After the Armistice Ball (35 page)

‘Have you seen something?’ said Alec, so quietly it was as though his voice was inside my head.

‘No,’ I breathed back. ‘It’s my foot. I twisted it.’

I suddenly realized that it
was
my foot and, bending, I set the candlestick down and closed my hand around the worst of the pain. It was hard and hot, bulging up around the top of my shoe. I lifted my heel, but resting all my weight on my toe was worse. Alec crouched beside me and felt first my good ankle and then the other, squeezing a little too hard and making me gasp.

‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll go on on my own.’ He must have been able to see me shake my head. ‘Well, all right, but take my arm.’

Thus we went on, I leaning heavily on Alec’s free arm, clasping his wrist tight and biting down on the knuckle of my other hand to stop the tears. Dread, shame and pain wrestled one another inside me, until each seemed to withdraw to a different part of me and settle there, the pain clenching my jaw, the dread of what was to come pounding an ache like a fence-post into my head behind my eyes, and the shame of it all – Silas’s voice – lodged like sandbags in my guts.

At the top of the stairs a passageway stretched out in both directions. To our left the meagre light slowly ran out and the corridor sank into gentle gradual darkness like a mouth, like a throat, but to our right we could see the passage turning a corner. We could see the angle of the wall and the sharp shadow it cast reaching towards us; somewhere along that way was an unshuttered window. Without speaking we started to move towards the light, and as we turned the corner, the brilliancy of it shooting out around the door at the end seemed too much to be the mild sunshine we had left outside on the drive. The door seemed to seethe with the effort of holding it and when I reached out and turned the handle it was as though the light itself burst out.

Almost in the centre of the ballroom, small and dark against the soaring windows and mirrors all around, Daisy sat primly on a wooden chair looking at her feet. I blinked and shook my head, and then I saw that her feet were taped up in what looked like a bandage and bound to one of the chair legs, together and to the side, crossed at the ankle just as we had been taught to sit at school, but her hands were behind her back instead of in her lap and the upright set of her shoulders came from the rope holding her hard to the chair-back, without which not only her head would be drooping.

I started towards her, with a howl of sour despair rising up inside me, but at my movement her head jerked up, her eyes rolling above the tape on her mouth, and her whole body began to surge, the chair creaking and rocking with each heave against the ropes. Alec got to her before me, worked her mouth free of the gag and knelt to tussle with the cord around her wrists as I took her head in my arms and held it.

‘She said no one would ever find me,’ Daisy said, working her face free of my grasp. ‘She told me no one would ever find me and Silas would never prove anything. But she must be mad. I kept telling her half a dozen people knew I was here and she couldn’t hope to get away with it, and that’s when she gagged me.’

Alec freed her wrists at last and hunched over her ankles.

‘Can you walk?’ he said. ‘Has she hurt you? Because as soon as these ropes are off you must run. I shall have to carry Dandy, so you must run along beside us.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll start now. I’ll be out before you. I’ll hop.’

Alec put out a hand and gripped my arm so tightly my fingers tingled.

‘Don’t go out of my sight,’ he said, still working at the bandage with his one free hand. I moved back to stand by Daisy.

‘Where is she?’ I asked, but before it was out of my mouth I heard footsteps, brisk, light, tapping towards us. A door in the panelling opened slowly outward and I caught a glimpse of a dark stone-lined corridor, a service corridor. Lena nudged the flap of the door wide with her hip, her eyes down, concentrating on the crowded tray of objects she carried.

We stood frozen while she negotiated the door, even Alec’s hands stopping their worrying to watch Lena edge into the ballroom and look up from the tray. Slowly, she took in the sight of us. Then she turned with a quickness that startled at least me and hurled the tray back through the gap in the closing door to scatter its contents on the stone floor of the passage.

I never knew what she had planned for Daisy, never saw what was on the tray, but the sounds it made when it fell stayed with me for years no matter how I tried to keep them out of my ears, and more especially my dreams. Metal rang on stone, glass shattered and heavy, dull objects thumped and rolled away. Lena smoothed down her apron – it was not until then that I noticed she wore an enveloping white apron – and walked towards us. She looked quite as tranquil as I had ever seen her. More so perhaps, I thought, as she drew near. Her face had a limpid serenity that I had never seen there before, and it was more grotesque than rolling eyes and drooling mouth would have been. I thought again of Alec and his pie and the headless Sergeant Pinner, imagining that Alec would have had just this smooth look on his face as he ate. It was the look of madness, when all the guy-ropes of the everyday have finally been shrugged off and the mind floats up and is gone.

Lena looked at each of us in turn, smiling gently, then rested her gaze on me and spoke.

‘Tell me then, my dear.
Have
you been watching me?’

I nodded, and Lena nodded along with me, still smiling.

‘I thought so. I thought so,’ she said. ‘And so it is all my own doing. I tried to use you, my dear Mrs Gilver. Perhaps if I hadn’t invited you to Kirkandrews to witness our tragedy . . .? Tell me, what did I do wrong?’

I gaped at her but then it dawned upon me that this was not meant to open a moral debate but merely to ask where she had betrayed herself to me, and when I tried to think of an answer I found I could not. Where
had
she gone wrong? Where had the suspicion come from, seeping invisibly like gas, until one was enveloped in the miasma, cut off from all the sight, sound and smell of the world but still unable to believe any of it was real?

Smiling, she waited for me to speak and as she did the smile changed, becoming as gaudy and jagged as a lizard’s fan.

‘You don’t even know, do you?’ she said, speaking now through clenched teeth, making thick white spots of saliva gather at the corners of her mouth. ‘Bumbling cow of a woman that you are. I chose the stupidest person in the room. So stupid. How I should hate to be you – Dandelion Gilver – bumping around in the fog like a sheep, too stupid to see how stupid you are . . .’

‘No need to run through the whole farmyard,’ said Alec’s voice, steady but strained. ‘And you’re wrong as it happens. It’s not stupidity, it’s goodness.’

Lena threw back her head and whooped.

‘Goodness?
Goodness?’

‘Goodness,’ said Alec, ‘which could not help but see evil in front of it. Dandy’s goodness meant that she could smell you like a rotting corpse. I don’t expect you to understand. Something as vile as you are can’t hope to recognize it.’

I wished he would stop. Lena was beginning to seethe, visibly, rocking back and forward on her heels. I had no fear that she would overpower Alec and escape but I wanted desperately to talk to her and get some answers before she crawled into her madness and pulled it over herself for good.

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, my voice loud enough to cut through Alec’s hectoring. She rounded on me, but I refused to flinch.

I asked her again.

‘Why did you do it?’

‘Are you too “good” even to imagine, then, Mrs Gilver?’

‘Not at all,’ I said, surprising myself with the level drawl I managed to get into my voice. ‘Only I should like to know if my theories are accurate. Why did you do it? Why did you start it?’

‘Because,’ she said, stepping very close to me so that the spittle fell on my face as she spoke. Alec rose and moved towards us, but I put up a hand to stop him.

‘Because,’ she said again, ‘they were mine.’

‘Of course they were yours,’ I whispered, sickened, amazed that I could still be sickened by anything. ‘But why would you want to hurt them?’

‘You stupid woman,’ she said. ‘You stupid, blind pig of a woman. Not the girls. The diamonds. Those diamonds were mine. I loved them and they were nothing to him, just as they should have been nothing to you.’ She rounded on Alec and, unable to meet his eyes, glared at his chest. ‘You and that little tart and all the little tarts you would have bred. It was an outrage to think he could give them to you when they were mine.’

‘So you stole them,’ I said. ‘But –’

‘I didn’t steal them,’ said Lena, suddenly very loud. ‘You can’t steal what is already yours. I simply took them. He would have left them to that little tart along with everything else and I couldn’t stand for that.’

‘But then you went too far,’ I said. ‘You tried to steal them twice and when it seemed as though nothing would ever bring it to light you told Cara to sell them.’

‘She couldn’t have anyway,’ said Daisy. ‘They belonged to her father.’

‘They belonged to
me,’
said Lena. ‘They were mine. They have belonged to the ladies of the Duffy family, generation after generation for three hundred years.’

‘Cara was a lady of the Duffy family, you old fool,’ said Daisy.

‘Oh yes,’ screamed Lena. ‘Cara, precious Cara, precious Cara Duffy. Little tart.’

‘And why pick on us?’ Daisy demanded. ‘What have I ever done? What has Silas?’

‘Filth,’ spat Lena. ‘Parading around all that money and underneath, nothing but filth.’

‘You’re mad,’ said Daisy. ‘You’re not even making any sense.’

Lena’s eyes rolled.

‘So you told her to sell them,’ I insisted, laying a hand on Daisy’s shoulder trying to quiet her, trying to keep Lena with us. ‘And then what?’

‘She couldn’t be trusted,’ said Lena. ‘Much better, really. Much neater that way. I had the use of her and then she could go. She was going to get all of it, you know. He just couldn’t see past his precious little darling. He didn’t know her like I did. What a dirty little slut she was. She had to go.’

There was one question I knew I must ask.

‘Could you have done it? Could you have killed your own child in cold blood?’

‘Is it too awful for you to imagine?’ said Lena. ‘With all your
goodness.
Could I? Of course I could. I’m vile and evil, Mrs Gilver, I’m wicked and mad. So my own child doesn’t matter any more to me than an ant under my shoe. Weren’t you listening?’ Her eyes were glittering with amusement now.

‘But you didn’t get the chance,’ I said, and I saw her face flash with something I did not understand, just for a moment.

‘Of course I had the chance,’ she said. ‘What are you talking about? I made the chance, and I took the chance.’

‘But something went wrong,’ I insisted. Her eyes flashed again.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Something changed your plans. What happened? What did she tell you to make you so angry?’ Lena’s eyes were still huge with fear but her shoulders dropped a little.

‘She told me what she had done. What she was. Who could bear to hear what a stinking, filthy tart she was all along?’

‘But you knew that,’ I said. ‘You said you knew what she was.’ Lena looked away from me and I saw a cold resolve settle into her face. Then she took a huge breath, threw back her head and shrieked.

Still screeching, she took three enormous steps backwards so that all of us were in the sweep of her gaze. There was something ridiculous about the extravagance of the steps, like a second-rate Shakespearean actor of the old school, or like the game I used to play as a child. Giants’ Steps and Babies’ Steps, it was called, and that was what Lena’s giant steps looked like, as unreal and yet as deliberate as that.

‘I killed her,’ she screamed. ‘Do you hear me? I killed her and if I hang it will still be worth it.’ She spoke as though she were Boadicea giving her battle cry, as though she were Joan of Arc declaiming her creed, triumph in her voice and her shoulders thrown back to take the arrows in her breast, but her eyes were the eyes of an animal threshing in a snare as the gamekeeper draws near it. I stepped towards her, staring, peering deep into that animal’s eyes.

‘How could you?’ I said. ‘How could you do that to your own child?’ The fear flared again; I saw it. Something small inside her had leapt up and just managed to see out of her eyes for one second before it fell back down. Then she regarded me with some of the old calmness, and she spoke softly to me, just to me, too soft for the others to hear.

‘You stupid woman,’ she said.

I stared at her, feeling something shift, but it was far too deep to tell what it was, and then she turned on her heels and ran.

Alec took two steps after her, stopped, wheeled back, swayed for a second. We could hear Lena’s footsteps racing away.

‘Go,’ I yelled at him.

He skidded over the ballroom floor and was gone. The ring of his shoes on the bare floor joined the clatter of Lena’s heels and then both became muffled as they reached the top of the stairs and flew down over the felted treads. A scream, then a confusion of thumps and knocks, a shout from Alec, and silence. I knew at once what had happened.

Carefully, I lowered myself beside Daisy and stretched out my throbbing foot before bending over the ropes.

‘I left my candlestick on the stairs,’ I said. Then I looked down and smiled as the tangle under my fingers began to loosen. ‘Typical. Boys are never any good at untying knots.’

‘Hence penknives,’ said Daisy, getting stiffly to her feet and shaking herself free of the coils. ‘Now, put your hands around my neck, darling, and let me help you up.’

We had just begun to limp across what looked like an acre of gleaming floor, her two numbed legs about as useful as my good one, when Alec appeared in the doorway, his face puckered, one of Lena’s shoes dangling from his hand.

‘She tripped,’ he said, walking slowly towards us. ‘I tried to catch her. I almost caught her.’ He looked down at the shoe, regarded it for a long time, then set it carefully on the floor and swung me up into his arms.