel stared at him.

‘Mr Weekes?’ she said. ‘Do you know what time she spoke of?’

‘No, child. I do not know. Whatever it was, it’s long past now. I would not trouble yourself with wondering.’ He could not look her in the eye. He patted his pockets as if searching for something, and ran his tongue over his cracked lips.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said softly. What frightens him in my enquiry? ‘It was only a passing curiosity.’ Duncan Weekes sagged visibly in relief, and nodded. She took her leave of him and went back onto the deadened street, where the darkness was complete, the sky a fathomless black. She walked back to Abbeygate Street with a sense of foreboding that bordered on fear. She thought of the welt on the side of Starling’s face; she thought of the two of them lying together, all the time Richard had been courting her. She had no idea how she would react when she next set eyes on her husband.

The house was in darkness, and Rachel waited a while in the kitchen, with dinner set out all around her. She found she had no appetite for it, as the evening grew old and Richard did not appear. Her own relief at his absence troubled her too much. I am bound to him, for all time. What will life be, if I am already pleased when he keeps away? She went upstairs to bed, and sat awhile with her trinket box on her lap, carefully unpinning the lock of her mother’s hair from the lining and holding it to her lips. The hair was smooth and cool; scentless, unfeeling. She shut her eyes and tried to conjure Anne Crofton into the room; tried to hear what advice she would give her daughter. I must learn to love him, there is no other choice. She knew that her mother would have said something similar, if she could. She sent out a different prayer instead. I might have found her, Mother. Tell Papa – I know you are with him. I might have found her. And she will anchor me, when now I am cut adrift.

For a second, Rachel could almost hear her mother – the gentle creak of the boards beneath her tiny, slippered feet; the swish of her skirts and the soft sound of her breathing. But when she opened her eyes the room was empty, of course, and she felt the ache of despair, like a bruise that didn’t heal, but grew deeper all the while. A memory came to her then, unexpectedly – of her mother’s voice rising in fear. Rachel concentrated, frowning, trying to make it clearer. A sunny day, and water sparkling; excitement, laughter. Her father’s hands around her ribs, lifting her; and then that shout from her mother, high and panicky, and in its wake was emptiness. Nothing more would come but the shine of summer colours on water: blue and green and white.

Rachel wanted to sleep with the lock of hair in her hand, but didn’t dare in case she ruined it somehow. In case the ribbon came undone, and scattered the precious stuff. She pinned it back to the velvet, stowed her box away in the drawer, and went to bed. When Richard came in it was night, Rachel didn’t know the hour. The room was frigid, and pitch-black. He came in with no candle, stumbling and loud, and landed heavily on the bed. Rachel lay perfectly still with her knees drawn up in front of her and her elbows tight to her ribs. She fought the urge to scramble away from him, and tried to breathe evenly, so that he would think her sleeping.

‘Rachel,’ he said, his whisper loud enough to rattle the darkness. He reeked of spirits. The mattress sagged as he leaned over her; still she did not move, nor speak. ‘Rachel.’ He pulled her shoulder, trying to roll her towards him. For a second she resisted, but then realised she could not do so and yet feign sleep. So she let him turn her onto her back, and could not keep her breathing steady. It juddered in her chest. She felt his lips on hers, his skin ice-cold from the frosty night; felt his hand brush clumsily across her breasts, cupping each one and squeezing, too roughly; he moved it lower, to her crotch, and pushed his fingers inside her, and the casual, thoughtless way he did so appalled her. Yet still she did not move; she barely breathed, paralysed now by the dread of what he would do next, whether she was sleeping or awake. She felt entirely powerless to stop him, to dissuade him. She was entirely powerless in that, and always would be. But then he sagged bonelessly against her, his head heavy on her chest. ‘Oh, why?’ he murmured, indistinctly. ‘Why can’t you love me?’

Rachel held her breath and made no reply. She had no reply to give him, after all; only that she had wed in hope of coming to know and love him, but that the more she knew him, the less she loved. Soon he was asleep, still lying heavily across her, making it impossible for her to either escape or rest.

After meeting Starling in the abbey, and hearing what she’d had to say, Rachel felt Alice’s absence even more. As though the gap she’d left was a tangible thing, a space with edges and depth and echoes; as unfathomable as the way she’d vanished, so completely – like a murmured word in a crowded room. Rachel felt it everywhere she went, but nowhere stronger than in the house on Lansdown Crescent, where the residents wove their lives, one way or another, around this gaping hole. Treading carefully on such dangerous ground. But Rachel felt it in her own home, too, where Alice had never been. Strangely, she felt the girl missing from her own side; she felt Alice missing from her memories, and from her dreams of the future.

Rachel visited Jonathan Alleyn twice each week, reporting to his mother afterwards, when she could be found. The lady of the house was often secreted away in some part of the house that Rachel didn’t know. She sensed that Mrs Alleyn was lonely and might perhaps welcome somebody to talk to; but at the same time, she had not been made welcome enough to feel comfortable knocking on doors in search of the lady. The weather grew ever colder, and stormier. Rachel came to dread the wind, rolling down the hill as she climbed to Lansdown Crescent, making the strenuous walk even harder; blinding her eyes and tugging at her clothes. She wore the weather like a garment by the time she arrived – stained and dripping for rain; pink-cheeked and sniffling for frost; dishevelled and breathless for wind.

Rachel saw Starling more often than she saw Mrs Alleyn. The red-haired servant seemed to have free run of the house, though she was a kitchen maid. She was a near constant presence; appearing in the corner of Rachel’s eye, flitting up a stair, or beckoning her from the servants’ door to come and exchange a word. And since there was far more to be said and done at the Alleyns’ house than there was in her own, Rachel came to anticipate her visits with a kind of eager anxiety. She thought about them whenever she wasn’t there; about what had recently passed, and what she would do on her next visit. Richard was away from Abbeygate Street more and more, and when he was home didn’t seem to notice her increasing preoccupation. He rarely asked what she did at Lansdown Crescent; only took the money and pocketed it with a distracted smile, and bade her always to send his warm greetings to Mrs Alleyn.

Rachel’s visits were sometimes very short; far shorter than the time it took her to walk there. On one occasion, Jonathan was asleep when she knocked softly and entered; slumped over his desk with a quill in his hand, ink stains all over his fingers. His crossed arms hid what he’d been writing; an empty wine bottle sat next to him, and a stained cup. Rachel had the idea of looking for Alice’s box of letters then, but the thought of being caught doing so made her skin crawl. Besides, Starling said she’d already searched. I must find some way to ask him. Often he sat dumbly while she read, gazing out of the window or directly at her with a startling intensity, saying nothing. When he did that, Rachel found her heart racing in such frenzy that it made her voice shake, and spoiled her reading. Sometimes, she found herself stealing glances at him when his attention was elsewhere; at his face, his hands, his body inside his clothes. That he was a murderer, and that she could sit so close to him, seemed unreal. Each time she thought it a jolt of fear and amazement went through her.

One mild Wednesday afternoon, Rachel walked in on Jonathan in the grip of one of his headaches. He was sitting in the dark with the shutters latched, and when she opened the door the light from the hallway made him recoil. He was at his desk with his head gripped in his hands, trembling; his skin pale and shining with sweat. When Rachel asked, shocked, if she should leave him, he could only give a curt nod, keeping his mouth and eyes tightly shut. Another time she walked into one of his nightmares. He was in his sleeping quarters, and Rachel hesitated to go near him, for decency’s sake; but the noise he was making was terrible to hear, and she worried that he might be feverish again. She lit a lamp and, steeling herself, went to his bedside. He was lying on it fully clothed, and there was no evidence of him having been drinking. He was panting and his body made panicky movements – arms and legs jerking as though he was trying to run from something. His head twisted to and fro on his neck, and he was muttering, spitting out odd words that made no sense.

‘Mr Alleyn,’ said Rachel; quiet and fearful. She cleared her throat and said his name again, more strongly. ‘Mr Alleyn, wake up. You’re having a bad dream…’ At the sound of her voice his body went still, but he continued to breathe rapidly and gave a low moan, as if he was in pain. Tentatively, Rachel put her hand on his forearm and squeezed gently. ‘You must wake, sir,’ she said. And in a heartbeat, he did just that.

His eyes flew open, and he lunged towards her, catching her hand as she tried to retract it.

‘Is she dead? Is she dead?’ he said, in a voice that rasped. Fear washed coldly over Rachel. She remembered his hands around her throat on their first meeting, and the way she’d felt her own death come crowding in like a swarm of flies.

‘Mr Alleyn, please let go. It’s only me. Mrs Weekes… you were having a nightmare.’

‘I tried to make it right,’ he whispered, still clasping her arm. His eyes looked through her, tortured and afraid. His body was wracked by a sudden sob, and Rachel knelt down, trying to prise his fingers from her arm.

‘Tried to make what right, Mr Alleyn?’ He caught her other hand too, squeezing her fingers. Tears streaked down his face.

In spite of her fear, Rachel’s heart softened at the sight of such anguish, and she stopped struggling against him.

‘It was only a nightmare, Mr Alleyn. Rest now. You’re safe here.’ But am I? This man is a killer. But in that moment he didn’t look like a killer; he looked like a frightened boy. Gradually, Jonathan let himself be soothed, and was asleep again within moments. The next time Rachel called, he seemed to have no memory of the incident.

Starling seemed impatient, as if she had expected some instant revelation. Often, the girl appeared by Rachel’s side as she left the Alleyns’ house, and walked partway down the hill with her, always taking her on some hidden route through a tiny alley rather than being seen out on the main street. She walked briskly to keep up with Rachel’s longer strides, and tucked her hands into her armpits for warmth. Rachel always asked to hear something else about Alice; always wanted to know her better. Starling seemed happy to talk about her, as though she’d long wanted the opportunity to do so. Her face lit up when she did; a warmth and animation that sloughed off her habitual expression of suspicion and displeasure. So Rachel learnt of Alice’s penchant for marzipan, and hatred of oysters; her skill at the piano and her flat, tuneless singing voice; her grace, and intelligence. How she had educated Starling, as her own governess had educated her.

‘Mrs Bouchante, she was called. A widow, from France. She taught Alice until she turned sixteen and then left, so I never met her. Alice said she smelled of bitter almonds, and that her skin was as dry as a lizard’s,’ said Starling, with a smile. Rachel heard about Alice’s colour blindness, and her heart that fluttered and kept its own time; about her love of animals, and the little drawings she did of the insects and flowers they saw along the riverbank. ‘I wish I had one to keep. To remember her by. She sent most of them to Lord Faukes.’

‘What was Lord Faukes like?’ asked Rachel one day. ‘Mrs Alleyn says he was a good and great man.’ Starling stopped in her tracks at this, closing off in an instant.

‘He was all guts and garbage; a man who took without asking. He’s good now he’s dead, and I’ll say nothing else about him,’ she snapped. ‘See you again, Mrs Weekes,’ was all the farewell she gave as she turned and walked back up the hill, leaving Rachel startled.

When Rachel next saw Jonathan, he was restless and unable to keep still. He had deep shadows under his eyes, as he paced from chair to desk to window and back again, limping on his lame leg. Rachel watched him uneasily. His movements were jerky, and unpredictable. He spent a good deal of time rummaging in the drawers of his desk, searching for something with a frown of distraction.

‘What are you looking for?’ she asked at last, exasperated. Jonathan looked up with a start, and then froze as if confounded by the question. He stood up slowly, his hands hanging limply at his sides.

‘I… do not remember,’ he said, troubled.

‘Please, come and sit down. Have you not slept?’

‘No, no. I cannot sleep. I do not sleep,’ he muttered, and began leafing randomly through the papers on his desk. ‘The note. The note from the lovers’ tree,’ he said quietly. ‘I was looking for it. I thought… I thought perhaps I had read it wrong. Perhaps there was something in it, some clue I had missed.’

‘The lovers’ tree? What is that? What note?’

‘The note! Not written by my hand, and not by hers… whose then? That is the question!’ His hair was falling into his face and he scraped it back impatiently with fingers that shook. He is exhausted. Without thinking, Rachel moved towards him. She put one hand on his arm to still him, then took his hand and drew him towards his chair, surprised by the warmth of his skin.

‘Mr Alleyn, please come and sit down. Come and sit with me. You are overwrought,’ she said softly. And now I hold that hand that would have choked the life from me, she thought, wonderingly. He would have killed me, and I am told he has killed another. Why then can’t I feel that, in my heart? Why don’t I believe he is a murderer? As if caught off guard by her touch, Jonathan let himself be led. He sat down on the edge of the chair, still frowning absently, and when she took her hand away she felt his fingers cling to hers, just for a second, as though he would have liked the touch to remain. That harrowing look of pain and regret was in his eyes, and Rachel felt pity gnawing at the unease he caused her.

‘You were looking for a note from Alice? A note she left you?’ Rachel asked. With a swell of nerves, she saw her moment to ask. ‘Perhaps it is with all the other letters? I will search for it amongst them, if you tell me where?’ The words sounded so duplicitous to her own ears that her mouth went dry, but Jonathan didn’t seem to notice.

‘Other letters? What other letters?’ He shook his head, and when he spoke his voice was heavy with despair. ‘No, it was a note for Alice. Not written by me, but left in our secret place. A place only she could have told him about. The other… person.’

‘The lovers’ tree? It was a place you used to meet at?’ she asked, and Jonathan nodded. ‘And this… other person, who left her a note. You think that it was a sweetheart?’ Starling swore it could not be so. But if he saw a note?

‘I was told… I was told she’d been seen with another. I did not believe it, not for a heartbeat. Still, I do not… And yet… and yet…’ He shook his head, perplexed. ‘I found a note left for her, with a time and day to meet. It was not signed… but it was not in her hand. Who, then, was she to meet?’ he said, in quiet desperation. Rachel thought for a moment, her strange but ever strengthening loyalty to Alice Beckwith shaping her answer.

‘It could have been entirely innocent, could it not, Mr Alleyn? People are ever quick to impugn a lady for the most harmless of gestures…’

‘That’s why I wished to read it again! But I can’t find it… I’ve looked everywhere… I searched all night. What if I… what if I never saw it? What if my mind is playing tricks on me again?’ He chewed savagely at his lower lip, and Rachel saw a thin line of blood spring up where he tore the skin.

‘Stop. Stop doing that.’ She took his hand again, pulled it away from his mouth. ‘You’re exhausted, and you need to eat something…’

‘I will not eat until-’

‘You will eat, sir. I will see you do so, or I will come no more; for I won’t sit by and watch you sicken.’

‘Watch me sicken?’ He almost laughed. ‘Madam, I sickened years and years ago.’

‘That much I can see, and perhaps it is time for you to stop revelling in it so,’ said Rachel, crisply. Jonathan frowned as she went to the door and called to Dorcas to bring coffee, bread and cheese.

‘Let me have some wine if I must take something.’

‘It’s not yet noon, sir. And there are more than enough wine-soaked men in my life as it is.’ Jonathan watched her steadily as she came to sit back down. ‘Do not eye me so, sir. I know your opinion of my husband well enough; I’m sure I don’t need to explain any further.’

‘You are different today, Mrs Weekes. You are bolder.’

‘I am tired too, Mr Alleyn.’

‘The kind of tired that sleep does not cure?’

‘Yes. That kind.’ For a moment they looked at one another, and neither one blinked.

‘Then perhaps we begin to understand each other,’ Jonathan murmured at last. Rachel looked away, suddenly selfconscious.

When the tray was brought up Rachel had some coffee as well. She cut a thick slice of bread and topped it with cheese for Jonathan, and watched him steadily while he ate. He seemed to recover his appetite as he did so, reaching for more without her prompting. The hot drink steamed the window glass, obscuring the view of brown autumn trees and city roofs. It gave the impression of the room closing in around them, isolating them from the rest of the house, the rest of the world. Rachel was surprised to find this comforting.

‘You said to me before that you wished to unsee things you had seen, and undo things you had done,’ she said at last. ‘Will you tell me which things?’ Jonathan stopped eating at once, letting the last piece of bread fall from his fingers.

‘Why would you wish to hear such things?’

‘Because… because I do not understand you, Mr Alleyn. But I wish to. And because I think, perhaps, long years of holding these things to yourself, and staying silent, have not helped you to forget them. Perhaps if you spoke of them, if you shared them…’

‘You would take up half my burden for me?’ he said bitterly. Rachel watched him, silently. He chewed his final mouthful and swallowed it laboriously. ‘Such things are not fit for a woman’s ears.’

‘Oh, what is a woman, but a human being?’ Rachel replied, irritated. ‘You haven’t borne the knowledge with any great stoicism, or grace. Why should I fare any worse than you?’ Jonathan stared at her and, slowly, his face filled with something like dread, and she understood that some part of him wanted to speak, and yet feared to.

‘It is not the knowledge I must bear, but the deeds,’ he said. ‘I have never spoken of them.’

‘Try it, sir. Only try it, and then let us see,’ she said.

‘I don’t know where to start.’ Rachel thought quickly; to ask him outright about Alice would get her nowhere.

‘Tell me how your leg was injured. Tell me of that battle,’ she suggested.

‘Battle? No, indeed. It was at B… Badajoz.’

His voice failed him, as if the word were too much; it was spoken in a hoarse whisper, raw and fearful. ‘It was no battle. It was a hell on earth, a heinous orgy of destruction and grief… No.’ He shook his head vehemently. ‘I cannot start there, for that is the end, not the beginning.’

‘Tell me of the beginning of the war, then. I was still young, at that time. My father didn’t encourage me to hear much about it, but I saw news of our victories on the side of the mail coach. They would decorate it with ribbons, too.’

‘You were still young? As was I, Mrs Weekes, as was I. I was that concerned with assembling my baggage, and with turning out my horse just so, that I’d given almost no thought to fighting. To why we were going; to what a war would be. I had not known what it would be. Jars of coral tooth powder and pomade, with silver lids – that’s what I spent my last few days trying to find. Isn’t that a perfect folly? That’s what I thought I needed. A jar of hair pomade with a silver lid.’ He shook his head incredulously.

‘You were a cavalry officer, then?’

‘Yes. Moths – that was the first thing. Do you believe in signs, Mrs Weekes? Portents, I mean?’ he said intently, leaning towards her with a gleam of desperation in his eyes, as if he could somehow change any of what had passed.

‘I…’ She had been about to deny it. ‘I should not; yet I see them, sometimes.’ The morning of my wedding, when that thrush sang its heart out, keeping its eye on me. Trying to warn me.

‘Enlightened thought calls them the product of a weak and superstitious mind. But perhaps we do not yet understand all there is to know about this world, and this life. I think such signs should be heeded.’ Jonathan nodded gravely. ‘The first sign I saw was the moths. I took a wound – you will laugh to hear how. Some fierce battles were fought, that first summer of 1808. We fought the French in Portugal, before we even crossed into Spain. We landed like conquering heroes and told the Portuguese people their time of oppression was over, even though we’d already lost men and horses in the surf, trying to land the boats… Before we even set foot on the peninsula, we lost men. But still we thought we were invincible. On the very first march, men fell out of line in the heat. I remember looking at the dust cloud above us and thinking we would all be smothered beneath it. The troops were green novices, weakened by the sea crossing. They’d joined up for a wage, or a meal, or for the glory the recruiters told them would be theirs; and I was as green a novice as any of them, for all I was an officer, and mounted upon a fine horse. My first wound… my first wound was a scorpion sting.’

Afterwards, he knew to shake out his boots before putting them on in the morning. The sting felt like a jab from a red-hot needle, in the arch of his left foot; he kicked the boot off and watched, revolted, as the half-crushed creature limped away. It was yellowish-brown, about the length of his thumb. He examined the wound but there wasn’t much to see at first – a small hole leaking clear fluid, around which the immediate area had gone white, the outer area a mottled red. The pain of the initial sting soon faded, to leave a low throbbing only. Jonathan rinsed his foot with cold water, then pulled on his boots and thought no more of it.

A battle was brewing; they were at the village of Vimiero, and the French were coming. His blood rose at the thought – he had yet to be tested in any real way against the enemy; he was excited and afraid; he was keen to know how he would prove himself as an officer. Within two days, however, Jonathan could think of little else but the pain in his foot. Had he been an infantry man, and not mounted on Suleiman, he would not have been able to march. He would have been left behind, his company command replaced. At the end of the second day he slept with his boots on. He was sure that if he ever got his left boot off, he would certainly never get it back on again. His head was pounding, he felt weak and dizzy. The foot with the sting was so hot he worried that it might set fire to his stocking. It felt huge, heavy, and very wrong. He kept the boot on for a second reason too – he didn’t want to look at his foot.

Then came the heat and fury of the battle at Vimiero, and Jonathan learned how he would prove himself in the fray – capable, outwardly calm, while inside his heart shuddered in outrage. When it ended the British were victorious, the French routed and in retreat, though there were heavy losses on both sides. Wellesley and several other senior officers wanted to pursue them, all the way to Lisbon. They were denied this by high command; the French were to be allowed to take their wounded and retreat unmolested. They were even, eventually, to have the use of English ships to leave Portugal, a decision for which the British commanders would be recalled to London to give account. On the strewn and smoking battlefield, French and British soldiers greeted one another as they searched the fallen for men they could save. They shared a few words, a laugh, a pinch of tobacco. Dazed and exhausted, Jonathan watched them with a growing sense of unreality; for if the men did not hate one another, how could they kill one another? Why would they? He was baffled by it; felt apart from the rest of them for being unable to understand. That was his first real taste of battle, and it left him numb, bewildered, and frightened.

When he dismounted from Suleiman at day’s end, Jonathan couldn’t even set his left foot down. Captain Sutton, his company second in command, noticed the way he grimaced and hovered the leg. He forced Major Alleyn to sit down on the crumbled remains of a village house, and when pulling at the boot caused him to scream in agony, Sutton cut it from his leg instead, using a short, sharp utility knife. The stink that emerged with the bloated foot caused them both to blench. Captain Sutton helped him to the field hospital, gave him brandy and then left to return to the men.

The surgeons worked in open-sided tents under big, yellow lamps. They worked right through the hot night, engaged in what was often a futile battle to save the gravely wounded men. Since his foot was not life-threatening, Jonathan sat to one side and waited his turn, watching in mounting horror. The surgeons sawed and they stitched; they dipped their hands inside men to pick out shrapnel; they fished for musket balls with long forceps; they plastered over belly wounds, no matter what damage had been done inside the man. When they ran out of plaster, they packed wounds with cotton rags and the shirts of dead men, and when they ran out of those they did not pack them at all, but left them open to the night sky and waited for the men to die. Which they did, crying piteously for God or their mothers until their voices left them. The night clamoured with the sounds of their agony. Jonathan sat, and he watched, and he waited. It took around twenty minutes to amputate a leg through the hip joint, he learned. Only a stick of wood kept that man from biting through his own tongue. There was nothing to relieve pain but watered-down rum, which the men vomited back up in their shock. The smell of blood and rum and bile was everywhere, impossible to escape – to breathe was to breathe it in. Sweat ran from the surgeons’ heads into the wounds they were trying to close.

It was near sunrise before Jonathan was seen to. He climbed onto a table upon which, moments before, he’d seen a man pass his last moments with blood and piss leaking from his shattered body. He felt the man’s fluids seeping through his own shirt and breeches. The surgeon took one look at his bloated foot and then glared at Jonathan with disgust dawning through the wooden exhaustion on his face. He looked disgusted that Jonathan should trouble him with so trivial a wound, and Jonathan was disgusted with himself as well. He was disgusted with the war, and the ways of men, and the whole world. He stared up as the surgeon cut away his stained stocking. Underneath, his foot was darkly purple, huge and stinking; a crusted layer of pus had dribbled from the scorpion sting and dried on his feverish skin. It smelled like foul meat and corruption. Calmly, the surgeon took up his bloody scalpel and sliced open the skin around the sting, so that all the poison and filth inside could run out. A splatter of rank and rotting blood, to join the unspeakable mess on the floor. Jonathan was too exhausted, too shocked at the pain to make a sound. He gazed up at the lamps, and that’s when he noticed the moths. Huge black moths, the biggest he’d ever seen – the size of the palm of his hand. They circled the lamps, drawn to the light, on wings as black as pitch and so velvet soft that they made no sound at all. In his near delirium, Jonathan saw them as the souls of the men who had died that night, trying to find a way back into the light, into life. He took them as a sign, a stark warning, that they were all dead men.

‘I should have heeded that warning,’ Jonathan said to Rachel. ‘I should have fled. Better to have been called a coward outright, perhaps, than to have carried on, and been a part of what came later. To this day I cannot abide the smell of rum… The smell of it returns me there, to that night, and it’s like a nightmare I can’t wake up from.’ Jonathan’s face was colourless in the wan light of the day; beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. For a while Rachel feared he might faint, but he did not; he stayed hunched in his chair. Rachel swallowed, struggling for something to say.

‘I have heard it said that war changes a man; that he is forced to address his own true nature, his own essence, by the extremity of his situation…’

‘War changes a man, it is true. For the most part, it changes him from being a person to being meat. Meat and offal, to be left lying for flies and stray dogs to consume.’ He glanced up at her. ‘You flinch at this, Mrs Weekes? It is the truth, and you wanted to hear it.’

‘I know I did. And I do. The truth is important, for nothing festers like a falsehood, this much I know.’ She watched him as she said this, in case it would have some effect on him, but there was nothing. Only his dark, pained eyes in his pale face, and the sense of a vast tide of feeling pent up behind both, causing chaos there.

‘Some things are worse than falsehood, I think. Some falsehoods can be kind,’ he murmured.

‘You carry a great weight of experience inside you. A great weight of bad memory.’

‘So great I can never be rid of it, and it taints everything I have done or will ever do since. I can do no right, now; not after the wrongs I have done. After Badajoz… after Badajoz I did a kind thing. A good thing, I think, though many lies were woven around it. It was the last thing I did in that war, my last action in it, and with it I hoped somehow to begin to make amends. But I can’t think of it without thinking of everything else, of what compelled me to do it. Every single thing I have done since the war is tainted by the things I did during the war. Do you see?’ Suddenly, he clasped his head in his hands as if it hurt him. ‘I could give everything I owned to a poor man in the street, and it would not be generosity. It would be a symptom of my guilt, my disease.’

‘In war a man is compelled to fight, and to kill. It is duty, sir, not sin,’ Rachel ventured.

‘Compelled to kill, yes. To kill in battle, when under attack, or in the defence of others. Would that that was all I did, during those years.’

‘You mean to say you killed when you should not have? You killed… innocents?’ she whispered.

Jonathan’s eyes bored into hers, and when he spoke his voice was as cold and sharp as a blade.

‘I have seen and done things that would send you screaming from this room, Mrs Weekes.’ Rachel’s heart beat faster; nervous tension made it hard to breathe.

‘In war-’

‘On the march towards the Spanish border in the autumn of 1808, after we had allowed the French to leave the field, defeated and weakened, or so we thought, they fled before us, destroying everything in their path. All food, all water supplies, all shelter. We came to a village where every last soul had been put to the sword, for the crime of having us come to their aid. A young girl… a young girl, not more than fourteen or fifteen lay in the middle of the street. Her face was comely, even in death. She had been crushed beneath a vast stone that they’d placed on her chest so that she could neither breathe nor move as they ravaged her. Who knows how many times – the lower parts of her body were a ruin. Nearby lay the corpses of a man and woman, and of smaller children, three or four of them. Her parents and siblings, it seemed, who had been made to watch this most brutal spectacle before being slain themselves.’ He paused and swallowed convulsively, and Rachel fought to keep her horror from showing.

‘A while later, two or three miles from the village, we came upon a French infantryman who’d been left behind by his comrades. He was wounded in both legs – not severely, but he’d grown too weak to carry on. But he had a good deal of life left in him. He lived a good long while.’ Jonathan gazed at Rachel, and now his eyes were quite empty. ‘There was a man amongst our foot, an Irishman called McInerney. The raped maiden had borne a likeness to his daughter, he said. The wounded Frenchman lived long enough to plead for mercy as McInerney took off his skin, a strip at a time. A good many of us watched him, including myself; we did nothing to hinder him. But this bloody revenge did nothing to slake the men’s anger. If anything we grew angrier still. That beast part had awoken in each one of us, and every vile thing we did and saw from then on only made it stronger. That is what war does to men, Mrs Weekes. That is what it did to me.’

‘Enough!’ Rachel gasped. Her hands flew to cover her mouth. She’d been trying to show no reaction but this was too much, and the room was spinning. Jonathan gave her a pitying look.

‘Now you wish you hadn’t urged me to speak. I should apologise, because you had no idea what you were asking, but I cannot. I live with these things. This is what I know the world to be, and if you understand that, then you will understand why I want no part of it.’

There was a pause in which neither one of them spoke. Rachel struggled to compose herself.

‘Don’t cry, Mrs Weekes,’ Jonathan said quietly. He reached out as if to cover her hand with his, but she snatched it away and saw him retreat, turning in on himself again.

‘Forgive me… it is only that…’ She shook her head, helplessly.

‘It is only that I repel you now, more than when we first met, though my room stank of death that time – one of Starling’s little pranks – and I near killed you.’

‘No! It is only that… when the fight is to stay in command of oneself, the slightest kindness from another can… can be the ruin of composure. Is it not so?’ She blotted her eyes and looked up to find the ghost of a smile on Jonathan’s face.

‘And you wonder why I baulk from telling it all to you. You wonder why I baulk from that kindness,’ he said bitterly.

‘I’m quite all right, Mr Alleyn. Only unaccustomed to hearing… such things.’ She took a deep breath. Jonathan had sunk back in his chair and was gnawing at his lip again. ‘You need to rest. You need to sleep, sir,’ she said.

‘You have some measure, now, of what I see when I close my eyes,’ he replied.

‘Perhaps a tonic of some kind… a sleeping draught?’ Jonathan shook his head.

‘Such oblivion is dangerously compelling, Mrs Weekes. For… for years I relied on tincture of opium to liberate me from this. It brings on a wonderful kind of living death… a release from all thought and care. At one time I lay near to death because if it. Only my mother saved me then, removing the stuff from me, and leaving me to suffer in its absence. She saved my life, I think, though I did not thank her for it at the time. I’m not sure I thank her for it now. It would be simpler to die, I sometimes think.’

‘Our lives are God-given,’ Rachel said softly. She shrugged. ‘It is not for us to decide when we relinquish them, and what would be simpler is not pertinent.’

‘Is that so?’ he said, his mouth twisting in disgust.

He stared blackly at her for a moment, and then erupted out of his chair. ‘You say it is for God to decide, then? Does God put guns in men’s hands? Does God make men rape young girls to death? Does he take aim with flying shrapnel and artillery fire? Does he place one fateful finger on each man on a battlefield and say “fever, gangrene, dysentery”? No!’ His voice had risen to a shout, and Rachel didn’t dare reply. He seemed to tower over her so she stood up, knotting her fingers in front of her to keep them still, and watched as Jonathan strode to the bookcase and fetched down one of the large glass jars he kept there. It took some effort to lift it; the liquid inside sloshed. Rachel could sense the weightiness of it, and inside was a wrinkled, knobbed thing, trailing tentacles from its underside. ‘Do you know what this is?’ he said.

‘No,’ Rachel whispered.

‘This is a man’s brain. He was a criminal – a murderer, in fact.’ Rachel stared at it in horror.

‘How… how came you to have such a thing?’

‘I befriended one of the doctors my mother sent to me. An anatomist. He thought he could cure the pains in my head by cutting a hole in my skull the size of a sovereign, to relieve the pressure. By exposing my brain to the sun and sky I would be cured, so he proclaimed. What do you think? Should I have let him?’

‘Sweet Lord, no, he would have killed you, surely?’ said Rachel. Inside the jar the brain was moving, the cords beneath it wafting like the sentient tendrils of some creature. She began to feel queasy.

‘He said not. He said he had experimented up in London, upon a woman who’d been driven quite insane by the deaths of her six children. He thought the procedure would let the ill humours out of her mind, and restore her reason.’

‘And did it?’ Rachel’s voice was near strangled.

‘Well, she raves no more. She speaks no more either, nor walks, nor eats. They feed her through a tube, and when they stop, she will die.’

‘Why do you tell me this?’

‘I would make you see, Mrs Weekes. I befriended this doctor, though I did not let him carve my skull. I went with him to watch the opening of cadavers brought down from the gallows; I… I wanted to learn how the body worked. I wanted to find the place inside a man where the soul resides; I wanted to be sure, again, of its existence. Because otherwise we are just machines, aren’t we? Like the digesting duck – like that copper mouse? So I watched, and I studied, and this is what I found out: we are just machines, Mrs Weekes! We eat and we sleep and we shit and then we do it all again, just like the other beasts that walk this earth. And when we die it is because another man has broken some part of us – removed some cog from the machine so that it may not run. And this, this-’ He shook the brain in its jar so that the fluid sloshed and the lid rattled; he took one slow step towards her, then another. ‘This is what decides it. Not God. Not fate. So I ask you, Mrs Weekes, if another man may decide when I should die, why then should I not decide it for myself?’

Jonathan Alleyn stood in front of her, eyes snapping; holding the jar out in front of him like some gruesome gift. His hands were white with the effort of gripping its smooth sides; shudders ran up his arms.

‘We are not mere machines, sir. I am sure of it. Man was made for a higher purpose… in God’s image…’ said Rachel, shakily, fighting the urge to run from him. She could not take her eyes from the greyish thing, the dead thing, in the jar. Is that truly what I keep inside my skull? It seemed desperately wrong that it should have been torn away from its owner and kept in such a hideous manner, for living eyes to look upon. Such things are meant to stay hidden.

‘In God’s image?’ Jonathan laughed then – a mirthless sound. ‘Then God is a murderous bastard, Mrs Weekes, and you are a wilfully stupid woman.’ Rachel flinched, cut by the insult.

‘What then of love?’ she said desperately. ‘Where in that machine of blood and bone does love reside, Mr Alleyn?’

‘Love?’ he spat. He stared at her blankly as if he didn’t know the word, and then his eyes blazed anew. Anger disfigured his face, turned his lips bloodless and thin, put deep furrows between his brows. It made him look bestial indeed. ‘Love is an illusion. Love is a myth. Love is a story we tell ourselves to make living more bearable! And it is a lie!’ he roared, lifting the jar high above their heads.

Rachel froze. Jonathan’s sudden rage assaulted her like a flare of agony, so intense it slowed time, and made everything else hollow and unreal in comparison. In that moment, she glimpsed its black, ravaged heart; the look in Jonathan’s eyes chilled her. He can’t even see me any more. Then his arms came down abruptly, swinging with tremendous force. At the last second Rachel managed to take a step backwards, and so the jar exploded into shards at her feet, not over her head.

Silence rang in her ears. The reek of spirits rushed to fill the room, stinging her eyes and nose, bringing tears to blur her vision. There was a stinging from her leg, too – blood was welling from a cut above her ankle, a neat slice through stockings and skin. The murderer’s brain had come to rest on the toe of her right shoe. When Rachel moved her foot she felt its soggy weight. It rolled away sluggishly, shining wet and looking more alive than it should. Her gorge rose; she shuddered and clamped her hands over her mouth. Jonathan was breathing hard, staring straight ahead without blinking; his empty hands hung at his sides. A sliver of glass had flown up and nicked his cheekbone, and a thin line of blood ran straight down from it, looking like a scarlet tear. Gradually, Rachel saw some awareness return to his expression; he blinked, and then his eyes widened, and he swallowed. As if released by this, she stepped past him hurriedly, her heel grinding a fragment of broken glass into dust. Her walk became a run, and she left him there, standing in silence, as she pulled open the door and fled.

At the bottom of the stairs two figures were waiting for her – Starling rushing from the door in the panelling, and Josephine Alleyn coming from the front parlour. Rachel stopped and leant on the newel post to catch her breath.

‘Mrs Weekes! I heard a terrible noise, I feared…’ Mrs Alleyn chose not to say what she had feared. Her face had worn panic, but soon resettled itself.

‘He… the jar… I think…’ Rachel fought for words. ‘I am not injured,’ she said.

‘But, you are. Your ankle… come – come at once and sit down. Starling, why do you loiter? Send up some tea, and some warm water and cloths.’

‘Madam,’ Starling muttered, scowling as she vanished. Josephine led Rachel through to the parlour, and seated her on the couch.

‘I do hope my son has not… What is that dreadful stench?’ Mrs Alleyn recoiled, putting her fingers under her nose.

‘Oh, I can hardly tell you!’ Rachel cried. She felt the liquid sloshing around in her shoes, between her toes, and nausea washed through her again. ‘It was one of his… specimen jars. The h-human brain. He… dropped it.’ Mrs Alleyn leant away from Rachel, revolted.

‘Please,’ she muttered. ‘Take off your shoes and stockings immediately. Falmouth! Take these things away. Clean and dry the shoes, if you can, but do not bother with the stockings – burn them. And send Dorcas to my room to find a clean pair for Mrs Weekes.’

‘My thanks, Mrs Alleyn,’ said Rachel, wearily.

The stockings that Dorcas brought were knitted silk, far finer and softer than Rachel’s woollen ones. Josephine Alleyn watched her wash her feet and put them on with an expression that hovered between compassion and froideur.

‘Tell me, Mrs Weekes, was this a deliberate attack by my son?’ she asked, at last.

‘I do not think so. That is… he meant to smash the thing, in his anger… but I do not think he meant to injure me.’ But he would have, perhaps, had I not stepped back. Without even knowing he did so. The thought sent her a shiver.

‘What had angered him so?’

‘I… it was my fault. I spoke of love. I thought to… soothe him, to reassure him, when he had grown agitated. But the effect was quite the opposite.’

‘Yes. It would have been,’ said Mrs Alleyn. When Rachel looked up she found the older woman studying her. ‘But you must know, Mrs Weekes – you who have also lost people – that love can be as cruel a thing as any under the sun.’

‘Yes, I suppose it can be.’

‘When I first invited you here to introduce you to Jonathan, I told you, did I not, that I sensed some strength in you?’

‘You did, Mrs Alleyn.’

‘That was the strength I sensed, for it is in me too. It is the strength that comes from suffering, and surviving it. My son does not have it, and so his wounds do not heal.’

‘You speak of your own grief at losing your husband, and your father?’ At this, Mrs Alleyn’s face fell out of its steady composure for once. Her eyelids flickered down, her lower lip shook, just for a moment.

‘I had but two years of marriage to Mr Robert Alleyn, before his untimely death forced me to return to my father. They were the happiest two years of my life,’ she said, words weighty and cold with sorrow. In that moment, Rachel saw Mrs Alleyn differently. She saw a woman, alone and afraid, rather than a grand and powerful lady. Impulsively, she took the other woman’s hand in both of hers and held it tightly, as much for her own comfort as for Mrs Alleyn’s.

‘I do fear that I shall never be that happy,’ Rachel said, with quiet yearning. ‘For such love – passionate love – I have never known.’

As though a door had closed, Josephine Alleyn retreated from her.

‘Do not wish for it,’ she said. ‘Such love will use you ill, like as not. It used me ill. It used my son ill.’ She stared down at their clasped hands so pointedly that Rachel released her hold, confused.

‘But you would not wish to have never felt it at all, surely?’ she said. Mrs Alleyn did not answer at once, and thoughts paraded behind her eyes.

‘Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps I value the lessons it taught me, more than anything. The strength that losing it gave me. A woman needs that strength, to survive the ordeals this world will devise for us. The ordeals men will devise for us.’ She said this so grimly that Rachel did not know how to answer.

When Falmouth returned her shoes Rachel immediately smelt the preserving spirits still on them. She didn’t ever want to put them back on her feet, but saw little option. Mrs Alleyn wrinkled her nose and scowled.

‘Well. You will have to wear them to go home, Mrs Weekes, I cannot lend you any of mine. I have always had very dainty feet, but yours… But then do burn them, and find yourself another pair. This should cover your expenses, and you may keep the stockings.’ She fetched coins from a nearby drawer and handed them over.

‘You are very kind, Mrs Alleyn.’

‘But are you, Mrs Weekes? And are you kind enough?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Will you come again to my son, in spite of this… latest mishap?’ She asked it abruptly, almost impatiently. If I say no, she will waste no more time with me.

‘I… I must have a chance to rest, and to think, Mrs Alleyn.’

‘To think?’ she echoed, and then waved her hand. ‘Very well. Take your time, Mrs Weekes.’

When Rachel got home she gave her shoes to a pauper, and found that the foul smell had got into the stockings Mrs Alleyn had given her. She dropped them, pinched between thumb and finger, into a pail of soapy water; then sat near the front window and waited for Richard, lost in thought. Jonathan Alleyn filled her mind: the things he had told her about the war; the way he had lost control in his anger. Is Starling right about him? Could he have done Alice harm, even if he didn’t intend it, and doesn’t remember it? The thought was somehow more troubling to her now than it had been in the beginning. But not killed her, said the echo, in hope. Not that. If there truly had been a letter for Alice from some unknown other person… could that person not also have made her disappear? Or helped her to? She could be alive.

A knock at the door startled her up. It was a smut-faced boy with a note for her; she gave him a farthing and he scampered away. The note was written on a small scrap of paper, the torn corner of a bigger sheet. The ink was as black as soot, the writing well slanted and done with extravagant loops, untidily, as if hurried. The note contained few words, but those were enough to still her. Forgive me. Jon.^a Alleyn. Rachel folded this tiny note into her palm and held it until the paper turned as warm and soft as skin. The other note is the key to this – the note to Alice from the lovers’ tree. Did she betray him for another? Is it the war that plagues him, or his secret guilt? I must know.

For several days, she did not return to Lansdown Crescent. She needed to let herself settle, to take a breath, to understand what she thought and felt a little better. To understand why she kept Jonathan Alleyn’s note tucked into her trinket box, and reread it as if it contained some important and complicated instruction that she needed to learn by heart. It had been too long since she’d visited Duncan Weekes, so she took him a beef pie, still warm from the oven. They sat to either side of his mean hearth and ate it from plates on their laps, with a mug of hot watered brandy each, talking about small things and pleasant memories. The old man seemed in good spirits, and Rachel was keen to clear her thoughts for a while, so she mentioned nothing of the Alleyns, or her difficult involvement with them.

She went with Harriet Sutton and Cassandra to buy new shoes with the money Mrs Alleyn had given her, on a day of such pervading chill that the chief topic of conversation was the distant dream of the coming spring and summer; the picnics and boat trips they would take together; the short-sleeved dresses they would wear, the flowers in their hat bands.

‘With the coins she gave you, you could buy a far finer pair,’ said Harriet, as the cobbler measured Rachel’s feet, and she chose a style from his design book.

‘I know. But this way we can all go and have tea afterwards, and I can treat us to cakes to go with it. If you would like to?’

‘Oh, can we?’ said Cassandra, her face lighting up.

‘Those old shoes of mine were far too lightweight for walking right across the city two times in the week, as I now must. A simple, sturdy pair like this will serve far better.’

‘And Mr Weekes will not mind? Your spending money on us?’ Harriet asked this quietly, for Rachel’s ears only.

‘He will not know of it,’ she replied. ‘And if he did, why should he begrudge me the rare pleasure of entertaining friends? I know, in truth, that he wishes me to be out in society more.’

‘Oh, I am sure he would not begrudge it.’ Harriet smiled again, but her eyes showed some misgiving. ‘But perhaps we are not quite the society he would encourage you into.’ She thinks of the money he lost at cards, and she knows it was not the first time. She knows how he hoped I would make him richer. Rachel found that she was not embarrassed by this, but grateful for her friend’s understanding. ‘It is an adjustment, is it not?’ Harriet went on, kindly. ‘The pocket money my father used to give me was far more than I had to spend during my first years as Captain Sutton’s wife.’

‘Well, perhaps that is also true for me. But it has been many years since I had any money to spend whatsoever. Do not discourage me from enjoying a small bonus such as this,’ said Rachel, with a smile.

‘Oh don’t, Mama! Don’t discourage her,’ said Cassandra imploringly. She turned from examining the many-coloured swatches of fabric and leather on the counter, her black hair swinging like a sombre pennant.

‘Listen to how she pleads! I never knew a girl more enamoured of cake as this one,’ said Harriet. ‘Or one so spoilt by her parents to have become so.’ Cassandra widened her eyes, quite artfully, her demeanour gravely slighted. ‘See how she tricks me!’ Harriet laughed.

‘Cassandra, my dear girl, I can think of no better reason to trick your mother than for cake,’ said Rachel mischievously. ‘But in this instance you are quite safe – no such tactics are needed. Cake will be had.’ The little girl went back to the swatches, and Rachel smiled at her mother. ‘Let me, dear Mrs Sutton, to thank you for all of your many small kindnesses since we met,’ she said.

But Rachel could not stay away from Lansdown Crescent for good. Jonathan Alleyn took a deep breath when he saw her.

‘I didn’t think you would come again,’ he said stiffly.

‘Well,’ said Rachel, as she stepped into his study. She wrinkled her nose. ‘The stink of that… liquid still lingers.’

‘The ethanol… I know. Starling has scrubbed and scrubbed, much to her distaste. But to no avail.’

‘I daresay it will fade, in time.’

‘As will the memory of what caused it, I hope. Mrs Weekes,’ he said, looking down at the offending patch of floor. ‘Mrs Weekes, forgive me. To behave in such a manner was…’

‘Unforgivable?’ she supplied. Jonathan glanced up in dismay, and relaxed a little when he caught the humour in Rachel’s eyes.

‘Yes. Unforgivable. But here you are. I am… glad.’

‘Your temper is your enemy, sir. You must not let it command you.’

‘Yes. It was not always so, but…’ He rubbed at his face, then yawned uncontrollably.

‘Have you still not slept since I saw you last?’ said Rachel, incredulously.

‘Perhaps I have… a little. I don’t remember.’ He looked up again with a bitter smile. ‘Sleep is the soul’s ease, remember, and I have none.’

‘Let’s not have this again. I do not believe we can lose our souls, or even that they can change. Like life, they are God-given, and immutable, and if I risk another of your rages to say so, then so be it. But perhaps the soul may be wounded; perhaps it may sicken, and retreat deep inside us,’ said Rachel. Jonathan slumped, as if her words exhausted him.

‘Some things are easy to say, more difficult to prove.’ He turned away and sat in the chair behind his desk, staring listlessly at the clutter that covered it.

Rachel thought for a moment, and then went to the shelves. ‘Do you mean to cast another of my specimens at me, in revenge?’ said Jonathan.

‘No. I mean to show you some proof.’ She held out her hand to him, and in her palm sat the clockwork copper mouse. ‘You were meditating on what made people, and animals, different from automata, you told me. Was it really necessary to craft such an exquisite toy in the process? Or did you do it for the pleasure of it?’

‘I… I don’t know.’ He frowned.

‘This is a beautiful thing, Mr Alleyn. Truly, a beautiful thing, and it came from within you. From your heart and soul to your hand.’ Rachel wound the key and watched the little mouse run. Jonathan watched it too.

‘I was thinking of Alice, when I made it,’ he said. ‘She loved… all creatures. Small, furry things; helpless things. She had a pet harvest mouse for a while, when she was a child. It had lost a leg to the farmer’s scythe, and she nursed it. She kept it in a tinder box, and named it Harold.’ He paused, watching the mouse run as if he’d never seen it before. ‘Did you ever hear such a ridiculous name for a mouse?’ He smiled at the memory. Rachel swallowed, ever uneasy in the face of his shifting emotions. They seemed to race through him like clouds in a blustery sky.

‘There, then,’ she said softly. ‘It is as I said. Your soul is intact, sir. It’s only your heart that’s broken.’ Jonathan Alleyn gave her a long look, and when the copper mouse stopped running he took it from her, and held it in his cupped hands. ‘You… you slept once before, as I read to you, Mr Alleyn. I wonder if you might again?’ she said.

‘I’m in no mood for poetry, Mrs Weekes,’ said Jonathan. ‘And sleeping in this chair makes my body ache.’

‘I brought something other than poetry to read today. Something to take your thoughts away from your own troubles, and fix them on far-off times and places. Why not recline, while I read it?’

‘You mean to tuck me into bed like a child?’

‘I mean to do no such thing. But if it’s sleep we’re aiming for, then you may take yourself to bed without fear of embarrassing me.’

Jonathan watched her steadily for a while, and then rubbed at his eyes so fiercely that he turned them red. He rose unsteadily and crossed to the far end of the room, to the doorway that led through to his shadowy sleeping quarters. There he paused.

‘When I thought you would not come again, I… I liked it not. Will you… will you come again soon, Mrs Weekes?’ he said. Rachel faltered to hear him sound so vulnerable. Does he need me, now?

‘As soon as you wish it, Mr Alleyn,’ she said. Jonathan nodded, and turned away from her. Rachel heard the bed creak as he lay down upon it.

‘Whatever it is you plan to read, I’ll hear precious little of it if you remain right over there,’ he called out to her. Rachel approached the darkened threshold, and knew that she must not cross it. She fetched the chair from his desk and positioned it near the doorway, then took out the book she’d brought with her, brand new, the spine pristine.

‘I haven’t read this yet myself, so we will begin it together. It’s a novel by Sir Walter Scott, and the title is Ivanhoe.’

‘A novel? I don’t care for novels.’

‘How many have you read?’ she countered, and was met with silence. ‘As I thought. A good many gentlemen claim to have no interest and find no merit in a fictional story, when they haven’t given themselves the proper chance to sample one,’ she said.

‘Men’s minds have greater cares and responsibilities than women’s. What is there to be gained from wasting time reading the fancies of others? Such things are for the entertainment of young boys.’

‘Listen, and perhaps you will find out what’s to be gained,’ Rachel replied, tartly. There was a loaded silence from the unlit room, and so she began to read.

She read for an hour or more, until her mouth was dry and she had reached that state of deep tranquillity that came when she was carried away by a piece of writing. Finding herself at a natural pause in the text, she listened. From the darkness the only sound was of heavy, regular breathing. He sleeps. Rachel closed her eyes for a moment, filled with a powerful sense of satisfaction. Before leaving she sat a while in silence, and found herself wishing she might look in on him in his sleep, and see his face in repose for once, free from anger and fear and misery.

Starling had been waiting for Mrs Weekes to quit the house for a good long while. Her visits to Jonathan seemed to grow longer every time, and Starling struggled to find good reasons to remain within earshot of the front door closing. When at last she heard it, she darted quickly up the servants’ stair and caught the woman’s attention with a stifled hiss. Mrs Weekes turned quickly, with a startled expression that was almost like guilt. Starling was suspicious at once, and realised how flimsy a thing her trust yet was. It bothered her that she knew not what passed between Jonathan and Mrs Weekes in his rooms. Does she keep things from me? Mrs Weekes was so pale; walked with her back so straight and her shoulders so still. She walks like a statue might. Like an effigy of Alice. Next to her, Starling felt short and scruffy. She felt again like the guttersnipe she’d once been, and it made her prickly, defensive.

Together, they walked a short distance away from the house, keeping close to the high wall of the garden so that they would not be seen from inside, then turned to face one another.

‘Well, then,’ said Starling, for want of a better commencement.

‘Well. Your face has finally healed; I’m glad to see it,’ said Mrs Weekes.

‘I’ve healed far worse wounds in my time. You’ve said nothing to Dick Weekes? Good,’ she said, when Rachel Weekes shook her head. ‘And what did you discover from Mr Alleyn today? Have you found Alice’s letters?’

‘No. I mentioned them to him some days ago but he… he didn’t know what I was talking about. Starling, I don’t think he has them. He was looking for something in particular, though – a note he said he found in the lovers’ tree. Do you know of such a place? He said there was a note to arrange an assignation, left in that place, but not written by him or by Alice – though it was addressed to Alice.’

‘He’s lying,’ Starling said at once, though the news made her stomach turn over. There can’t have been.

‘He was confused… he seemed to think it might be a letter sent to Alice from the man she eloped with. He’d been searching for it in his room; he wanted to read it again in case it would tell him something new. But how could it, after so many years?’

‘It’s you, Mrs Weekes. The way you look so much like her… You’re bringing it all back to him.’ As you are bringing it all back to me.

‘But why has he not mentioned this note before? To anyone?’

‘It is an invention. There’s no such note, and Alice had no other lover. He seeks to deceive you, Mrs Weekes!’

‘It did not seem that way. He was not calculating. He was frantic… confused…’

‘In what way confused?’ Starling demanded. Mrs Weekes seemed taken aback by her tone – she was always so sensitive, yet so measured. It ruffled Starling all the more, and impatience gnawed at her every thought.

‘He… he did say he wasn’t sure he had seen this letter, truly. But it seemed to me that he had.’ Rachel Weekes sounded uncertain.

‘Well, how can you be sure if he had, if he is not sure and the note cannot be found?’ said Starling, tersely. When Mrs Weekes made no reply she took a deep breath to calm down, clenching her teeth. I should not have encouraged this woman to interfere. Dick’s wife was disturbing things – upsetting the fine balance she’d wrought between Jonathan’s sanity and his madness; tipping it the wrong way. Rachel Weekes wore a reproachful look on her pale, serious face.

‘He spoke of your pranks. “One of Starling’s little pranks”, he said, when he mentioned the stink in his rooms the first time I called. What do you suppose he meant by that?’

‘How should I know what he meant? He is only half sane at the best of times, and hardly knows what he’s saying.’ Guilt nudged at her. Somehow, knowing that Jonathan was aware of her persecution made her feel almost embarrassed; like a child caught out.

‘He doesn’t seem mad to me. Only… disturbed,’ Rachel Weekes said stubbornly. ‘Sick in spirit.’

‘Aren’t they one and the same thing? You have a very forgiving soul, Mrs Weekes, or perhaps it is only a short memory.’

‘I have not forgotten how he attacked me; believe me, I have not. But he was not himself that day. As I come to know him a little better, I can see that he was not himself.’

‘And what of more recently, and the smashed jar? He was not drunk then – why did he attack you?’

‘I… we were speaking of love and fate, and of… selfmurder.’

‘You condemned it?’ said Starling.

‘Of course I did,’ said Rachel Weekes. Starling grunted.

‘Well, that would do it.’ She glanced up at the woman’s incomprehension, and took a deep breath. ‘He tried to end his own life. A few years ago.’

It was after his mother ordered all caches of opium removed from his rooms, and he was locked inside to rail and curse against her and God and the world. For days the door stayed locked, and nobody went in to him. Wild sounds of destruction were heard; vile curses bellowed out in pain and rage. Starling saw Josephine Alleyn standing with her back against his door, listening in silence, all ashen and clammy with anguish. When peace returned they opened the door just long enough to push through a tray of food and water. And so it continued.

It was weeks before Jonathan was well enough for life, such as it was in that house, to go on. He was skin and bones when Starling next saw him, appallingly thin. Death’s head upon a mop stick. His sunken face was that of a stranger, and when he saw her shock he smiled bitterly.

‘What’s the matter, Starling? Don’t you like to see me suffer?’ The smile crumbled away; he hung his head. ‘If Alice could see me now,’ he whispered. ‘If she could…’

‘If she could see you now she would despise you,’ said Starling, knowing it was not true. She fled into his bedchamber, stood in darkness to catch her breath. The loud sound of breaking glass called her back out. Jonathan was a soldier; he knew which wounds bled the worst. He’d stabbed the bottle into the top of his thigh, near his groin, and his leg was already glossy with blood. For a second, Starling did nothing. For a second, she held the power of his life and death in her hands, and it filled her mind with fire, and rang in her ears. No. You shan’t rest. She ran forwards, splayed her hands across the wound, shouted so loudly for help that it made her throat ache.

Rachel Weekes gasped; a sharp intake of breath as though she’d been slapped.

‘He said I was wilfully stupid,’ she said quietly. ‘Perhaps he was right.’ She shook her head. ‘How great must his torment have been, to do such a thing? How deep his wounds must go.’ Her words brought Starling back to the present, with the memory of that moment hurting her throat anew.

‘What wounds he has he gave to himself. It is his guilt that torments him; and that violence is his true self – any gentility is but a mask.’

‘Perhaps so.’ Mrs Weekes looked sad, and seemed to think for a moment. ‘He himself would argue that conclusion, I think.’

‘Well, then – oughtn’t he to know?’ said Starling. There was a pause.

‘Mr Alleyn has begun to talk to me, at least. To confide in me. He has begun to tell me about the war,’ said Rachel Weekes, hurriedly, as if she couldn’t bear the empty air.

‘About the war? What use is that? You must make him confide in you about Alice. The war did not sit well with him, that much we all know. He came back mad and violent, that much we all know. Countless other men came back and managed to continue with their lives without resorting to the murder of innocents.’

‘Did they?’

‘Aye! Better, stronger men than he, I think.’

‘Or less moral ones, some of them; less impressionable ones.’

‘What is this? Why do you try to make him a poor lost lamb? I’ve known him near all my life, Mrs Weekes, so do not seek to tell me what he is!’ said Starling, feeling horribly unnerved each time the woman spoke. It was like looking down from a high place, a feeling of losing balance, teetering. She couldn’t trace the cause of it, so she summoned anger to burn it away, and had the satisfaction of seeing Rachel Weekes flinch. She would turn my head, if she could. She would make me doubt the things I know.

‘I don’t forget that. I only… I only tell you how I find him,’ she said quietly.

‘Then perhaps you are a poor judge of character, and situation, and should not pretend you can be of help to me; or to Alice.’ Starling glared at her, and Mrs Weekes drew her shoulders back, taking a breath.

‘I can be of help. I want to know what happened to Alice.’

Starling thought for a moment before she next spoke, gazing at the garden wall.

‘I read a letter of his – one he wrote to Alice from Spain, before he came back from the war the first time. Before he came back and… killed her.’

‘And did you not find the others, with that letter?’

‘No, it was on his desk, by itself. It must have been the last letter he wrote to her. In it he spoke of the shame he felt – that he had done bad things, and that if she knew them she would love him no more.’

‘Yes. I believe he has seen and done much that haunts him.’

‘I hope it haunts him! I hope he sees her ghost in every dark corner of the room!’ And I wish I did. I wish I saw her too. ‘If he speaks to you of the war, then try to find this out. Try to find out what he did that shamed him so, that first year of the war. I think he told Alice, and she could not accept it.’

‘I’ll try. He…’ Rachel Weekes broke off, swallowing hard. ‘He has told me things lately that made my blood run cold. Things he saw, the way the war was waged on the common people of the peninsula, as well as between the opposing armies.’

‘It’s never a pretty thing, I’ve heard tell.’ Starling nodded. ‘I have met soldiers old and new, and when they drink, they drink to forget.’

‘Who did you take food to, the week before last?’ Rachel Weekes suddenly burst out.

‘What?’ said Starling, startled. A rosy blush swept up from Mrs Weekes’s neck.

‘I… I saw you, in the city. That is to say…’

‘Oh yes.’ Starling fixed her with a flat glare. ‘I’ve not forgotten that you told on me, to Sol Bradbury. Tattled on me for thieving.’

‘Weren’t you thieving?’ Rachel Weekes retorted, flustered. ‘I… I thought to do the right thing, in reporting it,’ she said.

‘Shows what you know about rights and wrongs, doesn’t it? And Dick said you’d seen me take a boat. Why did you follow me?’

‘I just… I happened to see you in the street, and I was curious. I saw you board a barge and go out of the city, and I-’

‘And you what?’

‘I envied you.’ The words were little more than a whisper, and somehow they made all the ire in Starling melt away. She smiled, though she didn’t quite know what pleased her.

‘You envied me?’ she echoed, and shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t say so if you’d smelled Dan Smithers’s breath close to.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Rachel Weekes, with a cautious smile of her own. Do I frighten her?

‘I took it to an old acquaintance, fallen on hard times.’ Starling paused, considering, before adding: ‘One who knew Alice of old. Perhaps the only other person but me that recalls her fondly. That recalls her at all, outside of this household.’

‘Will you go again to this acquaintance?’

‘I daresay I will, in due course.’

‘Could I go with you?’ Again there was that urgency to the woman, that keenness that Starling did not quite understand, or trust.

‘Why would you want to? It would bring down your husband’s wrath, if he found you out.’

‘He will not…’ This was spoken with less certainty. ‘I will be careful.’

‘But why would you want to? It’s a cold journey at this time of year.’

‘I want to… be free of the city for a while. And I want to talk to another person who knew Alice. It might help me to understand her better,’ she said. Starling considered her for a moment. She suddenly saw that Mrs Weekes needed something, very badly, but Starling had yet to divine what that thing might be. She shook her head.

‘You want to understand her? She’s dead, Mrs Weekes. You can’t know her now, I fear. You’re too late.’ Her own words made Starling pause; they grazed the raw edges of her own grief. ‘You speak as though you’re infatuated with her, and yet you never saw her, nor spoke to her.’

‘I see her in the mirror, you forget. And I see her in your words, and in… the words of others.’

‘Differing accounts indeed, I am sure.’

‘Truly. And I must know the truth, if I can find it out.’

‘To what end though?’ Starling pressed, doggedly. But it seemed that Rachel Weekes had no answer to this question. After a pause, and with a pleading look in her eyes, she said:

‘I could bring food. I could bring meat and bread, to pay for my presence on the visit.’

‘Very well.’ Starling relented. It could do no harm to me, surely? She risks more by it. ‘I will go again next Monday night, at around five in the evening.’

‘On All-Hallows’ Eve?’

‘Are you afraid of ghosts, Mrs Weekes?’

‘I think it might be wise to be.’

‘That is the arranged time, though. Meet me over the bridge, on the south wharf. And don’t be late, because I won’t wait if Smithers is ready to depart. It’s a wearying walk in the dark, if the boat has gone.’ Mrs Weekes looked pleased enough at this, and though Starling kept a stern face as she turned away, she found that she didn’t mind the idea of having the tall woman’s company on the dark and joyless trip along the canal.