The key in the lock, p.20
The Key In the Lock, page 20
Agnes must have heard me, for she asked me if I was well, twice, through the wall.
I did not answer.
When my breathing slowed, I crept around, putting my things into my bag. Not knowing what to do with the ring, I hid it in the pocket of my coat. But I knew I could not go. I could not leave Agnes. I sat on the bed. Slowly, I calmed. I could not pretend, any longer, that my feelings for Edward had disappeared. The brush with Tremain had given me a horrible reminder of his tyranny, and it occurred to me, now, for the first time, that perhaps Edward was scared.
But whatever he was, and whatever the state of his promises to Miss Myers might be, I knew I must put my feelings for him aside. Agnes must be cleared, and Tremain brought down, and there was only me to do it. I must have sat thinking for some time, for when a tap came at my door, it was Mrs Bly with a dinner tray.
‘This is hers,’ she said. ‘Are you coming down for yours? Mr Edward’s back. I fear he’s had his hopes dashed. He took his tray straight up to his room. But then a telegram’s come, and the master’s in a fearful mood, says he must go to Falmouth in the morning, and I don’t know now whether to trouble Mr Edward with it …’
She stopped, looked at me. I suppose I looked pale.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bly. I’m not hungry,’ I said. I took the tray. ‘I’ll take this in.’
When she had gone, I unlocked Agnes’s door. I waited for her to sit up, then put down the tray in her lap, and lifted the cover. Duck, in a sauce. Some silly, fancy turned carrots. Agnes picked a carrot and put it in her mouth before reaching for her fork. I put the dish cover aside on the chest of drawers, but when I turned back Agnes was quite still, not chewing. Then she spat out what was in her mouth, on to the plate.
‘What?’ I said.
Agnes looked up, pulling the back of her hand across her mouth. She looked almost triumphant. ‘It’s been mucked about with.’ She spat again, and at last swallowed.
I took the tray from her, and as soon as I did, she drew up her knees and held them. I put the tray on the chest of drawers, and sniffed the plate myself. Put a finger to the surface, licked it.
Bitter.
I spat in turn, into the plate. It was saltpetre, like they put in the powder. Not a poison; they put it in sailors’ food, sometimes. To kill lust.
Not a poisoning. A warning.
I met Agnes’s eyes, and tried to ignore the chill that was going through me. There was no ghost at Polneath: or, if there was, it had not tampered with a piece of duck and some carrots. Whatever I might once have thought about the nightshirt or the gun room, this could not have been Agnes, and I thought of Mrs Bly’s frank chatter, when she’d brought up the tray. I did not believe this was her, either.
This was Tremain.
I drew the stool closer, and sat down. ‘I told Mr Edward,’ I said. ‘About you and Tremain.’
Agnes looked at me. She swallowed. ‘Did he believe it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know you didn’t want anyone told. But believe me, Mr Edward holds little love for his father. I thought he would help us –’ I stopped. ‘But he was reluctant to speak against him.’ I looked into my lap. ‘He says he must think of the mills. He believes that there is not enough evidence, that there will be an open verdict, that there is no risk to you.’ I put a hand on Agnes, on her leg, over the blanket. ‘You could speak out, anyway.’
We both sat still a moment.
‘Nobody would take my word, over Tremain’s,’ she said. ‘And with Boscawen finding the key –’ She was silent for a moment.
I gripped her leg more fiercely. ‘There will be some other proof,’ I said. ‘There must be. I’m going to help you …’ I paused. ‘Can you think of nothing, nothing else we might use?’
She didn’t answer.
We sat like that, for some time.
I asked her if she’d have me go down and find her something else to eat, but she told me she wasn’t hungry. After a while, I locked her safely in, and went back to William’s room.
The wind was getting up, loud in the chimneys. Edward was back. But I must not think of him, I must not expect his help. I had one day, and then the inquest. One day to save Agnes. In the morning, I would go to Father at last. I would tell him all of it, and he would know what to do.
It was cold in William’s room. To comfort myself, I took out my letter from Edith, and opened it. My Christmas present.
My dear Ivy,
You will forgive, first of all, how late this is. You do forgive me, don’t you, sweetheart? For I know we said I would not write during the honeymoon, but I have been back a month now, as you very well know, and so all I can do is throw up my hands and confess myself guilty, for I have no good excuse but lack of time …
She implored me to visit in the spring. The spring; as if that existed, would roll around again, as it had in other years.
What is more, when you come, I can give you your presents. I got you a little glass horse in Venice and I have brought you a piece of the Colosseum. John said I oughtn’t, but really it is a very small one. Truly, Ivy, Italy is everything we used to speak of. The food is marvellous, and it costs almost nothing. I am quite sunburned.
I folded the letter. I felt further away from Edith than London, than Venice. Further away than the moon.
I thought of Boscawen. Edith had had two sisters to leave behind her at the rectory, and her mother alive, her father still working. She had been free to marry away.
I undressed, and climbed into William’s little bed. With the moan of the wind, I almost thought I heard the sound of a hoop, up and down, up and down in the passage outside. And that was when I realized it: the yellow nightshirt, the black shape on the gun room table, the strange taste in Agnes’s dinner.
Yellow sulphur. Black charcoal. Saltpetre. Gunpowder’s three components.
What had seemed like hauntings were nothing of the kind. William was gone. But his grandfather still thought he could silence Agnes by putting a bitter taste in her mouth.
At last I slept, and dreamed that years had passed, and I had forgotten to let Agnes out. I dreamed of Agnes, her hair flecked with white. Like an illustration I’d seen in a book once, with cobwebs woven over her brimstone-yellow mouth and eyes.
18.
I waited, in the morning, until I had seen Tremain leaving on foot for the Falmouth ferry. After another half an hour, I took Agnes’s uneaten dinner out in her chamber pot. Finding the kitchen empty, I took bread and cheese to last Agnes the day, trying to smile in reassurance as I handed it over. Then I locked her door, and crept down the north stair. I set out for home the front way, so that Edward might not see me from his study window.
As I walked, I felt shaky, hollowed out. Father would know what to do. I didn’t wish to burden him, tax his strength, but now I had no choice. I put my hands in my pockets, to warm them, and there was the ring: I must find a time, I thought, today while Tremain was out of the house, to drop it somewhere, in the pink bedroom.
Home looked odd, as I approached it. Even two days had made it different. Smaller, and its shortcomings more visible. The bleary panes of the little window high up at the turn of the stair, and the moss on the front path. The boot brush at the front door, worn and splayed past usefulness. Father could just be seen in his bedroom window, wiping his face with a towel.
The window of the consulting room was open, admitting the freezing December air. Father fairly lived in his consulting room, usually; he had an easy chair, where he read the Lancet in the eleven o’clock sun, and ate humbugs slowly from a brown paper bag, and if the heat was particularly insistent and no patient had called, slept. But now I realized what the open window meant. I was drawn helplessly towards it. Through the gap I caught the sharp scent of rubbing alcohol, and was reminded for a moment of Tremain.
There were tools laid out, in a metal tray – messy – and I looked away from them. Nearer there was the white hummock of William, covered in a sheet, mercifully clean. I could only see below his knees, his pale shins smudged with ash, his feet flopping outward, relaxed.
The thought of ghosts seemed foolish now. Here he was, real enough.
When I went in at the front door, Mrs Humphrey bustled out instantly and held my shoulders, asked whether they had been feeding me, exclaimed over the state of my hands and waved me into the parlour where there was a good fire. She appeared again, a minute or two later, with a large tray of tea, and currant buns. She put down the tray, and then twitched it so that it was squarer to the table. Mrs Humphrey never scowled when she was angry, only when she was nervous.
Looking at the buns, I realized how hungry I was.
‘How is he?’
‘He’s washing. I made him stop for a bit,’ Mrs Humphrey said.
‘He had a turn yesterday morning. When he came to Polneath.’
She nodded. ‘He couldn’t keep it to himself – I saw Mr Edward running to the King’s Arms, and then when he came back in their gig …’ She paused. ‘I made him rest till lunch, but then he had that to do.’ She nodded in the direction of the consulting room. ‘That Graves was here last evening. For his second opinion.’ She frowned. ‘I didn’t take to him.’
‘Didn’t you?’ I said, and smiled.
And Mrs Humphrey tutted, but smiled too, and told me to make sure Father had a bit of something, and bustled out.
For a minute I watched the tea steaming, the fire crackling. Garlands of holly and ivy were ranged about the fireplace. I myself had put them there, only days ago. On the mantelpiece was the little silhouette of my mother. Father said that someone had cut it once at a small house party, and they had blunted the tip of her nose – but it did have the look of her. We had no other portrait, but that one had always felt strangely apt, the little trimmed black shape, perhaps especially at that time of year. The dark blank of it, when every chair was a chair she was not sitting in.
Then Father came in, shaking his hands. It was impossible to tell whether they were wet, or troubling him.
‘My dear –’ He came forward to kiss me.
His touch was cold. I held his hands to warm and steady them.
‘Edith’s Rose came looking for you – she has postponed her party.’
‘How are you, Father?’ I held his hands for a moment.
He smiled at me, in a vague fashion. ‘I’m very well, my dear. Don’t fuss.’
I made a dissatisfied face. We sat, and I poured out the tea.
‘I did the examining yesterday. A sad task on Christmas Day, but I thought best not to leave it any longer.’ He gestured towards the consulting room. ‘This is the repair.’
‘Yes,’ I said, adding milk.
When I was a child, the forbidden books had not been novels but the anatomy texts on my father’s high shelf, with their detailed diagrams. I thought of William, in there now, the front of his body parted like curtains. Passing Father his cup, I tried not to examine the beds of his nails.
Somebody laughed, going by in the lane outside. Boxing Day visiting.
‘Did you find anything?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘All healthy,’ he said, sadly. He took a sip of his tea, his eyes gripping the cup until it was back in the saucer. He looked up. ‘His wisdom teeth would have given him trouble.’ Father gazed into his tea, as though he had forgotten I was there, or was thinking of something quite different.
‘Do you not want to know,’ I said, ‘how things are at Polneath?’
Father looked up, then stood. ‘Can I not first give you your Christmas present?’
I put down my cup. ‘My Christmas present?’
He sent me upstairs to fetch his, and I allowed myself a moment, in my bedroom, to breathe.
Back downstairs, I handed Father his little parcel, and he unwrapped it. Handkerchiefs, as usual. He liked new ones. The ivy motif looked childish now. He thanked me and kissed me, and handed me a little parcel in return.
I opened it and something dropped into my palm, heavy and satisfying. It was a hair ornament, in the Chinese style, a pink butterfly. ‘Thank you, Papa,’ I said, and got up to kiss him.
‘That’s not half of it,’ he said, but then he held up a finger, because there was a tap at the front door. Whether with the cold or the gravity of the week’s events, he refrained from putting his head out of the window to see who it was, but went out into the hall.
I looked at the ornament. Edith had had one just like it, a year or so before, and I’d had a kind of mania to own one, too. It seemed a foolish thing, now. I wondered whether Edith had worn hers, since she had been married.
In the hall, someone asked Father a question, and now he was answering. Someone from the village, with those long vowels Edith and I had worked so hard to avoid.
He came back in. I raised my eyebrows, and he said, ‘They’ll keep.’
Swiftly, I poured us out a little more tea. It was rather dark. ‘Father –’
‘Now,’ Father said, ‘the other half.’
I tried to look expectant, and he looked almost grave; nervous, as though he didn’t know how to say the treat. For a moment, I thought of Italy, or Paris at least. Could it be?
He rubbed his hands together. ‘Well. I have put, a certain amount, against an account at a dressmaker in Falmouth. And another certain amount at the milliner’s.’
‘Father,’ I lowered my teacup, smiled as best I could, shaking my head.
‘It’s high time you had nicer things.’
I rose, kissed him. ‘Thank you.’
I never asked for anything new, even though I had heard Mrs Humphrey complaining to Mrs Mason that you could see six inches of ankle in half my dresses, even though everything had been turned and mended twice. But it would be a relief, to have a dress I could hold my head up in.
‘And as regards linen and so on,’ Father said, ‘I thought, Edith could advise you?’
And now I saw the reason for his nerves, and saw what was meant. Nicer things did not mean a new walking dress, or a summer hat less childish and faded. Nicer things meant caps, such as those matrons wear, and bedjackets and pillowcases to be marked with new initials. Nicer things meant my marriage, to Richard Boscawen.
I put my cup down. Suddenly my stomach hurt. ‘Oh, I should think so,’ I replied, broadly, and tried not to hear the false note that had come into my voice. ‘But Father, I must talk to you. I have discovered who lit the fire at Polneath. It is – delicate.’
Father was watching me.
‘It was not Miss Draper. It was Mr Tremain. They were …’
Father closed his eyes. ‘It’s not Jake’s.’ He reached for my arm. ‘Thank God –’
I stopped still. ‘What’s not Jake’s?’
He met my eyes, and I swallowed, studied the tea table.
Agnes was with child.
I thought of her visits to the chamber pot, her inconstant appetite. How, the day before, Father had asked to see her alone.
‘I wish I’d known sooner,’ I said, unable to keep the reproach from my voice.
‘I only confirmed it yesterday morning,’ Father said. ‘I suspected, when I came to check her over before the inquest. But now I am certain.’
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I said. ‘Tremain set the fire. He wanted to be rid of her. Now we know why.’
Father looked down. ‘It’s early, still. Perhaps three or four months.’ He looked rather embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry you should have to begin to discover that such things go on.’
‘Father, that’s not – I mean, I’m shocked, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Mr Edward knows,’ I said quickly. ‘Not about the child, but about the – connection. But he doesn’t believe there is enough evidence. He thinks Agnes will be able to walk free, despite the key Tremain hid in her bed. He thinks the evidence insufficient to convict either her or Tremain, and that if Tremain’s reputation is tarnished then the mills will go, too …’
Father was frowning as I fell silent. ‘Perhaps he’s right.’
‘But she’s with child.’
‘He’ll say that it’s Jake’s.’ Father spread his hands, helplessly.
‘So you mean to do nothing.’
‘My dear,’ he said. ‘You cannot right every wrong.’ He swallowed.
I looked at him, perched nervously on the edge of his chair, his trembling hands holding on to one another.
‘And what about Jake?’ I could have sworn he was about to say what Edward had said. I’m sorry about Jake.
But Father only said, ‘I should be grateful if you would give him my apologies, my dear. I saw him, yesterday – he passed in the lane, just as Dr Graves had taken his leave, and – I’m afraid I spoke rather severely to him. Said he ought to marry her.’
I looked at him. ‘Of course.’
‘My dear –’ he said.
But I got up and went out, closing the door behind me.
In the hall, however, I was caught by Mrs Humphrey, who hauled me into the kitchen, wanted to tell me things and point at things. The washing, dusting, polishing, everything was behind. I felt a rush of fierce fondness as I listened, as Mrs Humphrey moved a pan of potatoes expertly from the heat. As she drained the potatoes, her face reddened. I had a sudden sense of how she and Father would exist together, after I had gone. Breakfast, dinner. Her grumbling over the state of his sleeves. I could hear Father in the parlour, the rattle of him clearing the tea things on to the tray.
‘If you ask me, it’s a crying shame,’ Mrs Humphrey was saying. ‘But I told your father not to go to that inquest – I said, it’ll be full of gossips and meddlers – and now look.’ There was a brief cloud of steam as she returned the potatoes to the pan. ‘He’s tiring himself out.’ Mrs Humphrey turned.
With my cuff, I wiped the window. ‘Why is the pudding bowl out in the yard?’
Mrs Humphrey snapped the dishcloth once and folded it. Then she moved behind me and squeezed my shoulders, as she did very occasionally. ‘I’m going to scald it out there,’ she said. ‘It’s been used.’
