The Misbegotten (19 page)

‘He doesn’t seem to want to try,’ Rachel murmured. Mrs Sutton might still see the sweet boy she knew in him, but Rachel had seen only a man, dark and mad and violent.

‘No. I fear you’re right. I hope it wasn’t ill-mannered of me, to speak so much about them? But I sense that you are a gentle soul too, and will understand that I only hope to mitigate for him any . . . extreme impressions you might have formed.’

‘It is a sad story indeed.’
And I look just like her. I look enough like this faithless Alice to make them both mistake me. But I know of another. I know of another who also wore this face.
She swallowed against a sudden hollow feeling beneath her ribs, a strange bubble of expectation.
Could it be?

‘Can you tell me, where did Miss Beckwith come from? Who were her parents?’ she asked.

‘I cannot tell you.’ Harriet shrugged. ‘But you must come to call, Mrs Weekes. Promise that you will,’ she said impulsively.

‘I do promise – it would be my pleasure, and I should very much like to meet your daughter. Before my marriage, I was governess to a family. I find that I miss the children a great deal.’

‘I should be delighted to introduce you to her. Oh, look – it’s nearly nine. Let’s go in for tea before the mad dash begins.’

There was already a crush of people around the tables of food and drink that had been laid out beneath the arches at one end of the tea room. People jostled and reached and chafed with impatience, like a flock of pigeons around spilt grain. Rachel and the captain’s wife managed to snatch some jellies and a glass of punch each before retiring from the throng to sit in a quieter part of the room. They talked of simple things, and Mrs Sutton shared harmless pieces of gossip about the people they saw, introducing Rachel to some of them. They were in conversation with a doctor and his wife when Richard and Captain Sutton emerged from their card game, late on in the evening. Richard was flushed, his eyes bloodshot in a way that Rachel was fast coming to recognise, and she took a steadying breath. He looked angry, and downcast, and was barely able to be civil as he was introduced to the doctor and his wife.

‘Are we come too late for tea?’ said Captain Sutton.

‘No, I think not – but make haste, or it will all have been eaten,’ said his wife.

‘Mr Weekes – may I bring you something?’ Rachel offered, since Richard didn’t look like he had the energy left to fight his way to the food.

‘No, indeed. My thanks. Unless it be a cup of punch,’ he said, his voice low and sulky.

‘Allow me,’ said Captain Sutton, making his way towards the tables.

‘Is everything all right, Mr Weekes?’ Rachel asked, in a low voice at Richard’s ear.

‘Yes. I . . . I had little luck at the table, is all.’ Richard found a weak smile for her. His lips were pale, and stood out against his reddened cheeks.

‘Not too much was lost, I hope?’ Rachel asked, carefully.

‘Nothing that I can’t recoup, at some later date.’

‘Here now, have this to combat the heat in here!’ Captain Sutton handed Richard a glass, and he gulped at it gratefully. ‘And how have you enjoyed your evening, Mrs Weekes?’

‘Oh, very much, thank you, Captain Sutton. Save for one thing, that is.’

‘And what is that?’

‘I have not danced once,’ she said.

‘Well now, that will not do at all, and if it does not offend you to stand up with so ancient a partner, I would be glad to escort you to the floor. By your leave, sir?’ he asked Richard, as he held out his arm to Rachel. Richard waved them on with a sickly smile and sank into a nearby chair. They joined another couple in a well-known quadrille, which Rachel had learnt from Eliza’s dancing master years before. Captain Sutton was a lively partner, more graceful than his appearance suggested, and Rachel was smiling and out of breath by the time the music stopped. ‘There now – will that suffice?’ he asked cheerfully.

On the way home, Rachel looked out of the chair’s small window at dark streets and rain-streaked walls sliding past, and thought. Hearing the story of Jonathan’s fall into madness made her much more sympathetic, both to his plight and the pain it must cause Mrs Alleyn; but if he had banished a good, close friend like the captain, why on earth would he wish to see her again? It could only be because she resembled his lost betrothed, Alice Beckwith, but apparently his urge was to hurt her for it, not to love her for it. But Rachel was curious, in a way she hadn’t been before. Curious to know what he would say to her if they met again; curious to know more about the girl she so resembled.
My mirror image. My echo.
Harriet Sutton’s words gave her courage, and the evening had been the most uplifting since her wedding day. She knew, by the time she’d helped Richard out of his sedan and up to bed, that she would go again to the Alleyns to find out.

On Friday the coalman came with his filthy wagon and sacks, his wheezy, broken-winded horse and his wizened face netted with sooty wrinkles. The coal cellar was underneath the pavement in front of the house, accessed by a door from the courtyard below street level. That door had a weak latch, and Starling took up her usual position, bracing it shut with her back as the coal was poured in through a small hatch in the pavement. With each sack that was upended came a thudding at her back, a pattering noise and a cloud of black dust that curled out around the door to gather in her hair and clothing. She felt sharp little grains in her eyelashes when she blinked. She braced her feet against the flagstones, feeling them slide where the stones were damp and slimy.
I am a doorstop
, she thought ruefully.
Alice brought me up a sister, Bridget trained me as a housekeeper, and now I am become a doorstop.
In the silence after the last load came down the horse coughed, and the coalman halloed down to her. Starling stayed a while in the gloomy courtyard, quiet with her thoughts. She heard Lord Faukes’s voice, unwelcome as it was:
But you were a starveling guttersnipe, so be content.
Ever with a smile in his voice to belie the barbs in his words.

Starling washed her face and hands under the pump, wincing at the water’s bite, then stood with a stiff-bristled brush and swept the soot from her clothes and hair. Through the kitchen window she heard Sol Bradbury singing ‘Proper Fanny’ as she crimped the crust on an eel pie, and through the corridor window Mrs Hatton was berating Dorcas for something. Intrigued, Starling stepped closer to the window to listen.

‘Oh, madam, please don’t make me!’ Dorcas quailed, in that shrill, wobbling voice of hers.

‘Dorcas, this cannot go on! I understand that Mr Alleyn is not an easy man to serve, but serve him you
do
, and those rooms must be cleaned at some point. The stink in there is starting to crawl out underneath the door, for heaven’s sake. There must be some forgotten dinner plate or something in there, going foul. At least go up and find what it is, and clear it out. Throw the windows open for as long as you can . . .’

‘But he has devilish things in there, Mrs Hatton –
wrong
things!’

‘There’s nothing in there that can hurt you. You know as well as I do how rare it is for Mr Alleyn to come downstairs. We may not have this chance again for some time . . .’

Starling blinked, unsure whether she’d heard correctly, then she rushed inside to where the two women were standing.

‘I’ll do it, Mrs Hatton,’ she said hurriedly.

‘Thank you, Starling, but really, Dorcas is the housemaid, and she must—’

‘Is he truly come downstairs?’ she interrupted.

‘That he is. He has a visitor.’ There was interest in Mrs Hatton’s voice, however much she tried to hide it. For a moment the three women stared at one another in wonder at this unlikely turn of events.

‘I’ll see to his rooms,’ said Starling, and went up the stairs on nimble feet.

She crept over to the parlour door and listened for a moment, to check that it was true. Sure enough, Starling heard three voices within – Jonathan Alleyn, his mother, and another female voice that she didn’t recognise. She wasted no time wondering but hurried on, climbing the stairs two steps at a time. The visit might be short, and even if it wasn’t Jonathan might conclude his part of it at any moment. She burst into his rooms, holding her breath, and ran to open the shutters and the windows. The smell was quite awful. Grudgingly, Starling hooked the remains of the rat out from under his desk with the poker, and cast it into the fire. She could still be cleaning his rooms when he came back up, that would cause no outrage; she could not be caught searching them, however. Opportunities to do so were precious rare, since he spent so much of his time ensconced within. Even when he’d passed out with drink, she didn’t dare. He woke with the ease of a soldier, as readily as a guard dog. Several times she’d been sifting silently through the papers on his desk, only to look up and find his eyes on her, watchful and unblinking. She shivered at the memory. His silent scrutiny was somehow worse than his rages. Starling had no idea where he kept the letters. He had all of Alice’s letters, she was sure of it – the ones she had written to him, as well as the ones he had written to her; the ones she’d kept in her rosewood box, which had vanished from her room right after she had.
Right after he killed her.

She opened the drawers of his desk in turn, running her fingers through the contents. Papers and journals; bills, receipts and military missives; small instruments like magnifying glasses and tweezers, and other things she could not guess the purpose of. One drawer was filled with tiny metal pieces – cogs, wheels, screws and spindles. It rattled as if full of money when Starling opened it, and she frowned, pausing to listen for any sound of his approach. Her heart thumped in her ears, sounding like footsteps. She continued to search until the desk was exhausted, but there was no sign of the rosewood box, or of a bundle of letters. Cursing, Starling went to the shelves next, which were laden with books and more strange instruments, and the glass specimen jars that so terrified Dorcas.

Jonathan had acquired them some years earlier. He’d gone to watch the dissections of several human cadavers at the hospital, though his mother declared such things an abomination; he’d been friends, for a while, with one of the doctors she sent to see him, who had dark theories about opening the skulls of living patients. Then the jars had started to appear – pale shapes preserved in alcohol solutions. A two-headed piglet, all wrinkled and white; a grey thing of wriggling, convoluted ridges, with two halves and a stem, which reminded Starling of the huge fungi that sometimes grew on the floodplain at Bathampton; a tiny creature that almost resembled a human baby, though its head was far too big and its body too small, and its eyes were nothing but large dark shadows either side of the translucent stub of a nose. The liquid in the jars sloshed as Starling reached her questing hands behind them, and her skin crawled away from them. She did not like to think about their origins, or how they would smell if the lids were opened up.

Then, from beneath her feet came the unmistakable sound of the parlour door opening, and footsteps in the hallway. Desperately, Starling returned to the desk and scrabbled through the jumbled papers and detritus on top of it. She nicked her finger on a scalpel, and left a drop of her blood on the blade. She heard the click of boot heels on the stone stairs. Then she saw a letter, just one; unsealed, the paper dog-eared and wrinkled. She stuffed it into her pocket and rushed into the bedchamber, where she was shaking up the eiderdown as Jonathan Alleyn came back into his rooms. Starling held her breath. He stopped as soon as he was through the door, as if trying to work out what was different, then turned his head towards the open shutters, the raised windows. She waited for the barked command for her to close them, but to her surprise Jonathan walked slowly over to the curving bay window, and stood in front of it, looking out at the damp, crisp autumn day.

Starling cleared all the dirty plates and glasses, all the empty bottles and filthy clothing from the room. She emptied the night soil from the pot, swept the floor and rubbed the furniture, relaid the fire and replaced all the candles. And all the while she could feel the letter in her pocket, swinging with her skirt, threatening to rustle and give her away. She itched to make her escape, to find a private place, and read it. When she was done she thought to just slip away, but at the doorway she paused. Curiosity gnawed at her, almost as strong as the urge to read the letter she’d stolen. Cautiously, Starling walked up behind Jonathan. He had not moved from his place by the open window, and stood with his arms hanging limply by his sides.

‘Sir? Should I close them up now?’ she asked. Jonathan did not reply. She stepped a little closer and peered around at his face. His eyes were shut and he was breathing as slowly and deeply as one asleep. Was it possible to sleep on your feet? Starling wasn’t sure. A moist breeze scurried in from outside, and pushed at his hair and the untidy loops of his cravat. It smelled of wet grass, of damp stone and mushrooms – of the deep autumn that had settled over England. It was cold enough to pucker Starling’s arms into gooseflesh, but Jonathan looked almost serene. At once, she thought of ten different ways she could rouse him, anger him, disturb him. But she did none of them; she had the letter to read, so she slipped quietly from the room and went down to the coal cellar for privacy.

Rachel halted as the Alleyns’ front door closed behind her, and took a deep lungful of fresh, chilly air. She could hear the distant bleating of sheep on the high common, the tuneless clank of the bell-wether’s clapper, leading the herd. If she shut her eyes it was almost like being out of the city entirely, like being at Hartford Hall, perhaps; at the far end of the long oak avenue that ran, straight as an arrow, across the parkland. For a moment she longed to be there, to walk with the illusion of never having to return to any of it – her old job at Hartford, or her new job as Mrs Weekes. The thought troubled her. She opened her eyes to reality with a sinking feeling inside. Her second meeting with Jonathan Alleyn had been almost as unsettling as the first, especially in its outcome; for although there’d been none of the violence and peril of before, that time she had left convinced that she would never return, whereas now she was leaving having pledged to. Her throat was as dry as paper, and she swallowed with an effort; she felt strangely light-headed, and her thoughts refused to coalesce. Stepping into the house behind her felt like stepping out of time and place; into a world where the rules she was so familiar with no longer applied, and anything might happen. It was exhausting. She put a steadying hand on the railings as she descended the steps at last.