Spider Light (14 page)

As she crossed the park, her brain busy with all these details, one other thing kept uncomfortably crossing Thomasina’s mind, and it was something she could not quite ignore. That faint fluttering heartbeat she had felt in Simon’s chest…had she felt it or hadn’t she? She relived the moment when she had bent over to examine him the first time. She
had
felt something, but when she tried again, there had been nothing, she was sure about that.

But as she went into the house, she had to make an effort to ignore the thought that Simon had not really been dead when she slammed the steel doors of the kiln room.

The last person Bryony Sullivan had expected to see loping along Quire’s carriageway was the Reverend Skandry, but as she returned from an evening stint of duty at Latchkill there he was, like a thin black spider capering through the twilight. He hailed her almost at once, which meant Bryony could not whisk along the path to the cottage and pretend she had not seen him.

The last time she had met Reverend Skandry had been the previous afternoon at Latchkill. A patient in Forrester Wing, annoyed with the meagre dinner, had prophesied various grisly fates for the Prout, which had included being consumed by swarms of locusts and immersion in burning lakes where chained devils roar. The Prout, recognizing these allusions as biblical, had sent Dora Scullion for Reverend Skandry. Scullion had run all the way to St Michael’s Church and back, but as Bryony could have told anyone, Skandry had been of no help at all, and so poor Scullion had then gone pelting along to Bracken House to get Dr Glass.

Walking home, Bryony smiled at the memory of how Dr Glass had called Reverend Skandry a canting old preacher unable to recognize plain hysteria when he saw it. He had unbuckled the restraints from the patient and thrown them into the corridor. After this he said that if ever he found restraints used again in Latchkill he would take the place apart brick by brick to find every buckle and strap, and would then make a bonfire of the whole lot in the town square.

Reverend Skandry had taken his leave, his dignity in tatters, and Bryony had hoped it would be the last she would see of him, but here he was in the park, calling out to her in his thin reedy voice.

‘Ah, Miss Sullivan. Late duty at Latchkill, was it? Dear me, there’s quite a flurry going on at Quire, I fear.’

Clearly there was to be no escaping the man, so Bryony asked what the flurry might be.

‘It’s Mr Simon Forrester,’ said Reverend Skandry. ‘He seems to have vanished from Quire House without a word of explanation. Miss Thomasina is very worried.’

‘Vanished?’ Bryony did not know Simon Forrester very well,
but he was not someone you would associate with vanishing. ‘How peculiar. When did he vanish? I mean–when was he last seen?’

‘Not for two days, seemingly, and Miss Thomasina has asked me to make some inquiries–I am going along to the railway station in Chester first thing tomorrow morning. I am very glad to give my help, of course.’

He would be very glad indeed, the two-faced old hypocrite. Anything to ally himself with Quire House. By the end of the week, he would be making it seem as if he and Thomasina Forrester were bosom friends.

Bryony said, ‘I daresay he’ll turn up. Have you thought of asking at the post office? A telegram might have come for him, and he might have had to leave suddenly.’

Reverend Skandry conceded that this was a possibility, although he did not, it appeared, entirely approve of telegrams. He did not think the Lord had intended messages to be sent whizzing across hundreds of miles by electric power. He had even been in a house recently where there was a telephone which he had thought shockingly intrusive.

‘Useful, though,’ said Bryony.

‘That’s as maybe, Miss Sullivan. And I make no doubt Mr Simon will be found safe and sound. Gentlemen do not simply vanish without trace.’

There was a single light burning in one of Quire’s windows until very late that night. If Bryony curled up on the windowsill of her bedroom she could see it shining through the trees. Was it Thomasina who was wakeful up there worrying about where her cousin might be? Byrony was not inclined to think so; she did not think Thomasina ever worried about anything very much.

Everyone said Quire was a beautiful house, but it was a bit too symmetrical for Bryony’s taste. That was probably because she could remember the sprawling old house on Ireland’s west coast, where sunshine poured in through the latticed windows and the
gardens were a romantic wilderness of wild primroses and broken stone statues crusted with lichen.

‘You’re seeing it through rose-tinted spectacles,’ Cormac had once said when Bryony was in a nostalgic mood. ‘The house was falling down around our ears–there wasn’t a whole brick in the place or a sound tile on the roof, and most of the furniture was nearly in matchsticks from woodworm. It’s all probably crumbled into nothing by now.’

But they both knew the Irish house would not really have crumbled into nothing, and Bryony thought that children did not really notice or care about crumbling roofs or worm-eaten furniture. When she thought about the house she only remembered how the rooms had been scented with beeswax from when there had still been housemaids to polish the furniture, and how, if you stood on the terrace and looked across to the west, you could see the purple smudge of mountains and the glint of the sea…

Her father said that when he was a boy his mother used to walk in the gardens wearing a huge shady hat and cutting sheaves of lilac. ‘As unruffled as if she had all the time and money in Christendom and all the leisure in the world,’ he said, but then he would add, ‘And as if there were no bailiffs permanently camping out in the kitchen, or men arriving with a distraint on the furniture three times a week.’

When he talked like this, Bryony told him he had no romance in his soul, to which he usually replied that their family had kept the noble profession of debt collectors in business for at least two decades. He always sent her his slant-eyed smile when he said this, and Bryony thought they both knew that one day they would find a way to go back to that house.

The photo-copied papers Antonia had brought from Quire House did not seem to be in any particular order. The first set appeared to contain financial statements and accounts, mostly relating to maintenance of the fabric: repairs to the roof and gutters, to broken windows and kitchen supplies. Antonia flipped through these rather perfunctorily, pausing over a set of accounts headed Forrester Benevolent Trust, which appeared to be a specially created trust fund for the benefit of patients at Latchkill Insane Asylum who for some reason could not be admitted to the paupers’ ward, but who had no money of their own for the private section.

There was an exchange of letters between a local doctor and Latchkill’s matron. They did not seem to be in chronological order, which might have been because someone had thrust them carelessly into a box or an envelope twenty or even a hundred years earlier, or it might be down to haphazard photocopying by the sullen Greg Foster. Who cares about the dates on a load of boring old letters, he had probably thought. But it was easy enough to put them in sequence. Some of them were in a small, rather mean-looking hand, and others appeared to have been dashed off by somebody who was either in a hurry or was exasperated with the intended recipient.

The earliest was one of these exasperated in a hurry letters. The date was October 1899 and the address was Bracken House, Amberwood. Antonia wondered if Bracken House still existed. She would make enquiries tomorrow.

She began to read.

‘I’d have liked you,’ said Antonia, coming up out of the nineteenth century, and addressing the long-ago Daniel Glass. ‘I like the angry compassion you had for the patients, and I like the way you tried to help some poor frightened little kitchenmaid. I wonder if you did try hypnotism on your patients, and if so, how successful it was?’

As she worked through the rest of the papers, making notes as she did so, she wondered how Dr Glass would react to today’s methods and treatments, and how he would feel about Antonia reading his letters. She had the feeling he would not have minded at all, and might have been rather amused. You could be one of the ghosts that occasionally wander around in this cottage, Dr Glass, but I don’t mind that because I think you’re rather a friendly ghost.

The ten-minute walk to Quire House this afternoon ought not to be such a massive ordeal. It was a lovely autumn day–the kind of day Richard had always enjoyed. Antonia wondered if she could think about Richard as she walked, and this struck her as a good idea because if Richard was with her when she went out, she would be fine. It would probably not be too painful, after so long she could blot out that last sight of Richard lying on the floor, with that hellish
Caprice
music spattered with his blood. She could focus on good memories instead: on how his eyes used to narrow when he was amused, and how immensely still he always was when he listened to music. The way they had always laughed at the same things, and how she could never hide it from him if she was upset or angry, no matter how much she tried, because he always sensed what she was
feeling. No one but Richard had ever done that; Antonia did not think anyone else ever would.

Godfrey Toy was delighted Miss Weston kept their appointment. He had been a bit worried as to how serious she had been over helping to catalogue the cellar’s contents. Halfway through the morning he had begun to wonder if he was being too trusting and whether he ought to ask Miss Weston for a reference of some kind–Oliver would probably think he ought to. But it seemed rather discourteous and even a touch melodramatic. It was not as if there were likely to be any state secrets or incriminating letters in Quire’s cellars, and even if there were, Miss Weston would hardly turn out to be a Middle East spy, or a blackmailer of cabinet ministers or royalty. It was true that one or two of the smaller display items had recently vanished–jewellery and a pair of enamelled snuff-boxes–but that was one of the hazards of running this kind of place. Godfrey did not entirely trust Greg Foster, but he was trying to be fair to the boy, so he had not said anything. The thief was just as likely to be one of the visitors.

Still, he hoped the professor would not make one of his snarky comments about gullibility or manipulative females. If he did, Godfrey would just remind him of the other occasions when they had allowed people to do local research at Quire.

In case Miss Weston might be regretting her offer, he had thought out a little speech about forgetting she was here on holiday, and not wanting to impose on her time. But so that she would not think he was being dismissive, he had also rushed down to the town to buy some really nice things for a little afternoon snack which they could have with a cup of tea. Cinnamon toast, which Godfrey loved and which hardly anyone ever bothered with nowadays, and some of the really delicious scones from the bakery. Cherry conserve to go with them. Just as he was preparing to go back to Quire, he spotted some stuffed olives and smoked oysters in the delicatessen, so he put these in his shopping bag as well, in case Miss Weston stayed on for a glass of sherry. You
never knew. He added a bottle of Croft’s Dry Original, and then a second bottle of an amontillado because you had to cover all contingencies.

But far from regretting her offer, Miss Weston seemed genuinely keen. She said she was working through the photocopied material, and finding it absorbing. She had been particularly intrigued by the material on Latchkill Asylum.

‘The actual building’s long since gone, of course,’ said Godfrey, proferring the cinnamon toast. ‘But you could try the county library, or the records office–although that would probably mean going into Chester. But they’d have details about land transfers and so on.’

‘Would it be all right if I made notes on anything I find about Latchkill? Because—Oh, this is lovely toast. I haven’t had cinnamon toast since I was a child.’

‘Of course you can make notes,’ said Godfrey.

‘It’s truly just for my own interest–I’m not writing an exposé on anybody or wanting to solve some ancient mystery or anything like that. It’s only a holiday project.’

‘You can have the run of the cellars for as long as you like,’ said Godfrey. ‘In any case, you’ll be helping us out by starting the cataloguing. I thought you could work in the little room near the old sculleries–providing you don’t mind it having been the butler’s pantry. It’s not pantry-esque now, in fact we use it when the VAT inspector comes in, or for the auditor’s visit every year. The professor usually deals with that, of course; I haven’t a very good head for figures.’

Miss Weston said gravely that she did not in the least mind working in a butler’s pantry. She could bring her laptop with her or she could just make sheaves of notes and take them back to Charity Cottage to list everything in whatever way they agreed. They could see what worked best.

The curious thing was that Godfrey had been thinking of Miss Weston as rather ordinary–polite and pleasant and she had a nice voice–but nothing very remarkable. She was a good listener.
But when they talked about Latchkill and Amberwood’s history, her whole expression altered and she looked quite different. As if a light had flared behind her eyes.

It was silly to feel awkward about introducing the question of payment, but it had to be done and so Godfrey plunged in.

‘I don’t expect any payment at all, Dr Toy. I approached you, if you recall. And I’m not qualified for this kind of work. I might make all kinds of a hash of it.’

She would not make a hash of it, of course, because she was not the kind of person who would make a hash of anything she undertook. Godfrey found himself thinking that if he had had the necessary confidence (all right and maybe been a few years younger as well), Miss Weston might have been precisely the kind of lady he could have become a bit romantic over. Intelligent. Unusual. Not somebody you would necessarily look at twice, until something caught her interest and then there was that sudden glow that made you want to go on looking at her. He liked and admired ladies, but he had never felt he understood them and he had never dared approach one on any sort of emotional level, certainly not on any physical level. But he found himself hoping that Miss Weston would stay at the cottage for a long time.

If enough material on Latchkill turned up, they might even think about setting up a display on it–it was as much part of Amberwood’s history as anywhere else, and the Trust liked the museum to come up with new exhibitions and new angles on the area. If so, Miss Weston might agree to help with that as well. But Godfrey thought he would save that suggestion until they saw how things went. He also thought he had better keep in mind all the stories of foolish old men who became enamoured of much younger ladies. Not that he was so very old, of course–he had a good few years yet before he began collecting his pension!

So he just said that if Miss Weston was absolutely sure about the money…?

‘I’m quite sure, Dr Toy.’

Then, said Godfrey, they would not mention it again. He passed on to the pleasant suggestion that they abandon the tea cups in favour of a glass of sherry.

Walking back to Charity Cottage, Antonia felt distinctly lightheaded, which was probably due to a mixture of cinnamon toast, scones and two large glasses of sherry.

It was not dark yet; it was the in-between time that was neither quite day nor quite night. Antonia always found it a rather eerie time, because the light and the shadows could play tricks on you. She had always disliked going into her own house at this hour, unless she knew Richard would be there. But the sooner she was inside the cottage the sooner she could switch on lights and turn up heating, and perhaps put on the radio or the television. She unlocked the front door and stepped briskly into the sitting room, flipping on the electric fire and the old-fashioned standard lamp near the window, liking the friendly warm glow that instantly flooded the room. She left her jacket on the back of a chair, and opened the inner door. She would not want much supper after all those scones and toast, but there was some salad stuff in the fridge that could be washed and left to drain, and she had bought ham and cooked chicken in Amberwood yesterday; it was still a novelty to be able to walk into a shop and choose whatever she wanted.