House of Doors (24 page)

There was nothing for her here. She turned to go. Almost had gone, indeed; it was only that the stairs back up seemed suddenly so steep, her legs so tired and her mind more tired still.

In her hesitation, the touch on her arm was a startlement but not exactly a surprise. Like the touch of a man's hand in bed – yesterday that thought would have been
Peter's hand
but things were different now, she had known more than one – which was never a surprise but could always raise that unexpected shiver.

‘Sister? May I help you?'

And there he was, Cook himself, come from nowhere or from everywhere, knowing everything. Knowing her need and confident to meet it,
may I?
and not
can I?
– and perhaps she was building too much on such a small acquaintance and such a little word, but his voice was more refined than his role and she thought he knew exactly what he was saying.

And she was trembling now, and that wasn't only her knees faced with a climb of stairs. Trembling all through, and his hand beneath her elbow was the only solidity offered. She leaned on that and he led her away from the stairs, through the steam and sweat of the kitchen, through the scents of frying onions and boiling potatoes, past the seethe of vast pans over roaring flame and the press of urgent bodies turning this way and that. She was aware of them all, but only distantly; detached almost from her own body, focused just on that point where her arm met his, reliability amid the flux.

It was how she thought of him, she realized: a fixed point, security. Why she had come to him, from the bathhouse fog.

From one fog to another, but this was different. No one was falling here, she didn't need to hold on; someone was holding on to her.

He brought her through an arch of brick and down another flight of steps. Today seemed to be all about going down, when she wasn't going up.

The last cellar had been a claustrophobic inferno, the furnace raging through an open iron door. This was just the opposite: broad and dim and cool, reaching away and away, wooden racks and whitewashed walls and just light enough to find your way. You'd need a torch to read the labels on the bins and bottles.

‘Really, it all needs drinking,' Cook murmured at her side. ‘A lot of the lighter wines are too far gone already. The port's all good, and some of it is excellent, but port's not always what you want.'

‘No.' There was a quip ready on her tongue,
any port in a storm
, but that felt tired before she said it and it wasn't true anyway. Apparently she was more particular. She'd come to him and he'd been ready for her, and that was – well, not quite startling, but certainly a surprise.

He led her past a run of racks and bins and through a door of panel and glass, into an office unexpectedly walled off from the wine.

‘I don't know what to call this, quite. It's where they kept the cellar books, when the cellar was an active consideration. They can't have had a man just in charge of that, though; I suppose it was the butler's prerogative. I'm just not sure why he needed a separate cubbyhole down here. His pantry was upstairs, of course, convenient to the family. Still  . . .'

Still, there was a table, there were two chairs. There was a clean glass in front of her, the pop of a cork as he reached a bottle down from a shelf where it had stood dusty between ledgers. She didn't want wine; this wasn't wine.

A gurgle from the neck of the bottle as he tipped it, and the aroma hit her hard before ever the first dribble of pale gold liquor hit the glass.

‘Oh!' Apple-crisp and honey-mellow and neither of those, the sharp volatility of brandy underlying all. ‘Should we  . . .?'

‘You should.' He had only produced the one glass. ‘Drink that off, you've had a shock. Look sharp, now.'

Sharp, like the brandy. Like his voice. She seemed to have no resistance. The glass was in her hand, the weight of it, the touch against her lips; the brandy in her mouth like a fire coal, a source, heat and light in suffusion through all her cells.

‘Good. Now, sip this,' another gurgle, another measure in her glass. ‘Don't rush it again, this is too good to rush. Take your time, let it work through you.'

It was all through her already. She could feel it in her fingers, in her feet. She spread her hands on the table and settled back in her chair and felt rooted, through wood and stone to the earth beneath and the rock that underlay it, the whole planet in its turning.

She thought about that for a moment and said, ‘I ought to eat something.'

‘Yes,' he said equably, ‘but not yet. This first. Then I'll have someone feed you in here, you don't want to face the scrum upstairs.'

No. No, she didn't. But, ‘Oh, you shouldn't worry about me. You can't keep making me a special case,' in need of special treatment, soup or brandy or whatever he had in mind today.

He just shrugged, seeming curiously content with it. He wasn't joining her in the drink, but he did sit down across the table from her, apparently endlessly patient, not at all like a cook with a meal to serve.
This first
: apparently he meant more than a glass of brandy. This place, his company, his time.

She said, ‘You've been here a while, Cook. Longer than most, I'm guessing.'

‘Longer than any,' he said easily.

Of course they'd want the domestic services in place before the hospital staff could come, before the patients. Doctors need feeding, and their beds making and their laundry done.

‘Yes. I don't suppose anyone knows the house better than you do.'

‘No.' He'd have its geography at his fingers' ends, to know when and where and how to deliver urns of tea and cauldrons of stew still piping hot. And, yes, a bowl of soup at need.

‘No.' She hesitated, one last little moment; and then said it. ‘There's something here, isn't there? Some presence in the house.'
Something evil
she wanted to say and would not, not quite, not yet.

‘Oh, no,' he said in flat denial, bluntly confusing her, not at all what she had expected. ‘No, the house is empty.' And then, smiling thinly as a man might in the face of something difficult and deeply loved, he went on, ‘Of itself, it has nothing to offer. What you find in D'Espérance is only what you bring.' And then, his lips tightening around that smile as though to hold it in the face of her defiance, her disbelief: ‘It can seem  . . . heavy. I do know. I came here myself, with luggage enough of my own and no one but me to carry all the weight of it. I barely made it through the door.'

‘I  . . . I don't think I understand,' though in honesty she thought she did. She only didn't want to. Not this, not now.

‘It's not the house that's haunted, Sister. It's you, always. You fetch your own ghosts with you. All D'Espérance will do is show them to you. Think of it as a lens, to make the unseen clear.'

She was glad then that she hadn't said a moment ago just what she'd been thinking.
Not evil. Not Peter. No.
But a man had  . . . come apart; and another had lost a hand, and she couldn't just screw her fingers into her ears and shut her eyes and turn her head away. Nor deny that she had come here haunted, with her ghost in tow. He had greeted her on the very doorstep, rising from the woodwork like Marley in the door knocker. That made her his first victim, she supposed, fainting across the threshold as she had. And since then he'd escalated, striking again and again, finding other targets, random men  . . .

No. She did not, would not believe that. Not Peter. Not evil. No.

She cupped her hands around the bowl of the glass, bent her head above it and inhaled, wanting to draw the fumes in deeply, wanting to feel the astringency of them like a purge all through her mind, searing out such ideas.

In vino veritas.
If there was truth in brandy, it was a harsher kind. But welcome none the less, as the man across the table said, ‘Everyone brings something. Show me a man who isn't haunted, I'll show you a man who's never lived. Or a man who's lying to himself, but that cuts no ice here. D'Espérance will show him the truth of it.'

What he was saying – surely, what he was saying? – was,
not Peter
. Not Peter, and not her; she wasn't responsible, she hadn't brought this down on that poor man in his bath. Other people's ghosts were at work here. The sense of relief was bitter and welcome and almost overwhelming.

Even so, she said, ‘But, but surely, he can't have done that to himself. Whatever burden he carries, whatever guilt or loss or  . . .'

Her voice died away in a gesture. She couldn't encompass the thought of so much disturbance in a man's mind.

‘No, I'm sure not. That would be beyond enduring. But D'Espérance is not a kindly house, it won't spare the innocent. A lens focuses the light, and people can get burned. Other people, if someone's  . . . passions  . . . are violent or uncontrolled, or wilful. There would be ways to use it as a weapon.'

‘No, but why? Surely not  . . .'

He said nothing; he didn't need to. A man had bled half to death in his bath. That couldn't be incidental. It wasn't an incident, it was an act. Actual.

This was a hospital. More, he ran the kitchen of a hospital; more yet, an army kitchen in an army hospital. Gossip would be the fuel here, more even than tea. Of course he knew exactly what had happened in the bathhouse. He probably knew exactly how the patient was doing in theatre right now. One of the nurses would be relieved, and talk to her special friend when she came out; and her friend would talk to the orderly who swept the corridor, who would talk to the orderly who fetched the lunch, who would bring it all back to Cook. No need to be discreet, then. No point in it.

She said slowly, ‘It was as though someone had undone all the colonel's work. Unstitched him. Not put him back the way he was, but worse. Left him with his own wounds and the colonel's depredations too, everything the colonel has to do – or undo – before he can patch a man together. How—?'

‘Never ask how. That's not a question here. These things happen, that's all there is to say about the how. About the house. It's much more useful to ask why. If it was deliberately done, then why would anyone see that as a thing to do? Who hates the colonel or his work so very much?'

She wanted to say
Major Black, and I heard them fighting just before it happened; if passion is the trigger we should look for, there it is
– but that made no sense. The major used the colonel's work to his own ends, to support his strategies. He even wanted the colonel to do more, he wanted to fake it, to give healthy men such surgeries before the advantage of surprise was lost. She couldn't in fairness accuse him of this. He didn't actually hate the colonel, he only wanted to govern him. There must be something else, someone else. A saboteur, finding a strange eldritch course against the war effort? Or a personal grudge, against the colonel or maybe against the man himself, poor Barker  . . .?

She shook her head, fidgeted with her glass – her empty glass, and when had that happened? – and shook her head again when Cook reached towards the bottle. ‘No, no more. And no lunch either, just give me a slice of bread and let me go. I have a wardful of men in shock. Half of them were actually there to see it, and they must all be wondering now how strong their own stitches are. The colonel has been a miracle worker up till this. Now he has feet of clay. Fingers of clay. And he made their faces for them, and – well, faces of clay. They can be pulled apart.' So could that image; her English mistress would have been appalled. No matter. ‘But – Cook, you hear all the whispers in the house.' The soldiers' gossip and the nurses', the patients' too, it would all trickle back here like water finding its level. And that wasn't all she meant, and he must know it. He heard what the house was telling him. She didn't quite understand how, but that was a lesson she'd take on board, not to ask how in this house. He had his story, that was obvious. Perhaps he'd tell her another time. Perhaps not. She wasn't planning to tell him about Peter, but she could imagine its happening, regardless of purpose or desire.

He nodded, non-committally. There was what he heard, and what he was prepared to share, and they were different. As no doubt they ought to be.

Still. ‘Will you tell me? What you hear about this, what it means?'
Tell me what to do
was what she was really saying, though she only realized it herself once the words were out. She was perhaps too ready to provide herself with heroes, especially since Peter's fall from grace. He had left a void she had a need to fill, a voicelessness, a silence where she went to hear wisdom. She would install anyone if they gave her half a reason. Aesculapius, nearly: if he had made any move to win her trust, if he hadn't kept himself so neutral in his distance. Colonel Treadgold, of course, though he seemed  . . . damaged now, not the rock she looked for.

Michael? No. Even the thought of that could make her smile, even now. Bed Thirty-Four was not a throne, and she did tend to enthrone men.

Cook, though: so far he'd shown himself to be a source of what she needed, just when most she needed it. Soup, pastries. Brandy.

Knowledge too, it wasn't just the inner woman that he catered to. He seemed embedded here, deeply rooted. Perhaps it was the other way around, that every institution taps into its cooks. Perhaps he was the source, rather than the messenger.

He nodded again, non-committal again. Ruth took that as it was meant, she thought: as a promise to consider what she'd asked. No more.

She left him then in his little glassed-in cubby, closed the door behind her, went up to work. Up and up.

ELEVEN

I
f there was war in the house, it was a strange and disproportionate kind of warfare, with only the one side fighting. Fighting and losing.

Colonel Treadgold spent all afternoon in surgery, trying to patch Flight Lieutenant Barker together again. Crudely, swiftly, trying to save his life. Not his face, not his hands, not any of the colonel's careful early work. All that had been expunged, leaving the man worse off than before, teetering on death's edge, dragged there by simple pain and shock and loss of blood.