The Shape of Darkness Page 13

  ‘I’m sure it was my fault,’ he whispers.

  Please God, let him be right. For if this assailant really is trying to take the things that she loves, it makes sense that they would move on to her family after her art. The idea makes her feel like she is in the river again, fighting desperately for breath, but poor tattered Cedric gazes remorsefully at her and she does not want to give him further cause for fright. She dredges up a wobbly smile. ‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘Look what I have for you here.’

  ‘Food?’

  ‘Almost as good, my dear: money.’ She pretends to produce a coin from behind his ear. ‘Why don’t you run to the Cross Keys and see if they have any pork pies left? And could you pick up an ounce of tea from Mr Asprey for your grandmamma?’

  His troubled face lights into a grin. When she sees that smile, nothing else in the world seems to matter.

  ‘Thank you, Auntie Aggie.’

  He seizes the coin but makes sure to leave the house more slowly than usual, showing her that he has heeded her warnings.

  Agnes lets her false smile drop. Her lips purse in worry instead. At least she knows where Cedric is going, and he is familiar to the tradespeople he will be buying from: they will keep an eye on him. But if her fears are correct, she will not be able to let him gad about with his hoop and stick any longer. She must keep him indoors.

  It feels wrong. He is too bright, too noisy and busy for this gloomy little house. He has already read all of his chapbooks; she will have to visit Milsom Street and see if she can get any more.

  But first: the coat.

  Her workbox is in the parlour. She opens the door and tiptoes inside. Mamma is slumped in the wing chair, snoring alongside the grandfather clock. Her poor swollen skin looks red, but perhaps that is a flush from the fire and not a result of the dropsy. If only Simon would examine her again. He is always so reluctant.

  Agnes sits on the sofa, opens up her workbox and selects a spool: a dull brown. It does not match the colour of Cedric’s coat exactly, but it will have to suffice. She spreads the garment out on her lap. All these torn, tangled threads look like the roots of a felled tree. She snips them into shape, threads her needle and begins to sew.

  It is difficult to concentrate. There are too many concerns swirling around her head. Not just Cedric and Mamma, but the Campbells. Are they still safe, out there? Perhaps she did the wrong thing by giving into that overbearing woman’s requests. Maybe she should have tried to remove them from her premises by force. She pricks her finger, curses under her breath. She cannot think of it. She simply must not allow herself to dwell upon anything but the stitches.

  The crescent-shaped rip is finally repaired. As she picks up the coat and turns it over to reach the torn sleeve, something drops onto the floor. A piece of paper. It must have been tucked in Cedric’s pocket.

  She bends to scoop it up. The edges are rough; it was probably torn from a book and folded twice into this vague square. She hesitates. It belongs to Cedric. Young as he is, he deserves some privacy. She should put it back into his pocket and forget about it.

  But she doesn’t.

  She sets down the needle and begins to tease apart the damp folds of paper.

  Pencil, just like the note pushed under her door. The same handwriting, Agnes realises, as she opens the scrap in full, revealing a single word.

  The same word she heard at the séance.

  Mine.

  CHAPTER 17

  Agnes has locked Mamma and Cedric in the house. It is hardly a foolproof plan, but she can think of no alternative while she runs for help.

  Her footsteps clack against the pavement. She is walking too fast, striding right through icy puddles. She wheezes, but carries on. Wet feet and shortness of breath do not signify; after receiving that note, the prospect of catching pneumonia again seems like the very least of her troubles.

  She turns through alleys plastered with handbills for coach builders, boarding houses, and a lamp depot. Pasted fresh over the last is Ned – or Edward Lewis, as the police appeal for information calls him. There is a lifelike drawing of his face, clearly copied from a photograph. It seems the picture he had taken for his grandmother came in useful in the end.

  Agnes averts her eyes from the poster with a fresh spurt of horror. If it were Cedric, in his place …

  She has no good likeness of her nephew, nothing beyond a silhouette. She has always resisted daguerreotypes, but now she sees why a relative might pay good money for such a clear record. It is insurance against a failing memory. For if Cedric’s face were not before her every day, she would lose not only his precious features, but those of someone else dear to her heart.

  She would lose sight of the resemblance to his father, Montague.

  It is mainly uphill to Alfred Street. Her lungs heave for breath. Simon has established himself in a good location, close to the Circus and the Assembly Rooms, where his rich patients recline on chaises longues and sip languidly at the Bath waters. She stumbles up to the black iron railings that surround his house, pausing to blot her brow with a handkerchief and pinch her cheeks so she looks less like a person on the verge of collapse.

  The more reasonable and collected she appears, the greater chance she has of persuading Simon.

  She knocks. The charwoman answers the door – or, rather, sees Agnes and shuffles away again, uninterested by such a regular visitor. Perhaps she was hoping for a gory injury to brighten her day.

  Agnes wipes her feet, takes off her bonnet and gloves and lays them on the console table beside the door. This house always smells of herbs and carbolic soap. Impersonal, sanitised. The silhouettes of the dead Carfax children that line the staircase are the only decorative touch. It is the home of a man without substance, lacking flesh and blood.

  Simon could surely afford to hire one or two live-in servants, but he seems to prefer his isolation. The charwoman, Mrs Muckle, comes in for a few hours each day to tackle the worst of the drudgery – everything else, he does himself.

  She recalls what Cedric said about Simon’s time in Edinburgh. Maybe it was digging up bodies and anatomising them that changed poor Simon from the eager, ambitious young man that he once was. She always assumed it was his marriage. That was certainly when he started to lose his hair.

  His consulting room is on the lower floor, in concession to his less perambulatory patients. Agnes makes her own way there, collecting Morpheus as she goes. Simon’s previous dogs would not walk confidently beside her skirts inside the house, but cringe in anticipation of a kick. The pitiful things did not have wit enough to distinguish one Darken sister from the other; all they heard in the rustle of a gown was danger.

  She taps on the door in case a patient is within, but Morpheus headbutts it open before Simon can respond.

  The consulting room is papered in a damask the colour of potatoes and beef. Walnut furniture houses inkwells, empty glass domes, a magnifying glass and piles of paper tied neatly with string. Beside a row of leather-bound books, a chipped phrenology bust gazes impassively down at them.

  Simon’s desk is lit by a brass lamp with a tall, glass chimney. He sits behind it, reading a newspaper, but her entrance raises him to his feet.

  ‘Miss Darken! I did not expect you. Have you been walking in all this damp?’

  He pulls out a chair for her and rings the bell for tea. Her prepared speech thickens on her tongue; it is not possible to be eloquent while he fusses about her. ‘Simon – I must … I had to …’

  ‘I suppose you have already seen,’ he cuts in, as Morpheus settles down by her feet. He gestures at the newspaper. ‘It has been a busy morning and I only just read it myself.’

  She stiffens. ‘Not another death?’

  ‘No. Did you not hear? They have identified the man.’

  ‘The killer?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Oh, no. The man who … drowned. The one you asked me about.’

  She had almost forgotten. Looking back, her former worries seem insignificant. />
  Noting her silence, Simon speaks gently. ‘It was not … Lieutenant Montague.’

  ‘No.’ She shudders, remembering the Sylph’s frantic gasps. ‘His name was Hargreaves.’

  ‘So you have read it?’

  The charwoman interrupts them, thumping inside with two cups of a questionable-looking beverage. Chagrined, Simon stops leaning over Agnes’s chair and returns to his own seat.

  ‘I put sugar in it, Doctor,’ the woman informs her employer as she sets the cup down on his desk. ‘Thought you might need it after this morning.’

  ‘What happened this morning?’ Agnes asks.

  Simon waves the question away with a pained expression, but his charwoman is only too keen to elaborate. ‘Suicide, weren’t it, Doctor? Is that what you found?’

  ‘Indeed, the contents of the stomach lining would seem to suggest it was not accidental. Now, please, Miss Darken is—’

  ‘So he ate them? A whole box of matches?’

  ‘It would appear so. That will be all, thank you, Mrs Muckle.’

  Still she hovers. ‘I’ll be off home for the day, then?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  The charwoman raises her eyebrows at Agnes, as if she has revealed a great wonder to her, and makes her exit.

  ‘My apologies.’ Simon grimaces, sips at his tea and grimaces again. ‘That was not intended for your ears.’

  It is endearing how he still thinks to protect her. She saw things at the séance in Walcot Street that would make his hair stand up on end.

  Death is not the conclusion, but the alternative she saw is hardly comforting. If Hargreaves is still drowning, and Ned is still cold, she dare not think how this other man, who died feasting on phosphorous, will linger through eternity.

  ‘I am not so very fragile, Simon. I do encounter sad stories in my work, too. In fact, I lately met a woman who worked in a match factory.’ She pauses, conscious she must not reveal the full circumstances of the meeting. ‘She worked there with her stepfather, and he suffered terribly from the chemicals, even without ingesting them.’

  ‘Ah. The jaw, was it?’

  ‘Yes. What is the cure for that? Is there anything a physician can do for him?’

  ‘Not a physician, but a surgeon.’ He mimics with his index finger and thumb. ‘Removing the mandible – the lower jawbone – is the only way to give the poor fellow a fighting chance. One must cut out the rot before it can contaminate the entire body.’

  ‘Have you ever performed that operation, Simon?’

  ‘I have,’ he replies on a downward note, closing the topic. As with Edinburgh, as with the lady sent to the asylum, Simon does not speak of his surgical days. Sometimes Agnes wonders if that is why he has become so plump in recent years: he is swelling with all the words unsaid.

  Feeling uncomfortable, she picks up her cup. The tea looks pale and insipid. Come to think of it, that is what has always troubled her about the atmosphere of this room and its dull decoration: it is like a cup of weak tea.

  She pours some into a saucer and offers it to Morpheus, who laps it up without hesitation. His forebears would have been warier. Of course, there was no proof that Constance poisoned them …

  It will be better if she does not mention Constance at all today.

  ‘Simon,’ she says, crafting his name carefully. ‘I know you try your best to shield me from all delicate matters. But you see, I can talk to you quite composedly about a suicide and a jawbone extraction, so I hope you will realise there is no danger in being candid with me today. We must face a topic we have long been avoiding.’ She draws in a breath. ‘We must speak about Cedric.’

  He blanches, reaches for a paper on his desk. ‘This is not the best time to—’

  ‘Listen, Simon. Please put that down and listen to me. I understand why you do not wish for him to inherit your practice – that would be, well, I understand your objections. You did him a great kindness in giving him your name. But you must give him something more!’ He tries to screen his face with his hand but she sets her tea down by Morpheus and goes over to him. ‘Please, Simon. Apprentice him to someone else, send him from Bath. I know you do not have a vast fortune …’

  ‘His mother saw to that,’ he laughs bitterly. ‘Even before the separation.’

  ‘I know, I know. But none of it is his fault. He is fond of you, he believes you are his parent, and you avoid the boy.’

  Simon’s watery blue eyes do not focus on her, kneeling beside his chair, but on the bookshelf, as if it were telling the story of his pain. ‘It was difficult,’ he croaks. ‘His father … I did try. But his father was stamped on his face the moment I delivered him.’

  ‘You saved the whole family by marrying Constance. None of us are in danger of forgetting your goodness. The scandal she would have faced, the shame upon my mother …’ She takes his hand.

  ‘I did it only for you.’

  ‘Then do this for me too. Perhaps Cedric can train for the army? He needs to get away from here, some place safe. It is better if he goes. I can be brave, for him …’

  Finally, Simon regards her. ‘Can you, Miss Darken? I am not convinced you can make up your mind to live without your nephew.’

  She bites her lip.

  ‘Come, now. Whatever has brought this talk on?’

  ‘I am afraid, Simon! The killer is drawing closer to me. They will not stop at my clients, they will take the people I love next. They want me to be all alone.’ Simon’s hand turns rigid beneath hers. ‘I have received a note – two notes in fact. One was pushed under my door and then I found one in Cedric’s coat pocket! They want me to know how near they are, how easily they can destroy everything … Should I go to the police?’

  ‘No!’ he exclaims. ‘There is no call for that yet, I am sure, but …’ He pulls at the tiny flecks of stubble on his chin, thinking. ‘But what did these notes say? Was there any indication of who they were from?’

  She rubs at her forehead, as if she could erase the image of that slanted writing. ‘No, it was just pencil words … One asking if I had missed someone, and the paper in Cedric’s coat said “Mine”. As if they would claim our dear boy! I thought …’ She looks sheepishly at him. ‘There was a moment when I thought it might be Lieutenant Montague. That somehow he had found out … But he has no right, has he, no legal right? Nobody can prove …’

  ‘No, no,’ he says distractedly. ‘In the eyes of the law, Constance gave birth to my son. And much as I despise the man, I must do Lieutenant Montague the justice to say I do not consider him capable of murder.’

  No. The pain he caused Agnes may have felt like death, but even his betrayal cannot convince her that he was a thoroughly bad man. He was young, easily swayed, far more equipped to navigate the ocean and the demands of a ship than the tempests of human relationships.

  ‘Yet someone is capable of it, Simon, and now they have turned their eye upon my family! Please, find the boy some work safely away from Bath. I do not care about anything else, so long as Cedric is not harmed.’

  Simon seems to realise he is squeezing her fingers. He lets go of her hand, pats it. ‘Leave it with me. I will make enquiries.’

  ‘Is that all? And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? You are sure I should not take these notes to the police?’

  ‘On no account. That would only fuel gossip. Besides, a single word written in pencil cannot aid the investigation in any meaningful way.’ Always the slow crawl of a snail with him. It drives Agnes distracted. ‘Have some patience, Miss Darken,’ he counsels. ‘Wait for me to call upon you with more information.’

  ‘Wait?’ she echoes, indignant. ‘When my clients are being killed and my nephew is in danger – you expect me to just wait?’

  Simon burdens her with a sad, sad smile. ‘You have waited all these years for Lieutenant Montague. You might at least give me a few days.’

  CHAPTER 18

  Pearl curls her fingers into her palms, fighting the urge to open her eyes. Just when she t
hought all her hope had tired, there’s this: a patting, a tapping.

  This is the moment everything will change. Mother’s answering her at last. She just has to concentrate a little bit harder … But she’s already focusing so intently that it feels like her head will burst.

  The tap comes again, in the same rhythm but louder, like the telegraph machine Myrtle told her about, beating out messages from important men in London to important men in India. Only this message is travelling further – not just across water but through the veil itself.

  She hones in on the sound, leaning forward.

  All at once there come three loud thuds.

  A female voice calls. ‘Hello?’

  Pearl can’t breathe.

  ‘I say, hello?’

  It isn’t Mother. It’s just someone at the front door.

  Miserably, Pearl gets up from her cross-legged position on the bed and walks out into the hall. Myrtle’s gone on an errand and she’s not meant to make a peep while she’s out. But the woman sounds so forlorn …

  ‘Please, I am desperate for your help. It is wet out here and people are beginning to stare at me,’ she wheedles.

  Pearl dare not speak above a whisper. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Miss Darken, dear,’ the voice says. ‘We met at the séance.’

  A swell of giddiness overcomes her. Miss Darken must mean the séance that took place before she became so ill. Her body still hasn’t fully recovered from that evening and what’s worse, she remembers so little about what happened.

  ‘My sister’s out,’ she stammers.

  ‘I know that. I saw her leave.’

  ‘You must go away,’ Pearl calls. ‘I’m not supposed to open the door.’

  ‘But I need to speak with you.’

  Nobody ever wants to talk to her; it’s always Myrtle they’re after. And if Myrtle finds out that she’s spoken to someone at the door, she’ll be in a whole heap of trouble.

  ‘I’m not allowed.’

  ‘Please.’ The lady is taken by a cough.