The Penny Heart (54 page)

It was too late. Peg’s light returned, illuminating raw meat and dead pairs of eyes. I could sense Peg rather than see her; she moved very quietly about the far side of the room, opening and closing the doors of the cages.

‘Is that my little boy?’ she said from the other side of the larder. ‘Where have you hidden him?’

I risked retreating backwards, pushing past a sticky, raw carcass. I expected at any moment to feel the hard wall behind me.

‘I can see you. And hear my little boy.’

Could she see me? The lantern beam swung ever closer, hurting my eyes. Behind the raw carcass was another, this one wrapped in cloth. My hand groped backwards, hopelessly praying to find some means of escape – a door, a cupboard, anything. Then I glimpsed a second tiny light behind Peg. In the outline of the door a bent-backed figure hovered in silhouette. It was Nan. Though only a frail little woman, her light brought me a grain of comfort. I was no longer alone with Peg.

‘You will never leave,’ Peg crooned in my direction. ‘For I am you, Grace Croxon.’

One of her hands held the lantern, while the other lay stiff and useless against her side. She set the light down on the butcher’s block, and with her one good hand, took out the knife.

‘So you will soon be dead.’

Pinpoints of fear prickled over my skin. Warily, she began to search, edging ever closer to the rack of hanging meats where I was hidden.

Terror drove me backwards. I pushed myself behind the cloth-covered carcass. My scrabbling fingers found something peculiar. A disc of bone? No. A button. I explored further. A piece of what felt like lace. My hand reached backwards and – could it be? – was clasped by another human hand – only this hand was as cold as the grave. I stifled the scream that threatened to burst from my throat. Instead, barely able to breathe, I explored further. I found a mass of wiry human hair. Glad of my tallness, I reached around the corpse and found the iron hook that suspended what I suddenly knew with absolute certainty was Mrs Harper’s gown. Then, I held that poor soul’s corpse in front of me like a shield.

I knew my plan would only work if I waited until Peg stood just before me. I held my nerve, and my breath, as she swung the carcass of venison aside. Now she was no more than a few paces in front of me. I saw her pale hand reach forward, grasp the next blood-raw carcass and pull that aside. In a moment she would discover me.

Let her see what is not there, I prayed. Her distance from the weak beams of the lamp was in my favour, as was her injury and intoxication. There she stood, only inches in front of me; leaning forward, her head questing this way and that. A skull-like shadow masked most of her face. The glint of her eyes widened in triumph as she saw before her a woman in black that might have been me, her head bowed, cowering before her. Peg swung back her good arm and struck with the knife as I clasped the corpse before me, like a sandbag absorbing the blows of a cutlass. Blow after blow fell upon us. Even though Mrs Harper’s poor body took most of the force of Peg’s attack, still her fury almost knocked me backwards. But I thought of Henry, hidden beneath my cloak and discovered the strength of a lioness. All about us the smell of death was stifling; a sweet but foul putrescence. Then at last Peg exhaled a victorious groan, stood back, and dropped the knife.

‘Now where’s my little boy,’ she sighed, looking about herself as if waking from a drunken sleep.

With vicious speed I threw Mrs Harper’s body towards Peg. What she thought when that cadaver sprang at her from the darkness I will never know. She screamed, as if in horrified recognition, her hands raised to her face. Clumsily, she tripped backwards onto the stone flags and tumbled with a loud gasp and crack. Sprawling on the floor, she tried to kick the corpse away. In the corner of my eye, I saw Nan creep into the room. Then, as casually as if she were butchering a rabbit, Nan retrieved the knife from the floor where Peg had dropped it.

‘No!’ I cried. Peg was still groaning, half-stunned from her fall as Nan rose over her, the knife wavering in her palsied hands. With all that old woman’s strength she drove the blade fast into her tormentor’s chest, with a wet noise like a butcher at his block. Peg made an unnatural choking sound and her head arched backwards. Then her face froze in death; her eyes glassy, her mouth fixed open. My adversary lay felled with my gown ridden high to her knees and one shoe half-off, like a drab collapsed in an alley.

I crumpled to the floor, my breath in hoarse rushes, cradling Henry, who protested as I hugged him and kissed his precious face.

‘Come here, Nan,’ I said, once I grew a little calmer. She came over to me and we gripped hands, both of us trembling like leaves. Her poor bruised arm reached out and touched Henry’s head like a talisman. ‘I heard the bairn cry,’ she said in a tremulous voice. ‘And I weren’t going to let that she-devil near him.’ Looking over her shoulder at the rumpled horror of Peg’s corpse, she said, ‘That were the best day’s butcherin’ I ever done.’ Then I laughed bitterly, for I could not believe such a terrible test of my strength had ended.

Footsteps approached from the passage. It was Michael, wild-haired and pale, like a wraith of the man I had married. Nevertheless at the sight of him, the man I had once loved, the father of my new child, I felt a sudden shameful need for him. I called to him and opened my arms. But he had eyes only for Peg, lying splayed on the floor. He knelt at her side, breaking into unmanly sobs of a kind I had never heard before. I watched his cheeks grow wet while I attended to Henry. So Peg had won this final battle. Only after a long spell did he even notice me.

‘That baby.’ He approached me, thin and hollow-eyed. ‘Is it mine?’

I felt near to expiring with weariness. ‘What? Like the money and the land, you mean? Yours? No, I don’t believe he is, in that sense. I gave birth to him alone. And I’ll care for him alone. You’d better get rid of her.’ I pointed at Peg’s corpse.

‘But where?’ he asked, in a self-pitying tone. I looked at him with disgust.

‘Just think of somewhere to bury her. Unless you want me to send for a magistrate? I want my son to know nothing about this, ever.’

A clinging drizzle fell, but the long night was ending: a luminous smudge was growing at the eastern horizon. As I drove the pony trap through the gloom, nothing looked or felt quite real – yet a febrile energy pushed me continually onward. I was dimly aware of a deadness in my fingers and toes, and the sensation of floating through the muffled landscape. The fear that had beaten against me like a frantic bird was subsiding. I had never felt more resolute.

‘Why did you sell my land?’ I asked my husband in a tone as frigid as the air.

‘That was her idea.’

‘Naturally it was.’

‘Most of the money is in my strongbox upstairs. I shall give it back to you.’

‘Of course you will. You stole it.’

Michael began to jabber, attempting to explain himself. ‘You cannot know what it was like – you cannot. That first time I met her, something extraordinary happened. After she fleeced that pound note from Peter – I was angry, but it was more than that. She ran away, and at first I lost her. I found myself inside a mansion. It was like falling into an enchanted world.Red and green lanterns lit my way, and a fountain ran with wine. And the devil was in me to find that girl.

‘She was up on the roof, hiding in the lines of laundry. I cornered her against a wall and she threw Peter’s pound note at my feet. “Take it,” she said. “Now let me go.”’

I glanced at him, a hunched outline beside me.

‘I didn’t want to let her go. The way she pressed herself against the wall; her head back, her throat open, her eyes penetrating mine. She knew me better than I knew myself.’

He fell silent, and I knew he relived the enchantment of that moment. ‘Go on,’ I demanded, wanting to hear him, but also wanting to end this torture of not knowing, at last.

‘She lifted her skirt to her knees, laughing in that throaty way of hers. I grasped her skirts in my fists and lifted them higher. Then, from nowhere, a slap stung my face. I reeled back. She was laughing at me, at my discomposure. “You deserve a slap, you filthy devil,” she said. I was so angry I reached out to shake her, to pull her to me. This time she whispered in my ear, “I know a private place. I’ll show you who is mistress.” And she grasped my hair, jerked my head back, and made me look into her face. She was as strong as an Amazon. “You may serve me only if you swear to obey me.” And there it was. She knew the clockwork of my soul – how to make it run faster, make it spin, make it stop dead and tremble.

‘However hard I battled against this – this vice, Peg understood me. I told you, it began with that monster at school. At first he protected me from other boys, from bullies, he let me make free in his apartments. Then he began to whisper of cruelties, of lewdness – no. I cannot speak of it. And never, ever, of what he did to me. I tried, truly I have tried to conquer it. But for solitary years I’d longed for such a fierce mistress as her. She hit me again, and I was hers.

‘“Where is this private place?” I asked.

‘“Where is it,
Mistress
,” she insisted.

‘Then, to my eternal frustration, we were interrupted by that magistrate and his constable. I was in an agony. And that damned magistrate wouldn’t let up, goading me to charge her.’

‘And Peg?’

He muttered quietly, ‘It was not very pleasant, you know. She begged me. Said she would be hanged.’ His voice grew strident. ‘I thought it would be better for the law to have her. At least that way I could save myself.’

‘Oh yes? You would have seen her hanged. Yet when she was reprieved you visited her? In that vile cell.’ I was near to spitting with fury.

‘She begged to see me before she was transported. But when I saw her it was again like falling through that trapdoor into another world. I paid to be alone with her. I was helpless. Pain, pleasure – I lost all reason.

‘She had hopes of a retrial; there was some crooked lawyer involved. But it worried me, it would attract unwelcome attention if I suddenly changed my testimony. I realised that all I had to do was never go back to her. The law would pack her off to Botany Bay, and that would be the end of it. Seven years was such a long time that I persuaded myself she would never come back. So the day I was supposed to visit her, I found a tavern and got dead drunk instead. God help me, I paid for that.

‘A few weeks later I got that token in my post. Love token? It was a curse. Every day it pressed like an iron weight upon my mind. I fell into despondency, only my parents prevented me from taking my life. Still I hoped, I prayed, that she would never return – for no one ever did return from Botany Bay, did they? But three years later, she found me again and I knew it was the end. She hunted me down; lay in wait for me here, in the empty hall, at Delafosse. Those weeks before you came – I surrendered to my true nature. I’d have beggared myself for her. You do understand, I was in her hands; I wanted to be at her mercy, her willing servant. She wasn’t a kind mistress. She told me about Moncrieff, she heard some servant gossip, laughed at my misery – until I had to destroy that room that taunted me with its hypocrisy.’

He looked over, towards me, his eyes huge and beseeching. ‘But Grace, I wouldn’t let her hurt you. Once she’d got the key to your box and your money, I begged her to leave you unharmed. That charade at Christmas Eve – it was a favour to you, she thought it amusing to let you live, so long as you changed your name and never came back.’ He pulled a dark bottle from his pocket and took a long draw.

‘What is that? A mind-fogging potion of hers? Don’t you see how she has destroyed you?’ I snatched the bottle from him and threw it hard onto the road where it smashed with a satisfying crock.

Michael glanced back at where it had landed and said plaintively, ‘I’ll try, Grace. Now I’ve come to my senses again. Thank God you are home. We’ll settle down again. I’ll be respectable again, a good father to Henry.’

He smiled at me, a weak ridiculous smile; but at my shrivelling glance, his next words died on his tongue.

‘Once you have done what you need to do, Michael, I wish never to see your cowardly face again.’

The gate to Whitelow pastures hung from its post. The rain still fell across the ruined landscape, in quivering grey sheets. A quagmire of mud stretched before us. The pleasant green pastures of my land had been destroyed, first by the attempt to build the mill, and then by the arsonists’ efforts to destroy it. The charred ruins of a few low walls were all that remained. Fearful of the gig’s wheels sinking, I halted beneath a dripping tree and we both alighted.

Michael doggedly fetched Mrs Harper’s ruined body, wrapped in a meagre blanket. Old and new wounds punctured her shrunken frame, and her once-modest gown hung in ribbons. For a moment her poor withered face hung upside down, and to my perplexity, I believed I recognised her.