The Misbegotten

1821

Overnight, frost had settled on every stone of the city, every leaf and blade of grass of Barton Fields, where Rachel and Richard met Captain and Mrs Sutton to walk. Mist lay thick over Bath, snaking along the river as though the water had breathed it out. It crept up the lower slopes of the city, so that only the upper crescents rose clear of it; an elegant harbour along a shifting white shore. Cassandra Sutton was swaddled in coat and woollen shawls, with gloves on her hands and leather boots laced high up her legs. She walked ahead and then skipped back to them, to show them whatever she’d found – acorns, or fir cones; once a massive horse chestnut leaf, golden brown and crusted with ice. The exercise made her cheeks pink and her eyes shine, and the child looked as vibrant as the spray of crimson hawthorn berries she next brought to show them.

‘Cassandra, do not run about so, I beg you. You’re a young lady now,’ said Harriet Sutton.

‘But if I run I’ll keep warm,’ the little girl pointed out, and smiled winningly at them as she turned and trotted away once more. Her teeth were a flash of white against the darker colouring of her face.

‘Cassandra!’ Harriet called after her, but her tone was amused, not reproachful.

‘It does children good to run, and fill their chests with fresh air,’ said Rachel.

‘True enough. But Cassandra is coming to that age when I think I ought to instil a touch more decorum in her, perhaps.’

‘Oh, she is but nine years old, is she not? I think she could safely be allowed to run wild for a couple more years.’ Rachel smiled. ‘When I was her age, my father still took me fishing for tadpoles. We would stand for hours in the muddy edges of a stream, dipping for the poor creatures. I think he longed for a boy, to take on such outings! Once Christopher was born, I was allowed to become his daughter, rather than his son. I was about Cassandra’s age when that happened, and I turned out well enough, I suppose.’

‘Indeed you did. You turned out very well indeed.’

Harriet looped her arm through Rachel’s as they walked; Richard was walking further behind, with Captain Sutton.

‘Harriet, may I ask you something?’ said Rachel.

‘Of course.’

‘Does your husband ever talk about his time in the war? The war against the French, I mean?’

‘In truth, very little.’ Harriet Sutton sighed. ‘I do not press him on it, since it seems to me that it pains him to speak of it.’

‘Do you think it… troubles him? The things he has seen and done?’

‘My husband is a good and kind man; I’m certain such violence troubles him. But he does his duty to king and country. His duty as a solider.’ Harriet turned her head to look at her husband. ‘The army needs men like my husband, to bring a measure of decency to the grotesquery of the battlefield.’

‘Indeed.’

‘What makes you ask?’

‘Mr Alleyn has lately begun to speak to me of his time in the war. Of the things he saw and did,’ said Rachel. And they are things that turn my stomach. ‘I can’t imagine how any man could come through the same and remain innocent of heart.’

‘Yes. I have heard of other soldiers who find it impossible to return to their old lives when they come home. They find society meaningless; their days pointless; their wives and families… frivolous.’

‘And what becomes of these men?’

‘Gradually, they resettle, and find peace.’ Harriet shrugged. ‘Or they do not, and turn to drink and dissolution, or retreat from the world.’

‘Or retreat into drink and dissolution, all three,’ Rachel murmured. Harriet smiled sadly.

‘What does he tell you?’

‘Such things…’ Rachel shook her head. ‘Such things that I begin to understand why his memories torment him so. Why he has lost his faith in humanity.’ And then I read him a tale of adventure and chivalry, and he sleeps, like a child.

For a while they walked in steady silence, watching Cassandra as she darted here and there beneath the naked limbs of a horse chestnut tree, filling her coat pockets with glossy nuts.

‘I am glad,’ Harriet said then. Rachel turned to look down at her diminutive friend, confused. ‘Jonathan Alleyn’s heart is good. I know this to be true. And war may change a man’s mind – change his outlook and his behaviour, change the very way he thinks, perhaps. But it cannot change a man’s heart.’

‘But perhaps, if they behave badly enough, it matters not that their heart remains what it always was. Not everything – not every deed – can be forgiven, after all.’

‘Can it not? Is that not what Christianity teaches?’

‘I don’t know.’ Rachel thought of Alice, and the way she had vanished from the world. She thought of the Portuguese girl Jonathan had spoken of, crushed beneath a rock and ravaged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said again. Harriet squeezed her hand.

‘Don’t give up on him, Mrs Weekes,’ she said softly. ‘Nobody has grown as close to him since he returned from the war as you are now. You are doing him good, I know it. And you are doing good, by your time and your… willingness to see past the wall he has built around himself.’ Rachel nodded vaguely.

‘I hear such things about him, from… others, that I hardly know what to think,’ she said.

‘You can trust my own account, I hope. I know him to be good.’

‘But, how do you know, Mrs Sutton? How are you so sure?’

‘I… I cannot say. Forgive me. Tell me, what does your husband make of your progress?’

‘He makes nothing of it. He knows nothing of it,’ said Rachel. ‘He cares only for the wage I am paid by Mrs Alleyn. He never asks me what I do there, or how I fare.’ Try as she might, Rachel couldn’t keep the unhappiness from her voice, and alongside it was something new; something like contempt. She hoped that Harriet Sutton wouldn’t hear it, but the look her friend gave her was troubled, and she didn’t speak for a good few moments.

‘The first year of marriage is a voyage of discovery,’ Harriet said eventually. ‘And perhaps it is inevitable that not all things we discover will be to our liking.’ She smiled sympathetically, and Rachel looked away. Suddenly, her own distaste for her husband shamed her.

They had reached the end of the track across Barton Fields, and waited for the men by the path that would lead back into the city, and to a coffee house where they could warm themselves. Rachel smiled warmly at Richard to disguise her true feelings. His return smile was thin and uneven, as though he tasted something sour in his mouth, and Rachel’s heart sank even further.

‘Well, I think we’ve earned something hot to drink, and perhaps something sweet to eat, to warm us, hmm?’ said Captain Sutton, sweeping his daughter into his arms and touching the tip of his long nose to hers. ‘Cassie! Your nose is like an icicle!’

‘There’s nothing so warming as having one’s family around one, I think,’ Harriet remarked to Rachel and Richard, who had linked arms without speaking to one another.

‘Quite so,’ said Rachel, but Richard spoke at the same time, and more loudly.

‘I have found little warmth in my own, lately,’ he said, then closed his mouth tightly, letting his eyes slide angrily over Rachel’s face before looking away into the mist. Rachel was mortified and didn’t know where to look. There she stood, arm in arm with her husband, their faces turned away and a wall of unspoken hard feeling between them.

Late in the evening, Rachel found herself wondering about Richard, and his habitual long absences at night. At first she had assumed he was with clients at inns or private houses, or with traders; that his frequent drunkenness was the result of toasting and sampling and the sealing of deals, or somehow otherwise linked to his business. But after his comment to the Suttons, she was no longer sure. Duncan Weekes had counselled her to be glad his son had not broken his wedding vows to her, and to forget about any prior indiscretion. But what if he does break them? She didn’t dwell on the question, since the answer was what if indeed – she could do nothing to stop him, except to expose him and try to shame him into behaving better. But even that, she found, did not interest her. She was not interested in improving him. The realisation came as a shock, and if it was true then she should also be uninterested what he got up to when he was not at home. He would say it was not her business, and he would possibly be right. But I would still know, she decided. I would know the full story of what I have wed.

Rachel wrapped up against a light rain, only heavy enough to glaze the cobbled pavement. She went from place to place with her brows furrowed and her hood drawn forward to hide her face from passers-by. She could not bring herself to enter an inn alone, but she peered in through windows, and through doors when they were thrown open by people coming and going. A cloud of talk and laughter and warmth and stink wafted out from within each time, and caused her a curious mix of revulsion and loneliness. She saw ruddy faces, and smiling eyes; she saw arguments and tears, and lovers dipping their heads together in secretive corners that the candlelight barely reached; she saw men drinking alone, staring at nothing, swallowing down mouthfuls of spirits like food. But she did not see Richard Weekes in any place she visited, and after two hours of searching she gave up, cold and oddly disappointed. Do I want him to be a reprobate, then? To excuse myself for not loving him? On the pavement she almost stepped on a man, sitting with his feet in the gutter.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ she muttered, as the toe of her shoe got caught in his coat tails. The man swayed but made no reply, and Rachel paused. ‘Mr Weekes? Is that you?’ She bent down to see his face. There was a cut above Duncan Weekes’s right eye, which had dribbled a crusted line of blood down to his jaw; he sat with his eyes shut and his mouth slack, stinking of brandy and piss. ‘Mr Weekes – are you well? Can you hear me?’ said Rachel, more urgently. She shook his arm and his head came up, slowly, eyes opening a fraction to see what trouble he was in.

‘Rachel! How charming to see you, my dear girl. Do come in, come in. Sit by the fire and warm yourself.’ His voice was a slur, hard to understand. Rachel bit her lip anxiously.

‘We are not at home, sir. We are on the street by the Unicorn. What happened to your eye? Were you attacked?’

‘My eye?’ the old man mumbled. ‘My eye?’

‘Come, sir – you must rise. It’s far too cold a night to be sitting out like this, and we wouldn’t want you apprehended for doing so. Come, I cannot lift you, you will have to help me.’ Rachel grasped him under his arm and urged him to rise; his coat sleeve was wet through, and filthy. For a while Duncan didn’t move, and Rachel was left to tug at him futilely, but then a pair of passing young men saw her plight; they hefted Duncan to his feet with ease, grinned and tipped their hats to Rachel when she thanked them. Slowly, she coaxed Duncan Weekes to walk. ‘Let’s away to somewhere warmer, somewhere kinder,’ she murmured, as they stumbled along.

‘Forgive me, child. Forgive a foolish old drunk,’ Duncan said thickly, and then coughed; his chest sounded clotted and unwholesome. Rachel found her throat too tight to reply.

They were not too far from his lodgings, and when they reached the door Rachel patted his pockets until she found the key. His room was wholly black, and little warmer than outside. She manoeuvred Duncan onto his bed and then tried to light the fire, but found no coal or wood to do so.

‘Didn’t you buy coal, Mr Weekes? Didn’t you buy some fuel with the money I gave you?’ He only stared at her in abject apology, and Rachel understood what her money had been spent on. ‘Well, then,’ she said, helplessly. ‘Well. Blankets, then.’ She lit some candles, which gave the illusion of warmth with their yellow light; piled as many blankets as she could find on top of the old man, and fetched water and a cloth from the washstand to clean the cut on his face.

‘I lost a hand of pontoon, when I’d bet a shilling. I did not have the shilling,’ he confessed, trying to smile. ‘Lucky he only gave me this small cut and not a sounder hooping, eh?’ A bruise was spreading out from the wound, and he winced when she dabbed at it. ‘It will make my head thump all the worse, come morning.’

‘Oh, why do it? Why ruin yourself with drink, sir?’ Rachel exclaimed suddenly. Duncan Weekes’s face sank down.

‘It’s like a command you have to answer, though you know the master for a base villain,’ he said softly.

‘You, and my husband, and Jonathan Alleyn… the stuff makes fools and firebrands of all of you!’ She squeezed out the cloth in the bowl. The water was icy.

‘Miserable fools, yes. It makes us lose the things we love most.’ Duncan Weekes’s rheumy eyes shone. The candle flames were caught in them like little sparks of life. Rachel stared into them.

‘What happened to your wife, Mr Weekes?’

The old man sighed; shut his eyes for a moment before answering her.

‘She’d been away one Christmas, to visit her nephew. I was meant to go to Marlborough, where her nephew would leave her, and accompany her on the last leg of the journey by stage. But I… I drank away my fare, and fell into a stupor. So she came back alone, and being last to board, since she had waited as long as possible for my arrival, she had no choice but to ride on the roof. We suffered a spell of bitter winter weather, at the time. Bitter. By the time the stage reached Chippenham, they found her… they found her succumbed to the cold.’

‘Oh, Mr Weekes,’ Rachel breathed.

‘Grog is the devil itself. It was grog and my own weakness for it that killed her, sure enough. So you see, I can’t blame my boy for hating me,’ said Duncan, bitterly. ‘But then, perhaps the devil is in us to begin with, and the grog only gives him free rein. Aye, perhaps ’tis so! It is in the Alleyn family. I have seen it. I have seen their devil for myself!’ The old man’s eyes widened, and he grasped her hand where she tended him. ‘Oh, be careful, my dear! It worries me deeply that you have taken that man into your circle, into your life.’

‘I have come to know Jonathan Alleyn better. I do not fear him as once I did.’

‘Jonathan Alleyn… perhaps not, perhaps not. But the others…’

‘But, there is only he and his mother remaining,’ she said, confused. Duncan shook his head.

‘They all have his blood. And she is her father’s daughter, right enough,’ he said, in a voice gone small and frightened. ‘Richard will tell you… he will tell you I was dismissed from them for my drunkenness. That’s what he will tell you. But it wasn’t so. It wasn’t so!’

‘Why then, Mr Weekes?’ Rachel whispered, squeezing his hand tightly.

‘Because I saw! I saw them! And what I saw could not be mistaken. And they both knew it… they both knew what I’d seen… And I told her. I told her.’

‘Told who what? What did you see?’

‘I understood then… I understood them, then, and I was happy to go, after that. I knew how much my boy wanted to stay on, but I was happy to go after what I saw…’ Oblivion was tugging at him, closing his eyes, making his words lose shape and sense.

‘But what was it, Mr Weekes?’ Rachel shook him slightly, desperate to know. His eyes opened again, struggling to focus on her face.

‘Oh! Poor girl, I fear you have fallen into dark hands… dark hands. That family has evil secrets, and their hearts are black… I saw!’ He sank back again, and his breath came rattling through his teeth, wheezing and rank. The smell of it made Rachel recoil; it carried the stink of infection. She felt her heart thudding. She held Duncan’s hand and tried to warm it, but in the end hers only grew colder, and the old man slumbered on, restless but dogged, so she left him.

All-Hallows’ Eve was a bright, crystalline day; the low sun thawed an early frost to leave everything glittering with water. From a thousand chimneys, a thousand ribbons of smoke rose straight up into the still blue sky. Rachel spent the short daylight hours writing a letter to the Trevelyans, stitching an old tippet into a better semblance of fashion, and trying to make pastry that was neither tough and leathery, nor too fragile to lift. All the while, she could hear Richard down in the cellar. A steady stream of callers came and went; she heard laughter and hushed discussions; the rumble of rolled casks, the creak of the barrow wheel as stock and supplies were brought to the store or taken away. Today of all days, Rachel fretted. She thought up half a dozen excuses she could give Richard for going out of the house so close to nightfall, and even wondered about sneaking out without seeing him at all, and she was so nervous about it as five o’clock approached that she ended up pacing the kitchen-cum-parlour from one window to the other, gazing out in search of answers.

She sighed quietly in relief when, at half past four, Richard came up to announce he was going out.

‘Where will you go?’ Rachel asked, in spite of herself. Richard looked impatient for a moment, and then unhappy. He crossed to her and kissed her cheek, raising a hand to stroke her hair.

‘I have some business to attend to,’ he said, and Rachel stifled the retort that she did not believe it. It would be to an inn, or a gaming table somewhere. She remembered what Richard had once said about his father – that he wouldn’t be half so poor if he didn’t drink his wages away. Hypocrite. And you seem to increase such expenditure all the time. With a pang she wondered if she was to blame for Richard seeking his entertainment elsewhere, but she wanted him to go out, after all, so she said nothing more.

‘Will you be late?’

‘I’ll be as late as I need to be, Rachel,’ he said, irritated. ‘Don’t wait for me, but eat, if you’re hungry.’

‘Very well.’ I just hope your business keeps you out later than mine will keep me. Richard pulled on his gloves and left without another word. Rachel counted to a hundred once the door had slammed shut, then hurried into her own coat and gloves and headed for the river.

On the far side of the bridge she looked left and right, trying to pick out Starling’s small figure from the crowd of river men and traders, urchins and apprentices. In the failing light the torches dazzled her eyes and made it hard to see. Behind her, the city bells began to strike five and she felt a flutter of panic, until a hand grasped her arm and she looked down into Starling’s heart-shaped face.

‘I thought you’d changed your mind,’ she said, steering Rachel through the crowd by her elbow.

‘No, I-’

‘Hurry – he won’t wait. Did you bring food?’

‘What?’

‘You said you’d bring some food.’ Starling paused, and glanced at Rachel accusingly.

‘I… I’m sorry. Richard was in the house until the very last moment… I couldn’t. I was worried about getting away without him knowing.’

‘Never mind.’ Starling resumed her march through the muck and garbage of the riverside. They reached the same barge Rachel had seen Starling take before, and the girl went on board in one smooth jump. Rachel peered at the gap of inky water between the boat and the wooden jetty. ‘Come on, then,’ said Starling, seating herself on the sacks of coal. Rachel glanced at Dan Smithers, who gave her a lopsided grin that showed teeth gone brown; the upper and lower canines had worn away on one side into a perfect round slot for his pipe shaft.

‘Make the jump, ma’am, if you would have a ride,’ he said, still grinning. Squaring her shoulders, Rachel gathered her skirts and crossed the gap with a single long stride. She lost her balance, unprepared for the way the barge would move, and staggered forwards onto the coal sacks. Dan Smithers chuckled.

‘A gentleman would have offered me his hand to board,’ Rachel pointed out, coolly, but the bargeman only laughed.

‘Aye, ma’am. No doubt a gentleman would ’ave.’

Starling smiled at her indignity, though not unkindly. When she was like this – unguarded, in her element, she had a kind of buoyant confidence that Rachel admired, and envied. There was something resilient and indefatigable about her. Soon they were sliding beneath the ornate iron bridges of Sydney Gardens, between steep stone walls. The voices of walkers and hawkers and sweethearts echoed down to them; disembodied words drifting like ghosts along the water. Rachel shivered and pulled her coat tighter around her. Then they were out of the city and in darkness, save for the lamps on the prow and stern of the barge – two single flickering flames to hold back the night. There was no sound but the soft slapping of water on the hull, and the muffled clop of the horse’s feet. Rachel saw the first stars of the evening coming out, and excitement filled her; she felt as though she were escaping, somehow. But you will only have to go back again.

‘It’ll be a hard frost tonight,’ said Starling, her words causing pale shreds of mist to obscure her face. She was sitting cross-legged, her face half lit by the lamp on the prow, fiddling with a loose thread that trailed from her mittens. She is half a young lady, half a tavern wench.

‘How old are you, Starling?’

‘Possibly four and twenty.’ Starling shrugged.

‘Possibly?’

‘I’ve never known for sure. We always used my height to guess, but I was tall as a child and am not so tall now. So perhaps all our guesses were wrong.’

‘Doesn’t your mother know?’ said Rachel, confused.

‘I daresay she does, but since I’ve never known her, that doesn’t help much.’

‘You’re an orphan?’

‘I don’t know.’ Starling tipped her head to one side to look at Rachel, and continued. ‘I walked into the farmyard one winter’s day, wearing only rags. I was small – six or seven years old. Alice took me in, and cared for me.’

‘But if you were six or seven, you must remember your life before that, surely?’

‘I do not.’ Starling shrugged again. ‘I think I chose to forget; and forget I have. I sometimes have odd feelings, like warnings. Intuitions, you could call them. About people, or happenings. I think they might be lessons I took from that life before, but that’s all I’ve kept. The intuitions, and the scars.’

‘The scars?’

‘It seems I was beaten a good deal.’

‘Oh. That’s terrible.’

‘I have no memory of it, so it’s no trouble to me.’

‘And Alice decided to keep you? Did she try to find out where you came from?’

‘Not very hard, if she did.’ Starling smiled briefly. ‘Not when she saw how I’d been treated. If they’d wanted me back, they’d have come looking, wouldn’t they? I was only small. I couldn’t have walked so very far in the winter, with no shoes on my feet. They must have been nearby, and as happy to be rid of me as I was to stumble into Alice’s care.’

‘So that’s why you have such a singular name?’

‘Alice used to say that the starlings had brought me to her. They were making a row, coming in to roost, and then there I was, barefoot on the muddy yard with feathers in my hair.’ Starling smiled as she spoke, and Rachel saw how much she enjoyed this legend about her beginnings.

‘So she raised you as her own?’

‘As a sister, more or less. Alice was only seventeen or so herself when I appeared. It was a funny kind of upbringing – Alice treated me as her kin, and Bridget taught me how to be a good servant.’

‘Who is Bridget?’

‘She was Alice’s housekeeper, but also her guardian, and her gaoler. She was employed by Lord Faukes…’ Starling paused, swallowing. ‘She was employed by Alice’s benefactor to serve her, but also to keep her confined to the house and village of Bathampton. Alice never went further than the edge of it her whole life.’ Starling turned her face away sadly, as a vixen’s harsh shriek echoed across the water. ‘Apart from one time,’ she added, so softly that Rachel almost didn’t hear her. ‘It’s Bridget we go to see tonight; she’s old now, and infirm, and much reduced from when I first knew her.’

The cold was making Rachel wheeze; biting her hands and feet. Her teeth rattled together. Sudden movement in the lamplight startled her but it was only a barn owl. It ghosted along in front of them for a while, as noiselessly white as snowflakes, then vanished into the darkness like a secret. Rachel looked over and found Starling watching her with eyes gone huge in the lack-light.

‘It’s not much further,’ she said, as the yellow shapes of lit windows came into view up ahead. ‘Can you see the house?’ She pointed, and Rachel made out some tall chimneys and the straight line of a roof, perhaps three hundred feet back from the canal. ‘That’s the house I grew up in. That was the house where we lived, the three of us. Child, maid and crone.’

‘Is Bridget a housekeeper, still?’

‘No, she’s too ill to work; she lives on charity. She has no family of her own left. Only me.’

‘She is lucky, then, that you take the time to visit her.’

‘What else should I do? At times there’s been little love lost between us but… she is there in my earliest memories, and she was kind, in her own way. She is my family, too. All the family I have now.’

‘You could wed, and make your own family,’ said Rachel.

‘Perhaps I will, one day.’ Starling looked down and picked at her glove again. ‘The beard-splitters I meet aren’t the kind of men I’d care to wed.’ She glanced up apologetically, and Rachel was glad of the darkness to hide in.

When they arrived, Rachel disembarked more deftly than she’d boarded, and followed Starling onto a bridge across the canal. As the barge slipped away eastwards its lamps looked like tiny will-o’-the-wisps, dancing over the dark water.

‘How will we get back again?’ Rachel asked, suddenly afraid.

‘If we’re lucky, there’ll be a boat heading west that’ll let us ride. If not, it’s a brisk walk back, not much more than an hour. We might even feel warmer if we walk. What time must you be back?’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes my husband…’ Rachel paused. It was too easy to forget that Starling knew her husband well; perhaps better than she did herself. ‘Mr Weekes usually stays out late,’ she finished, in a stunted voice.

‘Yes. That sounds like Dick Weekes. Always off caterwauling,’ said Starling, tonelessly. They made their way along the deserted village street. There were lights on in windows but no sounds of music or voices from within; Rachel found the stillness eerie.

‘Where is everybody?’ she whispered.

‘Those that aren’t in the pub will be tucked up indoors. It is All-Hallows’ Eve, after all. They’ve no wish to see their dead walking.’ In the borrowed light of a doorway Rachel saw the flash of Starling’s feral grin.

‘I should quite like to see some of mine again. Even if they were in spirit form,’ Rachel said softly. Starling’s grin evaporated.

‘Yes. So would I.’

At the top of the street they turned off onto a muddy track, pitted with frozen puddles and tunnelling between overgrown yew hedges. At the end of it huddled a row of three tiny cottages, single-storeyed, each with two small, square windows to either side of a narrow doorway, and a squat chimney poking up through the centre of the roof. They caught a whiff of the cesspit, and the reek of old ashes. Starling strode purposefully to the middle cottage and rapped her knuckles against the wood. She lifted the latch without waiting for an answer.

‘Bridget, it’s me! And I bring a friend with me.’ She glanced briefly at Rachel as she stepped inside, as if embarrassed to have used the word friend. Rachel followed close behind her, hoping for warmth, but, like at Duncan Weekes’s lodgings, the temperature barely rose inside the cottage. The air was stagnant; the only light came from a single candle on the mantelpiece, above a stove in which the last embers of a fire were dying.

‘Bridget?’ Starling called again, passing through a doorway on the right. Rachel waited in the first small room. The floor was bare, and the only furniture a crooked table with a stool tucked under it, a wooden cupboard, and a rocking chair which sat facing the stove. Everything felt stiff with cold, from the bones of the house to the very air itself. From the other room she heard the rustle of a straw mattress, and murmured words. ‘You can come in now – and bring the candle,’ Starling called.

Holding the candle before her made everything else recede into shadow, but Rachel saw Starling perched on a three-legged stool by a narrow cot bed, and in that bed lay a shrunken figure with cheekbones like knife edges and deep rings under its eyes; wrapped in so many layers of blankets and shawls it was hard to tell where the bed ended and the person began. ‘Bridget, this is Rachel Weekes, lately married to Dick Weekes, the wine man. Mrs Weekes, this is Bridget Barnes. Come closer so she can see you.’ Rachel did as she was told, noting how keenly Starling watched Bridget’s face. Of course. She waits to see her reaction to me. To this face which is only half mine. But if Starling had been hoping for anything as dramatic as Mr Alleyn’s response, she was disappointed. Bridget simply stared, without blinking, for such a length of time that Rachel found herself staring back, deep into the old woman’s sunken eyes. They registered recognition, but no surprise; only a deep, slow-turning sadness.

‘Well. I suppose there were only so many faces God could create. Sooner or later he had to make the same one twice,’ said Bridget. She sounded breathless; her voice was thin and the air seemed to only penetrate the topmost portion of her lungs, so that she had to take constant small snatches of it. ‘You’re welcome here, Mrs Weekes. Though your presence might cause a stir, on this of all nights.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Barnes,’ said Rachel.

‘We saw nobody, as we came to you. Nobody who might think her a ghost,’ said Starling.

‘It’s Miss Barnes,’ Bridget pointed out. ‘I never did marry. Perhaps if I had I would be tucked up warm in the house of my son or daughter now, instead of in this sty; though I shouldn’t complain of having the almshouse when there are plenty that haven’t.’ She stopped and took several breaths to catch up, coughing wheezily. ‘The damp in the walls plays havoc with my chest,’ she said, to nobody in particular.

‘Well, I may not have a warm and comfortable house I can take you to, but I do have some things for you. Look here – some candle stubs, more beer, a ham bone, some dried fish and peas and…’ Starling pulled an earthenware jar from her sack with a slight flourish. ‘Honey! I didn’t even steal it. I bought it for you, Bridget,’ she told the old woman proudly.

‘Well, now, I’m sure you didn’t need to go and spend your money on me, girl,’ Bridget muttered, but Rachel could see how pleased she was.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Starling said haughtily. ‘So be happy that I did, eh?’ For want of somewhere to put it down, Starling sat cradling the honey in her lap. She reached out with one hand to twitch the bedclothes straighter, and as she turned her face away, Rachel saw it was etched with worry. This woman is her only family, and she is a frail and expectant thing.

Under Starling’s direction, Rachel helped to carry in more wood from a pile behind the cottages. The eerie stillness in the shadows beneath the frozen trees made them hurry back inside.

‘Is there no coal?’ said Rachel, and Starling shook her head.

‘There never is. I thought about bilking some from Dan Smithers, but though he’s my friend he’ll not carry me if he thinks I’m stealing from him.’

‘I have some money. We should have bought some from him,’ Rachel pointed out, opening the stove and feeding in some smaller twigs to get it started again.

‘Open both vents on that stove, or it’ll take an hour or more to light!’ Bridget called from the bedroom. There was no water in the kettle, and with a sigh Starling went back out into the darkness, to the pump on the street, and Rachel was left alone with Bridget, feeling suddenly awkward.

She hovered in the front room for a while, until Bridget called her back to the bedside.

‘Lord, I hate this darkness,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s early evening, but could be the dead of night. My eyes can see to do nothing past four in the afternoon! And shan’t now until April next.’ Rachel took Starling’s place on the three-legged stool.

‘Spring does seem a long way ahead,’ she said. Bridget grunted.

‘You must forgive me for not rising. I’m not so much the invalid I seem, but today my chest is heavy and I have no strength. It comes and goes, some days better than others. Perhaps this will be my last winter; perhaps not.’ She spoke matter-of-factly; without fear or self-pity. ‘Your face wakes old pain. Old grief. Why have you come?’

‘I am… employed at the Alleyns’ household, on Lansdown Crescent. As reader and… companion to Mr Jonathan Alleyn…’

‘To Jonathan Alleyn? So, Starling hasn’t poisoned him yet, then, or slipped an adder into his bedclothes.’ Bridget spoke scathingly.

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Well. I’m not surprised. For all her bluster and spite, she’s a sensible girl. She has a good job there, and she knows it. Where else would she go, for heaven’s sake, if she left the Alleyns?’

‘I… do not know. She seems to hate him, though. Her master. And to hate the mistress a little as well.’

‘She has to hate him; what else can she do? She blames him for Alice leaving us. Easier to think him a murderer than to accept the other idea.’

‘You do not think he did it?’

‘No. But who can know, especially after all this time? There were so many secrets, so many meetings that I knew nothing about. I turned a blind eye as much as I could. Who was I to thwart their plans? Lord Faukes would have cast us all out if he’d found it out, but Alice loved Jonathan so keen – loved him like breath. And I loved Alice.’ She shrugged; coughed a little.

‘It seems most who knew Alice loved her. All but Josephine Alleyn.’

‘All who knew Alice loved her. Josephine Alleyn met her only once; her hatred was for what Alice was, for what she represented, not for Alice herself.’

‘And what was Alice to her?’

‘A scandal, of course. A rich man’s by-blow with no name of her own, born in shame.’ Rachel’s heart squeezed in her chest.

‘You know of Alice’s birth?’ she said, her throat going tight with nameless fear.

‘It doesn’t take a genius to fathom it. She was placed into my arms one day, a little girl with a sunny smile and hair like silk. Lord Faukes brought her, and put her into my arms, and I saw the way he favoured her. What man has tenderness for a child, unless it is his own blood?’

‘You say Alice was Lord Faukes’s child?’

‘I cannot prove it, and it was never spoken of. But why else do rich and powerful men sponsor nameless young children? And keep them tucked away, out of sight and mind?’

‘How old was she when he brought her to you? How old was Alice when you saw her first?’ Rachel pressed, leaning forward and pinning Bridget with her gaze. The old woman frowned in thought.

‘Small, still. Not more than three years of age. I never knew where she’d been before that – I knew better than to ask.’ Suddenly, Bridget’s eyes swam and her mouth twisted up, and when she spoke tears misshaped the words. ‘I was as much of a mother to that girl as whoever it was that birthed her. Mother and nurse and servant. Does Starling ever think of that? She goes on like she’s the only one that misses her.’

Rachel shut her eyes. Three years old. Abi… was it you? She struggled to keep her composure.

‘Do you… do you think Alice is dead?’ Bridget looked up sharply at her strangled tone, then shook her head.

‘She ran away. She had enough cause to, if she’d come to accept that she could not marry Mr Alleyn. I never heard from her again after that morning she went out. She loved to walk… it wasn’t strange that she went. I heard the door swing just after dawn, before the sky was proper lit. I thought to myself, “I do not need to rise just yet. Alice has gone out, she will bring the eggs on her way back in. Starling will light the fires.” That’s what I thought, as I lay there all lazy and warm. And that was the last sound I ever heard from my Alice. She should… she should have sent us word! She must have known how we’d worry, and that we would have kept any secrets she wanted us to. She should have sent us a word.’ Bridget settled her chin as she spoke, but there was more pain than rebuke in her voice.

‘It surprises you that she did not?’

‘Yes. But then,’ Bridget shrugged. ‘Letters get lost.’

‘The Alleyns are sure she eloped with another, but Starling insists that Alice had no sweetheart other than Jonathan. That she would never have been untrue to him…’

‘She deceives herself,’ said Bridget, abruptly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t like it any more than she does, but I know what I saw with my own eyes. I saw Alice, with another man.’

‘What other man?’ Rachel asked, her heart beating harder. Let her be alive.

‘Don’t you think I’d have sought him out if I knew? I was… pleased. I saw him only once, from the back. They’d been talking on the bridge by the inn, and then he went off towards the toll bridge. Their talk was lengthy and… impassioned. A quarrel, almost. I saw him from far away as he went, and only from behind, but I was glad. Surprised, to be sure, but glad. She couldn’t have Jonathan, you see. They must have told you? Josephine Alleyn must have told you? Jonathan was forbidden to marry her; she was nobody. She might even have been his own kin… but even if that weren’t so, she was too far below him. I daresay they made plans to run away, or to wed in secret, but they’d been in love since they were bairns. He’d have done it already, if he was going to. Wouldn’t he? That’s what I tried to tell her, though she wouldn’t hear me. If he truly meant to wed her, he’d have done it long before. Loving him was only ever going to break her heart. So when I saw her talking to this other one, I was glad.’

‘Who was he? What did he look like?’

‘He was nobody! He was a stranger who asked her for the time of day, nothing more!’ Starling’s voice was tight. She stood in the doorway with the full kettle in one hand and a sloshing pail in the other, knuckles crimson from the cold and eyes glittering with anger.

‘I know what I saw, Starling! There was more to it than that!’

‘You know no such thing! What would you know?’

‘What would I know, who raised her up and knew everything she did – even the things you thought you kept secret?’

‘They were planning to run away! She and Jonathan! And they were going to take me with them… If you saw her speak to some man, then perhaps he was helping them, somehow. Perhaps he was a friend of Jonathan’s come to bring her news of a plan he didn’t dare write down.’

‘If you believe that you’re naught but an idiot, girl!’ Bridget snapped, and then coughed, and spoke more softly. ‘Why go searching for a complicated answer, when there is a simple one right in front of you?’

‘Because,’ said Starling, and then stopped, swallowing. ‘Because Alice loved me. She called me her sister. She wouldn’t have just left me here – left me to Lord Faukes. She promised.’

‘She loved you, for sure. And she loved me, in her own way. But we all thought she loved Jonathan Alleyn more, Starling, and yet she betrayed him. I saw her, and I know what I saw.’

The two of them stared at one another. Their argument had the weary, scarred sound of one that had been had many times before, and hurt them both every time. Starling turned away to put down the pail and set the kettle on the stove. Rachel sat in silence, huddling into the shadows by the bed, still electrified by the news that Alice had come into their lives aged three, not newborn. Her heart thumped so hard that it seemed to shake her all over; Bridget turned a beady eye on her, and seemed to see it.

‘But you have not answered my question, Mrs Weekes,’ she said. Rachel looked up at her, feeling absurdly guilty. ‘Why have you come here?’ In the silence that followed the question, Rachel sensed Starling’s listening ears. Suddenly, she wanted to tell them. She wanted to tell somebody what she dared to hope, but that hope was such a fragile little thing – a house of cards that could tumble down if someone trod too heavily close to it. But if she spoke it out loud, it might also coalesce. It might also make it true. Rachel swallowed, licked her lips, and spoke.

‘I had a sister. Her name was Abigail. A twin sister, identical to me,’ she said. In the other room, the silence grew even more acute.

‘Her favourite colour was blue; I remember that quite clearly. Lavender blue; and mine was yellow. On our last day together, Mama tied back our hair with ribbons to match our favourite dresses – lavender for Abi, primrose for me…’ That warm and sunny day; a day of light and air as soft as a gentle caress on your skin; a day of whispers and secretive giggles, caught behind small hands. Their brother Christopher was not yet born; the two girls were their own whole world, and their parents were the stars around which they spun. They had two languages – one for each other, and one for other people. A language of intuition and odd, fluting syllables; in truth they barely needed to speak at all, since the one knew instantly what the other wished to say. They were old enough to walk and run, to climb onto chairs and down steps. They were old enough to loves stories and songs, and to play games with their dolls and toy horses. They were old enough to have a favourite colour, and a favourite food, but they were no older than that. That day they were going to visit their grandparents, a destination not quite as exciting as the carriage ride that would take them there.

The girls loved to ride in the carriage. They could never sit still and straight on the leather seats, as they were instructed to. They fidgeted and bounced here and there, and craned to watch from the window; they knelt on the seats, and played on the floor as it rocked and rattled. Their mother, Anne, just smiled and took pleasure in their delight; she told their nurse not to reprimand their antics too firmly. The girls loved the horses, too. Before setting off, they each took a turn in their father’s arms; he held them near the animals’ blinkered heads and let them stroke the coarse whorls of hair between their eyes.

‘Take care to keep your fingers far from his mouth, Abi,’ warned their father, John Crofton. They loved the pungent smell of the horses, particularly when they’d been running awhile and had sweat foaming on their powerful shoulders. The horses had bright chestnut coats with white legs and cream-coloured manes and tails. Their father had got them for a good price because red horses with four white legs were said to be unlucky. Tosh and palaver, said John Crofton. The little girls dreamed of being allowed to ride outside, on the box, sitting next to the whip. Then they could watch the manes fly and hear the hooves strike and the wheels clatter; they would feel the wind streaming in their hair and see the world rushing by, like flying.

But even their libertarian mother was adamant – they could not ride on the box, and they weren’t allowed to lean out of the window unless the carriage had halted or was moving very slowly, with no trees or hedges nearby to snag them or lash at their eyes. At the ford was one good place, since the crossing was always made cautiously. The road slipped into the By Brook and vanished along the rocky bottom to emerge the other side, muddy and rutted, some thirty feet away. It was early in the summer and spring had been full of downpours; there were still days of torrential rain, after which the landscape gently seethed when the sun returned, steaming as it warmed and dried. So the By Brook was running high; it was deeper than usual at the ford, and faster. The water shone; a green, unbroken skin undulating over the rocky bed, reflecting the vibrant colour of young beech boughs overhead. They heard the coachman, Lenton, holler to the horses, an elongated ea-sy that slowed the carriage. They heard the first great splashes as the horses started into the water.

‘Me!’ the girls shouted at once, each desperate to be the first to look out. Their father smiled indulgently.

‘Rachel first, since you were first to pet the horses before we left, Abi.’

John Crofton dropped the window as low as it would go, and held Rachel’s small body on his knee so that she could curl her fingers over the sill and stick her head out. Droplets of water landed on her face like rain, kicked up by the horses. She gazed down at the white plumes where their legs churned the river, and smelled their sweat and the clean river scent; the sticky leather of the harness. The water came well above the horses’ knees, covering their white socks. Their tails trailed in it, tugged downstream. The carriage slowed right down, and wobbled side to side over unseen rocks. Rachel looked up at the back of Lenton’s grey head. He was sitting straight, knees wide; tweaking at the reins, keeping them slow. Then the carriage tipped slowly, the left wheel riding up high onto some obstacle on the riverbed. It inched up to a high point and then stopped altogether. Rachel gripped the sill tighter as she was pulled towards the other side of the carriage. She felt her father’s hands tighten around her middle. She felt thrilled, and yet safe.

‘Hup now. Easy on, easy on.’ The coachman’s voice stayed low and calm; the horses leaned into their collars, but the carriage stayed stuck.

‘The wheel must be wedged in some crevice,’ said Anne Crofton. ‘Can you see anything?’

‘Hop down, little girl, and let me look,’ said their father. But Rachel didn’t want to relinquish her vantage point, and hung on.

‘I want to see! My turn!’ Abi cried suddenly. She reached up and grabbed the window’s edge. She jumped, pulling on her arms to lift herself up. All of her weight was against the door. At that moment the carriage jerked forwards, and righted itself abruptly, and in the next instant the latch popped open, the door flew wide, and Abi was gone.

‘Abigail!’ Their mother’s voice was a piercing, incredulous shriek. For a sickening moment Rachel was also airborne; her father’s hands tightened convulsively, gripping her ribs so hard that it hurt. There was water and the wet, black side of the carriage beneath and behind her, then she was inside again, thrust far back into a seat and left.

‘Abigail – catch her! Lenton, catch her, man, catch her!’ John Crofton was in the river, over his knees and struggling against the current. He lurched, could not find safe footing; had to keep one hand back to grip the wheel for support. The horses tossed their heads and plunged at the sudden noise and movement; Lenton was caught up with them, wrestling with the reins.

‘Abigail! Oh, my baby! My baby!’ Anne Crofton was hysterical; Rachel hardly recognised the sounds coming out of her mouth. Her mother was leaning out of the carriage with her arm flung out and her fingers splayed as though she might somehow reach Abi and pull her back to safety. But the river was fast, and deep enough, and the girls were only just old enough to climb onto chairs and down steps, not out of heedless rivers. Rachel stood behind her mother in the unsteady carriage, and looked out. Far down the river, where it curved out of sight beneath dappled green trees, a fragment of lavender blue was racing out of sight.

‘She drowned?’ Starling’s voice made Rachel jump; all the grim inevitability of the story was in it.

‘We had to think so. We grieved as if she had… but we never found her, you see. We never found her… body. My father and our man went the whole length of the By Brook, to where it joined the Avon – here, at Bathampton – asking in every village and cot along the way. But nobody had found a little girl, alive or dead, in the water. We were so young; I remember that day only as snatches of colour and sound and scent. I don’t remember her falling, not exactly, but I remember the colour of her dress, and how pretty it looked in the water. And I have always had the feeling…’ Rachel paused, and took an uneven breath. ‘I have always had the feeling that she wasn’t gone.’

‘So when you were told about Alice Beckwith, who you looked so similar to, you thought it could be her? Your sister?’ said Bridget.

‘The accident happened not ten miles from here in the By Brook valley, and that river runs here, to join the Avon! And now you tell me that Alice was brought to you aged three years or so… don’t you see? It has to be her!’

‘Poor girl.’ Bridget was shaking her head. ‘I can see why you would want to believe it. But you have a similar look to her, not an identical one, and Alice was some issue of Lord Faukes’s, I’m convinced of it.’

‘But you don’t know it!’

‘No, I do not know for sure. But don’t agitate yourself over it so, Mrs Weekes!’

‘Don’t agitate myself, when I may have found my sister, lost to me these twenty-six years?’ Rachel felt panicked, desperate; she felt Abi fading, slipping away from her. Stay, dearest.

‘But you have not found her,’ said Starling, a grim silhouette in the doorway. Her voice was hard, and even. ‘Alice is long dead. You have not found her.’

Rachel sat in silence for the rest of the visit. She rose from the bedside and went to sit by the stove, which was finally giving out a little heat, as Starling made a soup of the dried fish and some barley she found in the cupboard, and took a bowl of it to Bridget. She watched as Starling put a smooth lump of stone on to heat as she swept the floors, then wrapped the stone in rags and slid it under the blankets near the old woman’s feet; then she brewed a pot of tea and sweetened a cup with honey for each of them. All the while, she and Bridget exchanged comments about her work and the Alleyn household, and what provisions and charity might come in before Starling next visited, and who had been caught with whom, canoodling behind the church. There was no more talk of Alice or Jonathan, or the other man in Alice’s life; as if a truce had been called until the next time. There was no more talk of Abigail, and Rachel sensed them parting around the subject like a stream around a fallen branch; as though she had brought something shameful, embarrassing, to the cottage. She said nothing, feeling cowed and angry, and foolish too. What if it is not folly to believe it? Jonathan found a note… and Bridget saw another man. What if she ran away, and is alive somewhere? The thought was so sweet it was almost unbearable, and Rachel swallowed hard. Even if she didn’t remember me, she would know me as soon as she saw me.

There were no boats heading west, so Starling and Rachel walked back to Bath along the towpath, side by side. The moon in the icy sky made everything strange and grey; the canal, the landscape, their skin and eyes – even Starling’s bright hair. For a long time neither one of them spoke. They walked quickly, the cold clenching in their chests.

‘Will we pass the lovers’ tree?’ Rachel asked, at last. Starling shook her head.

‘No. It stands back the other way, towards the river. And it would be folly to go so close to the river’s edge in darkness. If you stumbled in at this time of year… We can go another day, in the light, if you want.’

‘I would like to.’ There was a silence before she spoke again. ‘It must have been terrible, not knowing what happened to Alice. Terrible then, and terrible now.’

‘Yes,’ said Starling, with a note of suspicion in her tone. ‘But I do know what happened to her.’

‘But you are not sure. It… it can be a way to grieve, I think. Or rather, a way to postpone the grief, and to divert it. After my little brother died my father chased after every doctor in England for an explanation. For a definitive answer – what was the illness that took him, how did it work, where did he acquire it, how might it have been prevented. It… it drove him to distraction for a while, but it did not bring Christopher back.’

‘I know she’s not coming back,’ Starling whispered tersely. ‘I only want justice for her.’

‘If she is dead then justice does not interest her. It is only for you that you seek it.’

‘Should her killer go unpunished, then? Should his crime stay hidden?’

‘No. I only mean that… that perhaps you ought not let your grief blind you. You ought not let it insist upon an answer when perhaps there is none. Or perhaps you truly have it already.’

For a moment Starling made no reply, and when she did speak her voice was low and angry.

‘What answer?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that Bridget saw Alice talking with another man?’

‘Because it means nothing! It was innocent! Alice was pretty… men often tried to catch her eye.’

‘But Bridget knew her as well as you did – wouldn’t she know what she saw? And what of the note Mr Alleyn spoke of, from the lovers’ tree? Don’t the two things together perhaps suggest that-’

‘No! No, they do not! It’s all a veil, can’t you see? You want her to have run away because you want her to be your sister, and living. But she did not; and she is not!’ Starling’s voice rang out loudly. She quickened her pace as if wanting to leave Rachel behind.

‘You… you cannot have it both ways, you know,’ said Rachel, striding to catch up with her. It was a thought she hadn’t entirely meant to voice, but there was no way to take it back. She braced herself for Starling’s response.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You cannot have Alice flawless, and yet murdered by Jonathan Alleyn. He cannot have all the blame for her vanishing.’

‘Speak plainly.’

‘They loved each other, that much is known. They were in love for years. Do you mean to tell me Alice would reject Jonathan when he came back from the war, because he was disturbed? Haven’t you told me she was a most forgiving woman, and kind-hearted to all?’

‘Yes. She was.’

‘Then would she have rejected him if he came back in a poor state? Even if he had done bad things in the war?’ There was silence. ‘Would she?’ Rachel pressed.

‘No.’ The word was small, and unwilling.

‘Then what cause would he have to murder her?’ Again, silence. ‘The only possible cause would be that she did indeed try to leave him for another.’

‘No! Faukes must have frightened her into it, somehow.’

‘But she was quite prepared to defy Faukes and elope with Jonathan, you told me. You don’t want it to be so, and I understand. But Bridget saw her speaking with another man, and Jonathan found a note – an invitation to meet, written to Alice in writing he didn’t know.’

‘That is no proof! Where is this note, then?’

‘If he did not find it, Starling,’ Rachel said gently, ‘what other reason could he have to harm her?’

They walked on for a while, their steps steady and measured in the dark. Rachel felt oddly calm, oddly removed from the scene she inhabited. She felt as though she was gliding past the world, drifting along to one side, powerless. A pair of watching eyes. Just like on my wedding day. I exist only on the edges of this. ‘There is another explanation.’

‘What?’ Starling leapt at this small offering.

‘He did not kill her.’

‘Then who did? This other man she met?’

‘So you can conceive that she was meeting another? That she loved another? Then can’t you conceive that she ran away with him, in truth? That she was too ashamed to face you and Bridget because of it; too ashamed to face Jonathan? She wrote to him to break it off. Captain Sutton was there with him in Brighton when he got that letter.’

‘She would not leave us. She would not leave me. Jonathan killed her!’

‘Only if she was untrue to him. That could be the only reason. Don’t you see, Starling? You can’t have it both ways!’

‘And this is how you honour the one you hope is your lost sister?’

‘I would rather have her faithless, and cowardly, than dead,’ Rachel said softly.

‘Alice was neither of those things!’

‘Then you prefer her to be dead?’ The words were pitiless to Rachel’s own ears, and she awaited an angry rejoinder that didn’t come. After a minute or so Starling blew her nose, and Rachel saw her cheeks all silvery wet.

‘I wish you hadn’t come,’ said Starling, quietly. Rachel couldn’t tell if she meant on the visit to Bridget that night, or to Bath, and into Starling’s life. She heard an echo of her own loneliness in the words; wanted to put her arm around the girl, but didn’t dare.

‘What did you mean when you said Alice left you to Lord Faukes?’ she asked instead. Starling didn’t answer, but Rachel noticed the way she tensed, her shoulders curling inwards just fractionally, as if to absorb a blow.

They paused at the foot of the bridge that would lead them to Bath’s inner streets, as though unwilling to return to their lives in spite of the late hour, the cold, and the unease between them. Rachel thought of Richard, and what she would say if she found him home, waiting for her. That is my life, in spite of my reluctance. I chose it and I can’t change it. He is my only chance for a family. It was an unavoidable truth. Unless. Unless I can find Abi. She followed Starling’s gaze to Lansdown Crescent, in the high distance, and knew then where she would rather go. The realisation hit her like a slap, a jolt that went right through her. Should we switch places? But if Starling had once wanted Richard Weekes, Rachel knew she wanted him no longer. She was clever enough for that. Her will is bent on proving Jonathan Alice’s murderer. Now I must bend to proving he is not. Their parting glance was full of unspoken things, and Rachel didn’t ask, though she wanted to, when or if they would meet again in private. She tried not to dwell on how much she would rather have carried on at Starling’s side, to Lansdown Crescent, to the dark and disordered rooms on the second floor, and their dark and disordered inhabitant. Be alive, Abi! Be alive, and run off, as Bridget believes. As all others believe. Let Jonathan not be your murderer, and me not destined to lose you twice.

The house above the wine shop was empty and unlit. Relieved, Rachel let exhaustion swim into her body; from the cold, and the wearying intensity of all she had heard and said that night. She went slowly up to the bedroom with a taper to light the lamp, undressed and brushed out her hair. Her stomach felt hollow, but she didn’t want to eat. She closed the shutters and went to the dresser where her trinket box was kept. She craved her mother’s advice like never before. Seconds later her heart fled her chest, sinking like a stone. The box wasn’t in its normal place. She scrabbled through gloves and stockings, combs and neckties; through each of the drawers and then throughout the rest of the room, though she knew she hadn’t put the box anywhere else. But there weren’t that many places to search, and soon she was forced to stop, sit down on the bed, and accept that the box, with her mother’s lock of hair pinned inside, had gone. At once she guessed its certain fate, and then she wished even more to be Starling, and free; rather than Rachel, and trapped.

By the time Richard returned the abbey bells had rung eleven and the streets outside were quiet; Rachel’s anger was cold and hard, unlike anything she had felt before, and underneath it was a bud of fear that threatened to bloom – the fear that wherever her treasure had gone, it might not be retrievable. It made her incautious; she didn’t notice that Richard was frowning even as he came into the room, face flushed, skin clammy in spite of the cold outside. She didn’t notice that his shirt had been pulled loose from his belt, that his knuckles were grazed and crimson. She rose to her feet and met him with a tumble of tight words.

‘Where is it? My trinket box?’

‘Your what?’ said Richard, but the guilty cast his frown took told her the truth.

‘It was my mother’s. If you’ve sold it you must get it back.’

‘Leave me be, can’t you? I have had a trying time of it this evening.’

‘I daresay you have. It must be a trying business, staying out so late all the time, and drinking so much. Where is it? You had no right to-’

‘I had no right? You are my wife, Rachel. Or had you forgotten? Everything you once owned belongs to me.’

‘That box was precious to me! It was my mother’s before it was mine! You knew how much it meant to me.’

‘It was just a thing, Rachel! An object that served little purpose in itself, but which has paid a number of bills.’

‘Your bills, not mine! Your debts from the gaming tables, I don’t doubt.’

‘Mind your tongue, Rachel. I won’t be wedded to a shrew, and I won’t be spoken to like that in my own house. Or out of it. Not by you, or anyone.’ Richard’s face darkened still. A vein ran up the middle of his forehead, cast into relief by the lamplight; it spoke of something building up inside.

‘What did you do with what was inside?’ Rachel was shaking with fury; her mouth was dry.

‘There was nothing inside – naught but a scrap of paper, and those earrings, which fetched a little extra.’

‘A little extra? They were worth a great deal, you stupid man! And the lock of hair? Please tell me you kept that. Please.’

Rachel shut her eyes to await his answer – she couldn’t bear to see it writ large across his face. So she didn’t see his fist before it hit her, slamming into her mouth and jaw. She sat down abruptly, put her hands to her face in shock. There was a moment of ringing numbness and then pain bloomed through her head, squeezing like a giant fist until she thought it might crack the bone. There was blood on her fingers when she brought them away, blood in her teeth and on her tongue; a metal taste of iron and salt.

She looked up at the sound of footsteps. Richard loomed over her. She thought he would put out his hand to help her up, but he did not.

‘Never speak to me that way,’ he said, in a voice she barely recognised. He was shaking now – a tremor of barely held violence. His fingers twitched, and Rachel waited for a second blow. It did not come. Richard turned away from her, fetched a handkerchief from the drawer and tossed it at her. The blood from her lip left scarlet kisses on the linen. She had never felt more alone.

Unsteadily, Rachel got to her feet.

‘If you insult me again, I will…’ Richard trailed off, glancing at her, and she saw his tension begin to ebb away, and shame come to fill its shoes.

‘You’ll what?’ she said. Beat me harder, like you beat Starling? A wave of misery crashed over her, because she realised she wasn’t surprised that it had come to this, nor so soon. She was not surprised that Richard had hit her. And he will hit me again, that is a certainty. She felt utterly defeated.

‘You are my wife. You must show me the proper respect, Rachel! It’s not my wish that things be this way between us.’

‘Respect cannot be beaten into a person.’

‘I disagree, and I pray you do not make me prove it,’ he said coldly. Rachel shivered, a sudden clench of fear twisting her inside.

‘There was a lock of hair in the box. Pinned to the lining. A lock of my mother’s hair, and the last piece of my family in my possession. Is it gone then, with the rest?’

‘I saw nothing inside but the earrings.’ At this, Rachel did begin to cry. The tears were hot and blinding. ‘Such keepsakes are worthless, in truth,’ Richard said gruffly.

‘It was not worthless to me!’

‘If you were a better wife, a warmer one, and more loving, I would not be gone as much. If you had widened our circle, as you were supposed to, I would not need to pay as much for my entertainment. Instead the only friends you make are madmen, or existing acquaintances of mine who can afford but a single bottle of sherry come Christmas!’

‘So this is my fault? My fault you are dissolute and drunk, and fritter away your money at the tables?’

‘Yes!’ Richard’s sudden bellow was shocking. Rachel felt a dribble of blood ooze onto her chin. ‘Come now and make amends. Come and be my wife.’ He held out his hand to her, turning to the bed.

I will die before I let him take me tonight. Rachel stepped towards him, closer to the light. She left the blood on her chin, and let her mouth open to show her bloodied teeth. She could feel her bottom lip swelling, the cut stinging like a burn. She stared at him, steady and cold as the grave, and did not take his hand. After a moment, Richard dropped his hand and turned away, as if he couldn’t stand the sight of her.

Alice would never have left me to Lord Faukes. But of course, Alice hadn’t known what that man was like – her ostensibly kindly benefactor. He will have things his own way. Starling wondered, as she rose from her cold and sleepless bed the next morning, if Bridget had known when she gave Alice that warning just how right she was; how vile and corrupt a man Lord Faukes had been, whom Alice treated like a grandfather, and kissed and embraced whenever he came to call. Aged twelve, Starling had come to think of him as like a fruit gone bad, still keeping a glossy thick rind to give the appearance of wholesomeness, when inside the flesh was a rotten pulp, riddled with worms, eaten away by decay. The thought of it made vomit burn in the back of her throat. Never was a man less deserving of Alice’s kisses. And Rachel Weekes asks me what did I mean by it. She hears things all too clearly. Starling remembered all the times Bridget had bade her keep out of Lord Faukes’s way, all the times she’d sent her hurrying from the room on some errand when the old man had tried to talk to her, or take her hand, or give her some titbit. She remembered the way Bridget had hovered and stared when Alice embraced the old man; poised, watching, fighting the urge to pull Alice away. She knew. But if she thinks Alice was Lord Faukes’s child, what danger could she have imagined her to be in from him? Starling decided not to think about it; not to think about Lord Faukes. She even shut her eyes to banish the images, but her memories spun on nonetheless. She stumbled on the stairs; grabbed at the wall for support.

Nine days after Alice had last been seen, Lord Faukes came to the house in Bathampton and Starling found out just how completely her world had ended. The atmosphere inside the house was unbearable, like a breath held so long that it threatened to burst. Bridget was silent and as grim as the grave; already in mourning, already shut off from the world – from Starling, who was still waiting in mounting terror and confusion for Alice to walk back through the door. For she had to, surely; she had to. When they heard the sound of a horse approaching, both knew it would be news. Starling ran into the yard, so overwrought with relief she thought she might scream. She thought it was Alice returned, and when she saw that it was Lord Faukes she thought he must have brought word of her; news of when she would be coming back. Bridget stayed seated at the kitchen table, only lifting up her face to show the new, deep lines criss-crossing her skin, as though grief was a whip that lashed at her.

Before their master was even off his horse Starling was at his side, closer than she would normally stand, made careless by need. But she didn’t take his hand to implore, or even touch his sleeve. The rot beneath the rind; she could still smell it, however distracted she might be.

‘You have word of Alice?’ she said, and did not curtsy or bid him good day, or wait for him to speak first. Lord Faukes glared at her, long and steady, as he handed the reins of his horse to the yardman. He walked on towards the door, and she trotted alongside.

‘She did not manage to make you any less brazen-faced, then, eh?’ he muttered, distractedly. Once indoors, he handed Starling his hat and gloves and went through to the parlour to sit down. ‘Bring me brandy, girl. Bridget, I would speak to you.’ His voice was grave, but even. The women, old and young, glanced at one another. They could read nothing from his words, so they did as they were bid. When Starling took in the brandy, Bridget was already standing in front of him with her hands laced together, quite still and resigned. Starling wanted to stay but Lord Faukes said brusquely: ‘Be gone with you, little wench.’

For ten minutes Starling waited alone in the kitchen, and just like the first time she’d waited for news from the parlour, time grew sticky and slow, stretching itself out near to breaking point, like a string of tar. They seemed unbearably long, those last few moments in her life in which Starling had hope; the possibility of joy. When Bridget came out her face was grim and still, giving nothing away. Starling rushed to meet her.

‘Bridget, tell me. What news is there? Where’s Alice?’

‘I don’t know where she is, child.’ Bridget pressed her lips together briefly, clamping off the words. ‘But she’s gone, and I think… we must be ready not to see her again.’

‘What? What do you mean? There is news, then? Tell me it!’ Starling gripped the older woman’s hands, felt how cold and dry they were. Like there was no blood beneath the skin at all.

‘Come in here, Starling, and stop clamouring so. I will tell you what you need to know,’ Lord Faukes called from his chair, the same parlour chair he always chose, though his hips wedged into it tightly, his flesh moulding into the wood and fabric. Half reluctant now, Starling went to stand in front of him. ‘Bridget. I have a yen to eat veal for supper. Go into the village and see if there is any to be had.’

‘Sir, I doubt that at this late hour there will be any-’

‘Go on and look for some, I say!’ His sudden bark burst the bubble of decorum that had perched, fragile, over the household. Starling felt a warning again, scratching away at the back of her mind as though it wanted out. But she had to know what he would tell her about Alice. She was caught, like a fish on a hook. Bridget glanced from her master to Starling and back again, her clenched knuckles even whiter, spots of crimson in her cheeks and her eyes full of some desperate want that she could do nothing to fulfil. With wooden steps she made her way to the door and went out of the house, not even pausing for her coat or hat, or for coins to pay the butcher.

Only once they were alone did Lord Faukes look up at Starling, and clear his throat.

‘Alice has disgraced herself beyond redemption. She will never be welcome here again; I shall have no more to do with her.’ He spoke without anger, but also without doubt.

‘What disgrace? What do you mean? Where is Alice?’ Starling pleaded.

‘You will not see her again.’ His words landed like blows, each one shaking her more than the last.

‘What?’

‘She has run away with a man; a lover. Feckless, ungrateful girl. She has eloped to be wed, since she knew I would not allow it. There. It is as painful to me as it is to you, I hope you realise. She has deceived us all as to her true nature. Or perhaps she was corrupted by the wild influence of another. Or others.’ At this he gave her a steady look, hard and considering. ‘Tell me truthfully. Did you know of this liaison? Of her plans to behave to so ruinously?’

‘I don’t understand.’ Starling shook her head. ‘She has run away with Jonathan? But… he was here after she went missing; he came looking for her…’

‘What nonsense is this, with Jonathan? Of course not with my grandson! He would not act so wrongly! I don’t know the name of the man she has gone with. If I knew it, believe me I would find them all the faster. Jonathan is at Box even at this moment, deeply upset by it all. I do not deny that I knew of some… attachment between them. A cousinly affection. But the idea that the two of them would collude in such a way is… preposterous.’

‘But they planned to marry! They have written to each other and spoken and thought of little else since I have known them!’

‘Written, you say?’ said Faukes, eyeing her severely.

‘And… and she has taken nothing with her – no clothes, none of her possessions… all are still here!’

‘Of course she’s taken nothing – you shared a room, did you not? She could hardly pack a trunk without you knowing it, could she? Whoever she has left with, she must think he has the means to clothe her anew.’

‘But Jonathan… Alice…’ Starling struggled to set her thoughts in order. She put her hands to head to keep them all in. ‘Alice loved Jonathan! She would never run away with anybody else!’

‘Do not contradict me, wench!’ Faukes shouted, his face mottling with blood. ‘It’s more than you deserve that I take the time to explain the situation to you!’ He thumped the arms of the chair with his hands, making the frame of it shake. He was as solid and strong as the wood itself, Starling thought. She rolled onto the balls of her feet, ready. None of this is true. She was as certain of it as she was of her own heartbeat.

‘Forgive me, sir. But I… I…’

‘You do not want to believe it, any more than Bridget did, or Jonathan or I. But it does no good to deny facts when they are put plainly in front of you. The girl has made a mockery of all she has been given, and she will have nothing more from me or my family. This house will be let. I will see you and Bridget put into positions elsewhere, if you will accept my help with due gratitude, and be good and obedient, the pair of you. And you will speak no more of Alice Beckwith. The girl is dead to me; I will not hear her name.’

‘How do you know, sir?’ Starling whispered, her throat too tight for speech. ‘How do you know of this elopement?’

‘She wrote a letter, delivered to my house in Box.’

‘May I see the letter?’

‘So, she taught you to read? No, you may not. I flung it into the fire, it angered me so. There. Take this bitter news and be reconciled to it, for it cannot be changed. Perhaps I might find room for you in my own household. Eh? What do you say to that?’ Lord Faukes levered himself out of his chair as he spoke and stood over her, head and shoulders taller. Starling took a step backwards. ‘I shouldn’t mind seeing such pretty, flaming curls every day.’ He reached out a hand as if to catch a lock of her hair, and Starling stepped back again.

‘No!’ she managed to cry.

Her backward step made her catch her heel on the corner of the couch. As she fought for balance he dealt her a backhanded blow to the side of her head that made her ears ring, and she twisted as she fell, landing hard on her stomach across the arm of the couch, which drove all the air out of her in one rushing exhalation. Before she could think or try to rise she felt the weight of him bearing down on her. His hand was on the back of her neck, gripping hard, pushing her face into the seat so that she could hardly breathe, let alone fight him. She reached over her shoulder, nails scrabbling at his sleeve, seeking skin. She couldn’t reach any, could not make her arms bend behind her to find his cheek or eyes or mouth; any soft part she might have been able to injure. She had nothing to bite but the dusty fabric in front of her face. Her own breath was hot and suffocating, clamped over her nose and mouth like a swaddling cloth.

‘I’ve tamed wilder things than you, girl,’ said Lord Faukes, his voice tight with lust and amusement. ‘But fight on, if it please you. The harder won victory is always the sweeter.’ Starling felt air touch the backs of her legs as her skirt was lifted; felt her skin bruised as her drawers were torn away; felt that bone-deep warning, that knowledge she should not have had of what was coming. Knowing it made it hurt no less, and made it no less shaming. Her vulnerability, her failure to prevent what was happening filled her with a terrible rage, as incandescent as it was futile. She shrieked it out into the muffling cushions – every curse and threat and insult she knew, and then wordless cries when his thrusting began, tearing into her. It was not over quickly. Lord Faukes was not a young man; he took his time to take his pleasure.

Sometime afterwards, Bridget rushed in, eyes and mouth wide open, to find Starling still leaning over the arm of the sofa, staring at nothing, her jaw knotted tight at the hinges as she ground her teeth together.

‘I knew it… I knew it as soon as I saw him ride past me, all red in the face and loose in his limbs! The foul old bastard! May he rot!’ Bridget cried; the first and only time Starling heard her curse somebody. ‘May he rot! Are you injured? Can you rise?’

‘Don’t touch me,’ Starling ground out, and she felt Bridget hesitate, startled at her tone. There was a pause, a measured beat in which Bridget changed tack, subtly and effectively.

‘Well, you can’t stay there all day, bung upwards and bleeding on the carpet. Come up and let’s get you clean.’

‘I won’t ever be clean. And let the carpet go to bloody hell. Let the next lot worry about the stains on it, for we won’t be here much longer, he says.’

‘No more we will. But clean you shall be, Starling. The traces they leave can always be rinsed away.’

‘Not always. That was not the first time.’

‘I guessed as much.’ Slowly, Starling peeled herself up from the sofa, standing gingerly. Blood and seed ran down her leg and she shivered in revulsion. She met Bridget’s gaze, saw that the older woman was near as aggrieved as her by what had happened.

‘Only Alice stopped him until now,’ she said, and Bridget nodded.

‘Forgive me. You couldn’t know the danger. I’m sorry I went out.’

‘I knew it. And you had no choice but to go.’

‘I had a choice, but I was too much the coward to take it.’ Bridget’s breath suddenly hitched in her chest; she thumped a fist into her ribs and groaned. ‘But no more! No more! I will call him master no more!’ she cried out, then made a sound like a sob but dry, hollow.

‘Don’t cry, Bridget. Help me to wash instead. You’re right – I can’t stand the stink of him on me.’

‘How much older than your years you sound, Starling.’ Bridget scrubbed her face with her hands, then let them fall to her sides. ‘You always did. Come then. I’ll put water on to heat, and fetch the tub.’

Starling sat in the tub with her body stinging, the hot water too harsh on the lesions and bruises; she felt calm, almost dead.

‘How will it be without her, Bridget?’ she murmured.

‘We have no choice but to find out, my dear,’ said Bridget; a term that had always been reserved for Alice, until then. ‘You’re not bleeding each month yet, are you? At least there should be no child, then. And you are not a child any longer, Starling. You must choose where you would go, what you would do. This will not be the only time – that much I can assure you. If you continue to accept the wages of that man, this will not be the only time.’

‘You will go your own way, then, Bridget?’

‘I will. And take you with me, if you’ll go.’

‘What about Alice? How will she know where to find us?’

‘Alice is gone, girl. One way or another. Though it breaks my heart to say it.’

‘She will come back, I know she will. She wouldn’t just go and leave us. And what about Jonathan? She’d never leave him for another! You know it as well as I do!’ At this she saw Bridget pause, and choose not to tell her something. She had no will to demand to hear it. But she decided there and then that she would stay in Lord Faukes’s service. That she would stay near Jonathan, in a place that Alice would return to. Bridget seemed to know it too.

‘I would have kept you with me. Kept you safe and found you work. Remember that, in the times that are coming,’ said the older woman, gravely.

‘You can’t keep me safe. Only Alice could do that.’ She didn’t mean to be cruel but she saw the remark hit home. Bridget’s face pinched, and she said nothing more, fetching more hot water and clean towels in silence. Starling sat and she thought and she waited. She waited to find out how life would be from then on.

I must find her last letter. Starling carried on up the stairs without thinking, to the second floor of the house on Lansdown Crescent. She didn’t pause to check where Mrs Alleyn was, or Mrs Hatton, or Dorcas. A smell of cinders and baked fish lingered in the stairwell. Never once had she believed that Alice had written a letter to Lord Faukes, to tell him of her elopement; she knew a bare-faced lie when she heard one. Her thoughts were troubled, turning this way and that, trying to fix on something clear. Damn Mrs Weekes and her theories. Could she be Alice’s sister? When Mrs Weekes had described the way her infant sister died, Starling had remembered Alice’s sudden fear on the day they’d swum in the river at Bathampton. Remembered how close she’d come to panic when Jonathan suggested swimming out into the current. Could that have been a distant memory, resurfacing? A nameless warning, like those that Starling’s early years had left her with? Starling shook her head, muttering refutations beneath her breath. Alice was my sister. Rachel Weekes muddies the water, nothing more. She is a fantasist! The reason why Jonathan killed Alice was in Alice’s last letter to him, sent to Brighton, and it was not that she had fallen in love with another. It had to be something else, something which had brought him hurrying back to Bathampton; something which had turned him wild and mad.

She was at his door and breathing hard, and then inside without knocking. At the sound, Jonathan came from his bedchamber with his shirt untucked and rumpled, his hair a mess in front of his eyes.

‘Starling? What’s happened?’ he said, tilting his head at her; his tone so normal, so understated that Starling took a step backwards. Time and reality skidded around her. Here is the man I hate. Does he not know that I hate him? ‘Are you well? You’re so pale.’

‘Am I well?’ She reeled slightly, putting out her hands for balance. ‘This is all wrong,’ she murmured, dizzily. Past his bedraggled figure, on the cluttered desk, was a knife. A pewter blade, dull in the low light; a blunt instrument for the breaking of seals and the splitting of figs. Blunt, then, but still lethal, if used with enough force. Starling stared at it as Jonathan watched her, bewildered. Three steps were all that were needed, she calculated. Three quick steps, a turn and a strike, and whatever truths he knew would bleed out of him and drip through the fancy plasterwork of the ceiling below. She rolled onto the balls of her feet, balancing herself.

‘Starling,’ said Jonathan, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He sighed. ‘You remind me of her sometimes. Did you know that? Just in your… gestures. Your facial expressions. Just sometimes.’ Starling blinked, and lost sight of the knife behind a haze of tears. She shook her head vehemently.

‘I wish you had died instead of her!’ she said. Jonathan didn’t flinch.

‘So do I,’ he said.

The proper thing to do would be to stay indoors until the cut and swelling on her lip had fully healed, but Rachel found she cared less and less for what was proper. One side of her chin was greenish grey with bruising, and the cut had knit into a stiff black line. As he dressed, Richard kept his eyes turned away from her, and wore his guilty scowl.

‘You will not go to the Alleyns looking like that,’ he said, pulling on his boots.

‘I have an appointment. I will keep it.’

‘But, your face…’

‘What of it?’

‘You should send a message and say you’re unwell,’ he suggested, as sulky as a child. Rachel felt a whole new emotion just then, one she had never known before – an exhausting blend of fear and contempt.

‘But I am quite well, Mr Weekes. And I’m sure my appearance will cause no particular outrage in that house,’ she said stiffly. Richard didn’t see fit to argue further; he went down to the shop without another word and Rachel was left to wonder if that was how things would be between them, for the rest of their lives. Anger, violence, disappointment. For both of us, it seems.

By the time Rachel had climbed to Lansdown Crescent the sun had turned the milky sky a blinding white, and behind that a touch of blue was beginning to glow. Frost furred all of Bath’s window glass; the air was entirely still. November was promising to be cold and sharp. Jonathan rose from behind his desk when Dorcas showed Rachel into his rooms; he smiled, but it melted from his face when he saw her.

‘What happened here?’ he said seriously.

‘A small mishap, nothing more.’

‘He beats you?’

‘This was the first time, and my fault, in part. I quarrelled with him.’

‘The first time is rarely the last. What was the quarrel about?’

‘I-’ Rachel broke off, unsure if it would sound petty and sentimental to him. ‘It was a trifling thing, to be sure. I had a silver box that belonged to my mother. And inside it I kept a lock of her hair, pinned to the lining. The box is… sold.’ It still made her sad, and somehow more alone.

‘Sold by your husband, without your knowledge?’

‘Yes. A childish thing to mourn, I know. But mourn it I do.’

‘Perhaps, but to have a piece of the child you were can be a precious thing,’ said Jonathan, softly. ‘I can scarce remember what it was to be a child. Who I was then, before all of this…’

‘Perhaps it does no good to. The temptation is always there to imagine what that child would make of me now. Of the life I have chosen for myself.’

‘Nobody can know the outcome of things, before they are begun. You should not blame yourself,’ Jonathan said quietly. Rachel turned to gaze out of the window, where the sky was now brilliantly blue. The rooms around her seemed stifling in comparison.

‘Come. Let’s go out for a walk. I can’t bear to stay cooped up inside today.’

‘I don’t go out.’ Jonathan shook his head with a frown.

‘I know, and it’s high time you did. Come. The fresh air and exertion will do us both good.’

‘I don’t care to be seen. My leg, and all the tattlers… And I can’t abide crowds,’ he said. Rachel thought for a moment.

‘How about sheep? Can you abide sheep? I daresay they will have nothing much to say about you, or your leg. Come. I insist.’

Dorcas and the butler, Falmouth, watched in undisguised amazement as Jonathan came downstairs and asked for his coat and hat. They watched in more amazement as he left the house, squinting in the sunshine, with Rachel on his arm.

‘They will run and tell my mother I am cured,’ he said drily. He kept his arm, and Rachel’s hand on it, clamped tightly to his ribs, and Rachel felt the tension running through him.

‘It is only a walk,’ she said carefully. ‘Quite a commonplace thing.’ Jonathan kept his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him, ignoring the glances they got from passers-by – gentlefolk and dallying servants both.

‘People are staring,’ he muttered. ‘Damn their eyes!’ His weak leg twisted and buckled slightly as he walked, giving him a jolting, uneven stride.

‘Let them stare. They’re most likely looking at my lip and wondering if I kicked you in the leg to retaliate,’ said Rachel. Jonathan laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard it, and straight away she loved the sound, and the way it bounced along. In the sunlight his skin was terribly pale, but the shadows under his eyes and cheeks looked less severe. She could see the grey running through his dark hair more clearly, yet at the same time he seemed younger, as uncertain as a youth.

They reached the far end of the crescent and passed through a gate onto the high common. The grass was ankle-length and tussocky, drenched in dew and frost-melt, glittering in the sunshine. They walked for twenty minutes or more, climbing steadily, until the city was behind and below them, and the only sounds were the occasional bleats of sheep and piping of birds. The uneven ground was hard work for Jonathan, and he had been so long without exercise that he was panting by the time they stopped and turned to look back. The dew had soaked their feet and the hems of their clothes. Rachel’s toes were damp and numb, but she didn’t mind it at all. The blood was thumping through her veins; she felt warm, and well. They stood side by side to catch their breath, and squinted down at the tangled streets of the city, where the last shreds of mist lingered like ghosts.

‘This is as far as I have been from my rooms in nine years or more, I think,’ said Jonathan.

‘No wonder you’ve been so unhappy,’ said Rachel. Jonathan looked down at her, but said nothing. ‘I prefer to look the other way – away from the city. To look at the far horizon. Somehow it always makes problems seem smaller,’ said Rachel. Jonathan turned obediently to the west, where the River Avon shone like a discarded silver ribbon, winding through fields and trees still clad in the remnants of their autumn colours.

‘I came to Bath with my mother because I didn’t know where else to go, or what else to do. I didn’t care, because I wanted to die,’ Jonathan murmured. ‘Now it seems I will never leave.’

‘Of course you could leave, if you wanted to.’

‘And go where, and do what?’

‘Wherever you choose; whatever you choose. Take a wife, begin a family. You have that freedom; you have that choice. Don’t you see? You can do that. You need not stay trapped here, as I must.’ If I persuade him well enough he will do it, and I will see him no more. The thought jolted her heart. Better that, though, than him continuing in torment.

‘The rules are harsher for women than men.’ Jonathan narrowed his eyes against the light, and they were unreadable. ‘But you could still leave him, if you were strong enough to do so.’

‘And go where? And do what?’ She smiled, sadly. ‘I would be a pauper, reduced to beggary, or whoredom. I would have no employment, no society. No. I have no choice but to remain by my husband’s side.’ Whatever lightness of mood she had felt suddenly vanished, and she took a deep breath.

‘Then I will remain as well,’ he said. ‘Who else would sit and read tales of adventure and derring-do to me, a mad cripple?’ He smiled, and Rachel smiled back at him.

‘You are not mad, or crippled,’ she said.

‘Then what am I?’ he asked.

Wounded. Haunted. A killer. The person I most yearn to see.

‘You are a good man, war wounded and much troubled by the past.’

‘And you are the soul of tact and diplomacy,’ said Jonathan. ‘Do you think I can’t see the other thoughts that whisper to you behind your eyes?’

‘What do they whisper?’ she asked. He sees me? In response Jonathan only smiled again, took her hand and raised it to his lips, pressing a kiss into her chilly skin. Rachel felt the touch of his mouth right down to her bones, like a burn or a bruise, but sweeter. For a moment she couldn’t remember how to breathe. Because a week or so past he might have killed me, and now he kisses me? she wondered. No, said the echo, only because he kisses you. She suddenly thought how Starling would react to his gesture, and felt a little sick. As if he sensed this, Jonathan dropped her hand at once. He looked at her for one second more, his expression shifting, ambiguous, then he turned to the horizon again.

‘May I ask you something delicate, Mr Alleyn?’ Rachel said weakly.

‘I think you have earned the right to.’

‘What makes you so angry with your mother? I mean, long years living together under… difficult circumstances may well breed discord, I know, but it seems to me that there is more to it than that. That you blame her for something,’ said Rachel. Jonathan folded his arms, shielding himself. He did not break off his stare into the west.

‘Yes, I do blame her. She is the reason… I think. I mean, I can’t know because I know she lies, and does not tell the whole truth even when she deigns to tell me some of it. But she is the reason Alice wrote to me.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Alice’s last letter to me. She wrote to me, a letter that reached me in Brighton.’

I know. Rachel managed only in the last instant not to say this out loud.

‘She said… she said we had to part. That we could never be together, or marry. That it would be an abomination. That was the word she used. Abomination. To describe our love, that had been as strong and blameless as the sun since we were just children. She said… things between us could never be as they had been before. We should not meet again.’

Bridget was right, Rachel knew in that moment. Why else do rich and powerful men sponsor nameless young children? And if Alice had been Lord Faukes’s child, she would have been Jonathan’s aunt. Oh, poor girl, if she found that out. Rachel swallowed, she shut her eyes for a second, and Abigail flickered in the far corner of her mind, ever fainter. Rachel reached for her. Josephine could have been wrong. Perhaps Lord Faukes only adopted her. Found her, and adopted her, she thought desperately.

‘And there was more… I know there was! If only I could remember…’

‘You do not have the letter still?’

‘I can hardly remember that day. I had just got back to Brighton… I was injured, exhausted, half mad, half starved. I can barely remember my journey back to Bathampton at all. It’s like some strange, dark dream. And when I came to myself I didn’t have the letter in my possession. I must have dropped it, or cast it away. But – abomination. I remember that word; I did not dream it.’ He shook his head. ‘It was the retreat back to Corunna, you see… from the moment we marched into Spain, it was near impossible to write, and when I did write there was nobody to take the letters. She had no word from me for weeks and weeks, so she went to Box to see if they had news,’ said Jonathan, shaking his head slowly. ‘Oh, Alice! Why did you do that? If only she hadn’t. She must have thought that they would welcome her – she must have thought that they’d find common ground, in their love and fear for me. She wasn’t to know that my mother – and my grandfather – had rules she couldn’t hope to know about.’

‘So your mother told her something to make her flee?’ How much has he guessed?

‘Yes. When I arrived back to find her gone, they spun me the yarn that she had run away with another, and forsaken me. Mother told me she’d left a note, to my grandfather, to explain and apologise. They said she was a disgrace, a pariah, and I was to forget her.’

‘But you didn’t believe them.’

‘When my mother lies, I can tell. She has lied all her life, and though I can’t discover the truth, still I know she lies.’ His voice had turned hard and angry.

Rachel thought hard, searching for sense in the conflicting tangle of all that she had heard said.

‘But you said to me, some time ago, that you’d found a note from Alice’s… new companion. A note for her, to arrange an assignation.’

‘Yes, I…’ He broke off, and frowned. ‘I’m sure I did. But it was… I was not myself in those days. I have forgotten much… there are stretches of time I can’t account for. Dark spaces. They are one of the things I brought back from Spain with me. Dark spaces.’ He shook his head again, and Rachel felt a chill go through her. The first time I came to read to him, he said those words to me – dark spaces. When he could not remember throttling me. She thought of the brain in its heavy jar, teetering above her head, and the blank, blind look in his eyes. ‘But the note has gone, if I did find it. It has gone. Perhaps I destroyed it. Perhaps I… never saw it. A nightmare, it might have been. Brought on by the lies my mother and my grandfather told.’

‘Starling suggested as much.’

‘What?’

‘I…’ Rachel hesitated, unwilling to reveal the extent of her contact with Starling. ‘We have spoken, Starling and I. She was curious about my face… my resemblance to Alice.’ She held her breath but Jonathan sounded sad rather than angry.

‘Yes. She loved Alice as much as I did.’

‘She does not believe that Alice was keeping other company. That she ran away with anybody else.’

‘I know. She thinks I killed her.’ He looked at Rachel and smiled at the shock on her face. ‘We have had many years in which to fling hurtful and violent things at one another, Starling and I.’

‘But, she also told me…’ Rachel paused again, unsure if it was right or wrong to speak. ‘They had a housekeeper. Bridget Barnes.’

‘Bridget saw Alice speaking with another man, shortly before she vanished,’ said Jonathan.

‘You know already?’ said Rachel. Jonathan was still breathing deeply, his chest rising and falling emphatically.

‘Yes. My grandfather got it from her, and told me. But still, I… won’t condemn her. I know when my mother is lying. Whoever this man was, and why ever Alice went away with him, she can only have thought it was for the best. They must have deceived her in some way. Or perhaps taken her against her will.’

‘But you always seemed so angry with her – you seemed to blame Alice for abandoning you!’

‘And I did, for a time. Perhaps I still do, in darker hours; for I cannot think why she would go, and why she would stay away all this time. What could have been so terrible that we could not have surmounted it, together? So then, I think again – they must have forced her away somehow.’

‘Why would they, when she had been prepared to break it off with you? Your family didn’t want the two of you to wed. Alice went to them and revealed your intentions, and something was said to frighten her. She wrote to you to break it off. Why then would they go further?’

‘I don’t know! Don’t you think I’ve asked myself these things, time and time again? The only people who know are Alice and my mother. One cannot tell me, the other refuses to.’

‘So you think…’ Rachel was finding it hard to speak. Her voice was trapped in her throat, choked by her heart. ‘You think that Alice is still alive?’

‘Yes, of course. I pray that she is. I would rather… I would rather have her alive somewhere, in love with another, sparing me not a thought… I would rather that than she be dead. Only Starling ever thought that would be better.’

‘So would I,’ said Rachel, but quietly, and Jonathan didn’t seem to hear. They stood a while, each lost in thought, with the sun shining in their eyes and a buzzard circling high overhead, riding the warm air as it rose from the hill. Rachel let her arms hang down by her sides and tried not to wish that he would unfold his arms and take her hand again. She felt childish, foolish, to think it. What would I gain from such a gesture? Again, the echo answered her, as softly as a pent breath gently released. Everything.