The Misbegotten (39 page)

It was weeks before Jonathan was well enough for life, such as it was in that house, to go on. He was skin and bones when Starling next saw him, appallingly thin. Death’s head upon a mop stick. His sunken face was that of a stranger, and when he saw her shock he smiled bitterly.

‘What’s the matter, Starling? Don’t you like to see me suffer?’ The smile crumbled away; he hung his head. ‘If Alice could see me now,’ he whispered. ‘If she could . . .’

‘If she could see you now she would despise you,’ said Starling, knowing it was not true. She fled into his bedchamber, stood in darkness to catch her breath. The loud sound of breaking glass called her back out. Jonathan was a soldier; he knew which wounds bled the worst. He’d stabbed the bottle into the top of his thigh, near his groin, and his leg was already glossy with blood. For a second, Starling did nothing. For a second, she held the power of his life and death in her hands, and it filled her mind with fire, and rang in her ears.
No. You shan’t rest.
She ran forwards, splayed her hands across the wound, shouted so loudly for help that it made her throat ache.

Rachel Weekes gasped; a sharp intake of breath as though she’d been slapped.

‘He said I was wilfully stupid,’ she said quietly. ‘Perhaps he was right.’ She shook her head. ‘How great must his torment have been, to do such a thing? How deep his wounds must go.’ Her words brought Starling back to the present, with the memory of that moment hurting her throat anew.

‘What wounds he has he gave to himself. It is his guilt that torments him; and that violence is his
true
self – any gentility is but a mask.’

‘Perhaps so.’ Mrs Weekes looked sad, and seemed to think for a moment. ‘He himself would argue that conclusion, I think.’

‘Well, then – oughtn’t he to know?’ said Starling. There was a pause.

‘Mr Alleyn has begun to talk to me, at least. To confide in me. He has begun to tell me about the war,’ said Rachel Weekes, hurriedly, as if she couldn’t bear the empty air.

‘About the war? What use is that? You must make him confide in you about
Alice.
The war did not sit well with him, that much we all know. He came back mad and violent, that much we all know. Countless other men came back and managed to continue with their lives without resorting to the murder of innocents.’

‘Did they?’

‘Aye! Better, stronger men than he, I think.’

‘Or less moral ones, some of them; less impressionable ones.’

‘What is this? Why do you try to make him a poor lost lamb? I’ve known him near all my life, Mrs Weekes, so do not seek to tell me what he is!’ said Starling, feeling horribly unnerved each time the woman spoke. It was like looking down from a high place, a feeling of losing balance, teetering. She couldn’t trace the cause of it, so she summoned anger to burn it away, and had the satisfaction of seeing Rachel Weekes flinch.
She would turn my head, if she could. She would make me doubt the things I know
.

‘I don’t forget that. I only . . . I only tell you how I find him,’ she said quietly.

‘Then perhaps you are a poor judge of character, and situation, and should not pretend you can be of help to me; or to Alice.’ Starling glared at her, and Mrs Weekes drew her shoulders back, taking a breath.

‘I can be of help. I want to know what happened to Alice.’

Starling thought for a moment before she next spoke, gazing at the garden wall.

‘I read a letter of his – one he wrote to Alice from Spain, before he came back from the war the first time. Before he came back and . . . killed her.’

‘And did you not find the others, with that letter?’

‘No, it was on his desk, by itself. It must have been the last letter he wrote to her. In it he spoke of the shame he felt – that he had done bad things, and that if she knew them she would love him no more.’

‘Yes. I believe he has seen and done much that haunts him.’

‘I hope it haunts him! I hope he sees her ghost in every dark corner of the room!’
And I wish I did. I wish I saw her too.
‘If he speaks to you of the war, then try to find this out. Try to find out what he did that shamed him so, that first year of the war. I think he told Alice, and she could not accept it.’

‘I’ll try. He . . .’ Rachel Weekes broke off, swallowing hard. ‘He has told me things lately that made my blood run cold. Things he saw, the way the war was waged on the common people of the peninsula, as well as between the opposing armies.’

‘It’s never a pretty thing, I’ve heard tell.’ Starling nodded. ‘I have met soldiers old and new, and when they drink, they drink to forget.’

‘Who did you take food to, the week before last?’ Rachel Weekes suddenly burst out.

‘What?’ said Starling, startled. A rosy blush swept up from Mrs Weekes’s neck.

‘I . . . I saw you, in the city. That is to say . . .’

‘Oh yes.’ Starling fixed her with a flat glare. ‘I’ve not forgotten that you told on me, to Sol Bradbury. Tattled on me for thieving.’

‘Weren’t you thieving?’ Rachel Weekes retorted, flustered. ‘I . . . I thought to do the right thing, in reporting it,’ she said.

‘Shows what you know about rights and wrongs, doesn’t it? And Dick said you’d seen me take a boat. Why did you follow me?’

‘I just . . . I happened to see you in the street, and I was curious. I saw you board a barge and go out of the city, and I—’

‘And you what?’

‘I envied you.’ The words were little more than a whisper, and somehow they made all the ire in Starling melt away. She smiled, though she didn’t quite know what pleased her.

‘You
envied
me?’ she echoed, and shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t say so if you’d smelled Dan Smithers’s breath close to.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Rachel Weekes, with a cautious smile of her own.
Do I frighten her?

‘I took it to an old acquaintance, fallen on hard times.’ Starling paused, considering, before adding: ‘One who knew Alice of old. Perhaps the only other person but me that recalls her fondly. That recalls her at all, outside of this household.’

‘Will you go again to this acquaintance?’

‘I daresay I will, in due course.’

‘Could I go with you?’ Again there was that urgency to the woman, that keenness that Starling did not quite understand, or trust.

‘Why would you want to? It would bring down your husband’s wrath, if he found you out.’

‘He will not . . .’ This was spoken with less certainty. ‘I will be careful.’

‘But why would you want to? It’s a cold journey at this time of year.’

‘I want to . . . be free of the city for a while. And I want to talk to another person who knew Alice. It might help me to understand her better,’ she said. Starling considered her for a moment. She suddenly saw that Mrs Weekes needed something, very badly, but Starling had yet to divine what that thing might be. She shook her head.

‘You want to understand her? She’s dead, Mrs Weekes. You can’t know her now, I fear. You’re too late.’ Her own words made Starling pause; they grazed the raw edges of her own grief. ‘You speak as though you’re infatuated with her, and yet you never saw her, nor spoke to her.’

‘I see her in the mirror, you forget. And I see her in your words, and in . . . the words of others.’

‘Differing accounts indeed, I am sure.’

‘Truly. And I must know the truth, if I can find it out.’

‘To what end though?’ Starling pressed, doggedly. But it seemed that Rachel Weekes had no answer to this question. After a pause, and with a pleading look in her eyes, she said:

‘I could bring food. I could bring meat and bread, to pay for my presence on the visit.’

‘Very well.’ Starling relented.
It could do no harm to me, surely? She risks more by it.
‘I will go again next Monday night, at around five in the evening.’

‘On All-Hallows’ Eve?’

‘Are you afraid of ghosts, Mrs Weekes?’

‘I think it might be wise to be.’

‘That is the arranged time, though. Meet me over the bridge, on the south wharf. And don’t be late, because I won’t wait if Smithers is ready to depart. It’s a wearying walk in the dark, if the boat has gone.’ Mrs Weekes looked pleased enough at this, and though Starling kept a stern face as she turned away, she found that she didn’t mind the idea of having the tall woman’s company on the dark and joyless trip along the canal.

In the kitchen at the farmhouse, there was a suspended, ringing moment after Starling blurted out Alice’s and Jonathan’s secret. When it ended she was sent upstairs, but she did not quite go all the way. She sank into the same spot by the banisters from which she’d first seen Jonathan and Lord Faukes, though it was harder for her to fit there than it had been, and there was such a restlessness in all her limbs it was near impossible to remain quiet or still. For a long time, Alice only wept, and that was the hardest thing of all to bear. She wept with a kind of frantic need that prevented Bridget from saying anything at all. Starling heard the scrape of chair legs on the kitchen floor, and the kettle coming to the boil on the range.

‘Alice, child, stop now,’ said Bridget, after several long minutes. ‘Take a deep breath, slowly now. Be calm, be calm. Take a sip of tea.’ She heard the trembling rattle of a china cup in its saucer.

‘Bridget, you must not tell him! Promise me! Please, I beg you, for he will prevent us from ever seeing one another if you do, and he will like as not cast us out and we will have nothing and be ruined! And I will never see him again!’ Alice gabbled.

‘All this you knew, and yet you continued your liaison – you indulged your feelings, and encouraged them to grow. All this you knew, and also that I am employed by Lord Faukes, and must obey his commands.’ Bridget spoke heavily, wearily.

‘I indulged my feelings, and encouraged them to grow? No, I am
compelled
by my feelings, Bridget! You must know, you must understand . . . haven’t you ever been in love?’ Alice’s voice was shaking. Starling knew she would be pale, wild-eyed.
Do not let her take one of her turns because of what I said.

‘I fancied I was once, and it was no more prudent than this love you have for young Mr Alleyn. My father stepped in and prevented our becoming too attached to each other, and before I had shamed myself publicly. It was a painful separation, I shan’t deny it. But now I see the sense of it, and you must see the sense of removing your affections from Mr Alleyn.’

‘The sense? No, I see no sense in that! I see no sense in separating, or being kept apart, when our souls are wound tight together and have been these many years! You must have seen it? You must have known the way we feel for each other?’

‘I’ve known it, yes. Anyone with eyes in their head would know it, seeing you together in the same room. Even Lord Faukes knows it, though he does not know you would disobey him like this, and meet with his grandson in secret – as I did not know it. Alice, what were you thinking? He is engaged to another! And even if he were not, he is destined to make a fine marriage, into a noble family.’

‘Would I not make a fine wife for him?’ said Alice, in a tone of such misery that Starling couldn’t stand it.

‘You are as fine to me and those that know you as any high-born lady, Alice, but that is not the way the world works, and no amount of love or wishing will ever change it. You have no name. You have no family, and no fortune. Jonathan is the son of a noble lady.’

‘He does not love Beatrice Fallonbrooke! And he will
not
marry her; he has sworn it to me. These past three years, he has tried to remove himself from the engagement. Only his honour and duty to the lady prevent him from renouncing her publicly.’

‘His honour? How honourable is it to lead you a dance like this, and break your heart, when he knows he cannot wed you? He will be cut off if he does. You would have nothing, and nowhere to go. All doors would close to you.’

‘If we were wed, I would happily live under a hedge with him!’

‘Foolish girl! Think!
Think
about what would happen!’

There was a long silence. Starling didn’t dare breathe, and her chest burned. Her pulse was thumping painfully in her head; she tried shutting her eyes but it only got worse.

‘Please don’t tell him,’ Alice whispered then.

‘I am duty bound to. He will separate you, I fear. We will be moved away, too far for any secret meetings to take place.’ Bridget’s voice was flat, unhappy.

‘Moved away? No!
Please
, Bridget . . . I won’t survive it.’

‘You’ll survive it because you’ll have to. What choice is there? Be grateful it was me Starling told on you to, and not Lord Faukes . . . I don’t know what would happen if he found out the full story.’ Bridget’s voice was laced with warning. In the silence that fell again, Starling heard Alice draw in a deep, gulping breath. She thought then about running down to the kitchen, throwing herself down in front of them and saying something,
anything
, to undo what she had done, and mean their lives would not be turned upside down, and Alice’s heart broken. She found that not a single muscle in her body would respond to the command. The numbness of sheer panic held her, and her shame was like a heavy weight pushing down on her.

‘Believe me, I would rather not have to leave this house. We have been comfortable here, these twenty years . . .’ Bridget muttered then. Alice gave a gasp.

‘Then do not tell, dear Bridget! Pretend as though nothing has changed! As though Starling had not spoken, or I had denied it all and you believed me!’

‘I can’t do that . . . if it were found out . . .’

‘It will not be! How could it be?’ Alice’s voice was bright with desperate hope. ‘Don’t shake your head, Bridget – tell me you will stay silent, and we can remain here in Bathampton, and all will be as it was before!’

‘Alice! This is not a game!’ Bridget cried. ‘Lord Faukes loves you, and has always been gentle with you. But make no mistake, he is a powerful man, and he will have things his way. I have seen how he deals with those who defy him . . . And in the not trifling matter of his grandson’s marriage? You wouldn’t be able to throw yourself into his lap and weep your way out of that one, mark my words.’