Crimson Peak: The Official Movie Novelization (19 page)

Carrying a few parcels—little things she had purchased, such as warmer mittens and a muffler—she walked into the empty kitchen and set them down. A pan sat untended on the stove. The potatoes in it were burning and smoking, and she took it off the burner.

“We’re back!” she called.

And then Lucille approached from the far end of the kitchen, her face drawn and pale. There were rings under her eyes.

“Where were you?” Her voice was strained. She moved like one of Thomas’s automata, as if every muscle in her body had been stretched to its limit.

“We got snowed in,” Edith said. “We—”

“You didn’t come back last night!” Lucille shouted. She grabbed the pan and slammed it on the wooden surface of the worktable.

Edith was startled. “I… we…”

“You were supposed to come back last night,” Lucille insisted.

“We spent the night at the depot,” Edith explained.

Lucille blinked at her. Then she began to scrape the food, which was ruined, onto plates. “You
slept
there?”

Her distress was bewildering. She could not be surprised that Thomas had at last asserted his husbandly privilege, and yet it seemed almost as if Lucille thought she should have been consulted on the matter.

“Yes, we did. What’s wrong with that, Lucille? He’s my husband.”

But she would not be placated. “I am serious. Is this all a joke to you? All solved with a smile? I was worried sick!”

“Worried—”

“You two out in the storm!” Lucille cried.

Of course. Like Edith herself, Lucille was no stranger to tragedy. Her parents were both dead. She knew that bad things could and did happen to people she cared about. Until one was scathed in that way, one did not understand such fear. Edith did.

“I didn’t know if you’d had an accident. I was all alone. All alone. And I cannot be alone…”

The house creaked. Clay oozed from the cracks between the wall and the ceiling. And Edith thought she might know another reason Lucille was so upset—Lucille had been alone in the house after that monstrous apparition had menaced her. Perhaps she, too, had sensed something. Maybe even seen something. She was overwrought.

Edith wanted Thomas to observe the state his sister was in.
We need to leave this house. All of us.

“The house,” Lucille repeated, as if she had read Edith’s thoughts. “It’s sinking. It gets worse every time. We must do something to stop it.”

No. We must give up on it
, Edith thought.
This horrible place cannot be redeemed.

A sudden, sharp bout of dizziness grabbed hold of her. The kitchen tilted, stretched, and blurred… and Lucille’s face along with it.

“I need to sit down,” she said. “I’m not well.” Her forehead beaded with perspiration and she couldn’t make her eyes focus. It was as if the entire house was rippling in and out of existence, losing track of itself, forgetting to remain solid.

What am I thinking?
she wondered.
I’m not making any sense.

“I’ll make you some tea. It’ll be ready in no time.”

Lucille sounded more composed. She bustled about while Edith’s stomach churned. Her gaze fell on Lucille’s ring of keys, which, of course, should have been passed on to her. Lucille had fought so jealously to keep it. Perhaps she was feeling supplanted.

She noted a name engraved upon one of the keys: ENOLA. The same as the trunk in the pit.
There
was a mystery. Had there been an Enola Sharpe, perhaps? A relative? And a letter addressed to E. Sharpe had been handed over to her,
Edith
Sharpe, at the depot. She took out her letters and shuffled them to find the one from Milan. There was no first name, only the first initial. Could there be several E. Sharpes in their family? If so, it struck her a little odd that no one had mentioned it.

While Lucille filled the teapot, Edith furtively slipped the key off the ring, then returned the set to the table. Then she passed the letter to the bottom of her stack, so that she could work on her puzzle all by herself.

Another wave of dizziness hit her, and the room spun. Edith’s stomach fell. She had been so happy away in the village with Thomas that she had minimized just how awful it was here. She could feel the clay-soaked walls closing in; she couldn’t imagine taking a bath in that tub, ever again.

As Lucille put the now-filled pot on the stove, she saw Edith’s letters and scrutinized the topmost one. “Is that from America?”

Edith nodded weakly and Lucille boldly picked it up and read the envelope.

“From your solicitor,” she said, and sounded pleased. “You should read them. Rest a bit. I’ll make you some tea. It’ll take care of everything.”

Her smile was forced, and Edith wondered if Lucille would ever truly like her. But she could not think of that now. She was sick, so very sick, and as bitter as the firethorn tea was, the prospect of drinking something to ease her symptoms was very appealing indeed.

However, the prospect of returning to her bedroom was not. Still, what choice did she have? As Lucille had said, this was her home.

At least for now.

* * *

It watched.

In the green-tiled bathroom of Allerdale Hall, the red rubber ball rolled beneath the claw-footed tub and the little dog whined and pranced, trying to cram itself beneath the tub’s curved bottom. The ball remained tantalizingly out of reach. It cocked its head, staring at it with all the longing of child gazing at a toyshop window at Christmas.

The pup sat back on its haunches and barked wildly, ecstatically.

And the ball rolled out from under the tub.

Then the ball flew through the air out of the bathroom. The animal skittered on the wood and clattered after it, barking. It followed the ball into the bedroom and was about to dash under the bed to retrieve it when it slid to a stop. It put its ears back, showed its teeth, and began to growl.

Back in the bathroom, a spider dropped down from the ceiling toward the tub. It touched down on the lip of porcelain, then bounced upward to its center. It began to weave its web like an old maid at her spinning wheel. From out of the drain, a sluggish fly emerged, buzzing haphazardly, and began to spiral toward the web. Flies were summertime pests; they were not to be found in snowy climes. The hungry spider kept weaving, one eye on the prize, working feverishly to complete its snare in time to catch the fly. In the next room, the dog whined and its sick mistress got sicker.

The fly that should be dead and the dog that should be dead in the house that should be dead, and the bride, who would be dead soon.

It watched approvingly, appreciating the complexities—and fragilities—of life.

A
LAN WALKED INTO
the hotel lobby and felt ghosts around him. This was the hotel where Ferguson had delivered the news of her father’s death to Edith, possibly with Cushing’s murderer at her side. He envisioned his poor darling plummeting from the elation of love to the desolation of loss in a few short moments. He couldn’t imagine how that had felt. He also wondered what she had been doing alone in a hotel with Sir Thomas. Annie, her maid, had stated that her mistress had received a large sheaf of typewritten papers at home bright and early in the morning, and soon after had left in a rush. Annie had found a letter with beautiful handwriting among the pages and had been dying to read it. The only problem was that Annie did not know how to read.

It wasn’t until Mr. Ferguson had arrived at Cushing Manor to tell Miss Edith of her father’s death that Annie had known that her young lady had left to meet up with a man. Unescorted.

Everything had been so rash, so tumultuous. Alan was not exactly stolid, although he supposed Edith found him so. He would never have compromised her reputation, nor dragged her away from everything she knew three weeks after her father had been bludgeoned to death. There, he had thought it, and it was what he believed.

“Are you sure this is their forwarding address?” he asked the hotel manager, looking down at the written information.

“Sir Thomas and Lucille Sharpe. Yes. In Cumberland, sir.”

He supposed that was all the address you needed when you were an aristocrat. “Thank you,” he said.

He sat on a round settee and made mental calculations about how soon he could travel there. After a short interval, a man—younger than Alan had expected—approached purposefully.

“Mr. Holly?” he asked. Carter Cushing’s intelligence gatherer. As Ferguson had told Alan, Holly was a hard man to locate.

“At your service, sir.” Mr. Holly was deferential but not subservient.

“Do you have the copy of the information?”

“Did you bring the sum?” Holly countered.

Alan handed him a substantial packet of bills, and Holly pocketed it. The man moved closer, speaking in a conspiratorial tone.

“Mister Cushing, God rest his soul, was a loyal and honorable customer, sir.” He leaned in. “I am obliged to demand a satisfactory reason for your inquiry, as I do not divulge a client’s information, even after his passing.”

Alan remained resolute in the face of obvious extortion. “Mr. Holly, I paid you already. That’s reason number one. Reason number two is that the well-being of someone dear to me may be at stake. And finally, you have the fact that I will punch you repeatedly until you do as we agreed, sir.”

Holly briefly considered his reasoning and then handed him a folder. “This is the newest information I’ve obtained.” He also handed Alan a leather folder full of newspaper clippings, which Alan opened. Holly pointed at the front page. “August 1879. People knew Lady Beatrice Sharpe was awful harsh with her children. But no one would ever dare do anything about it. Now this. Front-page news. Quite gruesome. All that blood.”

Alan jerked with great disgust at a pen-and-ink drawing of a butchered woman. She lay with her head slumped forward. An axe or perhaps some sort of sharp knife had cut her head nearly in two. The victim was Lady Beatrice Sharpe, the widow of Sir Michael Sharpe, baronet. Sir Michael had died two years before in a hunting accident.

He read the article; the murder had occurred in the upstairs bathtub at Allerdale Hall—the family seat of the Sharpes. Edith’s new home. This woman would have been Edith’s mother-in-law had she lived. The only other people in the house at the time of the killing were Thomas, who was then twelve, and Lucille, fourteen. However, the paper was careful to say that there were no suspects. Were the children cleared?

Did Sir Thomas disclose this family skeleton to his fiancée before their marriage? Had this horrible scandal shaped him as Edith’s loss of her mother had shaped her? Edith was fanciful, romantic, and possessed of a vast imagination. But what of a young boy who had apparently suffered at the hands of his mother, then lost her in a violent murder?

He simply could not believe that Carter Cushing would allow anyone remotely connected to such a heinous murder to be in the same city as his beloved only daughter, much less invite him to dinner under his own roof.

“Cushing saw this?” Alan queried.

“No,” Holly answered. “It took some time to obtain these clippings. The only relevant piece of information I could hand Mr. Cushing was this civil document here. But it was enough to impede any further relationship between Sir Thomas and Miss Cushing.” He paused to see if Alan was following him. “In other words, one that would have prevented them from marrying.”

Alan was
not
following. He didn’t know what the civil document signified. It was clearly an English legality, not an American one.

“Why is that?”

Holly pointed to the significant section of the paper. “Because, you see? Sir Thomas is already married.”

A
LONE IN THE
bedroom, Lucille’s fresh tea at her elbow, Edith calmed down her dog, which seemed upset about something, then opened the first of her letters from the depot. It was from Mr. Ferguson:

My dear Edith:

Please be advised that the first transfer of your father’s property has been completed. The remainder will require your signature.

Yours very truly
,                 
William Ferguson, Esquire