A Dark Dividing (49 page)
Authors: Sarah Rayne
It was eight o’clock when Simone finally came out of Thorne’s. She set the alarm and locked the door carefully, conscious of extreme tiredness. Facing ghosts was a fatiguing business, it seemed.
Ghosts. Whatever had happened before or since, Sonia had not been a ghost that day, she had been a living, breathing entity. Simone was still grappling with the prospect of phoning her mother later on, although she could not begin to think how she would tell her. But she would make the call as soon as she got in. Maybe she could write out what to say before phoning—yes, that might make it easier. But however she put it and however she did it, there was still going to be that appalling moment when she had to say that it looked as if after all she had killed Sonia, and they had better try to think who the brown-haired woman might be, because clearly she was mixed up in all this—
She was glad that she had her car here for once, and that she could drive straight home; she reached her flat, parked outside the building, and got out, locking the car door. She was just turning to go up the narrow path to her own door when a figure stepped out from the shadow of the adjoining building and stood in front of her. Simone glanced up with an automatic stab of apprehension, because you never really felt safe from muggers and handbag-snatchers in London, even though this was a fairly quiet street.
It was not a mugger and it was not a handbag-snatcher either, and for several wild seconds Simone thought she had tumbled straight into the nightmare and not realized it—or even that Time had somehow wound itself back, because although this was a set of features she had never, to her knowledge, seen before, it was a set of features she knew and recognized. Brown hair, in no particular style, plain features with rather hard little eyes. A little plain brown sparrow or a wren, unremarkable except for the mouth which was thin and might merit the description rat-trap, and except for the hands which were unquiet and nervous… Simone recognized her at once as the woman she had glimpsed in Sonia’s mind that day: the drab, rather dowdy woman whom Sonia had hated so fiercely and who had become part of Simone’s own recurrent nightmare.
There was a moment when Simone stared, her mind whirling with confusion, and there was another moment when she thought that it was not so much that Time had wound itself back: it was more that it had wound itself forward, because now there were lines of age around the woman’s eyes and mouth that were not there in the dream, and that was somehow the most frightening part of all because surely ghosts did not age, surely they stayed frozen in their own fragments of time and space and infinity…?
She thought she started to say something although she had no idea what it would have been, but before she could frame any words the woman had reached out a gloved hand, and there was a glint of something and then a sudden sharp skewering pain spiking down into Simone’s arm. The familiar street with her own front door only yards away tilted and spun, and for a moment she thought she was going to faint.
‘You won’t lose consciousness,’ the woman said, as if she had picked this up. ‘I’ve given you chlorpromazine—enough to make you more or less helpless, but not quite enough to knock you out altogether.’
Simone managed to say, ‘Why—?’ but the woman was already taking her arm very firmly, and propelling her along the street. She felt immensely strong.
‘My car’s just along here,’ she said. ‘And what’s going to happen is that we’re going to get into it—you’ll be in the back seat, but you’ll be strapped in and I’m going to bind your wrists and ankles so you won’t be able to do very much. And if anyone questions us before we reach the car I shall say you’ve been taken ill and that I’m a nurse and I’m driving you to hospital. I really am a nurse anyway,’ she said, ‘so it’s likely that I’ll be believed. Here we are now. In you go.’
Simone had been hoping that someone would come along and that she could appeal for help, but the woman’s car was only a few steps along the street and this was not a time of day when many people were around. The car was a small hatchback—Simone was pushed on to the back seat, and the woman leaned over her. There was the feel of something being snapped around Simone’s wrists—twine or some kind of thin tough plastic. The sort of thing they put around your wrists in hospital with an identity tag on it. She remembered that the woman had said she was a nurse. But everything was feeling so distant and blurry that Simone was not even sure that this was actually happening any longer. Perhaps it was a new twist to the familiar nightmare, and if so she might wake up in a moment. ‘And now your ankles,’ said the woman, reaching down. ‘Good. Last of all the seat-belt. I don’t want to be stopped by the police because we aren’t both properly belted in.’
She clicked the seat-belt around Simone’s waist, and then straightened up, closed the rear door and got into the driver’s seat. Simone struggled against the wrist bindings, but whatever the woman had given her—chlorpromazine, had she called it?—was making her so impossibly weak that even to move a finger took a huge effort.
‘There’s no point in trying to get free, Simone,’ said the woman, and glanced at Simone in the driving mirror. Her eyes were like hard little pebbles. ‘Oh yes, I know your name,’ she said softly. ‘I know a very great deal about you, Simone. I’ve been watching you on and off for quite a while now and I’ve been waiting to meet you for years. I know far more about you than you can possibly realize.’ She fired the engine and the car moved off.
‘Where—are—you—taking—me?’ Getting each word out was like climbing a mountain but Simone finally managed it.
‘We’re going on quite a long journey, Simone,’ said the woman. ‘Tonight we’re going to Mortmain.’
Charlotte Quinton’s diaries:
16th November 1914
This morning we are going to Mortmain, Floy and I.
I was all for going out there directly we arrived last night, but Floy pointed out (with maddening male logic!) that it was already well past midnight, and not a good idea to approach any house, least of all that house, at such an hour.
So I have had to contain my soul in as much patience as I can muster for the last seven or eight hours, and have managed to eat a little breakfast (a cup of coffee and a slice of toast), and now I am ready, wearing a plain tailor-made (brown twill), over a cream silk blouse. Realize it is wholly frivolous to be recording this sartorial information when in a very little while I may be meeting my dear lost daughters after fourteen years, but refuse to lower standards on these matters. Also, writing about my clothes helps to fill up the time until we can decently set out for Mortmain. Brown twill costume, small brown hat with bronze trimming, buttoned boots, amber beads and brooch, cambric handkerchief, sprinkled with lavender…
I think I am more terrified than I can ever remember being in my entire life, but I shall not let anyone guess.
9.30 a.m.
My bedroom is at the front of the Bridge, overlooking the roadway (quite a small room but v. cosy and pleasingly furnished), and I have just opened the window to listen to the morning. The air always smells so different in the country to London, and I do so love the autumn scents—golden brown and copper scents, all mixed in with soft rain and chrysanthemums and bonfires…
Down below I can hear Floy arranging for the pony and trap that serves the Bridge’s guests to be brought round for us at 10.00. So in an hour’s time—perhaps two hours—I may be on the other side of the most momentous meeting and the most extraordinary event of my life.
Charlotte Quinton’s diaries:
20th November
It is now three days since we arrived in Weston Fferna, Floy and I, and we began our search early on that first morning, taking the Bridge’s pony and trap out to Mortmain House and asking the man to bring it back to collect us at midday. (Would not have thought of this, but Floy sometimes unexpectedly practical.)
We had no very precise plan, only that we would go up to the house and ask to see the beadle, and then inquire of him whether twin girls, their bodies joined at birth, had been brought here in the first weeks of 1900.
‘It’s a very long time ago,’ I said doubtfully to Floy as we got down from the trap, and walked the last few yards to the house.
‘Fourteen years. That’s barely a speck in the infinity of time. Hardly the weight of a microcosm floating in the seas of eternity.’ When Floy is at his most flippantly lyrical it is usually because he is hiding his feelings. I knew he was hiding them now; his voice was light but I saw how his eyes went to the house, still a little way ahead of us on the track, and I thought he flinched just very slightly.
I had been hoping that this time Mortmain would be less forbidding, but of course, I was wrong. Mortmain was, and is, enough to make anyone flinch. For all these years I had remembered it as a place of lowering darkness, but today there was bright sunshine and a lovely golden haze from the autumn trees. None of this helped Mortmain to look better; even on a sunlit day it’s a terrible place. It ought not to have any reality outside of brooding midnights, in fact it almost ought not to exist at all in daylight.
We walked silently up the track, but as we drew near, Floy said, ‘Charlotte, I think you had better take my arm as if we’re a married couple, although perhaps—’
‘Perhaps we had better be as strange as if we had been married a great while, and as well-bred as if we were not married at all?’
His mouth lifted slightly, but he only said, ‘My, my, someone has been attending to your education while I was away, Charlotte.’ He paused and looked down at me, and then in a very different voice, said, ‘Ready, my dear love?’
I was not ready of course, and I probably never would be ready for this encounter, but when Floy looks at me like that and calls me his dear love in that caressing voice, I become convinced that I can climb mountains and swim oceans. So I said firmly, ‘Yes, I am ready,’ and with a feeling that I had tumbled backwards into a dreadfully familiar nightmare, I reached up for the door knocker and let it fall on the dull oak of the door.
We were received by a rabbit-faced maid who eyed us nervously, twisting her hands in her apron, and then bobbed a nervous, awkward curtsey and scuttled away to apprise someone of our arrival. Five minutes later we were seated in a small study, facing a jowly, small-eyed man with a female seated next to him. I thought she was the woman I had seen in the Paupers’ Room all those years ago—there was the same rat-trap mouth and cold eyes—but I could not be absolutely certain.
‘So you see,’ Floy was saying urbanely, ‘we are here to trace the two girls who came here fourteen years ago.’
‘Not possible.’ The words came out like little hard pebbles, and I saw Floy’s lips tighten momentarily. But he only said, ‘The children’s legal family are extremely anxious to know their whereabouts.’
‘Took their time being anxious, didn’t they? Fourteen years.’
‘The family were told the children had died,’ said Floy, and an angry edge had crept into his voice. I glanced at him and thought: don’t lose your temper, Floy, please don’t, because this is one of the rare occasions where I don’t think it will do any good—
Either he caught the thought or he had reached the same conclusion himself, because when he spoke again he seemed to have the anger more under control. He said, ‘We know—and the family’s advisers know—that certain illegalities were committed when the babies were taken. Our inquiries have brought us here.’ A pause, the space of four heartbeats. I was watching the man and saw that the mention of ‘advisers’ had struck an unpleasant chord with him. If either of these two were to break, it would be him.
‘Mr Dancy was involved in the babies’ abduction,’ said Floy. ‘We do know that.’
A look passed between the two people behind the desk, and then the man said, ‘We might know Mr Dancy. We wouldn’t say we didn’t know him.’
‘In the way of business,’ said the woman.
‘Ah.’ Floy leaned forward. ‘So you know Dancy. And the girls? You know what happened to the girls? Come now, this will probably need to become a police matter. It would be better for you to co-operate with me.’
Again the exchange of looks. It was clear that neither of these two people knew what status to accord Floy, and also that neither of them quite had the courage to ask who he was.
Then the man said, ‘We was given proper legal rights all those years back. All in order. As for abduction, there was no such thing.’
‘Guardianship given into the hands of the Trust,’ said the woman righteously. ‘Signed by the father in this very room, and sworn to by a justice.’
Signed by the father. By the
father
… I had already known it, but even so there was a deep sad pain at this final proof of Edward’s cruel deceit. It was no consolation to know that Edward was not, in fact, the twins’ father.
Floy was saying, ‘Where are the girls now?’
‘With Dancy.’ It came out sullenly. ‘He takes the ones he thinks suitable.’
‘For his music hall? Or for his brothels?’
‘We don’t ask questions. We’re answerable to the Trust, no one else.’
‘It must be a very strange Trust indeed if it allows children to be handed over to a man who runs a freak show and a brothel,’ said Floy. He was still keeping his temper but it was a near thing.
‘Dancy
is
the Trust,’ said the man. ‘Mortmain belongs to him. It’s his money as runs it and the children who come here are made over to him. He takes guardianship of them. Mostly they’re orphans or bastards. Not wanted anywhere else. All legal. So what he does with them when they’re older is his right.’
I said, ‘But the women I saw working here some years ago? They were adults.’
‘Oh, we take paupers as well.’ This was the woman, speaking off-handedly. ‘That’s Poor Law requirements. Mortmain has to obey the Poor Law requirements.’
‘In return, presumably, for certain benefices from the church authorities? Yes, I thought that was what you meant.’ Floy considered for a moment, and then said, ‘Where is Matt Dancy now? Does he live here?’
‘He has a room here,’ said the woman unwillingly. ‘But he’s not here so very often. Mostly he’s in London.’
‘He’s not in London now. He travelled up here almost a week ago.’
The man glanced at the woman, and appeared to shrug. ‘He’s taking his performers around the towns for a week or two,’ he said.
‘London too hot to hold him, was it?’
‘I wouldn’t know as to that. He came here a night or two, and talked about going around some of the towns hereabouts. All in the way of business.
His
business. There’s many a tavern will pay well for a travelling show.’
Many a tavern will pay well.
This part of England is a maze, a spider-web of little villages and hamlets, and although, as Floy had pointed out, I had spent my childhood here, I knew it would be difficult to track Dancy down to any one place.
‘Difficult, but not impossible,’ said Floy. And then, frowning, ‘Charlotte, oughtn’t you to stay in the Bridge while I search?’
But we hired the Bridge’s pony and trap as a permanency—only real means of transportation in the area—and began going doggedly from village to village and town to town. I think the boy driving the trap thought we were mad or possessed, but Floy paid him well and he did not ask any questions. We returned to the Bridge each evening, dined in the small coffee room, and slept the sleep of exhaustion.
Floy was tireless. Several times I broke down and cried from fatigue or despair or both, and he was unfailingly patient. But it was a bizarre chase we were engaged on, and towards the end there was a nightmare quality to it—the sort of nightmare where you are desperately hunting something across an alien landscape, and where you never quite manage to catch up with your invisible quarry.
But the quarry was not completely invisible; in villages where Dancy had taken his performers he had left his smeary spoor. Yes, they had seen the concert, people told us in the lovely lilting voice of the region. A bit sad they had thought it what with those poor creatures on display—not what you’d really call entertainment, was it, but there you were, you did not get so much entertainment out here, and it made a change, didn’t it? Take the children and everything. And lovely singers there had been at the end, as well. It was a beautiful thing to hear good singing.
It is ten o’clock on the evening of the third day, and we have dined on the Bridge’s very good mutton and apple pudding with cider syllabub to follow, and tomorrow evening we are to travel to a little cluster of villages near to Machynlleth. For it is there that Dancy seems to have taken his performers. They will be giving two shows in one of the old barns once used by travelling players and now a local hall for local choirs and children’s concerts, and Floy thinks this is where we shall finally reach Dancy. The villages are further south than either of us had expected to travel but Floy has consulted a map and it is not so very long a journey. Twenty miles or so.
I would not care if it were a thousand times the distance. I would travel barefoot through flood and tempest, and scale the iron walls of Milton’s fire-drenched Malebolge in order to reach Viola and Sorrel.