The Misbegotten

1821

Starling waited while Rachel Weekes went in to Mrs Alleyn, to give her usual report on her visit with Jonathan. The reports had been getting shorter and shorter, though the visits grew longer and longer. Starling had a strange feeling about that. A kernel of mistrust in her gut; hard and bitter as an apple pip. And now they walk out together, arm in arm. I wanted her to torment him with that face, but she heals him. She was restless with frustration. All her years of hard work, all the little punishments she had meted out; all of it was being undone by something she herself had set in motion. When she heard the front door close she darted out and up the servants’ stair, glaring at Rachel Weekes as they moved away together along the garden wall.

‘What are you doing? Are you on his side now?’ Starling snapped, the words surprising her. She hadn’t been aware of thinking them.

‘What?’

‘Walking the high common like… like…’

‘Like what?’ said Rachel Weekes. She seemed distracted, and Starling noticed her split lip, the bruise on her jaw.

‘What did he beat you for?’ she asked, in all curiosity. It seemed that Rachel Weekes’s marriage had followed the same course as her own liaison with Dick, only more rapidly. She still felt angry with the woman for marrying him, but now it was because she’d been stupid enough to saddle herself with him. Rachel’s attention settled onto her more steadily.

‘What’s wrong, Starling?’ she said levelly.

‘What do you mean?’ Starling was taken aback by her tone; affronted. ‘You know what’s wrong. I thought you wanted the same as me – to find out why he hurt Alice, and to prove it. But now I think what you want might have changed, mightn’t it? What now, are you in love with Jonathan Alleyn?’

‘No,’ said Rachel, with a kind of startled outrage that spoke volumes.

‘Hard luck if you are. You’re married to Dick Weekes, until God parts you. And Jonathan loves Alice, not you.’

There was a pause, and Rachel stared hard at Starling until she could hardly bear it. The weight of the taller woman’s gaze seemed to crush her.

‘What have I done to you, to make you try to wound me so?’ she said.

‘You were supposed to be on my side!’ Starling sounded childish to her own ears. She folded her arms in disgust, to hide the tremulous, unhappy feeling that was growing inside her. ‘Tell me what you found out today.’

‘I asked him about Alice’s last letter to him. He said she called their love an abomination. She said they should never see each other again.’

‘Abomination… I hardly know what that means.’

‘It means that Bridget was right, perhaps, about Alice being Lord Faukes’s child. If the love she and Jonathan had was incestuous…’

‘No.’ Starling shook her head. The idea made her sick to her stomach. ‘Alice couldn’t have been Faukes’s child. No man so vile could sire such a sweet girl.’

‘What did he do to you? Lord Faukes, I mean?’

‘What do you think he did? What do all men of power do? They take without asking.’ Starling heard the bitterness in her own voice; the ugliness. Rachel Weekes’s face reflected her pity, and disgust. Starling spoke on, to deflect it. ‘What of your lost sister – what of that? Now you say it was not her?’

‘I… I want it to be. I want Alice to be Abi…’

‘But she could be… she could be, couldn’t she? If she was Lord Faukes’s, wouldn’t he have had her from birth? Wouldn’t he have brought her to Bridget sooner?’ What are you saying, mindless fool? Alice was your own sister, not hers.

Starling sighed sharply through her nose. ‘Anyway, it matters not, and can never be known for sure. But do you believe now that Mr Alleyn killed her? That he had reason to?’

‘I don’t… I don’t know.’ Rachel frowned, and looked down at her hands. She cradled one in the other, and rubbed her thumb over its surface as if to check for a wound or a mark. ‘He spoke of… dark spaces. Dark spaces in his memory.’ The words, spoken reluctantly, sent a thrill through Starling.

‘It is as I said – see how he begins to build the story that he was out of his mind, and can’t remember doing it? That’s what he’s hiding behind, and how he’ll end up forgiving himself.’

‘No. I don’t think he’ll ever forgive himself. He’s no longer sure he saw a note to Alice. The one he said he found in the lovers’ tree. He says it might… have been a nightmare.’

‘I knew it! I knew it.’ Starling’s throat was aching tight; she thought she might scream, or laugh.

‘What of the man Bridget saw her talking to?’

‘What of him? We will never know who he was. And anyway, it was innocent. It was nothing.’

‘Why should Alice argue with a man in the street?’

‘It matters not! He is almost ready to confess to you! I am certain of it. You must press him more. When will you come again?’ She grasped Rachel’s hand to force her concentration, her words tumbling eagerly, shaking with excitement.

‘And what then?’

‘When he confesses? Then I will…’ Starling trailed off. There was such a sudden, ringing emptiness in her head that she noticed the damp, gritty smell of stone all around; she noticed the chill in the air making her nose run, and the stinging under her thumbnails from peeling oranges that morning. She had no idea how to answer Rachel Weekes’s question.

‘Have you tried asking him?’

‘What?’ Starling whispered, distracted.

‘The things you want to know… have you tried asking him at any time, in all the twelve years since you both lost her?’

‘Yes, of course I have! I asked, over and over, in the beginning. But he was only ever silent about it – about her. About everything!’

‘Fresh back from the war, he would have been? Full of misery and guilt and the horror of it… And I wonder how kindly you asked him, Starling. And were they questions, or accusations?’ Rachel Weekes made the reprimand so gentle that Starling barely noticed the sting. ‘Have you asked him since, or have you only sought to keep him as mired in despair as you could?’

‘He deserves no kindnesses from me. Or anyone.’

‘Are you sure?’ Starling thought on it a while. She knew the answer; she had always known the answer. He deserved no kindnesses – and hadn’t this pale facsimile of Alice near enough confirmed his guilt, just now? And yet Starling stayed silent, and was silent for so long that the time to reply came and went. Mrs Weekes took her hand and squeezed it in parting, and as she walked away Starling was left with the ghost of her warmth on her fingers.

Since you both lost her. Rachel Weekes’s words flew around in her head like snowflakes, settling on her with a freezing touch, time and again. No. I lost her. He took her. Starling went up to Jonathan’s rooms with cheese and grapes for his lunch, without even being asked, and found herself standing in front of him. He was in his chair by the window, where she most often found him of late; his back turned to the dark, cluttered contents of his rooms so that he could watch the world instead, with light on his face and his eyes far away. A trail of footprints led the way to him, flecks of grass and damp autumn leaves that had come in on his boots from the common. When he looked up at her his face was calm, and he almost smiled to see her. Starling clenched her fists and this fledgling smile vanished. He seemed to tense himself, ready for whatever she would throw at him. Have you tried asking him? So many questions sprang into her mind, and each one gave her a feeling of pressure behind her eyes. She blinked furiously at it. Why did you kill her? How did you kill her? Where did you hide her afterwards? How can you bear to draw breath? Why should I not kill you too?

‘Why…’ she began, her voice so constricted she had to try again. She was confounded by everything she might ask. Jonathan gripped the arms of his chair as if he might leap up and flee, but his eyes were clear. He is sober. When did I last look into his eyes, and see them sober? ‘What… What did you do, on the way to Corunna, that shamed you so? What did you do, that made you hate yourself so?’

Jonathan stared at her in silence. If he deduced that she had read his letter, he gave no sign of it.

‘You have told me often that I will burn in hell,’ he said, eventually. Starling held her breath. ‘But I have seen it already. I have seen hell, and it is not hot. It is cold. As cold as dead flesh.’

‘What do you mean?’ Starling whispered.

‘You have never asked me about the war before.’

‘I… you did not want to talk to me.’

‘I did not want to talk to anybody. Not until Mrs Weekes made me.’

‘She…’ Starling swallowed; could not tell what she felt. ‘She said I should ask you the things I want to know.’

‘And this is what you want to know? Then you shall hear it,’ said Jonathan. Suddenly, the look on his face made Starling want to stop him, made her want to not hear it, but it was too late. He took a deep breath; began implacably.

‘Before the retreat came the advance, of course; in the autumn of 1808. We advanced into Spain divided, with no maps, poor supply lines and only some ill-informed Portuguese scouts to guide us. It was folly, before it even began.’ He paused, shook his head. ‘But orders had come from London, and had to be obeyed. The army was to be divided into three parts to travel more covertly; those three parts were to take three different routes, and reunite at Salamanca.’ The man in high command, Sir John Moore, was overheard to mutter of the recklessness of it. The sky and ground were still dry, and a dense pall of dust hung above the army, but Jonathan felt a deep foreboding. He realised that it would be a miracle if all eventually reached Salamanca before the winter, and without starving to death. Huge, black moths beat their silent wings in his mind.

He rode Suleiman to a high ridge and sat for a while with Captain Sutton at his side, watching the long columns of men and wagons and horses as they moved out. Most of the men were cheerful, pleased to be on the move. He heard snatches of song and laughter; the roll and beat of the marching drums; the high-pitched whistling of piccolo flutes – sweet sounds above a background din of squawking chickens, lowing oxen and rumbling, creaking wooden wheels. The women – wives who’d drawn lots in London to be allowed to follow their men; prostitutes, washerwomen, gin sellers and mysterious hangers-on – had been told to stay in Portugal. They’d been warned of the hardships ahead – the columns were travelling light; there would be no wagons to carry them, they would have to follow on foot, and there wouldn’t be enough food. Still many of them followed, as stubborn and single-minded as the pack mules many of them were leading. Jonathan watched them pass by behind the men, skirts already filthy to the knee, and he feared for them.

‘Why do they come? Why didn’t they listen?’ he said to Captain Sutton, and the captain gave a shrug.

‘They travelled all these many miles to be with their men. What have they in Portugal to stay for? It is an alien land, and if they stay not with the army, then there is no point at all in their being here.’

‘We will never manage to keep all fed.’

‘We must hope to find food as we go. Fear not, Major; I am sure we will bring them through it.’

But the captain didn’t sound sure; he sounded full of the same doubt that Jonathan felt. When the weather broke and the rain started, the air itself turned grey and the ground was soon a quagmire. The mud was a hindrance to those at the very front of the lines. To those behind, when many hooves and feet had churned it already, it was a sucking, debilitating nightmare. Jonathan checked Suleiman’s feet every evening, cleaned and dried them out as best he could; but he could still smell the rankness of thrush taking hold, and feel the heat and swelling of mud fever in the animal’s heels. It was the same for the men – they were not dry from one day or week to the next. It was impossible to keep tents or kit, skin or boots clean; the mud got everywhere. They stopped singing; the pipers stopped piping. Their feet bloated, blistered, cracked. In startlingly quick time, the chickens were all slain and eaten. There was no food to be found in the barren landscape, and what farms and villages they passed had most often been gutted and laid waste by the retreating French. All their enemies had left them were horrors and corpses. At the end of each day’s march, as Jonathan tried to care for Suleiman’s feet, he whispered to his horse of the warm stables awaiting them in Salamanca; the sweet meadow hay that would be piled high in his manger; the oats he would have in his nosebag, fresh and tasty instead of mouldy from the constant damp. Suleiman shivered and heaved a sigh as he listened to this, as if he didn’t believe it, and Jonathan’s own stomach rumbled as he spoke.

Moore’s section of the army, with Jonathan, Captain Sutton and their company within it, was the first to reach Salamanca, in late November 1808. They were weak, exhausted, underfed. They were rife with dysentery, sickness and lice, and they were told to be ready to move again at once, because a French force ten times their number was at Valladolid, a mere four or five marches away. French numbers in Spain swelled all the time; Napoleon himself had arrived to lead in the centre and south – the emperor was quite determined that Spain would remain a part of his empire. When Jonathan heard this news he felt a cold fist of fear in the pit of his stomach. He was ashamed of his reaction and tried to hide it as he passed on the alert to his company, though he saw it mirrored in some of their faces. Others showed excitement at the prospect of a fight; some were clearly furious, though Jonathan could not guess at what; some showed nothing but weary acceptance. A drawn-out, hollow expression, which made their eyes look dead.

‘It will be a relief, will it not – to fight at last instead of marching?’ said Captain Sutton carefully, as he and Jonathan shared a flask of wine in the captain’s billet later on. Naked candle flames juddered and flapped in the draughty room, sending shadows careening up the walls. Jonathan looked Sutton in the eye and knew that the captain saw his fear. He knew, but did not despise him for it. Still Jonathan flushed with shame as he raised his cup.

‘A relief, indeed,’ he said, then drained the drink down. Wherever a wine cellar had been discovered in the city, it had been raided. Huge barrels had been rolled out into the streets and drained, and sat empty with a few collapsed, insensible men around each one. More than one man had drunk himself to death already. And still the cold rain fell.

‘Without fear there can be no valour,’ said Captain Sutton, softly. He was older than Jonathan by fifteen years, and had seen battles and wars before this one. He was a good man, and kind; he helped his inexperienced senior officer wherever he could, and Jonathan was grateful, even though this care made him feel like a child swimming out of its depth.

In the middle of December they quit Salamanca again. Sir John Moore had resisted for as long as possible, hoping for the other army contingents to reach the city; hoping for the arrival of Spanish allies to reinforce them. None came. But then word came that the French had moved south; that they thought Salamanca deserted, and had no idea of the British force in occupation there. There was a chance to strike an unanticipated blow; a chance to divert the French from harrying the beleaguered Spanish in the south, and Moore took it. He marched them north-west, towards Saldana, where a famous commander called Soult, dubbed the Duke of Damnation by the men, was in command of a large French force. After a stationary month, one of few comforts and scant food, the men were almost happy to march again, especially if there would be a battle at the end of it – the waiting wore them down; they wanted to fight. Jonathan thought of the violence and death they had seen so far, and couldn’t understand their eagerness. But he kept this to himself, close-guarded; just like he kept his doubts and all his misgivings about his chosen career to himself.

‘It will soon be time to give the enemy a taste of our mettle, men – and our steel!’ he bellowed to his company, and they gave him a resounding cheer as they marched. The words were bitter in his mouth, and sounded hollow in his ears. Behind the saddle, Suleiman’s ribs arched out, plainly visible beneath his too-thin coat. When the wind blew the horse shivered, but did not baulk. Jonathan felt the shudder pass up through his own body, as though he and his horse were one being. Lend me your courage, brave friend.

Jonathan wrote to Alice constantly, and managed to resist telling her of the fear he felt, and his disgust at the bloodlust of his compatriots. He managed not to describe the way they all seemed to be growing less and less human as the weeks wore on. They grew more bestial, more brutish and cruel – even in their most basic characteristics: they were hairier, ragged, and they stank. The war was shaping them to its own ends. He wrote none of that, and instead wrote of the longing to return to her which occupied his every waking moment, and haunted his dreams as well. Then their surreptitious march was cut short – they encountered a company of around seven hundred French cavalry, and engaged them in a short and brutal fight which finished when the French were all slain. Thus Soult was alerted to their march on Saldana, and their whereabouts.

Word was sent south; the main French force halted, turned, came back for them. When Jonathan was passed the dispatch with this news, he felt his guts turn watery and his legs soften with panic. He bit it down and awaited orders, but they had no other choice than to flee. Within days they might be surrounded by so many thousands of French that any battle would be a massacre. There was no choice but to retreat, back to the coast in the west. On Christmas Eve 1808, the British turned towards the mountains. The officers had to herd their reluctant men – the troops wanted to stay and fight the Duke of Damnation, or Napoleon himself – to fight anybody, rather than climb a mountain range in wintertime, with no supplies. They knew that the mountains would be every bit as deadly as any such battle might be.

Jonathan was sure he could feel the French behind them. He sensed them like a huge black cloud, or like a wave about to break over their heads. He had the constant unnerving feeling of being watched, crept up on. He gave short shrift to his disobedient men, although he stopped short of having them flogged. Men under other officers were not as fortunate. Some took a hundred lashes for a muttered complaint; two hundred for straying away from the columns; three hundred for cozening mutiny. They were left with their backs in tatters, unlikely to live, and loving their commanders no more than before. Run! Jonathan wanted to scream at them. What is the matter with you? Run, while you can! The words stayed trapped in his mouth, straining to get out, as the rain turned to snow and the wind grew teeth and claws. His men took the obvious conflict within him as a sign that he hated the order to retreat as much as they did. It made them love him more, and if he’d had any laughter left he would have laughed at this irony.

It was cold enough to freeze the blood in their veins. Each night the snow set with frost, turning hard and razor sharp. Men who had lost their boots in the sucking mud of the plains now walked barefoot, on feet gone black with frostbite, shapeless with swollen bruises. One man had worn his right through to the bone. He was kneeling in snow, looking down a rocky slope at the milling French not far below them, when Jonathan came up behind him. The smooth, grey knobs of his heel bones protruded through the lacerated soles of his feet. The sight gave Jonathan a dizzy feeling, as if he teetered on the lip of a precipice, and was about to fall. When the man saw him looking, he grinned at Jonathan.

‘A fair sight to frighten the Frenchies, eh, sir?’ he croaked, in a voice as broken as his body. ‘Don’t fret for me, sir; they pain me not at all.’ There was a dull, feverish light in his eyes, and Jonathan moved away without talking to the man, afraid of him because he was clearly dead but still marching; dead but not yet aware of it.

To begin with, the rearguard of the British force was harried constantly. Again and again they had to turn, draw up lines, and repel the French pursuit. Make ready! Present! Fire! Shouted out, over and over again. Jonathan heard the four words in his sleep, and woke with his hand curled around the hilt of a sabre he wasn’t holding, his arm aloft, ready to fall to the accompanying roar of musket fire. He led one short, vicious fight to hold a river crossing, after which the little stream was left crammed with corpses, both French and British. Jonathan surveyed the scene with his ears ringing from the guns; the burbling water sounded like music, like silver bells. There was smoke in his eyes and mouth; his throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow, and there was nothing in his canteen. He went to the water’s edge and knelt in the freezing mud, and scooped up water that was colder than ice, and red with blood. He drank it down nonetheless. It soothed his throat, and tasted of iron. On the far bank lay a young French soldier, still just a boy. He fed the red waters from a wound to his face – half of which was missing. But the boy lived for a little while longer; Jonathan met his eyes and found he couldn’t look away. He sat down in the filth and stayed with this dying lad, whose blood he had drunk with the water. There was no rancour in either of them; no anger or spite; no blame. Only a shared acceptance of what had been done, and could not be undone. When Captain Sutton hauled him to his feet Jonathan blinked, and saw that the boy was dead.

In the coming weeks death was always with them. There were injuries, old and new; there was starvation; there was illness and disease; there were skirmishes, and there was the all-consuming cold. Then death, as if bored, began to find new and creative ways to take them. There was a strange reaction to some supplies of salt fish and rum that finally reached them – when consumed in quantity it blasted through the men’s starving systems with devastating results. There was a swirling fog one day, so thick and white that the eye could not pick out what was ground and what was not. It hid the precipitous drop into a canyon, and more than one man stepped off the edge, all unawares. A pair of mules stumbled off as well, taking a cartload of wounded men with them. All were too weak to cry out as they fell – including the mules. Childbirth claimed one young girl, who remained seated in the snow in a crimson swathe of her own blood, cradling her baby as she waited to die. The child was born too soon; it moved weakly for only a minute or two before it died. Jonathan stopped beside the girl for a while. She sat mute and immobile, not struggling to rise; she looked very beautiful against the snowy ground, with her dark, dark hair and her silvery eyes. Jonathan stayed and waited with her, but he could think of nothing to say or do for her, and death seemed in no hurry to claim her. So he walked on, burrowing his face into his greatcoat.

The next time their path led them alongside a yawning nothingness, an empty drop in which the wind moaned and snow skirled, Jonathan saw a man step off the edge, quite deliberately. Horses collapsed underneath the men they carried and were butchered and eaten, if time on the march allowed. Dogs suffered the same fate. Otherwise, the men chewed the leather straps from their kit and uniforms for sustenance. By the middle of January 1809, as their path began to descend towards the fertile plains that would lead them to the sea, the retreat through the mountains had killed five thousand of them. Jonathan walked beside Suleiman with his arms around the horse’s neck. He was too weak to walk unaided, but Suleiman was lame in both his front legs, and winced at every step, and Jonathan could not bear to mount him, however much Captain Sutton urged him to. So he half walked and was half dragged by his horse, and when he tried to check Suleiman’s front feet to find out the problem, they were so hard-packed with ice he had no way of telling. The horse’s coat was matted and bedraggled; it clung to his stark bones, hard with mud and frost. Jonathan tried to murmur encouragement as they went, but after a while his words became nonsense, and his lips cracked and bled when he moved them, so he only thought what he wanted to say. Keep going, my brave friend, for I will perish here without you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I brought you here, brave creature.

When they reached the low plains the milder air was like a lover’s kisses, soft on their faces and hands and in their lungs. There was winter grass for those horses and mules that had survived, but still nothing for the men. Starvation made them all a bit mad; it gave them a glint in their eyes like feral dogs. And Suleiman would not eat. He showed no interest at all in the brownish grass that was suddenly all around him; without the numbing ice in his feet he was in such pain that he trembled all over, all day long. It tore at Jonathan’s heart to see him suffer so. There was no reproach in the horse’s eyes, no blame, but there was also no fight, no spark. On a mild, damp day on which the men finally caught the tang of the sea, Suleiman’s shuffling walk halted, his knees buckled and he lay down. The men trudging behind them parted around the fallen horse without a pause or a thought.

Jonathan knelt beside his horse’s head. He tried to lift it onto his lap, but it was too heavy and his own arms were far too weak. For a while he was content to let the horse rest. He dribbled some water into Suleiman’s mouth, but it ran back out again. Only after an hour had passed, and Captain Sutton came to find him, did Jonathan begin to see the danger.

‘Major Alleyn, sir, we must move on. We’ll make camp on top of the next rise, if we can reach it by sundown,’ said the captain, rousing Jonathan with a hand on his shoulder. ‘Come, sir, we will find you another horse from the lines.’

‘What? I need no other horse. I have Suleiman,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘A valiant creature, indeed, Major Alleyn, but I fear he is spent. Come, let us end it for him the more swiftly, and be onwards.’

‘You will do no such thing!’ Jonathan struggled to his feet and staggered as a wave of woozy exhaustion swept over him. ‘He will make it. He is not spent. Come, Suleiman, up! Up, my brave boy! We are nearly at camp!’ He tugged on the reins, his voice growing louder and louder. He leaned with all his weight, but Suleiman did not even raise his head.

‘Sir-’

‘No! I will not hear of it! Up, Suleiman, up! Fetch me some brandy, Captain. That’s all he needs, a little brandy for strength!’

Captain Sutton fetched a tot of brandy in a tin cup and dutifully handed it over, though his eyes said that he knew a lost cause when he saw one. Frantically, Jonathan lifted Suleiman’s chin, peeled back his lips and dribbled the brandy onto his tongue. The horse’s gums were greyish white, and the brandy had no effect.

‘Come up, Suleiman! Up!’

‘Leave off him, man, the poor beast is done for,’ remarked another officer, walking past with the bandy-legged gait of a lifetime spent in the saddle. Frantically, Jonathan fetched his crop from behind the saddle and gave the horse a whack across the rump. It left a welt in his fur, but the muscles beneath the slack skin didn’t even twitch. Jonathan could hardly see for the tears burning his eyes. He had never hated himself more. With a gasped breath he hit Suleiman again.

‘You must get up!’ he shouted. With slow surrender, Suleiman blinked his uppermost eye. Jonathan dropped the crop and collapsed beside him, weeping uncontrollably. He smoothed the thin coat around the horse’s eyes and ears; a gentle stroking to make up for the blows he’d delivered. ‘I’m so sorry, my friend. I’m so sorry,’ he murmured, over and over again. He felt Captain Sutton’s hands on his shoulders, coaxing him away.

‘There’s nothing more to be done, sir. There’s nothing more you can do for him. Come away. Come away now.’ Jonathan rose unsteadily and allowed himself to be led away. ‘That’s right, sir. Best leave him now. No more to be done, and it upsets the men to see you so distraught. Best to leave him; I’ll make sure he’s taken care of.’ They’d gone only fifteen or twenty paces when a shot rang out, and Jonathan turned to see a man standing over his fallen friend with a smoking pistol in his hand.

‘I made it down the mountain only because of him. My friend. And see now how he is rewarded for all his strength and bravery.’ Jonathan loathed the tears on his face, and scrubbed at them angrily.

‘There never was a better horse, Major Alleyn. But there was nothing more to be done.’

That night, Jonathan sat in his tent at his folding field desk, quill pen poised over a piece of blank paper. He’d been trying to write a letter to Alice, the first one in weeks, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could write. To tell her anything was to invite her into the hell in which he found himself. To tell her anything was to tell her what he had become, and risk her loving him no longer. He was a man who watched newborn babies die in the snow; a man who drank the blood of dead comrades. He was a man who feared battle; a man without valour, who reviled the passionate violence that his country needed from him. He was a man who had left Suleiman lying on a grassy plain to die – that beautiful, powerful creature she had called magnificent, in the water meadow at Bathampton the summer before. He was a man who wanted to go home, and see nothing more of war, ever again.

Christmas had come and gone. Bathampton and everything in it seemed to belong to another world completely; a world in which things as sweet and pointless as Christmas could exist. The page stayed empty as the minutes crept past, and when Captain Sutton came in Jonathan was glad of the interruption. The captain carried a plate, and on it was a thick steak of roasted meat and a slice of bread; the smell of it made Jonathan’s stomach twist in painful anticipation. But the captain didn’t speak as he put the plate in front of Jonathan. He opened his mouth as if to, but then he said nothing, and would not meet Jonathan’s eye. So Jonathan suddenly knew exactly where this meat had come from, and he stared at it with perfect horror. He was relieved when Captain Sutton left again at once, and didn’t stay to watch him eat it. To watch him eat of his own horse. But eat he did, though it was with the sure knowledge that he would never be himself, would never be as he had been before, ever again.

‘We reached Corunna the next day. That was how close Suleiman came to finishing the march. But part of me is glad he didn’t make it – the lame horses… the lame and the weak were shot instead of being allowed to take up valuable space and supplies on the journey home. He would have been shot even if he had finished the journey. This is how men repay their loyal servants and companions.’ Jonathan fell silent, and in the wake of his words the air felt colder, and harder to breathe.

‘And you wrote to Alice from there. That day that you reached Corunna, you wrote to her and told her of your shame.’ Starling’s voice was small and weak in the aftermath of his brutal speech.

‘Yes. I wrote to her there. I dreamed of her. I thought of her as a man dying of thirst thinks of water. She was the only thing that drove me to survive.’

‘And then she wrote to you in Brighton, and told you that you must for ever part.’

‘They landed the boats at night, so that the people of England would not see our frightful condition. So that they would not be out in the streets to smell the stink of death and defeat on us,’ Jonathan murmured.

‘And you came at once to Bathampton. And you killed her,’ Starling intoned.

‘No!’

‘But how do you know? You came at once, and I saw how deranged you were. You say you can’t remember clearly from that time, that you have dark spaces from those days when she vanished, so how do you know? How do you know you didn’t?’ Starling’s voice had risen to a shout but Jonathan didn’t flinch. He stared up at her, wide-eyed.

‘Because I would have cut my own heart out of my body first,’ he said.

‘You are sure of that? As sure as she loved you?’ Starling trembled as she fixed her eyes on his, and did not look away. Jonathan’s face was naked, somehow; without wine or opium he was wide open to her scrutiny, and though he said nothing Starling saw doubt in his eyes – unmistakable, rising like flames to consume him.

I know when my mother lies. Josephine Alleyn was sitting in the parlour when Rachel was ushered in. Jonathan’s mother had no book in her hands, and no embroidery. Nothing to occupy her as she waited. A gilt clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly, and Rachel noticed that the canary’s gilded cage was empty. She decided not to ask what had become of the bird. Something about the older woman’s absolute stillness made her uneasy. Her blue eyes were clear and steady, and younger than her years, but Rachel could read nothing in them beyond an unusual intensity. No candles had been lit, and the wan light of day leached the colours from the room. The robin’s-egg blue silk divan; the cerise drapes at the windows; the greens and golds of the carpet. All were rendered greyer, weaker. My mother lies. Rachel tried to smile as she came to stand in front of Mrs Alleyn, but the older woman did not ask her to sit.

‘You walked out with my son, I believe, on your last visit.’ She spoke without tone, without any particular emotion. Again, Rachel felt some warning. It’s only because of what Jonathan said, and he speaks from years of bitterness.

‘Yes, Mrs Alleyn. I thought it would be beneficial…’

‘So it was your idea, and not Jonathan’s?’

‘Yes, madam.’

‘I see. And do you think it was proper of you, to suggest such a thing? My son is an unmarried man…’

‘But I am a married woman, Mrs Alleyn, and retained as companion to your son.’

‘To read to him within this house, as I recall our arrangement.’

‘Forgive me, Mrs Alleyn. I had not meant to cause offence. I only hoped to cheer your son with some fresh air, and a change of… vista. I understood that my role was to cheer him.’

‘To cheer him, perhaps. Not to flirt with him, and expose him to public ridicule.’

‘What ridicule have I exposed him to, Mrs Alleyn?’ Rachel was at a loss. The accusation made her even more nervous.

‘Cajoling him into leaving the house – for I cannot imagine he went willingly – when his appearance is so dishevelled, and his health so reduced. And on the arm of the wine man’s wife! Not to mention in your current state of… injury.’ She nodded to indicate the cut on Rachel’s lip, still visible though the bruising had faded. ‘I’m surprised at your boldness, going about so openly with your face thus disordered. And what if he had fallen, or taken a chill? Do you have any idea how disastrous that could be for my son?’

Rachel stood in stunned silence for a moment. Without raising her voice or changing her tone, Josephine Alleyn had thoroughly upbraided her, and cut her to the quick. The wine man’s wife. Her cheeks burned in humiliation, but she felt a spark of defiance as well.

‘Forgive me, Mrs Alleyn. If I… overstepped my role, I am truly sorry. But it seemed to me, in fact I am sure, that the walk did Mr Alleyn a power of good. We walked out of the city and onto the common, so as to suffer no unwanted scrutiny.’

‘You walked the length of the crescent before you reached the common, however. Do you have any idea how the neighbours watch me? Watch us, my son and I? They are always watching, and wagging their tongues.’

‘Such… rumours and falsehoods that are spread about your son can only have been undermined by seeing him in the flesh, and well enough to walk out, surely, Mrs Alleyn?’

‘You were asked to read to him, Mrs Weekes. Nothing more.’

‘Yes, Mrs Alleyn.’ Josephine Alleyn watched her calmly for another long moment, then blinked slowly and turned her head away. At once, the tension in the room seemed to lessen, and Rachel breathed a little easier.

‘If it is true, what you say, and my son was revitalised by this walk, then he will be encouraged to walk more often. Properly attired, of course. But it is not for you to accompany him, Mrs Weekes,’ said Josephine.

‘I do not think he would like to walk by himself,’ Rachel murmured. Josephine’s gaze returned to her at once.

‘Then I shall walk with him. Or I will invite one of his gentlemen friends to do so.’

‘Yes, Mrs Alleyn.’

‘I hear from your tone that you don’t think he will go with them. Do you think you have special powers over him, Mrs Weekes?’

‘No, Mrs Alleyn. No special powers; or powers of any kind. Only the… beginnings of trust, and friendship.’

‘Trust? And he does not trust me, you mean to say? His own mother?’

‘I am sure he does, madam,’ said Rachel, hastily. My mother lies.

‘And how does this trust show itself to you? Tell me. Does he confide in you? What does he speak to you about, if you have not been reading all these weeks, but making friends instead?’

‘He speaks of his experiences in the war… Of their terrible nature. He speaks of growing up, and of his grandfather.’ Rachel met Josephine Alleyn’s cool gaze and hesitated before going on. ‘He speaks of Alice Beckwith, and the loss of her.’

Josephine Alleyn reared backwards slightly, as though Rachel had struck her, but she quickly recovered herself.

‘How could he not, when you look so much like the wretched girl?’ she said tersely.

‘Forgive me, Mrs Alleyn, but I had understood that it was my resemblance to Abi that led you to engage me here in the first place?’

‘Abi? Who is this Abi?’

‘Abi?’ Rachel blinked, startled. ‘Alice. I meant to say Alice.’

‘And so it was. But I think now… I think now that perhaps that was a mistake.’ She watched Rachel carefully for her reaction, and Rachel struggled to keep her face composed when fear sizzled through her, so quick and surprising that the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

‘I think that it is partly not knowing exactly what… became of Alice that hinders his recovery, and keeps his mind trapped in… circles of questioning, and wondering,’ she said.

‘What do you mean, not knowing what became of her? She eloped. She disgraced herself and insulted my family. What more is there to know?’ Josephine frowned in consternation.

‘Miss Beckwith wrote to him before she disappeared. A letter that reached him in Brighton, just after he landed back from Spain-’

‘A letter? Impossible!’ For the first time, Josephine Alleyn’s voice rose, and colour appeared in her cheeks. ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs Weekes. It is… painful for me to speak of that girl. After what she did. And after we learned of her intentions towards Jonathan, she was forbidden to contact him. I had assumed that she would have enough respect for my father to comply with his wishes.’

‘You knew, of course, of the profound affection that existed between your son and Miss Beckwith.’

‘He was young. He… his head was turned by her. That was all. He could never have wed the girl, it would have made him a laughing stock.’ Josephine twitched her skirts, though they were perfectly draped. ‘Pray tell me, what did the girl say in this letter to Brighton?’ The question was carefully spoken, her composure impenetrable once more.

‘I do not know exactly, Mrs Alleyn, other than that she wrote to break off all connection with your son.’

‘Well. Strange that she had the decency to do that, before acting so abominably.’

‘Strange indeed,’ said Rachel, attempting to emulate Josephine’s tonelessness. She didn’t altogether manage it. Mrs Alleyn watched her for a while, as if thinking something over. Then, to Rachel’s surprise, the older woman smiled benignly.

‘My dear Mrs Weekes, forgive me if this conversation has seemed… censorious in tone. But I take my son’s wellbeing, and my family’s good name, most seriously. It would be to the greater good if from this day you consulted with me beforehand on all matters regarding any extra… activities. Stick to reading, Mrs Weekes. I know what’s best for my son. And perhaps it would be more… tactful of you not to encourage him to speak so openly about private, family matters.’

‘Yes, Mrs Alleyn,’ said Rachel, when it became clear that she would not be released without having agreed.

‘You may go up to him now.’ Mrs Alleyn waved her fingertips in an elegant gesture of dismissal. Rachel turned and left her, on legs that felt shaky after the encounter. She couldn’t tell if what she felt was anger, fear, or embarrassment.

She climbed the stairs, through the column of old air that ran through the Alleyns’ house like slow, dying blood. It caught in her chest, and she was gasping by the time she reached Jonathan’s rooms. He was there to open the door for her, ready for her knock. He smiled, but then cocked his head quizzically at her breathlessness.

‘I might come down next time, to meet with you. We needn’t always stay in my rooms. Although, I do prefer to be away from… prying eyes,’ he said, and Rachel shook her head. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Abi! I said Abi, instead of Alice… just now, to your mother…’ Rachel spoke almost to herself, and shook her head again, in disbelief. She swallowed. There was a hard lump in her throat; her face felt hot and ugly.

‘Abi? Who’s Abi?’ Something about hearing her sister’s name on Jonathan’s lips was so sweet that Rachel couldn’t stand it. Her chest shook, and tears wet her face.

‘Why do you weep? Come.’ He took her hands and led her to the armchair by the window. ‘Sit. Tell me what has happened.’ Rachel sat down and pressed her eyes with her fingertips.

‘Your mother…’ she began, but couldn’t decide what to say.

‘My mother what?’ said Jonathan, bleakly. Rachel looked down at his long-fingered hands, cradling hers, and tried to calm down. Outside, the wind tossed the trees and seethed through the cracks and corners of the city, sounding like a hungry ocean. The house creaked and shifted around them, as draughts nosed through doors and windows, down chimneys and under roof tiles.

‘No… it’s nothing. It’s only… she questioned me just now, on the wisdom of our… recent walk…’

‘And this questioning has left you in tears?’ He spoke angrily, ever ready to flare up against his mother.

‘No! No, it was not that… I made a mistake, that’s all. We were talking about… about Alice. And I said my sister’s name instead.’

‘Your sister? I had no idea you had a sister – you’ve never mentioned her.’

‘She… is lost. Drowned. It’s thought by everyone – everyone but me – that she has been dead these twenty-six years…’

‘Then she must have been a tiny child when she was lost.’

‘Yes. Not yet three years old, and swept away by a river in spate.’

‘But that is a bitter cruelty, to have lost a sister and a brother both. And her name was Abi?’

‘Yes. Abigail. But don’t you see?’ Rachel stared into Jonathan’s face, searching it, hoping that he would make the connection. If he thinks it could be true, then it could be. It could be. But Jonathan only looked puzzled. ‘Abigail was my twin sister; identical to me. Nobody is quite sure of… the details of Alice’s birth. She was delivered into Bridget’s care as a child of around three years, not as a baby. Abi was carried away by the By Brook, which runs to join the Avon at Bathampton… And… and… our faces, Jonathan! We wear the same face!’

For a long moment neither one of them spoke. Rachel’s tears went cold and stiff as they dried. She hardly dared to breathe, and then Jonathan stood and turned to the window, folding his arms. His shoulders were broad, sharp protuberances under the faded blue cloth of his coat; he’d tied his hair back with a thin black ribbon at the nape of his neck.

‘I don’t know…’ he said at last, quietly. ‘It is a strange thought, that Alice might have had a sister, and that you are she.’ He turned to face her again. ‘I can understand why you would want it to be so.’

‘I have always felt that she was not gone… Throughout my life, I have always felt Abigail’s presence in the back of my mind, and heard her voice, like a shadow, but one that comforts me…’

‘Her shadow indeed, perhaps. Many people believe that our loved ones never truly leave us.’

‘No, it is more than that… I can’t explain it very well. There was a bond between us, something special and strange. And I never truly felt that bond break, though I can hardly remember having her with me; I can hardly remember those days. Yet I never truly felt her to be gone.’ She gazed up at Jonathan imploringly, longing for him to believe it too. When she saw doubt in his eyes, her throat ached.

He sat beside her again, took up her hands and pressed her fingertips to his lips, and again his kiss made her feel both weak and strong, and quietened all her thoughts.

‘You have Alice’s kind heart. And you have the mirror of her face, but there are many differences between you. You are taller, and stronger in frame. You are stronger in other ways too… you have greater resolve. You are braver…’ he said.

‘All that could be the result of growing up, surely; of growing older?’

‘And why would my grandfather take in and sponsor a foundling child, of unknown parentage? He was generous to his own, but he was no great philanthropist…’

‘Abigail… Abigail was the sweeter of us two. My mother always said so. She was the sunnier, the more ready to laugh. Perhaps she charmed him, and he took pity on her…’

‘If anybody could have charmed Grandfather, it was Alice,’ Jonathan conceded. ‘But it does not stand to reason, my dear Mrs Weekes. How would he have come by her?’

‘By serendipity! By that same force that means I might find her now, after so many years, and after I thought myself cut off from family for the rest of my days. By that same force! For there must be some balance, some fairness, must there not? We can’t always suffer only loss, and never also feel God’s kindnesses, can we?’

‘God’s kindnesses?’ Jonathan echoed, with a bitter smile. ‘Dear girl, I don’t believe in any such thing. Some balance? Some fairness? No. There is none to be had.’ Rachel hung her head, but then felt his fingers lifting her chin towards him. His face was mere inches away, and in the light from the window she saw coppery flecks in his irises, hidden till then. ‘Take this current unfairness, for example. For years I have punished myself for the things I have done. And how is this balanced? That you seek me out, and find me, and yet come to me already wed to the least worthy man I can think of. And you speak of God’s kindnesses?’

Rachel opened her mouth to answer but it was empty of words. There was only the shine of light in his eyes and the feel of his skin against hers. All sensation, all awareness, seemed to crowd into the places where he touched her, so that nothing was missed, nothing not noticed. He regrets that I am wed. As simply as that, her mind cleared of all other hopes and fears, leaving a sudden, perfect clarity that, while it lasted, felt like the answer to everything. If he kissed me now, I would be his. Part of her yearned for him to do so, but behind that came relief when he did not. This relief clamoured to be heard; it grew into the perfect calm of the moment like threads of ice growing into water. It was fearful relief, it had doubts; it sent her the black, frightening thought that the hand now holding hers was the one that had taken her sister’s life. If that is true, I will know he is right – there are no kindnesses in this world. But I must know.

The Pump Room was so warm that the flecks of sleet on Rachel’s clothes melted at once, and soaked through. She was so distracted that she hardly noticed. The long, elegant room was crowded with people, walking and sitting and sipping at their beakers of hot water. It was the same water that filled the hot baths; steaming, raw from the earth and smelling faintly of eggs. There was a crush of wheeled chairs by the doors, as invalids were brought in for their dose. Rachel paced a circuit of the crowded room until she saw Harriet Sutton with a cup in her hand, talking to a group of middle-aged women. Rachel cut through the throng to reach her side.

‘Ah, Mrs Weekes! How lovely that you could join us. Let me introduce you to our little circle of health-seekers.’ Harriet took her hand, smiling as she introduced her friends. Rachel chafed with impatience as her manners kept her there, curtsying and exchanging pleasantries, until sufficient time had passed that she could draw Harriet to one side. The tiny woman took a sip of her water and grimaced. ‘Do you know, I am quite convinced that drinking this must be truly beneficial, though I’ve never noticed any particular effects, one way or the other, for why else would we be counselled to drink something that tastes so peculiar?’

‘I do not know, Mrs Sutton. I wanted to ask you, if I may, about… about the time Mr Alleyn left Brighton for Bathampton. When he received Alice’s letter. You told me that your husband was with him, as he read it?’

‘Yes, he was.’ Harriet’s face turned grave. ‘Are you all right, Mrs Weekes? You seem… anxious.’

‘Forgive me.’ There are dark spaces in his memory. Of all the things Jonathan had said to her, it was these two words that troubled her the most. Dark spaces. ‘I feel that I am… I’m perhaps close to finding out what became of Alice Beckwith. And I need to know… I need to know whether she is alive or dead.’

‘Alive or dead?’ Harriet breathed. ‘But what is this? What are you suggesting?’

‘I can’t explain here… but I will soon, I promise. I-’

‘You can’t mean that Jonathan did her harm?’

‘I know you think him incapable of it, but he has told me himself of the terrible things he saw and did in Spain and Portugal, and that his memories of the return to Brighton and then to Bathampton are… unreliable.’ Dark spaces, in which dark things might have happened. Harriet was looking at her strangely, with something almost like fear, or a warning. ‘Your husband was with him when he got the letter, and when he set off. I wanted to ask… was he violent? When he read the letter, did he fly into a rage?’

Harriet looked around uneasily, as if fearing to be overheard.

‘When he read the letter, he wept,’ she said. Rachel shut her eyes for a moment, as relief swept through her. ‘But in a man grief and violence often go hand in hand.’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel, softly. And if he killed her, my sister? If he killed her I won’t ever be able to forgive him. ‘He speaks of trying to make it right. Of atoning.’

‘Listen to me, Mrs Weekes. Jonathan Alleyn is a good man. I live with the proof of it, every day. I’m sorry to make such a statement and not explain myself fully, but there are things that happened at war, with my husband and Mr Alleyn, that I have been sworn never to speak about. He is a good man, and there was nothing in that letter that should have made him attack the girl…’

‘You saw the letter?’ Rachel interrupted, confused.

‘Yes, I-’ Her friend broke off, and looked down at her hands. ‘I have it still.’

‘You have the last letter that Alice wrote to Jonathan? How is this?’

‘He dropped it, after he read it. It was left on the floor as he rushed at once to catch the mail coach west. My husband was perplexed as to what could have caused such a reaction. He picked the letter up, meaning to return it to Mr Alleyn when he returned. But Mr Alleyn didn’t re-join the regiment for a good long while, and what with everything that happened with the girl’s elopement, my husband thought it better to…’

‘To keep it from him?’

‘He didn’t wish to deepen a wound so fresh and painful. Jonathan Alleyn was ever one to brood and… lose himself in thought. My husband thought that if he had the letter to pore over, it might only serve to torment him. I said that if he didn’t mean to return it, he ought to destroy it, but he said that the right time might come to return it to him.’ Harriet frowned guiltily. ‘There was nothing in it to make him violent…’ she whispered. ‘Only to make him grieve.’

‘Will you give it to me, to take back to him?’ said Rachel, gravely. In a man grief and violence often go hand in hand… is that what hides in the dark spaces? The thought made her stomach turn over, and for a second she thought she might be sick. She clamped her teeth together as Harriet nodded unhappily.

They walked back to the Suttons’ apartment, and Harriet fetched the letter from a small drawer in her bureau. She hesitated as she held it out to Rachel, who felt a shiver of anticipation when she saw the small square of folded paper.

‘You do understand, don’t you? Why my husband never returned this note?’ said Harriet. Her eyes were wide in a worried face.

‘His intentions were good. But the time has come to lay the matter to rest,’ said Rachel. Harriet nodded.

‘Stay a while if you want. You must want to read it,’ she said. Rachel looked up guiltily, and Harriet gave her a gently knowing look. ‘I think that you, too, have the best of intentions. And far easier to read it here than out in the cold wind.’ Rachel took the letter, sat down on the very edge of an armchair, and opened it.

When she left the Suttons’ apartment minutes later, Rachel went straight to Duncan Weekes’s rooms, but found them empty. The letter was in her pocket and her hand kept straying to touch the paper through the fabric, to check its safety. Her mind was clamouring as her rapid pace carried her through the city. Sleet fell from a collapsed sky, stinging in her eyes and forming small, wet drifts in the gutters. She felt as though she must hurry, must race to save Alice, though what had been done to her, or what she herself had done, was long past, and couldn’t be changed. Her father-in-law’s name was in the letter, and the suggestion that he knew more than he had ever said, so her path led, inevitably, to the Moor’s Head. Rachel peered in through the window. The rippled glass deformed the faces of the inn’s patrons, but since she saw no sign of her husband she steeled herself and went inside.

The transgression made her feel naked; eyes turned towards her, blatant and speculative. Keeping her face down, Rachel went to the bar where Sadie, whom she recognised from her wedding day, was leaning on her elbows, looking bored.

‘I’m looking for Mr Duncan Weekes,’ she said to the girl.

‘He’s over there.’ Sadie hooked her thumb towards the far corner of the room. ‘But I doubt you’ll get much sense from him. He’s proper swallowed a hare this afternoon.’

‘He’s what?’

‘He’s mauled. He’s drunk. Been snoozing at his table these three hours gone,’ said Sadie. Rachel followed her gesture to the back of the inn, where her father-in-law was resting his head on the table, a pewter beaker knocked over beside him and a puddle of spirits creeping close to his scalp. In spite of all the noise, Rachel heard the wet rattling in his chest as she sat down beside him. She shook his arm gently.

‘Mr Weekes? Father? Wake up, please.’ The old man mumbled something and slowly raised his head. His eyes were bloody and exhausted. When he saw her, he did not smile. If anything, his face turned even sadder. ‘How are you, Mr Weekes?’ Rachel asked, pointlessly.

‘I cannot seem to find my feet today,’ he croaked, and Rachel fought not to recoil from the stink of his breath. That is not debauchery but the taint of decay. He must be seen by a doctor. With a pang of anxiety she realised that he wasn’t drunk at all, only weakened by illness, and unable to rise.

‘I need to ask you something, sir. I have Alice Beckwith’s last letter to Jonathan Alleyn. She says… she says you told her the truth about his family, and about Lord Faukes. She says that you told her what they feared to, and that she was an abomination. Mr Weekes? Are you listening?’

‘They all have his blood,’ Duncan mumbled. His expression was haunted.

‘You mean that… Alice was Lord Faukes’s child? Is that what you told her?’

‘Not just his, not just his. Don’t you see? I saw them. I… saw them.’ Duncan wiped his mouth with a hand that trembled. He shook his head, bewildered. ‘What letter have you, my dear? She wasn’t to send any letters. I heard them say so. Any letter she wrote was to be intercepted, and not sent.’

‘Intercepted by who?’

‘Whoever she handed it to.’ He shrugged, and shook his head again. ‘That poor girl. That poor, poor girl. I should never have told her. It was the grog, my dear; the grog is the very devil.’

‘So her other letters were delivered to Lord Faukes instead? She writes in this one…’ Rachel drew the paper from her pocket. ‘She writes that she has sent many letters, and is desperate to hear from him.’

‘All went to Box. They can’t have known of that one you have there, I’m sure of it.’

‘Mr Weekes.’ Rachel gripped both of his hands in hers; stared into his eyes. ‘Please tell me what you told Alice. Tell me what you saw.’

Duncan Weekes picked up his fallen cup and peered into it, with little hope or expectation.

‘I never told my boy. Perhaps that was a kindness, in all this rotten cruelty. He loved her, you see.’

‘Richard? Loved who?’

‘He loved Josephine Alleyn. With all the fire and fury with which a young man falls in love.’ Rachel froze. She thought of the tremor that had run through Richard when he’d introduced her to Jonathan’s mother, and his long, deep bow. He loves her still.

‘But… she is twenty years his senior!’

‘What matters that? She was beautiful, noble, refined. The most beautiful lady, and he was enslaved by her. He’d have done anything she asked of him. That’s why he was so incensed when we were laid off. He had the blue devils for months after. So I never told him what went on in that house. That was a kindness, was it not?’ Duncan gave her an imploring look but Rachel was too shocked to respond. She waited for what he would say next, and when all that came was silence, she swallowed.

‘I… I must hear it, Mr Weekes,’ she said.

Duncan Weekes tried to clear his throat but ended up coughing, and it made him wince.

‘You must by now have heard something of Lord Faukes, from the Alleyns?’ he said.

‘Fine words from them, and… a differing account from Starling.’

‘Who is Starling?’

‘A servant in that house,’ said Rachel. Duncan nodded.

‘Aye, she’d have fewer fine words about him, I don’t doubt it. Poor wench.’ He spoke slowly, heavily. ‘The serving girls at Faukes’s house in Box all knew to keep out of his way. From his wife’s lady’s maid, while that lady yet lived, to the lowliest pot-washing scullion. If they were young, and comely, they knew their time would come. And the more comely they were – and the younger they were – the more careful they had to be. But all the care in the world could not protect them at all times, for ever. If the master sent for them, or came down to their quarters, they could not deny him.’ Duncan Weekes swallowed with an effort, and his face wore disgust. ‘Indeed, denying him only seemed to increase his enjoyment of them. Some of them came to accept it, and stayed on. The master was generous with wages, and time off in the year; more generous than other lordly folk about. So the girls weighed it up, and some found that it was worth suffering his occasional assaults. Others had no such fortitude.’

Duncan’s own sister urged him to put in a word with the house steward, and beg a place in the household for the daughter of a cousin of hers. Duncan put her off as long as he could, but his sister was a shrewish woman, with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, and she would not be fobbed off for long. So Duncan tried to quash his misgivings, and spoke to the steward. The girl was taken on as second still-room maid, and the day she arrived Duncan’s heart sank at the sight of her. She was a tiny thing, not more than thirteen, skinny and dark but with enormous green eyes that lit up her face; glassy, empty and afraid. Oh, why were you not fat and hairy and sour of breath? Duncan thought. He told the girl, whose name was Dolores – told her twice, three times – to keep herself out of the master’s eye. But Lord Faukes came down to see what new gift had been brought for him, and smiled delightedly when he saw.

Duncan dogged the girl’s steps as much as he could. He had vague ideas about protecting her, at least until she was a little older, but when the time came, of course, he could do nothing at all. Her terrified cries echoed through the lower halls of the house. Duncan could only sit and listen, and drink. So drink he did. So much, that night, that when Dolores stumbled out into the darkness, with bloodied lips and bruises on her neck, and wandered off towards her old home, he couldn’t even get to his feet to follow her. He asked his sister, later, if the girl had made it back to her mother, but received only the hardest glare of her hard eye in answer. Dolores was not seen at the house in Box again.

One girl named Sue, pug-nosed and pugnacious, sussed the lie of the land immediately – she had the clever, calculating look of a girl who knew too much of the world. After Lord Faukes’s first two tumbles with her she called herself his mistress, and sought to elevate herself to the upper serving positions. She went with him willingly, flipping her skirts and flirting like a doxy; calling him Lord Gundiguts to the other servants. The cook called her a buttock, but Sue was unrepentant. It availed her not at all, however, since Lord Faukes liked to take, not be given. She was dismissed when her belly began to swell, and Duncan saw her one last time, scowling on the back step with a screaming babe on her hip, as the steward handed over a few coins for the child. There were other bastards as well – born to tavern wenches, servants and farmers’ daughters. People of no import. They were sent away with money, if they were lucky, and still comely; sent away with curses and warnings if they were not. Only one misbegotten child was lavished with all of Lord Faukes’s love and care. Only one.

When the master’s son-in-law died and his daughter Josephine returned to live in Box with her young son, Jonathan, Duncan Weekes and the whole household were pleased. Lord Faukes’s appetite had worsened since Lady Faukes had died, and they hoped his daughter’s presence would help to calm and moderate him. Duncan was standing next to his own son, Richard, when Josephine Alleyn arrived in a smart chariot drawn by a team of four grey horses. He heard his son’s intake of breath as Josephine descended. Richard was still only a child, but Josephine Alleyn was as lovely to look at as any queen of hearts. She wore a long pelisse of umber-coloured velvet over a dark green dress, with a matching hat over her mahogany hair. Her eyes were a deeper, richer blue than any he’d seen. No good will come of loving her, Duncan silently warned his boy. So the household was cheered by Josephine Alleyn’s arrival, though the lady herself was cool and reserved and, Duncan thought, sad to her very bones. But she was a widow, he reminded himself; that would surely account for it. And for a while Lord Faukes’s visits below stairs, and his escapades in the cupboards and dark corners of the house, did lessen. Before long, Duncan found out why.

One fine May day, Lord Faukes and his daughter were to visit friends in Bowden Hill. Duncan waited on the box of the coach while Richard held the door. He was too young to be a footman, but Josephine Alleyn liked his face, and seemed to find some gentle amusement in the proud way he thrust out his chest to make up for his lack of height. Their route led them through the village of Lacock, and then across a series of narrow bridges that traversed a flat, boggy area of streams and reed beds. One of the bridges was blocked by milling sheep, and Duncan was forced to halt the coach.

‘Clear the bridge!’ he shouted to the elderly shepherd, who gave a nod and waved his crook unhurriedly at his animals. The horses snorted and fidgeted as the flock milled around their legs. The stink of their dung and their oily wool was ripe. ‘Hop down, lad, and stand nearside of Santi’s head. Keep her steady and the others will follow,’ Duncan instructed his son. ‘I’ll stand by the coach to keep them clear.’

‘Go wide, you wretched muttons,’ Duncan muttered, as he climbed down and felt his boot slide in something soft and fresh on the road. He took up a position by the door of the coach and waved his arms to drive the sheep further from it. The curtains had been closed behind the windows, so he didn’t knock to explain the delay in case Lord Faukes or his daughter were dozing. But as the last stragglers trotted past, and Duncan Weekes turned, movement caught his eye. The coach rocked slightly, as though something went on within, and the curtains crept open, just a crack. Without even meaning to, Duncan saw inside. It was only for a second, but that was long enough – the scene struck him with all the awful clarity of the night sky lit suddenly by lightning. Josephine Alleyn sat with her head tipped back, her lustrous eyes fixed on the ceiling. Her father’s mouth was on her neck, questing hungrily, one hand squeezed her breast, his other reached under her skirts, between her thighs, out of sight. There was a straining of fabric in Lord Faukes’s crotch, and an expression of perfect emptiness on Josephine’s face; as though wherever her thoughts were, they were far, far away. It was a look of acceptance, disconnection; a look of numb oblivion. It was not a look of surprise.

The moment that Duncan stood there, immobilised by shock, felt like hours. He turned away as soon as he could; forced his stiff, unresponsive legs to climb, and flicked the horses on so sharply that they plunged in the harness, and the shepherd was forced to hop smartly out of the way.

‘What’s got into you?’ said Richard, grabbing the box rail for safety. Duncan blinked at his son. He hadn’t even checked that the boy was back aboard before he’d driven on. He glanced over his shoulder at the coach and knew that speed would carry him no further from what he’d seen, or from what he served. So he brought the horses back to a steadier pace, and reached under his seat for the bottle of brandy he kept there for cold, night-time journeys. He drank half of it down in one go, and lowered it with a cough to see disgust on his boy’s face. ‘You suck on that like at your mother’s dug,’ Richard chided, copying the language he heard in the stables. ‘It’ll get you kicked out one day, old man. You’d best hope I’m full trained as coachman the day that happens, or where will we be?’ By the time they reached Bowden Hill Duncan had emptied the brandy bottle, but it had done nothing to expunge that lightning-bolt scene from his mind.

So Duncan had his suspicions already, when he learned about Alice Beckwith. A servant will learn the secrets of a household, however close-guarded they be – this he knew already, and could not forget no matter how drunk he got. He heard Lord Faukes talking to his grandson, when they came to the stables for their horses. He heard Faukes tell the boy that Miss Beckwith, who they would ride out to visit, was the love-begotten daughter of a good friend of his, and that he had agreed to care for the girl, but since she was a bastard born, Mrs Alleyn would not approve, and would stop their visits, and so Jonathan must not tell her. Duncan Weekes heard the little lad, who adored his grandpa, swear, in his piping voice, to keep the secret.

Other things overheard taught him that Alice Beckwith was kept at Bathampton, with a servant and a governess. He learnt that Faukes doted on the girl, and planned to marry her off as well as he could, eventually, when the time was right. When, twice a month or so, Lord Faukes came for his saddle horse and rode out alone, or with his grandson, for the afternoon, Duncan could guess where they were going. He knew of Alice Beckwith, and he had his suspicions; for no other man in the county was as likely to have sired a bastard as Lord Faukes. He had many other such children, and none of them were treated with anything like the same care and attention; why would he lavish it on the by-blow of a friend? A friend who was never named, or visited? Alice Beckwith was special, that much was plain. Duncan could not un-see what he had seen in the carriage; he could not un-hear Faukes forbidding his grandson to tell his mother about the girl. He could not undo the conclusions that he came to. He could only drink; and drink he did, knowing full well that he and at least one other in that house were going to hell.

So, when the young girl with the unusual face and the pale hair walked up to the main door of the house on a windy day in the autumn of 1808, and then came running back out again not ten minutes later, Duncan guessed who she was. It was past noon, and he had drunk enough brandy by then to knock most men out, but Lord Faukes was away from home, and if Josephine went anywhere she asked for Richard to take her, so he knew he wouldn’t be called upon to drive that afternoon. He was making his weaving way from the stables towards the inn in the village when Alice Beckwith stumbled out of the door and down the steps, then hastened towards the gate and right into his arms. Her face was wet, and she shook like a little bird in shock.

‘Steady there, my pretty maid,’ Duncan slurred at her. ‘And who might you be?’

‘I’m A-Alice Beckwith.’ After she spoke she fell into fresh sobs.

‘There, there, child. Nothing is as bad as all that. Alice Beckwith – yes, I know you. The one kept at Bathampton – the special one. Why those gravy-eyes, when you have such noble parents? When you have such a cozened existence? You have turned your face quite red, child,’ he said, taking her hand and trying to soothe her. He blinked owlishly, struggling to focus his sluggish mind, his blurred vision.

‘Cozened? Noble? How can you… What do you know of me, sir? What do you know of my parents?’

‘You came in search of your lord father, I don’t doubt. And now you weep to find him not at home? Weep not, sweet girl. He will be home again ’ere long…’ He paused after he said this, and frowned, befuddled. For a moment he couldn’t imagine why any young woman would want to see Lord Faukes.

‘My lord father?’ she echoed, staring at him in shock. ‘Is it known, then? Has the secret been kept only from me, and not from the rest of the world? What cruel joke is this?’ she gasped, breathing so fast it hurried her words.

‘Cruel – ah, yes! Cruel indeed. A cruel man, he is,’ Duncan mumbled, still not quite finding the thread. Before him, the girl shook and wept. She raised trembling hands to her face, and seemed to think hard.

‘You spoke of… my parents, sir,’ she said at length. ‘Do you know… something of my mother, then?’

‘Your mother? Hmm? A fine lady, yes, and a great beauty, is she not? My son is deep in love with her, though he is less in age than you, I would say. But there are few that would not find her lovely.’

‘You know who she is, my mother? How do you know, sir?’ Alice grasped at his hands imploringly. ‘Was her name Beckwith?’

‘Beckwith? Beckwith – no, indeed. I do not know the source of that name – your wet nurse, perhaps.’ Duncan shook his head and smiled at the girl because she seemed sweet, and in distress. He patted her hand. ‘There, there. Dry those tears, young miss,’ he said, having forgotten why she might be crying.

‘I have so many more to shed, sir,’ Alice whispered. ‘I can scarce bear to think how many.’

‘Oh come, now – why so? You are young and fair, and your parents are wealthy. And though you be a secret and a shame, see how bonny you are! You are not to blame, miss, no indeed.’

‘I am a shame, sir? You know this? Am I a shame to my lady mother – is that why she knows me not?’

‘Forsooth, how can you not be? For no woman in history lay willingly with her own sire, and I declare that Mrs Alleyn is no different – for I saw them, miss – how I wish I had not! I saw him about his blasphemy, and I saw how verily disgusted she was.’ Duncan shook his head, but it made the ground lurch and his stomach heave, so he stopped.

The girl had gone very quiet, very still.

‘I… I don’t understand,’ she said, but from the way she gasped out the words, robbed of breath, it seemed that she’d begun to. Duncan had the vague and disquieting sense that he’d said too much.

‘Hush and do not tell!’ he said anxiously. ‘Good girl, good girl. It is a very great secret. Even from the other servants, from which a house usually has none. Only I have found it out.’ He tried to tap the side of his nose but missed; tried to smile but could not. ‘But take heart, child. You’ve not yet grown into all of her beauty, but you may yet, and who could have guessed so fair a maiden could come from so foul a union? You have her blue eyes, and though her hair is dark and shines so well, still I have heard that a good many men prefer a fair head, such as yours. So weep not, dear girl, weep not.’ He waved his arm magnanimously and threw himself off balance, staggering. Alice Beckwith was staring straight ahead, abject, her face a sketch of perfect horror. Duncan could not fathom her distress but he somehow felt he’d been the cause of it. ‘May I help you at all, young lady?’ he said tentatively.

‘No, sir. You have helped me enough,’ she said, in hushed and deadened tones.

Duncan Weekes was watching Rachel, bleary-eyed and hunched in on himself. Rachel’s stomach was turning with nerves and disgust.

‘You mean to say, you believe that Alice was Josephine Alleyn’s child… sired by Lord Faukes, her own father?’ She swallowed, and tasted something bitter in the back of her throat.

‘She was special to him. She was dear to him.’

‘That is no proof,’ Rachel said, her voice choked. I am an abomination. ‘Josephine Alleyn speaks very highly of her father. She reveres his memory, and their good name.’ My mother has lied all her life.

‘I drove her to the church when he died, Mrs Weekes,’ Duncan said gravely. ‘She shed not a tear for him, and as I drove her home when he was safe in his grave she wore a smile behind her veil. She wore a smile, and was less sorrowful than I ever saw her previous.’ He took without asking. And this is Jonathan’s family.

‘Oh, God. But… I cannot believe it – not of Mrs Alleyn! And you told Alice this?’

‘You need believe nothing of Mrs Alleyn. She was innocent and helpless. You need only believe it of Faukes, and there’ll be women a plenty that will vouch for his character; for what he wanted he took. And, God forgive me, I did – I told Miss Beckwith.’ Duncan’s chin sank to his chest, his mouth wrenched down at the corners by misery. He’s good now he’s dead. Rachel remembered Starling’s words. Alice would never have left me to Lord Faukes. Duncan coughed painfully; wiped his mouth with a filthy handkerchief. ‘I heard she ran off, not long afterwards. I heard she ran off to who knows what fate, and from the look on her face when I spoke to her… I ask you, who could blame her? That poor girl.’

For a long while, the pair of them sat in silence. Rachel could hardly believe all she’d been told, but a dark thought was growing in her mind, unbidden and irresistible. Grief and violence often go hand in hand in a man. And if she told him this about his family – and hers – how strong must his grief have been? It was hot and stuffy in the inn but Rachel shivered. She would have been his aunt and his sister both, if it’s true. But what proof is there, other than this old man’s guess? There could be no proof, she realised then, other than to hear it from Josephine Alleyn herself. No proof because it is all a mistake and supposition, and it is not so? No proof because Alice was a foundling? And I know, yes I know, who lost her.

‘Where was Alice before Faukes brought her to Bathampton? And how could Josephine have borne a child before she was wed, and it be kept a secret?’ she said. Duncan raised his shoulders wearily.

‘Who can say where the babe was? Somewhere else, with a wet nurse paid to keep her lip buttoned. The year before… the year before Josephine was wed, Faukes took her to Scotland for half a year. The retreat was to help them both recover from the continued grief of losing Lady Faukes, it was said. But there could have been another reason, too. The timing of it, from the age I took the Beckwith girl to be, would have been fitting. When they returned to Box she quickly wed and made her escape.’

‘She told me…’ Rachel swallowed. ‘Mrs Alleyn said to me that those two years she was wed, and away from Box, were the happiest two years of her life entire.’

‘Well might they have been, poor accursed lady.’

‘But why would she return to her father, then, when she was widowed?’

‘What he wanted, he took,’ Duncan said softly. ‘She was always in his power. Always.’

Just then, a voice behind her shocked Rachel even more than the story she was learning. It was loud, and incredulous.

‘What the bloody hell is this?’

‘Mr Weekes, I-’ Rachel gasped. She struggled to her feet; the chair legs and her skirt and the table seemed to catch at her.

‘You what?’ Richard’s eyes were flinty with anger.

‘Now, my boy, you must not chastise…’ Duncan Weekes began. He tried to rise but couldn’t. Richard caught Rachel’s arm in an iron grip and towed her towards the door.

‘Let go!’ said Rachel.

‘Richard, you mustn’t be sharp with her!’ Duncan called after them, weakly. Richard swung back to point a trembling finger at his father.

‘I’ll deal with you later,’ he said, and Duncan fell into fearful silence.

They burst from the inn onto the cold, grey street. There was no more sleet, but the fog that had barely lifted all day was like a wet, frigid blanket.

‘What have you been doing?’ Richard took both of Rachel’s upper arms and hauled her close to him. ‘I forbade you to know that man, and yet here I find you, fast friends!’

‘He is my father now, too, Mr Weekes. And he is poor, and sick, and I am fond of him! We need to send a doctor to him, and soon. He is not a bad man,’ said Rachel, indignation making her brave. She could feel Richard’s grip bruising her arms, crushing the flesh down to the bone.

‘What do you mean by that?’ He gave her a shake, his lips curled back, snarling like a dog.

‘He drinks, but then so do all men in Bath, it seems. But he does not go whoring, or lie, or beat his women!’

‘What?’ For a second, Richard seemed dumbstruck, and Rachel felt fear building, coming to smother her defiance.

‘I know about Starling; about you and her. And I’m sure there have been others,’ she said. Richard’s eyes grew huge.

‘By God, I’ll kill that little slut!’

‘It was your violence to her that led me to the truth about you!’ Richard released her and ran his hands through his hair. Then he stood half turned from her, with one hand over his mouth, watching her askance. ‘I know all about you. I know you loved another as well – Josephine Alleyn! No wonder she has been so helpful to you. Were you lovers, too? Tell me!’ Richard raised his hand to slap her, and Rachel shut her eyes. The fog swirled around them. ‘Do it then, sir. Why keep these things behind closed doors? Why not thrash me in the street, where all can see you do it?’

For a moment Richard stayed in that pose, arm pulled back to unleash a blow, his whole body harder than stone. Then he let the arm drop and turned to face her again, still angry but somehow defeated.

‘Rachel. You were supposed to love me,’ he said. ‘You were supposed to make things better.’

‘You give me nothing to love,’ she said.

‘Truly, no woman has ever loved me,’ he said flatly. ‘What strange fate is that – to be given this handsome face, and then let no woman love me?’

‘I believe Starling did, at one time.’

‘Starling?’ Richard shook his head. ‘She loves only Alice bloody Beckwith. And Jonathan Alleyn.’

‘Jonathan? She hates Jonathan.’

‘Hate, love. Aren’t they oft-times the same thing?’ He stared at her, and she could no longer read what was in his eyes. ‘Perhaps in time I shall come to hate you, too.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Rachel, shaking so badly that she couldn’t keep her voice steady.

‘We’ve a long time together, Mrs Weekes. Our whole lives. If there’s no love now then there’s plenty of room for that other to grow.’ His gaze was cold and unyielding, and Rachel felt his words weigh heavy on her; a burden of truth she had no choice but to carry. ‘Go home and wait for me,’ he said. The freezing mist chilled Rachel through her clothes. She shook her head. ‘You will do as I tell you.’

‘Where will you go?’ she said.

‘That’s none of your concern.’

‘You’ll go inside and upbraid your poor father. Won’t you?’

‘That old cuff?’ Richard shook his head. ‘I have more important things to do. My father will die soon enough, by the looks of him. I shan’t waste any effort on him.’ Richard took a step closer to Rachel and smiled cruelly. ‘I shall save that for you, dear wife.’ He turned and walked away. The words were like a blow to the stomach, and Rachel felt her strength ebbing away. He can, and he will. I am his. She swayed, and felt despair stealing over her like a shadow.

Starling dreamt of horses with bullet wounds, their eyes bulging in agony as blood streamed from the black wounds in their skins. She woke clammy with sweat, weak and shaking. Jonathan’s description of the war in Spain wouldn’t leave her mind, though she told herself resolutely that it changed nothing. She couldn’t help but think that to have lived through such horrors would make anybody numb to violence, and more prone to it, and that should – and did – make her more convinced than ever that Jonathan had killed Alice. But at the same time, inexplicably, she found some of her hatred of him leaching away. It does not excuse what he did. It can’t be forgiven. She seemed to have the ghost of his stink in her nostrils. The metal and rot smell he’d had when he turned up in Bathampton in the ruins of his uniform, fresh from Corunna. She knew now that it was the smell of a person who has walked long miles with death riding on their shoulder like some malevolent imp, all needle teeth and poisoned claws. She blew her nose a dozen times, and sniffed deeply at pungent ingredients in the kitchen – cinnamon, cloves, pickled beets and peppermint oil.

‘What are you, kitchen maid or truffle hog?’ said Sol Bradbury, perplexed, but Starling only shrugged. If he did it, and I finally know it for true, then what should I do? She was swirling coffee beans in a skillet over the fire, waiting for them to roast, when she realised. It makes no difference at all. She froze, and stayed that way until the acrid smoke of the burning beans brought Sol over, cursing and flapping a cloth at the pan. It makes no difference at all.

Towards the middle of the afternoon she took to the streets, wrapping up against the fog with the vague but pervading urge to go home. She went down to the wharf but there was no sign of Dan Smithers, and no other boat moored up that planned to leave eastwards inside the next hour, so Starling set off along the towpath on foot. It was the longer route out of town but she didn’t want to wait. She was at a dead end, after years of struggling through a maze of doubt and enquiry and conviction. Suddenly, she had no more energy; her anger had burnt itself out like the stub of a candle. What’s the point? It is as Mrs Weekes said – none of it will bring her back to me. None of it will change things for me. When she reached the edge of Bathampton, with numb cheeks and clumsy feet, she paused. Her route had automatically been taking her to Bridget’s cottage but now she stopped, and turned north, towards the house that was the first home she remembered.

Starling walked up to the yard gate and stood there, staring at the exact spot on the muddy ground where she’d first set eyes on Alice. My saviour. My sister. The trees had grown taller, naked but for a few ragged leaves remaining. Rooks had come to roost rather than starlings; they cawed and clattered down at her, their voices echoing peculiarly. Hunched in the fog, the house looked like the ghost of the place she knew. There was a yellow light glowing in the kitchen window, just as there had been then; and smoke rising silently from the chimney, a darker grey than the murk. Chickens still pecked and scratched the ground; there was the stink of pigs from the sty; a haystack in the open barn; a brown horse’s head, drowsy-eyed, leaning over the stable door. Starling studied it all and made believe that she could walk right up and push open the front door, and that Bridget would be standing at the stove, ruddy-faced from the heat, and Alice would be by the fire with her feet tucked up underneath her, reading poems or a novel or one of Jonathan’s letters. The thought put a lump in her throat that ached like a twisted joint, and she teetered, on the verge of stepping forwards as if it all was true. I am no different now, after all of it, than I was that first time. I still have nothing. I still am nothing.

She walked on past the George Inn, and then turned towards the toll bridge. She passed a few farmers and villagers along the way, none of whom she recognised, or who showed any interest in her. The mist and cold made people hunker into themselves; keeping their eyes low, their voices mute. Starling stopped on the bridge and leaned over, staring down at the smooth, grey water. She couldn’t smell its dank perfume – the sodden air and the tang of wood smoke on it were pervasive. The stone of the parapet leached the last warmth from her flesh, but she let it. She could see the lovers’ tree; a skeletal, drooping mass at the river’s edge, almost obscured by the gloom, looking like a hunch-shouldered figure. There was frost on the broken meadow grasses; frost on the scarlet rosehips and hawthorn berries in the tangled hedges along the lane. In the slow eddies near the riverbank, a thin crust of ice rode the lapping water. Starling stared at the lovers’ tree until her eyes ached and watered from it. And then she saw movement in the shadows underneath it.

Not daring to blink she waited to see it again, thinking she must have dreamed it. But there was movement again a moment later, and she was not mistaken. There was a figure standing beneath the branches. Starling gulped in a huge breath, and felt a desperate kind of hope. If she did run away, if she lives… she would come back here. She would. Without hesitation, Starling pushed a path through the hedge, scratching her arms and legs on blackthorn, and clambered down to the meadow. She hurried through the long grass with her skirts bunched up in her fists, breathing hard and sniffing at the drip on the end of her nose.

‘Alice!’ she called, as she drew near. The fog swallowed her voice. Behind the cascade of willow whips she could see the dark shape of a person. It made no response to her call; it made no move at all. Starling jumped down onto the hard mud at the water’s edge, slipped and fought to keep her balance. ‘Alice, is it you?’ She hurried forwards again, but was suddenly uneasy. The prickle of a warning, at the back of her skull; just like she’d had many times before.

The shadowed shape was too big to be Alice. Too big to be a woman at all. Starling slowed to a halt just beyond the tree’s embrace. ‘Who’s there?’ she said, trying to keep her voice even, strong. It will be hard to run on this ice. But I am smaller, lighter. But whoever was waiting still ignored her. Starling took a deep breath; blood was pounding in her ears. She parted the branches with her hands and stepped into the deeper shadow. And finally the figure stood up from its seat on the protruding root; stood up and turned to face her, and Starling cried out in alarm. ‘You!’ she said, as the air rushed from her lungs in astonishment.

Rachel paused by the front door of number one, Lansdown Crescent, her hand halfway to the bell pull. Dorcas would answer it, or the manservant Falmouth, and they would take her to Mrs Alleyn. That’s not who I wish to see. She retraced her steps and went down the servants’ stair instead, letting herself into the corridor outside the kitchen. She slipped past the kitchen door, checking in the still room and pantry before she reached Starling’s room; all were empty. In the kitchen, Sol Bradbury was nodding in a wooden chair near the inglenook; a huge, half-peeled apple was going brown in her lap, cradled like a pet. There was no sign of Starling, and Rachel cursed silently, anxiously. For months she’s shadowed me around this house, now when I need her, when I have this letter to show her, she vanishes.

‘Mrs Weekes. How odd to find you here. Did you lose your way?’ Rachel spun around to find Mrs Alleyn at the foot of the stairs, her hands linked calmly in front of her, her face a stony mask. At the sound of her voice, Sol Bradbury was wide awake and peeling industriously, blinking away her somnolence.

‘I… I-’ Rachel stammered.

‘I saw you coming along the street and wondered where you’d got to. I wasn’t aware that you had an appointment with my son today.’

‘Indeed, I do not, madam. I only…’

‘You only what?’ said Josephine, in that level way of hers. Rachel’s mind went blank, the silence rang. ‘Perhaps you wanted to see me about something? I can’t imagine there’s anything you might need to discuss with my servants.’

‘Yes, Mrs Alleyn. That is so,’ said Rachel, still frantically trying to think what to say.

‘Come, then. This is no fit place for a conversation, and I too have something I desire to tell you.’ The older woman turned with an elegant sweep of her dress, and went back up the stairs. With dread stealing over her, Rachel followed.

Mrs Alleyn led her into the front parlour, and settled herself on the couch. ‘Now, tell me what brought you here today?’

‘I wanted to…’ Rachel paused, and looked at Josephine’s lovely face. Whatever happened to Alice, you know all about it, don’t you? She summoned all her courage. ‘I’ve been speaking a great deal of late to my father-in-law, about his time in your service.’

‘Mr Duncan Weekes?’ Josephine blinked, seeming to readjust herself minutely. ‘He was a good coachman. He had a marvellous way with the horses. Such a shame his… affliction meant we had to let him go. My father was rather fond of him, in truth.’

‘Yes. I have heard a great deal of your father’s affection for his staff,’ said Rachel. Josephine Alleyn’s lips thinned into the smallest of smiles; her eyes glittered. ‘He has also told me about the time Alice Beckwith came to visit Lord Faukes at Box.’

‘Mrs Weekes, I can’t for the life of me discern what possible interest you might have in Alice Beckwith, a common girl who made an outcast of herself twelve years ago.’

‘Did she? Did she make an outcast of herself, or was she cast out?’ She will not have me back here again, Rachel knew in that moment.

‘I’m sure I don’t understand what you mean.’ Josephine Alleyn’s voice was like ice. ‘Now let us come to what I wished to say to you, Mrs Weekes. It’s clear to me that your… employment with my son is leaving you tired and overwrought. It’s only to be expected, after so many weeks of close contact with an invalid-’

‘Your son is no invalid, madam!’

‘Please don’t interrupt me. When I said that manners had abandoned us here, I did not expect to be taken quite so literally. The task is clearly too much for you, and I will not hear of you continuing, and risking your own health by doing so.’

‘And that is your final word on it?’ said Rachel, after a stricken pause.

‘I never change my mind, Mrs Weekes.’

‘May I…’ Rachel took a breath. ‘May I go and explain my coming absence to your son?’

‘I have already informed him. Now.’ Mrs Alleyn stood, her back immaculately straight.

‘But… I’m helping him! He’s been getting so much better.’

‘You have my thanks, I’m sure. But to continue is quite out of the question. I was mistaken about your… suitability for the role. Do not let me detain you further.’

‘It pleases you to keep him shut away, does it not? Far less trouble to you, less scandal. Far less chance of him learning the truth about Alice, and about your noble father!’ said Rachel. Josephine’s face went rigid with anger.

‘Go no further, Mrs Weekes, into matters that are none of your concern. It would be a shame if your misconduct meant I could no longer support your husband in his business. You saw yourself in; now kindly see yourself out.’ Rachel had no choice but to obey her. Falmouth opened the front door for her, a golem without the least flicker of an expression on his face. But Rachel hesitated on the threshold. I will be allowed to see him no more.

‘I demand to be permitted to take my leave of Mr Alleyn,’ she said, turning with her heart in her mouth. Josephine stood on the parlour threshold, her arms loose at her sides.

‘I thought I had made it quite clear-’

‘He would wish to see me. If you refuse me I will make it known to him that… that you have turned me away.’

‘Oh? And how exactly-’

‘I will make it known to him.’ Rachel spoke with such quiet resolve that Josephine made no reply. For a moment they simply stared at one another, a silent war which Rachel won. Without another word, she started up the stairs.

She felt hunted; she felt Josephine’s hard, angry eyes follow her every step. By the time she reached Jonathan’s rooms she was almost running. She knocked and let herself in, closing the door fast behind her. The floorboards creaked under her feet like the deck of a ship. And the storm beneath us is just now breaking. Jonathan got up from his desk. There was ink on his fingers; his hair was clean and had been cut to skim his collar at the back. His face was clean-shaven. He looked so different that Rachel hesitated.

‘Mrs Weekes, I didn’t expect you today, though I am delighted you’ve come. See how I have tidied…’ He trailed off, so she knew she must look desperate.

‘Your mother has told me I must not come again. That I will no longer be admitted,’ she said breathlessly. ‘She said she’d already told you of this decision, but I wanted to… I wanted to be sure.’

‘She lies. She said nothing to me,’ said Jonathan.

‘I had feared as much.’

‘What has happened between you? You look as though she has hounded you up the stairs!’

‘I feel as though she has!’ Rachel almost smiled, but it would not come. She felt too desperate, too afraid. ‘I came to speak to… to speak to you, but she found me first and I… said some things to her about… about Alice. And about your grandfather. I let it be known that I had begun to suspect… That I had developed a greater interest in Alice’s disappearance than perhaps I should have.’ She stopped, shook her head and tried to put her thoughts in order. Will I accuse him outright, then? ‘But I fear that if we are to see each other henceforth, it will have to be in some other place.’

‘What things about my grandfather?’ Jonathan frowned. ‘No – you must not let her prevent your coming, Mrs Weekes!’

‘She is the mistress here, and if she tells the servants not to let me in… It would be impossible, to attend under such circumstances.’

‘I own this house, and the servants – not my mother. I will make them let you in.’ Jonathan’s eyes were intent, his voice rose indignantly. Rachel shook her head.

‘No. No, I could not. Not knowing that it angered her, that she had forbidden it. My husband… my husband would not permit it. She has some hold over him still – some powerful hold. He was in love with her, you see. Perhaps he still is.’

‘Who? Richard Weekes in love with my mother? Who says so?’

‘His father, Duncan Weekes. He’s known it of old. Since Richard was a young boy, he says…’ Rachel shook her head, still confounded by it. Josephine Alleyn, and Starling, and others no doubt… all called him theirs before I did; some might call him theirs still. It is as well that I love him not.

Jonathan thought for a while, and then gestured to the chairs by the window.

‘Come. Sit,’ he said, more gently. ‘Let us discuss this, please.’

‘It’s hopeless, sir. I can come here no longer – you must see, it would be impossible? If my husband forbids me – and he will, should your mother decree it – then we could not hope to keep our appointments secret.’

‘You must agree to still visit, however. You must.’

‘How can I?’ Rachel stared hopelessly at him. ‘I am not the mistress of my own destiny – it is bound to his. To him. He has already found out that I see his father against his wishes… I have not yet discovered what the full consequences of that will be. And he would find out in an instant if I went against him with regard to you, and your mother. He might beat me, sir. He might indeed do something worse.’

‘Mrs Weekes…’ Jonathan paused uncomfortably. ‘You must not let him. You must not abandon me so easily. I beg you. I… I cannot do without your friendship. That is, I would not want to.’

‘You would not?’ she breathed. They sat apart, not touching, but Jonathan did not look away from her, even for a second.

‘Your visits are the only thing that makes life bearable, Mrs Weekes. In all the long years since the war, no one else has managed to… return a fragment of my former self to me. I have been so afraid, all these years, of the… lost, dark places in my mind. In my memory. Only you give me the strength to look into them. Please. Do not abandon me now, at the behest of two people who cannot understand. Not when you have shown me that forgiveness is possible.’ After this he fell silent, and his face darkened, and Rachel thought of the letter in her pocket. It seemed to weigh more than a piece of paper should; her hands began to shake. Why do I not hand it over to him? Do I fear him, still? Do I fear the effect it might have? For a moment she wished she didn’t have it; she wished she knew nothing, that her face was hers and hers alone, and no question of a vanished or murdered girl could come between them. To be with Jonathan, there in that room, and to hear him say such things, would be enough to make life happy. Why couldn’t it have been so?

Rachel turned her face away. Outside, a man came with a taper on a long pole to light the streetlamp on the corner; the fog devoured its weak glow just a few feet from the flame. I was going to show the letter to Starling, not to Jonathan. Rachel wasn’t sure whether the letter would bring Starling any joy. Combined with what Duncan Weekes had told her, she knew that Starling would be newly convinced of Jonathan’s motive for killing Alice. She could have ruined them with what Duncan told her. No wonder they tried to stop all her letters. Yet still my courage near failed me when I was told I could see him no more. So she stayed silent a while longer, with the letter heavy in her pocket, and some other weight fettering her heart.

Jonathan cleared his throat softly.

‘Mrs Weekes, I must tell you something,’ he said. He was watching Rachel intently, and at once she sensed bad news.

‘What is it?’

‘I have been thinking a great deal about what you told me… about your sister, who was lost, and the possibility that she might have lived a second life, as Alice.’

‘Yes?’ Suddenly Rachel was alive with nerves; the blood seemed to swell in her veins.

‘Something had been plaguing me over it. Mrs Weekes, how old are you?’

‘I am twenty-nine, sir. I will be thirty next spring.’

‘Then it is as I thought. I fear that… Alice was not your twin sister; she could not be. Alice was a year and a half older than me. If she lives, she is thirty-five now. You are too young.’

And as simply as that, Rachel’s hopes were destroyed. There was silence after Jonathan spoke. The words fell dead from his lips, and landed at Rachel’s feet like little bones, cold and hard. There was a writhing feeling in her chest, and she gasped at it. Tears burned her eyes. Abi, no. Don’t go. But she couldn’t bargain or riddle her way around this; she could not argue it might not be so. Even after everything she’d heard from Duncan Weekes, and Bridget, after everything she had come to believe of Lord Faukes and Josephine Alleyn, still her mind had clung to the idea that they might all be lying, or mistaken; that it was all talk and rumours and no proof; that the little girl Lord Faukes had put into Bridget’s arms, and sponsored all her life, had indeed been Abigail. It had never occurred to her to check that most fundamental thing she and her twin had in common – their birthday. Rachel bowed her head and wept in utter disappointment; she felt so cold, and so tired.

Outside the window the world seemed to stretch away, endlessly grey and empty. Say something to me, she implored but the voice in her mind stayed silent. Then I am alone. She felt desolate then, as though she could never again move from the chair where she sat, because she would never have the strength to, would never have the cause. This was why my heart was numb. To save me from ever feeling this way again.

‘Do not weep so, Mrs Weekes. Please. It would have been a wondrous happenstance, I know, but… wondrous things rarely prove to be true,’ said Jonathan, gently.

‘Wondrous? Perhaps.’ Rachel shook her head. ‘But it was the one thing I was hoping for. You break my heart, sir.’

‘Losing your sister breaks your heart, and I am sorry for it. But I had to tell you, did I not?’

‘Oh, why? Why could you not have just left me in ignorance, and with hope?’ she cried.

‘Because it was lies, Mrs Weekes,’ he said grimly. ‘Two girls were lost, not one.’

‘But I had hoped that it was otherwise, Mr Alleyn. I had hoped so much,’ said Rachel, brokenly. ‘It was the one thing that could have given Alice a happy ending.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If she was Abi, and not Lord Faukes’s, then there was no cause for anyone to harm her. If she was Abi, the two of you could have defied them, and wed. And if she was Abi she might indeed have run away with another, and perhaps be alive somewhere. But I cannot believe any of that if she was Alice. I cannot imagine Alice a happy ending.’

‘What are you saying? What do you mean, if she was not Lord Faukes’s?’ Jonathan was frowning now, that darkening look that she had learnt so well, and learnt to avoid. But she was too sad and sorry to be cautious, then. She took out the letter and handed it to him. ‘What is this?’ He stared at it as if she offered him a live snake.

‘It is Alice’s last letter to you. The one that reached you in Brighton.’

Jonathan froze. Still held in mid-air, the letter began to tremble. Clenching his teeth, Jonathan snatched it from her, and Rachel saw a tremor pass right through him. He closed his hand, crumpling the paper tight inside.

‘How came you by this?’ he said, grinding the words out.

‘I was given it, to return to you, by… by Harriet Sutton.’

‘Sutton? Then he-’ Jonathan swallowed, his throat constricting. ‘He had it all the while, and kept it from me? My friend… why?’

‘He… he didn’t want you to dwell on her, I think – on Alice. Once you were back with the army, and preparing to fight again…’

‘It wasn’t for him to decide that.’

‘No. No, it wasn’t. But he could have left it where you discarded it, and it would have been lost…’

‘Damn him!’ Jonathan burst out. He stormed out of his chair and paced the floor beside her, his face contorted with anger. ‘And you have read it, I take it?’ he snapped. Rachel looked away in shame.

‘I’d thought she was my sister-’

‘Even if she was, you had no right!’

‘No. I had none,’ she said.

‘But you made it your business, to enquire into mine. You and the rest of the world alongside you.’ Jonathan stopped pacing and looked down at her with that blankness she had seen before. Where is it he goes, when he is most angry or afraid? Slowly, Jonathan flattened the letter out and slid it into his pocket.

‘Aren’t you going to read it?’ said Rachel, wiping her face with her gloved fingers.

‘Not here,’ he said coldly. ‘Not now.’

‘She writes of the other man-’

‘Say nothing more!’

Jonathan half turned away from her and covered his mouth with one hand, and Rachel was suddenly, horribly reminded of Richard, and the pose from which he’d raised his arm to strike her, just hours before. When Ifirst met this man he would have choked me to death, were it not for Starling. ‘How long have you had this letter? How could you keep this from me? I trusted you!’ he said savagely. Rachel stood and moved away from him. She thought of the heavy glass jar, thrown down at her feet, and his blind empty eyes as he’d done it. So much that is good, and so much that is bad, contained in this one room. Suddenly, she couldn’t bear to be enclosed by those four walls for a second longer. Jonathan’s face was terrible; he took two steps towards her, and Rachel fled.

She quit the house on Lansdown Crescent, and knew it would be for the last time. She would visit no more; see Jonathan no more. Who is he, in truth? The man I thought I knew, or the man Starling knows? She hurried down the steps and turned west along the crescent, away from the city centre. She wanted to quit Bath too, she realised then. She wanted to quit Richard, and her home, and everything she had found out since her arrival. I want none of it. I am alone; so let me be alone. Rachel began to cry again; the ache in her chest was agonising, and made it hard to breathe. There was a shout behind her.

‘Wait!’ She turned to see Jonathan following her, shrugging on a black coat. He was a monochrome creature: pale skin, dark hair, dark clothes, as though life and pain had robbed him of colour. He limped more than ever in his haste; hunching his shoulders and turning his face away from passers-by.

‘Leave me be!’ Rachel called back to him. She turned and carried on walking, past all the mournful buildings with their streaked stone and watchful, empty windows. She was at the gate to the high common when Jonathan came up behind her.

He caught her arm as she unlatched the gate.

‘Wait, Rachel. Where are you going?’

‘Away from here! Away from-’ Rachel coughed and sniffed; her face was wet, chilled.

‘Away from me?’ he said darkly. ‘Do you think… do you honestly think I killed her?’

‘Didn’t you?’ she cried. ‘Wouldn’t you have killed me, twice over, if Starling hadn’t stopped you one time, and I hadn’t dodged you the other?’ She twisted her arm and he let it go. Rapid thoughts shifted behind his eyes.

‘But I loved her,’ he murmured, brokenly. ‘I loved her. How, then, could I have harmed her?’ Rachel’s pulse was racing, it made her head feel bruised.

‘Because of what she told you! Because of what she alludes to in that letter, and what she then told you when you saw her – when you came back to Bathampton all mad and undone!’ she said. ‘Can you claim to remember differently?’

‘I… I…’ He shook his head. Rachel felt the last pieces of hope crumbling down around her feet, till there was nothing left.

‘I told Starling that she must have loved another, that that would be the only reason you might have to harm her, but I was wrong, wasn’t I? She was innocent all along. She was innocent.’ Jonathan said nothing, but he nodded. ‘You said to me once that you had killed innocents,’ Rachel said softly, full of dread. ‘You said you had done things that would send me screaming from the room. You said you’d tried to make it right, but nothing would.’ Still Jonathan only stared, and stayed silent. Rachel could hardly find the breath to speak; there seemed no air to breathe. ‘You’ve killed innocents,’ she said again.

‘Yes!’ he said.

‘Do not flinch from the memory of it – what right have you to do that? Look at it, and tell me what you see!’

‘I can’t.’

‘You must! It’s there, in the… in the dark spaces in your thoughts – I know it. Did you kill her?’ Rachel shouted. Jonathan would not look at her. His eyes were fixed on the shifting fog, searching. ‘Did you kill her?’ Rachel said again. Gradually, a change came over Jonathan. His eyes grew wider and lost their focus, so flooded with guilt and horror it looked like it would drown him. He took a slow, shuddering breath. ‘Did you?’ Rachel demanded. ‘Did you murder her?’ The words rang between them.

‘Yes,’ he breathed then, the word like a poison, killing all it touched. A sob punched through Rachel’s chest and made her wail.

‘Oh, God, how could you? I did not believe it! I believed she lived! I believed I… I defended you! When all this time Starling has denounced you, I argued against it, but she was right! It was all black lies, and you are the blackest of all! How could you?’ She slapped his face; a feeble blow, puny compared to the pain she was feeling, but it seemed to rouse him. He grasped at her hands, and she fought him off.

‘Wait, Rachel, I-’

‘No! Let me go!’ She wrenched herself free and fled through the gate, up onto the waiting white expanse of the common.

She slipped and struggled up the hill, wanting nothing but to be away from him, away from all of them and everything she knew. The grass was as icy and white as the air, sliding beneath her feet. Her breath came in uneven gulps, and she was half blinded by tears. So I have nothing, only a husband who grows to hate me, as I hate him. The grief she felt was like losing her father and mother again; like losing Christopher. She remembered the cool, unnatural feel of her little brother’s cheek on her lips, as she’d kissed him in his casket. It was excruciating. Abigail! She reached out for the echo in her mind and it was there, weaker, fainter, but there. Her shade then, only ever her shade. A memory, nothing more; or just my own mind seeking to comfort itself. When she had no more breath to run she halted, bending forwards, body heaving.

‘Rachel, wait!’ She heard his shout, not far away, and it sent a jolt right through her. He is coming after me. She twisted around, unable to tell which direction his voice had come from. Nothing was visible in the mist but the uneven ground, and to her left, a stand of black, tangled hawthorn trees at the bottom of a steep dell in the hillside. Fighting for breath, Rachel gathered up her skirts and continued to climb the hill. Her head was throbbing. There is indeed no fairness; no kindnesses. He did not lie about that. ‘Rachel, come back!’ His voice sounded closer yet, as if he was hard on her heels, and Rachel sobbed in panic as she toiled onwards.

She had reached a point where the land seemed to flatten when she could go on no further. She sat down on the frosty grass, laid her head on her knees, and let her lungs fill and empty like bellows. Within minutes she felt the sweat on the back of her neck and along her spine begin to cool, and then chill; she felt damp creeping in through her skirts. For a long while, she felt nothing else. She thought she heard another shout, perhaps from Jonathan. But it was wordless, and seemed a long way away, so she paid it no mind. What matter if he comes and kills me this time, anyway? The only person who might care was Duncan Weekes. Perhaps Starling would care? Perhaps not. She will never see Alice’s letter, not now I have given it to Jonathan. And she’s searched for it for so long. Rachel shut her eyes and tried to think of nothing. Into the empty space came a memory of the By Brook, bright and glorious in summer light. Abi’s small body bumping against hers, fighting for space at the carriage window; pale, pale hair, finer than spun silk; a lavender-blue dress; her mother’s face, full of happiness for the last time. After that day there would always be a shadow behind Anne Crofton’s eyes, all the deeper once Christopher also died. Rachel heard the frightened shout, saw the flash of distant blue in the lively water, rushing away, so quickly. She stopped herself, frowning. She pushed the thoughts back, concentrated hard on the memory of that small body next to hers; the blue dress, the pale hair. Abi. How can I do without you, dearest?

She drifted for a while, beset by sparkling glimpses of memory, and stinging shards of pain. When she opened her eyes it was because shivers were wracking her body, her every muscle cramping with cold. The light was failing, the grey all around deepening by the minute; she could see nothing around her, not even her own shadow, and a new fear gripped her. What madness was on me, to run out here, away from help? She stood up and spun in a circle, desperately searching for something familiar, some landmark or path to lead her back towards Bath. All she had were her own footprints, crushed into the frost; not easily visible but there for the following. She’d taken two steps with her eyes fixed upon them when she realised that Jonathan might also be following them, coming up behind her; slower on his lame leg, but still coming. How long did I rest? Does he still follow? On legs weak with fatigue, she turned to traverse the hill, the ground sloping treacherously under her feet. She meant to make her way down on a route parallel to that she’d previously taken, just in case Jonathan was still behind her. The darkness deepened with every second that passed; her eyes blurred with the strain of seeing. At one point her ankle crumpled sideways, twisting painfully and making her cry out. I must get back to the city. The thought of being lost on the common at night was terrifying. He cannot see me, at least. She felt a deeper chill at this thought. And neither can anybody else.

A pair of partridge erupted up from near her feet and she yelped in fright, pulling up short and holding her breath to listen. There was no other sound. The silence seemed to crowd in around her, amplifying the racket of her blood as it sang in her ears. Pointlessly, she turned about, gazing blindly into the gathering dark. Downwards. It is the only option, the only way back to safety. The safety of my home, she thought, bitterly. Then, with a jolt of relief, she saw the deep dell she’d skirted on the way up – that steep, rounded bowl in the earth with stunted, straggling trees knotted at the bottom. She was hurrying past it when something caught her eye. A colour, when all else was white or grey or black. Cautiously, she went closer to the edge, straining her eyes to see. And then she did see. A crumpled black shape, at the bottom by the hawthorn trees; twisted and lying at odd angles. Jonathan. He had fallen down the slope and lay with bright red droplets scattered around his head like the spent petals of some macabre flower; as still and silent as ice. Rachel fell to her knees; skeins of suffocating dread rose up and wrapped around her.

‘What are you doing here?’ said Starling, made stupid and slow by amazement. Her breath plumed in front of her face; there was a stink of unwashed skin and alcohol.

‘What am I doing here? This is my place.’ Dick Weekes swayed drunkenly as he took a messy swig from a bottle of brandy. Starling edged back until she felt the leathery touch of willow branches on her shoulders.

‘Your place?’ She shook her head. ‘This is Alice’s place; Alice’s and Jonathan’s.’ She glanced at their initials on the tree and saw that the carving had been obliterated; gouged out by a mass of angry knife marks.

‘I come here sometimes. Lately, a great deal. I come to visit her ghost, and see if she forgives me yet.’ Dick smiled blearily, but there was no mirth in his eyes, only misery.

‘Whose ghost? What are you doing here?’ Starling couldn’t make sense of the scene: Dick Weekes in Alice’s secret place.

‘Alice’s of course, you bloody halfwit!’ he snapped, sitting back down on the root. He sank his head into his hands, elbows on his knees, and Starling stared at him.

‘You knew Alice? But you… you didn’t know her! How could you know her? All this time I’ve known you, you’ve never said…’

‘All this time.’ He chuckled then, a nasty sound; looked up at her with savage eyes. ‘All those times you straddled me, and slid yourself down my shaft to the baubles, you were doing the goat’s jig with the man who killed your precious Alice Beckwith. Is that not a neat folly?’ He waved the brandy bottle aloft as if to make a toast. Starling stared; mute, stunned. ‘And she was meant to make it better. That other one, the one I married,’ he mumbled. ‘She was meant to love me and forgive me, and make it better.’

‘It was you Bridget saw on the bridge, talking to Alice that time. It was you she went out to meet; who wrote her a note and left it here at the tree…’

‘We were seen? I tried to avoid that. But by God, she was a stubborn wench! She would not love me.’

‘What did… why…’ Starling shook her head. She clasped at her stomach, suddenly feeling like she would vomit.

‘I was to woo her. I was to lure her away. I was to tempt her into loving me, and disgracing herself. I was to make Jonathan Alleyn discard her.’

‘By who? By who were you sent to do these things?’

‘By his lady mother, of course. By Josephine Alleyn, another one who did not love me.’ He took another swig, his voice heavy with self-pity, slurring from his drink-thickened tongue. ‘With my glorious face, she said, I could not fail. With my glorious face.’

With a bump, Starling sat down in the mud. Her muscles were unresponsive; she struggled to take in what Dick was saying.

‘After Alice went to Box, after she went to Lord Faukes… When she recovered… she was quiet and secretive. She was sad… she wrote letters, but no letters came back.’

‘Her letters were not sent. Not a one. All were intercepted and carried back to his lordship. I was to make her ruin herself and abandon Mr Alleyn before he returned from overseas. She was to tell him nothing, and do nothing to hasten his return.’

‘One letter was sent,’ Starling said woodenly.

It went on a February day not long before Alice’s death, when the sky was a threatening mass of cloud, and there were tiny flecks of rain on the breeze. In those days Alice still went out alone, and at strange times, but rarely with Starling or Bridget. She was keeping a secret, Starling knew – possibly more than one; the kind of secret that gradually, inexorably, wore a person away. Her eyes looked bruised all the time, and she never smiled. Even at Christmas, which Alice loved, she’d been sombre and sad, picking at the roast goose on her plate and offering no opinion on the decorations.

‘Won’t you tell me, Alice? Won’t you tell me why you can’t marry Jonathan?’ Starling whispered, lying nose to nose in bed one night. She pulled the blankets up over their heads, so that Alice would feel safe and Bridget would not hear.

‘I cannot.’

‘Then promise not to leave me!’

‘I have already…’

‘Promise it again!’

‘I promise-’ Alice broke off, and hesitated. ‘I promise not to leave you, Starling,’ she finished. But somehow this promise, extracted in darkness, did nothing to reassure Starling. She knew that change was coming, she just could not tell the shape of it.

Since the lovers’ tree Starling was determined to prove steadfast and true to her sister, so she didn’t keep cajoling her to speak, but only tried to cheer her. She fell back on that childish recourse of pretending all was well in hopes of making it so; begging Alice to read with her, to teach her poems, to go with her on walks and errands – all without success, until that cloudy day, when at last she agreed to go out. They went into the village, and Starling noticed Alice staring into the faces they saw, as if calculating, or searching for something. On the way back Starling waved and called out to a familiar barge travelling west, and Alice grabbed at her arm.

‘Do you know that man?’ she said, as they stepped back to allow the plodding horse to pass.

‘Yes, that’s Dan Smithers,’ said Starling.

‘Would he do a small favour, if you asked him? Is he an honest man?’

‘I think he would. I think he is.’

‘Then bid him take this letter for me, and send it on from Bath,’ said Alice, urgently, pressing the folded paper into her hand.

Starling ran on a few paces, and called out.

‘Mr Smithers! Will you carry this letter to Bath for us, and send it on?’

‘What’ll you pay me, bantling?’ Dan called back, taking his pipe out from between his teeth.

‘I have a farthing… and I can sing you a song, if you like?’ At this the bargeman laughed and moved to the edge of the deck, reaching out to take the letter.

‘Keep your farthing, girl. Only a goosecap would cast chink over water.’ He tucked Alice’s letter into his shirt and drifted on his steady way.

‘Will he do it?’ said Alice, watching the bargeman’s retreating back with a strange, hungry look in her eyes. ‘Will he send it?’

‘Of course.’ Starling shrugged. Alice sighed then, and the hand that held Starling’s squeezed it tight, as if for courage.

‘Then we shall soon see,’ she said; words as desperate and hopeless as a faithless prayer.

‘Jonathan Alleyn got that letter – it was that which brought him rushing back here, from Brighton,’ said Starling. The frosty ground she sat on was eating into her flesh, but she could hardly feel it.

‘Well, it made no difference,’ said Dick.

‘It did to him. It did to Mr Alleyn.’

‘It made no difference to Miss Beckwith.’

‘Why did you kill her? Why? She was good… only ever good! She was my sister.’ Starling could hardly speak for the grief crushing her.

‘I never meant to! Do you think I meant to?’ Dick erupted to his feet. The brandy bottle flew from his hand and landed in front of Starling, the last drops splattering out. ‘Do you think I meant to? I did not. I… she was kind, like you said. I wanted her to love me.’ He laughed again, high-pitched and strange.

‘You’re mad.’

‘I was meant to make her love me, and the bitch made me want her to! How’s that for a twist of fate.’ He lurched to one side and retched violently, sending a spew of rancid brandy onto the riverbank. ‘But by God, she was stubborn.’ He coughed, spat, wiped his chin on his hand.

‘She wouldn’t betray him. She wouldn’t betray Jonathan Alleyn.’

‘Clung to thoughts of that Hopping Giles like a nun to Christ’s bloody cross. She only agreed to meet me because I swore I would open my own veins if she refused. She tried to talk me out of it – out of all the devotion and unending love I professed, as ardently as any bleeding poet. She sat patiently and listened to me harp on, and then told me sweetly that it could not be; that her heart belonged to another for all of time, even if they could not marry. When I said I would drown myself in the river if she didn’t consent to an elopement she just gave me a look, all grave and sedate, and said “Do not, sir, I beg you. Only try to forget me, and find another to love.” ’ He strained his voice into a grotesque parody of Alice’s.

‘She was true to him,’ Starling whispered. ‘When she would not betray, did Mrs Alleyn bid you kill her?’

‘No! Not… not baldly put, not like that. I knew she desired it, though. But I never meant to. I only… thought to frighten her. To scare her into obeying me, and accepting me…’

‘To scare her into loving you? You’re a pitiful fool, Dick Weekes.’

‘And you were my whore, Starling,’ he sneered at her.

‘What did you do to her?’

‘I only struck her. Just a blow, to that pretty face. I shook her a little first, and made threats… She said if I loved her I would let her be, so I gave her a blow across the chops, and she fell down, and… and… it wasn’t enough to kill her! It wasn’t enough for that! But she was pale as death itself, lying there on the ground, and she gasped like a landed fish. The only colour she had was the blood on her teeth. I thought she was playing me for a fool… I thought she was feigning injury. But then she… she stopped gasping.’ He shook his head as if bewildered. ‘Dear God but I’ve seen her gasping like that, and those red teeth, in a thousand dreams since then.’ He shuddered. ‘But it wasn’t enough to kill her… it wasn’t! I’ve hit enough women to know what force to use.’

‘You dog.’ Starling could hardly speak. Her body was shaking so hard her teeth rattled in her skull. ‘You dog! Her heart was fragile… it could not stand a shock, or too much agitation.’

‘It wasn’t my fault. She wasn’t supposed to die.’

‘Where?’ The word was a barely unintelligible moan. ‘Where?’ Starling tried again.

‘Here. Just here. She lay where you lie now, more or less,’ he said woodenly. He shook his head again, and tears bloated his eyes. For some reason, the sight of them made Starling angrier than she’d ever been in her life.

‘No, where is she now?’

Slowly, unsteadily, Starling got to her knees, and then to her feet. She curled her hands into fists, though it seemed to take every last bit of her strength. Dick ignored her, still staring at the spot on the ground where Starling had sat down. He tottered; staggered to keep his feet.

‘At least, I thought, Mrs Alleyn would love me for it. What better way to get the girl out from under her feet? But none of it.’ He stooped to pick up the brandy bottle, nearly pitching forwards as he did; peered into it and then cast it into the water with a feeble overarm throw when he found it empty. ‘This is my place,’ he mumbled. ‘We were dismissed soon after. Father, and me along with him. I’d made myself a murderer at the age of eighteen, for her, but she didn’t even want to see me after. Didn’t even let me kiss her any more, or touch her breasts like before. She’d made me think… she’d made me think I could have all of her, if I did as she asked. She made me think that.’

‘All this time… all this time… Where is she now, you bastardly gullion?’ Starling shouted, finding a storm of rage to give her strength. With a snarl she flew at him, clawing at his eyes with their lying tears. Befuddled and slow, Dick fought her off, clumsily trying to grab at her hands and strike her at the same time.

‘All this time you’ve been plaguing Jonathan Alleyn, and for naught, Starling! For naught! I can’t say that hasn’t cheered me, from time to time.’ He grinned at her then, a cruel and sickly expression.

‘Bastard!’ Starling screamed, and with all her strength she shoved him in the chest, wanting nothing more than for him to vanish; to be no more. Dick reeled backwards, caught his heel on a root and launched full length into the river.

The splash was a huge white plume in the gathering dark; the sound seemed impossibly loud. Starling stood on the bank, chest heaving, and watched as Dick surfaced, coughing and spitting and shaking the water from his eyes. The water wasn’t deep enough to drown him. More’s the pity. But I should run. I should run before he climbs out. But Starling was rooted to the spot. Dick stood, and the black water was at his chest; he seemed to have trouble breathing.

‘I’ll choke the bloody life from you, you bitch!’ he said, but his voice sounded thick and peculiar, and as he began to wade towards the bank his movements were jerky and slow; like it was deep snow he strode through instead of water.

‘Where is she now? What did you do with her?’ said Starling. Dick didn’t reply. His attention seemed to have turned inwards, to his own body. Spasms juddered through him; he scowled in confusion.

‘Cold,’ he muttered, through chattering teeth. ‘It’s too cold. My legs… cramp has my legs…’ He stumbled then, and the water closed over his head again. ‘Starling, help me!’ he called when he surfaced, panic creeping into his voice. ‘I haven’t the strength!’

‘Seems to me a man in the prime of life, who knows just how much force to use when he hits a woman, should have no trouble climbing a riverbank,’ said Starling, icily. ‘Unless he’s drunk himself weaker than a kitten, of course.’ She stared down at Dick, not moving, not blinking.

‘Help me!’

‘I will not.’ Dick’s face had gone as white as the fog; his breath came in snatches, hissing out between locked jaws. He made for the bank again and this time reached it, his fingers snapping the thin ice where water met earth. He scrabbled at the bank, found a root and curled his fingers around it, but when he pulled at it his grip slithered free. He stared at his hands as if he no longer owned them.

‘Starling, help me. Please. Pull me up, for I cannot do it. I cannot.’ His legs rose in the water behind him, floating of their own volition. He craned his head back to keep his face clear of the surface. His puffing breath made little scuffs on the water.

‘Tell me where she rests.’ Starling gazed down at him, feeling calm now, feeling safe.

‘If you help me out, I will tell you. I swear it,’ he said. The current had Dick’s legs, pulling, turning his feet towards Bath. His eyes bulged in fear and he flapped at the root with hands that would no longer flex. ‘Pull me out! Pull me out and I will show you the exact spot! Else you will never know, Starling! You will never know!’

‘No, tell me now!’ There are only seconds. The current had edged Dick away from the bank. He stared at the root that might save him, splashed and paddled to no effect.

‘St-Starling, please,’ he croaked. In seconds he will be out of reach. Starling glanced around for a fallen branch with which she might hook him, but saw none. She took a step closer to the edge, closer to him, and hesitated, frowning in indecision.

Captain and Harriet Sutton were at table when Rachel was let into the hall by their elderly servant. She could no longer feel her hands or feet, or her heart. Her head was ringing and she couldn’t marshal her thoughts, or pick any one free of the tangled whole. Harriet came rushing out to her, alarmed, still swallowing a mouthful of food; her husband the captain was not far behind her, keeping a more tactful distance; and behind him Cassandra peeked out, keeping to the safety of her father’s shadow.

‘My dear, whatever has happened? You look terribly pale – come and sit by the fire, your hands are like ice,’ said Harriet, as she took Rachel through to the parlour.

‘Something terrible… I am so sorry.’ Rachel sat down, unsure what to say now that she was given the chance. The earlier events on the common had an unreal caste in her memory, as if they could not really have unfurled that way. ‘I am so sorry to intrude upon you like this, Mrs Sutton,’ she managed to whisper. ‘It’s only that I… I wasn’t sure where else to go.’

‘But, has something happened at home, my dear? Has something happened to Mr Weekes?’

‘At home? No.’ Rachel shook her head. ‘No, it is Mr Alleyn.’

‘Jonathan Alleyn?’ The captain broke in, brusquely. ‘What has happened to him?’

‘He is…’ Rachel swallowed; her throat was dry and tight. ‘He… I think he is dead.’

‘What?’ Harriet breathed. Rachel grasped at her friend’s hands when it seemed she might pull them away.

‘He killed Alice Beckwith! I never thought so… not truly…’

There was a hung moment; Captain Sutton was the first to break it.

‘Cassie, you are for Bedfordshire. Maggie,’ he called over his shoulder to their servant. ‘Take this young lady up to bed, if you would.’

‘But Papa, what about the butterscotch syllabub?’ Cassandra protested gently. Rachel looked up at the sound of her voice, and found the little girl’s dark, liquid eyes regarding her with curiosity and a touch of fear. I must sound like a mad woman.

‘You may take a dish upstairs with you. Go on now, be gone.’ Obediently, Cassandra turned and left them, her long hair swaying behind her. Captain Sutton came further into the room and closed the door behind him. ‘He killed Miss Beckwith? Are you certain of this?’ His tone was heavy with something like dread.

‘He confessed it to me! He said… he said…’ Rachel struggled to remember his exact words. ‘We were speaking of Alice – I’d given him back her last letter, you see. And he was… most upset by it… He fell…’ Rachel shut her eyes, because suddenly her head was lanced with pain. ‘We were up on the high common and he… slipped, and fell into a deep hollow. I think he must have hit his head. Harriet… there was so much blood!’

‘But you don’t know if he lives? How is this? Did you not stay to find out?’ Harriet was no longer holding Rachel’s hands but gripping them, so tightly that Rachel felt her finger bones grind together.

‘I… I’d been running from him. In the fog… Harriet, I… was frightened! He was so angry, and disordered… I thought he might do me harm, if I were to face him. After he fell, I found my way back down from the hill, and I sent the first men I encountered up to where Mr Alleyn was, to fetch him down. And… then I came here.’

Suddenly, Harriet Sutton released Rachel’s hands and put her own to her mouth, her eyes stretching wide. Her husband took a step forward and put his hand on her shoulder to steady her.

‘He was trying to fetch you back, on rough ground, in frozen weather and at sunset… you led him up there and left him struggling after you – a man made lame by battle? He will freeze, if nothing else!’ said Captain Sutton, with quiet intensity.

‘What? No… I… that wasn’t the way of it, truly! I never meant for him to follow. I didn’t even mean to go up onto the common. I only… fled, and did not think, until I was there. But… but, he is a killer! Don’t you believe me?’

‘I will send for news at once,’ said the captain, leaving the room for a moment.

‘Of course you did not mean to endanger him,’ said Harriet, soothingly. When her husband returned, the two of them shared a long look. ‘But he did say that he killed Alice Beckwith? Did he say those words?’ Harriet asked, softly. She blinked, and tears streaked down her face; she turned to her husband again. ‘Oh, my dear, what if he is dead? Poor Mr Alleyn!’

‘I don’t understand.’ Rachel looked in bewilderment from her friend to the captain and back again. The Suttons seemed to communicate in silence for a moment, and then Harriet gave a tiny nod.

‘We must tell her, my dear,’ she whispered, and the captain looked down at his feet with a frown.

‘Tell me what?’ said Rachel. Captain Sutton let out a pent breath in a rush, his shoulders sagging in defeat.

‘Mr Alleyn did kill a woman, Mrs Weekes. But it was not Alice Beckwith. It was Cassandra’s mother.’

Rachel frowned, still not understanding.

‘Cassandra? Your daughter, Cassandra? What can you mean, Mr Alleyn killed her mother?’

‘Her real mother, Mrs Weekes,’ said Harriet, softly. ‘For it had become clear, a long time before he brought her to us, that my husband and I would not be blessed with children of our own.’

‘Cassandra is another woman’s child? But… whose? Who was she? Why would Jonathan kill her?’

‘I will tell you,’ said the captain. ‘But I must beg you, Mrs Weekes. I must beg you to divulge none of this to anybody, not even to your husband, though I am loath to introduce secrets into a marriage.’

‘Fear not.’ Rachel’s voice was leaden. ‘We have many already.’

‘Nobody but my wife and I and Jonathan Alleyn know this truth. Not even Mr Alleyn’s good lady mother.’

‘I will speak of it to no one.’

‘Then you have my thanks, for that if for little else.’ The captain sank into a chair opposite the two women; hands on his knees, suddenly like a small boy. ‘It happened at Badajoz. After the siege, and the… madness that followed it.’

‘Badajoz?’ The name rang in Rachel’s memory. ‘I have heard of it. Jonathan… that is, Mr Alleyn, spoke of it once. Is that not where his leg was injured? The last battle he fought, before he was forced to come home?’

‘Indeed. I’m surprised to hear he spoke of it. Most of us who were there would prefer to forget it, I think. It was a massacre. A massacre the likes of which I had never seen before, nor ever have since – for which I am profoundly grateful. I will not describe it in detail. Not to ladies.’ The captain broke off and cleared his throat, though it sounded dry and clear. Rachel saw a measure of the same tension around the man’s eyes as when she’d coaxed Jonathan to speak of the war. ‘We paid most heavily for our entry to the city, and… when it was taken…’ He paused, his jaw closing with an audible click of his teeth. ‘When the city was taken, there was a mutiny of sorts. Looting and… violence, towards the defeated soldiers and the city’s residents both. It was indiscriminate and it was… hellish. It was like hell.’

‘My dear, enough. Do not speak on if it pains you,’ said Harriet.

‘Major Alleyn kept his head, though his leg was severely wounded by then, and he made me keep mine. We went into a church to…’ He flicked a troubled glance at his wife. ‘To prevent a desecration. There was a struggle, a fight. I left in pursuit of some of our own men, far the worse for wine. And then, some minutes later Major Alleyn came out, carrying a newborn infant.’

‘Our Cassandra,’ said Harriet, with a tiny smile. She looked at Rachel and took her hand again. ‘He saved her. In the midst of all that.’ Captain Sutton nodded.

‘I never asked what had gone on within. Major Alleyn was doused in blood, not all his own. He was beside himself. He said, over and over, that he had killed her. He had killed her.’

Captain Sutton laced his fingers together, squeezing so hard that the skin blanched. ‘I glanced in and wished I had not. But a woman who must have been the child’s mother was inside, amongst the dead. Major Alleyn would not let go of the babe. He cradled her like she was his own. But of course a soldier can’t keep a child at war. I suggested we find some Spanish woman to take her, but he would not hear of it. He told me that the country was cursed, and that if he left her there she would surely die. And he was probably right. Then he remembered my own dear wife, and our sad state of childlessness.’

‘And he brought her back with him when he came. To give to you,’ said Rachel. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. After Badajoz I did a kind thing… so Jonathan said, one time.

‘Yes.’

‘He said to me… he said to me that he’d tried to make it right. That the last thing he’d done in the war had been a good thing, but that it could not make right what had gone before. He was speaking of this. Of the murder of one innocent, and the saving of another,’ she said.

‘Yes, he must have been,’ said Harriet. The captain stood and paced the hearthrug.

‘You cannot call it murder. Not with Major Alleyn. He was trying to restore order in the men! He was trying to prevent their bestial behaviour… If indeed he killed her, he surely cannot have intended to.’

‘We have never asked him. And now I fear we never shall,’ Harriet murmured.

‘But… but we were speaking of Alice, when he told me he had killed her! We weren’t speaking of the war, we were speaking of Alice…’

‘Cassandra’s mother haunts him constantly. That much I know. She and the war are with him always,’ said Captain Sutton. ‘But perhaps now he is at peace,’ he added, in a hard voice that hit Rachel like a blow.

A long and steady silence fell. The fire seethed gently, and from upstairs came the muffled sound of footsteps – the light, rapid patter of Cassandra’s feet; the more stately tread of the servant. Rachel tried to think back over everything Jonathan had said to her about Alice, and about the war; everything Starling had told her about him, and about her lost sister. She tried with little success to make order of it all, and with more success to maintain her belief in Jonathan’s guilt. She had to still believe it, because the alternative was unthinkable. Have I believed the worst of him? Have I caused the death of an innocent man?

‘But he is a killer,’ she said, almost to herself. Harriet let go of her hand.

‘He is a good man. He saved an innocent life when all around was chaos and death. He gave us the greatest gift a person could give,’ she said passionately.

‘And if he did kill Alice, what then? He does not remember that day,’ said Rachel. ‘Does saving Cassandra excuse him of that? Even he did not think so – he told me so himself!’

‘If he harmed Miss Beckwith…’ Harriet trailed off, and looked at her husband. ‘If he did, then no. Nothing absolves him of that.’

‘Except death, perhaps, for then the Lord will be his judge. By your actions we may never know the truth. I for one will not believe it. Not ever. But then, I have fought alongside him. He is my blade brother, and so I know him better than either of you.’ Captain Sutton spoke in stony tones, then rose and left the room without looking at Rachel or excusing himself.

Harriet Sutton invited Rachel to stay longer, and take a bed for the night. She didn’t ask why Rachel was reluctant to return to Abbeygate Street – she didn’t seem to need to. But when Rachel refused the offer Harriet didn’t press her, and Rachel saw relief in her eyes. She couldn’t blame her friend, though it hurt nonetheless. She had broken into their family, and made a breach through which all they held dear might be threatened. I will tell no one. Slowly, she walked towards Abbeygate Street, along dark streets like tunnels through her caved-in world. She would have to confront Richard, and tell him what had happened that day; and he would beat her for her association with Starling, and for prying into the Alleyns’ lives, and for accusing Jonathan and then leaving him lying on the frosty ground, surrounded by blood. For doing anything to upset Josephine Alleyn, whom he loved dear. Loves dear?

Was I mistaken? Didn’t Jonathan tell me he killed Alice? She stopped on the cobbles of Abbey Green, where the fallen plane tree leaves had been rained and rotted into a slimy mulch in the gutters. Torch flares in the darkness flung dizzying lines across her vision, and suddenly the strain of thinking was utterly debilitating. She wanted nothing more than to lie down where she stood and let it all carry on without her. Did I lead him to his death? She stumbled on, and as she turned the corner into Abbeygate Street she saw a figure huddled on the steps of the wine shop.

Rachel paused, thinking from the way the figure hunched, leaning on the railings, that it was her husband or her father-in-law, far gone in drink. But the person was too small to be either of them, and as she approached she recognised Starling, curled with her arms around her knees, shivering under her shawl.

‘Starling, what are you doing here? If my husband sees you he will thrash us both.’ Rachel glanced up at the windows in alarm, and relaxed a little when she saw them unlit. Starling raised a pale face to her.

‘Neither one of us needs worry about that any more,’ she said.

‘What do you mean? Wherever he is, he could be back any moment… it’s late.’ As she spoke, Rachel realised that she had no idea of the hour. The afternoon and evening had blurred nonsensically. She shook her head in confusion.

‘I’m telling you, you don’t need to worry about him any more,’ said Starling, more firmly. She stared up at Rachel with her hard eyes, and Rachel’s stomach lurched.

‘Oh, mercy… what have you done?’ she whispered.

‘Me? Nothing at all. The fool fell into the river. He was drunk, as usual.’

‘He fell? How do you know this?’

‘I happened to be passing. It… it was at the lovers’ tree.’

‘At Bathampton? I don’t understand… why was he at Bathampton? Why were you?’ Starling stood up stiffly.

‘Can we go inside? I will tell you everything, but I can’t stand this cold any longer.’

‘Mr Weekes might return, and find us-’

‘He won’t.’

Rachel opened the door and led her inside. Starling went straight to the stove, and the squeal of protesting metal as she opened the hatch was piercing. She reached for kindling and coals from the bucket, and blew on the old embers to relight them. Her hands knew exactly where to go for these things, and for the andirons, and Rachel realised that this wasn’t the first time Starling had been in her home. In light of all that had happened she found she did not care one whit. She knelt down beside Starling as the coals began to glow, and the pair of them stayed that way, warming their hands in silence a while. When Rachel glanced across at the red-haired girl, she saw that her gaze was fixed, unfocused, far away.

‘I… you were right,’ said Rachel, shakily. ‘You were right about Jonathan Alleyn. He killed Alice, and now… and now I think he is dead. He… What has really happened to my husband?’ Slowly, Starling’s face turned to her, and the coals glowed in her wide eyes with their peculiar, lost expression.

‘It was your husband that killed Alice. I had it from his own lips,’ she said.

Rachel could only stare at her, dumbly, as the full story of what had happened at the lovers’ tree came out; she was glad she was on her knees already so she couldn’t fall down.

‘Josephine Alleyn said to me…’ Rachel’s voice was small, shrunken in astonishment. ‘She said to me that my husband had shown her great loyalty. It was this then. Don’t you think? She meant this pretend wooing of Alice; this being rid of her.’

‘Yes. I think so.’ Starling still stared, and never blinked. ‘Do you see, Mrs Weekes? Do you see what they’ve done to me? The very people I’ve served, and lived beside, and loved… these very people were the self-same that took her from me. My sister. Do you see?’ she said, and Rachel knew she meant the cruelty of it, the injustice. She nodded. ‘I have been tricked. I have been so wrong,’ said Starling.

‘We have both been wrong, about a great many things.’ Rachel paused, swallowing hard. ‘Jonathan Alleyn had nothing to do with it at all,’ she said numbly. Behind the numbness a grief was building, swelling up like a black bubble.

‘Nothing. He loved her and never harmed her, and these past nine years since he came back from Spain I have done all I could to torment him, and make him suffer! I have cursed him every way I know how!’ Starling’s chest shook so that her words were uneven. ‘But he said it… I heard him say he’d killed her… he said her blood was on his hands…’

‘But by her he did not mean Alice,’ Rachel murmured. Starling’s expression showed her confusion, but just then Rachel remembered something that hit her hard. ‘Oh! When we met… when I met Richard Weekes for the first time, he reacted most viscerally. I… I thought it was love! He told me it was love, and I took his reaction as proof of it. But it was recognition. He saw Alice! Just as you did; just as Mrs Alleyn and Jonathan did.’

‘Just so.’ Starling nodded. ‘I knew he started out in Lord Faukes’s service; I had no idea he ever met Alice, or even knew of her existence. He said her face has haunted him – his guilt, is more like it. He said he hoped to make amends by…’

‘By marrying me?’ Rachel whispered. Starling nodded.

‘But I don’t understand… don’t understand why Mrs Alleyn went to such lengths to be rid of her! Wasn’t it enough to send her off knowing that they would never consent to the marriage?’ Starling went on.

‘No, it was not enough.’ Why didn’t I see it? Why didn’t I see that if Alice’s origins gave Jonathan a cause to harm her, they gave his mother an even greater one? ‘She was his aunt, and his sister both. She was an abomination, through no fault of her own,’ said Rachel, with a bitter feeling. Starling only stared, her mouth falling open, as Rachel took her turn and told her everything that had happened that day since she’d read the letter that the Suttons had long hidden.

Starling turned and stared into the burning coals again.

‘Perhaps I should pity her then,’ she said eventually. ‘Perhaps I should pity Josephine Alleyn, to have had that monstrous buck fitch as her father, and suffered his attentions nonetheless… But I can’t pity her. I can’t, if she took it out on Alice when it was none of her fault. And if Alice was her own daughter… How could she?’

‘For the honour of her family name,’ Rachel said.

‘Honour? What honour had she left?’ Starling replied, bitterly.

‘Precious little, indeed. Little enough to make the remainder all the more valuable, and to make her guard it like jewels, and do anything she could to keep word of what Alice had found out from ever reaching Jonathan’s ears. Bad enough that Alice should tell him she was Lord Faukes’s issue; worse beyond tolerance that she should learn the full truth from Duncan Weekes, and share that too.’

‘Then that old man killed her, as surely as his son did.’ Starling’s face clouded in thought. ‘But Josephine can’t have known, can she – what old Weekes told Alice that day?’

‘Duncan Weekes meant her no harm,’ said Rachel, firmly. ‘Alice… Alice must have written of it. In all those letters that were intercepted, and carried to Box instead. If Lord Faukes read them, then to be sure, Josephine Alleyn would have learnt of their contents.’

‘I have served her ever since Alice was lost. I have served that woman almost half my days.’ Starling drew in a huge, shuddering breath, and Rachel glanced at her in alarm.

‘What will you do?’ she said.

‘I will finish what you started.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You have killed Jonathan Alleyn this day, you say-’

‘Not killed. I-’

‘And I have rid us of Mr Weekes. That only leaves the one who was behind it all. Because…’ Suddenly her face crumpled in anguish. ‘Because if Alice is dead, and Jonathan too; Dick Weekes… And Bridget lies dying… then I have nobody. I will not leave Josephine Alleyn in peace a second longer.’

‘You cannot mean to attack Mrs Alleyn… or do her harm?’ Rachel was shocked.

‘Harm? I had not thought to harm her. But then, why should I not?’

‘Because… your own life will be forfeit if you do!’

‘I… I don’t care.’ Starling got to her feet, her hands clenched into fists, resolution on her face. Rachel scrambled up beside her.

‘You must care! You must not attack her! Promise me!’ Rachel cried.

‘Why? Haven’t you heard your own words this past hour? Why should you care for her?’

‘I do not care for her! I care for you.’ Rachel grabbed at Starling’s arm to stop her leaving. Starling glared at her suspiciously.

‘What?’

‘If… if you go and do this, if you harm her and go to the gallows for it, then… then I too will have no one. Do we not have each other? Am I not your friend?’

Rachel released Starling’s arm and let her hand drop to her side. The cast-iron body of the stove clinked and popped as it heated. Then Starling broke off her gaze and turned again for the door.

‘Perhaps you are. But I must go, even so,’ she said.

‘What should I do?’ Rachel asked. Starling hesitated, looking back over her shoulder.

‘You can only wait. Not everything that goes into the river is found. I think that’s where Dick put Alice, once she was dead; like as not she was carried out to sea, all undetected. Food for fishes and… gulls.’ She swallowed convulsively. ‘If Dick is found, and recognised, they will come to tell you. You must seem surprised at the news, and grief-struck. Can you do that?’ she said. Rachel nodded. ‘It will be in the next few days, if it is at all. You can only wait.’

‘And then what?’

‘Your life is your own, Mrs Weekes.’ Starling glanced around at the room. ‘You have a home, and a business to run, or sell, or seek management for. I’m going now to Lansdown Crescent.’ She gave Rachel one more look, steady and sad. ‘I will send word.’

Starling closed the door behind her, and when the clatter of her footsteps had gone from the stairs, Rachel was left alone. She stood for a long time in the empty room. My husband is dead. I am free again. I am nobody again. But then, he only married me because I reminded him of Alice; I never was anybody in the first place. She stood until her legs felt wooden, as though the blood ran too slowly through them. Then, because there was little else she could do, she went to bed. She was exhausted, and sleep dragged her down before she’d even shut her eyes. Her last waking thought was laden with guilt and treachery and relief – it was knowing that her sleep would be undisturbed by Richard’s late returning and unwanted touch. But she dreamt of Jonathan, and the copper mouse. She dreamt that she was the copper mouse, that it was a figure of her that he’d made; her every tiny detail rendered in bright metal with meticulous care. She felt herself cradled in the palm of his hand, and there felt safe for the first time since her parents had died. She knew herself loved. Then she half woke to darkness, and remembered her last sight of Jonathan, crumpled and bloody on the frosty ground.

Starling had bade her wait, and wait was what Rachel did. She stayed indoors at first, and when there was a knock at the door she jumped to her feet, breathless with fear. But there was no news of Richard; the man who knocked was a client of his, trying the house when he’d found the shop floor empty and closed.

‘I would have words with your husband, madam, pray send him out,’ said the man. He was claret-faced and well heeled; all bluster and high dudgeon.

‘Mr Weekes is… not at home, sir.’

‘Then pray tell me where I may find him, for he has much to answer for. That last cask of sherry he delivered to me was supposed to be a mellow Lisbon, sweet and well aged – for that I tolerated his high prices. Instead it is new, and hot, and scarce drinkable – though I can taste the honey with which he’s tried to improve it… And the hogshead of rum I had from him is so well baptised a child might drink it and find it mild!’ The man raised a finger and pointed it steadily at Rachel’s face. ‘It will not do, madam – never let it be said that I, Cornelius Gibson, will stand to be bilked in this manner! I mean to call him to account, and you may tell him that, madam – he will be called to account, and word will spread that he is a pedlar of balderdash, and no honest man.’ With that, Cornelius Gibson stalked away down the steps, rapping an ebony walking stick smartly at his side. Rachel shut the door and leaned against it to catch her breath. When I am his widow will I be ruined all over again, by his debts and his frauds and dishonesty?

In the afternoon she went out in search of Duncan Weekes, but found him not at home, nor at the Moor’s Head, nor at any other inn she passed by. She went home again to her lonely vigil, but it was not for long. Moments after she closed the door there came a knocking at it, and something about its slow, ponderous rhythm gave her a shiver of prescience. This is no angry customer. They have found him. Nerves fluttered in her stomach as she opened the door to a tall, thin man in a brown coat and a greasy black hat. He had a hooked nose and pinched cheeks, and eyes like nuggets of coal.

‘Mrs Weekes?’ His voice was soft and oddly mellow. Rachel nodded. ‘Madam, I am Roger Cadwaller, the wharf constable. It is my sad duty to report that a corpse was taken from the river this day, and that some amongst the river traders have named it Richard Weekes, your husband.’ The thin man spoke without emotion, and paused as if expecting Rachel to comment or cry out. Then he really is dead. I must seem surprised, and grief-struck.

‘He… he has not come home,’ she managed, in a tiny voice.

‘No, madam. And will not, I fear.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He is with an undertaker, behind Horse Street. Will you come?’

‘Come? Why?’ Rachel’s heart lurched. Do they think I killed him?

‘Aye, madam. You must look upon him, if you can, and name him your husband so that there can be no doubt it is he.’ The man hadn’t blinked since she opened the door. Rachel couldn’t keep her eyes still.

‘Very well,’ she whispered.

She followed Roger Cadwaller for a few minutes, down Stall Street and into Horse Street, then off into a tiny alley. The day was dead and cold; a steady drizzle sifted down from low clouds. The constable stopped by a set of narrow steps and guided her down them, between tall flanking buildings, to a damp and shadowy courtyard. From there he led her to a door that hung off-kilter, its black paint peeling and flaking away. The constable knocked, and they were admitted at once. I must seem surprised, and grief-struck. Rachel put one hand to her mouth in sudden outrage at her own dispassion. Her steps faltered, and she threw out her other arm to the wall for support. Neither Roger Cadwaller nor the wizened old undertaker who inhabited the place spared more than a glance at such behaviour. I am not surprised. I am not grief-struck. I am horrified. Rachel’s stomach and legs felt watery weak. She absolutely did not want to look at Richard’s dead body, but the two men led her on inexorably. Down more steps was a vaulted cellar, cold, dimly lit by a single pane of smeared glass in a high slot of a window. There, on a wooden table, stripped down to his drawers, lay Richard Weekes. There was an odd ringing in Rachel’s ears, and the room and everything in it seemed to recede from her. No, it is I who am receding. She moved unsteadily to stand beside him.

Richard’s hair was matted with river mud and shreds of weed, but his skin was flawless and pale, unmarked by any injury. Yet even without a wound on him, there was no chance of making believe he was still alive. Something about his stillness, the way he seemed smaller than he once had, the marble smoothness of his face – all screamed of lifelessness. He had no more scent than the stone walls around him. Rachel knew that if she touched him he would be cool, and too solid; the flesh gone dense and leaden without the spirit to buoy it up. The hair on his chest and arms looked too dark, too wiry. His mouth was closed but his jaw had fallen slack, robbing him of the firm line his chin normally took; his eyelids were swollen and purplish. But even so, even lifeless, his face was beautiful. Rachel stared at it for a long time, and couldn’t tell what she was feeling. You did not love me, but you did love. You were violent, but you did not mean to kill. You never forgave your father for the loss of your mother, but he also did not mean to kill. Was there good in you, or only bad? She came up with all these questions and more, but no answers; her heart was empty – she had no grief for him.

‘It is him,’ she said, long moments later when the undertaker had begun to fidget with impatience.

‘My thanks, madam,’ said the constable, in his smooth, unfeeling voice.

‘How came he to… be in the river?’

‘We shan’t know, madam. He had no quarrel that any saw or knew of. The men who pulled him out pressed him well, to force the water from him in hopes of reviving him. The dregs that came out were ripe with the red tape.’

‘The red tape?’

‘Brandy, madam,’ said the constable. Rachel blinked, and nodded to show she’d understood.

‘The water’s cold as a witch’s kiss, missus,’ said the undertaker. ‘Like as not he stumbled in, beetle-headed and boozy, and was undone by the bite o’ it before he even knew hisself drowned.’ The constable winced at the man’s rough speech.

‘I see,’ Rachel whispered.

‘The river men that knew him said he was a man who was wont to… sample too much of his own wares,’ said the constable.

‘He was a borachio, just like his father before him,’ Rachel said flatly. I’ll make no excuses for you, Richard. ‘It was rarer to see him sober than otherwise.’ They stood a moment longer in silence, each one watching Richard’s pale corpse as though it might sit up and nod ruefully in confirmation of its fate. If they’re waiting for me to kiss him farewell, they’ll wait for ever. ‘Have you told his father of this ill fortune?’

‘No, madam. Do you know his whereabouts?’

‘Yes.’ Rachel turned her back on her late husband. ‘I will tell him all that’s happened. And I will be back to make arrangements for the burial,’ she said to the undertaker.

‘As it please ye, missus.’ The old man nodded. With that Rachel fled the room, hurrying out of the cellar, along the alley and up onto Horse Street, where she gasped in a huge lungful of mucky air to dispel the scentless, stony pall of death.

She walked slowly to Duncan Weekes’s rooms, carrying with her the worst tidings a parent can ever be given. She thumped on the street door until her knuckles and the heels of her hands were stinging, and eventually a grey-haired woman in a filthy dress, red-eyed and white-lipped, let her in with a scowl. Rachel went downstairs and knocked at Duncan’s door for some minutes; there was no sound of movement from within, so she tried the latch. The door was not locked; it swung open with a creak.

Inside it was as frigid as ever, and shadows lurked in all the corners. There was no fire in the hearth; no candles or lamps alight. A sour smell hit her, and by the overturned hearthside chair she saw a splatter of vomit on the floor. Rachel looked towards the bed with a mounting, stifling sense of the inevitable. Duncan Weekes lay there, huddled under his blankets so that only his face was showing. He was as still and lifeless as his son. Rachel crouched beside him.

‘Mr Weekes? Father?’ she said, though she knew it was futile. The old man’s eyes were screwed tight shut, brows beetled and drawn together; his mouth was slightly open, lips blackened. The old woman who’d opened the door for Rachel appeared behind her, and peered over her shoulder at the corpse.

‘The barrel fever, no doubt,’ she said, with a sniff. ‘Or mayhap the old man’s friend. I’ve heard his churchyard cough, these past few nights.’

Absently, Rachel tucked the blankets tighter around Duncan’s chin. I knew he was sick, yet I did nothing, and let it slip from my mind. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Weekes,’ she whispered, stricken. There are no kindnesses.

‘I’ve a boy you can send for the undertaker, if you’ve a penny for him,’ said the old woman.

‘Very well.’ Rachel found a coin in her pocket. ‘He is Duncan Weekes, and his son Richard Weekes lies with the undertaker behind Horse Street.’

‘I know the one.’

‘Fetch the same man, if you please. Father and son can lie together awhile. I’d always hoped to reunite them.’

‘Fate will play these cruel japes on us,’ said the woman, nodding. The coin vanished into the palm of her bony hand and Rachel left, walking away with a feeling that her head was swelling; it felt light, and strange. How truly I spoke, when I said that I had no one.

More than ever before, Rachel felt apart from everything and everyone else. She walked for a long time, and felt invisible; as though she was less real in the world than the people she passed. I could vanish without trace; just like Abi. Just like Alice. She felt like a boat with its line cut, and nothing to keep the current from tugging her away. She was laden and heavy with guilt and sorrow, so much that she could hardly feel anything. Just the ringing echo of it all in the big empty space inside her.

The city closed in on itself for the night. Lamps were lit and shutters closed; the doors of inns swung to against the weather, and people hurried towards their homes, not dallying in the street with the drizzle and the leaching cold. These three days have been the longest I have ever lived. Rachel tried to imagine what life would be like from that moment; with no husband, no family; no visits to Jonathan or causes to hope. Will the Suttons still be my friends? I am a threat to them, and the captain blames me for Jonathan’s fall. It seemed impossible that she should be expected to continue, to bear it all. Weary and shivering, she reached Abbeygate Street and climbed the steps. Inside there would be no welcoming warmth or light for her; yet however sad a place it was, it was her only home. As Rachel pushed the door a scrap of pale paper caught her eye, fluttering across the boards like a tiny ghost. She bent and picked up the note, returning to the streetlamp outside for the light to read it by. She read it twice and then shut her eyes, sinking onto a nearby step as a storm of joy and relief took her balance. Mr Alleyn asks for you. Come at once. Starling.

The house at Lansdown Crescent was abuzz when Starling returned to it. It was only hours since she’d left to go to the lovers’ tree, since she’d seen Dick there and learnt the truth, and then gone to share that burden with Rachel Weekes, yet it felt like weeks. In the sudden bustle and thrum of gossip her absence seemed to have gone unnoticed, and she slipped back into the stream without a ripple.

‘There you are! You picked a ripe time to go off… pass me that beef bone, and get grinding some salt, will you?’ said Sol Bradbury when Starling appeared in the kitchen. Starling cocked her head curiously at the cook. She didn’t sound troubled enough to have had news of Jonathan’s death. Obediently, Starling picked up the heavy blade bone, still with some shreds of roast meat upon it, and took it to the cook. Sol dropped it into a huge pan of water on the stove, moving neatly aside of the splash.

‘Why?’ said Starling. ‘What’s going on?’

‘What’s going on! The master has cracked his head and lies abed all insensible, and the mistress is running half mad, and swears if she sees Mrs Weekes again she’ll have her guts for garters. Dorcas keeps fainting at the sight of the blood… The doctor’s with Mr Alleyn now, and I’m to brew up a beef broth for when he wakes…’

‘He is not dead?’ Starling’s heart gave a jolt that left her breathless.

‘Dead? Heavens, no! What, girl – is this not trouble enough that you go asking for more?’

‘No. I only…’ Unthinkingly, Starling turned for the stairs and went up.

She hardly spared a glance for a rotund man who was letting himself out of Jonathan’s rooms; she recognised him vaguely as one of the many doctors who had come and gone over the years, having done nothing to help with the pains in Jonathan’s head. Inside, the room was brighter than she’d ever seen it before – candles had been lit in every wall sconce, and along the hearth; on the desk and nightstand. The room was soaked in the golden glow of them all, the deep shadows banished; and as if a spell had been broken, the rooms that had frightened away a succession of housemaids were made commonplace. Untidy, cluttered with unusual things, but no longer threatening. It is only secrets that scare us. It is not knowing; it is the things we cannot see. Jonathan lay at the centre of this flood of light in the far chamber, pale skin and dark hair stark against his pillows, and a red stain seeping slowly through a bandage around his head. Starling went to stand at the foot of the bed, and then noticed Josephine, sitting in a low chair at the far side of it. Hatred scorched through her, and then her mistress spoke.

‘He will not die, the doctor says. He has broken his wrist, but the blow to his head was not grave, only bloody. He will not die. He will wake.’ Josephine spoke to nobody; she spoke to the room and the Gods, to all and none. She spoke to tell fate how things would go, and to dare it to deal otherwise. Starling looked at her for a long moment. Josephine’s eyes were wide in an immobile face. She watched her son with steadfast intensity. She loves him, and yet it was her doing – the thing that has grieved him most all his life. And she knows it. Starling expected to feel angry, but did not. She took Alice. She did it full knowing, and has hidden it ever since. She has let me serve her, and suffer her father’s lusts as I waited for news of Alice. She has fed me lies. All this she reminded herself, but still the anger would not come, and she was left to search for reasons why not. Because that beast was her father, and he took from her as much as from me. Because she is Jonathan’s mother, and right now she is as full of fear as a person can be.

‘I can pity you, but I do hate you also,’ she murmured. Josephine Alleyn blinked and turned to look at her.

‘What did you say?’

Starling was silent for a moment. She remembered Rachel Weekes’s fear for her, and her own desire to come and wreak vengeance on this woman. But Jonathan was not dead, and so everything had changed. I no longer have nobody. I have him. She returned her gaze to the man in the bed and probed her heart to see what remained, now that her misplaced hatred had blown away like smoke. She remembered him laughing at her antics the day they swam in the river at Bathampton, before he went to Spain and everything changed. A shard of grief cut through her then, for all they had lost since that day – both of them.

‘I’m glad he will recover,’ she said. Josephine Alleyn looked at her son again and seemed to forget what Starling had said before. She reached out and took his hand, tenderly, gently.

‘He is all I have,’ she murmured, and Starling understood then that Alice would be avenged, and all the grief of her death would be paid for at last. Because I have much to tell him, when he wakes. And then you will lose your son, Mrs Alleyn.

Jonathan showed no signs of waking. Josephine remained with him for a long time before retiring to bed, demanding to be fetched back if there was any change. Starling volunteered to stay with him then, as the long night crept by, one breath at a time. She sat vigil, and she waited, and she did not sleep. Faintly, she heard the long-case clock in the hallway strike two, and at that exact moment she remembered that Rachel Weekes had returned Alice’s last letter to Jonathan. She got up so quickly that her chair tipped over and clattered to the floor, and she froze, ears straining for any sign that the noise had roused Josephine. None came. Jonathan’s long black coat was hanging from the corner of the armoire, and she crept over to it, feeling for the stiffness of paper in the pockets. When she found it she returned to the bedside on soft feet, righted the chair and watched Jonathan’s face for a long time. She couldn’t shake the suspicion that he would guess what she was about, wake and snatch the letter from her or chase her from the room with curses; like all those times before when she’d searched for this exact piece of paper. No. He is innocent. I must keep reminding myself of this. With a slow inward breath to steady herself, she opened the letter.

My Dearest Jonathan

Oh, why do you not write? I have a suspicion about it. I have written so many times, these past weeks, and remain desperate to hear from you. You may be dead, injured, lost; or you may have had word from your mother, and shun me. I have no way of knowing, my love! It is cruel. Here is what I suspect – however it distresses me to write it. Since always we have handed our letters to the yardman here at the farm, to take up to the coaching inn and send on for us. Yesterday I walked along to the bridge and I saw our yardman hand what looked to be my letter to a scruffy lad, who made off with it. I am quite sure the boy was not in any way connected to the mail or the inn. Can it be that none of my letters have reached you, Jonathan? But this one will – I have a plan for it.

I went to Box and I met your mother. I know I ought not to have, I was not invited. I did not think to meet her, I sought only Lord Faukes, to find out if there was word of you. But it was your mother I met, Mrs Josephine Alleyn, so I confessed my reasons for going to her. She said such things, Jonathan! She was so angry, and so cruel. She hates me, and gave me news of my parentage that appalled me. And if this was not enough, soon afterwards I was given to understand why she might hate me even more – the coachman told me such things. Such dark, dark things. I will not relate them in this letter, in case it too goes astray. It was in my earlier letters to you – the ones which have gone unanswered. Forgive me for it, dearest Jonathan. In my distress, I did not stop to think. The words came pouring out of my pen, and now these tidings are out in the world somewhere, and could do you harm. Forgive me. The coachman was in his cups, and yet… and yet, he seemed so sure. He told me what even Mrs Alleyn feared to. Oh, I am an abomination! I am accursed. Do not come home to them, Jonathan – they are liars, and not what you think they are; and if you must come back, do not come to me. The pain of seeing you would be too great.

There is another thing. A man has appeared, with rough manners but a charming nature. He courts me as though his very life depended upon it. I know his face – I have seen it before, I’m sure of it. But I cannot think where; he is not from Bathampton. He begs to marry me, to take me away to Bristol or wherever I choose to live. I have done all I can to dissuade him but still he comes again and again to visit me, and says he will die without me. I thought – my darling, I must confess it – I thought for one moment, one dark day, that I should go with him – that I should vanish, and be sure you never had to set eyes on me again. For one moment, I thought it. Lord Faukes has not visited here since I went to Box. I feel some judgement coming, hanging over me like the sword of Damocles. So for one moment I thought I should go with this charming charlatan. For charlatan he is. But I could never do it, my love. I could never let you think I had forsaken you, for once I had gone they would surely tell you lies about me. Oh, how can I write such things about your family and about the man I have known and loved all my life as my benefactor? That seems a cruel joke now. My life has been a cruel joke, from the very beginning.

I am an abomination, my love. But I can call you that no more. Our love is an abomination. I feel my heart breaking, Jonathan. It is tearing in two, and I do not know if I will survive it. But you and I must remain apart, now and for ever. I will stay here and await my fate, once they have decided it. And if we never see each other again then let me swear it now – I loved you truly, and will love you ever.

One who is always, but can never be, yours.

Alice B

Starling read the letter right through twice; she held the paper to her lips, and breathed in any last lingering traces of her sister. All these terrible things she knew, and never told me. All this she bore alone. After the lovers’ tree Alice had promised to keep no more secrets from her, but this one she had kept. Did she think I would love her less? If she’d asked me to run away with her and live in a cave, I’d have done it. Starling sat in her chair and wept quietly for a while. Then, as dawn seeped its grey light into the room, she felt a flicker of urgency. He had to wake, so that she could speak to him before Josephine returned. He had to hear what she would say without interruption, or denial. The house was silent; not even Dorcas was up yet, clonking the shutters or riddling cinders from the ashes. Starling leant over the bed, and reached out to touch Jonathan’s uninjured arm.

‘Sir,’ she said, her voice a dry whisper. ‘Mr Alleyn, you must wake.’ She shook the limb gently. It was warm and limp. What if they are wrong, and he will not wake? She grabbed up his hand and shook harder, then leant forwards and slapped her fingers against his cheek, fear making her rough with him. ‘Wake, Jonathan! Alice needs you! I need you!’

Jonathan’s brows pinched together. Without opening his eyes, he spoke.

‘Peace, Starling! Your voice is like a hammer to my skull.’ He was groggy and hoarse, but he didn’t sound confused; he knew her. Starling exhaled in sharp relief.

‘You’ve hurt your head, Mr Alleyn,’ she said, as softly as she could. ‘And your wrist. You fell, up on the common.’

‘On the common?’ Jonathan’s eyelids fluttered open, and he gazed up at the swags of the bed canopy in thought. ‘Yes. I remember. I was trying to find Mrs Weekes. She… I said something, and only afterwards realised how it must sound to her. She ran off into the fog…’

‘I know. She is quite well. That is – well, there is much to tell you.’

‘You know? How do you know?’ He turned his head to face her and winced at the pain of movement.

‘We have become friends, she and I. I think. But listen now – can you listen? Are you awake? There are things I must tell you.’ She stood and looked down at him, and Jonathan met her gaze with eyes full of apprehension.

‘I am awake,’ he said carefully.

So, in a quiet voice, Starling told him all of it. She told him about Dick Weekes and the lovers’ tree; about Duncan Weekes and what he had seen and told to Alice the day she went to Box; about Rachel Weekes and why Dick had married her; and then everything Dick had said before he went into the river. Jonathan listened to it all without moving a muscle or making a sound; almost without any reaction at all, other than a look of pain that built like gathering clouds. When she finished she held her breath and waited.

‘Am I to be happy at these tidings, Starling?’ he said, at last.

‘Who could be? I speak only as one who has mourned her, and yearned to know of her fate, as you too have mourned and yearned. But this is the truth; we have it now, however black and bitter it may be.’

‘And the man who killed her. Rachel Weekes’s husband. He is dead. You’re sure of this?’

‘He is dead. Worthless wretch that he was.’

‘Worthless wretch perhaps, but one who also mourned her, it seems, in his own inadequate way. A puppet of my mother’s. I should disbelieve you at once, and cast you out.’

‘You know I speak the truth.’

‘For years you accused me, and were wholly convinced of my guilt.’

‘I know. I… am sorry for that.’

‘And now you are convinced that my mother was behind it all instead.’

‘Your mother, and your grandfather – who I know was a bad man, and not at all what he seemed from the outside; though you loved him, and Alice did too.’

‘You know he was bad? How do you know?’ Jonathan said angrily.

‘Because… because he had knowledge of me, sir, against my will. The day he came to tell me I would see Alice no more, and times again after that, before he died. I swear to you by the air I breathe, this is the very truth.’ Jonathan turned away as though he couldn’t bear to look at her; Starling saw a tear streak from his eye and vanish into the pillow. ‘You don’t know the full story of how he died, do you, sir?’

‘He died of apoplexy,’ Jonathan intoned. ‘A sudden fit, and painless.’

‘He died on top of Lynette, the new upstairs maid. She put up a good fight, and his heart gave out in his chest. And, Lord love you, sir, you were the only person in that house to mourn him.’ If he does not believe me, I will go from here and never see him again. ‘And… we would have known it all far sooner – we would have known that Alice was Faukes’s child, if Captain Sutton had only given you back this letter at once.’ She handed Alice’s letter to him, and when he took it there was a tremor in his hand. ‘It confirms all we have learned.’

She waited while he read it, and watched the muscles of his jaw moving under his skin, alive, and playing out the fight of his feelings.

‘My mother has lied all her life; this I already knew.’ His voice was forced out through clenched teeth.

‘Sir…’ Starling whispered. ‘Sir, might I have one of her others? One of her other letters?’

‘What?’

‘I should dearly love to have one of Alice’s letters to keep. Just to have something of hers, you understand – some keepsake, touched by her hand.’

‘I have no other letters of hers.’ Jonathan frowned at her. ‘What letters do you think I have?’

‘All of hers – those that you wrote to her, and that she wrote to you. Yours she kept in a rosewood box in her room, and it vanished after she did. I thought you took it? Did you not take it, sir?’

‘No.’ Jonathan shook his head. ‘I did not take it. And hers to me I… I destroyed.’ His voice failed him for a moment. He shut his eyes. ‘All of them. When I returned and thought that she… when I believed, at first, what I was told of her conduct. I wish I had not. I… I wish I had not.’

‘But if you do not have them, who does? And what of the letter I took from you – one that you wrote to her, your last from Spain, from Corunna, soon before she died?’

‘I know not who took them. My grandfather, I daresay. And that letter from Corunna… I never sent it. She never saw it. It stayed in my pocket all the way back to Brighton, and then came with me to Bathampton after I received her letter. I never got the chance to send it. I have always had it.’

‘Oh.’ Starling felt even this small hope fade away. ‘Then that letter, recently returned to you by the Suttons, is all that exists of her; all there is to prove she ever lived, except what we remember.’

‘Yes. Between them, they did obliterate her.’ Jonathan looked down as he spoke, his brows shadowing his eyes, his mouth a bitter line. ‘Fetch my mother to me now.’ Silently, Starling obeyed.

She knocked softly on Mrs Alleyn’s door and was summoned inside at once. The older woman’s face was hollowed out by fatigue but her eyes lit with hope and happiness when Starling said that her son asked for her. Enjoy this, madam – your last moment without blame. Starling trailed her back to Jonathan’s room, and at the door Mrs Alleyn turned and frowned at her.

‘Why do you pester my steps like a tantony pig? Go now and bring up the beef broth, and some tea. And perhaps a little brandy.’

‘No, madam. I am no longer your servant,’ said Starling, and the words made her heart lurch with fear and elation both. A thrill that made her fingertips tingle. There. I have cast myself off.

‘What? How do you say no? Go at once, and-’ Something in the way Starling stood, resolute, with her face full of knowing, pulled Josephine up short. ‘Well then,’ she said instead, incredulous, but almost resigned. The first sparks of a terrible anger were in her eyes. ‘Be gone, if that is so,’ she said. Starling shook her head.

‘I serve your son now, madam. Only he can send me away.’ Josephine glared at her a moment longer, and turned a little paler. She must wonder what gives me the strength to speak to her thus. She must wonder, and she must know. It was not anger that blanched her, Starling saw then. It was fear. She pitied Josephine again, for what was to come, and for what she had suffered, the hand she’d been dealt. But it was none of Alice’s fault. The chickens will always come home to roost, Bridget used to say. With a haughty expression that looked like a mask Josephine carried on to her son’s bedside, and Starling went behind her like a vengeful shadow.

Jonathan had edged his way up the bed, to sit straighter. There was a glaze of sweat on his face and he was breathing deeply, flaring his nostrils.

‘Jonathan! Dear boy, it gladdens my heart to see you woken, and well,’ said Josephine.

‘Does it?’ His eyes were hard.

‘Of course… why would you think to question?’

‘Because you lie, Mother. You have lied to everyone all your life. You lied to my father, and you lied to the world, and you lie to me. You killed Alice Beckwith with a lie.’ There was a frozen moment, and then Josephine shot Starling a glare like the jab of a knife.

‘What has this wretch been saying to you? What lies has she told? She is a mendacious rat, a muckworm… I only kept her because your grandfather instructed me to…’

‘Grandfather told you to keep her?’ said Jonathan. He looked at Starling, and she had no need to say anything more. ‘And there, I thought you had done it to be kind. How foolish of me.’

‘Jonathan, what is the matter? Why do you attack me – I who have only ever loved and cared for you-’

‘I don’t think you’re capable of love,’ said Jonathan. He continued before Josephine could reply. ‘Richard Weekes has told me everything.’

‘What?’

‘I said Richard Weekes has told me everything. Your little puppet, that foolish boy who thought himself in love with you, all those years ago. He has told me you sent him to coax Alice away. To make her betray me in any way he could. To goad her into an elopement… and when that failed he killed her. On your instruction.’

‘Lies.’ Josephine’s voice was almost lost; it was a breathy whisper, crushed by fear and anger. ‘It is lies. How dare he… how dare he!’

‘Do you deny it?’

‘Yes, I deny it! It is base lies, every word!’

‘Alice came to visit you one day, to ask for news of me. You told her… you told her that she was my grandfather’s bastard. Didn’t you? You told her that and then sent her away. You thought that would end our connection to one another for ever. But Duncan Weekes met her that day too, and he told her something else. Do you know what else he told her?’ said Jonathan. Josephine only watched him now, her face as still as stone. ‘Do you know what your coachman saw, peeping through the curtains one day?’

‘Enough! I will hear no more!’ Josephine exploded. She threw up her hands as if to cover her ears; turned away from the bed and made for the door.

‘Stay!’ Jonathan shouted. ‘Mother you will stay!’ The command was like a whip crack which nobody might disobey. Starling shrank back from the bedside, seeking a friendly shadow in which to hide. There were none to be had. This might break him.

Josephine turned to face her son but came no nearer to the bed this time.

‘Do you deny it?’ said Jonathan. ‘I knew you for a liar. I’ve always known. But I never knew what you lied about, until now. And I can forgive you for it… of course I can. Such evil… such a sinful blight on our family, on all my memories, it turns my stomach to even think it! But it was not your doing. Not that part.’

‘I beg you, continue no further with this,’ Josephine whispered.

‘It’s too late for that. I know. Do you deny it?’ he demanded. In response, Josephine only stared at him, her eyes filling with tears. She took a long, shuddering breath.

‘You were never meant to know about your grandfather! My whole life I have guarded against your ever knowing!’ Her face distorted with horror.

‘I understand. I understand that you sought to… protect me. From such ugliness. But now I must have the truth. Because I have tortured myself, Mother. Do you understand? I have tortured myself for the loss of Alice for twelve long years, trying to think what happened to make her leave me. I even thought, in dark moments… I even thought I’d killed her! When I came back after Corunna, and my mind was disordered… I have lain here and thought myself a murderer, and a madman, and all the time you knew! You knew!’

‘She was an abomination.’ This was more like a growl than speech; low and brutal, vicious with hatred. Starling’s heart stirred at the sound of it. ‘When she came to Box and asked for my father, I knew at once she was some issue of his. But the more I looked at her, the more I thought…’ She trailed off, shaking her head. ‘I knew. I knew who she was, then, though I thought that child had been dispatched at her birth, into the far north. I confronted my father. I made him tell me… Oh, Jonathan! It stilled my very blood that she still walked the earth! She was an abomination!’

‘She was innocent! And I will have the truth, for her sake and for mine, because this house – all our fortune – is mine, and if I think you are lying to me, ever again, I swear I shall put you out and you will end your days a washerwoman, or begging in the hedges.’

‘You would not! The shame of it!’

‘I have no shame left, Mother; I’m surprised to hear that you do. So speak truly now, and let us have it all. Am I my father’s son?’

‘Yes. You are… perfect. You are my salvation-’

‘Alice was your daughter. Yours… and my grandfather’s.’ To this, Josephine gave only more silence, as if she could not bear to say it.

Tears swelled in Jonathan’s eyes and dropped onto his cheeks. ‘But I loved her, Mother. I loved her so dearly. You knew that.’

‘She wasn’t meant to exist! I was… I was so young when she was born. She was taken away at once; it made me sick to even look on her, to hear her wail. Oh, I wanted to drown her right then! But my father told me she’d be adopted away and would never know of her parents. He told me this, and I believed him, like a fool. Then I married your father, and moved away from him, and… it was like waking from an evil dream. It was like life had started anew, and all the old tyranny could be forgotten. But my father, he… he kept her instead; he raised her up in comfort, close at hand. He loved her.’ As she said loved Josephine’s lips curled back from her teeth; she turned it into a curse word.

‘You didn’t know she was nearby, all those years? At Bathampton? You didn’t know Grandfather saw her regularly – that he took me to meet her?’

‘Of course I never knew! I would never have allowed it to continue – never! And he knew it… I was kept ignorant for that very reason. But when she… when she turned up at Box, asking after you, and after her benefactor, Lord Faukes… I knew then. I knew. My aunt Margaret had that milky pale hair, just the same as hers.’ Josephine’s eyes widened. ‘Only look at the miniature downstairs in the parlour and you will see.’

‘My grandfather was not at home when Alice called. You were cruel to her. Vicious to her.’

‘She asked me for news of you, her beloved… that’s what she called you. He is my beloved, and this silence is more than I can bear. When I realised what my father had done… that he’d let you know her… that he’d let that creature fall in love with you…’ Josephine stopped and put her hands to her midriff, clamping her jaws tight shut. She looked like she might vomit; spitting up these truths that revolted her so. ‘There was no quicker way to be rid of her, and to ensure she would renounce you, than to tell her. Half of the truth, if not all of it.’

‘But why did you not stop there? She wrote to me to say we could never wed, she wrote to me of her broken heart. Why was that not the end of it? Why send Richard Weekes after her, why kill her?’ Tears ran freely down Jonathan’s face; he didn’t seem to notice them.

‘I didn’t think… I didn’t think, when I told her. Your grandfather was furious with me… because, of course, she would tell you. She would tell you. We could not allow it. I wanted her sent away – far away. I wanted her reduced to a hedge whore, where no one would listen to her!’

‘She was innocent!’ Jonathan’s voice was raw.

‘She was an abomination! But your grandfather…’ Josephine shook her head incredulously. ‘He loved her too well. What fools and devils are men! He loved her, and would hear of no harm coming to her. But he made sure she could send no letters to you, while he thought on what to do about her. But he must have known, right away, that there was no solution. None but mine. And from her letters, we learned what Duncan Weekes had told her – that treacherous old fool. And we learned that she would tell it all to you, the first chance she got.’

‘So you sent Richard Weekes to ruin her.’

‘And if she would not be ruined willingly, then he would take her against her will, carry her away somewhere and stain her for ever. But he did better than that, wastrel that he is. He did better than that.’

‘He did better.’ Starling echoed the words in the silence that followed, unaware at first that she’d spoken out loud. Jonathan and his mother turned to her abruptly, as though both had forgotten she was present. ‘Even Dick Weekes wanted to please her, by the end. Did you know that? What he did to her tormented him, and I don’t think he could forgive himself. That’s the kind of person she was. Bridget always used to say that two wrongs never made a right, but that’s what happened with Alice. You and Lord Faukes so wrong, and Alice coming out so right. God must have taken pity on such a cursed birth and decided to bless her in every other way. By the time he killed her, even Dick Weekes wanted her heart,’ she said.

‘I care not whether he loved or hated her. What he did that day was the only good and useful thing he ever did,’ said Josephine.

‘A good thing?’ Jonathan whispered. ‘You say he did a good thing?’

‘It was for the best! Jonathan, my dearest boy – what life could you have had with her, knowing that you were so close related? Knowing that whatever feelings you had were a sin?’

‘Whatever feelings? Let me tell you what they were, Mother, though you have ever refused to hear it: I loved her. I loved her like part of my own soul. Or perhaps its whole… perhaps she was my whole soul, for it felt as though she took it with her, when she went.’

‘You must not say such things – the very words appal me! She was an abomination. She should never have lived, and did nothing better than to die!’

‘We could have lived on in this knowledge, grievous as it was! We could have called each other cousin, and quashed all thought of passion, and been content to know that the other was safe. Even now, even having seen my anguish all these years, even after I have pulled my mind apart to guess her fate, even now you exult in her death?’ Jonathan’s eyes bored into his mother’s, but Josephine never flinched.

‘She should never have been born. She did nothing better in her life than to die.’

‘Then I will see you no more. You are the abomination, Mother, and it is a symptom of your affliction that you cannot see it. Go away from me.’

‘What do you mean? Jonathan, my son, I-’

‘Go away from me!’ His roar split the air like a thunderclap. A tremor ran through Josephine; she tottered slightly, and raised one arm for balance. Then, with the immaculate care of one at a cliff edge, she turned and walked to the door.

‘We will speak again,’ she said, barely audibly, on the threshold. Then she left.

For a long time Starling didn’t dare move or make a sound. She had never seen such anger. She stayed where she was, in the corner of the bedroom with her back to the wall, and listened to the blood thumping in her ears. Behind it, the quiet sounds of the house awakening could be heard; the opening and closing of doors, the scrape of an iron in a fireplace. From outside came the keening of seagulls as they laid claim to the city’s rubbish. Their voices were high and woebegone. Gradually, the heaving of Jonathan’s chest decreased; he grew calmer, and sat under a pall of such deep sadness that it was almost tangible. If Alice was here she would cradle your head, and stroke your hair, and murmur of better things until your heart was less sore. But Starling didn’t dare. After ten minutes or so, Jonathan put his fingertips to his eyes and rubbed them hard.

‘Starling,’ he said quietly.

‘Yes, sir?’ She suddenly felt almost shy of him, ashamed of everything that had gone on between them since Alice disappeared. Jonathan looked at her with red-rimmed eyes.

‘I feel as though my head might explode,’ he muttered.

‘You are injured, sir,’ she said.

‘Yes. But it’s not that. Will you…’ He paused, and for a moment seemed almost as shy as she. ‘If you sent word that I wished it, do you think Rachel Weekes would come to see me?’

‘I am certain of it, sir,’ Starling replied.

There was no answer to her ring at the front door of the Alleyns’ house, so Rachel let herself in through the servant’s entrance, bold as brass, and went all the way up the back stairs to the second floor. She felt like a thief, a trespasser intruding where she didn’t belong, but she had Starling’s note clenched tight in her palm. She carried it like a talisman from which hope and courage flowed. As she came through the door in the panelling and onto the landing, she froze. Mrs Alleyn was standing in front of the naked window at the end of the corridor, as still as a carving, with her back to Rachel and her face to the black glass. She must have heard Rachel’s approach, but gave no sign of it, and Rachel’s exclamation of surprise died on her lips. It was still dark enough outside that Josephine could have seen little but her own reflection, staring back at her. Rachel saw the ghostly echo of herself in the glass. My own image, she thought, sadly, nothing more. Suddenly, her heart tumbled into the pit of her stomach. Jonathan’s mother stood too still, was too removed. Has he died after all?

‘Mrs Alleyn!’ she cried out, before she could stop herself. Josephine turned slowly. Her face was empty of expression; she didn’t seem surprised to see Rachel, and she said nothing to her. After this moment of dispassionate study, she turned away again. Rachel went a few steps closer and stopped right outside Jonathan’s rooms. ‘Your son has asked for me, Mrs Alleyn,’ she said. ‘Is he within? Mrs Alleyn?’

‘If he sent for you then go to him, and leave me be.’ Josephine’s voice was as cold and raw as a winter wind. With a shiver, Rachel knocked on Jonathan’s door and slipped through it at once.

The shutters in Jonathan’s rooms were closed, the fire was burning merrily and candles lit all the walls. Rachel was temporarily bewildered by the abundance of light and warmth where there had only ever been darkness and a stony cool before. There was a smell of beeswax, smoke and spiced wine.

‘Starling? Is that you? Is there still no word?’ Jonathan’s voice came from the bedroom. Rachel tried to answer him but joy stole the words. She walked in silence to the doorway where she saw him, sitting up in bed in a crumpled white shirt, one arm bound up with a splint. There was a long, stitched cut on his forehead, couched in bruises. He looked up and saw her, and for a long time he did not speak. He took a slow breath, and his eyes shone.

‘Mrs Weekes,’ he said, at last. ‘You have come.’

‘Could you doubt that I would?’ she said.

‘When last I saw you, you were running from me.’

‘I… I was upset. Everything you’d said… my sister, and Alice. I thought… I thought…’

‘I know what you thought.’

‘And do you know what I now know?’

‘Yes. Starling has told me all.’

‘Then you two are reconciled. I am glad.’ Rachel swallowed painfully.

‘Reconciled? I suppose we are. She and I should have been united in all of this, through all these years. It was only mistakes and suspicions; only lies and silence that drove a wedge between us. But to Alice she was a sister. So to me, perhaps, she should have been the same. In my own grief and disorder I never considered Starling’s plight, but she needed my protection. It was wrong of me. Selfish.’

‘In times of ordeal, such omissions can be forgiven. She will forgive you, I know. That you loved and never harmed Alice will be enough for her.’

‘And what of you, Mrs Weekes? Can you forgive?’

‘I have nothing to forgive you for. I accused you, wrongly. I led you into danger, and injury. I should ask rather that you forgive me.’

‘But I am a killer. You were right about that.’ Jonathan sounded grim, sickened. Rachel walked closer to his bedside, and he didn’t take his eyes from her.

‘How are you? The wound on your head looks quite… bad,’ she said. Jonathan grimaced.

‘It is not grave. It should be bandaged still, but the heat and pressure of it were too much, and I tore it off. In truth, my head thuds like cannon fire.’

‘I should go, and let you rest. Sleep and make yourself well.’

‘Seeing you makes me well,’ said Jonathan. ‘Don’t go yet.’ Rachel smiled, but then it faltered.

‘My husband is the one. All this time, he is the one who killed your Alice,’ said Rachel. Jonathan looked down at his hands.

‘I know. But he was not the only one. I… her heart. Did you know that Alice could not see colour? At least, not all colours. She tried to hide it from me, but I knew. As if a flaw like that could have made me think less of her. She was colour blind, and her heart was weak. She often used to grow faint if she got overexcited, or was shocked by something. Starling said… Starling said that was what killed her, in the end. Dick Weekes only hit her, and her heart could not cope with the fear.’ Anger made his voice shake.

‘Yes. She says Mr Weekes claimed not to have intended to take her life.’

‘Yet take it he did, but he was not solely to blame. You have seen the books on my shelves, Mrs Weekes. I told you that at one time I studied medicine, and anatomy, in order to… understand how human beings work. What drives us – where the soul resides, and if it can be lost.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘I have read that in unions where people are… too closely related, their offspring will often miscarry before birth, or be born weak, and flawed. And die young. It is the same in animal husbandry. Stock books are kept carefully, to ensure such consanguinity does not occur.’ He stopped with a gentle shake of his head.

‘You mean to say that… that Alice’s constitution was a result of her… unusual birth?’

‘It is just as I once said to you, Mrs Weekes. We are merely animals, after all, subject to the same rules that govern all of God’s creatures.’

‘Then you know of your grandfather’s… relationship to Alice?’ She gazed at him searchingly. He looked up, his face stricken.

‘His, and my mother’s. And so mine too. Starling has told me everything.’ Jonathan’s brows pulled together, which made him wince.

‘Everything? That was no kindness on her part!’ Rachel cried. ‘She need not have-’

‘Yes, there was need. It is better that I know,’ Jonathan interrupted.

‘What will you do?’ Rachel whispered.

‘Do? About this crime against Alice? I see precious little that I can do. The only one who could have declared my mother’s part in it is dead, Starling says. Drowned in the river.’

He hesitated then, and seemed to remember that it was Rachel’s husband he spoke so heedlessly about. ‘Forgive my callousness,’ he said.

‘There is nothing to forgive. He is dead. I… I have seen him with my own eyes.’

‘My condolences, Mrs Weekes,’ Jonathan said cautiously. Rachel thought for a moment.

‘I… I do not grieve,’ she confessed, in a small voice. I am set free.

‘His father, Duncan Weekes, might speak against my mother, if I asked him to. If a case against her was to be made. He knows things about… my family… that nobody else knew, until these last few days. You are grown quite close to him, are you not? Do you think he would…’ Jonathan frowned. ‘But then, who would take his word, poor and drunk as he is, over my mother’s?’

‘Duncan Weekes lies next to his son. Sickness and poverty have taken him.’ As Rachel spoke, guilty tears crowded her vision.

‘And for him you do mourn. Poor creature,’ Jonathan murmured.

‘He was a good man, beneath his weaknesses and sins. A poor creature indeed.’

‘Then,’ said Jonathan, pausing to think, ‘then there is nothing to be done. I will see my mother no more. That will have to be punishment enough for her.’

‘She waits outside. She haunts your door like a sentry.’

‘I will not see her.’

‘What she did… what she did, she did to protect you.’

‘And to protect herself. To hide her sins. You cannot ask me to forgive her.’

‘I ask nothing. I only say… I only say that to have family is a blessing, and one not to be sloughed off without due thought.’

‘A mixed blessing at best, Mrs Weekes. And this day mine feels more like a curse. You have a deeply forgiving nature, Mrs Weekes, this I have come to learn. But you should not forgive indiscriminately. People must pay for their crimes.’

‘Indeed.’ Rachel studied him for a moment. ‘You have paid for yours, Mr Alleyn. I have met Cassandra Sutton.’

Jonathan shut his eyes for a moment, and looked ill.

‘Starling… Starling said as much,’ he said. ‘But you cannot forgive me. You do not know what I did.’

‘I know the outcome! A live, healthy child-’

‘The child of a murdered woman! A child robbed of her mother.’

‘Cassandra Sutton has a mother, and a father. No – you must listen. She has a mother and father who love her very much. She is bright, and sweet, well cared for. She has been robbed of nothing. Her current happiness is all your doing, and you should be proud.’

‘Proud?’ Jonathan laughed then, a taut and empty sound. ‘There is nothing from that time, from that war, of which I can be proud.’

‘I know how you came to rescue Cassandra. Captain Sutton said-’

‘Captain Sutton does not know. Captain Sutton was not there, in that church. What occurred was between the child’s mother, and me. And you cannot forgive me, because you cannot know.’

‘Then… tell me, Mr Alleyn. Tell me.’ Jonathan stared at her, and for a while she thought he would not speak. He must. This is the only way. She suddenly knew that this was the final step in a long and wearing climb; that by taking this last step, the path would go easier from there on. Let it be so. She sat down in the chair at his bedside and leaned forward, reaching for his hand. ‘You must tell me about Badajoz,’ she said.

‘Badajoz.’ The air left Jonathan’s chest, streaming out like surrender. He shut his eyes again, and then he spoke.

He spoke of the three years of war after his return from Bathampton, leaden-hearted because Alice had gone. Three years in which he lived by rote, and fought with silent, grim distraction. After the flight from Corunna the French had flooded back in to retake Portugal, but in April 1809 Sir Arthur Wellesley returned to Lisbon to take command, and the French were driven back towards the Spanish border once more. Jonathan and his fellow officers struggled to keep order in the ranks; the men were restless, and disobedient. After battle they turned thuggish and cruel. Jonathan noticed the empty look in their eyes and knew he had it too; the selfsame brutishness. Wellesley called the men scum, and rabble. He hanged them for plundering, but it did no good. Jonathan was popular with the rank and file of his company; he understood their anger and their fear, the way they were losing themselves. He did not reprimand them for acting like animals, when the war required them to be animals.

And yet the heart of him looked on, and recoiled in horror from the bloodshed and the pain and the wanton destruction. At Talavera, after they’d pursued the French through a burnt and ruined landscape into Spain, he was with the light dragoons as they charged headlong into a hidden ditch. He was catapulted from his horse as it fell, and heard the crunch as the beast’s two forelegs snapped. He had not named the animal – he hadn’t named any of his horses since Suleiman – but still its screams cut through his battle fog like knives. He didn’t blink as he put his pistol to the horse’s head and pulled the trigger. The British and Portuguese were outnumbered by almost two to one at Talavera, but they won what would be proclaimed as a glorious victory on the sides of mail coaches at home. The battlefield was almost four miles long, and two miles deep. Towards the end of it a grass fire started, racing across the parched ground and burning many of the wounded alive. Scores of those that did not burn died of thirst instead, under the merciless Spanish sun. Jonathan searched through fields of crack-mouthed, black-tongued corpses to find Captain Sutton, who’d been knocked insensible by a clod of earth thrown up by artillery fire. Jonathan took him into the shade of a cork tree, and sat with him there until his wits returned. A wounded French rifleman dragged himself over to share the shade; he shared his water and his tobacco tin with Jonathan as well, and made remarks about the heat and the search for food, as they sat with their eyes stinging with the smoke of their burning comrades.

After that great battle, Wellesley was made Lord Wellington. French troops arrived in Spain in ever increasing numbers, but Spanish guerrillas and Portuguese partisans were everywhere, slitting the throats of sentries and harrying smaller troop movements. Back and forth the advantage went; an ebb and flow of men across the Spanish border like the sea around a mid-tide mark. By the end of the year the men were more afraid for their next meal than they were of battle. The looting and pillaging continued, as did the hangings. As the autumn grew old, starvation circled them like carrion crows. Jonathan punched new holes in his belt with the tip of his sabre when it would no longer fasten tight around his shrinking middle. The two warring sides sent out foraging parties to look for food. These men met frequently, and greeted each other courteously, sharing tips and insights into the terrain, into water supplies and edible plants. Jonathan wondered what would happen if they all, on both sides, just declared peace and refused to fight any more. The thought was so bittersweet that Captain Sutton found him crying like a child one day, sitting cross-legged on the muddy ground with autumn rain soaking him.

‘Up, and be doing, Major Alleyn,’ the captain told him kindly. ‘You’re that sodden, the men might think that you weep. It will do them no good to think it.’ He put an arm around Jonathan’s bony ribs and half carried him out of sight of the men, who were carousing – dancing to a fiddle and pipe with a kind of desperate levity. It was the tenth of October, 1810; King George III’s birthday in the fiftieth year of his reign. They’d butchered a donkey that the retreating French had hamstrung and left to die. Jonathan ate the roasted meat alone in his tent, and thought of Alice, and of Suleiman.

At the battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, in spring the following year, a truce had to be called at the end of the day so that both sides could clear the bodies from the ruined village. There were so many that the narrow streets were near impassable. Jonathan stepped on an outflung hand by mistake, looked down and saw that it was tiny, no bigger than a woman’s or a child’s. The arm it belonged to, and the rest of the body, was buried beneath others, five or six deep, so he never had to see who had owned the hand – the delicate finger bones he’d ground beneath his boot heel.

They moved on to Badajoz, a fortified town in a strategically important location near the Portuguese border. Betrayed by its own governor, Badajoz had fallen into French hands, and been heavily garrisoned. The allies laid siege, digging in as winter approached. There was heavy, relentless rain. Jonathan had seen wounded soldiers burn to death after battle, now he saw them drown in waterlogged mud. The men, hard-bitten and proven, grew idle and restless over that winter of 1811. They occupied themselves with scorpion baiting, cock fighting and horse racing; with picking the fleas out of their clothes and bedding and hair; with whoring and wrestling and hunting for game; with watching friends sicken and die from festering wounds and outbreaks of a plague-like sickness.

Jonathan came down with a bout of fever, and lay listless and sweating in his tent for five days. Captain Sutton visited often, wet his lips with wine, and tried to cheer him with funny stories about the tomfoolery of the men, but Jonathan could not raise a smile for him. In their japes and their games and their contests he saw the lust for violence, coiled inside each one of them like madness; like embers that might burst into flames in a second, and consume the last of the man’s humanity. These were the men who were invested to retake Badajoz on the twelfth of March, 1812. These men made brutal by all the fear and pain, hunger and violence; made brave and savage by their own suffering, and half mad by all they had seen. Jonathan looked over them as they approached the city, and he feared them. Lord Wellington might see a rabble, but he saw a pack of wolves, liable to turn on each other, on their officers, on him. Captain Sutton kept close to him as the siege was set and the barrage began. Jonathan felt his friend’s eyes upon him, measuring. He wondered what madness the captain saw in him; whether he saw the fear and sorrow and the yearning to hide away from it all, or whether he saw the urge to kill and destroy, to vent his rage on all around him. Both were in him, and when he pictured Alice’s face it fed both sides of him equally – the surrender, and the fury.

The artillery barrage succeeded in making three narrow breaches in the town’s crenellated walls. The French waited inside in their thousands; any attempt to storm the breaches would result in a slaughter. Wellington could see it; Jonathan could see it; the lowliest foot soldier could see it. Nevertheless, the command came for the attack to begin at ten in the evening, under cover of darkness and with the French unprepared. But some sound was heard; some inadvertent tip-off betrayed them. The French set fire to the body of a British soldier and hurled it out from the walls to cast light on the advancing men, and as easily as that the element of surprise was lost. The British charged, right into a series of traps the French had set for them. They were blown up by mines, drowned in flooded ditches. They were impaled on iron spikes, and on makeshift barriers of sword blades; the momentum of men behind ensuring the death of the vanguard. Those that reached the breaches were slain in their hundreds, and all the while the French inside hurled out insults and taunts; goading them, laughing.

‘You must not laugh at us!’ Jonathan roared as he came close enough to the walls to hear it. He was standing on the bodies of the fallen; he was sprayed with flying blood, drenched in sweat. He knew that the beast in them all was awake, and that the laughter of their enemies ran like fire in their blood; a red frenzy that turned them from men into something both more and less. It kept the attack alive; it stormed the walls, and pressed into the city; it opened the breaches to the onrushing men; and after two hours in which nearly five thousand of the allied besiegers were slaughtered, it sealed the fate of the city of Badajoz.

The wolves were unleashed, and nothing could rein them in. They were the sum total of all they had seen and suffered, all they had been required to do and to bear. They were a vision of mankind stripped of all decency and pity, and they were hell-bent on revenge. Women were raped, and raped again. Children, even crawling infants, were kicked around for sport, stuck with bayonets. Men were tortured, killed, torn to pieces, be they French invader or Spanish resident. Men looted, men desecrated, men ravaged and pillaged; men turned on one another and fought to the death over spoils as trifling as a piece of food or a bottle of wine. Over the right to rape a woman before she died, or afterwards. Their officers could not hope to control them. Their officers dared not try, for fear of being torn apart themselves; the men were blind drunk on brandy and wine and blood.

Jonathan wandered through it all without seeing it, for the first twelve hours or so. He found a dark cellar, entirely empty; lay down on the dirt floor and slept a while. He did not feel as though he possessed his own body; he felt like a ghost, drifting unseen amongst it all. Only when he awoke and rose did he notice the pain in his leg, and the way it would not take his weight. He looked down and found a chunk of wood thrust straight through his calf. The exit wound was a chaos of black clotted blood and shards of grey bone. The sight caused no emotion in him at all. He stumbled out into the violated streets. A cloudy day had dawned, but the light brought no respite to the degradation of Badajoz. The men went about in packs, under no command. Jonathan did not speak to any, nor interfere with the things he saw. He did not dare, since to interfere was to see it, to take it in; and to see it was to run the risk of losing himself for ever.

But Captain Sutton found him, and brought him to a group of five men, the sparse remnants of his company, who had banded together for safety from the pillage.

‘Thank God you’re alive, Major! I had feared the worst. If anyone can restore some order here, it’s you, sir.’ Captain Sutton splinted up Jonathan’s shattered leg, tearing strips from his own uniform to bind it. ‘But I should get you to the surgeons first. Come,’ he said.

‘No!’ Jonathan cried. He remembered the surgeons: the stink of rum and bile and open bowels; the mound of severed limbs that piled up outside the window of a Talavera convent where they’d set up their tables. Huge black moths, circling the field lamps. The pain in his leg was coming in waves now, a rising beat of agony, but he would not submit to the surgeons. ‘No! I can stand. I can walk. Let us bring a halt to this madness.’

‘Are you sure, sir?’ Sutton wasn’t convinced, but Jonathan stood, using an abandoned musket as a crutch.

Talking had returned Jonathan to himself, however reluctantly. Nausea bubbled in his gut as they moved cautiously through the ruins of the town; smoke skirled around them from a hundred different fires. They broke up fights and issued orders that were sometimes heeded; more often ignored. They hastened the passing of soldiers and citizens who had been left in dreadful agony, deliberately, and with no hope of survival. They pulled a man from a barrel of brandy only to find that he had drowned himself in it, and was beyond reprimand. They fired their guns to scatter a group of men squabbling like magpies over the gilded treasure from a plundered church. And as the hours passed, Jonathan’s heart grew sicker and sicker with it all. He knew, with complete certainty, that not one man of them would ever feel himself possessed of his whole soul again. They must lose a part of it, or risk the corruption spreading to every corner. All too often, it was clear that this had already happened.

It was the woman’s screams that drew them. Many women wept noisily, or prayed, or were mute or unconscious as they were violated. This woman screamed with such anger and outrage that Jonathan flinched away from the sound. He did not want to witness what would cause her to make such sounds. Grim-faced, his small band of men rushed towards the church from which her voice came echoing. She was at the far end of the aisle, near the dais where the altar sat. It was a small church with a pretty rose window high in the wall, its glass miraculously intact, lighting the scene of torment playing out below in shades of blue and gold. A group of ten or so British soldiers surrounded her, and had been with her for some time by the looks of it. She had been stripped naked, and struggled to rise even though her lower body was awash in blood. Each time she got to her knees she was kicked back down, and as Jonathan approached a man climbed on top of her, and began his work again. She screeched with that wild rage, and the hair stood up on Jonathan’s arms.

‘Enough!’ he bellowed. He levelled his pistol at the man with his breeches down. ‘You will desist, there. That is an order!’

For a startled moment the men all turned to look at him and were silent; and Jonathan’s heart, which was speeding so fast that he couldn’t feel its separate beats, filled with the hope that they would obey him. But then the one who appeared to be their leader, a big man with close-cropped hair and a pocked face, snarled.

‘You can buss the blind cheeks, sir. We’ve paid with our blood, and now we’ll have our sport.’ Behind him, the woman’s face, which for a moment had mirrored Jonathan’s hope, crumpled into desperation again.

‘I order you to leave her be,’ said Jonathan, but the hand that held the pistol had begun to shake, and even though Captain Sutton and their few loyal men stood to either side of him, he felt the shreds of his authority evaporate. He put a bullet in the lead man, but his aim was off; the wound was in the shoulder, and did not fell him. And then the two groups fell upon each other like bitter enemies, not like the comrades they’d so recently been. Jonathan and Captain Sutton were outnumbered, but their small band fought with right on their side, and for once that seemed to count for something. Nevertheless, most of the woman’s rescuers fell to her tormentors before it was done. One of them, a lad no more than seventeen, was driven off down the aisle with his foe hard behind him, a hunting knife gripped in his hand. Moments later Captain Sutton went the same way, pursuing two others who fled before him. Jonathan was left alone to fight the lead man, the man he had shot, with his bare hands.

They fought gracelessly, grappling at one another, Jonathan’s crippled leg offset by the bullet wound in the other man, which spattered blood onto both of them. His opponent was bigger and stronger, but he was also drunk, and Jonathan’s slim frame belied the wiry hardness of his muscles. The lead man got his hands around Jonathan’s neck and would have crushed his windpipe if Jonathan hadn’t gouged a thumb into the bullet hole in his shoulder, pushing until he found where the bullet had lodged against the bone, still burning hot. The man roared and thrust him away, so violently that Jonathan staggered and went to his knees. In front of him was another man’s musket, spent, the bayonet stained with blood. As he stood, Jonathan grabbed it by the muzzle and spun about, swinging it as hard as he could. The butt caught the pock-faced man across the side of his head with a hollow knock and a splintering sound; he dropped like an empty sack, and didn’t move. The sudden silence roared in Jonathan’s ears. He felt as though his blood was simmering in his veins, poisoned. As he turned to leave, a scuffle of movement behind him jolted him into action again. Hands closed on his arm, and he wheeled around, thrusting blindly with the bayonet. He felt it meet resistance; felt that resistance part around the sharp steel. Then he looked down into the Spanish woman’s face, and knew himself a murderer.

She made a strange gulping sound, as if trying to swallow the air instead of breathing it. Jonathan knelt and tried to hold her up as she sank forwards, to stop her pushing herself further onto the blade. He didn’t dare pull it free; he’d seen that done too many times, and knew the spurt of blood and rapid death it would bring. In his horror and shame he tried desperately to think of a way to save her, a way to undo it, when he knew there was none. He turned her carefully onto her back, and knelt with his arms around her, cradling her naked body. There was blood on her breasts; bruising on her neck. Her face was long and hard-boned, but her mouth was beautiful, sensuous and full. She tried to speak, but could not. She gulped at the air some more, staring at him with such intensity that he knew she was desperate to tell him something.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, wretchedly, over and over. ‘Lo siento, lo siento… forgive me, I beg you.’ He rocked her gently but it made her whimper in pain, so he stopped. Still she gave him that piercing look, her black eyes shining in the jewel-coloured light from the window. She raised one hand and reached it towards the wooden pews flanking the aisle; her fingers grasped at nothing. Her hands were slender, and elegant; there was blood underneath her fingernails, and the smell of her sweat and her skin was in Jonathan’s nostrils. In that moment, the only thing he was aware of, in all of existence, was the woman dying in his arms. She turned her face to her outstretched hand, murmuring in her throat, a sound too weak to be words. Then she stared back up at Jonathan for a moment, and he was looking into her eyes at the exact moment life left them. A tiny, cataclysmic shift; as simple and irreversible as the passing of time.

Her reaching arm dropped, her head lolled to the side, and Jonathan felt that he was living through the worst and blackest moment of his life. And when he followed her gaze and her gesture to the pews, and found her baby hidden there, he understood why she had bled so much, and why she had been so outraged at the thought of her own death. The child was no more than a few days old, tiny and unaware, wrapped in a grubby blanket and unharmed, untouched. Its eyes were closed, edged with black lashes; a peaceful face below a mass of dark hair. The woman had refused to accept her fate for the sake of this child but Jonathan had robbed her of everything, anyway. He lifted the baby into his arms and ran his stained finger gently down its cheek. Its skin was so soft he couldn’t tell if he was touching it or not. He knew at once that any chance of saving himself lay in saving this one tiny life, pure and miraculous amidst all the corruption.

Neither Mrs Weekes nor Jonathan Alleyn seemed to notice that Starling had returned to the room. She carried a jug of bishop – warm, watered wine in which a roasted orange bobbed – and stood quietly in the doorway between the two chambers, where she heard the latter part of Jonathan’s tale and all the anguish with which he told it. Mrs Weekes lifted his hand when he fell silent; she held it to her cheek, and the gesture struck Starling violently. Rachel Weekes looked so like Alice in that moment, with her face bowed and her pale hair shining, that it gave her a wrenching feeling inside. It’s because she loves him. That’s what makes her look like Alice. With this realisation came a flash of jealous fire, which lasted only an instant and was followed by a strange emptiness, like loss.

‘She would forgive you. You must see that,’ said Mrs Weekes.

‘Would she? I think not. She wanted so much to live, for her child. She was determined to live, and she survived the brutal treatment she was given only to die by my hand,’ said Jonathan.

‘She wanted her child to live. That’s what she wanted more than anything. The battle had nothing to do with her, but that woman gave birth to her baby amidst it all, and somehow keep her safe until that moment. And you did what she wanted – you kept Cassandra safe. I think she would forgive you.’ The pair of them stared at one another for a moment, and Starling saw that Jonathan hardly dared to believe it.

‘Mrs Weekes is right – what happened was an accident. You didn’t rape her, you meant to save her – and you saved the babe. This was no crime,’ said Starling, and at once felt that she’d intruded into their intimacy. She stiffened, and colour came into her cheeks. She deposited the jug of bishop on the side table to cover her discomfort.

‘Everything that happened there was a crime,’ said Jonathan.

‘But not one you are responsible for,’ Rachel Weekes insisted.

‘Then, this story does not make you despise me?’ he said. Rachel Weekes watched him steadily.

‘Nothing could,’ she said.

Starling saw how easily their hands stayed clasped; how unabashed they were. Their touch seemed at once casual and essential, to both of them, and Starling was excluded. Their feelings put up a barrier to her, just as the feelings between Alice and Jonathan had done, years before. She was powerless to do anything about it; she felt herself diminishing, becoming less substantial because of it. She could only watch, and try to find a voice with which to reach them.

‘What will you do now, Mrs Weekes?’ she said, and was surprised to hear how hard her voice sounded. Rachel Weekes looked from Jonathan to Starling and then back again, and it was her turn to show confusion.

‘I must… I must bury my husband, and my father-in-law. I must sell the business, or find a manager. I must…’ She frowned, letting go of Jonathan’s hand and smoothing the skirts in her lap. ‘I must find a situation, I suppose,’ she concluded, then looked up at Jonathan Alleyn with questions writ large on her face. She doubts him, but she dares to hope.

‘Mrs Weekes. You have some onerous tasks ahead of you. If I may be of any assistance, during any of it, you must please tell me,’ said Jonathan. Rachel Weekes said nothing, but gave a tiny nod. ‘I plan to leave Bath,’ Jonathan went on. ‘I’ve stayed here too long. This house has been my gaol and I would be free of it. Let my mother stay here, and reflect on all that has passed. I could go… I could go to the house at Box. There are tenants in it, but they may be given notice…’ Here Jonathan paused, and glanced at Starling. ‘Then again, no. Perhaps that place has as many unhappy memories as this one,’ he murmured. ‘I may even sell it. There are plenty of other places I could go.’

‘I think a change of situation and surroundings would be most advantageous to your continued recovery, Mr Alleyn,’ said Rachel Weekes, in a constricted voice that shook slightly. He studied her for a second, perplexed.

‘But, Mrs Weekes… Rachel,’ he said. ‘I will go nowhere unless you will accompany me.’ For a heartbeat Rachel Weekes did not react, then her smile broke over her face like the sunrise.

Starling’s throat squeezed tight, aching, as she watched this exchange and felt herself sliding away from them, quite alone. Her eyes burned and she turned, stumbling blindly for the door and the corridor outside, where Mrs Alleyn waited – another invisible person, another unwanted remnant of the past, with no place in the now.

‘Starling, wait!’ The voice that called her back was Rachel Weekes’s. Starling pivoted clumsily on her wooden feet.

‘What will you do?’ Rachel asked.

‘I know not,’ Starling replied. ‘It matters not.’

‘You cannot mean to serve Mrs Alleyn from now on, surely?’

‘No. I shan’t serve her.’

‘Then… will you come with us instead?’ Us. Already they are become ‘us’. But they were too new an entity; it was too soon, and Mrs Weekes seemed to flounder after using the word. ‘That is, will you come with me?’ she corrected herself. Starling gave her as hard a look as she could find; a glare as weighty as she could make it.

‘You’ll have need of a servant, no doubt. Perhaps I might prove too costly for you, though,’ she said. Rachel Weekes blinked, and looked hurt.

‘No, I… have little need of a servant, in truth,’ she said. ‘But I have great need of a friend.’ The two of them watched one another, and then Rachel Weekes smiled; a fleeting, transient expression. She doesn’t know if I will accept her or spurn her. She gives me that power. Starling swallowed. You cannot replace Alice. She’d meant to say it out loud, but couldn’t bring herself to. How could she, when this tall, pale creature had fought for Alice alongside her, as if she had known her, as if she too had loved her? Starling’s face was frozen; she was afraid that if she moved a muscle, all would fly out of her control. ‘Will you then? Come with me?’ Rachel Weekes asked again. And this time Starling managed to nod.

‘I will,’ she said.